I studied To Kill a Mockingbird at school, and it remains one of my favourite books. Although I never got around to finishing reading it’s sequel, I still cherish TKAM as one of the texts which helped make me who I am. The image of Atticus Finch standing up to the racist mob come to lynch Tom Robinson is one I still draw strength from, so to discover here that some schools in the American deep south now want to ban it disturbs me greatly. They say they don’t like the use of the N-word, or produce a load of other bullshit excuses; but it’s clear they just don’t like how it portrays the white majority as being in the wrong.

This is part of a frightening trend in the States – the resurgence of white dominance over any other minority. They want to get rid of anything which might show them in a bad light, and distain anything attacking their bigotry, past or present, as ‘liberal propaganda’. It’s as if, inspired by the embarrassment to humanity they currently call a president, these poor, poorly educated, disenfranchised white zealots want to recapture the power they once had as the dominant group, and still think they are entitled to. Thus they want to get rid of anything which opposes bigotry or speaks up for equality. Such people perhaps even think the mob was in the right and should have lynched Tom, simply for having the audacity to make love to a white girl. It’s very scary: first books like this will be taken off reading lists; pretty soon figures like Martin Luther King will start to be attacked.

Lyn and I went to the cinema yesterday afternoon/evening to watch Blade Runner 2049, and I’m more intrigued than when I rewatched the first part last week. While there is slightly more daylight in this sequel – just a tad – the [i]mise en scene[/i] is no less ominous and dystopian. Walking to the cinema under a sky spookily reddened by sahara dust put us perfectly in the mood for a great noir, and that was exactly what we got.

Blade Runner 2049, then, is a great film: as many critics have been telling us, it is every bit the equal of it’s prequel. To be honest, though, I think I badly need to rewatch it, as I think I may have missed a few plot points. Nonetheless, I still feel able to make a few comments about it. First of all, it struck me as quite a Lacanian film: it was all about the relationship between the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. What is real? What is merely created as symbols? And what do we imagine? As with it’s prequel, this film raises all kinds of questions about the nature of reality. It’s rather like The Matrix films in that sense, inasmuch as it is science fiction used to convey highly intriguing philosophical ideas. Memories are part of the Imaginary Order, yet in this film they are created; does that make them Symbolic? Memories make us who we are, but if memory can be manipulated and recollections can be deliberately given to us, who are we? I would love to see a proper Lacanian reading of these two films.

I don’t want to say much more: I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it, and, as I say, I think I need to rewatch it before I do any proper writing about it. If you haven’t seen it, though, you must. It was great to see Harrison Ford back in the role of Deckard, and although I thought it dragged on ever so slightly, as we rolled home last night my head was abuzz with ideas and questions – Blade Runner 2049 had done exactly what a film is supposed to do.

I just came across this piece of communication-aid related news on the BBC website. A company in the states is working on making personalised voices for VOCA users. Having realised that we all have the same, generic mechanical voice, they are working on a way to give each user their own unique sound. Frankly, having lost count of the times I’ve been told I sound like Stephen Hawking, I can tell you this is long overdue.

I’ve always known Nigel Farage to be a selfish, egocentric scumbag; this puts it beyond doubt. The Mirror reports that he has been caught red handed dodging taxes via a fund on the Isle of Man. ”Mr Farage opened a trust fund in the Isle of Man in a plan to slash his tax bill, our investigation revealed,” the Mirror reports. How dare this p’tahk claim to be a man of the people when he refuses to help pay into the system? He manipulates people into voting for something totally outside their best interests, then buggers off to an offshore island. This embarrassment to humanity should be rotting in a jail cell.

Twelve massive rallies were held across the country yesterday, aimed at stopping Brexit. I didn’t go, not wanting to get myself into a state, but thousands of people apparently turned out. I first heard about it on Tuesday, going down Whitehall on my way back from the Pink Floyd exhibition: I was handed a flag and a leaflet. From what I see on social media, the protests were huge. Up and down the country, the public mood is turning against Brexit. For my part, I’m now quite certain that, sooner or later, this embarrassing farce will come to a crashing end and we’ll re-enter the EU. Given the inherent contradictions of Brexit, that is more or less inevitable. The mainstream media outlets didn’t cover these protests because they wanted to avoid accusations of anti-Brexit bias, but there are lots more to come. Sentiment opposing Brexit is growing; pretty soon it will be impossible to ignore, and it won’t stop until the stupidity of last year is reversed.

I just spoke to my parents. We usually leave our Skype chats for Sunday mornings, but I needed to tell them something, and I thought I’d call them instead of just sending a message. Over the course of our conversation, though, Dad mentioned this rather alarming story: a Chinese space station, launched in 2011, is now out of control and will crash to earth within the next few months. ”[I]n 2016, after months of speculation, Chinese officials confirmed they had lost control of the space station and it would crash to Earth in 2017 or 2018. China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come down between October 2017 and April 2018.” Dad only mentioned it in relation to the poor grammar used in the comments, but I was left wondering, why was this the first I had heard of it? Why on earth is this not all over the news? there is nothing about it on the bbc website, and not a whiff from any other broadcast news. Most of it will probably burn up in the atmosphere, but if a socking great space station was about to fall out of the sky, I’d nonetheless want to know about it! I find it bewildering that this story should be almost universally ignored, perhaps even censored, by the mainstream press.

If anyone needs a bit of a laugh, I’d advise them to go here. I just stumbled over it, and almost wet myself laughing. What could be funnier than a guy with Cerebral Palsy trying to cover a David Bowie song? It’s almost as bad as when I tried to do Karaoke with Rob back at uni. Mind you, I must say I like the wit in the changes Ted has made to the lyrics to fit his theme.

I think I’ll just flag this video from The Young Turks up today. On one level it’s highly amusing, but on another it’s very very worrying. There is apparently increasing concern in the White House about Donald Trump’s mental state. According to white house sources, Trump’s behaviour is becoming increasingly dark and unstable. It seems being president didn’t turn out to be as much fun as he thought it would be. In fact, according to the video, there are increasing discussions about invoking the twenty-fifth amendment, where a president can be removed from office on mental health grounds. If you ask me, that would be the thing any sensible nation would do: Trump’s an egotistical buffoon with no idea how to run a country; the longer America insists on calling him it’s leader, the more of a joke it appears. Trump’s a reality TV show star who craves attention, too stupid to grasp the fact that not everyone thinks he’s as wonderful as he thinks he is. By invoking this amendment, america would show the world that it can act like a responsible, mature nation after all.

Something incredible has happened. On Tuesday, on my way back from a good long walk by the river, I stopped in Co-Op to buy dinner. While queuing to pay I thought I’d just check my email on my ipad. To my utter astonishment, in my inbox I saw an email from Steve Dale – he had obviously seen my blog entry and decided to make contact. I squealed with joy and surprise and, having payed, quickly made my way home to reply. He is doing well, and is now a Learning Support Assistant at a college in cheshire. I told him how I was, about moving in with Lyn and about university. So much has happened since I was in his GCSE English class; so much has changed.

Reading that email, and the second one I got from him the day after, felt as if I was hearing a voice from the past. In many ways I’m a completely different person to the wobbly little boy who sat at the back row of his classroom. Mind you, in a lot of ways I’m exactly the same. I confessed to him that I don’t read much in terms of literature these days – I’m more likely to be found glued to my computer, watching youtube or writing a blog. I was very pleased to read that his daughter Ellie, now aged twenty, is doing very well for herself, working as a hair stylist. It felt so good to reconnect to him after all this time.

He closed his email saying that he often comes down to london, so it could be possible for us to meet up. That would be great; I’d love to catch up with him in person. In the meantime, it’s great to be connected with him online. Late last night, I connected with his daughter over Facebook. This is one of the truly awesome things about the internet: you can never truly lose contact. I now look forward to lots of email exchanges with him, as well as getting to know his daughter. When I typed that blog entry three days ago, I had no idea that this would be the result; I was just musing wistfully, with no real hope of actually finding my old English teacher. I think the key was posting a link to the entry on the Woodford Lodge Facebook page. I remember the man whose enthusiasm about books stays with me, even today. Getting to know him again, as well as his daughter, will be wonderful.

I just rewatched Blade Runner for the second time in two days, so to speak, having watched it yesterday for the first time in over a decade. L and I will probably go to see the sequel soon, so I wanted to refresh my memory. The film I found myself watching yesterday afternoon was utterly intriguing: dark and brooding. It intrigued me so much yesterday that it nigh on demanded a second viewing today.

I won’t attempt to post a full review on here now. Whole theses, even full volumes, could be written about this filmic text – as I’m sure there have been. Of course, it harks back to the film noirs of the thirties and forties; but there is also something emphatically eighties to this film. The [i]mise en scene[/i] cannot seem to escape the period when it was made. It is also very urban, never escaping the confines of a claustrophobic, dystopian, future los Angeles. I noticed too that it is shot exclusively at night, and there isn’t a single glimpse of daylight throughout the film. Could this mean that the entire story just takes place over one night.

I can now see why so many cinephiles are so interested in this film. It raises so many questions while you watch it, and leaves you to wonder about so many things: what would it mean to be a replicant? Are our memories what makes us who we are, and if a memory could somehow be implanted would that personality be real? Can you create artificial personalities so detailed that even they think they are human? The biggie, of course, is the question of whether Deckard was a Replicant: I was just watching it, scanning each frame for clues, and I cannot decide. Ridley Scott did not think he was supposed to be one, but I think you could find good evidence that he is. Either way, I now can’t wait to see the sequel: this is a franchise I can see myself getting into – it is science fiction taken seriously and used to say something about the human condition.

Yesterday was a very cool day indeed. We went up into town to see the Pink Floyd exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum. While of course I’ve known about them, I’ve never particularly been into Pink Floyd; but this was something Lyn on the other hand was really looking forward to seeing.Pink Floyd have a reputation as one of the most inventive and influential music groups around, so I was curious to find out a bit more about them.

It took a bit of time to get up there (it always does when we go into central London) but once we got in, we were immediately fascinated. There was so much information on the band’s history and style; there was so much to see and digest. The only problem was, the headphones the museum gave us to listen to as we walked around didn’t quite work: they were meant to trigger as you went past a particular exhibit so you could listen to information about it, but mine seemed to keep fading in and out at random even when I wasn’t moving. Either I’d be listening to something and it would suddenly fade out, or something random would start even when I wasn’t moving. It soon began to get very irritating.

That aside, we had a great afternoon. We had arranged to rendezvous with Dominik up there, and we spent a good two or three hours at the exhibition. I came away my curiosity whetted and itching to discover more. Pink Floyd now seem quite awesome, and I want to go deeper. What I managed to glean from the headphones was fascinating: an inspirational, inventive and unique band which has been at the forefront of music for over fifty years. I now see why people like Lyn, and indeed my Dad, are so enthusiastic about them. Most of all, though, now I really want to go see them play live.

You know, this autumn marks twenty years since I started my GCSE English. My parents had to fight for me to do it: I went to a special school which luckily had a comprehensive nearby. A few students from my school – the more academically able ones – took the odd class at the nearby comp. I had always shown a gift for writing and a passion for literature, so the idea was for me to do GCSE English alongside able bodied peers. That way, I could benefit from more specialised teaching, and hopefully go on to do the more advanced stuff, instead of frittering away my potential.

It was fairly daunting at first. Up until that point, my education had been a matter of small classes of no more than eight or nine fairly disabled classmates, being taught at the most basic level. All of a sudden I was in a class of twenty or thirty able-bodied kids, where I knew far more would be expected of me. I didn’t have a LSA to accompany me until a month or two in, so for the first few lessons I was completely on my own. I knew I had to pull my socks up and make an effort, so that is precisely what I did.

Luckily we had the most awesome teacher in front of us. I often still think of Steve Dale these days, wondering what became of him. It was Mr. Dale that gave me my first taste of proper education: through him I got to know Shakespeare, and books like To Kill A Mockingbird. He was an inspirational, energetic teacher. I also recall that, that first year, he took some time off for the birth of his first daughter. The aura he gave off when he came back was truly wonderful. She would be nineteen or twenty by now; I wonder what became of her.

Time, inevitably, passes. I think I have mentioned on here before that the comprehensive school, Woodford Lodge, has now been demolished. Yet without it, without that first taste of real education twenty years ago, I doubt I would be who I am today. I have been thinking about Mr. Dale a lot recently: he was wisecracking, yet wise. He shared my love of Tolkien. I wonder what he would say about me – I’d love to show him my MA Thesis. It seems a lifetime ago that I first began to walk, two or three times a week, over the fields to Woodford Lodge and back, my head full of wonderful new ideas and imaginings, little realising that I was becoming me. It now seems so distant, yet I still remember the breeze on my face and the singing of the birds in that quiet corner of cheshire.

I’m afraid to say that, after this week, any residual respect I had for the United States of America is now gone. If it’s withdrawal from the climate change accord wasn’t bad enough, how can anyone possibly respect a country which allows its citizens to get hold of guns so easily, and then does nothing when so many people are shot in cold blood? I realise this might be a cultural issue, and that one must respect cultural diversity, but as far as I am concerned, America is nothing more than a collection of umpteen million fools, deserving only the worlds derision. Don’t they realise the obvious truth, self-evident to anyone capable of anything approaching rational thought, that making guns harder to get hold of would make bloodbaths like the one we saw this week far rarer? It really frustrates me, as I’m sure it does many people. This, on top of the election of Trump and the rest of it, means that I cannot respect America any more.

I’ve only just got to my computer, but I’ve already found something intriguing. This bbc story on immersive cinema literally begs me to explore it further: it’s something I’d not come across before, but it ties directly into my master’s subject. It’s a new type of cinematic experience, where, as well as watching the film, viewers apparently interact with characters played by actors who come into the auditorium. It’s just about begging me to try it out and explore it further, as it seems to take the cinematic art in a new direction. My masters was about the ways in which the audience could be said to ‘enter into’ film via their art or analysis; this project specifically encourages and invites such entry. I’d also love to see whether anyone has written anything about how this new form of filmic reception ties into more established ciniphiliac writing, such as the work of Bazin (where’s the nearest decent academic library when you need one?!). I’m intrigued, and itching to find out more.

I know there’s a lot of this meme going around, but it was just too funny for me not to make my own contribution.

I just came across this short video on the bbc website, and thought it definitely worth flagging up. Part of their 100 Women series, it’s by a transgender woman who is also a scientist. She fascinatingly and tellingly talks about the differences in the way people treated her before and after she transitioned: people stopped assuming she knew as much, and trusted her to know technical details less. It’s perhaps only through situations like this that we can see the true extent of sexism in our society: we have a person here who has experienced both sides of the divide, and who is able to articulate the differences between them very well.

I now need to make a confession. When I posted my entry earlier, I hadn’t actually watched May’s speech. Suspecting it would just have made me angry, I just read a few headlines and guessed the rest. Watch one tory speech and you’ve watched them all, eh? However, I just watched the evening news bulletins: the speech was an utter, utter car crash! Almost everything which could go wrong, it seems, did. In fact I very nearly began to feel sorry for may, but then I remembered who she was and what her party is doing to ‘us’. For all her sops about building more council houses to try to convince people may is on their side, this is a government pushing through draconian benefit cuts, which is inflicting some of the most conservative, regressive legislation for decades upon us.

The tories are clinging on to power by the skin of their teeth. They really, really needed a good speech today – a performance strong enough to turn their fortunes and bring the country together behind them. What they got was so bad it was comic: an about average tory speech so riddled with mishap it was almost Pythonesque. Yet it is nothing more than these jerks deserve, and May’s days in Downing Street must surely now be numbered. I must admit, I love a good car crash sometimes.

If Theresa May had any honour, she would have got up on that stage in Manchester just now, dropped to her knees and started pleading for our forgiveness for all the pain she and her party have put this country through recently. She does not, and so instead we were subjected to the usual mixture of half-truths, lies and slander directed at the opposition we have come to expect from the Tories. The party is a joke, clinging to power by a thread, forcing the country through a brexit process based on a delusion. How dare she stand there and claim she is motivated by compassion, when the only thing that motivates any tory is greed and pure self-interest? And how dare that p’tahk Patel slander Corbyn and Labour, claiming that the tories, not Labour, are the ones who care about the poor? To hear these vile, vile people spouting such bullshit, insulting our intelligence with their outright lies, makes me incredibly angry. Daily I see evidence of the suffering these scumbags are causing, often firsthand; for them to stand there, patting their own backs and pretending to be a force for good, makes my blood boil with rage.

I just finished watching the third episode of Star Trek Discovery for a second time, having given it an initial viewing late yesterday afternoon. I now think I’m ready to say how disappointed I am with Discovery: last week I was more than willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but what I just found myself watching was utterly disappointing. The plot makes no sense, for one: why are they giving a known, convicted mutineer so much freedom on a new ship? Indeed, why is the program as a whole just focussing on one character, Burnham, in stark contrast to every other Trek incarnation? It is’t as if she is a particularly interesting character; indeed, she just strikes me as neurotic and melodramatic. The whole show just feels like an average american drama with the Star Trek title tagged on to it. It had none of the qualities we first fell in love with Trek for: instead of the depiction of a diverse group of people working together to explore space, this was merely about one rather irritating woman and her struggle to fit in. The fact that, despite having been convicted of mutiny she seemed able to roam the ship doing whatever she wanted, made no sense. On top of that there was a lot of psuedoscientific gibberish about some sort of biology-based propulsion system apparently faster than warp drive, totally out of keeping with the rest of Trek. Of course I’ll continue to watch Discovery – Trek is Trek – but, as it stands, it has a lot of work to do to redeem itself and bring itself alongside the likes of TNG and DS9.

Why is the bbc or any of the major news outlets not saying anything about the major anti-tory protests up in Manchester yesterday? Tens of thousands of people were marching against both Brexit and the tories, yet you hardly hear a word about it down here. Of course, one glimpse at social media tells you it was huge: many of my northern friends were involved, and some of the stories and details I’ve come across are really rather alarming. Vast crowds kettled by the police as the tories try to keep up the pretence that the country does not loathe them; people being arrested in their droves despite protesting peacefully. As far as I’m concerned that protest represented the british public as a whole, appalled at the tory party currently at it’s draconian worst, and at Brexit being forced upon us essentially against our will. If the beeb et al. is truly committed to showing us what is really going on in this country, why didn’t they cover this protest?

Lyn and I had quite a lovely evening yesterday. The cafe in the park was putting on a charity nights, and had invited L to go along and do a DJ set. We had a great time: everyone had a free burger and beer (I stuck to coke – I’m still off the hard stuff) and we sat there chatting, listening to Lyn as the sky went dark. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else, so it was a great social event. One of the staff there, Sakiko, is a singer: at one point they asked Lyn to pause her set while she sang three or four beautiful songs, her opera singer-quality voice gliding up into the quickly darkening london sky.

Unfortunately soon after that it began to spit, and everyone started to head home. It had been a great event, and all for a good cause. It was in aid of the local hospice, so I made a small donation and we set off home, hoping they will put on more events like that soon.

[i][/i]This blog entry is simply to wish my niece Elise a very happy first birthday. Can it really be a year since I recorded her birth on here? It hardly seems it. I hope she is having a wonderful day anyway, and that she is getting spoiled rotten by her parents.

While part of me rather doubts it’ll ever come to anything, this is just too cool for me not to flag up. ”People will soon be able to fly from city to city within minutes, rocket and car entrepreneur Elon Musk says. Mr Musk made the promise at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia.” He speculates that we could soon be using hypersonic rockets to fly between cities; rockets capable of flying between London and New York in less than half an hour. Imagine it: instead of having a coffee in the park, I could enjoy my daily dose of caffeine on Broadway, or in Sydney, overlooking Darling Harbour. Bring it on Mr. Musk, I say.

Today I have the pleasure of noting that yesterday my blog hitcount passed the three million mark. As I noted when it went over the two million line a couple of years ago, it seems to be going up faster and faster. I know bigger sites can expect three million hits in a day, but this is just my little corner of the web where I waffle on about whatever takes my fancy, so I must be doing something right. Watching the hitcount go up and up gives me the incentive I need to keep blogging, so you can expect much more. Mind you, I’ve decided to steer clear of politics for a bit: the political situation is getting too stupid to bother with, and makes me far too angry.

From time to time I rather facetiously like to brand Star Wars a kids franchise. I uses to assume that it was aimed at adolescents and post adolescents – roughly the same audience as, say, Star Trek. Yet, especially since the franchise was taken over by Disney, I have taken pleasure in teasing Star Wars fans that theirs is a children’s franchise. Yet, the question arises, is it? What’s the difference between a children’s franchise and one aimed at adults? To me, Star Wars seems to lack a maturity adult franchises have: it has more in common with Harry Potter than The Lord Of The Rings; it’s characters more crudely drawn, it’s plots simpler. To my mind, Star Wars tries to claim gravitas for itself, but that gravitas is frittered away by the inclusion of absolutely infantile things like having aniken skywalker race tie fighters. Darth Vader was once one of the most awesome, menacing villains in film, but knowing he was part of such a childish sequence, cheered on by the cringeworthy Jar Jar binx, places him firmly besides the likes of Jafar and Sheer Kahn. The light sabre was once an iconic weapon, yet it was rendered a mere prop for martial arts stunts in the newer films; the equivalent of Mithrandir’s mighty staff became a hogwarts students wand, stripped of iconic weight in favour of a far more shallow type of coolness. Adding the second blade to the light sabre was the semiotic equivalent of a dose of monosodium glutamate: it may have looked cool, yet, because it was done only to look good and to bring in the bucks, the change lacked any artistic merit.

I get the impression that George Lucas sees himself as cinema’s equivalent of JRR Tolkien, a claim that has always struck me as highly presumptuous: contrary to what he and his fans claim, his creations do not have anywhere near the complexity or detail of Tolkien’s. Lucas is just a self-promoting hack; the producer of kid’s films which he passes off as for adults. I mean, how can anyone claim Jar Jar Binx ranks alongside characters like Samwise Gamgee or Spock? Star Wars did once belong among film’s great sagas, but these days it’s for children. I’m sorry, star wars fans, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re obsessing over kid’s films.

I was wondering the other day how I could watch Star Trek Discovery. The solution, it seems, was quite obvious, although I did need to get my credit card out for it: sign up to Netflix. That’s what I did last night, and I’m now happy to report that I’ve watched the first two episodes of the latest incarnation of Star Trek. On top of that, having signed up for a free trial month, I now have easy access to all the TV and films I could possibly watch – this will keep me busy for days, if not weeks!

As for Discovery itself, it struck me as a good start, but I don’t think I can say much more than that. While there was a lot that was familiar to the trekkie – and I relished seeing Klingons again, with all their internal house politics – there was a lot that was unfamiliar too, such as new species. While this was certainly trek, it wasn’t quite the trek we know. It was great to see Klingons speaking the Klingon language with subtitles (Qa’pla!), for example, but on the other hand they didn’t look like the Klingons in any of the previous series (although this might be explained in a future episode, given that their appearance has changed before). Further, these two episodes struck me as a tad too feminine. They seemed driven almost entirely by two female characters. That is fair enough, I suppose; but the captain and first officer reminded me too much of Janeway when I wanted something more akin to Kirk, Picard or Sisco.

Nevertheless, I’ll certainly continue to watch, and eagerly await the next episode. Now I have access to all these tv programs, I’ll also be watching much more. In fact I can see myself becoming glued to my computer screen for most of the coming winter. The problem with things like DVDs was getting someone to put them in and take them out, but between Netflix, Youtube, Iplayer and other video streaming sites, that problem is now sorted. I may have to pay for Netflix, but looking at the range of what’s on there, just under eight quid a month is probably worth it. That said, then, I’m off to watch somee more.

Lyn might like this news. On Friday evening, BBC Four will broadcast a documentary about pirate radio stations. Lyn is a big fan of Radio Caroline and that kind of independent online broadcasting, and I’m getting into it too. This might be a good watch, then. It will certainly be very interesting to see what the beeb – a broadcaster as mainstream as you can get – say about that type of alternative media, both historically and contemporarily.

The new incarnation of Star Trek, Discovery, premieres today, and I’m just itching to find a way to watch it. It’s on Netflix in the US, but I haven’t seen where or how I can watch it over here. From what I’ve read, it looks pretty good, full of references to the other series. I’m still hoping they can somehow get Picard and the Enterprise D/E crew to make an appearance. As I wrote here, I’ll also be interested to see what it has to say about contemporary america, and what it has to say – if anything – about this new Trump era. Of course, how Discovery stacks up against other Trek series remains to be seen, and I can’t comment properly until I find a way to watch it. It has been so long since Trek’s TNG/DS9 heyday, it has a lot to live up to; but for now I’ll just say that it’s good to see ‘proper’ Star Trek back, as opposed to the reboot films.

I have been watching quite a lot of Youtube recently; it has become one of the websites I go to most, and I can spend hours on it watching videos. I’m sure we all do these days. I was just thinking, though: Is YouTube to film what twitter is to the novel? Short, intense forms of writing are encouraged online; is this similar to the short film form we see on YouTube? Do the shortened forms of both languages share qualities, i.e. Directness and immediacy? Short videos online are becoming far more analytical these days: people are increasingly using YouTube to say things they formerly used writing to, such as film analysis or political commentary. At the same time, as on twitter, these videos are a short, rather abrupt form of discourse – most videos I watch are only ten to fifteen minutes. Broadly speaking, they use the conventional grammar of other video media, but, just like on Twitter, it is highly abbreviated in order to deliver the maximum amount of information in the minimum time.

Thus, online, discourse is becoming shorter as a whole, yet no less informed. Intellectual expression – how we communicate our ideas and thoughts – seems to be changing, adapting to the online world. It is adapting to the shorter attention spans we now seem to have, as well as becoming more democratic inasmuch as we all have the ability to get our views across. This new online video language is one anyone with a cameraphone can use. Yet it is becoming no less deep and engaged: in fact, going by the videos I’ve been watching recently, people are far more intellectually engaged and curious than when they only had writing to express their ideas. Perhaps this is because new forms of media in a way encourage people to experiment. Either way the online world is opening up new languages and ways to express ourselves; visual, image-based forms of communication, more easily understood than the rarified neoacademic forms of writing used up until now.

At least amid all my current fury over Brexit – and last night’s newsnight enraged me so much it was frightening – I can still find good things to think about and look forward to. I caught this interview last night: David Attenborough, it seems, is back. I thought he had retired – and who would blame him? – but apparently he’s still going. At the end of a fascinating, and at times heartbreaking, interview in which he summarised sixty years of natural history film-making, Sir David gave us a big hint that his awesome career may not yet be over. He said he still felt like he was about 45, and alluded to more programmes to come. That’s great news, and enough to cheer me up. Something to cling on to as elsewhere things get more and more stupid.

I just want to jot down something which occurred to me last night which may be useful in future work. I was watching The Simpsons. I rarely watch it these days as I like to watch the news, but the last two or three nights I’ve turned over to watch the simpsons instead. As I was watching, something rather interesting occurred to me: the simpsons exist in a kind of eternal present. It’s quite an old program now: we’ve been watching it, every weekday at about the same time, for almost thirty years, yet the characters do not age. By rights, Bart, Lisa and Maggie should be adults by now, yet they are the same age as when we first met them. At the same time, the series keeps up with the times, existing unageing in an ever-present. In last night’s episode, for example, there were references to mobile phones and Facebook. Thus we see the same strange relationship with time that we see in the Bond films. They too are always set in the present of when each film was made; Bond does not age, but exists perpetually as a virile thirtysomething. In both franchises, we see the same odd time dynamic. Neither changes, and both keep up with the present, being always set ‘now’. Could this help explain why they are both so successful? Can we see something similar anywhere else?

Would someone please explain to me why, yesterday afternoon, the leaders of the world allowed some orange idiot from quite a poor television show to presume to lecture them on world affairs? The fool in question had no business being there; he clearly had no idea what he was talking about. And yet, in the United Nations joint assembly, yesterday afternoon the world’s leaders put up with the complete joke America calls it’s leader thinking he had a right to tell them how to do their jobs. If I was an American, I would be embarrassed to be represented by that vain, egotistical moron. Then again, I don’t care: since it elected Trump, America has lost my respect. I now consider the country a collection of spoiled children driven by immature, petulant whims. Who they elect is their business, but why should the leaders of more mature countries (mind you, the UK is hardly one of them at the moment) put up with the sight of that utter jackass talking to them as if he ranked among them? Frankly to watch that p’tahk stand there and lecture the UN, when it was clear he had no business being there and was way out of his league, was an insult to that noble organisation.

Hour after hour the fact that Boris Johnson still has anything to do with governing this country becomes more ridiculous. Hour after hour, the government struggles on, trying to maintain an absurd fiction. It becomes more farcical by the hour. I just came across this Owen Jones article, explaining just how silly things are getting; it’s well worth a read. For my part, I’m now convinced that this cannot last and that Brexit will collapse. How can it? The uk is a laughing stock: our international trade situation is a complete mess. We now need to renegotiate umpteen treaties which were working perfectly fine as part of the eu. I mean, this is just silly. No sensible government could let such stupidity continue, which is why I’m certain we’ll remain part of the eu. It’s just a matter of time, and the only question is when will they drop the pretence and call this moronic game to an end.

You were probably expecting me to have said something by now about Paris having been awarded the 2024 olympics last Wednesday, given that I was once so enthusiastic. To be honest I didn’t blog about it because it was just so anticlimactic. We already knew, weeks ago, that Paris was gonna get the ’24 games and LA the ’28. There was no big countdown, no big unveiling, and nothing to get excited over. Hardly noteworthy really. Nonetheless, I suppose I am still pretty interested in the subject: it will be interesting to watch how Paris goes about organising these games, and what they do with an event they have struggled so long to get. From what I read, the plans already look pretty damn spectacular. Most of all, I want to see what they do with their opening ceremony. Knowing the french, it will be very creative, artistic and cerebral, but I want to see whether they try to do anything as awesome as this. Oh well, I just have to wait seven years to find out.

I think I need to flag this Evolve Politics up. It is spot on, echoing what I’ve been thinking for quite some time. In it, Mark Turley argues that humanity needs to get beyond the idea of the nation-state. We now face certain problems which can only be addressed if we leave aside our petty differences and come together. ”When you actually break things down, the notion of ‘Nationalism’ really is incredibly stupid.” I could hardly agree more. While he rightly states that organisations like the EU have their faults, and problems such as finding a way to maintain democracy in such a United Earth would need to be resolved, transnational cooperation must surely be better than continuing to squabble as nation-states.

I witnessed something yesterday afternoon which really upset me, but which I think ought to be noted. Lyn and I had popped down to Asda, just for a few bits and pieces. We were going along the side of the shop in our chairs about to go in, when we passed a man and his young son going the other way. What I overheard the man say to the lad really troubles me: they had obviously just passed one of the homeless people who sit outside the shop asking for money; the man explained to the kid that he had given to the beggar because he was English. When I heard that I was appalled. I started to say something, but Lyn wisely stopped me, not wanting any trouble. The implication had been that he wouldn’t have given the beggar any change had he been an immigrant, or perhaps black, as if his compassion extended only to his own ethnic group. How utterly heartless. And to hear that being told to a young child, as if the xenophobic scumbag was imparting some great piece of wisdom, is sickening. That halfwitted chav didn’t deserve a son. Above all though, I worry that this may be a frightening indication of where british culture is headed post 2016.

Would someone please tell that self-important p’tahk Boris Johnson that merely repeating a lie doesn’t make it any more true. He is still insisting that we’ll be able to recoup £350 million a week for the NHS, despite that claim having been shown to be complete bollocks. Even the watchdog branded it ‘misleading’. Yet this is an utterly cynical act on johnson’s part: he knows the country is still divided and a lot of people are still very, very angry about what happened last year; he also has Teressa May’s job in his sights. Thus he is pretending to care about something extremely dear to many people – the NHS – in order to use it for his own ends. He wants to create a rhetorical binary where the EU is somehow placed in opposition to the NHS, using people’s love and admiration for the latter to turn them against the former.

Johnson doesn’t give a fuck about the NHS – like any tory, he’d probably privatise it if he could – but he knows how dear it is to many people, and he is trying to use that affection for his own ends in a sickeningly cynical act. It was this very trick that brought about the stupidity of last year, and he’s trying to use it again. The man should be rotting in jail for misleading the country the first time; persisting with the lie is beyond the pale. The NHS is vital to many; it is one of the truly great things about the UK. To see it being used as a political crutch by a self-important p’tahk who doesn’t really give a fuck about it boils my blood.

I am very pleased indeed with how last night went. I was, to be honest, quite worried about it. I had visions of everything going pear-shaped and the screening turning into a train wreck. Mid-afternoon yesterday I was getting quite fretful. But I needn’t have worried: in the end, the Old Cottage Cafe in Charlton park made a wonderful screening room. The event was quite well attended. The size of the cafe gave it a communal feel, as if everyone was part of the same social group precisely the impression I wanted to achieve. The Londoners films I had selected all fitted together nicely.

My initial plan had been to preface the films with some sort of talk contextualising them, similar to the presentation I gave last year. That way I could explain how the films had come about, as well as weave in some theory and info on Walter Benjamin. As time wore on, though, I began to think that such a presentation might not fit, so I decided to just give out a handout. Last night, however, sitting at the back watching the films, I realised I had made the wrong decision: a brief talk would have set the evening off nicely. Turning my volume down, I quickly tapped a few lines into my Ipad. Then, when the screening was over, I put my hand up and asked to say something. It was just something brief and rather cliche, but it did the trick and went down well.

That, then, is my contribution to the Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival done for this year. It has been terrific fun, and I’m already thinking about what I can do for next year’s event. I have a feeling this thing will just get bigger and bigger, and long may it last.

I think I need to flag this short vlog by Ted Shires up because it is, more or less, spot on. In it, Shires starts to unpack the way the Tories accuse Labour of treating disabled people as vulnerable. As he points out, the tories are playing semantics: they are firstly trying to present themselves as on ‘our’ side, standing up for us etc; and secondly they are trying to turn us against labour by accusing them of patronising us. Given this is coming from a party which is slowly stripping us of our means to live, it is sickening. The tories are feigning a support for disability rights, trying to look like they want to stand up for us against Labour, who would have us dependant on benefits. But that’s bull: the tories don’t care about us – they just want to cut benefits so they can reduce taxes for their rich friends. They seek to portray living with the help of state benefits as somehow patronising and regressive, the better to convert people to their individualist, everyone-for-himself worldview. It’s a cynical, deplorable manoeuvre, and tells you all you need to know about the people currently in government.

It occurs to me that somebody could create a profile of a cafe like the one the beeb has posted here about the cafe in charlton park. I think the two cafes have a lot in common: they both function as hubs for a community, the same customers going in day after day after day. I find it interesting how small little eateries like that have the same function wherever you find a small urban group within a larger metropolis. Charlton still has the feel of a village to it, despite being part of greater London; it’s community feels separate from that of the wider metropolis. Cafes like this are the pins which tack such communities-within-communities together. The bbc has done a photographic profile of one up in Clapham High street; I wonder if I could do something similar in charlton park.