Pete Ashton's Weblog

Interesting article on Comment is Free this morning. The Pirates' Code, by one Ned Beauman, tries to figure out why stuff gets pirated in the first place when there's no financial reward. For example, recording, editing and encoding TV shows so they can be distributed by BitTorrent within hours of broadcast or risking their jobs by leaking preview copies of albums and movies. He notes the somewhat bizarre news that torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay, which recently formed its own political party in Sweden, is planning to buy the legendary micronation Sealand off the Suffolk coast. But the real question is what motivates the thousands of others who make it so easy for the likes of us to get stuff from the big media companies in the first place?

This has puzzled me too. I figured out a while back that there are online communities (warez groups) who rip and encode stuff to agreed standards but why they made their word available to everyone outside their gangs remained a mystery.

Beauman reckons it's indicative of a general disillusionment with the mediocrity of the entertainment industry, which might seem a little odd given they're spending their time distributing stuff they apparently don't like. If you're sick of seeing endless shite movies being released why would you risk prosecution by pirating them? "They want to strike back against this regime of mediocrity in the only way they can. The executives from the film studios and the record labels treat them like drooling cattle, and they want to prove that they're not." In other words, by releasing Hollywood stuff for free the pirate is helping to bankrupt Hollywood, stripping its power away and forcing it to take notice that its customers don't respect it anymore, if they ever did.

It's stretching things a bit, certainly, but there's a grain of truth in there. I recently bought a couple of DVD box sets for the first time in my life, seasons 1 and 2 of The Wire. I could have downloaded them but, having sampled season 3 illegally and being blown away by it, I decided I wanted to support this sort of TV in the hope that, however small my actions, it might go some way to encouraging less of the shit and more of the quality. Despite having downloaded and watched seasons 3 and 4 I intend to also buy those box sets when they come out, partly for the quality (the leaked episodes of season 4 are a bit ropey) but again because I want to thank them financially. Buying stuff has become something of a political act, culturally speaking. Same goes for my eMusic subscription - I'll pay for the music I respect on terms that don't insult me even though I can probably get it for free somewhere else. The only language these people understand is money so I shall talk to them in that language.

Interestingly this attitude reminded me of Decadent Action, a slightly tongue in cheek counter culture movement from the 1990s that reasoned the best way to overthrow capitalism was by having everyone spend beyond their means.

"We use the simple economic principles of supply and demand with their intrinsic link to inflation to establish our theories. The state must control these factors to run the economy efficiently; throw in the wild card of massive irrational overspending on seemingly random luxury goods and the government is unable to take control. This will lead to hyper inflation and large scale social unrest, leading to the collapse of the monetary system and disintegration of the state apparatus."

I'm pretty darn skeptical about this stuff given that western society seems to live in a permanent state of debt these days, but the high profile given to the Bank of England raising interest rates to control inflation by encouraging saving would seem to indicate rampant spending on nonsense isn't well liked by the powers that be because they can't control it.

Piracy - it's not theft, it's a political act intended to overthrow the cultural hegemony of a morally bankrupt entertainment industry.

Or not.

Okay, I'll own up. One of the reasons for my lack of blog postage was discovering Veronica Mars, a television program originating from the United States. It's being broadcast on some cable channel over here but naturally I acquired copies via the BitTorrent network. However, unlike most shows I didn't have any obligation to feel like a rip-off pirate or to come up with whiney justifications about how I wouldn't have watched it on broadcast or paid for the DVDs, because while viewing it I was exposed to countless adverts, not in the act-breaks which were edited out as usual but within the show itself.

Product placement is nothing new (it's always entertaining how ubiquitous Apple computers are in TV world even though they always seem to be running the Animated Graphic Operating System) and can lend a sense of reality to the proceedings, but in Veronica Mars what used to be a glimpse of something has been developed into full-on endorsement. I first noticed it in an early episode where two of the characters were driving around. Suddenly there was a lull in the script, a moment of contemplation punctuated by the line "I really like this song", drawing the viewers attention to a track by The Postal Service ostensibly playing on the car stereo. Later on two characters exchange email addresses both @aol.com, someone thanks god they "TiVo'd it", a class has a competition for finding information on Google, cars are specifically identified by make and, most amazingly of all, Apple computers (as favoured by the resident cute geekette named Mac) are shown actually running OSX. And that's just what I can remember.

It helps that Veronica Mars is a high-school based drama based in a city with stark divide between the very rich and the very poor so the former have access to all the cool gear and given that teens do tend to define themselves around music (insert obligatory MySpace reference here) and cutting edge "stuff" it doesn't disrupt the show too much despite the audacity of it, but it does signify an interesting trend in that the appearance of all these things are blatantly paid for. It's like the producers know that given their young demographic a significant number of viewers aren't going to watch it as broadcast. They'll be downloading it or watching it time-shifted on TiVo without the ads or, eventually, watching a DVD years in the future. For this audience the adverts that traditionally pay for the show are non-existent, but the show itself, if popular, will be around forever.

Of course in this case a plethora of product placement isn't overly intrusive. In fact it's oddly refreshing to see teenagers using and referring to products and services as they would in the real world - that weird-assed search engine Willow used in Buffy always struck me as unrealistic, regardless of all the vampires and demons about the place. Of course for something like Battlestar Galactica you'd be hard pressed to push anything other than a recruitment advert for the US army and, flashbacks aside, there aren't a lot of opportunities for character endorsements on the Lost island so the scope for this kind of advertising is somewhat limited.

Oddly, given my somewhat aggressive stance on advertising, I don't feel that strongly about this, possibly because in order for it to work it can't be allowed to disrupt the show itself, especially when dealing with a savvy media-literate audience. My main problem with adverts is how they jump up and scream in your face at the most inopportune moments. Here they just float around adding a bit of depth (or shallowness) to the characters, occasionally functioning as devices to push the plot along, and since the plot is all in these sort of things that's not a problem.

As for the show itself, Veronica Mars is okay. It could be described as a bit like Buffy with a dose of Beverly Hills 90210 (which I've never seen but you get the idea) crossed with Raymond Chandler lite. The script is occasionally very funny and the plot torturously complicated owning a lot, methinks, to 24. It also does that "series arc" thing with everything leading up to one big conflab, which is nice and keeps the attention. I wouldn't recommend it unreservedly but if you like this-sort-of-thing then this is a good example of that.

The second season of Battlestar Galactica ended in Americaland on Friday and my torrent finally came through last night. Quite, quite wonderful. This program has gone way beyond the "it should be shit but it's not" line and into genius territory. Yet whenever I preach this to non-geeks they look at me all funny. But I was the same. Battlestar Galactica? Must be shit. It's not. Trust me on this.

I really should start cataloguing all the things I rescued from my mother's house last week as there's some curious stuff suddenly in my possession. Part of it is the suitcase full of British comics that had been in her attic since I moved out of home in 1991. These are mainly copies of 2000AD and early issues of Deadline along with a selection of zines and other A4 sized comics from the 88-91 era.

The 2000ADs are the real diamonds here. I'd started buying the comic in 1987 and got severely hooked, so when I discovered such things as comic marts and mail order services where back issues were available I started completing my collection backwards in time to around 1984 (issue 363). These are now sitting by my bed in a large stack which I'm slowly working through each night, and what's struck me is how well they hold up. Yes, they're a little corny at times and the quality is not consistent across the board, but there's some really top-flight stuff in there (Halo Jones has just started). I was toying with selling them for a nice lump of cash (although I doubt I'd get much) but instead these are going to be saved for Isobel and Spike when they're old enough to appreciate them.

The other comics are somewhat embarrassing, coming as they do from that era when comics "grew up". In hindsight they just reached puberty and got a bit shouty but there are a few gems amongst the shit. Philip Bond's Wired World, for example, shines like a beacon and really should be collected for future generations. Tank Girl, on the other hand, is bollocks.

[Update: Just having a cursory glance on eBay and it seems the bottom has plummeted on the 2000AD back issue market. I was paying £1-3 an issue back in the day and now it's just pennies and postage... Maybe it's time to complete the run? Or is that crazy talk?]

Feeling much better now, thanks for asking, though it was a bit of a nightmare. I think I must have gotten a wee cold there for a bit, thanks no doubt to cycling in the freezing air, but whatever, it had passed by Sunday morning and other than my thumb still being sore (partly related to a sprained wrist ten years ago) everything seems to be in working order.

A slightly disturbing side effect of being knackered and possibly having a cold was my dreams got rather odd. My friends often appear in them but never in a notable way - just as people passing through. This last week though I've been murdering the male ones or getting involved in terribly messy marriages with the females, which was most disconcerting to say the least. It then occurred to me I'd been reading a lot of Gilbert Hendandez's Palomar stories (specifically Poinson River) before bedtime which, amongst other things, have a fair chunk of violent deaths and complicated romances, so that's okay then.

Saturday was mostly spent in my dressing gown watching Spaced with a brief interlude to go shopping (not in my dressing gown, though I expect to do that at some point) with Andy and Alex so we could share a cab home, where I was reminded of how long some people, especially couples it seems, can spend in a supermarket. Me, I'm done in minutes. Them, they spend forever, doing what I have no idea. Still, it did give me a chance to think about varying my diet for the first time in months so I plumped for spag bol as something I hadn't had for a while, could be done very simply if necessary and has room for variation and mutation, specifically into chili. (I later proceeded to pour half the spag into the sink, but we won't dwell on that.) The taxi back from the supermarket took bloody forever to arrive, despite me tempting bad karma by ordering a second one under a different name in the hopes that one of them would get to us before the night was out, which I wouldn't normally do but 5-10 minutes is 5-10 minutes, by golly, and on the way home I repeatedly told myself that while I could have cycled there and shopped twice and still have time to construct a replica Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks I probably wouldn't have bothered in the first place and so it was worth it really. And then it was back to Spaced for the rest of the second series, this time fully dressed, only for Andy to discover the DVDs have a "Homag-o-meter" extra which points out all the references as it runs through, so we'll be watching them again then. But that's no bad thing. I kept thinking I spotted Buffy references only to realise they were things Xander said so they were probably references to something else to begin with. This po-mo entertainment world can be so complicated sometimes...

Sunday was a relatively early start (bearing in mind I'd been getting to bed at five and up at one for work this last week) for my first pseudo-commercial (in that I was paid with lunch) photo shoot for An Untitled Musical Project about which I shall write more later, but for now here's the initial selection taken in the wilds of Selly Oak.

Then after pouring over the photos for a few hours Andy and Alex announced they were going to watch a movie, which seemed like a good idea, so I joined them for Bubble Boy, a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal in his pre-hearthrob days which was surprisingly brilliant. Surprisingly because it should have been fucking awful being a by-the-numbers teen comedy road trip type film with a wacky cast of D-list actors more normally employed in animation voiceovers of the non-Pixar variety. But like Sky High (another film that should have been shit but became my favourite film of last year) it had enough absurd moments of milk-through-the-nose hilarity and slapstick and enough self-awareness of it's innate stupidity to drag it round the back of the film quality spectrum and jettison it onto the hallowed platform of films that are so far beyond "so bad it's good" as to be genius.

Or maybe Andy and I are just entering some kind of post-Empire senility where the years of po-faced pseudo movie-criticism have taken their toll, the hero directors of our youth being revealed as the workman-like practitioners they always were forcing us to revel in sub-Disney comedies. Though Alex liked it too and she's like a drama student and shit. Ah, whatever...

Went to see King Kong tonight with Matt.

S'alright.

Okay, it's a very enjoyable film that I reckon is worth going to see but it didn't quite gel for me. I'm not sure why. It wasn't the length as I like a good long film, and it certainly wasn't Kong which was a superb execution. It just didn't have that oomph that a mad film about a giant monkey needs.

That said, tumbling dinosaurs - superb!

And so I can finally announce my film of the year. Sky High.

No, really. Best thing I saw at the cinema this year.

Honest!

At a loose end and flicking through the paper I saw that Starship Troopers was on telly so I sat my arse down and watched it. When I saw it in the cinema back in 1997 it scared the shit out of me (parody? Not parody?). Watching it in 2005 it felt like reportage. Maybe 9/11 really did change the world...

I've been asked a surprising number of times what I thought of Serenity, the film by Joss Whedon that follows on from his cancelled TV show Firefly. So here goes.

As you may know, I became something of a late convert to Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer last year and like most late-comers got somewhat hooked. After exhausting seven seasons of Buffy, DVDs of Angel were borrowed and then, inevitably, Firefly.

Firefly was an odd thing. To be honest, the first few episodes don't really work, mainly because they were messed around by a network that didn't really know how to deal with what it had bought. The last chunk, however, are superb television, mainly because the series had been cancelled. Odd that. The middle episodes vary from the good to the very good. It's worth checking out.

So what of the film then? Well, it kinda sits in the middle. On the one hand this is Whedon doing what he wants to do and sorting out some of the plot threads from the series. On the other hand he's making a movie that has to recoup the $50 million the studio spent on it, so it's got to have a pretty massive mass appeal and make significant compromises other than squeezing in buckets of exposition.

I think he just about made it, but it's a little awkward. The characters don't seem as relaxed as in the series because there isn't as much room for them to stretch out. The few more intimate moments seem slightly forced and out of place as the plot, which appears to comprise the unmade episodes 15-22 of the cancelled series, races on. But that plot doesn't seem to me to be the most important thing, and goes against a pretty core tenet of Whedon's work - that the why isn't as important as the how - the story is a means to an end and that end being how the characters deal with it. While there was plenty for the characters to react to here there didn't seem to be enough space for them to do so. Lines which presumably were there to give the character's depth came across as homages, there to please the fans but not to add anything to what we already knew.

So I was mildly disappointed when I came out of the cinema, but only because the film hadn't been spectacularly brilliant. Compared to the vast majority of movies featuring space ships that get a wide cinematic release it was a fucking masterpiece of modern movie making and that I was expecting more says a lot, not just about the state of films generally but about Joss Whedon's potential.

In conclusion, it's good, but it's not as good as, say, Out of Gas or Objects in Space from the original series. I think Whedon's is still best with the 22 episode, 15 hour TV series format than the two hour blockbuster, at least when dealing with the ensemble cast which is where his strengths ultimately lie. But go see it all the same. It's still a damn good film.

There you go - my thoughts on Serenity.

Those of you who watch broadcast television and live your lives as slaves to the schedules should make space for a five minute slot on Channel 4 at 7.55pm on Thursday, just after the news, for the network premier of m'good friend Matt Abbiss' short film Invasion, as part of their Mesh season.

Those of you who can't be bothered with such nonsense should download the movie and watch it now.

It's very good. Something of the sinister east European children's book aesthetic about it. Well done Matt.

Oh happy happy, for today season two of Lost starts. Other than my small American readership, that statement might seem a little odd to those of you still tied to broadcast TV as Channel 4 is only on episode eight or so of the first season. But for us jolly pirates in BitTorrent land the second season starts now in hi-def widescreen with no adverts. Or at least it starts for me as soon as it downloads, hopefully by the time I get back from the pub.

It's been interesting watching the UK discover Lost. Thanks to a blanket marketing campaign most people seem to be aware of it and expectations were high. For me, when I discovered it Last October, there wasn't much hype, or at least I wasn't subjected to it over here in the UK. There was a brief mention in this B3ta newsletter and that was about it so expectations were on a par with an amusing kitten related animation.

So when my non-torrenting friends said they quite liked Lost but it didn't quite get what all the fuss about about it wasn't too much of a surprise. And now, like rain after a sunny day, comes the inevitable backlash in the Guardian (which naturally I can't find online because it was in yesterday's G2 and they don't have the index up for that anymore. This is what I was taking about Anna...).

Y'see, the trick with Lost, and other big and glossy Yank TV shows of this ilk, is not to take them too seriously. This might not seem obvious because they seem to take themselves very seriously indeed what with all the glamourous actors and the angsty characterization. But they don't. The writers are having a laugh, seeing how far they can push things yet still maintain the illusion of sense.

It's kinda weird because there is a plot there and it does matter, but at the same time the resolution of that plot doesn't matter one iota. Part of the glory of it is the horrific tangle of threads and storylines that don't seem viable yet keep being added to. That elusive Guardian article was titled "Has Lost lost the plot?" which just shows how they've missed the point. If you accept that the plot will be all over the place, that the themes will be irrelevant and that point, if there is one, is to put a bunch of one-dimensional characters in a ridiculous situation and fuck with them repeatedly, then it becomes an immensely enjoyable 40 minutes of sillyness which you can watch and immediately move on from. Nothing more, nothing less.

(It's also worth remembering that these things last for hours. I re-watched the first season the other week and those 17 hours could have been edited down to five or so. It only really gets going around episode 10 or so, so writing it off at this early stage of the UK transmission is a little bit hasty.)

Lost isn't big and clever drama and Channel 4 are fools for pretending that it is. It's daftness of the supreme order.

Somewhat amazingly I'd never read any of Frank Miller's Sin City comics. Well, maybe one issue many years ago but I certainly wasn't familiar with them. Kinda odd really since he's one of the main figures in American comics that pushed the envelope at a high profile during the 80s and 90s. But no, other than his Batman books (which are probably the only Batman books worth reading because they're both not really about Batman and all about Batman) and the (under-appreciated) Ronin I haven't read much of him.

But of course I know all about Frank Miller and what he's done. I know how he took the flagging Daredevil comic (he's a superhero but he's blind!) and introduced influences from Japanese warrior manga like Lone Wolf and Cub bringing a dramatic dynamism to the somewhat staid 80's superhero genre. I know how he tried to reduce everything down to it's essence stripping away unnecessary details to emphasis the point of whatever he was doing, something every cartoonist should be doing. He's someone who pushes the boundaries artistically, but also politically and socially, and who really understands where comics have come from and what they're capable of. There was a joke around the late 80s that he was the only person in mainstream American comics doing anything interesting who wasn't British, he was that good.

So not having read the source material yet being fully aware of where it was coming from I went to see Sin City today. An hour or so in I glanced across the packed cinema and the audience seemed to be stunned as if they were irresistibly drawn in to something they could not comprehend. What the hell was this thing?

I tell you what it wasn't. It wasn't a comic book movie in the generally accepted sense. Miller was channeling noir fiction with Sin City, from the high end Chandler and Hammett to the low-end schlocky pulps. The symbolism and archetypes he's playing with are not what you'll usually find in comics, which is why he makes interesting comics.

It's worth bearing in mind that the most exciting thing about the comic book medium is that you can bring pretty much anything into it. The underlying grammar, while complex in execution, is simple and flexible enough for the artist to fly off in some utterly unique direction while still staying comprehendible. Of course most creators don't bother with such hard work in the same way that most novelists don't bother to write innovative literature, but when they do it's really quite exciting because it happens on so many levels.

So what people watching Sin City are seeing is a film directly adapted from a comic that was unlike any other comic around at the time which sucked in noir fiction and cinema stripped down to it's pure essence. Since noir is a relatively unexperienced genre these days, especially in such a pure form, it's no wonder they're baffled. But a straw poll of those who've seen it says they like it. A lot.

There's another aspect to all this that I think might be relevant. Comics can be quite subversive and powerful when done properly. This might explain why so many mainstream comics are shite - if they weren't then someone might notice again. A good comic book gets into your brain in a manner quite different to a novel or movie. It's a very personal experience that involves a fair amount of work on the reader's part making connections between those panels. The best example outside of comics is how a murder taking place off stage or out of shot is so much more chilling than one explicitly depicted. Comics use this technique on every page in a myriad of different directions not only between panels but within the artwork itself. The creator gives you a bunch of pictures and some words laid out in a way to guide you through but you fill in the gaps. Comics is all about the gaps. Look at Peanuts - it's just perfectly constructed gaps.

A lot of this made it into Sin City, which might seem odd because it's a very in your face movie, but that's part of the power. I'm still not sure how they did it but that movie sucks you in, not through the flashy effects (which I stopped noticing about 10 minutes in) or the acting (admittedly not all the cast could carry the dialogue but those that did were mesmerising) or the plot. In fact all the obvious aspects of the film are pretty irrelevant, which really pisses off the critics because that's all they can grasp hold of. It's the gaps, those subtle tricks you don't notice that burrow into your brain and make you part of the movie, not by dragging you violently by the lapels but by subconsciously involving you.

Given that Sin City is a film with no morally redeeming features it's quite a trick to bring your audience in like that and like I say I'm really not sure how they did it, but I'm pretty sure it came from having Frank Miller on board. Give someone who really understands the subversive power of comics the tools and guidance to make a top quality movie and you know you're going to be in trouble of the best kind.

I wanted to feel at least something. Crushing disappointment was covered by the first with mindless glee coming at the end of the second, but Revenge of the Sith? Nothing. It was just a bit crap. Crap acting and dialogue is a given, this is Star Wars after all, along with crap direction, but mediocre special effects? I wanted a stupid spectacle of iconic bonkersness but it was all a bit ho hum.

I can't be arsed to give it any more thought. Time to move on, except I don't think I have anything to move on from. Yawn...

Andy's already written about this but what the hell, it's good blogfodder.

I've been doing a lot of webwork this week and, as such, hadn't left the house other that to stock up with milk and fags at the Co-op, such is the curse of the home worker (vis the title of Dave's blog) so when Andy suggested a movie it seemed like a top idea, even if spending a couple of hours in a dark room isn't necessarily the best way of "getting out". Since I'd been working nights I suggested an early showing, say 11am, and given there are fuck all decent films out at the moment plumped for The Machinist, a dark and disturbing movie about sleep deprivation, guilt and the awfulness of existence staring an incredibly emaciated Christian Bale.

So we buy out tickets and wander into Screen 4 which while not the shitty living-room sized screen you sometimes get is certainly the place they put the odd and the arthouse at the Five Ways multiplex. Since it's an 11am showing it's just us an a few random blokes in their late 20s, early 30s (for a palace of dreams, the cinema can give a quite brutal shock of reality) and we settle in to suffer the adverts.

Which are all for kids stuff. Cereals, toys, hyper-hyper animations shouting out at my fragile brain in widescreen at top volume. It's most disconcerting. Andy wonders if we're in the wrong screen, but I reassure him - the film and the adverts/trailers are on different reels and at this time of the morning it's not out of the question that the underpaid teenager running the projector just got it wrong.

Then the trailers, which again are for every kids movie due out soon, from the kinda interesting (Willy Wonka, Robots) to the utterly shockingly awful, and it being Easter there are loads of them, and endless stream of wrongness considering what we're about to watch. The trailers end, the tedious Orange "advert" with that guy who isn't Kevin Spacey does its thing and the title card comes up.

Pooh's Heffalump Movie.

Turned out while all the computers in the system, from the national website to the ticketing tills, said The Machinist was showing, the typed out schedule for the staff had this sub-standard Pooh cash in listed so that's what they showed. And there's something beautifully absurd about this - how wrong can you get? You order a Bourbon and you get Sunny Delight.

It actually all worked out okay because we then had a couple of hours to waste before the next showing and there's nothing better than having to creatively fill time, plus it was a nice day and I really needed outside stuff, so we wandered around Brindley Place and the canals (some photos) and all was good before returning for our desired dose of misery and pain.

The Machinist is okay. Visually it's stunning but the actual plot seemed a little linear to me. The reveal at the end, while not obvious was a little 2+2=4 and it didn't seem to be trying to say anything interesting or deep. Maybe that was the point - that there isn't really anything to say about guilt other than how it eats you away. I dunno.

According to Jeremy it's Gay History Month which I inadvertently celebrated last week with a binge of gay history related media consumption. First up was another re-reading of Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, his coming-out story set in the deep south at the height of the civil rights movement and one of the best graphic novels ever produced ever. The introduction is by Tony Kushner, writer of the play Angels in America which was adapted, by Kushner, into a 6 hour HBO TV movie a couple of years back with an all star cast and quality director. I spotted the DVD on Sam's shelf and, having a long night ahead of me, decided to check it out. It's also very good, set in the mid eighties with Reagan at his apex and AIDS ravaging the gay community. For a very very long film about death, angst, lies, betrayal, regret and more death it's a quite funny movie with wonderfully surreal moments. I highly recommend it.

While perusing the DVD box, however, something struck me. There is no mention whatsoever of the content of the film. If you picked this up in ignorance you would not know it's a gay film by an acclaimed gay writer about AIDS. That's a bit odd, I thought. Then inside the box is one of those leaflets advertising various HBO DVDs. Angels in America is described as exploring "the politics, morality and search for hope in the story of six interconnected characters and an Angel in the complex and turbulent world of New York in the late 1980's. Spanning the extremes of tragedy, love and betrayal, and life and death, Angels in America in a journey through the landscape of despair and hope that defines America at the end of the 20th Century." Can you say "don't mention the gayness"? In the same leaflet the Tony Soprano is identified as a mob boss with a mid-life crisis, the Six Feet Under folk are undertakers and Band Of Brothers is is clearly about soldiers in World War Two. Yet Angels in America doesn't seem to have anything to do with homosexuals. The web site is the same.

From a media ownership point of view, HBO is part of Ted Turner's media group which was bought by Time Warner. Maybe there's some right-wing political stuff going on. Except Time Warner also publish Stuck Rubber Baby. And HBO, while popular and successful, is not mainstream. It's audience is every so slightly more high-brow than standard US TV and quite used to controversial themes. In other words, they can deal with the gayness and probably expect it.

Maybe it's a trick on the part of the producers to get what they consider an important work into the hands of people who might, consciously or not, reject a movie about fags. But, according to Wikipedia, this was the most watched made-for-cable movie of its year, won a Golden Globe and an Emmy and was internationally acclaimed. Anyone who hears about Angels in American from a source other than HBO will know what it's about. So why are HBO so reticent to go with the gayness? Is homophobia and the ghettoisation of queer culture really still so rife in our modern, enlightened age?

Of course it bloody is.

I'm currently re-reading The Music of Chance by Paul Auster and enjoying it tremendously even though I know exactly how it plays out (and boy is there a twist 2/3 through). As I explained to Sam today, reading Auster is like walking down a straight road which looks ordinary but all the details start taking your mind all over the surrounding countryside. The Music of Chance is probably my favourite Auster novel. It's not as majestic as The New York Trilogy but there's something about it that appeals, probably the opening 50 pages with a man finding himself free to do anything at all so he just drives aimlessly around America not looking for something but welcoming whatever comes his way. Another reason I like it so much is that it's represents the first time I came across Auster, not with this book but with the film version which I'd rented on a whim back in 1994 and loved. Reading it again now I had the desire to see the film again to see if it holds up (I suspect it does) and what it adds, if anyting (Auster was involved in the production). And I thought it would make a good 30th birthday present for Sam as it's her kind of film. But it's not available. So much for the Long Tail.

Smoke, however, is being re-released in January so there's hope.

I'm about to recommend a TV program. Hold tight.

Lost. Plane crashes, about 30 people survive, no contact, weird island that's trying to kill them, backstories unravel. It's an American TV series so buttons are pushed and boxes ticked, and it's all quite absurd, as you'd expect with JJ Abrams being one of the creators, but it's very well done indeed. It's the pacing that does it - even though there's all this incredible visual stuff going on (the plane crash is repeated every episode from a different point of view and the island is gorgeous) and sheds of soapy angst it's balanced with the tedium of just waiting. Maybe my recent exposure to this sort of high production value Yank TV has softened me somewhat but I'm hooked.

Three episodes have been broadcast in the States so far so it won't be over here for ages, and when it does it'll probably be on Sky and ruined with ads, so fire up your Bit Torrent package, pop over to Suprnova, download and enjoy.

Just watched OutFoxed, a searing indictment of the Fox News channel in the US laying into its inherent right wing bias and fraudulent use of the term "fair and balanced". It''s quite an eye-opener, especially as we don't get Fox over here (it makes Sky News look like the Today program), and even though the documentary is obviously made with an agenda and does have some moments of factual sleight of hand (comparing Fox viewers with those of PBS is like comparing Killroy viewers with Radio 4 listeners. It'd be more interesting to compare them with MSNBC or CBS viewers but the graphics wouldn't be so dramatic) it's generally so out in the open that there's very little to fault it for. If you can watch it, and I got a copy via BitTorrent, do so, especially if you live in the States.

As an outsider I find these sort of documentaries interesting in that, as with Fahrenheit 911, it's easy to get all smug. I mean, this is Rupert Murdoch we're talking about! We've been suffering his machinations for over three decades! Has it taken you people until now to realise what he's up to? OutFoxed is clearly aimed at the educated middle class American who suspects something is wrong but can't quite pin it down (unlike Moore's work which with it's Oprah-style emotive content is strictly prime-time) and again I found myself wanting to shout "isn't this all blatantly obvious to you?"

But then I thought about it. We've been suffering Murdoch for over three decades. The Sun has been the bestselling daily paper for 26 years of its 40-year existence and where it leads others follow. Whether for financial or political reasons (or more likely both) Murdoch has made a concerted effort to influence and control our media and political landscape, creating a lowest common denominator in print and broadcast that allows the rest to fall while frightening our politicians into more and more draconian legislation. All this is blatantly obvious and yet we do nothing about it. Fox as a political force is a relatively new beast on the US media scene. News International has been fucking with us since the early 80s. I don't think we've got anything to be smug about here...

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this afternoon with Andy G. Scribbled some notes on the bus home.

Impossible not to be affected by two hours of blatantly manipulative documentary yet despite expecting to be a key demographic for Michael Moore's work I felt oddly empty at the end. I'd learned nothing new, had no revelations, just been exposed to middle aged Iraqi and American women crying. But then I'm not the target - this film wasn't aimed at me and the most worrying conclusion is if Moore is preaching to the converted, how ignorant are the converted?

I remember when the film came out in the states reading a few blog posts by generally intelligent, liberal American bloggers who saw the film and felt their eyes had been opened to things that had never occurred to them. Isn't this stuff just fucking obvious? Moore's only crime is that his focus is so narrow. What Bush & co are doing is no different to the situation in Italy, Russia, any number of "civilised", "free", "democratic" countries. (Ironically I don't think it's happening here in the UK because Blair is more obsessed with ideology than money, but that's another story).

I was left thinking that if this is what counts for radical, dangerous, left-field political film-making in the US then America is in more trouble than I thought. Strip away the personal Moore stuff, and there wasn't that much of it to begin with compared with Bowling for Columbine, cut back the emotive tear-jerking interviews, and you're left with the kind of report that would sit fine on UK broadcast TV.

Powerful people run countries, whether in business or government or both, and network with each other to make money at the expense of the people who elected them. It's been going on for generations. Tell me something I didn't know.

But then I'm not the audience this is intended for because I've been paying attention these last few years. The thing is, I don't think I've been doing anything special. I don't think I'm some kind of genius or in some kind of elite because I can come out of seeing this film and not learn anything new. The information Moore has filtered into his US-centric, anti-Bush tirade is out there and has been for years. What's shocking is that people are being shocked by it.

I'd recommend people go see it, if only to judge how much is news to them. If a lot of it is news then y'all better start paying attention.

Spiderman. Never that bothered about him to be honest. In fact I don't think I've ever even owned a Spiderman comic, despite having been through a short-lived but quite intense Marvel buying period circa 1988-9 which I don't like to talk about thanks very much. Sure, I know the whole mythos pretty well but more from unavoidable osmosis thanks to 15 years in comics than actually giving a damn.

So the word goes out amongst my comics mates that a trip it planned to the multiplex to go see Spiderman 2 and I figure what the hell. I'd noticed something of a positive vibe about the film emanating from areas of the web where I wouldn't expect such a vibe, a general sense that normally rational, level-headed folks who, while geeky in some ways were not geeky in a Spiderman way, had enjoyed the film rather a lot. The word seemed to be that Sam Raimi, having gained the trust of the studio by not messing up the first one, had gone hell for leather and lived up to the promise of his Evil Dead and Darkman days. That alone I'd be interested in seeing.

You know where this is going...

Spiderman 2 is one of the best films I've ever seen. At this moment I'd say it's the best film I've ever seen. I can't remember a film having that kind of effect on me in the cinema. It absolutely blew me away. Raimi is at the height of his powers and completely at ease as he drags the audience willingly into this absurdly brilliant... Yes, the action scenes are spot on, taking the controlled madness of his early experiments with the shaky cam to new levels. But then he switches gears with these incongruous extended scenes where nothing happens, as if you're suddenly in some continental art-house movie for five minutes, and it works. The film is utterly loyal to the comics, pretty much based on the original 60's Lee and Ditko run if I'm not mistaken. Yet it's not pretentiously overblown nor dragged down by fanboy baggage. It's the perfect superhero movie, which is a minor achievement. What makes it incredible is that the perfect superhero movie is also the best film of the year if not of the decade, and it's Spiderman 2. What were the odds?

Something interesting is going on in movie land. Peter Jackson (Brain Dead, Meet the Feebles) manages to take the turgid prose of Lord of the Rings and produce a 12 hour trilogy that not only pleases the tediously picky fans of said book but is also eminently watchable for people who really can't deal with the whole elf thing. And now Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) does the same with Spiderman.

I mean, Spiderman! I'm ranting and grinning like a kid over a Spiderman movie! I'm urging my friends to go see a Spiderman movie, a sequel at that! I never thought I'd see the day...

Well, Buffy has been watched in it's entirety. I woke up on Saturday feeling exhausted and after a moment of disappointment that I was about to write off a day just lying around I realised I hadn't had a day or evening off in ages what with work and visiting folk and gigs and comics conventions and the like, so I decided to write off the weekend. It was nice to do this consciously rather than realising in retrospect, so I stayed in bed as long as possible rising at about 3.00pm. Buffy seasons 6 and 7 were in the house and Sam was away for the weekend so after breakfast I settled down on the sofa and started. By 11.00pm Sunday I'd watched them all. Truly this is the only way to watch something like this - one huge 30+ hour orgy of absorption where nothing else comes into frame. So it's done. I've now seen Buffy and while it was good, in places very good, I'll probably never watch it again.

Unfortunately Angel series 1 appeared in the house today. I've given instructions that it must be hidden until I've got some work done...

I needed a break from the computer for a few days. I truely believed that. It was nothing to do with the Buffy DVD box sets that have started appearing in the house. Oh no. The fact that I've watched about 30 episodes since Friday evening has nothing to do with it. And 16 hours straight viewing is not a problem.

Oh God, I'm a Buffy fan.