This editorial is likely not to be one of the longest ones I’ve written, since there are no less then ten new Film Blitz reviews to get done this week, which I think is an all-time record in the three-plus years I’ve been doing the site. This is as a result of the first Phoenix Film Festival, which was on over the weekend, an intense jolt of cinema which saw us take in 8 movies in under forty-eight hours, including four in a row on Saturday afternoon. Poor Chris’ eyes were beginning to bug-out like 35mm lenses by the end of that little stint, and I must confess to feeling more than a bit hyper myself, due to the consumption of industrial quantities of Diet Coke. I look back to the days of all-night film-shows – or worse still, the eighteen-hour marathons of Black Sunday – with a mix of nostalgia and how-the-hell-did-I-cope? However, it was fun, especially since the festival had a budget cap on entries of one million dollars, meaning the total price of all the films was less than a quarter of the cost of Hannibal.

With that out of the way, and since I now possess a hangover-like aversion to seeing any movies for a while, I can return to another favourite leisure pursuit: worrying about my possessions. Regular readers will recall that 49 boxes, containing my entire life, were packed up and shipped out on the good ship Hong Kong Senator at the end of October. Fortunately, icebergs, nuclear-powered submarines and the Bermuda Triangle were all safely avoided, and the Senator duly docked in San Diego on January 17th. So, why am I still having to listen to one of the eight CDs I’ve bought since my arrival? Three words: United States Customs.

You will understand, given my past record with UK Customs, how annoying and bordering on the traumatic this is, even though all the things which UK Customs saw fit to seize (Funeral Party magazine, and a copy of Jail Babes), were actually exports from the Land of the Free. So, there shouldn’t be any problems, right? I mean, I even found a good home for my legal-there-but-illegal-here Traci Lords films, out of a keen desire to avoid deportation. What more could they want?

Of course, it is entirely plausible that it’s just bureaucratic failings which have extended the theoretical ten-day clearance period into something currently standing at eighteen and counting. After all, these are civil servants, and my brush with the Immigration wing taught me that “ninety days” is actually closer to four and a half months. And it’s also possible that the sight of 49 boxes, largely of videos and laser-discs, was taken as a sign for US Customs to send out for popcorn and beer, and settle in for a film festival of their own. In which case, I just hope they, unlike UK Customs, remember to rewind the tapes afterwards.

Things are not helped by the difficulty I’m having getting information out of the shipping company: emails go unanswered, phones are busy, and if I do get through, I’m told (very politely) to call back again later. Needless to say, this is pouring gasoline (see? I’m getting the hang of this American lark!) on the inferno which is my paranoia, and every knock on the door is now expected to be US Customs with a search-warrant and a SWAT team, because I forgot some arcane regulation about importing PVC-clad Hello Kittys.

Let’s give the shippers one more try…got through and am on hold…she’s now calling Customs from her end: I’m back on hold…[I visualise her asking Customs, “What do I tell him?”]…okay, they don’t know anything either, they’re in the dark as much as I am. And, goddamit, I can’t even drink to ease my fears, since I’m on day 18 of my month of sobriety: I’m seriously beginning to wish I’d picked another month. If there’s no update next week, you’ll know I’ve gone on the run!

The past weekend saw my first sortie outside of Phoenix to the rest of Arizona. Specifically, we headed down Interstate 10 to Tucson, which is the second city of the state, although it predates Phoenix by a good couple of hundred years – there was a Spanish mission there within a hundred years or so of Columbus discovering America. Since then – and probably largely since the invention of air-conditioning – it has been overtaken in most areas, but it still holds sway this week, because of the annual F-sized Tucson Gem Show. Seeing as round, shiny things are a matter of deep personal interest to me…for at least as long as their sale has been keeping a roof over my head…Chris and I spent most of Saturday going round the stalls.

Or, at least, a tiny fraction of them, for when I say it is “F-sized”, I am severely underestimating things. Across all the venues, my guess would probably be somewhere near ten thousand exhibitors, and with the best will in the world (not forgetting the aforementioned deep personal interest), you could never hope to get round them in a day – probably why the show lasts nearer two weeks. And, let’s face it, there is a certain point beyond which one pleasingly polished mineral looks pretty much the same as another. By about 3 pm, both of us had reached the “thousand-yard stare” stage: every time I closed my eyes, regiments of fossilised trilobites performed synchronised swimming routines, against a gently swaying backdrop of elegantly carved jade.

Though I do have to say that some of the fossils were fabulous. I had always been under the impression that they were kinda rare, but the evidence seemed very much to the contrary. As well as barrelfuls of those trilobites – I guess when you’re around for half a billion years, even a fraction of one percent adds up to quite a few – there were serried ranks of ammonites and unidentifiable pointy things. I was particularly impressed by a Moroccan slab, shot through with a gorgeous selection of prehistoric life-forms, which would have made a perfect table-top.

Also there, were people for whom rocks mean a great deal more than somewhere to put your coffee. I “borrowed” a poster for some “Healing Sessions”, illustrated with a photo of some woman holding a crystal over a ginger-headed bloke as he lay on a couch inside what was probably a pyramid or summat. The attached flier was a masterpiece of incomprehensible New Age gobbledigook:

12 Chakra
Energy Activations
Frequency Upgrades

This opening will assist you to shift and feel better in the new Higher Energies of this planet

Earth Activation Aura Balance with New Energy Matrix $47.
Physical work to eliminate body pains. Meridian blocks are opened for full energy potential while raising the frequency for the soul to seat between the 4th and 3rd chakra.

Solar Activiation DNA activation w/Crystal and Implant Removal $67.
The Holographic 12-strands of DNA are activated and connected into 12 geometric grids and 13 dimensional fields to awaken a persons ability to ground and create their involvement into 5th dimensional experience. Through past life regression, any past experience which produces negative patterns or blocks will be cleared; as well, implants and crystals located in the etheric body are removed. The personal grid system is also cleared.

Galactic Activation Golden Age Dimensional Activation w/DNA activation $88.
A connection to one’s Earth Golden Crystal Pool and the Acceleration Flame of Shambala is made. A plug at the base of the etheric body is removed allowing the brain partition between the medula oblongata and occipital lobe to unite. The brain is further balanced and energised by stimulating the corpus callosum to activate at a new level and accelerate right and left brain communication. The brain is initiated to process unconditionally. This activation can powerfully change your life to align it with your higher awareness and knowing who you are. Only do this is your inner guidance is ready and willing to harmonise with these evolutionary changes in awareness.

Univeral Activation Sri Yantra, Flower of Life, & Ascension Rose activation $111
Release astral contractors through a ceremony with Arcangel Michael and Lord Ganesha for success and wisdom. A new matrix is installed using the Sri Yantra, Flower of Life and Ascension Rose. These grids are activated and aligned to replace the fear and doubt grids. Fragmented soul parts will integrate. You will experience your true energetic essence and learn the sound of your essence vibration name. Unite with your eternal self and your feelings of pure glory. This activates your unconditional full acceptance for your life and aligns and integrates the necessary power grids to support you.

Glad that’s cleared that up. Two questions come to mind though – apart from ones like whether having your implants whipped out is necessarily a good thing (for example, if you’re Pamela Anderson). Firstly, are people really willing to pay for this sort of thing? And secondly, do you need to do any more than wave a few crystals over them in order to get them to part with their cash? If the answers are “Yes” and “No”, then I think we may have been barking up the wrong tree in simply selling the damn things…

So that’s it: I am now officially a resident of the United States of America, having returned last week to London and acquired my permanent (well, until November 2003 at least) visa. That was an experience in itself, making my way through the bunker-like security round the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which must be the ugliest building in London – imagine a multi-storey car-park with an F-sized golden eagle tacked on the front. And the ugliness seems to rub off on the staff, who redefine the terms “taciturn” and “unhelpful”. Oddly, they seemed to be mostly British, so they were possibly miffed to be faced on a daily basis by people going to a more hospitable climate.

Just to welcome me to London, it snowed, and remained largely dank and miserable for my week there. It’s amazing how rapidly a place ceases to feel like home, especially when, as in my case, you no longer have any possessions there [the latest word is that they are currently clearing US Customs in San Diego – reports of cases of popcorn and beer being delivered to their offices in preparation for an all-night video session are as yet unverified]. In addition, my room in Perran Road had been redecorated, removing the final traces of my personality from it – Steve and Abigail had done a very nice job on it, to be sure, but it did leave me feeling even more like a guest in my own home.

So I was doubly glad to return to Phoenix, even if I almost immediately came straight down with the nastiest bout of ‘flu I’ve bumped into for quite some time – most likely picked up in the all-you-can-eat bacterial buffet which is British Airways World Traveller Class. I’m not quite over it yet, but am certainly feeling a good bit better than I was: for someone whose constitution is usually horse-like, it’s a bit of a shock to find yourself crawling to the bathroom on hands and knees, in order to cough up a lungful of green, tenticular slime.

Still, this did allow me to become acquainted with American daytime television, which proved beyond all doubt that more channels is not necessarily better. Indeed, it may be that the reverse is true, because it dilutes the audience for each, reducing the advertising revenue and leaving the programme makers desperate to find the cheapest way to fill the afternoon hours (when, after all, no-one whom advertisers want to appeal to is going to be watching anyway). On the plus side, I can thoroughly recommend high-school basketball as a sedative; much-needed sleep rapidly followed.

At least spring is on the way – or may be, because that decision rests in the hands of a burrowing rodent called Phil. Yes, tomorrow is Groundhog Day, another of those American traditions like Prom Night, only familiar to us Brits through the medium of Hollywood – as an a homage, I did toy with the idea of just repeating last week’s editorial and seeing if anyone got the joke. But in case you’ve not seen the Bill Murray movie, the idea is that the behaviour of said critter determines whether winter is over or not: if he can see his shadow, it means six more weeks before spring. [I have to confess to suppressing a snigger on learning that the whole thing takes place on a hill called “Gobbler’s Knob” – scarcely more sensible is the town name, which is the Scrabble-icious “Punxsutawney”.]

It’s apparently based on an old proverb: “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.” How this got converted into something involving a furry sundial is less clear, but the critter in question is now a celebrity, possessing an electrically-heated burrow. One wonders why the animal-rights activists haven’t stopped this heinous and vicious experiment, involving as it does evicting a poor animal from its house. Such disruption permitting, tomorrow morning’s ceremony will no doubt be a staple of much of daytime television. At least it’s not high-school basketball.

I am a cat person. However, I find myself sharing a house with three dogs – partly because Chris has an unfortunate reaction to cats which involves hospital visits and anaphylactic shock, rather than a warm glow of affection. This is a new experience for me: I grew up in a house where there was always a cat around, and grew to admire their independent spirit, ruthless hunting skills and ability to lick their own genitals while maintaining a dignified expression. Our last cat – named Chicle, for reasons that I don’t think anyone ever explained to him or me – was a fine hunter, with his greatest trophy being a cleanly-severed pheasant’s head, though we always suspected the presence of a butcher’s shop nearby might have had more to do with that particular success.

If cats have a short-coming, it’s falling short on the personality front, once they get past the age where balls of wool are the greatest thing in the world. There was a point in Chicle’s life where we’d play a game of throw and fetch – I’d hurl him across the room onto the sofa, and he’d come running back to the fire for more – but he grew out of that. Adult cats all do pretty much the same things, purring, curling up by the fire and acting as the pet equivalent of the average stripper, their affection being in direct proportion to their needs.

There’s no denying, however, that the TC canines have their own distinct personalities. The senior citizen is Max, who in doggie years is older than the Queen Mother, and possesses both much the same gravitas, and agility. He is the Victor Meldrew of the household, answering only to Chris in her role as alpha-dog – when I attempt to command him, he suddenly turns his back and pretends to be deaf. This is actually entirely plausible given the loudness of his bark, which belies his years, and is only surpassed by the creaking of his joints when he rises in the morning. He also snores. I confess that, for a dog, Max is pretty cool.

The other two, Cody and Cleo, are both young enough to know worse, and their major role in life appears to be to inform everyone in the world to the fact that someone is at our front door – as if the noise of the bell hadn’t already alerted us. True, occasionally, they leap into action before the person reaches that point, but these are greatly outnumbered by the times they leap into action when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain-forest, or some such non-event. Their failure to appreciate the difference between a gang of drug-crazed psychos bent on some home invasion and, say, the mail-lady, is somewhat unfortunate. Cody’s main attribute is a startlingly wet and cold nose – I think she must stick it in the freezer or something. Many’s the occasion on which I have been lost in thought at the computer, only to find my armpit being nuzzled by said proboscis. It’s a bit of a wake-up call, to say the least.

Cleo was an enforced gift from Chris’s ex-husband, who threatened to have her put down if we didn’t take her. Mind you, this is a man whom I have spoken to twice on the phone since getting here, and he has mistaken a 34-year old Briton for his 16-year old American son on both occasions. That tells you all you need to know about his parenting skills. I suspect Cleo may not have got off unscathed, since she doesn’t seem to have realised she no longer needs to rummage through the garbage for food. We dare not leave any form of consumable organic matter within reach and out of our sight, or its container will be shredded in a manner which leaves us wondering one thing: why the hell she didn’t do that to her previous master’s throat?

Indeed, on odd occasions, I have found her looking at me with an expression best summed-up as, “I could tear your face off”. This is Robert Downey Jr. in canine form, bringing a lot of baggage, in need of special handling, and voted “Most Likely to be Found in a Canal Tied To Bricks”. The only thing that has saved her skin so far is the fact that we can’t find a body of water big enough to drown her in all of Arizona – but we’re praying for rain…

As mentioned in passing last time, it’s only through living in America that you come to realise just how insignificant an item Britain is, and how little most people care about what goes on there. The dearth of information appearing in the local newspaper here is striking, be it politics, sport (and I don’t just mean cricket) or any other area of affairs. It’s not just the newspapers, but all the other media too, and this approach may be generally common to Americans, perhaps resulting from a large chunk of the population being thousands of miles from any other country. Unless it happens to Americans, it really doesn’t happen, or so it seems – thank heavens for BBC America (though I’m not sure what Father Ted, a C4 programme is doing on there) and the Internet, which helps me to remain a citizen of the global community – as well as acquire dodgy bootlegs on Ebay and access a vast range of interesting…er, material.

I digress. The point is, that one British news item did make it into The Arizona Republic this past week: the report into serial-killer Harold Shipman, which discovered that he might have been responsible for the deaths of over 300 people. That’s quite some feat, and there was a grudging sense of pique in the reports, given that this figure would surpass anything any American serial-killer has ever done. Even Henry Lee Lucas only claimed three hundred or so, and he was a compulsive and habitual liar, who confessed to murders in Spain and Japan, despite never having left the good ol’ US of A. Sure, there may have been bigger murderers in the third world – the Colombian, Pedro Alonso Lopez, comes to mind here – but they don’t really count, since their victims don’t wear Nikes, and would quite probably have starved to death anyway.

On that score, in serial-killer chart terms, Shipman probably ranks a bit lower than his tally would indicate, since his victims were unlikely to have survived for all that much longer. Some would say, all that separates him from the other “Dr. Death”, Jack Kevorkian, is the relatively trivial matter of how much pain their patient-victims were in. And nor can Shipman claim to be the originator of this technique: in Boston just before the turn of the 20th century, Jane Toppan offed some 30 or more elderly patients with morphine, to become America’s biggest female murderess. And now, in similarly style, at the turn of the 21st century Harold Shipman did the same, only on a much bigger and millennial scale.

It does make me wonder how many other serial killers are lurking, unseen, out there in the medical profession. It’s an excellent cover, for in what other job are you expected to have people die when you take care of them. It is a salutory lesson for any wannabes, that it was only when Shipman changed his modus operandi and tried to profit from a victim’s death through being a beneficiary in her will, that he was caught. God alone knows how many more he might have killed if he hadn’t got greedy. He seemed to be going at about 12-13 a year, and probably had at least another decade or so before retirement. You do the maths.

Thinking back to my time at university, I do have to say that quite a high percentage of the “characters” to be found on campus, seemed to come out of the medical faculty. At the time, I tended to put this down to high spirits, or over-indulgence in alcohol – but the case of Harold Shipman should make anyone with the slightest sniffle look nervously over their shoulder before informing their GP. Hell, there are already enough statistics to suggest that hospital is a desperately unhealthy place to be if you are ill – I just never thought the reason was all the local sociopaths queuing up to mis-administer lethal injections…