Of Iranian Space Monkeys and Other Real Life Space Invaders

“Space,” as 70s prog-rock legends Hawkwind once told us, “is deep”. But that’s not all, for as Yuri Gagarin also informed us, it can be a disappointing place for religious believers. You see, the first cosmonaut apparently took a peek out of the porthole while he was in orbit to see if the Deity was floating about. When he didn’t see an old man with a white beard anywhere nearby he allegedly declared: “I don’t see any God up here.”

Andrei Platonov: The Good Stalinist

As a fan of Soviet literature one of my great frustrations is the lack of good writing from a pro-Stalin perspective. There is no shortage of books about the evils of Stalin and the system he created- Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov and Bulgakov all spring to mind- but what about those writers who actually believed in his vision for the USSR?  

After all, even today many Russians view Stalin with a mixture of awe and terror, or simply awe. As for me, I think he was a vile individual, yet I would still like to know what it feels like to believe in that living god. Of course many authors in the 30s and 40s wrote books praising Stalin but they were mostly if not all rotten: monotonous, simplistic, shallow and dishonest. 

Celebrity Death Match: Andrei Tarkovsky vs. Lindsey Lohan

Last Saturday I felt a bit ill and so decided to retire to my chambers early, to watch a bit of TV and drink tea. Immediately however I faced a problem: the old tube TV in my bedroom isn’t connected to cable and I didn’t have the life force to drive down to the grocery store and rent a movie from the dispenser next to the entrance. There was nothing to watch.

Dang, I thought, what am I supposed to do now? Read a book? Ridiculous! But at that moment I spotted a black DVD case in the corner of the room. And suddenly it all came back to me: yes, the

Why French Tax Exile Gerard Depardieu is My Hero

I’m not a fan of class warfare, so when I heard recently that Gerard Depardieu had lost his rag at the prospect of being taxed 75% on his earnings, I sympathized. It’s a ridiculously high rate that will only affect those people who can most easily avoid it anyway. In short, it’s unfair and stupid. Even so, when I discovered that Depardieu was thinking of renouncing his citizenship and becoming Belgian I wondered if that wasn’t a bit drastic. Yes, he’d save money, but… Belgium?

Obviously I wasn’t the only one thinking this as last week Vladimir Putin offered Depardieu Russian citizenship. The actor promptly accepted and I watched the celebrations on TV. There was Depardieu having dinner with Putin, Depardieu partying in Mordovia- he was having a great time: GLORY TO THE 13% TAX RATE, VODKA AND PRETTY GIRLS!

In Praise of Courtesy

Recently I was talking to a man who expects the Messiah to return this April. About halfway into our chat he thanked me for being “courteous.” This struck me as a strange thing to say, since I had asked for the interview. Evidently he was accustomed to journalists adopting a condescending or mocking tone.

That’s not an approach I approve of, and not just because it’s ineffective. I like to think I am a fairly polite individual. This is not down to any innate moral virtue, but because, when I was a child, my parents instilled in me near-Victorian codes of public behavior. If I were on a bus and a grown-up arrived, I had to surrender my seat; if adults were in the room I had to sit quietly; and if I were strolling on the sidewalk with a lady then it was my duty to walk on the outside lest she be spattered with mud from a passing car.

2012: The Year's Most Uplifting Moments

As everybody knows, the media doesn’t make its money by telling everybody what’s right in the world. Throughout the year we have been fed a steady diet of scandal, disaster, tragedy and horror. But as Lou Reed once sang: it’s easy enough to tell what is wrong, but that’s not what I want to hear all night long. So as 2012 draws to a close, I’d like to focus on five of the year’s uplifting events, to inspire us for the year ahead.

1.    George Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise

I’m not one of those types who whines that “George Lucas murdered my childhood” with his atrocious Star Wars prequels. Indeed, the older I get the more irritated I become with man-boys of my generation who can’t let go of the things they enjoyed as 7 year-olds. But even so, The Phantom Menace really was appalling, and I’ve blotted out my memories of the other two films. What shocked me most however was to watch as a formerly talented man systematically negated every correct decision he had made a few decades earlier. It was depressing to see such an anti-mojo at work. Could that happen to me? I wondered. Could I lose all judgment? Thus we may rejoice that Lucas flogged his franchise to Disney, and be happy for him that he realized he didn’t have it in him anymore (however he may justify the sale personally). May we all gain that level of insight, may George Lucas enjoy his $4 billion and may the new films be at least mediocre. 

2012, The Apocalypse And My Five Favorite Prophets

Apparently the world is going to end this week. That’s what the Mayans said anyway, though I’ve heard this might be a misinterpretation. Hey, Mr Editor- should I even write this column, since I might not live long enough to get paid?

Oh, alright then.

I’ve long been fascinated by The End. In fact I once spent a year reading exclusively about the Apocalypse, and my head was duly filled with the wonderful and terrifying visions of countless prophets and messiahs. Some of these fellows were dangerous, most were not. After a while I developed a fondness for certain seers. Here are some of my favorites.

Work As If You Lived In The Early Days Of A Better Nation

Work: it consumes vast amounts of our time, and each one of us must come to some kind of accommodation with it early on in life. If we have too much work we complain, if we don’t have enough, then we starve, or rot from the inside out. It’s a tricky thing.  

For a long time, I was against work. When I graduated at the age of 22 I had successfully managed to avoid doing very much of it since my degree was in English Literature, a subject any half-intelligent person can succeed in with a gift for improvisation and blather. The downside was that I was unqualified for anything profitable. Still, that wasn’t a problem as my goal remained work avoidance.

Kim Jong-un, The Sexy Dictator

The last couple of years have been very eventful for dictator-watchers. After a series of geriatric regimes collapsed in 2011, we are now seeing the tentative green shoots of an authoritarian recovery. For instance, in Egypt Mohammed Morsi is currently staging a coup. We will need to wait and see how all that plays out, but- pace the US state department and countless naïve Western journalists- it was entirely predictable.

The Metaphysics of Consumerism

Earlier this week while driving through Austin I saw an intriguing sign by the side of the road. It read “UNDERGROUND: Metaphysical VW repair.” “VW” stands for Volkswagen of course, and a grizzled old hippy with a long grey beard was standing in front of a shabby garage, waiting for battered old camper vans to pull up that he might lay his healing hands upon them. Just down the street was a strip joint, a run-down motel, a Korean shopping center and the bar where Janis Joplin was discovered forty odd years ago. Yes: I was on the funky side of town, where poor folk, hippy burnouts and middle class boys and girls who are temporarily slumming it while harboring dreams of becoming famous artists do their groovy thing, man.

But, I wondered, what might this “metaphysical VW repair” entail? Would the grizzled hippy strip naked and join hands with other naked hippies in a love circle around a crippled VW bug, chanting mantras until it was fixed? Were homeopathic herbs involved? Would they read from The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians? Would the hippy wave a selenite crystal over the engine, thus imbuing the injured mechanism with cosmic energy?

Texas Independence Now!

As you may have noticed, following the reelection of Barack Obama, many Americans got a bit upset. In fact they were so upset that they did what people do nowadays when they feel angry - they went on the Internet and moaned about it.

But these were not ordinary whinges, oh no. You see, the US government has a pointless website called “We the people” where anyone can go and pretend to interact with the authorities. In this corner of cyberspace ordinary citizens create petitions that will be completely ignored, as is the custom of advanced democracies all over the world.

On Russian Balconies

On a recent visit to Istanbul I stayed in an apartment looking out on the Bosphorus. Every morning I’d get up and see the sun sparkling on the surface of the water as birds circled languidly overhead. At night it was even better, as the thumping techno from the pleasure boats and the call of the Muezzin intermingled. It was very different from my usual mode of accommodation when I travel: cheap hotels, dirt, and the lingering possibility of sudden, violent death.

In many ways it was the culmination of a quest that began years ago in my hometown of Dunfermline in Scotland. Over there, you don’t see too many balconies. It’s too windy and wet. Yet I remember one house that had a huge balcony on the second floor. I used to walk past, wishing I lived there. I didn’t care that it was useless, that if I sat up there the wind would probably pick me up and drop me in the North Sea. I only saw the ideal of open living, close to the sky.

Important News You Might Have missed

As I write this, the US election is still underway. Though it’s the closest race the country has seen in 76 years, I feel confident in predicting that the winner will be a multi-millionaire Harvard law grad who was raised by white people, who spent some of his youth abroad, and who has spent decades in a church that many people consider strange. On top of that, he will be backed by massively powerful vested interests, and he will not close Guantanamo Bay or stop dispatching drones to annihilate Pakistanis.

Election 2012: Is it over yet?

In Texas, there’s never any doubt as to who will win a big election: Republicans. Indeed, in Williamson County where I live, a man can drive for miles before he spots an Obama sign in a front yard. Democrats are out there, but they are so greatly outnumbered that only truly bold souls- such as my neighbor- publicly advertise their support for Barack Obama and the grinning clown he chose as his VP.

A World Without Heroes

Many years ago, it was not considered strange for an unmarried bachelor to occupy his idle hours taking photographs of scantily clad little girls. In fact it was a favorite pastime of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, who died without any scandal attached to his name. Could he have gotten away with that nowadays? I don’t think so.

How to Become an International Celebrity Protestor

This week I was wandering around my local supermarket when I spotted something very unusual for Central Texas. A young woman was wearing a shocking pink T-shirt that read FREE PUSSY RIOT. Wow, I thought, they’re megastars now! And yet, although I more or less agreed with the sentiment on the T-shirt, I did wonder why these young women receive so much attention, when their protest was so asinine, and there are so many more causes in the world deserving of attention.

For instance, that little girl who got shot in the head in Afghanistan earlier this week- where are the T-shirts demanding justice for her? Nowhere. Or what about Mali, overrun by radical Islamists who are busy destroying ancient Sufi shrines? When is Paul McCartney going to tell them to stop? Never. And then there’s Nato member Turkey, which imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world: when is Sean Penn going to speak up for them? He isn’t.

Mysteries of the Aninal Kingdom

Humans – we think we know it all. There we go, traveling all over the planet, measuring things, taking pictures of things, analyzing the DNA of things, and – as we saw in last week’s column – we’ve even started recording the temperature on Mars for no good reason. But how much do we really understand about our world, our universe? Consider animals for instance. They’re all around us, eating, sleeping and pooping, but what do they really want? When you look closely at our four legged “friends” you’ll see some very mysterious behavior indeed.

Mars 2012: The Hunt for Microbes

Space: it’s not very interesting, is it? Well, alright I suppose that if you like rocks and dust and gas burning in a void it’s absolutely fascinating. But I must confess that ever since I discovered at age 8 that there are neither aliens nor robots nor warring space empires out there I’ve found it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the cosmos.

Free Speech and Stating the Obvious

It’s very difficult for outsiders to grasp what’s going on in a foreign country, even when it’s in the headlines a lot. I saw this when I lived in Moscow. Every day I’d read something in the UK or US press and be appalled at the trite, superficial and generally awful level of analysis of Russia on offer.

DAS IST NICHT GUT! Latvian Nostalgia for the Waffen-SS Death Machine

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like Nazis very much. Call me crazy, but all that Judenhass, genocide, invading other people’s countries, war and Thousand Year Reich stuff- it’s just not for me. It’s kind of, you know- evil.

Now Latvians on the other hand, they’re a different kettle of fish. They’re totally nuts for Nazis! No, really! It’s incredible! Is it the black leather and the skulls? The uniforms? The cool salute? The goose stepping? The death camps? It’s difficult to say, but one thing’s for sure, in Latvia the Swastika never goes out of style!

From Istanbul to Moscow

Recently I spent a couple of weeks in Istanbul and I was struck by the many parallels between Turkey and Russia. For instance: Turkish rugs. Turks like to put them on the floor, Russians hang them on their walls. But people in both countries dig the oriental style.

It’s not just carpet tastes that are similar. Both countries begin on the periphery of Europe and stretch eastwards into Asia; and in Russia and Turkey alike Islam and Orthodoxy have rubbed shoulders for many centuries.