I took last week off and spent it slumming around London, so you now get two art reviews for the price of one. And when i say 'art', I mean of course playing in odd playgrounds for adults.

The most talked about of course is Test Site, the enormous slide in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Only five? They should have filled that thing with slides! The queuing system was very oddly handled. We rocked up at midday to get a ticket for 5.00. But once we'd gone down at five, there were huge gaps where it wasn't being used. So clearly they are misappropriating times- I'm sure if they tripled the amount of slides and just let it be a free-for-all it'd be a lot more fun. Anyway, it's a big slide. Like a waterslide but drier and bumpier. I wanted to take my cameraphone down with me to capture the experience, but I didn't and Londonist has a great collection anyway.

More interesting to me was Bridge, an charming little art project that has received very little attention in the press that I can tell, but I really recommend. Essentially, the artist (Michael, who was there and happy to chat about the project/wade about in the water with you) has filled an old abandoned church with water, and installed these odd footsteps- they are like round pads (stepping-stones, really), and when you step on the first one, your weight causes the next one to 'rise up' out of the water, allowing you to take the next step, which brings up the next one, allowing you to slowly walk out into the centre of the water. It's purely mechanical and Michael's intention is to one day install it permanently in a lake somewhere (although he did say that it was slowly breaking down, even in the church).

It was by turns frightening and contemplative, which was more emotion than most art conjures in me. It's out of the way at the foot of Southwark Park, but I highly recommend you check it out while it's still open.

Much like learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere, or humming a song you haven't thought of in years and then suddenly hearing it a dozen times on the radio over the next week, since posting The Culture Defence I have been running into example apon example of how tradition is pretty much the only reason anyone does anything. One of the more amusing ones is Amanda's take on crusive writing and how it should die a lonely death (if you don't read Pandagon evey day, you really should).

I won?t strain your intelligence pointing out why arguments from tradition are horseshit, but suffice it to say, if your main argument for something is that it?s a tradition, then that?s all the more reason to re-examine your attitudes about it.

The current annual hubbub over hajibs, for example. This is actually a pretty complex debate with a lot of good points on both sides. I have a similar stance on this argument as I do on circumcision- I hate hajibs and wish they'd fuck off, but at the same time I'd find legislation banning them to be even creepier.

I hate the Hajib (and it's way-creepy cousin the Burqa) because it's a method of controlling women. Yes, there are lots of choice-feminist arguments about it's advantages in a leery man's world, but none of them speak to the point that the Hajib is a method of controlling, and supressing, women. Now, if a woman wants to wear a hajib, or a burqa, or anything else, then of course she should be able to, which is why I don't support legislating against them- that is removing women's choices, not adding to them, and many women wear the hajib as a legitimate expression of their choices and culture. But the bottom line is that it is not a matter of choice for a lot of women. And it's safe to say that these very same women have little other choices in their lives, as well. And that's cultural, which again makes people afraid of coming at the issue directly, discussing it honestly, without the veil of tradition coming down the cloack the argument in offence.

Many people I've discussed this with cannot seem to hold it in their minds that I can't vociferously hate something, yet not want it legislated against. I find it perfectly reasonable. Let's take porn. There's a lot of ugly, violent porn out there that I don't think anyone should watch and I find really disturbing that it exists at all. Yet I don't want porn banned, because my choices don't override others, and a boring world it would be if they did. Yet I'll happily give my opinion on people who watch that sort of shit. So while I don't think the culture defense is a valid argument for supporting something, at the same time I don't believe in the 'culture attack'- my culture doesn't override yours.

To: Office All
Subj: To whoever stole my cheese from the Office fridge

Dear whoever stole me cheese from the office fridge,

I hope you enjoyed my cheese. I was looking forward to eating it for lunch, and I certainly hope the joy you gained from stealing it surpassed my annoyance at having it stolen. You will be happy to know that I have replaced the cheese, along with several other food items, and you're welcome to have at them any time you please. You should probably be aware that I have coated a random selection of these items with an extremely powerful emetic that will induce immediate vomiting, loss of bladder control and uncontrollable defecation.

Have a nice day.

I watched, ah, 'Death of a President' last night. Probably the only time I've actually stopped what I was doing and made a special point to watch TV since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was quite heavily hyped, so I knew it would be a part of pop culture, or water cooler talk, if you like, and plus I'd heard some intruiging things about it, so thought I should give it a look.

To be honest, it was a big disappointment. It started out quite well, ratcheting up the tension towards the assassination, and then the footage of the murder itself was very well done. As a convinving documentary it was extremely well done, the footage of real people and real places were virtually seamless with the fiction. There were one too many shots of cars driving by hospitals, but real documentaries have that, too.

But once the assassination had actually taken place, I think the filmmakers missed a really important opportunity to make something great. What they decided to focus on was who was the assassin- it turned into a sort of less-than-compelling episode of CSI, looking at fingerprints and going into the history of suspects and trying to figure out who the assassin was. Which wasn't really great TV. None of these people are real, do I really care who gets caught and punished? Much more interesting to me was what would happen to America if Bush was shot? If the assasssin was Syrian, would they invade Syria? If it was just prior to the Presidential elections, would those elections be suspended? Before 9/11, many would argue that the most significant day in modern American history was the day JFK was shot. This event would undoubtedly have equally massive implications. Did the film look at any of them? Hardly. It was too busy talking about eight points of similarity found on a fingerprint. Yawn. To be honest it was pretty disappointing. It could have been a really important, even prescient, document of how American power is perceived from within and abroad. As it turned out it was a second-rate murder mystery with a lamely predictable conclusion.

If you missed it, I wouldn't worry too much about catching the rerun.

Like Pix, I'll be going Pink for October. Well, a sort of mauve.

Those of you who know why, know. Those of you who don't, ask.

No-one's happier about the Hoff revival than I, and I think the series of self-mocking Pipex ads is a lot of fun. But the above picture is just plain creepy and there's no getting round it. Is it me or does his head look way, way smaller than his body would indicate?

Scott says that the Hoff has taken so many steroids that his balls have dropped off. I don't know how he knows that.

I often have thoughts about things which I find hard to articulate. I know I think something about those things, but I'm not entirely sure what. One example that sticks out in my mind was a poster which had a London street, and everyone's heads had been replaced with security cameras. I think the slogan was something like: "Help your community by reporting suspicious activity." or something, but I found the poster very creepy. I wrote a blog about it but I wasn't able to articulate my thoughts completely so I abandoned it.

A similar poster which creeped me out was the series that had: NOT PAYING YOUR LICENSE FEE IS A CRIME. This was nicely parodied in the film Children of Men, except the slogans were: HARBORING IMMIGRANTS IS A CRIME and AVOIDING FERTILITY TESTS IS A CRIME. And I thought it was a cool parody, but I can't tell you why I thought it was cool, just that I somehow knew it. And I kind of like that ambiguously meaningful dialogue in films, where you're not entirely sure what is being said, but you're almost certain something is. I usually know if I like a piece of static art if it engenders that sort of feeling in me. The whole film is choc with little moments like that, from the over-the-counter suicide pill called 'Quietus' (ha!) to the Diana-like despair bought on by the death of the world's youngest person.

That's not to say that all the symbolism in the film is equally subtle- the film literally hammers home the point that 'children are the future', and goes a bit overboard when they spend a lot of the film trying to get the baby (who represents hope, see?) to a boat called 'Tomorrow' (which represents, uhm...tomorrow, geddit?).

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The film is set in a dystopian Britain in 2027, in which the rest of the world has seemingly collapsed into chaos (there's a hilarious ad shown at one point which shows the rest of the world's major citites being devastated in various different ways, followed up with the slogan: "Only Britain soldiers on!"), due to the fact that no babies have been born for the last 18 years. The reason for this is never given, which I think is a wise choice- it's just part of the film's reality. The world is neatly and quickly established as an exaggeration of present day Britain. Immigrants are forced into town-sized prisons for deportation, crime is rampant, policing is brutal. Youth is worshipped, happiness is sold in pill form, cannibis is still illegal (heh).

It's not an uplifting film, in fact I think there's barely one moment of levity in the entire process. But it's beautifully well constructed- Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the two very beautiful films Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter 3, does a great job in creating the grim London of the future (there were several shots of places I recognized, and I've no idea how they managed to film them), and there is a running battle in Bexhill that is artfully choreographed and nicely vicious.

I wouldn't call this a great film, it's certainly depressing and the narrative seemed to lack a clear direction, but I've been pondering it on and off since I saw it, thinking about the ramifications of the conceit and how they were represented, and enjoying that vague feeling of not quite knowing what I thought. That's better than one of those films you just forget straight away, isn't it?

So I just got kicked from Ade's post about belief and tradition, because I happened to raise the dreaded C-word (circumcision), a topic that is dear to my heart and I love ranting about, not least because it continually strikes me as one of the oddest paradoxes about modern society: we run ads about how awful it is to hit children, but we're more than happy to chop bits off of them when they're a few days old. Adrian asked me not to talk about it on his blog -which is fair enough, it's his place, but I thought I'd resurrect the discussion here.

It's funny that I was asked not to talk about it because a refusal to discuss things it usually a big indicator that the refuser knows they have no genuine defence for the argument in question. Another big indicator is the culture defence, which was also used:

I will not have this post subverted with weighted language that insults my entire culture and history regardless of ones opinion on God.

ie. "It's part of my culture and therefore not subject to discussion or critique." It's a pretty common argument, Wikipedia really needs an entry on it. Although I use the word 'argument' very generously, because it's not an argument at all, it's a false logic that should be denigrated and exposed as the sham it is. Which is not to say I don't enjoy and appreciate culture, I just think that if the only leg you have to stand on is that something is tradition, then it's not a very good basis for the defence of child abuse.

Yep, circumcision is child abuse- you're chopping up a baby for no rhyme or reason other than that your traditions demand it. And that is not reason enough. The biggest additional reason given is that it's somehow medically beneficial. This may have been true back in the day when folks lived in the desert and it was tough to find time to scrub. This is true no longer- the odds of contracting some kind of 'foreskin-related' disease is far, far lower than the number of botched circumcisions that occur every year.

The other big argument for it is that chicks dig cut dicks. This may be true, but listen to what you're saying: It's okay to perform gential mutilation on your eight-day-old child, in order that their penis looks better in 16+ years. Why not just wait and let them make the decision when they reach that age? At least then the choice is theirs. "Oh, it's not as traumatic as later on" What the fuck do you know? You ever had a baby say: "Yeah, it's not that bad." Ever chopped the end of your big toe off with a shovel? You know how you feel all woozy when you look at it? You know how your body will sometimes go into shock to try and cope with it? Now try that when you're eight days old, tell me that's a great idea. You don't punch babies in the head, why the hell do we allow people to chop them up?

So all you're left with is the culture defence. I think Saddam's been using this in his trial:

"But your honour, it's old tradition in my country to incinerate Kurds in this way!"

"By Allah you're right man, not guilty on all counts."

It's not a defence. My culture has a long and glorious tradition of racism and sexism, but I'll stand up against those too, I don't care who I offend or piss off. There is no defence to this act. Not anymore, not since the freakin' Enlightenment. Past parents who have cut their kids, you got a free pass. Future parents? You do not. You are on notice. You chop up your baby when it can't defend itself: you're a child abuser. Society might not say you are. The law may not punish you for it. Friends may be too polite to bring it up with you.

But deep down, below your fragile excuse for a fragile excuse, you'll know.