If Jerusalem is going to be built “in England’s green and pleasant land”, it’s going to be built in bubble wrap. Before entering, indeed before getting close, we will be warned repeatedly of the metaphoric city’s sharp metaphoric edges and its slippery-when-wet metaphoric steps. Just in case.

It is indeed impossible to avoid that which has become more British than whining: the Public Service Announcement. Regardless of your medium of choice, you will come across someone who feels you should be told what is dangerous and what is not, what is acceptable social behaviour and what is not and exactly what kind of person you are if you don’t toe the accepted social line. It’s all frightfully black and white.

Of course most PSAs carry important messages, but do we really need to be told them? It seems as superfluous as the Ten Commandments – did God really think we needed to be told that killing was bad? Surely that is a given?

But, just in case we forget, images of dead children, crying babies, dying patients, violence and blood constantly bombard us, over which we hear the big booming voice: “Thou shalt not drive excessively fast and run over small children” or “Thou shalt not do drugs, become a crack-whore and spread HIV”. Soon we will hear “Thou shouldst breathe.”

The latest PSA, which hit the media yesterday, is for Women’s Aid and is telling us (I think) that beating women is really not very cool. What makes this campaign so newsworthy is that it stars Keira Knightley and was directed by Joe Wright (Atonement and Pride & Prejudice).

In the two-minute film, Cut, Knightley is beaten by an abusive boyfriend after she arrives home from a day of filming. As Knightley gets beaten, the camera pans out to reveal an empty set with the tagline, “Isn’t it time someone called cut?”

In a statement on the charity’s website, Knightley said, “I wanted to take part in this advert for Women’s Aid because while domestic violence exists in every section of society, we rarely hear about it.”

The ad is particularly violent and has caused outcry from various communities. Most newspapers have called it “shocking”. Shocking? Perhaps to the Amish, otherwise this violence is bland, derivative, and passé when compared to the violence we see every day in the media, both fiction and non-fiction. It is no different to any other movie where a woman gets badly beaten, the PSA is simply attaching the signifier “real life” to its representation.

It wasn’t that long ago that Knightley was glamorising violence. Knightley was cast in Domino where the violence against her beauty was created as erotica. In this PSA, the violence against her beauty is meant to shock us. Into doing what, I am not entirely sure. And how do we differentiate the two?

Violence, as in Domino, is used in cinema and television as entertainment – as one of its main attractions, being either the star or a significant backdrop. So, why does Women’s Aid believe that Cut will not simply entertain? It is a beautifully shot, directed and stylised bit of cinema with fine acting and, of course, that all-important “action”. It is a very fictionalised representation of a very real issue – so much so that it is questionable whether the makers of the PSA have created enough of a “reality buffer” that forces us to make its “real-life” signifier influential enough in our dissemination of the piece. It is always going to be fiction. This, of course, somewhat ironically, makes the violence in the PSA simply gratuitous – the message could have been more effectively disseminated without it.

The message itself is, indeed, as ambiguous as the pay-off line. Exactly who is being targeted with this PSA? Is it targeted at me and the majority of other citizens who don’t need to be told beating a woman is a grotesque abomination? In which case, they are preaching to the converted. Is it targeted at men who beat women? In which case, I cannot see what the advert is actually saying to these people – they are surely not shocked by the violence as they see it every time their fists connect with their “girlfriend’s” jaws. Is it not perhaps even encouraging them? Perhaps the PSA is targeted at family members, friends and neighbours of abused women, encouraging them to speak out. Which, again, is not what the message seems to be. Just what the take home is, I am not sure. Yes, it asks us to donate £2 per month to “help save lives”. But, how is my £2 going to help?

The strategy the advert uses of blending fiction with reality is a dangerous one. By attempting to create reality and hence bring the issue of domestic violence in to our own realities through fiction is woefully ambiguous and a problem heightened by using a star in the lead. The advert’s ending, by returning to a film set, and the pay-off line, reaffirm the fictionalisation of the act and hence fictionalises the issue.

Of course the issue is not fiction and domestic violence is very real, with horrendous consequences. According to the website for Women’s Aid, two women are killed by a current or former partner in the United Kingdom in an average week. But I just don’t know what Women’s Aid are saying through Keira Knightley, or exactly what they want us to do about it.

Maybe, like so many PSAs, it is just reminding us that evil exists. That people are not very nice and that our actions have consequences. Personally, I think we know all this already – which allows me to appreciate Cuts’, cinematic beauty (more than its messaging). Anyone close to domestic violence, however, will, I think, simply be nauseated. Bring on Jerusalem.

You can view Cuts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt7JZSrDJA8

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

Album Review
Jeniferever
Spring Tides

Swedish playwright August Strindberg said, “People are constantly clamouring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life.” Fellow countrymen, Jeniferever, understand this and their pursuit of joy is not a clamour, but a hard, cruel battle of vast orchestrations that are in no rush to deliver gratification. Listeners need to wander the expansive snowscapes of their post-rock instrumentation, sometimes being blinded by the brilliance, other times being haunted by the scarcity of beauty and the solitary expanses.

Like Strindberg the band seem to want to attain a “greater naturalism”. To make music that doesn’t offer the mundane, the “slice of life”, but rather music that presents itself, or certainly results in, a psychological battle of brains (“hjärnornas kamp”).  Yet, again like Strindberg, they sacrifice naturalism’s tenets and its attempts to create a perfect illusion through music and prose, a secular world-view and by focussing on the contemporary and indigenous, for expressionism as they distort reality for emotional effect.

This blending of naturalism and expressionism may have grown from spending the past decade in relative isolation, hiding in the snowy desolation of a country that is, remarkably, the third largest music exporter in the world, with over 800 million dollars of revenue in 2007, surpassed only by the US and the UK.

It is this desolation that we feel in Spring Tides that drives the philosophy and influences the orchestrations. It gives Spring Tides both its eeriness and its rebelliousness: a mix of ambient, post-rock and goth. It is what allows Jeniferever’s songs to feel expansive and what heightens the created sense of beating winds built by the sometimes seemingly ceaseless thundering of guitars.

It is a powerful atmosphere brought to life by instruments that seem frozen by the extremities of their surroundings. Instruments such as organs, xylophones, horns, bells, guitars, piano and drums that swirl in heady conflagration. As a distant narrator, singer Kristofer Jonson’s vocals add an ethereal (some may say insipid) tone to the mix, as he quietly calms the oppressiveness of the instruments.

While this would seem to point to an album that is unified in its expression and its sound, Spring Tides is oddly discordant – one moment being the simple beauty of Ingrid Bergman, the next being the complexity of Ingmar Bergman, depicting bleakness and despair in an exploration of the human condition.

Yet when these two forces come together (as the Bergmans did in 1972’s Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata)), the result is a wonderful blend of beauty and despair, of simplicity and complexity, of power and grace. This can be seen in St Gallen, with its gentle piano shivering alongside the more forceful brass and stormy guitars before Jonson’s tender vocals emerge four minutes in.

Spring Tides is consuming, unusual post-rock that forces listeners to lie in the barren cold before appreciating its warmth. This is what post-rock is about – not the obvious incorporation of ambience with rock, or the digitizing of melodies – but the creation of an aesthetic that, unlike postmodernism, is not interested in describing a condition or a state of being, or focussing on social and political endeavours. Instead, it is interested in emotion and in Jeniferever’s case, this is brought to life by a polymathic blend of instruments.

Jeniferever is showing that just maybe, post-rock is heading the revival of expressionism.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

Film Review

Dolores was right, “It’s the same old thing since 1916”. But for the past decade, the fighting was not being fought with “their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns”, but with diplomacy. And it was working… until the murder of two British soldiers by the Real IRA at the Massereene army base in Antrim last month.

The murder of these two soldiers has caused considerable anxiety of the possibility of Northern Ireland once again drowning in bloodshed. These murders were the first deaths of British soldiers in Northern Ireland by terrorists since 1997 and they show us that the division of Ireland, forgotten by those of us not in Belfast, is still a very real issue. Ireland remains divided. Peace between Unionist and Nationalist communities is fragile. Ireland is still tormented.

This re-emergence of The Troubles (which officially ended in 1998) to the news agenda doesn’t make the political drama Fifty Dead Men Walking any more relevant, but it certainly provides the movie with a contemporary frame.

Unrest in Northern Ireland has been a perennial focus for filmmakers. The conflict makes for good cinema. The issues are complex, the morality fuzzy and everyone has an opinion (the Irish were born with an opinion, we are told in Fifty Dead Men Walking). Movies such as The Outsider (1979) In the Name of the Father (1993) and Resurrection Man (1998), to name only a few, have recognised this and exploited it with remarkable effect.

Last year’s Hunger superbly brought Bobby Sands’s painful story to life to again show us that not only does Northern Ireland have a lot to teach us but it also provides remarkably deep and thought-provoking content, so easily packaged in hard-hitting emotion suitable for powerful cinema.

Fifty Dead Men Walking is a vastly different movie to Hunger, yet it shares one important similarity. A similarity that few movies about the Northern Ireland conflict share: it is beautiful. Both Hunger and Fifty Dead Men Walking are built with strangely affecting imagery that comes from the ugliest sources. Director Kari Skogland searches for and finds the beauty amid chaos and brutality. Scenes filled with bloodshed, death and horrendous torture, are framed with such care, lit with such subtlety and are so heightened with sensual awareness that that we are forced to sigh at the beauty while we gasp at the horror.

The beauty, however, is simply a vehicle that helps Skogland immerse us in a movie that is essentially a highly political, partisan, inciting drama that deals with one of the most difficult to understand ethno-political conflicts.

Inspired by Martin McGartland’s incredible autobiography, Fifty Dead Men Walking takes us on to the streets of eighties Belfast and into the mind of informant McGartland (Jim Sturgess). McGartland managed to infiltrate the IRA as a tout supplying the former Special Branch with information regarding terrorist operations (the title is a reference to the number of people his information may have saved. A remarkable number when one considers that only 500 soldiers have died in the nearly 40 years of conflict.).

In the movie, McGartland supplies this information to Fergus (Ben Kingsley) and the two form a friendship as fragile as the current peace accord. These two characters drive the movie and allow it to grow beyond its mixture of politics and violence (are they ever separated?).

McGartland’s story is remarkable. Yet as far as cinema stories go, it is practically clichéd and it needs the “true story” tag to give it weight. That is not to say that the movie doesn’t add anything to the genre. It does, thanks largely to the manner in which Skogland seems to approach her directing – as a tool to squeeze emotion from every scene.

Yet this doesn’t blind her and she makes sure that she concentrates on the motives of the emotion. Snitch movies are driven by psychology and for them to work we need to understand why the betrayer is choosing to betray. While a significant effort is made by Skogland to explore McGartland’s motives, a clear answer is never provided and McGartland’s moral ambiguity adds to the already confusing story.

Yet this is not necessarily a negative. We see McGartland colluding with the oppressors and we see his sensitivity, his tenderness, his capacity to love. We also see his love of his country and his dreams of a united Ireland and while these feelings are at odds, we also see how at odds the character is with them. McGartland is tormented by his decision and it seems the only thing making him a betrayer are his moral conflicts and his loathing of violence.

We can see this conflict in McGartland when Fergus tells him, “the price of a conscience is death and none of us can afford it.” McGartland has a conscience, and we feel he will pay the price.

Skogland is not helped by a script that at times is woefully weak. “In war, truth is the first casualty and information is more powerful than bullets,” we get told with gravitas early in the movie – a precursor to the numerous twee philosophising that runs throughout the script. It is unnecessary philosophising, the audience can see the issues, can attach significance and don’t need didactic sound bites, which strip intelligence with every over-stressed point.

Yet, we can overlook this, thanks largely to Skogland, the power of Sturgess’s performance and the fact that the movie remains at all times even-handed. No sides are picked and no moral judgement provided – an outstanding achievement.

Fifty Dead Men Walking is as relevant today as it would have been in the eighties and nineties. As an artistic expression it realises that The Troubles deeply troubles viewers and it exploits this wonderfully.

The violence certainly did “causes silence”, to go back to Dolores, but movies like Fifty Dead Men Walking show that the silence caused by a decade of peace doesn’t mean that Northern Ireland isn’t screaming.

• Movies about the Northern Ireland conflict

* Bloody Sunday (2002)
* The Boxer (1997)
* Cal (1984)
* Circle of Deceit (TV) (1993)
* The Devil’s Own (1997)
* Divorcing Jack (1998)
* An Everlasting Piece (2000)
* Force of Duty (TV) (1992)
* The Gentle Gunman (1952)
* Harry’s Game (TV film) (1982)
* Hennessy (1975)
* Henri (TV) (1994)
* Hidden Agenda (1990)
* Holy Cross (TV 2003)
* In the Name of the Father (1993)
* The Informant (1997)
* Love Lies Bleeding (TV) (1993)
* Nothing Personal (1995)
* Odd Man Out (1947)
* The Outsider (1979)
* Resurrection Man (1998)
* Some Mother’s Son (1996)
* This Is the Sea (1997)
* Titanic Town (1998)
* Tyrone Fermanagh (2006; Short Film)
* With or Without You (1999)
* The End of the World Man (1985)
* Mickybo and Me (2005)
* Blown Away (1994)
* A Further Gesture (1997)
* Irish Eyes (2004)
* The Jackal (1997)
* The Long Good Friday (1980)
* Patriot Games (1992)
* A Prayer for the Dying (1987)

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

“Dying is an art,” wrote Sylvia Plath. It is an art she claimed to do “exceptionally well”. Whether her son, Nick Hughes’s recent death by suicide was art or not, we shall never know… it wasn’t a public affair.

Jade Goody’s death, on the other hand, was a public affair. As loathed as I am to write of it, I can’t help wishing that the role of these two deaths were swapped.

Hughes, with his fascinating genealogy, his wonderful mind (a highly respected biologist) and a well recorded paternal devotion (to Ted Hughes) – the ending of which upon his father’s death in 1998 may have been a leading factor in his suicide – is a far more fascinating subject for art than the gormless and one-dimensional Goody.

Just imagine what Hughes might have said in the months leading up to his death had he “Goodyised” it and transformed his death into his life’s greatest achievement. Imagine the commentary on living with the stigma of being Plath’s son and the kudos of being Hughes’s. His own thoughts on the couple’s turbulent marriage: her mental breakdown and his alleged abuse. It must have been hard for Hughes to live in the very oppressive shadow of one of the world’s most famous suicides. Maybe Hughes would, like his mother, make sure dying would “feel like hell… would feel real”.

Instead, we got Goody, who wanted to be known as, “one who irritated and entertained people in equal measure”. She died having achieved at least half her wish.

The public interest with Goody is not due to media saturation. Media saturation of her death is due to public interest. Serious journalism has long been bemoaning the celebrification of news without considering the wishes of society. It is a complex phenomenon. Do people really want newspapers dumbed down to celebrity gossip (and sales figures clearly support this – The Sun is the UK’s biggest seller) or is the dumbing-down of media creating a society that wants more gossip?

Even the media attention afforded to Hughes was largely gossip. His suicide was covered because of who his parents were, and, more importantly, because he followed his mother in his choice to decide when he exited the world – “is there a suicide gene?”  papers were asking.

The media’s role as an agenda setter has changed over the years as media owners increasingly see their role as purely corporate. Social responsibility has been replaced by profitability and the media’s primary function is to make money. The role of newspapers is now less about informing and educating and is more about entertaining.

It is easy to dislike Goody, whose intolerance was matched only by her ignorance – she thought Sherlock Holmes “made toilets”, asked, “who’s Heinstein (Einstein)?” and once said: “Do they speak Portuganese in Portugal? I thought Portugal was in Spain.” Yet, it is difficult for anyone to criticize the manner in which she controlled the media around her death. Her motive may very well have been to make money for her children she left behind, or it may have been less altruistic as she hung on so desperately to the fame she needed for fulfilment. Either way, she was in control.

The interest here, however, is not with Goody at all, but rather whether she managed to turn her death into art. Do images of her thinning hair and her fading body, of her wedding and hospital visits, and of her last gasps, have artistic value?  Does Goody’s story, packaged in episodic bites, framed and ready for consumption, artistically tell a story that appealed to our senses and emotions?

It is an interesting question, the positive answering of which would make Goody an artist and her medium, the media. And looking at Tolstoy’s What is Art?, it seems that Tolstoy might just have approved. Goody clearly created an emotional link between artist and audience, one that “infected” the viewer. She “united people via communication with the crucial values of clearness and genuineness”. She even met Tolstoy’s most important criterion that the concept art “embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings.”

Tolstoy might have even gone further and recognised it as good art. Tolstoy believed that “the stronger the infection, the better is the art”, and with Goody, infection was tremendous. Good art, claims Tolstoy, fosters feelings of universal brotherhood. Bad art inhibits such feelings. Goody’s death could even be seen as “lower-class” art and one with a Christian message – two important considerations for Tolstoy.

Of course, Tolstoy is not the only source we should approach when trying to define or criticize art and whether we see the “mediafication” of Goody’s death as art is certainly going to have varying opinions. Whether she has started a new art movement, we shall soon see. More likely, she may have pushed society’s morbid fascination with death higher up the media agenda.

Death is the ultimate reality show subject. Who knows, maybe we are not far from seeing a new version of Big Brother – Terminally Ill Big Brother, where contestants have only weeks to live and viewers vote for whom they believe will survive the longest.

Now, if those contestants were great thinkers, artists, poets, writers and scientist (such as Hughes), we might all just be compelled to watch.

• For an excellent Hughes obituary, visit http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5992445.ece

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

Sometimes we need to criticize that which has the best intentions, as we see the worst results. Last week, the world (well 88 countries, at least) turned off its lights… for an hour… sending us into a dark age of social consciousness.

The World Wildlife Fund asked citizens of the world to “vote for the earth” last Saturday by flipping their switches between 8:30pm and 9:30pm. It was a symbolic call to action and awareness campaign for global warming. A global unification of citizenry united in their concern for rising temperatures and environmental catastrophe. It was a way for us all to “do our bit” in the fight to save our planet.

It was a farce. A sad aggrandisement of mob mentality. A campaign built on the premise that “that every bit helps”; on the flowery notion that a billion people turning off their lights has more significance than simple symbolism. A campaign grossly disproportionate to the scale of the problem.

Surely we are further down the line with global warming than this? Surely by now, after over a decade of awareness campaigns and activism, we can do better than an hour of blackout a year? Even HIV/Aids had its red ribbon comparatively quicker.

So, what did Earth Hour really do? And most importantly, what didn’t it do?

There are two ways to view Earth Hour. Firstly, that it is about the electricity consumption lowered by the initiative. Secondly, that it is simply about creating awareness (the view held by the organisers, but not necessarily by the ill-informed public). Awareness is two fold: awareness of the individual’s role in saving the planet, and, more importantly, showing governments that its voting public is seriously displeased and if they wish to remain in power, they need to respond.

The first view is of course preposterous (though many who were eagerly sitting in the dark for an hour last week, were also in the dark of this fact).

The impact of Earth Hour is staggeringly low, less than negligible. Consumption dropped in the hour by between less than 1% and up to 15.1% in Toronto. Even when viewed over a day, the impact is hardly measurable – akin to placing a plaster on a self-emolliating monk.

Most who flipped the switch, of course never believed that it was really about the consumption of energy. But there were many (a surprisingly high percentage of the people I spoke to) who genuinely believed that turning off the lights for an hour had a direct positive impact on the earth’s environment – admittedly these were generally the same people who packed the family into the SUV with their ready-packaged picnics to drive miles to a vantage point to witness the blackout spectacle.

This shows a gross lack of understanding of the issue. A lack of understanding propelled by knowledge-less campaigns such as Earth Hour. The real danger here is, of course, that many adherents of the blackout believe they have “done their bit” and will continue to live the same wasteful lifestyles they have been until they smugly flip the switch next year.

The reality is that the world emits around 27 billion tons of CO2 each year, through transportation, electricity use and deforestation. When one considers that the average gas-guzzling American contributes only 20 tons to this (which is on average five times more than anyone else, 10 times more than the average Chinese, and nearly 20 times more than the average Indian), one quickly realises that the problem may be beyond the scope of the individual, even if we stopped breathing (a step too far for even the hardiest activist). Of course this doesn’t mean we should simply do nothing and every energy saving light bulb, over time, will make an impact. But we certainly need a far more radical approach than the superficiality of Earth Hour. We need to be given the facts, so we can all contribute to a significant change.

Take a look at our buying habits, for example. Our attitude to food consumption alone is staggering, as we continue to shop at supermarkets instead of at stores offering locally grown produce. A great deal of energy goes into producing, packaging, shipping, storing, and cooking just a single meal (nearly 21 percent of the fossil energy we use goes into the global food system). One tomato can travel over 1,500 miles to end up in the produce aisle at your nearest grocery store, while a locally sourced tomato, on average only 60 miles. It takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy in the U.S. food system.

Yet, our ignorance is even greater than this. Did you know, for example, that producing just one bottle of water requires between “5.2 and 10.2 million joules of energy per litre – 2,000 times the energy needed to produce tap water? The numbers are even more disturbing on a large scale. US consumers bought over 33 billion litres of bottled water in 2007, requiring 32-53 million barrels of oil, or one-third of one percent of total US energy consumption.” That’s a lot of oil wasted on what we can get out of the tap.

So, reduced consumption is clearly not a reason to “vote for Earth”. Which means, it must be about awareness. Yet the awareness created was hollow.

The point of Earth Hour, according to organisers, was “to send a powerful message from everyone to the world that reducing energy use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is important”. Even the organisers acknowledged the limitations of a one-hour annual event. But they argued the event’s worldwide popularity could influence governments to sign a new international accord on carbon emissions at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

This makes Earth Hour a political campaign – which is what it should be, but certainly not as it is billed. And it is as a political message that Earth Hour fails most significantly. Solidarity alone does not change political opinion. One billion people turning off their lights for an hour would have the same effect as two billion turning off their lights. Politics is blind to passivity.

History has proven time and again (just think of any colonised nation, or the existence of unions) that politicians are only swayed by calls to action with measurable financial impact. One billion people doing nothing (which is what we have already established happens with Earth Hour), but saying just how unhappy they are while they are doing nothing, just doesn’t create or change policy. Our leaders are well aware of the problem, which is why they are engaging in talks in Copenhagen, which is why Kyoto exists. Which is why Earth Hour is a useless political message to create awareness.

The only way to truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is an international regime that puts a cap and a price on climate pollution. For primarily industry, with influence from the consumer, to change the manner in which it sees business and how it views profit. The only way that will happen is if politicians around the world agree on the severity of global warming (which is an issue propelled by science and the scientific community) and to then enforce caps and penalties.

Climate change is no longer the new kid on the awareness block. You don’t get kudos anymore for using energy saving bulbs or recycling, that is expected. Global warming is a part of our lives, and yet we sense the futility of our efforts. We risk green fatigue because, after all, what can we do about it? Yet, real action is beneficial. We are developing clean energy sources and methods of decarbonising the atmosphere. For this to maintain momentum, we need to keep climate change near the top of our political agenda and to keep it at the top of the political agenda we need to DO SOMETHING and not do something that makes us all think we are doing something.

The message should not be to turn our lights out, but to manage the wonder of electricity better.  As Goethe said in 1825: “Electricity is the pervading element that accompanies all material existence, even the atmospheric. It is to be thought of unabashedly as the soul of the world.” This is not something we simply turn off in protest, especially when turning it off is solely symbolic.

I say boycott Earth Hour next year by creating awareness of the facts. By showing people that blindly aligning themselves with initiatives simply because they are “green” is not an intelligent solution to the problem. People telling you to “do your bit” in the energy-sapping online environment (such as through twee Facebook statuses) without truly understanding the issue is counterproductive. If we keep preaching to the converted and saying “anything is better than nothing”, then the lights are going to go out a lot quicker.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

Album review
Doves
Kingdom of Rust

An album title is important. It is our first introduction to the music to come, to the emotion that follows, to the philosophy in which we will get lost. It reveals a great deal about the band’s thought processes, the album’s theme and even, to an extent, the musical style.

Strangeways Here We Come, for example, is the perfect title to introduce us to the Smith’s album of uncertainty and aloofness and the melancholy prison in which we find ourselves when love goes wrong. Songs In The Key Of Life (Stevie Wonder), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy) and Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Smashing Pumpkins) are similar examples that offer wonderfully descriptive precursors to what lies beneath the sleeve notes.

The title of Doves’ latest album, Kingdom of Rust, is equally revealing, though undoubtedly not in the manner the Manchurian rockers would have wished. Not dissimilar to the music that follows it, it is a title that is derivative, boring, clichéd and uninspiring. It conjures images of Neil Young in the dying stage of his career (images, incidentally that his latest album dispels) mixed with evangelical pop, and the fatalistic philosophy that before we all die, we slowly fade along with the kingdom we inhabit. There is corrosion everywhere, especially, it seems, in the band’s immediate surroundings of Northern England.

Kingdom of Rust sounds and feels a realm away from Doves’ inspirational debut (Lost Souls) where they gently flow between pop and rock on the currents of intelligent indie music. Initially it sounds far from corrosive. Indeed, Kingdom of Rust has more depth, the music is richer, the songs more cerebral and complex than the band’s previous two albums, albums that never lived up to the wonder of Lost Souls. It takes their formula that unites synthetic undertones with hard, driving guitars to a far more intense level. It takes the listener to an emotionally challenging place that we should have been taken to with The Last Broadcast. Doves have clearly spread their wings.

While this should all be positive – bands are meant to progress and grow, to experiment and learn – for Doves, it all seems a little late. In the four years the band has been away, bands such as Elbow and Radiohead and to lesser degrees Interpol and Muse have produced albums that do what Kingdom of Rust does, only better. The music is not bad, it’s just not right for the time.

That is not to say Kingdom of Rust isn’t interesting. With Jetstream, the album opens with subdued chanting and soft strings that would fit on 1 Giant Leap, before slowly building to a hi-hat-led build up of intensity that never erupts, but rather ebbs and flows on the in and out flittering of synthesisers, organ trills, guitars and drums. It is a powerful song that gets better the louder you play it. It is all very Radiohead (an embarrassingly obvious compassion), but it is Radiohead of eight years ago, with a slight flavour of even Spiritualized of 12 years ago.

A complete change follows with the title track, a surprising and melodic sing-along that places you firmly in the Wild West, Manchurian style. The honky tonk beats provide the Americana, while the big strings and Jimi Goodwin’s vocals change the picture to a more sullen, deserted, snow-filled Wild West, where melancholy is both outlaw and sheriff. In fact, this is the Wild West of Northern England and from this moment we realise that Kingdom of Rust is as parochial an album as you are likely to get:

“I hear a sound
A sound above my head
Distant sound of thunder
Moving out on the moor

Blackbirds flew in
And to the cooling towers
I’ll pack my bags
Thinking of one of those hours
With you
Waiting for you

My god
It takes an ocean of trust
In the Kingdom of Rust.”

Outsiders takes us back to Doves we know adding dirty bass, varying pace and existential angst, which spills over into the conventional Winter Hill. Holding the album together is 10.03 an emotion saturated ballad with a gentle narrative and sumptuous pomp. It whispers of our longing for familiarity before becoming a gloomy bass-dominated jam with confusing backing vocals that build the pace into a frenzy.

These are good songs that like most music in the genre improves with each listen. Yet the best thing the album does is question the manner in which we appreciate music. Albums have bombed for being ahead of their time, while others, such as Kingdom of Rust simply do not work in the time they were released as too much has passed before them. The inseparable link between art and society forces us to analyse music with New Historic criticism. It forces us to appreciate it with the kaleidoscopic backdrop of society influencing our every emotion.

Because of this, Kingdom of Rust, at this point, simply doesn’t inspire… but not from lack of good song writing. It is undoubtedly an album of skill and refinement (in fact perhaps too much so), yet we have moved on, while Doves are stuck in 2005, where Elbow and Muse began stealing their glory.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

Yet, this doesn’t make Religulous (a portmanteau derived from religion and ridiculous) a bad documentary. It certainly doesn’t make it an unentertaining one. But it does make it flawed, perhaps even stripping it from documentary status to comedy. In fact, even though Religulous deals with incredibly important and very real issues around religious bigotry and religion’s blind, unquestioning, violent threat to peaceful society, it is fair to say that it is indeed as much of a documentary as director Larry Charles’s previous movie, Borat.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Maher’s globetrotting quest to understand why “people who are otherwise so rational about everything else… believe on Sunday they are drinking the blood of a 2000-year-old god” missed the serious secular humanist, critical thinking documentary resurrection, broadcast excellently through Jesus Camp, Deliver Us From Evil, Lake of Fire, For The Bible Told Me So and Zeitgeist. Instead of competing with these, or saturating the genre, Religulous does what none of these documentaries do, it makes us laugh, and each laugh is at the expense of religion and the religious.

I certainly laughed at Maher’s sharp wit and irreverent interviewing style, but then, like Maher, I “honestly see religion as detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Whether followers of faith will find Maher’s relentless mocking, his annihilation of his interviewees and his clever selection of targets as funny… well, god only knows - it’s unlikely the pious will watch it.

Maher travels the globe grilling people about their religious faith and making idiots look idiotic and the fanatics look fanatical. He goes to the Vatican and to Jerusalem, the Mormon Tabernacle and a truckers’ church in the Bible Belt, a congressional office, a faith-based amusement park, a museum where dinosaurs and humans are shown to co-exist and the church he attended as a child. He talks to an unashamedly wealthy evangelist in lizard-skin shoes, egomaniacal rabbis who deny the holocaust, a once gay man who now runs a church where he attempts to get gay men “back in touch” with the straight Christian inside, a minister of the Cannabis Ministry in Holland, a “neurotheology expert”, a Jew for Jesus and many more. With each visit Maher arrives with hammer and nails, ready crucify each interviewee, and he succeeds. Although each target is already carrying their own cross, Maher nails them up as he interrupts, interjects, laughs at, talks over, sabotages and generally doesn’t play fair. He cuts people short in the interviews and then further cuts the film in a speaking-in-tongues array of short sharp clips intermixed with subtitles, TV clips, various religious imagery, violence, bombs and old biblical movies.

As an example of journalism, it is pitiful. As an example of stand up comedy, it is superb.

It is clear that Maher’s humour will only work if he stays on the fringes of religious intellectuality. Because of this, Maher’s ad hominem attacks on religious hypocrisy don’t constitute a rational critique. Any serious theologian would have intellectually stoned him, dragged him through the centre of town and put his head on a spike.

Maher looks for the unquestioning, blind believers, or the believers in positions of power who appear fanatical under his mockery. He wants them not to simply ensure we have humour and to avoid serious discussion, but he also wants to highlight the point, or at least open the debate that perhaps “Religion is a neurological disorder” and “Anyone who has heard the voice of god is crazy.”

Thankfully, Maher is spoiled for choice in this regard and his search was clearly easy. Take the Reverend Jeremiah Cummings, a former member of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (and also a former Muslim), for example. Cummings is the stereotypical evangelist - power hungry, egotistical, capitalistic and has a god complex. He wears a fancy suit, lizard skin shoes and lots of bling. He is an easy target and within seconds Maher has him tripping over his own ignorance, misquoting the bible and appearing every bit as psychotic as Maher wants him to. Cummings may have had god on his side, but Maher has intelligence, research and a very quick wit.

Sure, the humour Maher creates at the expense of his interviewees proves nothing except that all areas of society has fools and fanatics - I am sure there are many secular humanists who are equally bonkers. But, ultimately, through this, Maher makes a particularly important point which we see in the dangerous dogma of each of his interviewees: that religion controls governments and governments control the ignorant, unassuming masses.

Maher is rightly terrified that our lives are being controlled by people “who believe in a talking snake”, by “irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.”

Religion is no opiate, it is a cocktail of nicotine, caffeine, speed and LSD - and those who are making society’s choices are injecting it every day. Maher shows just how extensive the problem is in his interview with U.S. Senator Mark Pryor, a middle-of-the-road Arkansas Democrat, who Maher exposes as your average American bigot who refuses to commit to believing in either evolution or creationism (as Pryor himself says… yes he says this on camera… “you don’t have to pass an I.Q. test to be a senator”). Scary stuff.

The debate Maher wants to create with Religulous was popularised by Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. Books I feel Maher expects us to have read. Books that offer the intellectual support to Maher’s unintellectual humour. The debate is desperately needed, as Maher says, he sees “So many nice people trying to make it about something good and yet it turns into something not just corrupt, but fucking little kids corrupt.” It is a sentiment beautifully highlighted by US physicist Steven Weinberg in 1999, who said: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Clearly Religulous is one-sided, biased and lacks objectivity. Ultimately, it is a freak show with a message. A message that the mandatory brainwashed religion of middleclass American Christianity and the middle-east’s cauldron of religious ideology must die for mankind to live.

Religulous is as subtle as a suicide bomber, as dogmatic as the scriptures, but as funny as all hell.

• Religulous opens in the UK on April 1

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

His hands
Emboldened by a moment’s hesitation
A second’s surrender, in which
the awkward juxtaposition
of what he’d always imagined
with what he’d never dared
hung heavy and sultry in the surrounding air
Those hands
That slid up and around
And around and over
In that moment
Snuck
under

A girl should not have a strong personality

You’ve been teaching me this dish
For many years now
Although you do not give exact measurements,
(one tablespoon of this, 20.25 grams of that
the way Westerners do)
Your recipe is fixed and certain
And always tastes exactly the same.
But I
Add mali instead of moluge
A foolish mishap
(an unacceptable lapse in propriety)

You frown from across the simmering pot
Disapproval more strong, more acrid
More pungent than that pickle you made
Thick, red, lemon peel, oil-drenched
Marinated in vinegar, garlic and chilli

The marinade has not soaked in deep enough
(that one you so carefully prepared)
It leaves me just as bitter

As you reach for the thavi, you warn me
Never to add foreign ideas
To fish curry
Lest it overpower
The tumeric.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

I love self-help books. They make me feel warm and fuzzy and motivate me to change my life. They let me know that everything is OK and that although I have many faults, I have never exploited the weak and desperate, the lonely and confused, the struggling and needy by writing a book that I claim is well researched, scientific and authoritative, but is really abusive, esoteric, new-age charlatanry.

The latest book to help me feel good about myself is Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke, a professional “motivator”. Blanke’s motivating, life-altering premise is that stuff is just “life plaque” holding us back from achieving our true potential.

Phew, deep…

Blanke wants us all to search our homes for that “stuff” we just don’t need and bin it. She wants us to start inspecting our physical spaces, our bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, dining rooms, attics, and garages and dispose all the worthless material items clogging them up.

She actually seems to have a point. Sure, it is a bleeding obvious point, but a point nonetheless. Disposing the things we don’t need and tidying up our houses seems like a fairly good thing to do – even though it amazes me that we need a book to tell us the value of good housekeeping. It’s even a point that carries subtle, yet powerful allusions on the emptiness of consumerism, the folly of a disposable mentality and the dangers of waste.

Of course Blanke is not really telling us the value of good housekeeping – we have magazines that do that – she is being metaphoric, and attaching emotional significance to the physical act of cleaning the house. According to Blanke, all the material things you are throwing away have symbolic meaning and with each lift of the dustbin lid we are not simply discarding unwanted material possessions but also (genius!) emotional and psychological possessions too.

According to Blanke, “Our lives are so filled with junk from the past – from dried up tubes of crazy glue to old grudges – that it’s a wonder we can get up in the morning, never mind go to work, care for our children… [or] put one foot in front of the other.” That’s quite a statement and if, like Blanke, you feel your life is so cluttered, “it’s a wonder [you] can get up in the morning,” then no amount of metaphoric spring cleaning is going to help – but the medication probably will.

At the centre of Blanke’s argument is this: “If we can’t decide what to throw out of our clothes closets, how in the world are we going to decide what to throw out of our mental closets – closets that are overflowing with the debris of indecisions?” The attempted association between a clothes closet and a mental closest is not only simplistic, but insulting. Drawing such a parallel highlight’s the book’s pseudo-psychology and Blanke’s disparity between her shallow feel-good narrations as she cheerleads us into action and her apparent lack of understanding reality. Many people are superbly adept at maintaining mental wellbeing, while being incapable of closet maintenance.

With these assertions, Blanke highlights a common mistake made by the self-help industry. A mistake that is central to its billion-dollar-a-year success. It asserts that by attaching a direct link (in addition to obvious environmental influence) between the material world and your emotional state; and by further linking material emotions and mental capacity, we will find meaning and mental and emotional health. Literally, chicken soup for the soul.

Science, on the other hand, shows us that a healthy emotional and mental state
has absolutely nothing to do with our closets. Throwing away that letter your ex-lover gave you is not going to result in you throwing away the pain of your longing. It is unlikely to even make it easier. A healthy psyche, is not found in your collection of dead batteries, your childhood comic collection or your garage filled with 10 years of junk. It is found in personal analysis and medical health.

So, when Blanke stresses in her book that it is crucial to throw away those parts of your emotional past that are holding you back – saying “Don’t spend a lot of time analysing what worked and didn’t work in the past. Let it go so you can live and work in the present. Be here now.” – she is asking us to ignore knowledge, to replace critical analysis and the information we have that provides us with the building blocks of who we are, with the superficial notion that it’s best to “forget” and to “be here now”. I say sod the pile of magazines piling up in the corner, forget about your ever-increasing collection of Tupperware and anything that reminds you of times when you have failed. Who cares about colour-coding the clothes closet or arranging your shoes in alphabetical order by designer. Spend your time on what really matters – you. Remember the past. Hang on to it. Analyse it. Grow. Learn. Move forward with all the possible information you can to make the best decisions to help you achieve all you want to in life.

The self-help books industry – the idea itself is a logical fallacy: buying a book to help you help yourself – is an $11-billion a year industry based on the false diagnosis of maladies, so its authors can offer unscientific solutions that through trickery and metaphor appear scientific. The industry has propagated thanks to ever-increasing publishing methods that allow the publishing of information under the pretence of authority; and the simple highlighting of the discontent of the human condition, which has arisen from the decentralization of ideology.

Sociologist Micki McGee argues in her 2005 book Self-Help, Inc. that the self-help industry is not only a weak crutch, but that it promotes a makeover culture that “traps Americans in endless cycles of self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ahead of a rapidly restructuring economic order.”

We are being forced into an ideology that ironically prevents us from thinking for ourselves, while being told to help ourselves. Through this we are being mislead about the value of individual psychotherapy at the cost of empirically validated therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy. It also leads to a culture of individualism, as Wendy Kaminer claims in her book I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, people focus on individual self-improvement instead of “joining collective social movements” to solve their problems.

The self-help industry is dangerous and so is Blanke’s book – yet it will undoubtedly sell millions. The market is primed for it. Christopher Buckley’s book God is My Broker asserts: “The only way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one.” Perhaps it is time to write a self-help book myself (and yes, I really do mean a book that will help me). I will call it How Not to Buy 50 Things You Don’t Really Want That You Will End Up Throwing Away in a Few Years in Attempt to De-clutter Your Emotional Closet.

My advice (and it’s free) is that if you are still going to buy Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life, then buy the hardcover version and beat yourself repeatedly over the head until you are stupid enough to believe it. Then throw it away.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.

My scepticism of this new dimension, which is nearly upon us, is not born from a clichéd fear of change, or a dogmatic clinging to tradition, but rather comes from a concern for the future of storytelling, scriptwriting, dialogue, and cinema rooted in emotion and not simply visual stimulation.

This dimension revolution is unlike the two previous ones cinema has undergone (sound and colour) in that it demands the changing of storytelling to fit the mode of production. All cinema is created and moulded by the technologies which create it and storylines adapt to this. However, 3-D’s raison d’être is in the highlighting of the visual, in making objects move from the screen and into the theatre. This is not like the introduction of colour and sound, which aided storytelling, enhanced the story, but didn’t create a new vehicle upon which entire movies would base themselves. The introduction of colour, for example, did not create a dimension for filmmakers to exploit – tempting them to fill each film with rainbows, and a kaleidoscopic array of flowers and colourful objects.

The revolution has, however, begun. Or at least it has got to the point we are seriously sitting up and taking notice and realising that maybe wearing silly cardboard glasses that give you a headache is an acceptable trade-off for a more complete cinematic experience. The revolution actually began in 1952, when Arch Oboler released Bwana Devil. Since then it has stuttered and unimpressed with numerous movies attempting to revive it, movies that have done nothing but prove how one-dimensional three dimensional movies are. Movies such as the MGM production Kiss Me Kate, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, Jaws 3-D and Hondo with John Wayne. It was only with the advent of 3-D digital animation movies that 3-D has had any success. So much success that I wonder whether there will ever be another big release, 2-D animation movie.

So, what has changed? Why are filmmakers convinced that now is the time for another attempt at adding another dimension? The obvious answer is technology. We now have the ability to create 3-D in a manner that the results don’t simply cause headaches and nausea. The less obvious answer is that filmmakers are doing everything they possibly can to stop home entertainment gorging an ever-increasing size of their profit pie.

Either way, it is difficult to see this as anything other than a gimmick. Though Hollywood is certainly behind this revolution and we will see over a dozen 3-D movies hitting the screen this year.

Directors and producers like James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation SKG, are going to the 3-D side and are not planning on coming back. Cameron recently told Time magazine that “every” film he is “planning to do will be in 3-D”.

Indeed, Cameron is currently shooting a live-action drama, Avatar, for Fox in 3-D. “While Disney and its Pixar studio,” according to Time “are releasing five 3-D movies this year alone, including a 3-D version of Toy Story. George Lucas hopes to rerelease his Star Wars movies in 3-D. And Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Tintin in it, with Peter Jackson doing the 3-D sequel next year. Live sports and rock concerts in 3-D have been showing up at digital theatres around the U.S. nearly every week.”

Katzenberg, who releases Monsters vs. Aliens this week told Time that: “This really is a revolution.” He also said that the latest 3-D movie technology is “the greatest innovation to occur in the movie business in 70 years”.

Yet, it seems that 3-D’s transition from animation to mainstream cinema is slow. The benefits of an extra dimension for animation seems obvious, yet less so for non-animated movies. We tend to perceive our on-screen real life characters in three dimensions, yet, until 3-D digital animation, our cartoon characters have always been flat.

Audiences want to see animation in three dimensions, a fact that was proven by
2007’s animated adventure film Beowulf.  Although the film was on general release as a standard two-dimensional film, as the Independent reported “about 50 UK venues screened the film in digital 3D, and the response was impressive. The 400 cinemas that showed Beowulf in its regular format took on average about £11,000 by the start of December. By contrast, the 50 screens showing the epic in 3-D grossed on average £29,000, and the four dedicated Imax cinemas that showed it made £110,000 each.”

If, as Cameron and Katzenberg suggest, 3-D is not simply a gimmick nor reserved to animation, then what does this mean for mainstream cinema? The first question we should ask when it comes to using 3-D, is: what is the artistic relevance? Children’s book’s, for example, often come with sound, which has great relevance, but there is no relevance to add that extra sense in the adult market. Is there value in shooting romantic comedies and drama in 3-D? Will it enhance viewers’ experiences? If so, surely this just gives directors the chance to throw whatever they like at the camera to create an effect, simply because the technology exists? And to justify 3-D, they would have to do it regularly.

This means that scripts will be modified to enhance the effects of the third dimension. This, in turn, will lead to movies that may be visually stunning, but will be devoid of dialogue and intellectually vacuous. Adding another dimension to the cinematic experience is simply too costly (in terms of the sacrifices we need to make to accept it) at this stage to warrant a mass conversion, and to adopt it as an “enhancement” to the normal cinematic experience would certainly be gimmicky.

All new technologies need to be embraced. Progression is good. High-definition and digital media have been great successes. Digital special effects have greatly enhanced viewers’ cinematic experiences. The importance here is to see 3-D cinema as having a place. But, unlike sound and colour, it is unlikely, at this stage to be adopted by all forms of cinema.

Of course, it would naive to think that one day, we won’t all be sitting in our lounges attached to the new “Cinematic 5000, Humungo Triple D Projector”, which screens our movies in real 3-D – visual surround sound. And while we are, perhaps we will be lamenting over the advent of five- or six-dimension cinema.

Let’s hope that with each dimensional progression, we never forget that great cinema will always be about great storytelling.

©2010 Hoodwinked by Hegemony. All Rights Reserved.