Without getting too deep into this, I’m pretty much of the mindset that everyone is equal and deserves an equal chance at everything in life, but then I go and read something like this and it makes me think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Seriously, how dumb must someone like this be:

This Texan woman who didn’t want to give Newsbeat her name is one of them.

She said: “I really don’t care what Obama says because I don’t want someone with a Muslim background running our country.

“He’ll be letting them all come over here and he’ll be buddy buddy with them all.

“We’ll be giving them nuclear arms. Next thing you know they’ll be attacking us again.”

What? WHAT????? Do some people actually shut out half the information they are given on the news? They are obviously wise enough to know an election is going on. Even the Republican’s own Colin Powell (who to be fair has always been what they call a RINO – Republican In Name Only) is backing the Democratic Obama:

He said: “I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said.

“Such things as, ‘Well you know that Mr Obama is a Muslim’. Well, the correct answer is, ‘He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian.’

“But the really right answer is, ‘What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?’ The answer is, ‘No. That’s not America.’

“Is there something wrong with some seven-year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she can be president?

“Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.

“This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

I’m starting to think that since America supposedly leads the so called free world as the most powerful nation on the planet that they should allow the rest of us to vote on who they choose.

It’s a shame I can’t get this worked up about British politics. In fact it seems my friends and I spend more time talking about foreign politics than we do about UK politics, but there’s no interesting characters in UK politics. Unlike the US, we don’t get to choose who runs our leading party, we only get to choose the party, and that’s becoming harder and harder. We have left wing Labour wanting to spend £12BILLION on tracking our private e-mails and phone calls, and yet the traditionally right wing Conservative party are claiming they would want to brink the NHS back up to scratch and put money back into education. Are we looking at a political switch sometime in the future? Things would just be too strange then.

After finishing Wuthering Heights I stand by my previous statements about Heathcliffe and Cathy. To me this book isn’t about love but it’s about passion, and passion covers love AND hate. The two characters obviously love each other at some point, then over time start to tease each other in the most awful ways possible. They are hateful, spiteful and downright nasty.

It’s often implied that Heathcliffe is some kind of demonic creature, which adds to the gothic tones of the book. I think it’s more likely that Mr Earnshaw was playing away from home and ended up with a son he wasn’t expecting, which if true makes the relationship between Heathcliffe and Cathy even more worrying.

Going into the book I was expecting some great love story, with the main characters torn apart like Romeo and Juliet. In reality this is a bleak, dark book which turned out to be a lot more interesting than I was expecting. While the book has many classic quotes my favourite has to be the following:

Instead of finding her outside, I heard her voice within. The little monkey had crept by the skylight of one garret, along the roof, into the skylight of the other, and it was with the utmost difficulty I could coax her out again.

Just cos I love the fact that even all that time ago they used the word “monkey” in such a way. I’m easily pleased when monkeys are involved.

Wuthering Heights took me a few false starts to get into and took me a few weeks to finish off as I could only concentrate on it for so long at a time. Soon as I finished it a few days ago I picked up a new purchase to read, rather than delving into my large pile of books to-be-read as I had planned. That book is Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis.

Ellis has been one of my favourite comic writers for a few years now. his “mainstream” stuff is some of the best super-hero work out there, especially his work on Thunderbolts and Iron Man. He does a lot of work for Marvel, which probably pays his bills, and then he does a lot of stuff for Avatar which I feel is probably where we see the real Warren Ellis. And that’s what this book is like. It’s sick and depraved in the most interesting way possible.

The basic plot involves a Private Detective, Michael McGill, who is hired to find the “real” American Constitution that has been lost from the White House for 50 years. Along the way he picks up and falls in love with a girl who helps him on his journey through America’s seedy underground. Most of the people/groups that McGill meets are based on real events that Ellis has discovered on the internet over the year. These include, but are not limited to, Godzilla Bukkake fetishists, men who inject their testicles with saline solution for fun and the infamous baby Jesus butt plug. All of this shocks McGill and yet is seen as being normal to Trix, his student sidekick/lover.

Trix is an interesting character, and without going into detail reminded me far too much of an ex girlfriend. McGill’s responses to some of the things she reveals also reminded me of myself, but I’m guessing they are the kinds of things most men would say in such situations.

While the novel is obviously written to purposefully disturb (Ellis admits he wrote it expecting it to not get published, he just needed to get his agent off his back) it has a lot to say about modern life, especially since the dawn of the internet, disguised as a hard-boiled detective noir. I think a lot of it is summed up by the elderly serial killer who explains to McGill that all these “freaks” are not the underground, they are the mainstream. To me this is Ellis telling us that the internet has taken everything previously underground and made it mainstream because anyone with a computer can now access such information/images/video etc, thus none of these things are hidden any more.

It’s quite a short book, around 280 pages, and there isn’t really much to each page. Most chapters are around 4 pages long, some being only a few lines long, not even a page. But this is pure Ellis, he knows exactly how to break things up into small chunks and give you only the information you need and nothing more. Unlike Wuthering Heights this only took me a few hours over a few days to read, although it’s that compulsive that it would be easy to sit and read in one sitting.

I hope Ellis has more where this came from.

(I got the American edition of the paperback, which may or may not differ from the UK version, which includes a short interview, behind the scenes stuff and even a few cookery lessons from Ellis. I like extras like this, really adds to the value).

Don’t worry, happier posts are in the works, I just feel the need to take 2 minutes to moan about Damien Hirst once again.

According to this article, Hirst has topped the ArtReview list as the most powerful person in art. This is based on the following criteria:

Art figures are measured on a number of criteria including financial clout, influence on the international stage and activity in the past year.

That’s all ok, as long as it’s not based on “talent”, cos then I really would be annoyed.

Seriously, is crap like this really worth putting in a museum? It doesn’t even look that much like Kate Moss. And she isn’t even all that attractive to start with, so I’ve no idea why she’s the subject of a sculpture meant to represent the “ideal beauty”. It’s hard to believe such a shallow piece has come from the same man that sculpted the amazing and thought provoking sculpture of Alison Lapper pregnant, a sculpture which had many levels to it and brought a lot of attention to both art and disability when it was placed in Trafalgar Square.

The Lapper statue celebrates both the female form in it’s many shapes and the challenges faced by someone born with such “disabilities” (which is in some ways a misnomer as her condition has far from disabled her), and also reminds us of the great statues of history which over time have lost limbs, such as the Venus de Milo. This new statue of Kate Moss, 50kg of solid gold valued at £1.5 million, is the exact opposite, a crass piece of pop-trash representing an over-paid, over-hyped woman of little true standing in the world. Maybe that’s the irony that I’m missing, and that making a statue of such a person out of such a material is a representation of everything wrong with this world. But I doubt that’s the case.

Along with Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, this is just another case of style over substance or talent that sadly is everywhere within the world of so called “modern art”. Hirst’s skull sold for £50 million. Just stop and think about that for a minute or two. £50 million. Both the skull and the gold statue of Kate Moss offend me more than they really should. If they were worthless pieces of art created from basic materials then I wouldn’t be that bothered, but the fact that they are created from such rare materials is obviously an attempt to raise the profile of such works and to generate hype. Think back to all the classics from the past, most of these were created by starving artists with genuine talent and a love of the work they were doing, most of whom died penniless and didn’t find fame until long after they died. Can anyone honestly think that a hack such as Hirst, or even Warhol, will be fondly remembered in 1, 2, 3 or 4 hundred years time?

The people that buy into tall this crap have no interest in art or the appreciation of such objects or images, it’s all about the wealth and status such objects show. This isn’t art for art’s sake, or even just for the shock value, it’s simply a disgusting display of wealth.

As usual, Hirst didn’t even do much of the work involved with the skull, seeing himself as more of a “conceptual artist”, which translates as “I’ll come up with the idea and get the credit, my flunkies can do all the work”. Much like Warhol before him. Of course, there is the age old argument that the very fact it even bothers me means the artist has done their job to get a reaction, and there could be some truth in that, Shame they can’t do work that gets a more positive reaction.

Hirst has turned his art into a brand. It’s Coca Cola, it’s Disney, it’s Apple. Each piece of his work is “the brand”. There are no individual pieces of Damien Hirst work any more, just one mass of branding split into pieces and sold to whatever idiot will buy them. Buy a can of Coke and you pay for the brand and you also pay for the drink, which at least may refresh you. Buy a piece of Hirst and you are buying the brand and nothing more. Coca Cola may give you refreshment, satisfaction and even enjoyment. Hirst’s work will give you nothing but a large hole in your bank account, and embarrassing looks in years to come when his work is no longer the in thing and he falls out of favour with the rich idiots with too much money to spend on this crap. Hirst is just like every other recognisable brand, just a name, something simple ready for mass consumption. Subject to wealth. Welcome to the world of capitalist art. Buy in now.

One thing that has kind of pleased me this last week was the news that work by one of my favourite artists failed to sell. Why would I be pleased? Simply put this work was never meant to be uprooted and sold to some idiot with too much money. It was made to stay on the streets and be free, for everyone to view, for everyone to enjoy. In fact I’d rather see it covered up or washed off than pulled down and sold in an auction.

The world of art really needs a revolution that pulls it down to the every man, not the money man.

A while ago I started reading Wuthering Heights for no other reason than I felt I must, it being a classic and all (Ok, so the fact that it was written and is set near where I’m from might have something to do with it. And the fact that I used to visit the town the Bronte’s are from a lot as a kid with my parents). It took me a few false starts until I truly started reading it but I’m about half way through now.

It took a while to get used ot the writing style and the difference in language between now and when it was written, and even for a full blooded Yorkshireman like myself I found some of the dialect to be hard to follow. So far I’m enjoying the book a lot more than I thought I would. For years I presumed it was just another period piece, the kind of thing my mum used to read when we were on holiday about orphans working down a mine or some such hardship, but to my surprise it’s a much darker book with an underlying depth that delves into the almost supernatural.

It’s never explicitly stated (at least not so far) but Heathcliffe seems to be something not of this world, or possessed by some deeper evil. And the way the world around the characters is described is almost like something from a Hammer Horror film (and since the book pre-dates Hammer by around a hundred years I wouldn’t be surprised to find it was an influence on horror writers since it was published).

I was always under the impression this was just another love story, but the love involved is dark and almost so strong it’s turned to hatred. It’s actually reminded me of American Psycho, whereby it keeps you gripped and interested even though you hate the main characters. For many years I’ve seen people use Heathcliffe and Cathy’s love as an example of the ultimate love, yet so far I can’t help but feel I’d never want to feel about anyone how they feel about each other, they seem to have the most destructive love I’ve ever seen. Mind you, they are both such horrendous people maybe they deserve each other.

Then again, all the above opinios may change by the time I get to the end of the book.