Shows which were listed in the 2010 or 2011 pieces on this topic are disqualified from a repeat nomination. I’ll probably lift the moratorium next year, on a rolling three-year basis, so that the 2010 shows – or. at least, any of them that are still being screened (Caprica, Spooks and 24 have already gone, with Fringe on its last series and The IT Crowd likely not returning either) – will be eligible to repeat. But, for now, here are ten more of the best pieces of televisiual entertainment to have graced our screens in the last 12 months.

American Horror Story
We had some catching up to do, having missed the first season when it aired last year, and centred on a house with a long history of murder, inhabited by a family of three – and all the people who had died in it previously. The second season is even more disturbing, taking its horror from the realm of the supernatural back to the evil that men (and women) do, set in a 1964 insane asylum, ruled over by a seriously-twisted nun and even more insane Doctor. Jessica Lange, as the former, fully deserved the Emmy she won, and James Cromwell… Well, Babe will never seem the same again.

The Aquabats Super Show!
They’ve been one of our favourite live bands for a decade now, with their mix of B-movie insanity and ska-punk pop tunes as infectious as Ebola, and they’ve wanted to get their own superhero TV show for even longer. Finally, The Hub – also home to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – gave them a shot, and the result is a brilliantly deadpan slice of fun for all ages (such as the TARDIS-like van, infinitely bigger on the inside). The production values are deliberately cheap and shoddy, but there’s an enormous and obvious affection for everything from Japanese monster flicks to Saturday morning cartoons.

Being Human (UK)
This took its own time to make the list, having got through three seasons of spectral, lycanthropic and vampiric angst without troubling any of my lists. However, the fourth season saw two of the trio replaced. Much as we had enjoyed Russell Tovey’s performance as previous werewolf George, the chemistry of the new household was a great deal better (and less whiny, it has to be said), while the storylines, too, seemed to have improved, with more thought put into them. It remains, however, really confusing to be watching this and the US version simultaneously, with characters and plot threads getting mixed-up in our poor old heads…

The Borgias
Not the British series, which still is widely regarded as among the worst of all-time [I don’t remember it as being that bad. Mind you, I was 15, and likely couldn’t see past all the tits. Minor factoid: watched some of it being filmed at Doune Castle]. This is rather better, held together largely by a great performance from Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI in a time when popes were allowed to have a wife and expected to have a mistress. Advertised with the tagline, “The original crime family”, the Borgias were supposedly an influence on Mario Puzo when he wrote The Godfather. It’s easy to see why in this historical romp.

Covert Affairs
It’s like Spooks/MI-5, only with better teeth and hair… Piper Perabo is perkily perfect CIA operative Annie Walker, jet-setting around the world, looking for intelligence in all the wrong places. But what initially looks to have about as much substance as a tanker of candy-floss, proves surprisingly steely, with no shortage of mayhem, betrayal and treachery. It also gets bonus points for re-introducing us to one of the best TV villainesses of recent years, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke) a.k.a. the woman who shot Mrs. Jack Bauer. Needless to say, we didn’t trust her, from the moment she showed up here, as department head Lena Smith.

Grimm
This started the same week as another fairy-tale themed series, Once Upon a Time, and we opted for the grittier approach taken here, with a cop who discovers he is descended from a long line of monster hunters. He has to sort out the good from the bad in the communities that lurk just beneath the surface, and also try to keep his personal life personal. In the second season in particular, that has become increasingly impossible, and the show has also improved beyond being just a “fairy-tale of the week,” which it looked like it might be early on. It now has depth and a universe of its own in which to work.

Homeland
Claire Danes also won a well-deserved Emmy, for her role as damaged CIA intelligence analyst Carrie Mathison, who becomes convinced that Nicholas Brody, a returning rescued POW from Iran, has been turned and is now a sleeper agent for the terrorists, despite being on the fast political track. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that she’s basically right: but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as she tries to convince her bosses that these are not just psychotic delusions, because she’s off her meds. And is Brody necessarily the bad guy he initially appears? Can he perhaps be turned into a useful asset?

Revenge
This is a guilty pleasure, a sprawling soap-opera which sees millionairess “Amanda Clarke” move to the Hamptons. Except, as the quotes suggest, that’s not her real identity: she is out for complete and utter vengeance on the family responsible for branding her late father a terrorist, and having him killed. #1 with a bullet is Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe), her father’s former lover, who betrayed him and is now reaping the rewards. Stowe is deliciously malevolent, and there are just so many shenanigans going on here, that you can only snuggle up on the couch with ice-cream, and enjoy the class warfare as it unfolds.

Touch
Kiefer Sutherland’s post-24 show on Fox is a lot more touchy-feely, with Sutherland playing a former journalist with a severely autistic son, Jake, who doesn’t speak, but seems to have an incredible awareness for numbers and the interconnectedness of things. That allows him to bring people together – but also makes the kid a potentially very useful commodity [if you’ve seen Pi, you’ll know why]. It’s a novel mix of the emotional (almost spiritual) with thriller elements, and the first season ended with Jack, sorry, Martin going on the run with Jake, after losing a custody battle. Interested to see how things develop, when it returns in February.

Whitechapel
After a couple of seasons where the show was content largely to mimic the most famous of London crimes e.g. the Ripper (inevitably!) and the Krays, the third went for more original ground and was a good deal more successful as a result. It manages to find the sweet spot between characterization and cases, which is often difficult for police procedurals – most tend to concentrate on one or the other. Not to say that this is staid or even slightly plausible, however; instead, it is played with all the enthusiasm and loopy imagination of a Victorian “penny dreadful”, and is all the more fun for it.

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
— Winston Churchill

It’s Election Day in the United States. Watching this election unfold with all the intellect and decorum of a Jerry Springer episode [and not even one of the good ones, about homewrecking lesbian strippers], I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that democracy – as it stands in 21st-century America, largely defined by this once every four years dog-and-pony show – is a failed institution.

“That’s positively un-American!” I hear you gasp. To which I respond… Well, duh – not American, remember? Because of that I won’t be voting, since I’m ineligible – which I guess counts as payback, a reversal on that whole “no taxation without representation” thing that triggered the Revolution. It will be the third Presidential election since I moved out here, meaning it has now been 15 years since I cast any kind of ballot. I feel absolutely no sense of loss at this, and heartily recommend this to others as a course of action. No matter who gets in, when they screw up – as they inevitably do – you get to roll your eyes and say, “Well, I didn’t vote for him.”

Of course, don’t ever make the mistake of confusing democracy and freedom. It’s quite possible to have one without the other, and the latter is much, much more important, obviously. The problem is not so much the concept of democracy, as when democracy gets ground down to the lowest common denominator through the mythical concept of universal suffrage – the idea that everyone, somehow, is equally capable of choosing a government, so their opinion deserves equal merit. It hardly needs saying that this is complete bollocks – and goes directly against the concepts American’s founding fathers had in mind as they set the whole thing up.

When George Washington was elected the first President in 1789, one estimate is that only 6% of the population could vote: men, over the age of 25, who owned sufficient property. This was not an accident. Founding father John Adams, one of the most revered men of his time, wrote to James Sullivan on the perils of universal suffrage:

Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters. There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level.

It was true then, and it’s even more true now, given the vastly more complex nature of the world in which we live. How many of us genuinely understand economics or foreign policy? I know I don’t. But somehow, I’m an oath of allegiance away from being given the right to help decide the country’s direction. Frankly, this scares me, and the mob rule which results would be unthinkable in almost any area requiring expertise: “I’m sorry, doc – I know you said our kid’s headaches are just the flu, but my wife and I both believe it’s a brain aneurysm, so we’ve scheduled the operation for Monday, ok?” Lunacy. Except in politics, where it’s called “democracy.”

The most important thing about the restrictions which were set in place initially for the United States was not that only men could vote, or those who owned property – but that these limitations, as a result, meant that the voters were almost always the best-educated members of society – the ones you probably want choosing the direction of the country. It remained that was for the first half of the 19th century, but the block of voters was gradually increased, until the requirements are now a) being 18, and b) having a pulse (with the latter optional in Chicago). Standards have declined to the point where we are today, which Adams pretty much nailed, writing two hundred years ago:

Such is the frailty of the human heart, that very few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.

This is what we see. The dirty little secret of democracy is that very few people vote for the candidate who would be best for the country. It’s almost entirely done on the basis of pure self-interest: which candidate would be best for me? Who’ll put more money in my pocket? Who’ll let me marry who I want? Of course, people will deny this, but you try to find someone who can honestly say, “While Party X is better for me personally, I’m voting for Party Y, because they’ll do a better job running the United States.” I’ll be here. Not holding my breath.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
— George Carlin

The way the system currently stands, parties play to those stupid people, because they are so much easier to influence. You can’t possibly hope to explain the subtleties of balancing the national debt in a 30-second TV commercial. But you can make outrageous claims that the opposing side’s candidates enjoys eating babies for breakfast, because he’s a Muslim who wants to legalize rape. That’ll do just as well, because it doesn’t matter whether the voter genuinely believes in your policies or has simply been scared into voting against “the other guy,” it still goes into your box. Parties don’t want an informed, well-educated electorate. That’s too much like hard work, because they are harder to influence. Smarter voters tend to be more suspicious, simply because it’s almost impossible to be aware of what’s going on, without becoming cynical.

Parties, indeed, are a large part of the problem. They remove the need for intelligent thought at the polls: just check the boxes corresponding to your chosen tribe, and you’re done with exercising your democratic rights for another four years. That’s the way it works for most people. Remove the labels, ban the political advertising and… Wait, what? You mean I have to find out what the candidates actually stand for? And think about the issues? You mean there’s more to it than blindly following the party line which I’ve been spoon-fed?

Personally, I’d strongly favor some kind of quick test at the polling station. Nothing too taxing, mind: just locate Afghanistan on a map, say. I mean, you invaded the fucking place, I presume we know where it is? Turns out 88% of young Americans don’t. Other tests have shown similar levels of ignorance: only 36% of adults could name the Russian Prime Minister, and a third couldn’t even name the governor of their own state. These are the ones who need to be weeded out of the voting population, with extreme prejudice. Because they’re not the solution, they’re part of the problem: a system that promotes and indeed almost demands, ignorance, fear and selfishness.

As noted above, I haven’t voted in 15 years, and in all likelihood, will never vote again. This doesn’t make me feel any less invested in the economy, world affairs or any other aspect of society. And I’d fully support a return to the level of enfranchisement seen in Washington’s days. Because I’d far rather the government which oversees our everyday life was decided by the six smartest percent of the population, rather than the 51 dumbest.

London Astoria,
January 24th, 1991

The Internet never forgets. Or it might forget, but it has a tendency to remember again later, coughing up hair-balls of long-forgotten events that you’d be prepared to swear had been consigned to the trash-can of history. Or, in this case, the TC archives, for tucked away in the corner of And This Is What The Devil Does, was a grainy, obviously ripped from VHS (complete with rolling tracking lines) recording of the Revolting Cocks live performance at the Astoria in London from January 24, 1991.

This was an event which I had attended, and written about all the way back in TC 9. It remained one of my all-time most memorable live experiences: all gigs, even the Rammstein one written about a month or two back, were measured up against it, I had, at one point, a copy of the same bootleg vid, but this had gone among the missing in the two decades and 5,500 miles of relocation since.

The Astoria, meanwhile, had bit the bullet as well, having been demolished in 2009 as part of the London Crossrail project. My other leading memory from there is a show with Front Line Assembly + Sheep on Drugs, which seems have taken place in October 1995. The basement formed another venue, known as the Astoria 2, and it was in there that I saw VNV Nation in 2000, less than a month before moving permanently out to Arizona…and seeing the band again on the night I arrived in Phoenix! But to get back to the RevCo gig…

The concert footage  is, of course, seriously crap quality. Even at the best of times, you’d get better quality shooting from a modern-day cellphone, and that’s when the lights from the stage are not completely blinding, reducing the screen to a white blotch accompanied by a badly-distorted soundtrack of industrial metal. Our son wandered in during the early stages, glanced at the screen, then left without comment. While it might have been different had there been breasts on view at that point (we’ll get to that later), it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the experience. However, this kind of bootleg is less about convincing the neutral as to capturing the essence of a live event for those who were there. As such, this does the job impeccably.

As the band takes the stage, we see Luc Van Acker, clad only a lucha libre mask [which, amusingly, I described as a “neon ski-mask” at the time of the original review, having clearly no clue about Mexican wrestling!] and Speedos. Al Jorgensen is beside him, dressed like a villain from a Sergio Leone movie, in a duster and Stetson. They open with the anthemic Beers, Steers and Queers, and it’s not long before the audience is getting into the spirit, adding their own spin to the first part of the title, by hurling cans at the stage. Fortunately, tins of minced beef did not follow. In absolutely the right approach, Van Acker basically ignored them – I remember another show where a disliked support band’s lead singer issued the immortal line, “If you don’t stop throwing things, we’re going off.” Cue an absolute hailstorm. 

After that, and a brisk remixed version of BS&Q, it was on to their cover of Physical, with the relatively well-dressed Chris Connelly – in that he was wearing a suit jacket, as well as his boxers – taking over on lead vocals. Oh, and did mention the pair of go-go dancers who were now vamping things up around the stage? TV Mind saw a third vocalist (Phildo Owen? Trent Reznor? The personnel of the band in this era was fluid, shall we say) join the cacophony, and one of the rubber dolls placed on stage was thrown into the crowd, to be torn apart by the crowd. The camera was up on the balcony looking down, and I can’t believe I was in that scrum of humanity, though probably not quite in the pit, having learned my lesson at a Cramps concert the previous year, where I ended up in hospital, getting my lip stitched.

Van Acker, apparently feeling upstaged by Connelly’s sartorial elegance, or perhaps suffering an inferiority complex, had wrapped a towel around himself. Or it may have been just so he could simulate masturbation with a bottle of beer, spraying soap-suds onto the front row. Not to be outdone, Connelly spent much of the next song, Union Carbide, simulating sex with one of the dancers, in a variety of positions. Ok, on further review of the tape, let’s go with probably simulating sex. Meanwhile, Jourgensen carried out possibly the most transgressive act of the entire evening, from a 2012 perspective. He lit a cigarette on stage. I was shocked by this blatant disregard for the lungs of those attending this event.

There was a steady stream of crowd surfers – undeterred by the risks of passive smoking – who had to be ushered off-stage by security. During No Devotion: one of the youngest – barely a kid, who looked vaguely like Neil Morrissey – can be seen politely asking a big, dreadlocked surfer who’d ended up on the stage if he’d mind very much rejoining the audience. The surfer just stared at him and wandered off towards the back of the stage. [The stagecrasher who made a grab for one of the dancers was treated a good deal less kindly. Mind you, their tops had now come off. ] During Chickenshit, it was Neal Morrissey vs. the Dreadlocked Surfer, Round 2, and this time it took the combined efforts of several security guards to force the latter off-stage. Only, when he went, he took Morrisey with him, tumbling into the moshpit together, like the end of some previously-unseen entry in the Predator series.

Luc Van Acker was now wearing a Queen Elizabeth rubber mask and fake breasts, but still simulating sexual acts with one go-go dancer – ah, to hell with this, let’s call her what she was and be proud of it – stripper during Stainless Steel Providers, while the other stomped the remaining rubber doll to death. The encore, an extended version of Get Down, complete with Bruce Campbell sample, unfolded against a barrage of strobe lights, smoke and cacophonous guitars which leaves the viewer struggling to make out a fraction of what was going on. If you can imagine being trapped in a tank during a heavy artillery barrage, you’re thinking along the right lines.

But it was during Attack Ships on Fire (above), that I realized why this was still the yardstick by which all live performances should be judged: an absolute wall of sensory experience, summed up by Owen shrieking, “Someone, somewhere, wake me up!” while a topless vixen emerged from a cloud of dry ice behind him, and a faux Queen wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet shags another stripper off to one side.

That, folks, is entertainment. And it was, and remains, fucking awesome.

For more fun, read and enjoy Jason Pettigrew’s awesome diary of the US leg of thst RevCo tour. It includes such joys as “some pink-haired trollop gave Michael Balch a hand-job under his Fairlight (“She has a good reach. I suggested that she play basketball,” says Balch later.)”

I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.
— John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 1906

The latest copyright discussion to break out on the Internet was the result of a post on the NPR radio blog by one of their interns, Emily White, entitled I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With, in which she says she has purchased about 15 CDs in her life. Here’s the crux of what she said:

As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience. What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

Seems like it was for some peopIe.

In particular top-grade musician/whiner David Lowery, who wrote a stern rebuttal, basically blaming Emily and her pals for driving “two dear friends” to commit suicide because…something something illegal downloads. I’m not clear on the logic there either. But apparently disturbed artists never killed themselves before The Pirate Bay came along. Except for Ian Curtis. Who clearly saw what was coming and decide to hang himself, to save time waiting around for Napster to start up and ruin his life.

“A lot of artists feel they aren’t being adequately compensated,” said Lowery in another piece [also on the irritatingly moralistic Trichordist site, self-righteously titled “Artists for an ethical internet”]. Well, boo fucking hoo. I feel I am not being adequately compensated for writing this, so I’d like the world to ensure that I am. KTHXBAI. Oh and I’d like a pony that shits rainbows as well. But despite this appalling lack of response to my personal needs by the universe, I’m still writing it. Because it’s what artists do. They create, not for compensation, but because they feel an urge to do so.

[As an aside, that’s why I never gravitated towards writing as a career.  When you stop doing something for pleasure, and start doing it to pay the bills – it usually stops being pleasurable. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, “I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old.” I can think of no way to lose the joy of personal expression faster than that.]

But if musicians aspire to go down that road, I’m fine with that. However, creating music and calling yourself an artist does not, in any way, entitle you to a living. Especially if you are stuck in a 1980’s paradigm [as Lowery apparently is, which makes sense, given that three decades ago is about the last time his band, Camper Van Beethoven, were vaguely relevant] where record labels would throw money at ten grunge bands from the Pacific NorthWest, in the hopes that one would become the next Nirvana. He simply doesn’t appreciate the massive shift which has occurred. Put bluntly, recorded music has been the centre of the large-scale music business model for about the past 100 years, but may well no longer be sustainable.

Not, I should point out, that it’s exactly on its last legs. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that global sales revenue in 2011 was down by… Well, guess how much from the year before? A whopping three percent. To $16.6 billion. Really, protestations of the damage done by illegal downloading to the music industry seem almost as overblown as the similar claims by Hollywood, while then turning round and report record box-office revenues.

This is a good part of why many really don’t care any more. People don’t respect copyright, because copyright owners don’t respect people. Witness, for example, YouTube’s automated takedown process, which tramples the concept of “fair use” for even the slightest fragment of content. Or the term extension bought and paid for by Disney and their ilk.  We’ve been lied to so often and for so long in the interest of greedy conglomerates, that it’s impossible to take their claims seriously, or those who defend copyright, almost regardless of whether their arguments have merits. Witness Rob Reid’s marvellous talk on his 8-billion dollar iPod:

All Lowery’s weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth is not going to put the digital genie back into the bottle. But this will not kill music, any more than home taping did in the 80’s. [Remember that over-wrought campaign?] Music existed for thousands of years before Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder in the 1870’s enabled the capturing and playback of sounds. While this small aspect of “music” may have led to much greater access worldwide – and certainly contributed to an awful lot of cocaine consumption, up the noses both of record company executives and musicians – the gravy train appears to be nearing the buffers.

It would not seem to be society’s place to restrict or limit innovation by all, or its results, because a small group of people “feel they aren’t being adequately compensated.” Lowery and co. are acting like medieval monks, raging in the face of the Gutenberg printing press, which radically altered the landscape and pretty much killed off the illuminated manuscript as a source of employment. I do agree that artists should be able to be compensated for their work, but the system as it exists is no longer workable. New methods will arise, and indeed, already are doing just that – such as along Kickstarter lines, where people pay in advance, funding the work ahead of its creation, rather than retrospectively.

The details aren’t important. But copyright, as it operated during the 20th century, is basically dead: an unenforceable concept that has been broken on the wheel of digital distribution. The sooner artists like Lowery realize it, and move towards alternative approaches, the better off they’ll be.

Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another day, another moral guardian pops up to condemn a game. Except, here, we’re not even talking about an actual game – just a trailer for one. I heard about this through a Google News alert, which brought me to this article on Forbes.

The blogosphere has tried the Hitman: Absolution trailer and it has been found guilty. In it, a group of female assassin’s dressed as hyper-sexualized nuns are brutally murdered by the ultra-masculine 47. It’s juvenile, brutal, an affirmation of every problem that video games have with women and an affirmation of the worst aspects of our culture.

I’ve never played Hitman – I saw the movie, which largely sucked, and think I spent a post-Thanksgiving sloth watching our son try to get through a mission. I seem to recall falling asleep, though that may have been as much the turkey overdose  as the game.  But, ooh! “An affirmation of the worst aspects of our culture”! I wanna see! Oh, dammit: I’m on my lunch-break. Better wait till I get home.

But in the meantime, of what did “the blogosphere” find the trailer guilty? Let’s click on the link, shall we? Turns out “the blogosphere” is apparently a guy in Melbourne called Brendan Keogh. Not sure what his qualifications are. He’s “a Media and Communications PhD student”, which I personally read as “too lazy to get an actual job.” This conclusion is confirmed by the “Occupation” listed on his profile: “Writer. Gamer. Student. Barista.”  Maybe there wasn’t enough room for “Layabout.” Among his other blogs are Feathers, Cogs and Stars, where he “will be uploading original short stories and poetry roughly once a fortnight.” This lasted three entries before he gave up, though frankly, it’s no bad thing. If you can get through them, you’ve a better stomach for shitty writing than I.

I mention all this, so you know that blogosphere thing is clearly in great hands…

Keogh starts out a long explanation of how he wasn’t going to write about the trailer – is he paid for the word on his blog or something? -then, six paragraphs in, finally gets to the issue: “My problem with this trailer is precisely its sexuality, more specifically its conflation of sexuality with violence.” Okay, let’s talk about tha… Or not. For the writer then heads off into a long discussion of “rape culture” in the video game world, though the examples offered are mostly smack-talk from Gears of Warplayers, whose relevance to the specific case I thought he was discussing is dubious. Give teenage boys headsets and an Internet connection, and you’re somehow surprised they aren’t congratulating opponents on killing them?

I disagree with the whole “rape culture” thing. Those who accept it, see the world through rape-coloured glasses and the results of that vision are unsurprising: Keogh’s statement that, “Videogame culture reinforces rape culture when 99% of videogame protagonists are male.” That’s a statement so entirely filled with delicious wrong, I don’t even know where to start, not least that videogame protagonists are not real. They’re pixels on a screen, and ascribing gender to them in a meaningful way says more about Keogh’s confused view of reality than anything. That aside, 100% of, oh, NFL players are male too. Is that reinforcing rape culture too? Like I said: start seeing the world through rape-colored glasses, and suddenly, everything potentially becomes the “conflation of sexuality with violence” which he abhors.

Now, don’t forget, I still hadn’t actually seen the trailer. But by the time I’d finished Keogh’s piece, I was very keen to see this “rolling in the digital filth”, which left him “embarrassed and ashamed and disgusted to have any part in a videogame culture that produces work like this.” Man, it’s gotta be totally out there, filled with more sexual battery than an Abel Ferrara retrospective. So here you go.

Well. That was underwhelming, wasn’t it?  It reached the end, I looked outside and, yep, civilization appears to be going on about its business. Dodged a (slo-mo) bullet there. Of course, unlike Keogh, I didn’t take the trailer seriously. To me, it was pretty clear that doing so would be a dumb mistake, right from the moment the killer nuns discarded their habits. This is not something that happens in real life, and from that point on, the clip ceased to have the slightest relevance at all to the universe in which I live. Maybe Melbourne is different in this regard, with packs of twisted sisters roaming the streets, launching RPG’s at random motels?

Could be, because this was the impact on Keogh: “It really upset me. Not just infuriated me, but upset me. I lost sleep over this last night.” Really? REALLY? REALLY? If that is truly the case – and it feels more like carefully manufactured outrage than a genuine reaction –  then someone needs to beg, borrow or steal a huge fucking dose of perspective. I saw a hardcore battle in which one bad-ass assassin took on an entire platoon of bad-ass enemies, who were clearly not popping round for a discussion, and prevailed over them. Once battle commenced, that was what mattered. And in support of this, it has been estimated the trailer contains, “Fewer than four seconds with the vaguest of hints of sexualization.” Oh, and I should point out, absolutely no rape whatsoever.

For those four seconds, I’ll defer to Penny Arcade in their assessment:

The cinematic ambitions of the Hitman games have always been prominently displayed on (or very near to) its sleeve; I watched the video to see what the deal was, and they’re playing around with their subtitle in a pulpy, grindhouse vein.  Robert Rodriguez through and through.  It’s fight choreography, and it may set an “erotic” stage but it quickly – and I mean quickly – gives way to a gruesome, life or death, septum obliterating struggle that might be hot for somebody but I suspect that’s a very specific demographic.  Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this; by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.  As spank material, it leaves something to be desired; specifically, spank material.

That demolished, let’s go back and address Keogh’s earlier argument, that the trailer was… Sorry, what was his argument again? It was so long ago I’ve just about forgo… Ah, here we go: “”My problem with this trailer is precisely its sexuality, more specifically its conflation of sexuality with violence.” I’m not sure what he’s studying, but he appears to have majored in Missing The Point. Because that’s exactly where the “edge” here comes from: the uncomfortable feeling to be found in the juxtaposition of arguably the best and worst things about being human. It’s been that way for ever: I’m no gaming expert, but in cinematic terms, basically the entire girls with guns genre is based on skating the razor-edge of this tension.

The real crux here is not the simple equation suggested by Keogh of “sex + violence”. Even as a non-expert, I can list off any number of video games which have female characters, in costumes you wouldn’t wear to the supermarket, inflicting copious quantities of violence on (largely male) opponents. Next to no controversy have greeted these. The big difference here? The sexual, violent women here lose. It’s an interesting double-standard. Society nods its head at sexual, aggressive even aggressively sexual women…as long as they get what they want. But meet their fire with fire, as the Hitman literally does, and it’s unacceptable.

Is the trailer sexist? Quite probably. But it’s an advertisement for a series of games which, I’m pretty sure, are almost exclusively played by the male sex, from a male perspective, and can hardly be condemned for trying to appeal to the target audience. It’s not called Hitperson after all, and despite the trailer, is not likely to reach the nun demographic. There may be some hippy-dippy land where you can advertise a game about a serial killer character in a bland way, completely incapable of causing offensive in all possible interpretations, that will magically work. But in the real world, you have to grab the viewer’s attention, first and foremost, and on that scale, the trailer rates an absolute 10.

You may or may not buy the game. [By most accounts, it’s nothing like the trailer – which is a shame, I’d say] You may or may not like the trailer. You will remember it, and awareness of the product in question increases, the more the likes of Keogh whine about it. Mission accomplished, level completed. Brandon, you just got pwned like a n00b [as I believe the kids say], by the very people you’re complaining about

As usual, the moral guardians bleat about the wrong thing entirely. If there is a “problem” here – and I’m using quotes advisedly – it’s that the Hitman series encourages the player to identify with a mass murderer, and is far from alone in so doing. Never mind the “rape culture” bogeyman Keogh sees in video games, which requires the viewer to join the dots and make a picture of a penis, out of whatever might be on screen. If there’s an issue, it’s the “murder culture” far more all-pervasive in the genre (and in a pretty “ritualistic” or “fetishistic” way in this particular game) that should be of concern to those worried about such things. Which wouldn’t include me. But the implication of Keogh’s argument is that it would be ok to have the hero mow down dozens of women, as long as they were actual nuns, not sexy fake ones. Hmmm.

I did find interesting this statement, in the very article linked to by Keogh. “Rape culture is using the word “rape” to describe something that has been done to you other than a forced or coerced sex act.” Keogh uses the words “rape” or “raped” 46 times in his piece about an animated trailer for a video game. One which contains no actual sex acts of any kind done to anyone, let alone forced sex. Whoops.jpg. By this definition, the writer is actual part of the very “rape culture” problem he claims to be fighting.

One final irony: less than a week after his rant, Keogh wrote another piece, entitked Bite the bullet: videogames don’t make deadly shooters – however, in his universe, they apparently do make rapists. In that article he concludes, “Videogames are complicated things. No less than films. No less than novels. No less than any other form of media people engage with. It’s about time researchers acknowledged this instead of seeking easy, linear and lazy cause-and-effect models that insult the multitudes of people that play videogames.” Shame he was incapable of following his own advice on his own blog.