Alasdair Watson

I’m listening to Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan duet on the song “Haunted”. It’s a great song – she comes across beautiful and clear and melodic against his ruined rasp of a voice, and it works as a nice love song, somewhere between Shane’s doomed romances and her own, slightly more uplifting songs about love.

And then I remember the last time I heard of the two of them in connection was a couple of years back when I heard Bob Geldof interviewing Shane, and they were discussing the dildo Shane had given Sinead for Christmas.

I’m sitting here, listening to a traditional folk song, and the thought occurs: why does traditional Irish music sound different from, for example, traditional Native America or Asian, or African music? Obviously, they use different instruments, but even were that not true, I’m sure you’d be able to discern a big difference. So what is it about the origins of disparate cultures that leads them to develop different kinds of music?

I mean, I’m not complaining, I’m just wondering…

I’m getting a little worried about my readership, looking at the horrible search requests that have lead people here. “hermione granger fucking” and “emma watson the bitch” are clear signs that there are people reading this who are in serious need of help. Or possibly just neutering.

Continuing the cube theme : “Ignoring Time Cube is evil”.

I know it’s a stream-of-conciousness from a badly fractured mind, but I can’t shake the notion that’s he’s worked out something fundamental, and in the process has lost the ability to explain it in terms a normal human can understand. I’ve got the idea he’s trying to communicate in 4-dimensions, or something. Weird and mad, either way.

I’m crap at spatial awareness puzzles, like Rubicks Cube. So what how of I have solving a 4-D Rubicks Cube? None, obviously. But frankly, I could watch it solve itself, as the program allows, for hours.

How long will I be able to resist the new iMac for, then?

Well, that should be the archives fixed. Link format has changed a bit, though.

Alan Moore interviewed. I’ve got half a dozen interviews with him and conversations about magic bookmarked, actually, mostly because my own approach to magic agrees in different ways with both his and Grant Morrison’s ways of looking at things. From what I’ve read Alan seems a lot more structured, which I’m not so big on, but at the same time, there’s a grace to it I respond to, while Grant’s seems much more freeform in a lot of ways, which works better for me, but at the same time, seems oddly sharp and harsh in places, a lack of subtlety that I’m not so fond of, although this may be just the fact that he’s kind of aggressive about it, whereas Alan seems more humorous about the whole thing, I suppose.

But anyway, the stuff that was the stand out bit for me in that interview was this bit:

“One way to look at it is to say each religion is a language, and magic is . . . linguistics. For a linguist, then, there’d be no such thing as a ‘false’ language. It’s not like, ‘Oh yeah, French is good, but Russian is not a real language.’ I mean, there are words in German for which we don’t have a concept in English, and vice versa. So the thing is, you have to accept all religions as being . . . they’re all true languages! I need to understand the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Gnostics, of the Christians, of John Dee, of current occultists, of the Hebrews, of the kabbalists. To some degree I take the quantum position that in order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. How a story in the New Testament seems to connect up with an ancient Egyptian legend. And how this in turn relates to one of the Tarot cards. Which gives it a certain position on the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. And if you follow through these chains of ideas long enough, you start to get a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. You start to see things in a different way.”

Well, David and Andrew weren’t convinced at all, and I’m hoping that the directors cut will a bit more coherent, but I watched THE STORMRIDERS for the first time last night, and I think I can see what everyone means about it. OK, the film itself was dubious at best, but as I say, this could have been a combination of dodgy editing and a bad dub, but the action sequences were gorgeous. If you like wuxia films (swords and sorcery style HK cinema, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and have a tolerance for the ludicrous, then I recommend this.

Fiona just sent me an interesting LOTR related link. I think the guy has it fairly well pegged in a lot of places, although it could perhaps do with being made clearer that when he says “children” what he means is “adolescents”.