It really pains me to say this. As the handy stats on me to the left will unfortunately remind me, i'm not a young man anymore. For half of my twenty six years on this globe, I've been an FT reader. I've never thought this dark day would come. But...I was a bit disappointed with this issue.
The blame falls in part on the damned Heirophant. After the discussion in this forum, my expectations put a bit more pressure on his column than in previous issues. Pressure it just couldn't take. The point of his article - which I take to be : Subjecting phenomena to critical analysis and finding flaws where there are flaws to find - or 'debunking' - is a good thing, but the term which he chooses to describe this has been mistaken, by both kinds of the uncritically minded, as the desire to find flaws consistently whether they were there or not - is fair enough. But why bother? We haven't even won 'sceptic' back yet, lets not open up another front. There isnt even an archaic spelling of debunker we can revert to in the meantime to distinguish good practice. There are worthwhile and interesting things to be said about the misuse of 'rational' terms to refer to a rather dull, unflexible worldview which imposes a presupposed limit on what an unknown quantity can be - whether the unimaginative 'Single vision and Newton's sleep' of Blake, or the Rabid Randi-ism of RAW's 'fundamentalist materialists'. This article doesn't really say much. The actual case in question doesn't get much look in. And he appears to say thae Charles Fort was full of sh*t. Which, of course, he was, and may our alien farmers harvest us all if he wouldn't be the first to say so. But, again: why bother?
From this, I flicked through until my eye was caught by a glorious announcement: a new release of Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End! No longer must I be cursed to annoy friends who haven't seen it with monologues from this film. Any good special features? I checked to see. To find a review which from the start announced its author's strong dislike of Viv Stanshall and all his works. Fair enough, some people just have a strange sense of humour. Some people even like My Family. But I complain when the editors of my student newspaper have just handed something to a reviewer who just isn't got to get it, and I complain even more when I've paid money to be told this. I'm not the market for this review - I know I love the film. Someone like RC Samson isn't either. The intended reader is surely someone who doesn't know if they'll like Stanshall or not, and they'll get no sense of whether they would from this paragraph. Unless, that is, they know the tastes of RCS. And I checked this by reading the other reviews. Time Bandits? yes, it is good -but 'Terry Gilliam's third feature - and what I've always thought of as a sort of prologue to the triptych of meditations on the human imagination represented by Brazil/Baron Munchausen/fisher King'...' What about the unfinished Quixote? What about Fear and Loathing? Even the brother's grimm, in a way... There's no need to limit Gillian's exploration of the twilight zone to a triptych, and there's certainly no need to humbly claim this observation as your own... Withnail and I's 'Twerpy student fans' . Fair comment.
From the film reviews to the music reviews. Music reviews? I didnt know FT had them. And it doesn't. What it has is the Forum, a place for the scouring of forteana and fortean opinion which has in the past turned up such classics as Ken Campbell on the Rev Fanthorpe and the pophetic outpourings of Doc Sheils. Or, in this issue, the obligatory piece by Karl Shuker,a couple of mildly interesting numbers and a page-hogging puff-piece rubberstamping the PR releases of a new age musician.
From this hat trick came a quickly gathering snowball of screaming apathy which saw me moan at the Weekly World Newsishness of "Marilyn Munro", remain unstirred by the Da Vinci cash-in self-promotion facing it, flick through the centeranian round up (yes, it has to be done, like the ABC reports - but if any of the material so recorded was in any way interesting, it would have found menton when it broke anyway) and pass my eyes over a pice on David Lynch (or was it on transcendental meditation) which told me little I didn't know about either. ..Even if I did like the deadpan cheek of his non-plot-spoiling admission "It's about a woman in trouble" . Y'see, I have this theory that Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With me form a thematic triptych...
All in all. I didn't hate it. I quite enjoyed whiling away an afternoon with the FT. But there was nothing to make me go wow. Ho Hum.
