So that's that

Saw some of the Olympic closing ceremony. Insanely spectacular in a fairly repetitive way, but:

1. What's the deal with on the UK bus with the gold lame for Leona Lewis, the artfully mixed race violinist-cellist combo in sports kit and David Beckham in his uttelry dull track suit? Bonkers.
2. Nothing staged about the crowds out in the Mall in front of picturesque Buckingham Palace. Nothing at all.
3. What was Placido Domingo doing there?
4. How many toilets do you need to have for 91,000 people in that stadium?
5. Is it not actually possible for Boris Johnson to do up his jacket? And how badly was he longing to shove his hands in his pockets, only to quickly remember that, in front of several billion people, maybe he really shouldn't?
6. Jacques Rogge seemed best able to handle the flag waving bit, though presumably he's had more pratice than most.
7. The Memory Tower - freakily beautiful. Since one of the artistic directors is on record as saying that he doesn't think such things are achievable in the West because of the different work ethic and human rights, does this mean that only totalitarian regimes can do proper spectacle?
8. Were any of the fireworks seeming in and around the stadium actually real?

Ah well. I hardly watched any of it. Slightly scary to think that it's over and now over to London. Saints preserve us.

PS This article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker from Beijing is great. "And thus the attempt to keep politics out of sport, which is as futile as trying to keep the sweat out of sex, began to falter once more."

Photo

Looking at this picture, I can't decide if, instead of being a kind of cute, grown-up joke, somebody might think it's actually offensive. I mean I can think of a few people who might. Is a picture of a toddler with a cigarette in her mouth actually funny or not? It is to me only because I can still remember that slightly edgy tang to the smell of the tobacco when my parents took out a cigarette, the crinkle of the paper in the packs, but oddly not the ashtrays so much. Perhaps my mother was really good about emptying them. Considering I've never been a smoker myself, I remember my childhood among smoking parents and their friends with a certain fondness for it. My father likes to say that when my sister and I were very little and were playing with our cat, if he threw an empty cigarette pack down, all three of us would scramble for it. Now, in some ways, that sounds like the worst kind of feral parenting. But this was in a posh apartment in Paris. What you can't see is the rest of the picture that I cropped, which is my mother in the foreground, bending towards a table for a light, fag in her mouth, short skirt and long hair. Put it all in colour and take away the marble fireplace, and it's a picture from a hand-wringing documentary on the decline in family values.

I dont' know what I'm trying to get at with this really. Except about how context shapes perceptions. And how innocence can become corrupted with hindsight, history reinterpreted through current assumptions that played no part in the original scene. Bit of a leap, but it's getting late. And I was thinking about reshaping history because of the annoyance of the day newswise, which was this article about a prayer group in the US that prays in the gas stations for cheaper gas and actually thinks that God's been bothering to listen. Nothing to do with market forces at all. I guess the bit that really got to me was reworking the words to 'We shall overcome' into 'We'll have cheaper g-a-a-s'. Selfish nutters.

Finally, progress

So, new laptop! No more excuses for so many things. Just have to take off some old work from the poor, redundant museum-piece IBM and off we go. Like the several moths that are even now careering around the room, along with an increasingly dopey fly. Hell- now I'll have to murder some innocent creatures. Which they appear to know, since the moths are dive-bombing me. I refuse to engage with the idea of strategically minded moths. It must be the shiny lights. Obviously this machine just demands blood sacrifice or something.

Except now I've remembered The lesson of the moth. Damn that anthropomorphism.