Give Up and Let Them Lose.

 We're all agreed on certain things in life. Don't negotiate with terrorists. Don't give in to bullying or threats. "Never," as Churchill had it, "in anything, great or small, give up."
 Well, I've got a better idea.
 I think we - humanity, all of us - should have a sponsored month of giving up. Just thirty days or so of caving in to the most powerful, insidious, effective force on the face of the planet.
 I refer, of course, to whingeing.
 I'm pretty sure that no matter how many piss-poor VHS tapes Al Qaeda releases, nobody is ever going to kowtow to their plans. No matter how many times the Westboro Baptist Assholes show up to protest a funeral and complain about god hating fags, none of us is ever going to turn around and say "y'know what, okay, we'll listen to you and act on your ideas."
 Nagging, on the other hand, is a different ball game. We all know what it's like to just sigh and give up to the relentless, irritating pressure of a nagging child or spouse, and I think we should apply this policy to the wider world, because it would be an effective way to (eventually) get a lot of people to shut the fuck up.
 Take the meditation crowd. The people who think that all the world's ills are caused by a lack of Buddhist chanting.
 According to hippies with bad websites, if 1% of the population of the world meditated regularly, there would be no more wars and everything would be hunky dory. They've been peddling this shit for years, so why don't we just do it? Give in to their whining and do it.
 One percent of the world's population (assuming a population of seven billion) is seventy million, which is coincidentally about the population of the UK. So, I say we all take the week off work and genuinely try it.
 We'll all sit at home for a week, light some candles and meditate, and it'll solve precisely dick all.
 Worse than that, it'll deepen a recession and we'll all lose our jobs, but the net gain is this: The hippies will shut up and we can take their ideas off the table forever. We tried it your way, Moonbeam Unicorn Jnr., and it didn't work. Now piss off.
 Next up we can deal with the libertarians and the hardcore right-wing capitalists. This won't require missing work, but it might be worth calling in sick to watch, if the whole thing is caught on camera.
 Libertarians and ultra-capitalists claim to want no government oversight on business, no government interference in day-to-day matters (including healthcare) and freedom to run a business in any way they want to.
 So, a few commandeered planes would be enough to send them all somewhere that already has those conditions, like, say, Somalia. No government interference, no rules, knock yourselves out. It's a dog-eat-dog world in places like that, just the way you want it.
 Come dinnertime, of course, it'll be a person-eat-dog world because you'll all be starved past the point of dignity.
 If they realise how badly they fucked up and call to come home, we'll let them. But we'll charge through the fucking nose for it, and maybe they'll learn their lesson.
 Which complaining assholes are next? How about bigfoot hunters?
 There are all kinds of idiots running around the wooded areas of... shit, everywhere, really, looking for giant ape men.
 If they're so convinced there's something out there, why don't we take a few hundred people - a few thousand, if necessary - and create a human chain around an area of alleged bigfoot habitat. Then we all walk towards the middle, and shoot everything we come across that's bigger than a squirrel.
 A little cruel, sure, but at the end of it, as we sort through the bear carcasses and start cooking some nice venison, one thing we'll probably notice is that none of the bodies we've come up with are those of a heretofore unknown missing evolutionary link.
 Also, again: Free venison.
 And in the unlikely event that we DO catch a yeti, then science benefits. Granted, not the branch of science that does a lot to improve your life - I doubt shooting a sasquatch will do much to improve your 4G connectivity or diminish the lines at airport check-in desks, but it'll give the biologists something to talk about, bless 'em.
 These are just three random examples of how we could deal with the more annoying sectors of society.
 Don't give in to threats or demands, just give people enough rope to hang themselves with.
 Obviously, things like Islamic fundamentalism couldn't really be rolled-out worldwide on a trial basis, so we'd have to let them fuck that up for themselves on smaller scale.
 Except they already did; it was called the Arab Spring.

C.G.I-don't-have-to-do-anything...

 I'm not sure when the movie going public first became aware of CGI, as a concept. Obviously, with hindsight, the water tentacle in 1988's "The Abyss" was done with computers, but I'm not sure how many people realised it at the time.
 Audiences in 1993 almost certainly assumed that all the dinosaurs that escaped from the shoddy fences in Jurassic Park were robots or puppets.
 Whenever it was, ever since CGI became part of the public consciousness, people have been complaining that it's ruining movies.
 I'm no stranger to this myself. Bad CGI breaks the spell of a movie like nothing else I can think of. It's the 21st century equivalent of a boom mike dipping into shot, or a corpse cracking one eye open to see if they're still in shot.
 Even the good stuff, however, comes under fire for ruining an entire generation of films. I disagree with this, but I do think it might be ruining a generation of actors.
 First and foremost, movies are about spectacle. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded. Whilst dramatic, dialogue-driven entertainment can be fantastic spectacles in terms of acting, the simple truth is that cinema surpassed the theatre as the most popular form of entertainment because you can do more things in a movie than you can on a stage. In terms of the give-and-take, you can film "12 Angry Men", but you can't have a stage play where giant lizards crush Tokyo.
 This need for spectacle has been met in different ways for different generations. Initially, the very idea of moving images was a draw. A single train moving towards the screen was enough to excite a roomful of terrified Frenchmen, or, as they're historically known, Frenchmen.
 Then came sound, and colour, but even before that, the limits of technology meant that the cinema had to rely on something unique for spectacle: Talented stars.
 I don't want to drum up sympathy for the rich and famous - especially as the rich and famous have a habit of being assholes off screen - but look at what stars of yesteryear were put through: Buster Keaton once broke his neck throwing himself off a train for a comedy bit, and ignored the injury for so long that when he found out about it, it was already healed. Yakima Canutt got himself run over by horses so often that his blood type was sugar lumps. It continued for decades. For one dance number in Singin' In The Rain, Debbie Reynolds danced so long and hard that she ruptured blood vessels in her feet, at which point Gene Kelly decided she still wasn't good enough and over-dubbed her tap moves himself. In the same movie, Donald O'Connor was required to do a scene in which he ran up three walls in succession, completing a backwards somersault at the top of each one. An 80-a-day smoker, he collapsed after filming the scene and, a week later, was told that they'd lost the negative and he had to do it all again.
 As better effects eventually came in, stars could impress with their realism, as much as their physical abilities. Increasingly, it became a case of one or the other.
 Either you were Al Pacino or Bruce Lee. Ten years later, you were Robert DeNiro or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
 Nowadays, however, you really don't have to be anything, and it's all the fault of special effects.
 Shia Laboeuf is the greatest living example of this. He's not a dramatic powerhouse, known for his brilliant performances in taxing roles.
 He's also not physically capable of anything more impressive than the next guy.
 But he's a gazillionaire, chiefly because he lives in an era where you can have giant robots punching each other through skyscrapers all around him, and all he has to do is stay out of the way.
 Same with superhero films - Mark Ruffalo, who is admittedly a talented actor, doesn't have to do anything when he becomes the Hulk. He can just toddle off to the catering truck while someone with a Mac creates merry hell with his green-skinned alter-ego. And even though he is talented, nobody is going to see that movie because Ruffalo would have made a decent "Hamlet."
 It doesn't even have to be the big stuff that's all done in post-production, either. It's child's play these days to have a stunt man perform a scene and then digitally glue an actor's face onto him afterwards. You often don't even need the stunt man, as he can be added later on. With the actor's face.
 We're already ten years past the first movies where all actors have to do is say the lines, and someone else makes a CGI person to go on screen and say them.
 In an age when celebrity exists as a sort of self-perpetuating symbiote of stupidity, where morons are famous in the eyes of the stupid for being stupid morons, it's hard not to long for a time when stars could act, or sing and dance, or do anything other than stand there while someone renders pixels around them. Or, in some cases, in place of them.
 Sadly, the best way for non-entity celebrities to get movie careers is going to involve a lot of talented computer guys, and the second half of a deal with Satan that many of them have already clearly signed. Think about it: Would you see a movie with Jedward in it?
 Course not.
 Would you see a movie with Jedward in it where photorealistic dinosaurs fought robots on the surface of Mars?
 Probably, yeah.
 With CGI cataclysms drawing the people in, actors don't need to have any talent anymore.
 It's not the movies that are getting worse because of computer graphics. It's the lazy actors in them.

Condoms Condemned

 In the vast pantheon of things that I don't like, you'd have to go a long way to beat condoms.
 It's not just that they're objectively ridiculous, although I've never found a sexy way to get through that whole "hey, wait there a second" mood killer. I hate pretty much everything about condoms.
 Technologically, they're laughable. In an era when we get live updates on the robot exploring mars delivered directly to the small communication device in our pockets, the way to make my penis less fertile should surely be more subtle than "wrap it in something."
 Sartorially, they're inept. They look stupid, and they're a terrible fit for pretty much anybody. I don't know who designed the modern condom, but I'd be scientifically intrigued to see what his junk looked like. All the attempts at making them more interesting through textures and flavours are redundant, as you can get vibrating sex toys in the average pub toilet these days that appear far more interesting, which again brings up the technology argument.
 Finally, though, what I hate most about condoms is buying them.
 It's not embarrassment at the idea that I have to tell other people I have a sex life; it's embarrassment at how arrogant that makes me feel. Buying condoms feels like I'm shouting "Hey, look at all the sex I'm having!" and that makes me feel, somewhat ironically, like a massive dick.
 All of this is old news, of course. I learned to bite the bullet and accept these little annoyances years ago, but it wasn't until today that I realised just how badly I'm being ripped off by condoms. (In fact, I always thought that process was supposed to work the other way around, but hey...)
 First of all, a few months back, I found out that the "everything for a pound" shop near my house sold prophylactics.
 This filled me with suspicion, but as I was out today and needed to stock up, I decided that for once, the medieval nature of condoms was in my favour. They don't need microchips or bluetooth capability, I reasoned. They just have to be made of something watertight. I'm pretty sure you can manufacture a small, watertight pouch for under a pound, so all should be well.
 Disappointingly, the pound-shop has apparently stopped selling condoms (due, I'm forced to assume, to a spate of local pregnancies) so I went to the supermarket.
 After buying a few things to camouflage the purchase (again, buying nothing but johnnies makes me feel somehow like I'm hitting on the checkout girl) I went and found the relevant aisle, and was stunned to see that a box of ten condoms was £10, but then you could get another, additional box for a pound extra.
 This means that Durex have apparently adopted the "double up for a pound" idea first used in Wetherspoons, which is both bizarre and fitting, as the Wetherspoons offer is how I usually manage to get laid anyway.
 Still, how badly are we being ripped off as consumers when condoms are clearly carrying a 90% markup as standard? Aside from the enjoyable irony of being fucked by a condom company, I'm quite annoyed.
 Clearly, the pound shop had the right idea, and my reasoning was sound. All these things are is small, latex sheaths, and as such they're dismissively cheap to manufacture.
 So, on top of all the other reasons to hate condoms, the price is apparently the final insult.
 I still bought the extra box for a pound. I didn't feel so much like I was hitting on the checkout girl at this point as actively announcing myself as a sex offender, but hey, my cheapness often trumps my neurosis.
 As a final note, by the way, buying twenty condoms apparently gets you bonus points on the "vouchers for schools" programme.
 Here's a hint: I don't have kids...

What I Reckon About... Bond. James Bond.

Sky Movies has launched an "All James Bond, All The Time" channel.
 No idea why; I can't find anything about Bond in the papers, or on TV, or on buses and in magazines and alright fuck it, look, it's a shameless ploy and we all know it.
 It also means I've been watching a lot of Bond films lately, because there's not much else on.
 Turns out - and forgive me if I'm late to the party - that Bond films, by and large, are shit.
 I just watched "From Russia With Love," often voted as one of the best Bond movies of all time.
 I'd seen bits of it before, but coming home after a long day's work and feeling quite detached, I watched it objectively and realised that it's fucking stupid.
 In one scene, Bond deduces that Robert Shaw's character is a Russian spy when Shaw orders red wine with fish at dinner.
 How many people who were just not-very-good-with-wine did Bond have to kill before this tactic paid off?!
 Presumably, this is why we never see Bond throwing a party for friends and co-workers. Everyone would sit, rigid and petrified that a lapse in manners could be their undoing.
 "What happened to Felix?"
 "Oh, he used a table spoon for his soup so James lasered his face off with a wrist-watch."
 It's the same reason Bond saves the world every other month, but never gets invited to the palace. It's not that the government isn't grateful for his effort, it's just that they can't take the risk of him lunging over a table and garotting an ambassador for using the wrong knife.
 Back to the movie: Bond battles a female assassin who has snuck into his hotel room, disguised as a maid. She then springs her lethal trap: Knives on the front of her shoes!
 Either through poor casting or the limitations of 1960s maid uniforms, she doesn't try to kick anywhere higher than Bond's knees, presumably because really badly cutting someone's shins is the most surefire way to ensure they'll die, later on, in an accident on the stairs on their way to the front desk to ask for plasters.
 Seriously, the woman was already in the room. She could have killed Bond easily with a small, concealed pistol, or even a non-shoe-related knife that you can use to stab someone above the waist, where their organs are.
 Later in the series, in "Diamonds Are Forever," the two scenes are combined.
 In this movie, Sean Connery's Bond (who, by virtue of being Scottish, seems to have aged about thirty years in the 48 months between movies) is told by the fake waiters aboard a cruise ship (who are really henchmen bringing a bomb disguised as a cake to Bond's room) that the wine with the meal will be a Mouton Rothschild. Bond says he would have expected a Claret instead, and the waiter apologises, at which point Bond points out that Mouton Rothschild is a claret, and then throws the waiter over the railing of the ship, along with his cake bomb.
 I've dealt with many snooty wine drinkers over the years, and it's usually best to just agree with them. Once again, we face the prospect that Bond has been killing and brutalising waiters for years, just for humouring him.
 "...All I did was sigh and agree that the Gallo wine was the best on the menu, and he yelled 'A-ha!' and threw me out of a window. And then he threw a cake after me and dived for cover, for no reason..."
 All in all, then, Connery's Bond films were just too stupid for me to ever take them seriously. If you don't agree, here's a clip of Bond with a seagull on his head.
 I tend to ignore the Roger Moore entries in the series, because I can never understand what they were trying to do.
 As I understand it, Roger Moore is a super-spy who must save the world from grave peril and evil masterminds, but has some sort of disease where he has to crack cheap knob jokes every few minutes. I can only assume there was a paperwork mix-up that led MI6 to hire a jobbing, end-of-the-pier comedian to carry out these missions. Meanwhile, somewhere in Blackpool, a lethal hit-man is grinding out tired Mother In Law jokes to a bored lunchtime crowd and wondering when he's going to be told who to kill.
 Timothy Dalton gets a lot of brownie points for being Bond when I was a kid, and for being the best film incarnation of the character that Fleming wrote. Dalton's Bond is hard-hearted and troubled, a burned out government asset with a conscience that he can't quite silence.
 Which isn't much fun, if you're a fan of exploding cake and nudge-wink humour.*
 Divisive as Dalton was, what's inarguable is that the plot of his first effort, "The Living Daylights," is a mystery to anyone without a degree in political science. If an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters create Shakespeare, this movie was written by throwing an infinite number of monkeys at one single typewriter until it produced something about the Cold War that also featured Gimli from Lord of the Rings.
 To compensate, the plot of the next movie, "License To Kill," involves Bond being mad at someone for feeding his mate to a shark. Also, Bond temporarily loses his License To Kill, in case you really needed things dumbed down. You do? Okay, Bond's friend Felix Leiter gives him a cigarette LIGHTER as a present, which becomes a plot point.
 (Years later, Leiter's replacement, Arnold Blowtorch, gave Bond a similar present that nearly took his fucking eyebrows off. Bond was even less fond of the American NSA liaison, Gerald Exploding-Cigar.)
 By this point in the series, anybody who had been working on the production staff since the first movie in 1962 was either too old or dead to continue, and with "License To Kill" getting slaughtered at the box office by Tim Burton's "Batman," the series took a hiatus for a few years and came back with Pierce Brosnan.
 On paper, Brosnan is the best Bond of them all. Handsome even by Bond standards, he could be as cruel as Dalton, as smooth as Connery and as relaxed with broad comedy moments as Moore.
 Sadly, Brosnan's films were mostly shite. "The World Is Not Enough" was easily the best of the series, a good movie and arguably the last "proper" Bond film ever made, but generally, Brosnan films were all style and no substance. "Die Another Day," a movie about Halle Berry's tits helping Bond stop a Korean diamond smuggler played by a ginger Englishman, is standout for featuring CGI so awful that it couldn't ruin your immersion in the movie any more completely if it just cut to a shot of Pierce Brosnan on the weekend, scratching his arse in his pants and drinking a can of warm Stella whilst reading "Razzle."
 I don't think Daniel Craig can be judged yet because he isn't done with the series, although I like his entries more for taking the action seriously, even if they do still have annoyingly silly moments like Bond having a heart attack and then immediately going back to his card game.
 I guess this whole long piece has been about me trying to find my opinion on Bond, because everyone seems required to have one, especially right now.
 I guess my opinion is this: I like Bond as a concept.
 And so does everyone else.
 Everyone has their own idea of what Bond should be, as the character has spread beyond literature and even beyond film, becoming the sort of cultural touchstone onto which we can all project something, whether it's Dalton's jaded, icy killer, Moore's "Mr. Nudge in a tux" incarnation, or Fleming's snooty, misogynist original.
 I'm not a fan of the films, because a lot of them, as I've pointed out, are stupid.
 But I'm a fan of the character, the way he exists in my head, and it's probably the same for everyone else. The only good films are the ones that give you the character you have in your mind's eye, whoever that might be.
 Just, for Christ's sake, don't order the wrong wine.



*I'm not, so I really like Dalton in the role.

[At least some credit for this article belongs to my cousin Sam, who doesn't have a blog or anything else I can plug in this acknowledgment. Still, most of this article is based on a conversation we had last week.]

Reviews: The Clifton Suspension Bridge.

[Apparently, Trip Advisor allows you to review some pretty arbitrary stuff.]


 "Clifton Suspension Bridge offers an excellent means of traversing the Clifton Gorge without the use of jet-packs or winged horses. As my wife is allergic to horses, and with the price of petrol - ironically - skyrocketing, this proved an excellent and effective service. Five stars." -Mr. Smith.


 "My wife and I planned a romantic fourteen seconds of plumetting, screaming, to our deaths, and found this rudely interrupted by the Clifton Suspension Bridge. We charged, naked and sobbing, towards the precipice, only to be conveyed unurt and quite embarassd to the opposite bank via this inconvenient eyesore. I will NOT be returning." -Mr. Sue S. Sydall.


"Although impressive for its history and architecture, I have noticed a slightly disappointing lack of goats on an otherwise excellent edifice." -A. Troll


 "A scenic and photogenic place to stare with brooding, steely expression at the city below as I listen to the menacing pulse of the night, but taxi access is shit and it's REALLY hard to get down from the plinths." -Batman, via mobile.


 "My experiences on this bridge have been decidedly up and down." -Dave's Travelling Bungee Troupe.



 "It has ruined a business that has been in my family for generations. I'm heartbroken." -Joe's Catapult Travel Co.


 "I haven't heard from Joe in fucking ages..." -Jim-Bob's Trampoline Landing and Big Soft Mattress Emporium


 "I think I'm lost..." -Robert Kincaid, photographer.


 "It's much windier and involves more running-people-over than the usual type of bridge. Also, I dropped some of my cards over the side." -John Collinson (Deceased)


 "It's fucking midnight and I'm still awake writing this utter shit. I'm too lazy to go and turn off the TV even thought it's 'The Lake House.'" -Luke Haines, just now.

Braaaiiins...

 Man, the Zombie genre is played out.
 I'm not entirely sure when the meeting was held that decided everything had to have zombies in it, but ever since the admittedly brilliant "28 Days Later..." we've had zombie games, zombie TV shows, zombie movies, zombie Nazi movies, zombie comedy movies, fast zombies, slow zombies, everywhere a zombie zombie.
 Just yesterday I changed the channel to find a movie in which the dessicated corpses of four women rise from the dead and go on holiday to Dubai.
 ...Oh, sorry, that was Sex and the City 2.
 Still, anyone who thinks that society needs more zombie-related entertainment at this point has clearly got a screw loose, because contrary to what most people will claim, the whole appeal of the undead is that we all fancy a go at genocide.
 Plenty of people have intellectualised the fad for reanimated corpses in horror movies, but they're over-thinking things. They claim that zombies are scary when, in fact, they're demonstrably not.
 Sure, they're dead bodies that walk around, which is pretty unpleasant, and they're trying to kill you, which is scary in the same way that anything trying to kill you is scary.
 But they're slow, and stupid, and can be dispatched pretty easily with a hammer.
 Anything that you can best with DIY implements is never really going to give me nightmares. You couldn't take out Michael Myers with anything short of a tactical nuclear strike. In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis stabs him in the eye with a wire coat hanger, Donald Pleasance shoots him half a dozen times and he falls thirty feet out of an upstairs window, full of bullets and, again, coat hangers.
 Five minutes later he's up and maiming  with barely a mark on him.
 Zombies? Forget it. You could handle one of them with the coat hanger alone.
 Look at the creature from "Alien." Try taking that thing on with the contents of your local Do It All and see how well it goes. "Not very fucking well at all" should be the answer you come back with, except you wouldn't come back at all because you'd be dead, torn limb from limb in a pile of Black and Decker products and a Dulux colour chart.
 So zombies don't scare me, much, and I'm sure they don't scare most other people, either.
 Why are they so popular, then? Because we all want to have a go at a few dozen guilt-free murders.
 I initially thought this was a generational thing. Being raised on Schwarzenegger and Stallone meant that guys my age wanted nothing more than to inject a few litres of horse steroids and mow down waves of evil foreigners.

    If this image wasn't your exact answer to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" then  
                                                        you're officially in the Taliban.



 Honestly, though, all my generation got was a slightly more ridiculous version of the same shit Hollywood had been churning out since the invention of celluloid. John Wayne almost single-handedly killed off the Native American population, when he wasn't single-handedly killing everyone in Japan...

                                                                     Artist's depiction.


 ...and many other stars before and since have built their careers on killing a fuck-ton of people for our amusement.
 These days, however, we can't just use "because they're foreign" as an excuse for machine gunning people on camera. (Although it's still apparently a workable excuse in real life, if the news is anything to go by.)
 In modern entertainment, we still want the thrills of mass slaughter, but without the faint aftertaste of white guilt that was starting to creep up on first world audiences.
 Then someone hit upon the idea of massacring  people who were explicitly not of any set colour (except a sort of mouldy green) or ideology, and were actually already dead in the bargain.
 Brilliant!
 Finally, in the 21st century, you could fantasize about comitting a murder-spree without looking like a racist or a psychopath. All you had to do was picture it involving zombies.
 This is the real reason audiences like zombie movies. The primal, ugly, flawed monkey brain that dwells within us all still craves violence, but the more civilized part of our makeup wants to make sure it's passed through an acceptable filter.
 If we're honest with ourselves, we're not watching a zombie film and thinking "Look out, surprisingly buff apocalypse-survivor, there's a flesh-eating corpse behind you!" as much as we're thinking "Man, I'd really love to stove someone's head in with an axe like that. Y'know. Justifiably."
 If anything, it's a positive sign that our mass need for cathartic slaughter has at least lost some of it's more explicitly racist and xenophobic overtones.
 Zombies, over-exposed as they are, might just be a tentative sign of cultural progress.
 Just, really: Stop telling me they're scary.

Gathering Moss

 It's difficult to put the boot into something you love - unless you're Justin Lee Collins, in which case it's called "foreplay" - but the new single by the Rolling Stones is pretty crap.
 It's overly long; four minutes when the verse only contains one repeated chord. It's disjointed (it feels like at least three different songs have been cobbled together to create a barely functioning whole, which is coincidentally very similar to how Keith Richards is assembled) and the lyric comes dangerously close to being just an old bloke complaining about the news, if said old bloke were complaining at four hundred heavily-compressed decibels.
 I've actually been a fan of the seemingly endless quality the Stones have displayed. I quite like that they've kept going, and when I saw them six or seven years ago they were fantastic.
 Keith in particular has been very vocal about the group's perpetual aversion to retirement, and his points seem solid. He has always maintained that the reason he keeps playing is that he likes it. "I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing it for me," he says flatly in his recent autobiography. Still, under the harsh glare of a ropey new single, you start to wonder about motivation.
 Firstly, it's not difficult to play guitar to the public. Since the invention of Youtube, pretty much everyone with an ambition to do so has had a crack at it, regardless of whether they should or not.
 So when Keith says he just enjoys playing to people, he should probably be honest and add the caveat that he likes playing to people "in big fucking stadiums."
 These stadiums, incidentally, come equipped with fireworks, massive inflatable props and vast, multi-tiered sets that have to be transported by a veritable fleet of lorries and vans.
 None of which is strictly necessary to the playing of blues rock. You can play it in a local pub if you're any good, and often if you're not.
 So what Keith says and what Keith means seem to be two different things. What he means when he says he likes "doing it" is that he likes shows involving massive spectacle and larcenous ticket prices that add to already bulging coffers. If that's not the case, then why does he keep doing it?
 The other members, meanwhile, never quite seem as keen on the whole "keep doing it" aspect in the first place.
 Charlie Watts, the oldest of the group at seventy-one, has maintained a side-line in jazz drumming, which seems to be his genuine passion in his dotage. He certainly seems to have been little more than a click-track on the recent single, and once again one struggles to ignore the mental image of a rickety, spent force of a band. A group of aging Stooges, still pushed on by Moe's determination even after their bodies and spirits have given out.
 Mick Jagger's voice, already idling just outside a parody of itself, does not bother me as much as the suspicion that he hasn't wanted to be in the band for about thirty years. His frequent youthful comments about wanting to retire before he was forty, coupled with his occasional - but still ocurring - attempts at other, "bigger" projects, give him the aura of someone whose only real opinion of the Stones anymore is a sort of rueful weariness. "Christ, am I still doing this?" his inner monologue seems to mutter in the undertone of every line.
 Ronnie Wood, frankly, has bigger problems than a his jobsworth guitar playing on this single. He recently seemed to express that after he left his wife for a teenage waitress and fell spectacularly, violently off the wagon, he should be seen as the victim when said ex-wife quite understandably sold a lot of his belongings.
 I could be massively, cynically jumping the gun, of course. Not only is that what I'm best at - turns out that whole "Olympics" thing went rather well, despite what I said - but it's only one single, and the second single from the Stones last album ("Rain Fell Down" from "A Bigger Bang") was fucking crap, despite that being a perfectly enjoyable album. The next single might be fantastic, although from here I can't help but expect it to be called something like "Phone It In (We Want More Money.)"
 Nonetheless, with their endless career and apparently diminishing returns, the Stones risk doing through longevity what U2 did through ubiquity: Making everyone wish they'd just quietly piss off.