Samizdata

Take a peek at this unusual link: author Claire Berlinski has written an interesting novel called Loose Lips, a roman à clef about CIA training at ‘The Farm’.

Save the hapless Claire from a fate worse than death (teaching)… go read the intro to this interesting book (also linked in the side bar under the Samizdata link farm’s ‘sundry fertilizer’).

Me!

You think I jest? Far from it. I have figured it out, I’ve got it sussed, I’ve cracked the code. Yesterday I wrote an article excoriating the Turner Prize judges for their choice in finalists for this prestigious £20,000 ($30,000) award for the ‘cutting edge’ of British art, sneering that one of the entries was just some lights going on and off in an empty room. Well guess who won. That’s right: Martin Creed won with ‘Light going on and off in a room’. I kid you not. Not only is this art, we are to believe it is the very pinnacle of British art!

And so, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I take it all back. What I mistook for incoherence is in fact genius! Not the judges, who are everything I said they were yesterday, but rather Martin Creed, who has also ‘cracked the code’. When asked to explain his creation he replied:

I can’t explain it, except to say that the lights definitely go on and off.

No, I am not making this up. Then when asked what he thought of the fact this prize purports to be the very best of contemporary British art, Creed replied:

It’s a stupid prize.

And what will become of the £20,000?

It is going straight in the bank.

Quite so, Martin. You will note that Creed makes no pretentious claims that his work is imbued with any meaning at all, other than a means by which he convinces the Brahmins of British art to enrich him to the tune of 20,000 pictures of Her Majesty the Queen.

Next year, however, that money is coming my way. I will enter my work called ‘Pervasive Space’. When the judges ask to view it, I shall gesture to the Tate Britain gallery. When they look and say that they see nothing, I shall reply:

Exactly! I knew that people such as yourselves, breathing only the rarified air of the art literati, would understand. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you with ‘Pervasive Space’ by Perry de Havilland. A dynamic space of variable proportion and indeterminate location, unconstrained by bourgeois limits of form, colour, space and time.

Cash, cheque or credit card are all just fine by me, thanks.

British sporting ‘hero’ Sir Geoff Hurst is too afraid of terrorism to fly on a British Airways aircraft. He joins the list of cricketer ‘heroes’ Robert Croft and Andrew Caddick and movie action ‘heroes’ Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwartzenegger in The Chickenshit Files.

My theory is that sports and media personalities such as these people are so astonishingly egocentric that they think any terrorist wishing to harm the USA or the UK must surely regard them as the very embodiment of that nation, hence they are a prime target. I hate to break this to you guys, but I do not think Osama bin Laden ever thought that US foreign policy was drafted by card carrying members of the Equity Actors Union, or he would have arranged for one of those hijacked aircraft to have been flown into Hollywood Boulevard.

In my first article on November 7 about these ‘heroes’ with feet of clay, I contrasted them quivering behind the walls of their mansions, with Ellen Degeneris, who stood up and taunted the Taliban live on television. Similarly, I would like to tip my kevlar battlebowler to Mariah Carey.

Now Mariah has been going through a rather bad patch in the last few months, with a nervous breakdown, erratic behaviour and visits to rehab gleefully reported in the press. Yet in spite of that and although she is a nervous flyer at the best of times, she flew to Kosovo yesterday and entertained US soldiers involved in the peacekeeping operation there.

So although Mariah Carey is not my usual taste in music, next time you see Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwartzenegger or sundry inconsequential sportsmen described as ‘heroes’, I invite you to blow a raspberry and go out and buy a Mariah Carey CD. She is got it where it counts… and I am not just referring to her more obvious charms. Good on you, girl.

Actor Bruce Willis refuses to fly to Britain ‘because his children pleaded with him not to’, cricketers Robert Croft and Andrew Caddick refuse to fly to India due to ‘security concerns’. Fine, that is their prerogative. It is also the prerogative of others to judge these ‘public’ individuals by their actions. In spite of the fact these people are far more likely to die whilst crossing the road, they allow misplaced fears to determine their actions.

Terrorism works when people allow themselves to become terrorised and that seems to have occurred with the timid of heart. Apparently Willis wants his children to react to even the most indistinct nebulous ‘threat’ by cowering behind the gated walls of their mansion. I hope his next role as an ‘action hero’ is greeted with the same derisory smirks and pithy asides that greeted Ann Heche when she played the heterosexual love interest for Harrison Ford in ‘Six days, Seven Nights’.

In less dissembling times, I think Willis, Croft and Caddick would have been called ‘cowards’.

So when Ann Heche’s former partner Ellen Degeneris stands up at the Emmy’s last night with a red, white and blue ribbon and says “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”, it becomes clear that not only is she a very good comedienne, not everyone in Hollywood is cringing in terror and blaming it on ‘their children’.

So here’s to you, Ellen. As we always suspected, you are indeed the one wearing the trousers.