Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run........

It's no good you know. This tribute to the glory of sport and human excellence is of course nothing of the sort. Every day I'm reading stories in the press (the normal press I mean not those blasted pinkos) of the people in charge of things and their frantic attempts to arrest anyone they don't know. Some baker chap in Dorset put bread rings in his window and was told to take them out, presumably under threat of life imprisonment or something. A man in London whose business is making artwork for all sorts of companies' publicity using spray paint has been arrested BEFORE committing a crime and told he can't go anywhere near any events or even own a can of spray paint. He has never been arrested before. For anything. In fact he is against illegal street art and tells people so. I was going to include all sorts of links to these stories but there's too many of them and I'm too exasperated.

Then we have the special lanes that only special 'Olympic' people can use on London roads. I must admit, though, to snorting with derision at the fact that they've been named 'ZIL' lanes after the habits of officials in Stalinist Russia. Of course then hardly anybody else actually had cars so there weren't any traffic jams to sail past. Christ, talk about history repeating itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.

The whole G4S security business had me screaming in hysterical laughter at the sheer incompetent insanity of it all. These people were given Himalayas of money to organise the safety of the crowds attending the events and then apparently just said to the government: 'Thanks chaps, we're off now' and all this is perfectly normal according to somebody called Jeremy Hunt (no I'm not going to) who is the Minister for Giving Shitloads of Public Money to Gangs of Barrow Boys and Oiks Who Are SURELY Taking the Piss. Or something.

There is also the case of the Border Agency people who have been in dispute with the government for 18 months over job losses and other issues. 18 months. Finally having had enough they announced plans for a strike during the Olympics. People, you would have thought they had advocated public masturbation. They were accused of, amongst other things, being unpatriotic. They were arguing against cutting the numbers of staff responsible for the 'border security' of the UK yet the hyenas in power, who routinely whip up media panics on the subject of 'porous borders' and 'illegal immigrants', treat them as if they were the modern Bosch. Of course their predecessors tried the same thing during WW2 and it didn't work then. As I write the union leaders concerned are claiming movement on the part of the hyenas and have called off the action.

The thing is though I can't help thinking that there's more to all this than may be immediately obvious. As mentioned in a previous post there must be many of these sweating corporate cutpurses and their political running dogs who will increasingly be looking to a flexible yet brutal state machinery to protect them from the maddened crowd. They must dream of the 'mob' climbing through their windows with numbered lists of London lampposts, names allocated and hanging lanes marked on street maps to ensure a swift passage to their destinations. In their worst nightmares they imagine that by meting out arbitrary retribution, the armed wing of the Provisional Westminster Government can terrorise the population into submission, thereby guaranteeing them a few more years of blood soaked despotism. Till the next time. This then is their vision of the future. This is what they have to offer the overwhelming majority who actually produce their privilege. So 2012 is a year of dress rehearsal for some future clampdown but I'll tell you this; I'm not panicking just yet because they're so fucking crap at it.

In cyberspace no one can hear you scream...

The thing about this writing business is that once you've made a start it is extraordinarily addictive; you literally get a chemical rush from the experience which is handy since I've foregone the toploading variety a couple of years ago. The two people who, to my knowledge so far, read this  have been very complimentary about it. (Of course they both write blogs themselves so constructive criticism is probably the better part of valour - but they're ahead of me so it probably bodes well for the future, readership wise).

However, issues arise like the undead alongside me as I think about this process. For instance, how often should you write and what length of time between posts starts to become neglect? It's been two weeks since my last entry so am I risking having my blog taken into care? Also how do you decide how candid to be when it's likely that those of a familial persuasion will read it? If this were a 'Dear Diary' situation it would be possible to get all Hollywood on the arses of any who happened to open the pages of a hard copy version, however secretly pleased you might be. The same can hardly be said of this situation can it? It's ok if you include 'adult' content because these dear people give you a disclaimer/warning that can be used if needs be. Not in this case though.

Perhaps that's a gap in the process? There could be an equivalent that says something like: "You are about to access material that, after you read it, you may wish you hadn't for a variety of reasons. You may experience detail overload leading to a breadth of emotions which the writer has no intention of accepting any responsibility for whatsoever. If you want to swallow the red pill click here. If you want to swallow the blue pill and never know what might have been, click here." x-))

Moving pictures tell a story 24 times a second.....

 So I've managed to get to my third post without having directly mentioned my healthy obsession with all things filmic. Of course the camera eyed amongst you will have noticed the oblique references already but I shall be scattering evidence of my passion through these pages regularly, for what value life without it's mirror, the moving image?

The moments in what we can call, for want of a more accurate phrase, 'real life' pass so quickly that none of us get a chance to reflect on their significance. It falls, then, to those (film makers) that capture a few, a very few, of those moments; that capture, as it were, the fractions of human existence as if catching a sigh in their hands, to keep for us a small collection of our experiences that we can revisit again and again. The experiences I'm talking about are those that are impossible to describe in words. Walking down a street at night in winter. Sitting in a room alone with the furniture. Standing in a public place and wondering about the life and loves of the people who pass you by, never to be seen again and, of course, standing on a railway station platform. You see? Impossible.

I'm talking about narrative rather than documentary cinema which is it's own country of genius and as such has a language that I'm much less familiar with. Sometimes known as the Seventh Art (I wish someone would tell me what the other six are) or the 20th century art form (ok I get that one) I hope to include examples of what I'm talking about through stills, video, links and so on. Just as soon as I've asked somebody how to do it.

Anyway if you're still with me after that little lot here's something to be going on with: Stop Dave, I'm afraid. First of all the visual beauty is stunning in my opinion. Austere, clinical, almost abstract and the severe geometry and monochrome colour (can you have monochrome colour?) combined with the forlorn, frightened voiceover conjure up, in me anyway, an increasingly clammy panic. That's HAL by the way. He's a computer and he's gone mad.