Alien | Fiction | Watch The Skies! Also, The Twilight Zone.

"The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I realised that I'd destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I'd been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness."
L'Etranger


"And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass."
The Prophet Ezekiel, describing with extraordinary accuracy the featureless lozenge-shape of a flying saucer.


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In Albert Camus' L'Etranger, the protagonist Meursault shoots dead an Arabic man. It may be in retaliation for an earlier act of violence. It may also be a longer-term build-up of racial tension relating to Meursault's aiding and abetting a friend of his, Raymond, beating an Arabic girl and being allowed to get away with it, largely thanks to Meursault's public support of his buddy. But, more likely, the murder has less to do with any righteous emotion of Meursault's and more to do with his sense of detachment from other people around him and his absolute lack of concern about whether or not the world sees him as a criminal.


All right - so if Meursault is America and the nameless Arab is Osama Bin Laden, and Raymond is Israel, and the girl is Palestine...then who is Meursault's mother? Answers on a postcard to http://www.hypastliteratureshouldnotbereappropriatedtoreferencemoderndayeventsnonotevenshakespeareiknoweverybodydoesitbutitsstillprettyshitty.com/.

In other news, Thor came out this week, directed by a man who understands the problems of making one's own mark on a piece of adaptive art while maintaining the original piece's integrity and the author's meaning (I'm thinking in particular of Henry V, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sleuth, and Wild Wild Wild West). Thor is of course itself an adaptation from the much-beloved source piece, Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, in which the Norse God Thor, a hearty, roaring, slightly stupid fellow with mighty abs and a propensity for violence, comes to earth from another dimension and romances an attractive American woman, having lost his hammer Mjolnir.


The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, much like aforementioned brazen rip-off Thor and very much like Adams' equally bizarre original Dirk Gently novel, which saw an alien inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Rime Of The Ancient Mariner' with the first moments of evolution - "slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea!", deal with the notion of ancient astronauts; the suggestion that the mythology of the supernatural - and in particular mankind's creation of sky-based deities - in fact refer to alien life-forms who chose to nurture certain of our civilisations. This theory found itself popularised by convicted fraudster Erich 'those pyramids with a flat bit on top were landing pads! Ezekiel didn't see God - he saw aliens!' von Daniken. It can also be found in the movie Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which is itself a rip-off of the disquieting Tintin adventure Flight 714.

More intriguingly, von Daniken's ideas were spread across the US by Rod Serling - whose classic series The Twilight Zone is apparently out in a new DVD boxed set. I plan to pick mine up as soon as I can. I'm also intrigued by the existence of a Dirk Gently radio series, which apparently starred Harry Enfield. I plan to stay as far away from the BBC4 adaptation as possible, which sounds dreadful (you can hear the brainstorming session now. 'Pudgy and short? Unfashionably dressed, with thick spectacles? Why can't we just get Stephen Mangan in instead? He's floppy-haired, awkward and he's good-looking. He's basically Hugh Grant, only he's been in Green Wing which gives him an edgy points.'). Anyone heard it?

Facebook | Music | Cultural self-diagnosis, or, Dr Zuckerberg will see you now

Zuckerberg gets SO MUCH BEAN theze dayz...

Were the British Isles to be, I don’t know, sunk tomorrow (I would say ‘by North Korea,’ but I can’t help suspecting Kim Jong-il actually wants us around these days, purely to prove that his football team isn’t the very worst in the world) all that would remain of me would be my Facebook profile. At least, I assume that’s the case – I can only assume my Facebook profile is controlled/spied upon/vetted the other side of the pond, although to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea what actually goes on at a Facebook HQ. Beyond the image of a Jewish fellow in flip-flops gangling around bellowing nasally about how he’s ‘redefining notions of privacy’ or something.

Basically, something of my Facebook profile would surely survive. Where all other records of my existence, be they familial, governmental, school or university-based or, indeed, on internet sites relying upon UK hardware, would be lost at sea. As would I myself, me myself, it can be assumed. Which begs the question, what would I then constitute? Who would I then be?

Eschewing for the moment quasi-philosophical notions of one’s internet avatar somehow preserving an existence within modernity far more consistent and comfortable than one has reason to hope for from their actual, pissing-and-shitting-and-sneezing existence etc. etc. etc. – not to mention sidestepping the frankly bizarre phenomenon of Facebook ‘tribute pages,’ dead people’s Facebook profiles that are preserved by their family in order to provide a kind of artificial graveside wall for people to continue to pay their respects to the deceased in texty misspellings and opaque acronyms – there is, I think, both an ever-growing self-defining tracklist and a comparable reading list on everybody’s Facebook profile that is rarely, if ever, thought of as a whole. And it is this, this above all, that I suspect might provide the most interesting basis for the Facebook reconstruction of a human being who no longer exists. The relationship between their reading and their music.

Because people who don’t read and don’t give a shit about music don’t, let’s face it, actually exist at all. In real life or on the internet.

I refer, of course, to the totality of what one has himself linked to, to what one’s friends have linked to on one’s own wall, and to what one has ‘liked’, referred to in statuses etc. etc. over a given time. Far more representative than what the person claims to be in the ‘claims I wish to make about myself’ profile-boxes (for various brilliant ways of dealing with an ‘about meee’ box, have a look at the LRB classified ads). For here is an account that factors in what you like, what you don’t like, what you want people to think you like, what your friends think you like, what your friends want you to like, what your friends wish to show the world that you do in fact like and so on – the whole multi-dimensional kaboodle. Here’s mine, since my little brother’s birthday last year (not that I picked the date because it’s my little brother’s birthday – it’s just where the ‘older posts’ Facebook button took me. What did I tell you, Zuckerberg controls us all…):

Tintin, Edward Lear, New Statesman, some pre-Copenhagen blog about environmentalism (back when environmentalism was cool and stuff), Eurovision, Stewart Lee, Adebishi Shank, Jonsi Boy Lilikoi, Lightning Bolt, Bunny Munro, Sir John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease, Giles Coren’s letter to the Times’ subs, the Antlers, the late Jay Reatard, Bliar’s forthcoming memoir, Brad Neely’s masterpiece-take on the first Harry Potter film, Nancy Banks-Smith’s reviews, American Psycho, Edward Elgar, Ian McEwan being a bellend, China Mieville, Keston Sutherland’s Beckett lectures, To Rococo Rot, Eliot Smith, Nick Cave, Fellini and Germaine Greer having it off, Geoffrey Hill, the Fall, the writers behind the Daily Show, Marina Hyde, Le Grand Meaulnes, …the elegant prose of a homosexual, the National, Slaraffenland, Kraftwerk, La Blogotheque, Black Cab Sessions, Final Fantasy, Tanya Gold being an even bigger bellend, Hans Teeuwen, Stagger Lee, Penny Red, Melanie Philips (hahahahahahahaha), Bret Easton Ellis, Italian hip-hop, Laurie Anderson, Tom Jones feat. Janis Joplin (it really happened), the writers behind EastEnders, INXS, Salman Rushdie, Les Savy Fav, Mark Mordue, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Jeremy Clarkson As Author and Goebbels.

Three readings of my Facebook self:

I am a Belgian-colonialist Zionist Nazi-sympathising anti-Islamic Deutchophile who likes ultra-violent novels and unjustified swearing.

(Tintin+Melanie Philips+Goebbels/the sinisterly-titled Black Cab Sessions/Italian hip-hop+Hans Teeuwen/Bliar/Clarkson+Krafwerk/To Rococo Rot/Nick Cave+Easton Ellis+Giles Coren)

I am a silly middle-class pinko-commy Francophile Guardian-reader with a penchant for avante-garde nonsense, made-up words and bum sex.

(New Statesman/Copenhagen blog/Stewart Lee+Le Grand Meaulnes/La Blogotheque+Marina Hyde/Tanya Gold/Nancy Banks-Smith+Laurie Anderson/Keston Sutherland+ Adebishi Shank/Jonsi Boy Lilikoi+…the elegant prose of a homosexual)

I am the worst kind of student pseud.

(All of the above)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor