I’m inclined to think that what we’re seeing is a mixture of racism, stupidity, xenophobia and class conflict, rather than simple deliberate, conscious, outright racism. It’s worth noting that we haven’t heard a racist peep from the racist contingent directed at Jermaine Jackson—he’s not perceived as ‘foreign’ because his accent is American, and the three women have felt no discomfort about the class gulf between them, because, unlike Shilpa, he doesn’t treat them like uppity servants.

Germaine Greer nails it, I think, in today’s Guardian:

The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her.

Not that I’m defending Jade Goody, Jo S Club and the Scouse one—the latter two in particular have made some pretty grisly comments—I just think that the issue is perhaps a little more complex than ‘OMG! They’re total racists!’.

Interesting, too, to compare this scandal to the first time Big Brother contestants, and the viewing public, faced accusations of racism. Back then, it was over Jade Goody, who is mixed race, and her ‘piggy’ nose.

Update, the next day:

Last night’s episode made great viewing.

Channel Four and Endemol covered their backs by including a segment in which Danielle Whatsit was confronted in the diary room about her opinion that Shilpa should ‘go back home’. Bizarrely, she seemed unaware that she’d been caught making a stock racist statement, instead dwelling on the unconscionable awfulness of suggesting that someone should leave the Big Brother house.

Jade’s spat with Shilpa was pretty ugly, but in the aftermath, it was clear that Jade couldn’t give a toss that her nemesis is Indian, homing in on the fact that Shilpa had said she needed elocution lessons, and that she looks down on her for being working class, and accidentally rather than deservedly famous. Jade also, with unusual eloquence, suggested that Shilpa should consider the position of her fanbase before she turns on people for being poor (formerly, in Jade’s case) and uneducated. Jo S Club’s ‘[Shilpa] can’t even speak English herself’ remark did rather make me wonder, though.

So, where does that leave us? Danielle Whatsit is a dim bulb, and a nasty little playground bitch, but unaware of how her comments will be perceived; Jade Goody is not nearly as thick as she appears, realises that a prolonged bout of bellowing will net her screentime, and has, understandably, a hefty chip on her shoulder about mockery from snooty, educated, middle-class people for her lack of education and, to quote Shilpa, ‘gutter’ ways. When it comes to the last, and least, member of the coven, I’m inclined to think that Jo S Club is just a racist little gobshite.

You don’t have to like sci-fi to enjoy these words and images, just interesting things. Things like neolithic cities without streets, the Chilean socialist internet, London’s 19th Century hydraulic power network, privacy issues for genitally-modified computer game avatars and cities with legs for walking.

Chief Isaac Wan, a slight, bearded man in a blue suit and ceremonial sash, leads the uniformed men down to open ground in the middle of the village. Some 40 barefoot “G.I.’s” suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo “rifles” on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters “USA,” painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

(There are also, famously, members of a cargo cult on Vanuatu who worship Prince Philip as a god.)

Shortly before midnight on August 2, 1981, a Panamanian-registered freighter called the Primrose, which was traveling in heavy seas between Bangladesh and Australia with a cargo of poultry feed, ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. As dawn broke the next morning, the captain was probably relieved to see dry land just a few hundred yards from the Primrose’s resting place: a low-lying island, several miles across, with a narrow beach of clean white sand giving way to dense jungle. If he consulted his charts, he realized that this was North Sentinel Island, a western outlier in the Andaman archi-pelago, which belongs to India and stretches in a ragged line between Burma and Sumatra. But the sea was too rough to lower the lifeboats, and so - since the ship seemed to be in no danger of sinking - the captain decided to keep his crew on board and wait for help to arrive.

A few days later, a young sailor on lookout duty in the Primrose’s watch tower spotted several people coming down from the forest toward the h and peering out at the stranded vessel. They must be a rescue party sent by the shipping company, he thought. Then he took a closer look at them. They were small men, well-built, frizzy-haired, and black. They were naked except for narrow belts that circled their waists. And they were holding spears, bows, and arrows which they had begun waving in a manner that seemed not altogether friendly. Not long after this, a wireless operator at the Regent Shipping Company’s offices in Hong Kong received an urgent distress call from the Primrose’s captain, asking for an immediate airdrop of firearms so that his crew could defend itself. “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various home-made weapons are making two or three wooden boats,” the message read. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”

If the Primrose’s predicament seemed a thing less of the twentieth century than of the eighteenth - an episode, perhaps, from Captain Cook’s Cook’s voyages in the Pacific. - it is because the island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as “Sentinelese,” but no one knew what they called themselves - indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask. Whether the natives’ prelapsarian state was one of savagery or innocence, no one knew either.

The same monsoon-whipped waves that had driven the Primrose onto reef kept the tribesmen’s canoes at bay, and high winds blew their arrows off the mark. The crew kept up a twenty-four-hour guard with makeshift weapons - a flare gun, axes, some lengths of pipe - as news of the emergency slowly filtered to the outside world. (An Indian government spokesman denied reports in the Hong Kong press that the Sentinelese were “cannibals.” A Hong Kong government spokesman suggested that perhaps the Primrose’s radio officer had “gone bananas.”) After nearly a week, the Indian Navy dispatched a tugboat and a helicopter to rescue the besieged sailors.

The natives of North Sentinel must have watched the whirring aircraft as it hovered three times above the great steel hulk, lowering a rope ladder to pluck the men safely back into modernity. Then the strange machines departed, the sea calmed, and the island remained, lush and impenetrable, still waiting for its Cook or its Columbus.

More on the Sentinelese, and other Andaman islanders, here.

Consider the alternatives: a not wholly unpleasant, well-dressed and handsome young man, a not wholly unpleasant, vaguely pretty young woman with learning difficulties, a sad, alarmingly unfunny old man, some lad from a novelty hip-hop act and a woman who appears to have had her personality surgically removed in exchange for a grisly pair of tits.

Then, consider Pete Burns: a post-human vision of beauty and terror, a living sculpture, inarguably the greatest living Englishman.

Update: A sad day indeed, but I suppose that Pete Burns was doomed to fail, too beautiful to be accepted by a jealous public. And it is at least some consolation that that public found it in their hearts to award the prize to a poor, brave retarded child.

Also posted to MetaFilter, where a discussion may or may not ensue.

As true aberdonian and worked in Edinburgh for years and went to loads of matches - in both ends - you talk off the fights and crews but realy being a supporter would be fun.

ps was left in Edinburgh when 11 when cousin was arrested for fighting at Waverley in 1981 nae good.

You never hear of the girl crews and we were there week in week out and fought like men when needed.

That last sentence just screams Sunday supplement feature, doesn’t it?

I’ve never read anything about female casuals, whether in terms of fashion or violence, and the only reference I can dig up, on the exhaustive Football Research Organisation UK website, is to a 1998 pamphlet from Leicester University’s Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research titled Factsheet 9: A History of Female Football Fans.

The only problem is, if I pitch the piece, and someone goes for it, I’ll have to actually talk to some lady hooligans. Scary. Very scary.

Graham Fagen’s exhibition Clean Hands Pure Heart opens at Tramway on Feb 11th.

This is a major commission for Tramway’s Visual Art Programme and will be accompanied by a new publication documenting the exhibition. In this new work for Tramway, Graham Fagen has continued to explore one of his main areas of interest - the cultural manifestation of a national or personal identity.

Working with acclaimed music producer Adrian Sherwood, Graham has used his background growing up in Ayrshire, and his own identification with the rhythms and words in reggae music, to create a new song, bringing two Burns songs together, put to reggae music. A screen of the making/ performance of the song, is “watched” in the gallery space, by four emblematic bronze plants and flowers, themselves laden with cultural meaning.

The accompanying catalogue has an includes an essay by Dr Francis McKee and a poem Shuggar Heid by author James Robertson, whose latest novel Joseph Knight, about the last black slave in Scotland, explores Scotland’s relationship with Jamaica and the Empire.

(In the past, Graham has even broadcasted radio from a boat ‘somewhere between Jamaica and Scotland.’)

The German word Umlaut means roughly sound change, being composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving “change”) and Laut, meaning “sound”.

Via, kinda, the always-splendid New Things weblog, which points to the Wikipedia Unusual Articles page.

Talking of playing records, or sound changing, I’ll be contributing to a Stet radio show, featuring a mix and some form of interview with myself and DJ Maggie Jones about the club on Subcity Radio. People living in Glasgow can tune in to 87.7 on the FM dial, others may click through to the Subcity website and access streaming audio in the MP3 and, rather wonderfully, Ogg Vorbis formats. The show is tentatively scheduled to air on the 10th of February - the time is as yet unconfirmed, so I’ll update as soon as I know more details.

The music I contribute will probably explore Machine Windrush territory - that’s a really stupid genre neologism I coined just this minute, since a lot of the records I play these days are, rhythmically speaking, Jamaican-born, and made in the UK, on computers and other machines. A possible, arguably more euphonious, alternative term: Tilbury Digital. (For those wondering what on earth I’m wittering about, this page might clear things up.)

I very much resent it in the West when people - maybe with all the good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, “It’s their culture.”

It’s like… saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches.

First of all, there are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible, and we should [all] fight against it. We shouldn’t accept them. Second of all, women in Iran and in Saudi Arabia don’t like to be stoned to death.

I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve had to say words to that effect, only to have them dismissed as the inevitable opinion of a blinkered, patriarchal, Western hegemonist oaf. I don’t know why I care what the sort of condescending prat who cites ‘cultural difference’ as a justification for stuff that is plain old wrong, but I shall be using Nafisi as ammunition against them from now on.

Anyway, the brouhaha surrounding Nafisi’s book passed me by, but going by the following snippet from a glowing notice in The Guardian alone, it looks to be well worth seeking out.

In her class Humbert Humbert’s seizure of his nymphet’s life and identity becomes a metaphor for the way the radical Islamic state was treating its women - not least in his recording that it was Lolita who initiated their sexual relationship, the adolescent who seduced her stepfather; it felt as though radical Islam was blaming women.