One Movie Meme

1. One movie that made you laugh
Rushmore (this is my definition of intoxicating joy)

2. One movie that made you cry
Bigfoot and the Hendersons (Well, I was on the brink)

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Raiders of the Lost Ark

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Bob Roberts (The best American political satire since Dr Strangelove?)

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
Repo Man (It's an indie classic with a flying car at the end. My devotion to this film has been persistently ridiculed)

6. One movie you hated
Switched at Birth (a 1991 true-life-drama which ended up in the VCR and was watched ad infinitum by my less cynical and more caring younger sister)

7. One movie that scared you
The Shining (watching it in an unheated flat late at night was probably a mistake)

8. One movie that bored you
Fierce Creatures (John Cleese and Michael Palin on screen together for the first time since A Fish Called Wanda... What in the world possessed them to shoot a story set in a zoo?)

9. One movie that made you happy
Little Miss Sunshine

10. One movie that made you miserable
Atonement

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
Day of the Dead

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday

13. The last movie you saw
Atonement (see no. 10)

14. The next movie you hope to see
Paradise Now

The source of the Meme

The Fedora Adventures of Indiana Jones

The imminent prospect of Indiana Jones returning to the cinema screen for a fourth swashbuckling epic has set pulses racing faster than any creature in a Grand National.

This abnormal excitement stems not just from the fact that three Titans of cinema – Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and George Lucas – are reunited. Rather, the film’s poster glows with the promise that the audience will regain lost youth for an evening.

There is a generation of men and women for whom watching Raiders of the Lost Ark was a defining event in the development of their imaginations.

Its tale of an archaeologist action hero who battles Nazis – the personification of evil – while discovering the Ark of the Covenant captivated millions. It burst onto the screens in 1981 and rehabilitated the idea of the American hero.

This is why it wasn’t dismissed as entertaining hokum, a pleasure which vanished as quickly as the audience’s popcorn.

The cinema of the 1970s had dared to deconstruct the American dream. All the President’s Men (1976) had portrayed the US as a republic with a rotting core, Mean Streets (1983) and Taxi Driver (1976) depicted urban depravity, and The Godfather (1972) suggested that the nation was essential a gangster state.

Watergate and Vietnam – brought to the screen as a vision of a hallucinogenic hades in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) – made American voters and cinemagoers alike hunger for assurance their country was essentially good.

They were ready to give Ronald Reagan a landslide election victory, and they wanted inspiring modern mythology at the box office.

Indiana Jones’s world-weariness mirrored the exhaustion of families who had sat up watching atrocities and scandal on the evening news for the past decade. His heroism came in being able to confront genuine villains at the crack of a whip – just as the Greatest Generation had done when liberating Europe and Japan in World War II.

Such affirmation, post-Iraq, will be just as welcome today.

The story’s biblical theme also suggested that there was more to the universe than can be determined in a laboratory. It is a testament to Spielberg’s filmmaking prowess that he could suspend the audience’s disbelief so masterfully, but it helped that he could tap into Sunday School stories deep in the subconscious of his audience.

The saga could have become Hollywood’s answer to James Bond with a slew of sequels and new actors taking the title role. But Spielberg went off to become a maker of Oscar-winning historical dramas while Lucas churned out three Star Wars movies – films more disappointing than an inflatable dartboard.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will fill cinemas around the globe. The first bars of the iconic soundtrack will transport audiences back to 1989.

The people standing in lines are not merely waiting for a film to begin – they anticipate time travel.

Zoomtard's Back!

It's a delight that one of the finest and funniest prose stylists on the internet is also one of the best thinkers about faith and film. After a mysterious absence Zoomtard is blogging again and, it seems, making up for lost time. This chap, whoever he is, should have a full-page column in both Rolling Stone and Christianity Today, and probably will have soon. But you can enjoy his writings for free here.

His blog is a repository and portal for the freshest writing about gender and religion I've encountered. He may well enjoy the stirring political analysis and all-round Minnesotan wisdom of Chas Leck.

(Why the pseudonym? I don't know. But as he's from the land of Bono, it could be an Irish thing).

Diamonds in the Dirt

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

Robert Rauschenberg, October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008

You Can Call me Al (Hambra!)

Last Thursday a Shaolin Kung Fu guitar legend, a brilliant apothecarist, and an Anglo-Irish hack set off in search of the near mythical Spanish-Moorish citadel city of Granada.



This wonderful pair had studied within its walls. They had such a good time they decided to get married.



We escaped the crazed streets of Malaga and were soon within this marvel of a metropolis where East and West have fused.



The Alhambra, where Muslim and Catholic rulers have built palaces, sits high above the city's weaving streets.



It is a fortress of gardens.



In this driest of terrains, the walls of the Alhambra dance with the light of reflected water. It is an oasis and a prize coveted by rival rulers for centuries.



Actually, Wales was having a heatwave, but Granada was in the grip of a bit of a damp patch.



Yet who can worry about the weather when there are marvels like this to look at?



Also in Granada were two more fine Welsh friends. But a city which survived the Vizigoths was unfazed by our invasion.



The sun flashed between downpours. But always there was the sound of water.



We left the palace and explored boarded a roofless bus.



Imagine being very cold. And then turn down the thermometer a few further notches.



But it was terrific fun. Through the earphones we could hear snatches of a legend about three black diamonds and a maiden with a cloven hoof. It's all, apparently, very significant.



The city is a treasure chest if you prize great cafes and bars where they bring you fresh salmon for free with each order. Viva tapas!



Old men exercise their dogs at dawn and dusk in Plaza des Lobos.



It's a thoroughly lived-in city, not a museum piece but a university town with torrential fountains.



But deep history is never far from the surface. Arabic astronomers used this device to plot the heavens.



And many a church became a mosque before morphing into a cathedral.



Visit and expect to say "Wow" a lot.



Yet, oddly, the streets and shutters are lashed with graffiti. Some of it's political, but there are a lot of fevered scrawlings.



But Federico García Lorca's house is a home of real artistry. It has the stillness, space, and lushness of the Alhambra, but is also an icon for the creativity and the violence which has burned through Spain in the past century.



Strange bollards dot the streets, which may explain the dexterity and gracefulness of the population.



Left to my own devices, I'd never have thought to visit the science museum, but I'm very glad we did. It was like a film studio for B-movies.



There were lots of interesting people to hang out with.



Come Monday, it was time to leave. The clouds cleared for the first time and revealed the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada.



Granada, a mystery of a city that time has never tamed. I have a hunch I'll be back.

Radical Reasonableness

A year ago Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness tore up the rule-book and went into government together in Northern Ireland.

This was the equivalent of Manchester United and City deciding to share a stadium.

Paisley lost too many fans by appearing to enjoy this new arrangement too much – instead of gritting his teeth in photographs he gave almighty chuckles. He will shortly make way for a successor, but there is no sense of impending calamity in the province.

Rather, the rest of the British Isles has also embraced this precedent for the unprecedented.

London has elected a mayor whose public persona could have been a PG Wodehouse creation. It is almost as if voters were delighted to find a politician who did not attempt to disguise his classically privileged upbringing by donning a ridiculous estuary accent and talking about his favourite brand of shell-suit.

There is also the prospect of grand constitutional change. Labour and the SNP in Scotland both (sort of) back a referendum on independence, and in Wales we are approaching the first anniversary of the Plaid-Labour coalition.

We associate revolutions with morbid discontent, barricades and belligerent vandalism, but what defines this remaking of the UK is the very opposite of vile racial or ideological sectarian excess. The people of these two islands seem resolute in their refusal to lapse into hysteria.

Even the fact the DUP had the self-confidence to dispense with the services of Paisley is further evidence of psychological transformation. There might have been a few more raised eyebrows than normal in a Belfast Starbucks but there was no Freudian grief at the ejection of a patriarch.

The September 11 terrorist attacks were expected to spread patriotic sobriety through an anxious West. Paranoid fantasies and turgid delusions might have sent the hijackers on their nihilistic mission, but invigorating reasonableness – not a retreat into the politics of identity – has defined much of modernity since that shocking day.

The US presidential race increasingly looks set to be a showdown between a septuagenarian Republican and a man called “Barack”.

Voters no longer demand politicians who wear the same shoes and sing the same songs in the bath as they do. This acceptance of difference suggests that concepts of community can survive rapid changes in demography.

The success of the SNP in Scotland has not been fuelled by Braveheart-style eulogies about the molecular superiority of haggis but by the calm competence the party has displayed since it gained power.

Ideas about independence are stirring because Scotland’s sense of contentment and community has been enhanced by cosmopolitan energy. Diversity has not led to a dilution of national character, but a greater confidence that this is a real country capable of solving its own problems.

Only a very confident prognosticator would dare predict what a Britain, Europe or America 100 years from now will resemble. But as Paisley proved last year, laughter may outlast strife.

The Transformation

For Badiou, the good life, ethically and politically speaking, consists in a tenacious adherence to some “Event” which bursts unpredictably on the historical scene, transforms the very coordinates of human reality and refashions from top to toe the men and women who remain loyal to it. One of the atheistic Badiou’s examples of such an event is the life and death of Christ. Terry Eagleton

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Hymns for the Indie Soul

Compiled by Adam

Message to God Little Birdy
Jesus Walks Kanye West
Jesus Walking on the Water Violent Femmes
Positive Tension Bloc Party
The Prayer Bloc Party
Intervention Arcade Fire
The Seer's Tower Sufjan Stevens
Ever Thought of Coming Back Kelley Stoltz
Waiting for the sun Powerderfinger
Bless my soul Powerderfinger
Light On Your Shoulder Rhubarb
Gone The Butterfly Effect
Airbag Radiohead
Sycamore Bill Callahan
Footprints Bill Callahan
Jesus the Mexican Boy Iron & Wine
Lion's Mane Iron & Wine
Down the Line Jose Gonzalez
Something Beautiful Sinéad O'Connor
Gloria U2
Sunday Bloody Sunday U2
Wonderful Life Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
He Wants You Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
A Place Called Home PJ Harvey
This Wicked Tongue PJ Harvey
People Ain't No Good Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
(Are You) The One I've Been Waiting For? Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Who By Fire Leonard Cohen
Suzanne (Live) Leonard Cohen
Airbag Radiohead
Paranoid Android Radiohead
Subterranean Homesick Alien Radiohead
Grace Jeff Buckley
Eternal Life Jeff Buckley
Corpus Christi Carol (For Roy) Jeff Buckley
The Woman By The Well Sarah Blasko
The Garden's End Sarah Blasko
The Golden Path (Featuring The Flaming Lips) The Chemical Brothers
Personal Jesus Depeche Mode
Christ for President Billy Bragg & Wilco
Thunder On the Mountain Bob Dylan
Gotta Serve Somebody Bob Dylan
Jesus, Etc. Wilco
Redemption Song Bob Marley
Power Of The Gospel Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals
Like A King/I'll Rise Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals
Jesus Gonna Be Here The Blind Boys Of Alabama
Come On Up to the House Tom Waits
Down There By the Train Tom Waits
Slow Train (Live) Bob Dylan & Grateful Dead
Grace U2
Yahweh U2
City of Refuge Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Hiding All Away (Manchester) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors (Full Version) Editors
The Weight of the World Editors
Push Your Head Towards the Air Editors
My Body Is a Cage Arcade Fire
No Cars Go Arcade Fire
All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands Sufjan Stevens
We Won't Need Legs to Stand Sufjan Stevens
The Man of Metropolis Steals Our hearts Sufjan Stevens
Walking With a Ghost Tegan and Sara
Jesus The Velvet Underground
Heartbeat And Sails Augie March

Gaudeamus

Incredible. The Gaudie. Aberdeen student newspaper, 1999. Just seen this pic on Facebook. They were thrilling days, fuelled by laughter and macaroni pies.

I think spring is here

A great friend's birthday provided an excellent reason to venture into England this weekend.



The downside of modernity is that people live too darn far apart. The plus side is that when you do see them they will have found somewhere fantastic to have lunch.



This is Ali's last birthday in the Bush era. Is there such a things as an Obama tree?



Albion! This is an amazing country.