HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS, or, JOHNATHAN RÉE: THE DUDE OF THE PHILOSOPHY WORLD.

 

I wish to begin this post by clarifying the use of the word ‘dude’; whilst endowing the term with the usual smattering of cynical detachment, I use the term in full adherence of its definition in surfer parlance, and mean it wholeheartedly.

Where to begin on the brilliance of Rée (or, as I like to call him, Johnathan)? For those who have ever stumbled and stammered and eventually snorted through (and at) any level of philosophy, Johnathan is your man. Marx, Arendt, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Diderot, Kierkegaard, and indeed anyone who has ever written luminously and importantly (and occasionally indecipherably) on the nature of life as we do and do not know it, has been read and dissected by our good friend Johnathan.

This surely makes the man very very clever, which is fairly evident throughout anything that he writes, but the fact is not rubbed into your face. Quite the opposite in fact; he calmly leads you into his graceful arguments with the patience of an C18th maiden, and not once does he suggest that you couldn’t have figured any of this out for yourself. And what is more, he chucks Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Proust and Freud into his footnotes, making the overall mixture a rich fruity kind of thing, nicely ornamented and spiced up.

Shall I stop there? I think not. Another piece of excellence about the man is that he knows everything, and if he doesn’t, you can be damn sure that he’s got the smarts to go off and research it and present it to you much like a dog running off in the park and coming back with a diamond tiara. One such example is in I See a Voice, where we have got a fairly complex history of physics and colour-music all parcelled up and ready to go. I wasn’t aware before how much I needed to know about Castel’s colour-harpsichord, but now my friends and family are all marvelling at my long-winded attempts at reiterating this golden piece of history.

My last point, before I go off to finish I See a Voice and quote him extensively in my own work, is that the man is funny! Haha funny! Genuinely and wonderfully hilarious! Now, I’d hate to compare yet another intellectual to my paramour, Bill Bryson, but I’m afraid it must be done. I’ve just read a section where Johnathan describes Hegel as working himself into a lather of indignation at the “completely superfluous richness” of poetic words to describe sound.1 Now, I may have just been reading theories of the voice for slightly too long, but isn’t that just the most hilarious piece of academic writing you have ever read? Because of course aren’t philosophers just a tad earnest at times? And wouldn’t it be brilliant if people pointed that out every now and again?

I must go now, for fear of accidentally writing my current essay verbatim here, but I believe my point has been made: philosophy should be everything that it already is, because it already is what it already is, but sometimes it helps if someone comes along and makes it all that little bit more exciting and enjoyable.

1.Johnathan Rée. I See a Voice: Language, Deafness & the Senses- A Philosophical History. (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999) p. 44

MADAMA BUTTERFLY, or, MISS SAIGON FOR GROWN-UPS.

 

A night at the opera at Leeds Grand; not for the faint-hearted, claustrophobic or even lightly overweight.

Last night I was lucky enough to catch an Opera North performance of Madama Butterflyat one of Leeds’ veteran theatres and I was transported from a grimy city-centre Saturday night to something just a little more magical. The Grand truly lives up to its name, containing every 19th-Century flourish the heart could desire, and having more secret passageways and staircases than an Escher painting. Proceeding higher and higher in search of our seats, I couldn’t hide my childish delight as we emerged from labyrinthine ginnels out onto a balcony a stone’s throw from the elaborately decorated ceiling. The drama of our seats (‘I wonder if I drop this bit of jam sandwich it’ll land on the bassoon player?’) did come at a slight cost though. It is certainly brought back with a startling truth that they make people on a larger scale nowadays than they did in the 1870s. At a reasonable 5 ft 8, I had to concertina myself in order not to intrude on the lady in the row in front and at one point, unbeknownst to me, my boots were resting lightly on her head. In the balcony bar I was stood next to a lady who must have been just a whisper under 6 ft 5; how she fitted into the pint-sized seats I have not an inkling. This brilliant piece of living history was nothing compared to the eco-system up in the Gods though; in this winter of climatological contrasts, new records were made and broken with regard to extreme heat and humidity levels. This, however, did not detract from the performance, instead it heightened the tension and drama of Butterfly.

It really is an opera of contrasts: from the braggadocio of Pinkerton’s tenor to the sweetness of Cio-Cio San’s soprano; from the boastful American themes (with more than a nod to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’) to the more pentatonic influences in the Japanese chorus; from rags to riches and back again; from doe-eyed geisha girl to scheming American. Perhaps Puccini was aware of all this schizophrenic back-and-forthing, so he helpfully and gracefully wove earlier themes and recognisable motifs throughout the opera in order to make even the most lily-livered rookie feel at home. I particularly enjoyed those moments where you could have sworn blind that you’d heard that particular melody before….before realising that Claude-Michel Schönberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber had just picked up vast swathes of the music and translated it into something eminently more appealing to the masses. (I fully accept my place in aforementioned ‘masses’ as I have every musical ever written on my iTunes.) Opera North also pleased me greatly by condensing quite a wordy three act opera into something entirely more succinct and elegant. In versions I had seen elsewhere, the dialogue lasted forever and hammered points home so strenuously that I’d wished heartily for something more understated- Legally Blonde, perhaps.

With regard to high drama, Butterfly certainly delivers. Not, perhaps, in the same way that Miss Saigon manages with almost exactly the same storyline – heavy on the high-tech helicopters and mass despair- but it certainly packs a punch.

The lighting was a far cry from the strobes and flashes of Miss Saigon, but it suited the scenery perfectly, and it was a creative way of indicating the passing of time during the long waiting scene. There is, necessarily, a lot of music to be gotten through in that scene, and the gentle noon-till-dawn effects were really quite lovely.

Erring on the side of subtlety, the translated titles were played on screens to the side of the stage, so that the audience was not distracted from the action by their own ignorance of other languages – I speak only for my own ignorance here. Other excellences include the casting; Cio-Cio San is supposed to be fifteen years old, and, thanks to some savvy casting, I believed that the woman on stage was but a shy teenage geisha. Despite Anne Sophie Duprels’ international acclaim and mature virtuosic talent, she’s certainly no buxom Wagnerian diva; quite the opposite in fact.

Staging and scenery also scored highly; despite the well-judged aesthetic updating to the 50s (from what I could tell from the costumes), the stage was mercilessly free of clutter, and the paper-house rivalled Ikea’s claim to flexible storage-genius. Even the costumes worked hard; in particular Cio-Cio San’s subtle Japanese-to-American conversion. Her habit of wearing T-bar heels in order to lay claim to her new citizenship was touching, as was her trendy new hair-cut and insistence on being called by her married name.

Butterfly is well-known for its tear-jerking qualities and I have to say that it did not disappoint. The love song at the end of Act I got my lovely companion straight away, but I have to admit that it left me cold. The endlessly patronising and possessive sentiments that Pinkerton warbled to Cio-Cio San made my teeth ache with irritation. The fact that he was a feckless, arrogant American marrying a beautiful fifteen-year-old with the full intention of leaving her, was less than adorable. To me, the true pathos lay in the scene where Cio-Cio San was renounced by her family and friends for converting from Shinto to Christianity. And, at the end after her suicide (in front of her son, no less), seeing Pinkerton and his American counterparts turning tail and walking away from the disaster that they had created, was somewhat unbearable.

It has to be said that Opera North really pulled it out of the hat. As a Northern company based in Leeds, this opera was made bespoke for the Grand, proving that the cultural scene in the North is second to none – as long as you know where to look. As cultural risk-takers they are responsible and respectful; they updated Puccini’s work to the extent that it made it more accessible, but kept the original magic. They addressed a love story between a geisha and an American without shying away from the post-colonial aspect, or patronising Cio-Cio San. Above all, they made of it something special. Incandescent is a bit of a strong adjective to just throw around, but I think I shall use it here, yes: Madama Butterfly by Opera North at Leeds Grand Theatre was nothing short of incandescent.

 

Picture of Leeds Grand thanks to http://kitschensinkuk.blogspot.com/2012/02/opera-my-perspective-madame-butterfly.html

Picture of Miss Saigon thanks to http://www.musical.org.nz/miss_saigon_photo_christchurch.htm

Picture of stage thanks to http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/madama-butterfly/id/4302

Picture of Anne Sophie Duprels thanks to http://www.operanorth.co.uk/blog/2011/11/11/anne-sophie-duprels-on-the-road-with-madama-butterfly/

SLOW-ROASTING CATHOLICS

To borrow and then invert a phrase of Bridget Jones’s, I am a Smug Singleton. I find the state of Singledom such a wonderful and liberating place that once, upon hearing that a friend had recently become engaged, I murmured absentmindedly ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry’, before coming to abruptly and notching that clanger up as the first in a series of increasingly horrifying social gaffs. That being said, I do most fervently adore Valentine’s Day. There is just so much to love about it. Like all of our most popular holidays, Valentine’s day is a jumble of grisly Christian history, pagan influence, inept calendaring and savvy marketing. What started out as a day of sacrifice and death has become a bizarre pink and red competition of affection. The fact that St Valentine was, in fact, plural- up to three blokes can claim the moniker- does not seem to bother us, just as we rarely distinguish between Santa Claus and Jesus at Christmas. When it comes down to it, Valentine’s day is about mass consumption which can occasionally be very fun. In fact, I am convinced that England invented and then relentlessly pushed most of our national holidays purely because of the horrible weather. Think about it: we have Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter in quick succession, beginning as the leaves turn and continuing right up until bare legs become de rigueur once again. This primarily means chocolate in funny shapes and, most importantly, very cheap chocolate in obsolete shapes the next day!

As my good friend Wikipedia has reliably informed me, Valentine’s day got a rep for being the day of romantic love because of a poem that Chaucer wrote for the one-year anniversary of the marriage of King Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. In a brilliant twist the pair were only 15 years old on their wedding day, making them woefully underage in modern terms. With the childish delight of one who loves decoding gruesome lullabies, I quite enjoy informing traditionalists that the holiday they are so enthusiastically celebrating is famous for condoning the sexual relations of minors. This usually takes place straight after I point out that the heart-shaped tokens they are bestowing upon their dearest one bears much more anatomical resemblance to a cow’s heart than a human one. At this point they usually become quite wan and begin googling anti-Valentine’s Day activities, of which there are many quite violently anti-sentimental options.

There are some lovely aspects of Valentine’s Day though. Dependent upon where you are in the world, the day becomes more than just a day for lovers. According to my (unfortunately) international friends, parts of Scandinavia, Lithuania, Latvia and many South American countries all utilize the day in varying ways to demonstrate love and affection to those they are close to.

This is a custom I have adopted with gusto, ploughing all my single-energies into making a series of ridiculous cards for my dog and buying the most lurid and unnaturally coloured chocolates for my family and friends.

However you celebrate (or anti-celebrate), I do hope you have a delightful day. With more than a nod to the arbitrariness of it all, I myself will be embracing the spirit of irrationality by garlanding the house with cow’s hearts, decorating the Christmas tree I haven’t thrown out yet with Easter eggs, putting carved pumpkins in the windows and slow-roasting a Catholic whilst wearing my Guy Fawkes mask. Then and only then can I feel that I have stylishly celebrated the day in keeping with the kind of scant regard that England has for history and basic common sense in the face of morale-boosting consumerism.  

All photos my own apart from chocolate Father Christmas from http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/berkshire/hi/things_to_do/newsid_8350000/8350839.stm

PHILOSOPHY FOR PHILISTINES, or, HOW TO READ NIETZSCHE AND BE A TOOL.

Philosophy is just one of those things; you either love it or you hate it. Or you really hate it. Or you wish you love it. Or you half-understand it but lack the intelligence to follow through. Or you wish you had strong feelings about it, but it has never even approached your daily life. Philosophy is many things, and I say that with the half-demented look of one who has spent the last two hours trying to sum it up.

 To be quite frank, I’m only in it for the drama. I make it quite well-known that I am a fan of Nietzsche. What I do not make well known is the fact that I have only ever read a tiny portion of his varied canon, and my favourite piece is perhaps the most obvious one of all: On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. Someone once asked me how I felt about the feminism aspect of his work and I smiled a smile of such dazzling intensity that I hoped they would forget the question and merely quoted:

 ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force; coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.’

 It’s a hell of a party trick, and I can do it for quite a few of my philoso-homies. And in answer to the earlier question? Not a clue. Didn’t even know there was a feminism question. Does it matter? Probably. But please consider this before you ask any more difficult questions:

 ‘Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibres? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?’

 Jesus, put that to music and I’d dance to it. I’d inscribe that on the back of toilet doors in clubs; I’d tattoo that on toast; I’d do any manner of pretentious hipster things to it just as long as no one asks me what I think of Nietzsche in relation to Hegel.

 I may be missing the point, but in the middle of a bloody and purple performance of Mozart’s Requiem I have never once leaned across a row of people to loudly whisper ‘Thrice-punctured Christ! I love the cadencing on empty 5ths, but that Handelian choral fugue is a bit precocious… Crikey Moses! That Gregorian chant is positively Hayden-esque!’ I would be pulled out of the concert hall on a wave of silent disapproval. This is why, when reading philosophy, I tend to silence those niggling thoughts (‘Yeah, but what would Cixous think?’, or, ‘Missing some of the finer Kantian influences there methinks’, or, ‘Goethe would be spinning in his grave’) with a stern look and the hissed incentive: ‘Shhh! I’m reading!‘

 This could engender accusations of formalism, but the truth is that I am simultaneously more clever and more of a philistine than that. I have had the kind of education which would have me beheaded if I were to focus purely on a formalistic reading of anything, but at the same time I do like to chop out teeny tiny beautiful bits of texts and murmur them to myself as if they were incantations, whilst rejecting the body of the argument. In the first seven hundred years that I was an undergrad, I was constantly reminded to sum up the text. To draw little lines under each paragraph and figure it out slowly and patiently. As a postgrad I was encouraged to ‘think dialectically’, which I liken to making Baked Alaska: Get some random ingredients; put them together with some really cold stuff; whip up some other stuff and smear it on the top; bake in a really hot oven; viola! The last original dessert before Heston Blumenthal got on the scene.

 Where was I? Oh, Philosophy. Yeah, it is really really hard to think dialectically, or even to summon up the time and inclination to figure out what that means, because, let’s face it, Young Adult, Shame, The Artist and The Nine Muses are all in the cinema at the moment.

 So! I have an answer to all those who wish that philosophy was more interesting than ‘Philosophy for Dummies’, and easier than actually studying it. And this is reading On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, memorising it, and then quoting it at every available opportunity. When people look at you in awe you have to maintain a modest face which is sometimes quite hard. And when people ask you where you read it, you can change the title on every quotation because you would be very very unlucky to actually find someone who could tell the different pieces apart. And if you do meet one of those people you can always distract them by offering them some Baked Alaska and then discussing the dialectical nature of it. If they don’t like Baked Alaska you’re screwed and don’t come looking at me, because I would only reply:

 ‘He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.’

 And if you, having memorised this, come back at me with:

 ‘Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deception.’

 I will shake my head sadly and say:

 Do I know what rhetorical means? (-Homer Simpson).

Text from: http://academics.eckerd.edu/instructor/starkjl/jls–inactive/405/September13/Nietzsche.pdf

Tattoo from : http://extreme2strokes.com/archive/nietzsche-tattoo&page=2

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BAD NEWS

Today, on one of my daily forays into the realms of cultural eschatology, I came across a very interesting article by a one Mr. Ewan Morrison. I don’t know how to express any of my genuine sadness and panic at his words, so I will merely link you (I hate technological terms) to his article and hope that by tomorrow technology has collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity (she blogs) and we are all returned to the green fields of the land that was once made out of nature. And if anyone is hoping to move far far away into a forested back-country beset with bears and completely devoid of any faint pulse of electricity, I’m on the next plane out. I’ll be the one hurriedly blogging my goodbyes before hurling my smartphone into the bin.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/self-e-publishing-bubble-ewan-morrison

Revolution is around the corner guys, so start stockpiling that paper whilst you still can – trees will be obsolete by 2014.

Title indebted to Modest Mouse.

GET SOME GRIT INTO YOUR ITUNES!

To be ‘absolutely incomparable’, in Goethe’s words, is a bit of a double-edged sword. Whilst being an accolade of the highest order, it is also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is common knowledge among the more cynical of critics that we, as audiences, like what we already know. This is something that countless reality TV shows have cashed in on with soul-destroying tenacity. I’m naming no names but the worst offender (rhymes with Hex-Tractor) has created a culture that demands we identify and classify everything before we are allowed to consume it.This is well documented in everything from supermarket self checkout machines: “’zucchini’? I only answer to ‘courgette’”, to the hilarious struggle that iTunes has with my music collection; deeming everything ‘alternative’ or ‘miscellaneous’ before giving up the ghost entirely.

The Manchester-based band Shoshin are an excellent example of ‘alternative’ or ‘miscellaneous’, as my iTunes library would perceive it, or ‘absolutely incomparable’ as Goethe would have it. Their website describes their style as a mixture of Rock, Rap, Ragga and Soul. So, pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want it. The frontman Pete Haley sums it up in perfect ad-man style: ‘Not a collage, just more of a fine blend’.

Which brings us seamlessly onto politics, obviously. If you have ever had the pleasure of seeing Shoshin live, I’d wager it was most likely on the street rather than in ‘empty venues dried up by local mediocrity and pay-to-play scamming’, to quote Haley again. In fact, this is a point on which they are quite adamant. Determined to record, produce and distribute their music independently, their manifesto is straightforward and uncompromising: ‘We’re gonna tour to hell and back to get you people to hear our music, and we’re gonna have a blast doing it’. Wary of the hype of success that a big-budget label campaign can inspire, the band try to steer their own ship; getting their music heard by people who will appreciate it, without having to bow to the inevitable star-shaping that A&R provide. Their touring is done on a tight budget and is constantly hampered by the stringent bureaucracy of the places they play. Their powerful and provocative sound drums up incredible crowd participation, but this in itself often attracts the attention of the authorities. No strangers to the inside of cop-shops, when on tour the band have been arrested countless times and have some interaction with the police every day: this can also been seen in their youtube videos when Haley has to constantly reason with the powers-that-be and justify their presence.

Having been a fan from the start, I noticed a difference in their sound on their three-track demo. Previously their sound had been about complex rhythm and a raw finish. The demo came out and I was disappointed. Someone had taken away what Shoshin meant; in editing the drums down to a metronomically precise standard they lost some of their ambiguity and intelligence, and the bass and guitar struggled to conform to the beat. The people had been replaced by plastic. The band were just as unhappy with this development as their fans were. The studio-experience was something that they had to lash out against: as Haley says, ‘All the beautiful nuances and variables of the drummer’s natural rhythm and groove are gonein favour of machine-like precision, a precision that contains within it absolutely no human expression whatsoever’. Their debut album has no such issues. Getting back in the driver’s seat Haley says, ‘We’re diggin’ all those old Hendrix records – in our opinion thats the way a rock record should sound.. raw, soulful and totally organic! So that’s how we’re recording our album at the moment, old-school, exactly the way we play it live. You won’t be hearing machines on our debut album, you’ll be hearing us.’ This journey, from grit to plastic and back to grit again is similar to the same kind of ‘progress’ that Mr Hudson made when he cut loose from The Library in favour of Kanye and auto-tune. He hit super-stardom with a vengeance, helped considerably by his savvy American mentor, but somewhere along the way he lost what had made him magical when he was still playing Leeds Cockpit on a Sunday evening with a broken guitar. On the subject, Mr Hudson has said post- ‘Straight No Chaser’, that he wishes his next album to have an English sound, ‘a dirtier, rougher sound, so that you’ll have to get the Hoover out after you listen to it.’¹

After listening to Shoshin’s debut album ‘City of Patience’ you’ll certainly be needing to whip the dusters out. The streets are back in the sound and that is what they have always been about. When talking about English music it is often a cliché to speak about the grit and growling, the scratches and imperfections, the accents and the idiosyncrasies, but they are what has made English music a worldwide phenomenon, so why give up what makes us great? Highly lauded in The Netherlands, Shoshin are hitting the road in February to take their powerhouse tunes on a European tour because the guys over there discovered the glory of Manchester’s finest long before us. And isn’t that a bit embarrassing?

‘City of Patience’ is now available on Shoshin’s website: http://www.weareshoshin.com/music.php

and tour dates are also available online.

1http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/05/26/caught-social-mr-hudson-in-sparkling-form/ [30 January 2012]

Photo thanks to:http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/

MY FUNNY SOCIOPATH, or, DR SHERLOCK HOUSE. WHO?

The other night I was idly consuming my own body weight in sweets that I neither enjoy nor think makes me look more classy in company (like the case of 80% cocoa chocolate – grotesque but it’s a connoisseur thing).  To offset the considerable horror of what I was doing, I decided to slam on one of my TV favourites. The choice was, as always, between Dr Who, House and Sherlock. All radically different programmes with radically different themes and characters. Of course. My viewing pleasure of just about anything has been dramatically curtailed by the aforementioned because of the sheer stupidity of just about everything else. Indeed, my pleasure in life has been dramatically curtailed by the aforementioned due to my self-diagnosed heightened intellect and incredible cognition for hidden signs.

I find myself thinking like the three leads, in a constant state of paranoia, i.e: my porridge is cooking rather slowly today. Maybe Moriarty has tapped the gas-pipes only to redirect it to a deserted warehouse in Southampton via mobile phone, which is where he will convert it into a deadly strain of an unidentifiable virus which will infect the population of New Mexico. Because of an important political conference, 3 members of the British parliament will go there, develop a fast-moving illness, and be flown to New Jersey in a plane full of dead people to alert Dr House to the emergency. It will be revealed to be Lupus but it is never Lupus, and House will figure out during a fluke dinner with Wilson (did I almost type Watson there?) that it is actually because we are all allergic to lettuce.  This information comes too late, however, because the Daleks have put Hitler in a cupboard and taken over the US govt and have started a health campaign, which involves Jamie Oliver, to get everyone to eat 4,000 calories of lettuce a day. On the lost moon of Poosh, the Silence are converting vast swathes of moon fields into lettuce fields which are poisoning the entire population of the Earth and turning humankind into adipose babies. James Corden figured this out ages ago, but he was brainwashed because he is normal, which is stupid in any other language, and Dr Who has abandoned him because he is off chasing a ginger in a short skirt and being emotional about his 800 years of being alone. Because it is my gas-pipes that have been tapped, I only have 10 minutes to notice that my blog stats have stayed the same for the last two days and someone is sending me a cryptic message. If I don’t turn on my phone STAT then I can’t receive a confusing text from a dead prostitute and have a sarky and dramatic exchange with my gay brother about a fez. I then have only 3 seconds to give an arrogant speech to the sky, adjust my bow-tie, send a few beams of green light into my porridge pan with my screwdriver, fall in love with Billie Piper, sexually harrass Dr. Cuddy, make a few racist comments about Jews, and discover a cure for AIDS before Mrs Hudson gets shot. Oh, and figure out the lettuce problem by being very wrong about something very personal. Dr House will reveal that it is only cynicism and Vicodin that keeps him alive. But then Dr Who will say something very simple, but deceptively complex, and Sherlock will curl his lip in a sexy way and Dr Wilson/Watson will smile a resigned smile and I will realise that it is just because I put my porridge on the wrong hob- the left one is always less effective than the right one. Or I could always OD on Vicodin and jump off a building and miraculously survive and regenerate just for the hell of it.

The way that these three programmes intertwine is perfect for someone like me who likes to guess the ending of a book based only on the smell of the pages, and who will only eat foods that can be cooked in under 3 minutes because waiting that extra minute is tantamount to being slow-roasted alive in flames of frustration. But then I started pondering what the endless appeal of the three eponymous stars is. The fact that all three men are tall, British, and quirky-looking is definitely a plus, but the plot thickens…

Essentially, all three are either high-functioning sociopaths, addicts, or aliens learning how to be human. Or all three in the case of Dr House. Interested only in the puzzle, with scant regard for the lives that may be lost in the riddle-solving, all three men are fully compatible with Mary Ann Doane’s conception of the ‘epistemological drive’, which features highly in Films Noir. The idea that men are ruthless truth seekers is somewhat of an ancient concept, but the idea that women exist only for men to investigate, undo, undress, is slightly worrying. The fact that all three characters simply cannot sit still, crack open a yoghurt and fill in their tax-returns is also a trifle suspect. They are constantly on the hunt for more interesting cases, and Dr Who’s TARDIS even cuts out the middle man by simply depositing him miles and years off-course and slap-bang in the middle of some cool drama. This allergy to the mundane is often detrimental, as the boring little details are often intimately concerned with the big issue. Mycroft Holmes particularly likes pointing this out to Sherlock.

Companion-wise, all three are lost without their parrotting little-people. The hangers-on are the most important part, existing merely to ask the stupid questions, walk a chaste few steps behind, hide the drugs, trigger the stokes of genius, and attempt to coax their wayward Einsteins to eat something once in a while and maybe not get sued so often. More often, they risk life and limb to hold the coats and deal with the paperwork. They even sacrifice their personal lives for their pet prodigies. Wilson loses endless wives because of House’s perpetual presence, Watson is so busy dealing with the snarky fall-out of Sherlock’s latest heartbreak that he forgets his girlfriends’ names, and Amy leaves her loveable but normal (that dirty word again!) husband without a second’s thought at a summons from Dr Who.

And why do we love them so? Maybe it is the mystery. Is House a person capable of love? Is he back on Vicodin again? Is Sherlock gay? Is he a virgin? What exactly is the deal with him and Mycroft? Dr bloody WHO?

Maybe it is the fact that all three attempt at morality occasionally, but their ridiculous insight and intelligence leads them to flirt with the bad-boys every now and again. House embraces Death as something that he can compete with. He plays fast and loose with the concept of law and order, and only the drugs stop his world from caving in. Sherlock is obsessed at an elemental level with Moriarty’s evil genius, and is almost seduced by the idea that he himself is Moriarty. He would rather play his parlour trick of guessing everything about you from the obvious rain-drops on your scarf than engage in human relations. And let’s not forget that our friendliest sociopath, Dr Who, was considered the most dangerous and tricksy creature in the history of the universe, necessitating his incarceration into the Pandorica.

Perhaps the appeal it is just because they are abnormally clever, and let us believe that just for a moment we can emerge from the smudge of the masses. That we, too, can be that brilliant and lonely and special.

Whatever it is, I’d better go. The bulb in my lamp flashed a few minutes ago, briefly, but I only changed it last week. Last time that happened the Cybermen got blown up with love and I’d like to try my hand at that.

Images from:

http://house.wikia.com/wiki/House_vs._God

http://blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/thegeekfiles/2010/07/matt-smith-and-karen-gillan-ho.html

http://geeksyndicate.wordpress.com/tag/benedict-cumberbatch/

I HEARD YOUR VOICE THROUGH A PHOTOGRAPH, or, THREE REASONS WHY BOOKS REIGN SUPREME.

1: THEY CAN SWIM:

2: THEY GO WITH EVERYTHING.

3: YOU GIVE AND TAKE THEM LIKE PIECES OF SOUL:

I saw this bookshelf out on the street in Heidelberg. The idea was that you bring a book that you have read and swap it with one on this bookshelf. So that someone else gets to read something that was once a part of you, and you get to read something that had a previous lover. This is why I buy second-hand books, but apparently in Germany, that most civilised of places, you can do this for free. My aim is to read a book that has a front page full of the signatures of previous owners. I’ve already started this mission with Helen over at ‘Two Drifters’, and would like to get a book to go all around the world…I’ve already got Hong Kong, Brunei, Australia, New York, Israel, Sri Lanka, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Crete, Scotland, Bali, Germany, Wales, Russia, Sweden, England, Holland, Kenya and Canada covered, but if anyone has a book that has been to lots of places, but not England, please send it to me! I’m an excellent tour-guide!

THE AVANT-GARDENERS.

Trees do the funniest things… is a TV show I would definitely watch. I love nothing more than watching home videos of trees being chopped down, then, with their last dying breath, collapsing at improbable angles and thoroughly squashing their vanquishers. I love it when they grow through pavements, destroy roads, force their way into houses. I loved the bit in Pocahontas where the tree roots tripped up the nasty whities. In fact I love it whenever a tree does something you may not expect from something that has spent its whole life buried metres deep in the ground. That moment when a tree may tap you on the shoulder and say ‘let’s face it son, I’ve been around a lot longer than you have.’ Trees are legends and surely that is reason enough to knit them a nice woolly jumper? This was exactly what Aino Louhi and Kaija Papu did for this leafy badboy:

Entitled ‘The Happiest Tree in the World’, this living sculpture is 7 and a half metres of knitted love. The Finnish collaboration call their art ‘beautiful knit tags for urban surroundings’, and their work has transformed statues, telephone poles, pianos and police cars into brilliantly coloured cuddly balls of love. That’s the kind of graffiti I wouldn’t mind wearing. In fact, I’m hoping that if I hang around in Tampere, Finland, long enough that they will take pity on me and make me a dashing knitted romper suit too.

Scandinavia really has a good line in trees. In the unsurpassable Djurgården in central Stockholm there is a whole garden just full of apple trees:

They have little tags on them saying their names and dates, and an officious little man making sure you don’t pick any (you can eat the fallen apples though, this is Sweden after all.)

They even have little crutches for the rebels that insist on growing despite being old and  hollow and crooked:

Around the corner there are little places to sit and eat your fallen apples and enjoy the Biblical connotations. This is also free – we are still in Sweden:

But none of these tree high-jinks can even hold a candle to The Coolest Tree in all of Djurgården, or, as I call him, Humphrey.

Move over Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, your work here is done.

YOU GET A SHIVER IN THE DARK – IT’S RAINING IN THE PARK.

The British royal family have been doing it for years: marrying Germans. And today I think I have found the best arranged marriage to sort out all our woes. The method is supremely straightforward. Simply drop as much money as possible on a pair of Deutsch Sennheiser headphones and then plug them straight into a Mark Knopfler solo.

Sultans of Swing is best for newbies, but then pretty much every song the Dire Straits did is appropriate for this mission.

Then, ear-drums thoroughly blown into the next hemisphere, you can move onto Mumford and Sons to truly get your atmosphere on:

Sorted. Cliché it may be, but you really can’t argue with German engineering and British music.