spodgod

Buffy fans of the world, prick up your ears!  Joss Whedon announced at his Saturday Comic-Con 07 panel that he is “this close” to signing a deal with the BBC to create a 90 minute movie starring Anthony Head as Rupert Giles.

“Ripper” has been one of those mythic could-have-been spin-offs from the Buffyverse since the season 7 finale – alongside vapourware like Faith the Vampire Slayer and the Spike TV movie.  Of all the ideas out there, this is the one I really wanted to see happen.  Joss Whedon at the BBC, where he can be as sophisticated and quirky as he likes.  Let’s hope the money guys don’t fuck it up before everyone signs on the dotted line.

Best. Buffy news. Ever.

An eighth of England is currently still under water – this coming just a month after a different eighth of it had been temporarily transformed into a boating lake by similar ”freak” weather.

Yesterday I heard two different views on the Government’s role in all this:

Watching BBC News 24 (imagine a more laid back CNN, with plummy accents and less cheese) an irate woman went into a live tirade about the lack of preparation made; the fact that the local council had recently dismantled flood prevention barriers, that she and her daughter’s business would take months to recover. I was quite sympathetic until she chose to finish with “…and what does the government spend all it’s money on? All these foreigners coming for “asylum” or whatever. They should think about the people that live here first”… The report switched quickly back to the studio…

Later I was waiting for a train. A chatty Eastern European chap started talking to Parsley and I, showing us a copy of the Metro, a free paper distributed at bus and train stations.  The front page picture showed the town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire under water. Funnily enough, he said a similar thing to the woman on TV – but with a crucial twist;

“This is a country where it rains,” he said “The government should fix what’s wrong here first, before it goes spending all its money invading Afganistan and Iraq”.

Both of those exchanges, in their own way, seemed very British to me.  Even in a state of emergency, people still cling to their pet bête noires – blaming them for the situation we’re in. 

In today’s Guardian, there’s a Q and A with Aimee Mann, which includes these reactionary snippets:

What’s the greatest threat to music?
Music downloads and CD burning.  If music is free, then the only people who can afford to make it are narcissistic jackasses who will do anything for attention.

Is the Internet a good thing for music?
It’s good for information, but pages like MySpace turn everyone into a musician, almost all of them terrible.  It’s as if people think there are bundles of money lying around, when actually becoming a musician is a drastic choice.

In other news, Kate Nash, who found pre-signing fame through MySpace, has the UK’s current number one single; “Foundations“.  She writes and records using GarageBand on an Apple Mac – an accessible sample sequencing program bundled free with the machine…  

So which camp are you in? Kate Nash or Aimee Mann?  Internet DIY or corporate grafter?

Me? I’m with Marshall McLuhan:

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. (…)  The amateur can afford to lose.  The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. 

Aimee Mann peddles the old trouper schtick that if you practice hard and have talent, if you graft and put in the hours, you will be noticed.  If that happens the end result is acceptance into the old order; the corporate music industry.  To do what though?  To fit within the parameters of that industry, where deviation from set templates – the environmental rules - is allowed only in incremental degrees.

The net has the potential to allow artists to sidestep the hours, the graft and the old order.  And those artists, though ostensibly still aping the same popular idioms as their “professional” peers, don’t have to follow the same rules.  Waiting for punk to happen again?  It’s happening right now.