Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

And Home of the Brave Pepper-Spray Wielding Uniformed Thugs.

So this week Peter Watts, brilliant Canadian hard SF writer, marine biology PhD, good e-cquaintance of mine, and by all accounts all round nice guy in the flesh, was pepper-sprayed, beaten up, and imprisoned by US border guards as he tried to leave the US for Canada. His crime apparently consisted of having the temerity, when pulled over, to exit his vehicle and ask what was going on (twice, because they ignored him the first time he asked). More detail here on his website, and here at Boing Boing. Long and the short of it, he's now been bailed out and is safely back home, but looks like facing charges, crippling legal costs, and a possible two year jail sentence for "assaulting a federal officer". Yeah, right. Bookish, forty-something marine biologist and SF author takes on a squad of armed border police. Of course he did. Happens all the time.

Couple of things:

1) Please go over and express your support for him in whatever way you can - moral, financial, or informational. Looks like there'll be a defence fund in the New Year, but right now I suspect the greatest value lies in getting the word out as widely and vocally as possible.

2) What the fuck happened to the US? (Okay, rhetorical question, I know). For me, the most terrifying thing about this is not what happened to Peter itself, but the scads of US citizens currently posting about it who seem to think that Peter pretty much had it coming; that getting out of your vehicle and remonstrating with law enforcement officers is an act worthy of a beating and jail. Jesus, talk about Daddy-fixated - do what the authority figure tells you, boy, and jump to it! Don't ask questions, don't get out of the car.

What is this, Germany 1933?

I guess this provides some insight for relative youngsters like me as to what it must have been like to be involved in the Civil Rights movement, back in the - currently fashionably vilified - sixties. Plus ca change, eh?

One wonders what the Founding Fathers would have done. Stayed in the car with their collective lip firmly buttoned? Somehow I doubt it.

So my local DVD rental store has this 3 for 2 deal on new(ish) releases, and as a result I've recently found myself watching a lot of add-on, look-it's-for-no-extra-charge-might-as-well-have-it, third-choice movies.

Depressingly, a high proportion of these have been SF.

Equally depressingly, on viewing these movies, my lowered, oh-well-not-like-I-paid-for-it expectations have been pretty much seamlessly met.

Is it just me? Let's see. Here, in alphabetical order, are the last three SF movies I rented - try to guess which one wasn't a third choice freebie, which one I actually paid for (and felt good about paying for when I'd seen it).

Moon
Star Trek
Terminator: Salvation

For extra credit, fit each film with one of the descriptors in the title of this post.

Very happy right now - my obsessively pre-ordered Black Rebel Motorcycle Club live CD/DVD package showed up this week, and in between zipping in and out of the country, I finally managed to grab the time to sit down and watch the DVD in full.

Fuck me, I'd forgotten how good those guys are.

I saw this tour, back in 2007, though I had to drive four hundred miles to my old hometown, Norwich, to see it and the gig itself was a little soured by segments of the audience who evidently considered themselves way too cool to show any real enthusiasm. (It also featured drummer Nick Jago storming off part way through - something that Peter Hayes and Robert Been handled with remarkable aplomb and an achingly good accoustic set). And all those things considered, it was still one of the five finest gigs I've ever seen. My only regret is that I didn't make it to the one in Glasgow - I was down with flu that night, had to give my tickets away to friends - which is one of the three dates, along with Dublin and Berlin, that feature on this DVD. Because by the look of it, those gigs were everything the one I saw was, but turned up to eleven.

So you have barking, snarling guitar and bass riffs, the likes of which you have to go right back to the early Stranglers to find comparison for. You have Wall of Sound power reminiscent of the very best of the Jesus and Mary Chain, but somehow tighter and more energised as a result. You have a striding, throbbing lope to the music, a strength settled into like a freight train building speed or a high performance engine when you drop a gear. You have the genuinely soulful interludes - Been's rendering of Ewan MacColl's sixty year old anthem Dirty Old Town, complete with crowd support, Hayes's flawless performance of the band's own sheerly poetic O/D accoustic lament Faultline, the skyline aching chords and moan of All You Do Is Talk.....

But most of all what you have here is consummate musical talent. Peter Hayes and Robert Been - these guys are capital M Musicians. You watch them swap bass, lead, rhythm, back and forth across the front space of the stage like it's nothing, and carve up the vocals between them, the way you'd share the driving on an overnight long haul; you see them roll out piano, harmonica, fucking trombone (I kid you not), and a cello bow to stroke in the opening of the aforementioned All You Do Is Talk......... And throughout it all, you see the steady flame of a genuine passion for the music, an attention to the songs that brings them out fresh and changed for the occasion. You see an intensity of engagement that not one band in a hundred can bring off.

And when it's all over, you can feel a little package of emotion lodged solidly there in your chest and throat, transmitted to you entire with all that passion and sound over the two hours of your life just gone by.

That, my friends, is Soul. It's the shape of life, captured and made to sing. And there are no finer exponents of that dynamic working in music today.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are putting a new album out in March next year and will tour in support, February to April in North America, April to May in Europe.

See them if you can possibly can.