John Walker's Electronic House

Walcot Nation Day.

First, let me explain Walcot Street. It is one of the parts of Bath that makes me love it so – it’s the place where the knitted toilet was found, along with favourite coffee shop, Doolallys. It’s also one of the places I can really dislike, especially the lame-ass top end with its “ooh, look at us – we sell thing with marijuana leaves on them, and mushrooms, and we’re so terribly cutting edge and naughty.” No you’re not – you’re a pathetic Glastonbury stand writ Bathstone, and the only people you impress are those as embarrassingly naive as you.

Walcot Nation Day is: The Day Those People Take Over.

It’s the close of the Bath Fringe Festival. The festival is a great thing, lots of interesting events and smaller bands playing even smaller venues, but it reaches its self-celebrating climax by closing Walcot Street to cars, and offering people the chance to spend the day feeling oh-so terribly maverick in the way they really just don’t care about the rules! Man! And if only this were irony. On the small stage near the bottom, a sad, charasma-free man stood shouting into a microphone, encouraging the dwindling crowds to shout “WALCOT WAIVES THE RULES!” Do you see what he did there? This is made only more sad by the whimpering dishcloth of a t-shirt he’s stretching over a body that years ago might have fit within, bearing the very same child’s-play on words, scrawled at a jaunty angle across a red brick wall. They’re just WACKY!

If you’ve ever hurried through the Greenpeace fields at Glastonbury, you’ll know exactly what you managed to avoid. Middle class, middle aged couples, breaking out the tie-dye a whole fortnight early this year, the nasty little ratty ponytail pulled outside of his collar this afternoon, both in the sandals they think demonstrate their wild abandon. Everyone’s looking so very pleased with themselves, and you know why? Because they’re smoking a joint, AND THEY DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS! Except, of course, they care very much who knows, frantically looking around to make sure everyone’s noticing their brave flaunting of the law.

I wanted to walk around handing out bras. For goodness sakes, stop it. You could hurt someone, or more likely yourself. It’s not a symbol of your freedom – it’s the reason you have sore knees.

So many people there look as though they might be really attractive, were it not for the fact that they’re clearly five recyclable cartons short of a low-wheat, alcohol-free six pack. That look of desperation to be a maverick, to cling on to some concept of the hippy they once saw on a documentary about Woodstock, and wished they could be like as soon as they could take a week off from the office.

Which is to say nothing of the belly dancers.

I have an instinctive loathing of so-called fashionable, zeitgeist weekday evening activities, that occupy those denied of imagination. While belly dancing manages to stop short of the pure, undiluted evil that is, bah, line dancing (It’s how Hitler would organise a dance. “YOU VILL STAND IN ZE STRAIGHT LINEZ AND DANCE ZE EXACT ZAME VAY”), it’s possibly far more ill-advised for the sagging parade who attend. Wherever music was played, the screeching gaggle of cellulite and sequins shuffled its way to the front, and began their foul writhing soup of jangles and squishing noises.

Wretched. I want to stress, as I feel my opinions could be misconstrued from the above: I think people should be allowed to wear whatsoever they wish, wherever they desire. My issue is with people who wear exactly what they so misguidedly think makes them interesting, as soon as they see something so exotic as a falafel stall. Go home. Get dressed.

In twenty five years of living in Guildford, the only really weird thing I remember seeing was a man driving around a roundabout on a sofa. Now, granted, that’s fairly weird. But living in Bath, I see something like that almost every day.

In fact, were I to get around to writing about these sights on every occurrance, I might have something approaching a regularly updated blog. And were I able to fathom how to transfer photos from my mobile phone to my computer, I’d be able to illustrate these things beautifully. I’m finally getting around to writing something about it today, because I’ve just watched, from my balcony, a group of eight hot-air balloons all attempting to bump into each other at once.

I love Bath. I really love it, in a genuine way. Nowhere else has thunderstorms like it. Nowhere is as capable of having every trend and anti-trend cohabit the same entirely peculiar places. And nowhere else, that I’ve seen at least, has full-size hot-air balloons flying as low as they possibly can, deliberately trying to bang into one another. Unless X-Ballooning is a new craze that has passed me by, I’m not sure this is the usual activity for what I had always previously perceived to be the most sedate form of travel. When I saw the first two hit, I gasped and wondered if they were ok. When I saw them coming around for another go, I realised all was not as it seemed. Another, higher up, immediately descended to join in, while another that had gone so low it actually landed popped back up to make four. They all drifted slightly apart, and then, with the sort of snail speed that made the whole thing a fantastic farce, collided in the middle.

Another example. A few weeks back I was walking back from the train station, and up Walcott Street (which I assume is built on the convergence point of about thirty-seven lunatic-inducing laylines). On the right, about two thirds of the way up, there’s a small, seemingly abandoned, chapel. There’s usually a black iron gate preventing any unsolicited prayer, but for the last few weeks it has been host to a series of increasingly strange art exhibits. For instance, a couple of weeks ago it played host to an array of entirely knitted items of full-size household furniture. Including a knitted toilet, sporting a knitted toilet roll. But that’s not the weird thing I bring this up to mention. He was far weirder.

On this particular day, before I’d known about any of the exhibits, I saw a man out of the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was someone in some sort of quiet distress, standing on the very edge of the pavement, face pointed at the gutter. But this was still just a corner-of-the-eye glance. A double-take later and I saw a man of indeterminate age, wearing a suit, long black coat and black fedora hat, holding a briefcase. He was indeed staring into the gutter, his face completely without expression. Motionless. And then I read the white writing on the briefcase:

this is | you
not a | are
dream | awake

And I began to wonder.

That’s my Bath. A place that offers things that might otherwise only receive their manifestation within dreams. But I am awake.

News just in:

ITV1 are to launch a new reality programme called Celebrity Celebrity Love Island, in which people who have ever been on television before will compete in the traditional Celebrity Love Island gameshow. Famous celebrities will take part in all the same activities as the regular members of celebrity, which probably include eating worms and lying down for a while.

Worst Thing Ever:

Typing your password into the ‘Name’ field, while someone is watching.

Today’s post is going to be very scientific. If you are weak (perhaps with a fragile heart, or a lady) you might need to prepare a small fan with which to waft your delicate face.

I have discovered a way that means spending every waking moment playing World of Warcraft can be a means to learnings.

The wonderful BBC are wonderful for about eight trillion different reasons at the moment. Pay your license fee with relish. Jonty, pay our license fee at all. If I catch anyone complaining about it, I will come to your house and fill all your shoes with wasp eggs. One of the many reasons for this wonderfulnessity(ment) is their awesome Listen Again archive for Radio 4 (and indeed, all their other major radio stations). Hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of programmes are available to stream (or download if you are a l33t haxx0r like me). And this includes an astonishing amount of wonderful science programming.

I was first alerted to this joy by the lovely Neil Mohr, who linked me to the programme “Five Numbers”, a superb series of five fifteen minute investigations into a particular number (0, pi, 1.618, i, and infinity). Having devoured this, I moved naturally onto “Another Five Numbers” (4, 7, 2^13,466,917 -1, 74% and 23 billion – that selection just looks so fantastic entirely without explanation). And from there, to everything else they have that didn’t look boring.

So while running about WoW, desperately trying to get to level 40 so I can have my steed, I’ve been dipping into this ‘chive once again. I would like to present the two best things I’ve learned recently:

Ants commit suicide. But not out of choice. There is a type of parasitic fluke that infests ants. It crawls into their ant brains and starts to control its behaviour. When ants would normally go to bed at dusk (the comments here may not necessarily reflect the quality of the presentation of the programming), the parasite causes the ant to go outdoors instead. It then makes the ant climb a blade of grass, and then bit really hard into the tip and not let go. (I picture this being a bit like when the Ghostbusters team controlled the Statue of Liberty from the inside of her head). Bunny rabbits then bound along, eating grass as they go, and thus consume the poor Derren-Brown-victim-a-like ant along with the blade it’s gripped to. And this is how that cunning little parasite gets to its desired destination – the inside of rabbits. Goodness knows what it does there – perhaps it makes the bunny go and graffiti the walls of angry farmers’ farmhouses, in order to continue its climb of the food chain.

The other thing is the best thing ever: Kissing is good for you. Every ml of saliva, you see, contains one hundred million bacteria. But not evil bacteria that make your kitchen grow a thick green film, but the good kind, perhaps a cousin of those that apparently live in expensive yogurt. So when you smooch, you exchange these bacteria with your chosen subject, and they receive a few billion of your finest microscopic defenders. And indeed you theirs. On the assumption that the person you snog is not disease-ridden or covered in open sores, you are fortifying one another against the cruelties of the harsh, harsh world.

Hoorah for science!

I am rich!

Well, actually I’m poor. It turns out the increasingly large numbers on my bank statement aren’t a good thing when they have that little ‘D’ written afterward. Not an emergency – I’ve been behind on my invoices for magazines, and after this evening’s slog through the tedium of filling them all out, I shall have the rent for Landlord Hicks within the week, with plenty left over for overpriced coffee and underpriced sandwiches.

But I felt rich this afternoon. My degree is unfortunately coming to an end on something of a downward spiral. Not in terms of grades, they appear to be going well (for those who followed the Dark Dissertation Days, I got my result last week – a First, so go Team Me), but in terms of the quality of the course. This last term is a pathetic shambles, made up on the spot, the assignments farcical and astonishingly un-thought-through by those setting them. It’s a real shame for the degree to end at its lowest – despite this not being a rare feature, there have been superb modules, and superb lecturers. This term is made even more frustrating, as the greatest of all the lecturers, Simon Perry (Siiiiiiiiiiimon), is taking one of the modules, and his lectures are exquisit. The module itself, and especially the humourless joke of the assessment, is not. A horribly wasted opportunity.

So when today’s Art and Popular Culture lectures descended further down the farcical helterskelter, there was little reason to stay on beyond lunchtime. As indeed there was little reason to go back into the lecture after the mid-morning coffee break. So instead a far more enriching time was spent in edifying conversation with my fellow skiver, during which I learned far more than I could have in a thousand hours of the populist drivel on offer the other side of the common room wall. When our current weather moodswings offered sunshine, we took it as our cue to make good our escape and catch the bus.

I want to stress, and not just because I’m conscious that a lecturer is reading this, that I find no pride or glee in leaving a lecture. I find it depressing that it is even to be considered. Our lecturer for this particular module seems a pleasant and intelligent guy, but he’s so horribly restricted by the appalling course materials that there is little hope. And I can watch soap operas and the Simpsons in my own time, without the aid of a man telling me which pages of the course booklet to read at various intervals. I look forward to Siiiiiiimon’s last lectures with the excitement I would have put into a forthcoming tenth birthday. My enthusiasm remains very high. However, so does my dignity and realism.

The riches… My train politely delivered me to Bath a smidgeon after 4pm. It was a Bath bathed in glorious sunshine, and one I found myself unable to traverse without interruption. I could not pass the semi-public park beside the canal, and seeing the spots of human colour dotted sparsly about its green, and feeling the bulge of an excellent book in my pocket, I was left with little choice. This particular area is odd. While the weather is wintery or miserable, it’s a shortcut to the leisure centre. As soon as the sun shines, a booth at the Roman/Roman-esque walled entrance becomes manned, and 95p is demanded to pass. That is, unless you can prove yourself to be a citizen of Bath. As I said, odd. All I had with me was some post for Chrissy, who used to live where I do now, so the address matched if the gender did not. I babbled confusedly at the man about how it was my address, and he waved me past more to get rid of me than anything else.

After prowling about to find an appropriate spot (beneath a tree, but a tree to myself, and not too close to one of the eight million Happy Couples licking each other’s small intestines) I settled, rejected, chose another tree, and settled. The tree was perfect – coloured with a healthy parody of autumnal explosions, and I found myself staring fixatedly at the leaves for a good while. Sun on my face, with time to gluttonously absorb the intense colours. I am rich.

A fantastic book was often upstaged by the fabulous antics of my fellow skiving public. I like to think that everyone there should probably have been somewhere else, but were equally unable to imprison themselves within banality on such a day. The most enthusiastic effort came from two girls, probably three or four years old, who I could only assume had been strangers until that afternoon. One belonged to the most fantastically attractive mother and father on one side of a central path, and the other to another group of grandparents and parents the other side of my tree. One was half-Indian, the other ghostly white. They were already best friends, holding hands, chatting aimiably with the alternative sets of adults. They engaged in races, a game of trying to smack the handsome dad on the bottom, but most of all pursued their secret and incredibly important missions that could only be whispered, a hand cupped to an ear, mouth pressed in close, which invariably involved running somewhere extremely quickly.

Couples came and went, occupying a bench for their privately allotted time, replaced immediately by the next pair as soon as their tongues became tired and they moved away. I imagine that there must have been some sort of delicatessen ticket counter and digital number displayed, only visible to the in-love.

And then, after two decadent hours of sun-spattled reading, as I went to leave I saw the most elaborate of courtship dances. The bored female sat on the hill and watched with a practised nonchalance while the male attempted complicated Thai Chi maneuvers, each requiring the most peculiar psyching up of pulling a fist back and forth as if sawing an invisible, shoulder-high, plank, before the sudden and often ridiculous punchy spin. I do hope that after I left, another male came along and attempted to win the female from him with more elaborate exercises, seeing the first slumping off, defeated, and without a mate.

It was the course director of my college who told me of my riches recently. I was informed that I was rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams, and that I didn’t know it. The thing is, I do know it. I may have a lot less than no money in the bank, but I have so far managed to escape the ridiculous routine that humans keep telling themselves they are required to perform. Jim celebrated the freedom a freelance lifestyle offers recently. It is something I absolutely do not take for granted. I am one very lucky, very rich man.

Stuart Campbell has coined the phrase “New Furious Games Journalism” to describe the phenomenon of recent weeks where slightly grumpy games journalists try to sound REALLY CROSS while not actually having anything to say.

It probably begins with the appearance of “RAM Raider” – a hilarious pun we’re all agreed. April this year he viciously leapt onto the web, all full of venom and hate, ready to reveal the hideous Truth of the games industry. And he has so far torn the establishment apart with news that, “games are sometimes reviewed too quickly” and “PR companies are a bit wasteful with their envelopes.” Keep an eye on Future’s shares.

And now up springs Gameslag. It’s another angry blog, but this time furious about the lack of quality in games, rather than in journalism. Posts are attributed to ‘AK’, who is presumably the same guy who posts as AK on Kieron’s blog regularly. This doesn’t seem very important – this isn’t a hatchet site focused on the excitement of its own secretive existence. However, it still appears to be upsetting RR who has seen fit to call him names and say he’s a bit like a girl. Sigh. But most bestest of all has to be Mr R. Raider’s complaints that “AK” is being anonymous, and how cowardly this is… More sigh.

I kind of wish these people would put their efforts into getting their passion into the magazines they write for, rather than the websites they hide behind. It’s possible, but it takes some effort.

.

EDIT: The last thing I wanted out of my post was for AK to stop or remove the site. And indeed, it’s the last thing I expected. About 60 people read this site a day, a few thousand visit RAM Raider’s. I was merely observing the new trend, riding high on the zeitgeist as I am only able, and lamenting that people seem to spend a lot of time complaining about magazines, and not much time actually trying to improve them.

I can’t see any reason for AK to take down his site. With RR being named all over the place now, I doubt his site will last the day. It would be good to have the more entertaining grumpiness of Gameslag continuing, I think.

Mono, Bristol Fleece, Tuesday night.

I’ve never been to a gig on my own before. All three people I know who have heard Mono (rather than heard of Mono) are currently on a remote Scottish island in what I imagine to be a cross between Five on Kirren Island and Battle Royale. And all three, while I’m sure are having a splendid treasure hunt/mass slaughter, expressed significant disappointment about not being able to attend. And it’s no surprise.

I’m a little woolly on the correct application of the genre “post rock”. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the reappropriation of rock instruments to be played orchestrally. Pioneers, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, are behemoths of sound, weaving foundational melody into a barely controlled cacophony, interspersed by recorded speech, shop tanoy announcements, and the prophetic ramblings of the mad. It is phenomenal, huge, and beautiful.

If Godspeed are giants, Mono are wraiths. They are the concept stripped bare, replacing woven destruction with ambient evolution. Precise, delicate patterns repeat and develop until everything is a roar, the persistent melody graffiti on a wall of noise. Until, and only when it is time, it unwinds and finally calms.

To watch this performed deceives the mind. Like a skilled artist casually sketching with a pencil creating a masterful work before your eyes, just two guys with guitars, one on drums, and a girl so slight as to look spectral on bass, doesn’t seem enough to be generating the universe of music that surrounds. As each piece reaches the peak of its crescendo, it’s almost impossible to keep your eyes open, as if your mind is refusing all other sensory input. And then, as the diminuendo begins, you can look again, and see the physical exhaustion of the band.

They care about what they do.

Thinking about something Pete said in a comment on the previous article, there’s something I didn’t mention about Geller that I intended to. While Pete was being ironic, it does remind me of something I think important.

Imagine being Uri Geller. Like so many ‘psychics’, ‘faith healers’, and ‘mediums’, he had a troubled start of getting caught a lot. But Geller caught a wave, and managed to gain some noteriety in the 70s for his spoon-bending antics. And he was canny. Here’s a nice idea: Go on breakfast television with, say, 2 million viewers, and ask people to picture something in their mind – just let a picture form, come closer to the television, lean in, touch your hand on the screen – there. That picture. Then say, “I was thinking of a boat/house.” It’s always a boat or a house. And then have a phone number appear on screen for people to call in if they were thinking of the same. The switchboard will be INUNDATED! You know, as many as fifty calls all at once, all who saw a boat or house or whatever. Proof! 50/2,000,000. Or 0.0025%. Conclusive, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Then you just have to bend a spoon and collect the cheque.

The problem is, if you’re a magician you make everyone wonder at how you did it. If you’re a ‘psychic’ you make everyone wonder. And if enough people start treating you with awe, it’s going to start affecting you.

So while Geller is a very talented close-up magician, he’s also a demagogue. He requires the emotional response of his participants to remain effective. And that’s dangerous territory. How would you cope if you regularly received emails like:

You helped us with our son [Name withheld] who has Tourettes Syndrome and ADHD.
Well we totally are convinced that it was your energy that saved our family.
I have done everything I can to spread the word about you except put it in the newspaper.
I wanted to tell you how you have touched our lives.
.
Hi Uri,
ty very much for your healing thoughts. You say that you are not a healer, but deep in my heart i know that you can heal, because i saw that with my own eyes as you helped my dog a few years ago. And i’m still thank you for that.
.
Hi Uri,
I had a complete day free of pain!!! This is the first time in months and months. I really think it is due to your thoughts. It’s so strange, yesterday it was very swollen and really sore, so I was dreading work today but I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t until someone asked how my knee was that I realized it was fine. Thank you for spending time thinking about it.

What hope do you have of remaining in control? Everyone you meet tells you that you are magically healing them, changing their lives, making them better – how could you not end up believing it too? And so the lie consumes itself.

The other thing I forgot yesterday was this link to an amazing interview by Simon Jones. For years this has been my favourite piece of interview journalism, and not just because of my interest in the subject. It’s one of the most honestly portrayed interviews I’ve read. Well worth reading.

Thank goodness for James Randi.

Yesterday’s brief foray into the world of Uri Geller has set me off again in my tireless campaign to stare in shock at his continued nonsense. Perhaps laughing is unfair, and if his current obsessions get worse, the laughter may become more sympathetic. But meanwhile…

Geller is proof that a desperate public will cling to anything, no matter how ridiculous, in the hope of self-aggrandising fulfilment. (I’m keenly aware that since I’m a Christian, eyebrows will be raised at me for such comments, and perhaps with good reason. Being a Christian skeptic is often awkward, but I maintain that it’s essential. While I believe Christianity to be quite true, I do not therefore necessarily believe the actions and statements made by Christians to be true. I have been present at occasions where Christians have used cold reading techniques, or otherwise flat-out manipulated people to believe things that are clearly untrue, and it upsets me far more than I’m willing to write about today – the torrent of angry, tear-filled swearing and vitriol would melt the screens of monitors. However, to my understanding, Christianity has the opposite effect of being self-aggrandising). Um, yes, Geller. Is it profitable? It’s probably true then.

But that is to forget the extraordinary amount of work he does for charity. Yes, every time Uri puts some loose change in a plastic box, you can be sure you’ll get to hear about it. An interesting thing about his charity page: click on the links to find information about the charities he donates to, and you find yourself on another page of his site telling you about how much money he’s given, rather than about the charity itself. A little odd. But this is very rude of me. He is giving lots of money to charities, and despite the vulgarity of needing to shout about it in every conceivable way, this is to be celebrated. Bravo.

So instead, let’s look at another interest: raising money for himself.

As I’ve linked in the post below, his latest venture is the wonderful Uribike. “Bend it, bag it, bike”. “Bend it”, see? Because after all, Uri Geller is famous for one thing, and one thing alone. His pathetic and unambiguous failures to support various lower league football clubs with his mindpowers go forgotten. The endless failed live experiments on television are not mentioned. The times he’s been caught cheating, perhaps most importantly the time he was caught in Israel with his fraudulent stage show, are blips in history. If Uri can do anything, it’s render cutlery useless. He likes to pretend he’s sick of this label, that it’s the tiresome milstone around his neck. But read any press release he produces and you can be sure to read “spoon bender Uri Geller”. And to give him his credit, he does bend spoons. A lot. You know, by bending them. Have a go – they bend really easily. A quick tip though, it’s best to distract people when you do it, or it looks a bit rubbish. So when your bike bends, who better to promote it than Uri “Is my name on it?” Geller?! Yours for a mere 300UKP.

But forget the bike – another recent venture is far more worth your attention. It’s his project Uri Geller Design. You could have your company’s website designed by his team of creative experts, and have a site that looks as incredible as this.

Web technology pushed to the limits.

Such legends as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis have received the logo-spinning excellence of his creative vision.

But the deal is better than that. No, it is. “We truly believe our customers receive a unique service, because additional to our competitively priced expertise, we will also produce a positive impact on your customers, with the free bonus of associating your company with an established successful name like Geller Design.” That’s right! After paying his company to design your website, you will receive, absolutely free, the bonus of your site having been designed by his company! There can be no doubt about his claim – his customers will receive a truly unique service.

Finally, in this celebration of all things Geller, we come to the number 11.

It’s been a bit of a thing for him for a while now. You see, he kept being drawn to look at clocks when they read “11:11”. I fully assume that he was scientific about this, and was noting down all the times he looked at clocks and they read times other than “11:11” before concluding any significance about this phenomenon. And then, rather unfortunately, when the terrorist attack on the US occurred on the 11th of a month, the proof became impossible to ignore.

This is the result.

It’s kind of freaky, really. Remember the policeman in Dark City, drawing spirals on the walls of his room? But, you know, not right about what’s going on. Highlights of this astonishing presence of the number 11 include (and these are all geniune):

With regard to the horrific bombings in Madrid, did you notice that the date was the 11th? Also if you add the date 1+1+0+3+2+0+0+4 add up to 11! Another interesting thing is that the was 182 days between the landmark date of sept 11 and march 11th, and if you add these together it makes 11

11=3, in binary arithmetic. 3 is the cornerstone of the trinity and also Hinduism.

HELLHEAVEN sounds like eleven phonetically

*World war one = 11 letters,
*World war two = 11 letters
*World war III = 11 letters

Uri Geller born 20, Dec.1946. 1+9+4+6+2+0=22.11+11=22.

Derren Brown = 11 letters

Harry Potter [11 letters]

Encarta World Atlas says that New York City and the World Trade Centre fall exactly on 74 degrees west, 7+4 = 11

I’11 leave it to you to draw your own conc1us1ons, but I think you’11 have to agree that he’s onto something here. The number 11 does appear to occur in existence. Rea11y incredible.

Back to my original comment – James Randi. If you want to learn more about Mr Ge11er, I strongly recommend the book, The Truth About Uri Geller, written by Randi. And his website continues to stand as a beacon of rationale amidst increasing streams of complete nonsense. While it’s relatively unimportant that people are so willing to believe in the extraordinary that they’11 interpret simple card tricks as mental manipulation, it’s far more worrying when certain individuals give people the impression that they can be healed by magic, or even more commonly, spend all their money on it. Also, Randi has found this fantastic website that contains homeopathetic cures for all known ailments. Including this result I generated:

The homeopathic remedy which best matches your symptoms is Psorinum Of your symptoms, it applies to these:

* mind; delusions, imaginations, hallucinations, illusions; devils; that everyone is possessed by a devil;
* mind; desires, wants; beat children;

Enjoy entering your favourite elevens into that. In the meaneleven, I’ll eleven eleven, if it’s eleven eleven eleven.

Eleven eleven, eleven.

It appears that thanks to Stu’s two links in the last 24 hours, I am the recipient of many of his readers, chums, pals and viewers. Hopefully the level of scorn in the following shall have you feel right at home. But if anyone calls me their ‘correspondent’, I will chop them up.

I really don’t like Derren Brown.

Derren Brown lying, yesterday.

And as is always the case when someone finds the passion to dislike something a great deal, it’s because I so want to really like him, and am violently unable.

When he began appearing on TV, I was excited. I love magic, and I love watching it performed well. I can do the odd trick, and I have a fair idea how a few effects are achieved. I find pleasure in either seeing what I know done well, or being mystified by what I don’t. There were similar beginnings with David Blaine – that first Street Magic special showed great promise for the first half. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything unravel as quickly as it did in the second, however. The much-touted levitation was clearly pathetic wire work, with fake reactions cut in. He used the Balducci effect to get some shock/amazement from people on the street, then used those responses with his ludicrous two foot levitation. And the moment you sink so low, you devalue everything you do. Who cares if he guessed the person’s card? He uses camera tricks and editing. As soon as one section is faked, the rest must be assumed to be fake as well. That and the credit to LYING CHEATING MAGICIAN Uri Geller were enough to see him written off as the useless wanker he’s demonstrated himself to be since. (Ooh, you sat inside some ice! You mean like… the Innuit race did for generations? Moron).

Where confusion tends to arise is in the condemnation of deceit within magic. “But surely all magic is deceit”, you observe, sitting back smugly. Unfortunately you’re an idiot and haven’t thought it through. Magic is about a contract. You lay down some rules at the start, make some important promises, and then you deceive within the limitations you’ve left yourself. So if I do a card trick where I ‘guess’ the card you’re thinking of, clearly I’m not really guessing – were that the case I should be taken to laboratories and experimented upon. However, if I’ve told you at the beginning that I’ve not got any stooges behind you telling me the card, and then have a stooge behind you telling me the card, I’ve just lied to you, and achieved nothing. If I cleverly cause you to pick a certain card (A CARD FORCE – one for the precious magicians out there), or ingeniously learn your card through whatever means, I have tricked you. Not lied to you. Yes, it’s a bit ambiguous. I might say I’m reading your mind, or that you are drawn to a particular card by my actions, or whatever. But you know that’s bullshit – that’s all impossible, and you know it. The difference is between lying about what’s possible, and lying about what’s impossible.

Brown started off reasonably well. His first series was a new approach – one that Blaine’s special had created room for in the schedules. A man, wandering the streets, achieving extraordinary effects. But this time, instead of guessing the card they’d picked, he was causing people to forget information, make choices they seemingly had no control over, and influence people’s minds. Mind Control. Except, of course, none of it was. It was just the same old tricks wrapped up in some really nice new patter… for the most part. So when he has the advertising executives design the exact advert for a taxidermist that he had in the sealed envelope, and then showed us the super-subliminal journey the pair had been on to get to the location, we think two things: 1) Wow, he controlled their minds with similar effects used in advertising, how clever; 2) He showed us how he did it – we know the truth. Of course, both are complete bollocks. There’s no reason to believe that he achieved the result in any way different than the manner in which sealed envelope tricks are usually achieved. How many times have wee seen a perfectly accurate prediction located in an envelope and not thought, “Gosh, they must have seen an awful lot of Seven of Hearts on their journey to the studio that day.” But hey, it’s fun to believe in the impossible, and so we allow ourselves that thrill. Whatever. The problem arises when it comes to the effects that rely on lying. Take, for instance, people on the tube forgetting their destination. He babbles on about how things on the tip of your tongue can be lost, and he’s figured out how to achieve this. Rubbish. Clearly he has no such power, or again, laboratories. (This should be the constant mantra when assessing tricks – if it really happened, should he be in universities being studied as a superhuman?). So what is he doing? There’s no card force, no sleight of hand – there’s no real option either than to believe him when he says he has powers of Neuro Linguistic Programming (which slightly unhelpfully doesn’t exist), or that he’s lying and cheating. Troubling.

Then came his specials. Oh dear. Suddenly he seemed to be going the way of Blaine. Beautifully subtle sleights and cunning ideas replaced with big, stupid lies. Just as Blaine did not sit in that box for 40 days (“We have to put the crane up to the box and the curtain around it for… um, and important reason. Now go away.”), Brown did not risk shooting himself with a revolver. Yes, the build up was fun, with all those tricks with the group in some nonsensical pantomime of selecting a volunteer, and certainly the atmopshere of the trick was remarkable – breath held as he pulled the trigger. But he blew it twice. The first time was the ‘incorrect’ empty barrel into the straw bails. You can be sure that if something goes ‘a bit wrong’ in such a trick, but not enough wrong to spoil the result, then the whole thing is a fake. A hint of weakness is supposed to make the whole thing more believeable – this can go wrong! It must be real! But it’s so painfully orchestrated that it just reveals the script. The second thing was NO ONE IS GOING TO RISK SHOOTING THEMSELF IN THE HEAD ON TELEVISION. He deserves credit for having created such an atmosphere for what was, ultimately, the stupidest hour of television since the last Eastenders extended special. And of course it was subsequently revealed as a hoax from start to finish. Fine, again, whatever. But why bother?

This new series, A Trick of the Mind, at first filled me with joy. I’d pretty much written him off on the basis of his continued claims of NLP and mind control in interviews – something else that steps widely over the line between Trick and Lie. Ask someone even as wretched as Paul Daniels whether he has superhuman abilities or is good at magic tricks, and he won’t hesitate before telling you the truth. He won’t say how he does it, but he won’t lie about psycho-babble rubbish. Ask LYING CHEATING MAGICIAN Uri Geller how he achieves his effects, and he will LIE about being a psychic, and ask you to buy one of his magic tents. So, when Derren Brown is asked how he achieves his effects, and he lies about NLP, into which category should he be put? Exactly.

But wait! Suddenly something new has happened.

At the beginning of this new series, Brown annouces, “This programme fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve the results you’ll see through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in this show.”

Magic! At last, the truth. Yes, psychology is certainly used. When doing a basic trick like the rings in the boxes (three gimmicked boxes, three rings, when the punters open the box it’s empty, when opened correctly, a ring is revealed) it’s important for the participant to feel as though they are being manipulated so they don’t think too hard about other possibilities. That’s the misdirection bit. Excellent stuff, and I relaxed and enjoyed. Effects like the staring contest, where people are suddenly and wretchedly afraid to look at him, or people’s willingly handing over their wallets and keys in the street still trouble me greatly. University laboratories. But there were many really nice tricks happening, and a new-found humility in the presentation. Gone were the ridiculous attempts to appear as Mr Serious Face, all intense and brooding. Instead he was aimiable and silly, recognising his own ridiculousness. I became even more relaxed. Sure, he was deceiving me left, right and centre, but at least he wasn’t lying about it so much.

And then Friday’s episode. The entire second half taken up with the most stupid, cruel and pointless trick imaginable. Derren develops a computer game that can cause people to fall asleep when they play. Right. Not a great start – an obviously impossible feat on which to base the whole thing. Then once his hapless victim miraculously fell into a coma induced by Brown’s instructions to “have another two flashes now,” Brown kidnaps him in front of his gormless friends, takes him to an empty building, puts a pretend gun in his hands and has him wake up to find himself attacked by zombies. The man is a bit muddled, and then scared, and then shoots at them, screaming and swearing, rather than the slightly more obvious response expected of someone finding themself surrounded by people in zombie costumes – saying, “Hello, stop being silly.” Then when it all looks too much, Brown rushes in, gives him a coma-inducing cuddle, and then takes him back to the pub, props him up in front of the arcade machine again (this is one of those comas where you can stand up sometimes), and he wakes up (by the magical power of klaxon) and believes it to have all been an intense gaming experience.

Oh, for the love of God.

It’s hard to imagine a more stupid conceit, or how he could have fit in any more flaws into the entire affair.

1) Occasional flashing lights do no induce comas (Yes, high frequency flashing can cause epileptic fits, amongst the epileptic – that has nothing to do with this).
2) People do not fall asleep standing up.
3) If those people were his friends, might they have reacted in the slightest way to
a) His falling asleep
b) Derren Brown appearing in a room with a camera crew
c) Their friend being kidnapped
d) The astonishing cruelty of the trick
4) Klaxons do not remove mystical comas
5) Being given a hug is unlikely to have the same magical effect as the magical computer game
6) People wouldn’t shoot at pretend zombies – they’d wait to see if they were real, as stupid as that might be

And so on.

So that means Brown leaves two options:

a) He defies all known science
b) He is using actors and stooges despite having said he would not

Hmmmm, which could it be?

Which means everything on the programme is now a lie. There’s no reason to ever believe he isn’t using actors. Every impressive effect? Actors. Every celebrity endorsement of a trick? A lie. Why believe otherwise, as he’s clearly shown that the statements at the beginning, the laid down rules, are lies. When he somehow knows the word being thought of, it’s because he arranged it with that guy earlier. You want to believe otherwise? Why? He’s already shown that he has no problems with using actors. Why go to all the effort of achieving a great effect when you can lie to the camera, and have a mate say the word you asked him to. The lazy, stupid conman.

There’s a fine line to walk for magicians. Brown has decided to spend his time on the wrong side of it, and has some rather unpleasant company.

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Edit: Oh gosh now, this is embarrassing. I appear to have made a terrible mistake above. It turns out that Uri Geller is not a LYING CHEATING MAGICIAN, but in fact a real, proper psychic. Why this sudden change in conviction? I’ll tell you. It was from reading the validating and absolute proof by Dr. Edgar Mitchell for the 267th time:

“Uri Geller has ability to perform amazing feats of mental wizardry is known the world over…Uri Geller is not a magician. Uri Geller is using capabilities that we all have and can develop with exercise and practice.”
– Dr. Edgar Mitchell,
Apollo 14 Astronaut and sixth man to walk on the moon

I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to doubt the words of the sixth man to walk on the moon. So to apologise to genuine real psychic and not LYING CHEATING MAGICIAN Uri Geller, I would like to help him advertise his latest miraculous gift to the world: The Uribike.