My name’s Jim, and I am an ethical pirate. The music and film industry would have you believe that downloading “their” material is wrong, an approach best summed up as “Piracy is stealing, mkay?” But, the reality of it is, that the morality is a great deal less clear-cut. Here, courtesy of an interesting series of articles, well ahead of the curve, from David Pogue are some hypothetical scenarios, all of which describe what is technically piracy. How many of them do you think are morally wrong?

• I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.
• I have 2,000 vinyl records. So I borrow some of the same albums on CD from the library and rip those.
• I buy a DVD. But I’m worried about its longevity, so I make a safety copy.
• I meant to record a movie – perfectly legal – but my recorder malfunctioned. My buddy recorded it, so I copy his DVD
• I meant to record a movie, but my recorder malfunctioned and I don’t have a buddy who recorded it. So I rent the movie from Blockbuster and copy that.

Before getting into the ethics of the topic, let’s nail a few myths. First, the one that piracy is somehow destroying Hollywood. In 2009, total US box-office was the highest ever, exceeding ten billion dollars for the first time, and outpacing the previous mark by almost 10%. Even the raw number of tickets sold – thus removing the effects both of inflation and high-priced 3D screenings – was the highest since 2004. And that’s despite the fact the 12% fewer movies were released than in the previous year. Doesn’t exactly sound like an industry in crisis, does it?

That’s in part because the movie business learned some things from the horrific errors of their musical brothers, who sat around with their thumbs up their asses, refusing to adapt and embrace legal downloading, or accept the realities of the new marketplace. Physical CDs were deemed untouchable until it was too late. The result? “U.S. album sales in 2009 declined for the eighth time in nine years,” and even including digital downloads, overall numbers dropped by 8.5% on the 2008 number.

And no wonder: the CD is basically the same now, as it was when they were introduced in 1982, no better or cheaper. In contrast, the movie industry has vastly improved the theatrical experience with things like Dolby, THX and now 3D [though Chris might argue whether “improved” is the right word for the last!]. The “added value” means that going to the cinema still remains an entirely different experience from downloading a film and watching it at home; there’s no such separation between a bought and downloaded CD.

Not that the process has been without its flaws.  For instance, regional coding of DVDs, intended to protect copyright has actually done quite the opposite. There are many DVDs out there that are unavailable in NTSC, Region 1 format, and so are not compatible with my system. If I want to see these movies, the only options are black-market providers of one kind or another. This means that rather than one rights owner – albeit, perhaps not the geographically “correct” one – getting payment for the work in question, nobody does. Well done, movie industry! Would you like to reload and try for the other foot too?

If you look at DVD sales, there has been a recent dip, dropping 13 percent from 2008-09 to $8.73 billion, down from $10.06 billion. Interestingly, this drop almost exactly balances the increase at the cinema, meaning that overall movie spending remained almost static last year – an impressive feat given the ongoing economic issues of recent times.  The DVD drop may also reflect that the stock of older movies people actually want to see has now largely been mined out – #1 on TCM’s list of “classic” movies unavailable on DVD is now So Big, a 1953 Jane Wyman vehicle which I don’t give a damn about, and am pretty sure you don’t either.

However, I note there is little or no resistance to other methods of films being seen, which also result in no payment being received by the creators or distributors. For instance, ever watched a DVD borrowed from a friend? Or perhaps, rather than buying a new copy of a movie, instead opted to buy a cheap, second-hand DVD? For that also “robs” the studio of income they would have had. Among the biggest culprits there are Blockbuster and their massive piles of ex-rental DVDs [well, assuming you can find a branch that hasn’t shut down, anyway…], but no-one claims this is “financing terrorism.”

Which brings me naturally to the dubious claims of the MPAA and its associates that video piracy equates to organized crime and terrorism. I’ve no doubt that organized crime use it as a fund-raiser: it’s a low-risk and potentially lucrative trade, so merits no more than a “Well, duh…” response there. But the sweeping generalization connecting the two is laughable. The vast majority of people who download movies are not organized criminals or terrorists, and the near-hysterical attempts by the business to label them all as such, are manna for parodies, such as the one below from The IT Crowd.

The key difference between myself and large-scale, commercial pirates – I should stress, I have no problems with the industry going after them – is that I have basically zero interest in downloading Twilight: Eclipse or The Last Airbender. My interest in downloading material is limited to two areas: replacement and obscurities. And it’s here that we enter the realms of “ethical” piracy – the unofficial downloading of material, that technically breaches copyright law but is, to an extent, morally justified. Let’s go into each of these categories in more detail, starting with format replacement.

Take Blade Runner. I have, over the years, bought it on: VHS tape; letterbox VHS tape; laser-disc; DVD; and DVD box-set. All told, I have probably spent about a hundred quid or so, on just a single movie, to keep up with the format changes imposed on my by the industry, with most of my copies now being completely obsolescent. Downloads provide a credible and, to me, entirely legitimate, alternative to this. It’ll remain that way until Hollywood lets me trade in my DVDs for the Blu-Ray version. Contrast music: if I buy a CD, I can rip it to my computer, rather than needing to purchase the MP3 from Itunes.

The need for this became clear during the recent re-view of the TC Top 50, as I found a significant number of movies listed were no longer accessible to me. We don’t even possess a video-recorder of any kind these days, let alone one that can handle PAL tapes – as a result, almost all of our VHS tapes became landfill fodder during the Great Leap Sideways of 2009. I view my replacement of these with digital copies as closer to a basic human right, rather than the threat to the fabric of civilization as we know it, which the MPAA would have you believe.

The last thing I downloaded was a 1982 TV version of The Woman in White, which I remember fondly from my youth, and which had apparently vanished without trace since. It was hardly high-quality, having apparently been ripped from a VHS print. Even viewed on a computer, it looks grainy and choppy: on a big screen, I suspect it would resemble a game of Tetris in period costume. But, still – I was delighted to have it. Of course, after spending gigabytes of bandwidth on that, I discovered days later that it was getting a UK DVD release. Oh, well…

Still, this does illustrate the basic principle, and I have few qualms about downloading material which is simply not available in a legitimate fashion. It’s more than a bit like the VHS-trading community which flourished among the horror community in the late 80’s and early 90’s, when James Furman and the BBFC were in full-on Stalinist mode [“What? Nunchakus?”]. More hi-tech, of course, and a good deal simpler too. No buying of VHS tapes by the box, or kicking off dubs using your two VCRs: by default, when you download a file through BitTorrent, it automatically becomes available for others to share.  Very democratic.

You can also use it to cover unforeseen circumstances, such as when a TV schedule change screws up your recording. We had this just this weekend, when for some reason, MI-5 didn’t start at the scheduled time, which meant our Tivo of it cut off with five crucial minutes remaining – and it’s not on Hulu or any of the other official sources. However, courtesy of the marvellous thebox.bz, a repository for British TV shows, we were able to see the missing chunks immediately. It’s hard to conceive of even the copyright holder truly objecting to this.

If I do have any sympathy, it’s with the group who made the PSA below – porn stars. The Internet was once an open money-pit for the adult entertainment industry, but things have now reached the stage where, if your tastes are for straightforward heterosexual fun at least, you’d be an idiot to pay for it. Still, it’s an industry that has always been on the cutting-edge of technology: VHS, the Internet, home camcorders, etc. so I’m sure they’ll adapt and survive. Maybe the next thing will be 3D-porn? Hey, bet you didn’t see that coming… Er, as it were…

And that’s the way the entertainment industry operates. TV was supposed to kill off the movies, which were supposed to kill off live theatre, which was supposed to kill off… I dunno, gladiatorial combat or something. It didn’t happen. The media which deserve to survive will do so. They may need to change, but even if the impetus for that is morally-doubtful activities such as piracy, can we really say that is a bad thing? Online downloading is a door the industry may not want to open, but there’s a battering ram coming, driven by the 16.7 million seeders currently present at The Pirate Bay. Get in the way if you dare.

We went to WWE Smackdown here in Phoenix on Tuesday night, and had a thoroughly good time – over four hours of entertainment, accompanied by pyrotechnics so loud they had Chris covering her ears. The televised main event saw straightedge bad-guy champion CM Punk (left) beat fan favourite Matt Hardy, in a ‘loser leaves WWE’ steel-cage match. The result wasn’t a surprise to us – previous events had made it fairly clear Punk would be fighting the iconic Undertaker at the next pay-per-view, so it seemed very unlikely he’d lose. But when we watched the show on TV on Friday, we were surprised to see some fans in the audience crying after Hardy lost.

Now, it’d be easy to mock those fans, going the cheap route and rolling out the tired old cliches about them not believing that wrestling is staged [I use that word carefully, and would never call wrestling “fake” – especially not the same week a wrestler we know died, apparently the result of taking too much pain medication]. However, that would also mean those who cry at sad movies should be similarly criticized for failing to distinguish reality from entertainment: despite what Titanic might say, Leonardo DiCaprio is not really dead. A capacity to produce the emotional reaction desired by the creator is one of the key definitions of an art-form, even if that emotion perhaps comes from the lizard part of the brain, such as when you get 15,000 people to chant “You suck!” in unison.

It’s somewhat similar to the long ongoing debate about whether video games should considered as ‘art’ or not, which has been a topic for discussion since Jack Kroll wrote in a 2000 issue of Newsweek that “Games can be fun and rewarding in many ways, but they can’t transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art.” That was almost a decade ago, and technology has certainly advanced massively since. However, many remain unconvinced: there’s an interesting debate between Roger Ebert and Clive Barker on this topic, and I do have to say, I have never had any significant reaction to a video-game. A certain poignancy in the middle of Final Fantasy VII; some slight dread while engrossed in Doom. Then again, I have never had any significant reaction to sculpture either.

Computer game designer Tim Schafer said, “Art is about creatively expressing thoughts or emotions that are hard or impossible to communicate through literal, verbal means,” and that’s a definition that could well be applied to the largely non-verbal world of professional wrestling. Sure, the cutting of a promo is part of the medium, but it’s what happens after the bell rings that really matters. Then, you’re watching a morality play unfold, a struggle between good and evil for supremacy – though evil may triumph over good, or ‘normal’ notions of what is “good” may be reversed. See Punk vs. Hardy for an example: Punk doesn’t smoke, drink or abuse medications, but by putting across a “better than you” in-ring persona, he has become the ‘heel’.

Like all media, it’s probably necessary to accept that there is a spectrum in effect. Not all films can be truly considered as art – or at least, successful art. Movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space certainly provoke emotions in the viewer, but you can’t really claim that Ed Wood was aiming for derisive laughter in his audience.  Similarly, you can’t lump together all pro wrestling as a whole, but need to accept that there is good and bad. You also need to realize that no match happens in isolation: they are pieces in a carefully-constructed storyline laid out episodically over the preceding weeks and months. Like any good soap opera, the more you watch, the more you get out of it. The casual viewer simply won’t be able to appreciate it anywhere as much.

An example of the best kind of wrestling would be the match at the last Wrestlemania, in Houston, between the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels (left and right respectively, above). A knowledge of the back-history involved was crucial. Undertaker had a remarkable record of 16-0 in previous Wrestlemanias [sure, we’re talking pre-determined results, but the mere fact that he has been deemed a credible winner every time since his debut in 1991, is still hugely impressive] On the other hand, he had never beaten Michaels, one-on-one. We’re also talking two of the most unquestionably charismatic performers in the field – I’m not sure why WWE have never tried to use Undertaker in a horror Western, as he’d be perfect.

Their struggle on this night was a marvelous example of story-telling through physical theatre, the pace of the encounter ebbing and flowing over forty minutes as well as any movie could hope to do, even though there were no titles at stake here.  It built to a crescendo where each man pulled out their signature moves, only to see the opponent refuse to succumb. Finally, the Undertaker delivered a second Tombstone Piledriver [a move you’d better hope is staged, because if you don’t do it right, you will break someone’s neck] and took the victory, running his Wrestlemania record to 17-0.

Britannica Online defines art as “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” If not a classical art, there’s no doubt that, by this definition, professional wrestling  qualifies: the skill involved certainly cannot be questioned, and if the imagination shown in the storylines is occasionally…well, let’s just say ‘somewhat excessive’, it’s equally undeniable. If you want a shared experience, then a wrestling show is more interactive and less passive than almost any other. Indeed, without the fans there would be no show; the spectators become part of creating the art, their reactions becoming part of the collective artistic experience.

Wrestlemania 26 comes to Phoenix next March. I’m not expecting any art critics from the local papers to attend alongside us, but it’s going to be an experience which we certainly wouldn’t miss for anything.

It came quietly at the start of the year – not with a bang, followed by weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Just a two-line notice in the Akihabara Times, quoting a press release on the Pioneer website [I presume, anyway – the second link is in Japanese, so I’m going on faith with that one]:

This is a sad day for all LD (Laser Disc) fans… Pioneer is stopping the production of their three latest LD players, the DVL-919, DVK-900 and DVL-K88… For your information, Pioneer sold over 3.6 Million LD players in Japan from 1981 to 2002.

I must confess, my first thought on this was not dissimilar to my first thought on hearing about The Wrestler: “I didn’t know he was still alive.” If asked, I’d probably have said that the last player rolled off the production lines in Japan at least five years ago, probably longer. But no: though the release of software pretty much petered out not long after the new millennium, laserdisc lasted for over three decades, with more than 360 million units sold. Do you think we’ll still be watching DVDs thirty years after their arrival? I sincerely doubt it.

LDs were for the truly hardcore cinephile. Hell, I started buying discs before I even owned a player: I think the first one I got was Cat People, and had to get Lino to dupe it down to tape for me. Even though it was widescreen, this did somewhat negate the point. The 420 lines of resolution they offered may seem weak now, compared to Blu-Ray’s 720, but they kicked the arse of VHS’s 250. However, there was a price to pay for this, and it came in the form of cold, hard cash. Very few laserdiscs were made in Britain, so you almost inevitably had to rely on imports, mostly from the US, but occasionally from Hong Kong or Japan. Those movie fairs held at places like the Electric Ballroom in Camden, were goldmines for these, but some of the shops on Tottenham Court Road had a few, and there were also the Cinema Store, Psychotronic Video and Eastern Heroes, who all had their moments.

These were of extremely dubious legality, since none of the imports had been passed by the BBFC; even if there were no cuts, the higher frame-rate for NTSC made the running-time different, ergo they were uncertificated. Most stores got around this by slapping stickers on them, though I vaguely recall the late, unlamented [due to their horrific over-pricing] Tower Records getting into trouble for adopting this technique. And, like most things illegal, they weren’t cheap: the most I recall paying for a single disk, was 65 quid for a copy of Flying Daggers, though there may have been a Yellow Magic Orchestra LD – from Tower, natch – that was a little higher. If you paid less than twenty pounds for a movie in Great Britain, you were doing really well.

Devo do a commercial for the joy of laserdisc, 1984

As a result of these cost and availability issues, there were overseas buying trips – most commonly to the USA, but I also recall trips to Paris, and raiding stores such as FNAC. Back in 1998, on the final leg in New York, I spent an entire afternoon in the Virgin Megastore, going through their complete stock. I ended up with so many discs, that I had to take a taxi back to the hotel. No matter the haul, all these shopping-sprees ended in basically the same way. Who can forget the ripple of fear as you approached HM Customs at Gatwick, staggering under the weight of uncertificated material? Or the thrill as you exited the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel to freedom, intent on subverting the very fabric of British civilization with your uncut copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Of course, you could order discs by mail, and enjoy the delightful game of Postal Roulette that followed. Would they arrive intact? Would they arrive at all? To this day, one of the highlights of my life remains getting HM C+E to cough up compensation, after they badly scratched a disc during one of their Naziesque inspections.

Laserdiscs were simply so much cooler than videotapes, coming as they did with extra features – again, this is now something we take for granted with DVD [“No in-depth interview with the costume designer? Wot kind of ‘special edition’ is this?”], but it opened up a whole glorious vista of experience, since VHS rarely had anything apart from the movie. The director’s commentaries were the bomb: a good one would be like having the people concerned sitting beside you, drinking a beer and telling you about the movie. Escape From New York, with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter pointing out each other’s ex-wives, would be a classic example. And much as I hate Quentin Tarantino, his and Robert Rodriguez’s chat on From Dusk Till Dawn, with input from Greg Nicotero, is another that highlights the possibilities offered by the medium.

I still watch my discs occasionally – most recently, Basic Instinct, only a couple of weeks back [Paul Verhoeven is another commentary master]. I have to admit, the video quality does look a bit dodgy, especially on a large screen, which are much more common now than they were at the time. But there’s something about a laserdisc which is more physical than a DVD, in much the same way that a vinyl LP offers more scope for design than a CD. Some of the box-sets that were released were simply phenomenal: Toy Story and Hellraiser are the first couple that come to mind, and occupy an honoured spot on the bookshelves in TC Towers. Criterion also did some impressive work, but their sets always seemed over-priced, even by the standards of the medium; I think the only one of theirs I ever got was Hard Boiled.

Laserdisc never became more than a fringe market in the West; in echoes of the VHS/Betamax battle, the technically-inferior videotape won. Though to be honest, it was never much of a battle, LD failing to capture more than a couple of percent of the market, due to various criticisms, valid or otherwise. “You can’t record on it.” “What? Turn the disc over in the middle?” “They keep falling off my record-player.” And when DVD arrived – much though I tried to deny it – I knew in my heart that it sounded the death-knell for laserdisc. However, with two bookcases, still stacked more or less floor to ceiling with the damn things, they may be gone but certainly aren’t forgotten, at least hear in TC Towers. Let’s just hope our player soldiers on for the next thirty years.

[Thanks to Alex M for being the bearer of these sad tidings!]

I don’t normally hold much common ground with the ‘Intelligent Design’ crowd, but even I have to admit that evolution is hard-pushed to explain the existence of the narwhal – to me, it seems not just proof of the existence of god, but that he/she possesses a twisted sense of humour. It’s the kind of animal that could only have been invented at the tail-end of a long college party, when it seemed like a good idea to outfit a marine mammal with a corkscrew on its nose. Narwhals should consider themselves fortunate that their creator apparently fell asleep, before deciding to add a can-opener and a pair of scissors to their other end.

While initially merely amused by narwhals, the more I learned, the more I realized that they fall into the category of “unjustly overlooked.” Dolphins get all the cetacean press, but all they really have to offer is a smile like Lindsay Lohan leaving court after a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Narwhals are much, much cooler, truly equipped to be the ultimate party animals (far surpassing dolphins, and their bottle-noses). That horn can be over nine feet in length., and when Queen Elizabeth I was presented with one in 1588, by privateer Martin Frobisher, she placed on it a value of ten times the horn’s weight in gold. Suck on that, Flipper.

Actually, it’s not a ‘horn’ as such, but a tooth that grows through a hole in the narwhal’s upper lip. The narwhal has two; almost always, it’s the left-hand one that expands out, but occasionally, the right tooth won’t get that message, leading to a rare, bi-pronged narwhal. The British Museum reportedly has one – no word on whether this leads to some kind of tusk envy among others of its pod. [Hence the saying, “As happy as a narwhal with two horns.”] The actual purpose of it remains a mystery, which is part of the animal’s appeal: obvious uses like fighting or punching holes through the Arctic ice, just don’t seem to happen.

However, in 2005, scientists from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology took a look at it through an electron microscope. They discovered 10 million nerve endings going from the core outward, and believe the horn is basically a massive sensory organ, that can detect changes in temperature, pressure, etc. It’s almost like the tooth is built in reverse, with the nerves on the outside, causing The New York Times to call the appendage, “one of the planet’s most remarkable.” When the whales break the surface, waving their horns around, it may be the equivalent of us licking a finger to tell which way the wind’s blowing, to help predict the weather.

Really, not much of a “Mystery” Whale, is it?

The name translates from Old Norse as “corpse-like whale,” describing the whale’s mottled black and white skin – those Old Norsemen were clearly not exactly observant, apparently managing, when naming the beast, to miss that whole F-sized tusk thing. The Inuits got it right, calling the narwhal Qilalugaq qernartaq – no, I didn’t just fall asleep on the keyboard – which translates to mean, “the one that points to the sky.” It’s generally thought that narwhals are involved in the unicorn myth. This is somewhat hard to swallow: I mean, if I was cruising the arctic seas and saw one, my first thought would hardly be, “Look! A horse with a horn on its head. We need a virgin to catch it.” However, these were the same sailors who apparently confused manatees with Darryl Hannah, when Rosie O’Donnell would have made more sense. So I suppose anything is possible.

One thing is certain. Narwhals combine style and function, mystery and grace, intelligence and strength, in a way that lesser species would kill for. They may, arguably, be quite the coolest animals on the planet.

When the Whales Came

Dir: Clive Rees
Star: Max Rennie, Helen Pearce, Paul Scofield, Helen Mirren

Narwhal fans are not exactly well-served by the cinema. As in most of culture, it’s damn dolphins that get all the coverage, going back to the 1916 silent film, The Fate of the Dolphin. Since then, we’ve had Flipper, Day of the Dolphin and even Touched by a Bleedin’ Dolphin. In contrast, the most well-known cinematic moment for the poor narwhals, is a ten-second cameo in Elf. But this 1989 film, while less renowned, contains significantlyl more tusky goodness – though it takes its time getting there. We were drawn in by a two-line synopsis that mentioned two of our favourite things: narwhals, and mobs of villagers. However, that really only occupies a small part of the film, albeit the climactic moments.

It’s set around World War I on the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall, on an island where the inhabitants largely survive by scavenging from whatever the sea throws up on the beach. Two children, Daniel and Gracie (Rennie and Pearce), befriend a reclusive old man (Scofield), whom the rest of the local treat with a mix of fear, suspicion and derision, because of his trips to the cursed, now-deserted nearby islet of Samson. He’s known as “The Birdman”, because he carves exquisite birds out of driftwood. That’s what attracts Daniel, who wants to learn the art partly as an escape valve from his abusive father. Gracie has no father at all, since he went off to join the navy, so she’s being brought up by her struggling mother (Mirren).

An ill-fated fishing expedition by the kids lands them on Samson, where they find a narwhal tusk over the fireplace in one of the abandoned houses. Back on their own land, they find some locals suspect the Birdman of being a German spy, because of the beacon fires he sets, and set out to make him pay. However, he is more pre-occupied with a narwhal which has beached itself on the shore, and tells Gracie and Daniel it must be returned to the sea, before it brings the rest of its pod ashore behind it – an act that would bring doom to this island, as it did to Samson. Which is where the mob of villagers comes in…

In the interests of accuracy, it should be noted that, I believe, narwhals are very rarely stranded on the British coast [only four instances have been recorded since the days of Good Queen Bess], so the concept here is probably, ah, on thin ice, zoologically-speaking. Though the massacre of narwhals in large numbers, sadly, still goes on: late last year, up in Canada, at least 600 were killed by locals after getting hemmed in by ice. I’d be more inclined to take claims of this being a native tradition seriously, if snowmobiles and semi-automatic weapons weren’t apparently involved, and the media kept away. Happy to use the tools of modern civilization; not so willing to leave your questionable “harvests” behind, or face public opinion when the world sees what’s going on.

Back to the film. It’s an idea that works very nicely, both as a metaphor for the war – we note the prominence given to a narwhalesque spiked German helmet in the local school – and as a reverential acknowledgment that narwhals have a mystical quality, perhaps more so than any other aquatic mammal. The movie is certainly helped by a strong performance from Scofield, and very natural ones by the two children, against a marvelously scenic backdrop. The pace is relaxed, to say the least – those, like us, lured in with the promise of narwhals, will likely find themselves looking at their watches. But as an unhurried, Sunday morning kind of a film, it certainly has some charm.

B-

The film only opened on Friday, but I have already had it up to here with the cinematic incarnation of Stephenie Meyer’s massively-selling doses of what should probably be called “teen fangst”. I can’t honestly claim to have read the entire book on which the movie is based, but I’ve read enough – for reasons which I’ll get to shortly – to be able to label it as sub-Anne Rice hokum, aimed at undiscerning teenagers with no literary taste, in search of something undemanding to read in between updating their MySpace profiles and writing really bad poetry. It’s not “bad”, per se: though quotes such as “He unleashed the full, devastating power of his eyes on me, as if trying to communicate something crucial,” might make you think otherwise. But it’s just phenomenally mediocre.

I will admit that a copy of Twilight can be found in TC Towers. It was bought for a curious Chris earlier in the year, and she did read it, though doesn’t like being reminded of the fact, and pulls unpleasant faces whenever the author’s name comes up. It’s particularly galling to her, I think, that the idea is one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” ones. Not that vampires at high-school is exactly ground-breaking. Josh Whedon would be quick to remind you, he took the whole “high-school as hell” metaphor to its literal interpretation, beginning with the movie in 1992. All Meyer has really done is take the Buffy-Angel scenario seriously, and beef up the drooling adjective count by several orders of magnitude.

It has some local resonance too, as Meyer lives her in Phoenix – just up the road in Cave Creek, actually – and went to the same high school as our kids. But perhaps most irritating is the fact that she’s a Mormon. Not that I have anything against Mormons, as such. But there seems something sacrilegious about one of God’s chosen people using the undead to make serious bank. Though it is easy to see the parallels between Edward and Bella, and the restraint they have to show in their relationship and the sexual restraint preached by the church. The irony is that Meyer was inspired to write the books by a dream – just as Joseph Smith was inspired to start the religious faith by a dream…er, divine vision. Why can I get to have dreams that generate quite the same level of revenue?

Typically, it was Trey Parker and Matt Stone who provide the most fitting commentary on the current fad. In the latest episode of South Park, the local Goths get upset at all the vampire wannabes that start showing up in school because it’s become cool. They abduct the leader of the vampire cult, and send him off to the most horrible, and miserable place on Earth.” That would be, according to the response, Scottsdale. Living in 85254 [Scottsdale zip-code, but legally in Phoenix] I am not inclined to argue. In the end – and I hope I am not spoiling this for anyone – they destroy the wannabes by burning down their lair. Or ‘Hot Topic’ as you or I might know it.

Still, in protest at the dumbing-down of the vampire to PG-13 sexlessness, we will be watching an example of the genre tonight – and one about as far from Twilight as can be imagined…

Screw you, Stephenie Meyer!