Oddverse.com

When I was young, being a gold painted man was about the scariest thing that could happen to you. If Doctor Who was to be believed (That was the theme of childhood then - somewhere between clapping if you believed in fairies, and hiding behind the sofa if you believed in Daleks. I clapped and hid. Having grown up, many of my best friends are fairies, although I don't hang out with many Dalek acquaintances), gold painted men came from space, bringing axonite.

Axonite was great. It could turn into more or less anything, for example, a cheese sandwich, a herring, or a nuclear power plant. It was going to solve all the world's problems. It was obviously a hoax, an evil scheme that had to be foiled. Tin-foiled. And foiled it was. Hurrah. Merely by using some sort of technobabble and a couple of none-too-special effects.

Of course, in 1970s teledrama, merely being gold skinned is not enough to prove ones evil nature. Gold is good, so to prove that they've really got evil intentions the Axons would mutate suddenly into big blobby tentacled things, that were clearly up to no good. Two years later, those orange blobby things would reappear, except painted green, and the viewing public would believe that they were Krynoids. But that's beside the point.

Strictly speaking, of course, the Axons weren't painted gold. They were wearing tight fitting body suits.

Which means that they had no nipples at all.

Missed a bit

Will Young, once the slightly photogenic underdog doomed to come second in Pop Idol has confounded my expectations once again. This time he's painted himself gold and started talking about changing the world through pop.

Obviously, my main concern in this matter is the opportunity to see his torso - which I had always suspected was slightly hairier than this. I'm also slightly concerned about his nipples. Although it might just have been cold.

I would consider spray painting oneself gold to fall firmly within the category of temporary body modification, and not really a lifestyle choice.

Douglas
if you do paint yourself gold remember to leave a patch of unpainted skin or you'll end up dead like the girl in goldfinger

alan
I could paint my buttocks orange.

Gregg
I think I need to go and lie down for a short while.

douglas
if you paint your buttocks orange you could get a large canvas and do buttock prints and then sell it for a large amount of money to someone who has huge amounts of cash but no sense.

Gregg
That's better... now, why the hell has 'Time Out' titled the piece "Golden Balls", rather than "Golden Boy" or "Golden Voice", either of which would make more sense?

dezz
To compensate for his tiny nipples?

alan
Or he is super-evolutionary, and with every passing second his nipples grow ever smaller.

Peter
Nipples v reminiscent of Hayden Christensen's in Clones. (But of course, both men are aimed at the same markets - teenybop girls and middle-aged gay men.)

alan
Time Out could see the bottom half of the photos.

Charlie B
How long were both of Hayden Christensen's nipples visible in "Attack of the Clones"?

alan
It was news to me too.

douglas
I note with interest that your redesign now overides my selection of window background colour. Not for long though :-)

Peter
For almost half a minute. You have to be aware of these matters.

dezz
Well then, maybe there's a reason for me to see "Clones" after all.

Gregg
"reminiscent of Hayden Christensen's in Clones [...] of course, both men are aimed at the same markets "
Was nobody else struck by this statement? Could it be true? Are they cloning vaguely attractive youths?

Gregg
Twigged it - he's auditoning for the big-screen version of 'Claws of Axos'. The nipples are really projectile weapons, part of the bio-mechanical menace that is Axos.

Brent
Before reading this, I had no idea who Will Young was, this micro-nippled man who paints himself gold and tells readers of the Sun that he owes his pop stardom to Karl Marx. A spectre is haunting Europe, indeed...

alan
Douglas - I did that especially for you

dezz
Three wishes:
1) I wish *I* was still a vaguely attractive youth.
2) I wish someone would twig *me*.
3) I wish these comments blocks were Googleable, so you could document the hits you'll get for "micro-nippled man."

I've got to work out how to do that automatically.

When I'm not provoking debate about body modification, I usually like to challenge my mind somehow, to open myself to new stimuli, new life, and new civilisations. That's not really happening at the moment.

My writing has stalled, and I feel that's partly because my life has settled into something approximating a routine. There's a degree of comfort, of certainty. Which is great, but in this environment I need more challenge. And that usually means opening my mind to new ideas. Now I get precious little time to read, I watch far too much television, and my main scope for finding new input is in the form of spoken word recordings on my mp3 player.

Maybe I'll do something about this when I'm on holiday next week. I don't know where I'll look for this magical inspiration that must be out there.

Tattooing vs Piercing?

In the society I live in, both are cosmetic procedures, performed with the consent of the body being pierced or tattooed. Both are, to some extent a fashion choice. For example, pierced eyebrows are currently fashionable. Go figure. It's not the most sensible piercing, as there are only a limited number of things that you can put there without risking poking your eye out while running for a bus, but never mind. Back to piercing vs tattooing.

While a lot of the reasoning behind being pierced or tattooed is similar, it is a fundamentally different choice. You must consider what happens if you change your mind? Piercings, I have been informed, can heal. Tattoos can be removed - less easily, and not always effectively, but they can be removed.

Both should nonetheless be chosen with care. As Brent pointed out, tattoos are this decade's bellbottoms - permanent bellbottoms. But much harder to discard.

So, it's like making a fashion choice. A fairly serious fashion choice. It might even be about taking control of your own body. For some people I'm sure it is. But not for the eyebrow piercers of this world, not for the guys who get drunk and get tattoos just because it proves they're a man. Not for anyone who has ever had a tattoo removed. For some people it's about giving away control over your own body - about self mutilation in order to conform or to be accepted as a member of a social tribe. It's about living through the pain and living with the change. Sometimes the decision not to get a piercing is as much about taking control as the decision to be pierced.

Ranted. Incoherent. Sorry.

And I've now seen my first ever episode of Big Brother. I've been aware of this show before, but I watched some of it this week. What a load of tosh.

On a cerebral level, I can see why it becomes addictive, I can see why people will dip in and out of it, in the vague hope that something interesting happens, or that somebody shows some flesh. I can see why people would view it as the only real alternative to spending a summer watching football. It's clearly insidious, viral television, working its way into your life via office gossip and its sheer pervasiveness. The set is fantastic. The idea is possibly genius. The show is undoubtedly tosh.

Gay Society. Kind of a contradiction in terms. And trying to find 'gay society' that isn't your bog-standard 'scene queens and keen teens' is like trying to find hen's teeth. Maybe marginally easier.

If you're looking for "gay society" that's not the horrendous stereotype, then you've got two options. Either move yourself to a major international cities, where there's room for much more diversity, an alternative to alternative, or hunt more carefully where you are.

The bulk of commercial public 'gay society' remains the decadent slutty stereotypical society. The important thing there is commercial. It makes money to offer an environment where people can get drunk and get off. I've seen this everywhere I've lived in the last five years.

To get away from that, you're really moving into sort of sensible territory, spending time in places and company that aren't particularly 'gay' in themselves. There's a mental link that needs to be broken between assuming that just because a bar isn't a gay bar it must be a straight bar. Balls. The bulk of 'gay society' happens beyond the 'gay scene'. And I like it that way.

I don't drink in gay bars, with the occasional exception of an odd drink in the Front Lounge, mainly because they're meat markets, pure and simple. That's true no matter where you are, from Dublin to San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Dublin's got a good side, in terms of tolerance. I've found Dublin to be generally very accepting of my sexuality, in particular dealings with lawyers, estate agents and banks, where I've had to talk about 'my partner' and there's been no assumption that I meant my wife. That's a really nice touch.

I'll stay here for a bit.

I'm reading a thrilling document all about documentation standards, so I need some respite. And that's where the budding romance comes in.

Yes, I have a budding romance to nurture. And in the best tradition of romances, I will present it as though I were pitching it to an American TV Producer.

She is a debonair woman-about-town, formerly the media darling due to her involvement in the 1901 census. Witty, erudite, and charmingly ensconced in Richmond. He is a forty-something Canadian journalist, currently putting the word to right on the Guardian, famous for its incredulous typography and its reputable web site. They've never met. Together, they solve murders.

According to the Political Compass, I'm about -5.75 on the left/right axis, and -6.5 on the authoritarian/libertarian stance. This makes me closest to Ken Livingstone politics wise. Which is fascinating. I always put myself much more the centre politics-wise.

It'll be interesting to get Mr Twinky to do this. He's always touting himself as being very left wing - almost naturally so given his socio-economic background. I reckon that he's probably slightly authoritarian, and certainly further to the right of me politics-wise. I shall ambush him and force this test on him. Oh yes I will, see if I don't.

Mr Twinky's only slightly to the right of me, and slightly less libertarian. I guess that means that I get to keep him.

It's interesting that everyone I know is somewhere in this quadrant - again, nothing terribly surprising about that, but it's interesting.

The telephone rings at five in the morning, a shrill dawn chorus, and I hurl myself across the flat to answer it. Morning calls are seldom good news. It's Carlito. He's ranting incoherently, and I try to calm him down, using the time honoured tradition of swearing at him. This seems to work, and he manages to tell me, between his sobs, that he is fleeing from a gand of half crazed gynecologista from the provisional wing of the pro-choice league of Georgia.

I'm hardly surprised, given Carlito's reputation, but I ask nonetheless how he managed to find himself in this predicament. Only - because it's five in the morning - I do this by swearing at him very loudly. Fortunately he understands.

He's taken up with a Vietnamese interior decorator called Nguyen Phuong Bic, a diminutive poppet of a lass, apparently, and not averse to teaching her skills to gentleman friends. Carlito was occupying too much of her time, and since he was only paying her by making paella for her, her sponsors and landlords got upset. With guns.

For some reason, they have now hired a hit squad to "take him out" and he doesn't think that means dinner and dancing, although apparently the head of the hit squad is rather dishy and looks fine in his combat gear. Whatever.

My advice to Carlito was to keep running, and not stop at public call boxes in Bogota simply to call me for a chat. He agreed that his timing was poor, but had hoped that I could put out a plea for help on the internet. I doubt that there's anyone in a good position to help Carlito, but his main query appears to be either -

• How can he evade a pro-choice hit squad, armed only with a small tin of pills, an electric back massager and a small quantity of baby oil or
• What's the difference between Unix and Linux?

Needless to say, I put the phone down, and I am thinking about changing my number.

Dense. I think that I can say that without fear of ruining the film for anyone. Whereas the plot of the other four films has been straightforward and linear, easy to follow, episode II needs charts and slide rules. I want to see it again, just to get my head round it.

It was a total immersion movie. I felt like I had been in the cinema for five or six hours, and I could have watched more. Very different from the Phantom Menace that way.

There were far too many high points to mention, including the severing of various body parts (damn good things these light sabres - sever and cauterise at the same time, so there's never any blood).

I loved it, although I didn't think it merited the applause it received. It did restore some balance to the force.

Call me Mr Vader

My nephew will be of roughly the right age that the first time he sees a Star Wars film, they'll all be available. This puts him in an interesting, and almost unique position to be the subject of a psychological experiment. After all, he'll be able to watch the first three without knowing that the tow-headed little boy will become the scourge of the universe. He won't necessarily connect Palpatine and Darth Sidious, will he? And when he gets to the end of Empire, he won't have to wonder whether or not Vader is Luke's father - he'll know.

Those of us who were old enough to see the first motion pictures when they first appeared now bring so much baggage to them that we can't watch movies like Attack of the Clones without wondering about these niggly little things - like how come C-3PO has no recollection of Tatooine when he gets there in A New Hope...

Lucky baby.

Call me Mr Vader

Gregg on George Lucas' destruction of the medium of cinema

On It's functionally dead as a medium, and has been for around twenty years. 'Star Wars' genuinely does seem to be the point where Hollywood went from creating films to mass producing films. Maybe it's wrong to blame Lucas. He didn't do it single-handedly, and probably had no idea what he was unleashing. Of course, it's the greedy studio execs who are really to blame. But I don't know their names. If someone has a... list...

Maybe it's fairer to say that Lucas' success destroyed cinema as a medium. He made it fashionable for directors to be blatant about how low an opinion they have of their audience. He showed that it was possible to make vast sums of money from the sort of thing that used to be filler material for Saturday morning kid's entertainment. He showed how you could create a buzz, and a fortune, through clever marketing. He killed the epic, and created the blockbuster. And that's the key thing - a blockbuster (and blockbusters have been the driving force in cinema for the past two decades) is a lobotomised epic. And he can't write dialogue. And have you seen the amount of CGI in 'Attack of the Clones'? WTF is going on with CGI? It's more expensive, looks less realistic and less convincing, and it puts actors off. This is the second one I was talking about. 'Clones' will do more to advance the cause of the "synthespian" than anything else. Of course, the biggest problem is that I like the SW films. Like cocaine, I know they're evil, I know they're rotting my brain, but I just adore them. I was raised on them. The first two are great - as entertainment. It's not so much Lucas the man whose responsible, as Lucas the elemental force of nature, destroying cinema by simply being too successful. SW is fine for what it is, great as a sci-fi romp, a re-working of classic motifs and mythic tropes. But the way SW was made, became a blueprint for all films. The idea that you could make vast sums of money by dropping complexity, intellectual and emotional engagement, sophisticated development of plot and character, and both naturalism and stylistics, in favour of Big Explosions, simplistic plots, one-dimensional characters and more Big Explosions. As I say, the movement away from epic to blockbuster. The only way something insightful or intelligent gets made these days is if it's squirreled away, labelled "independent" (even if it isn't). The idea seems to be that a film of great visual scope can't be complex, can't operate on more than one level. Even 'Gladiator' failed to push the envelope - failed to claim the same sort of emotional and intellectual territory 'Ben Hur' managed decades ago. Sentimentality and adrenalin, that's all mainstream films engender now, and indie cinema is treated as a gauche, embarrassing side-bar for obsessives and weirdos.

And yet still I'm going to watch the new film, and derive vast amounts of guilty pleasure. And that would be fine, if real films were still getting made.

As for the nuclear thing, didn't Oppenheimer already accept the blame there?

Thank you. Have you seen any real films lately? And how does a film differ from a movie, or a motion picture? How would you classify Jarman's Blue? Or Anderson's Magnolia? Or Akira?

Call me Mr Vader

There's the dilemma. Is Star Wars so much of a 'must see' that I need to rush out immediately and immerse myself in it tonight - or, can I wait until the weekend. Should I wait until the weekend. Should I buy a ticket in advance, or at the door. And critically, why do I care? I've read the script. I know a large part of what has to happen because it's the second film in a series of six - and I've seen 4, 5 and 6. I don't know why I should care. Phantom Menace was a bit of a disappointment, after all.

But I do care. I hated Phantom Menace, but I own it on three different formats. I keep looking at Star Wars lego, hoping that it will be good. This is more than just a film, after all, it's a little slice of cinematic history.

Or is it? Actually, my main interest is how children of the future will see it. Daddy, why is the fourth film worse than the third? Daddy, what on Earth are Ewoks for....?

Still from German movie "Das Experiment"

I think that the problem is the lack of dehumanisation. As far as I can tell, the guards are not granted the right to take actions that would strip an individual of their humanity, and thus by treating them as equals, they are letting the prisoners gain the upper hand. They have no threat. As a result, any action they take to try to gain control is easily circumvented, and their frustration and lack of organisation grows.

Still from German movie "Das Experiment"

You probably won't have any great reaction to the web site that documents the Elstree Prison Experiment. I know I didn't. This experiment is much more controlled than the Stanford Experiment from 1971, and while it makes interesting watching, there's no real sense of purpose to it.

For a kick off, it's quite clear who is in control. The experimenters. 100%. The only tension that's being created is the tension that they're putting in to the situation. They make the rules, and both the guards and the prisoners are equally bound by those rules. So the guards are prisoners too. Sure, it's fascinating to observe the development of relationships over time, but there's no scientific basis to this experiment - like the original. There's no control group, against which the experiment is measured. I'll keep watching the show, though.

Today's cheery effort.

If I was a feral child
I'd like to live with goatses
Because they're warm and snuggly
And wear such lovely coatses.

We'd hang around in pastures
And feast on grass all day
We'd trot across the meadows -
A life so rich and gay.

We'd not watch television
We'd not eat mushy peas
Yes, that's my new ambition
Can I be goat-boy please?

Or maybe not.

Somewhere, this weekend vanished. We had Michael over from London for two days out of a three day weekend, and somehow the time just slipped away. It was never the intention.

Despite the rain, despite the way that we managed to spend 80% of our time eating, we still managed to talk endlessly about friends and lovers, and to reminisce about the brief overlap in our lives when we lived a few hundred yards away from each other, somewhere in Asia.

There's definitely a novel in this somewhere, a fact that I realised in March 1999, and never did anything about. I'd set it in 1999, condense it in to a year, strip out some characters, and expand others. And there would have to be a fictitious ending. I don't know if I could do it any more, though. These days I tend to assume that anything that happens in real life is a bit more confidential than I used to back when I used to write about my friends more.

The world seems suddenly full of feral children. They roam the streets in packs, I hear. Occasionally, they are brought up by monkeys and grow up to be strapping young men who have no concept of human behaviour, other than to wear a gratuitous loin cloth.

We have feral children living in our street. They're not truly feral, being second generation feral children. They live with feral parents, and survive through a combination of peat burning and strange sadomasochistic chanting. Whe they grow up, they want to be hairdressers. Or leverets.

The world seems suddenly full of feral children. They roam the streets in packs, I hear. Occasionally, they are brought up by monkeys and grow up to be strapping young men who have no concept of human behaviour, other than to wear a gratuitous loin cloth.

We have feral children living in our street. They're not truly feral, being second generation feral children. They live with feral parents, and survive through a combination of peat burning and strange sadomasochistic chanting. Whe they grow up, they want to be hairdressers. Or leverets.

I was stunned this morning. As I walked to work, for a period of about five minutes I was following a beautiful arse. My eyes were locked on it. I must have looked like a little puppy dog, abandoned by his owner but still faithfully following, largely due to the magnetic attraction of this bum.

I think what made it more attractive was that its owner certainly knew it was an attractive bum, and was showing it off to its best. However, I have a suspicion. You see, some bums look great and then, when you grab them, your fingers sort of sink in, horribly. They're all soft and squishy, rather than firm and nice. I bet his was like that.

I can see it now. Slightly dumpy woman in twinset and pearls, and tall cute bald man in a tailored suit dragging innocent young architect around town to look at jobs.

"This one has the location that Darren is looking for, but the work may be less challenging to him. The office needs a lick of paint, but will that put him off...?"

Coming up, after the break, Susan finds a job that offers Darren twice the amount of money that he's looking for, but does involve full frontal nudity. Is Darren prepared to get his kit off for cash...?

So far this week, Mr Twinky's had three interviews. He's been offered three jobs. This is giving him a scary air of confidence, which is undoubtedly well deserved. It's not all doom and gloom and scary job offers though. One company has decided that they weren't interested in meeting him. Which seems fair. Because if they did meet him, they'd probably end up offering him a job, and that would just add another new dimension to the angst and confusion that is his scary three-way job choice.

I am unbearably proud of him.

Coming back to this topic. And kind of wishing I wasn't. It's certainly true that in the early days in Hong Kong, I found myself welcomed into a surrogate family. People who I gave friendship to unconditionally, people whose company I sought, and who sought my company. It was, undoubtedly, great.

But it was a fragile family, and it partly drifted apart, and was partly torn aside by outside forces. One of those forces was love. I'm going to avoid my usual rant about how wonderful love is, because love is blind. Sometimes, you can fall in love with someone who is so incompatible with your friends as to be rude to them to their faces. It puts them in an awkward position. It puts you in an awkward position.

I'll give an example here, with initials, rather than delving into individual cases, or talking circuitously. A and B are friends. B falls in love with C, who can't stand A - and for no good reason, I hasten to add. B still wants to be friends with A.

There are a number of possible outcomes.

• A confronts C. Possibly destructive.
• A confronts B. Less likely to be destructive, but could wreck the friendship nonetheless.
• A bottles it up, for the sake of B. Still meets up with B from time to time, but C usually finds an excuse not to be there. Frequency of meetings falls off. Friendship ends, and it hurts A more, because it's more drawn out. B doesn't fully understand why.

There are other possibilities, true, but I see these as the main ones.

And the thing is, if B and C ever split up, A will still be there. To talk to. To hug. To pick up the pieces. Because friends - true friends - are the new family.