Alternative Dullster

Scared of the future and stuck in the past
May the Lord in His mercy be kind to Belfast

Wednesday's Northern Ireland Assembly elections are simultaneously deeply fascinating and utterly pointless. It's the kind of duality we've come to expect from our divided brethern.

The election doesn't matter, really. The only way that the elections can have any real impact on life and progress in the Six Counties is if the DUP have been to see Spiderman, and remember the bit where Peter Parker's Uncle tells him that with great power comes great responsibility. So Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds can go easy on the shibboleths and sit down to do some business, or they imitate that other Hound of Ulster who fought the ungovernable sea.

And if they do that, Tony Blair will have no choice but to pull the plug on the whole damned lot of them. Thirty years of this nonsense, going on forty, all because the Unionists fought tooth and nail against one man, one vote since the foundation of the statelet? Tony Blair calling in his first favour from George Bush trying to get the politicans in the North to sit down and play nice? What a bunch of babies.

Direct rule is the way to go as patience runs out. How can the Unionists not see this? That unhelpful oik Jeffrey Donaldson was talking to Vincent Browne on the radio last night, mournfully telling the people that David Trimble will have to "consider his position." Jeffrey, like Warren Beatty, has always wanted to direct. Browne nearly got it out of him that he wanted to be Big Boss of Unionism, but Jeffrey seeped away once more.

As you know if you've been following politics in the North, Jeff is death on the Good Friday Agreement. Except for the bit where the Agreement calls for joint consent - now that the majority population of the Province, that sacred majority that the Unionists used to bang on so endlessly about, are overwhelmingly in favour of the Agreement, Jeff is demanding that there must be a majority of the Unionist community in favour of the agreement. The man has the political pliability of mercury.

And Tony Blair has to put up with all this? While he has the police out beating every bush in the Home Counties for mullahs and other difficult characters, he has to fly in Belfast to babysit Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster? Yeah, right, as the young people say.

The huge, huge winners in all this are Sinn Fein, of course. For the guns to stay silent, the ballot box must remain in the ascendancy over the armalite and that's exactly what happened. Not only are Sinn Fein increasing their own popular vote, but they're managing their vote with, ahem, military precision, ensuring that the vote returns the maximum number of seats.

Now the Shinners are casting eager and calculating eyes South, where the opportunities seem limitless. There is no opposition to the present Government, a void into which Sinn Fein would naturally fit. The war is fading fast from the public mind, as wars invariably do. Sinn Fein, the one-time pariahs, are now the white hats of the political process. The European Elections on either side of the border will be fascinating, but an offhand comment on the Vincent Browne show from someone, I know not whom but I'm presuming a professional psephologist of the kind that only ever surface at time's like this, indicated that the Greatest Symbolic Prize of all could be within Sinn Fein's grasp.

Let's say Tony Blair does bring Direct Rule back to North, just to shut them up for a while. For Gerry Adams, his work is done. The hardliners will not be happy with a return to direct rule, but Adams and McGuinness have been spectacular in their success in selling peace to the hardliners, without getting Beal na Bláthed on the way. So, now that there is no more work to be done in the Six Counties, what can the most popular politician in the Republic in poll after poll do for an encore?

If Mary MacAleese doesn't run again, or if Fine Gael is sufficiently foolish to try and trigger an election, Gerry Adams could carry the Sinn Fein standard in a Presidential election. And, as things currently stand, he'd romp home as the first Sinn Fein member elected head of State since Eamon DeValera in 1919.

Bertie will not want to see that happen. But it could, it could. The day could come.

Up to a Point, Lord Copper

Those of you who pay close and rapt attention to the literary pages of the English broadsheets will have noted the excellent reviews Lynne Truss has been getting for Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation. And rightly so - one of the many great aphorisms that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has given Western culture is Tara's pithy comment on why she no longer surfs the Internet: "I used to go online but everyone's spelling is so bad, it's depressing."

And she's right, of course. Most of people that post to fora (oh, forums, then, if you must) are either unspeakably lazy or virtual illiterates. And if even the basic courtesy of correct spelling is not being observed, what hope punctuation, grammar and syntax?

None at all, I'm afraid. Miss Truss's book is good, but not as good as I had hoped. I'm not sure I care for the tone she employs in the book - all the best correct English usage books have gloried in extremely arch tones, as best typified by the legendary HW Fowler and his great work, The King's English. HW always gave the impression that any time he caught a man with the blood of a split infinitive on his hands, he gave the bounder a damned good thrashing.

Utterly OTT, but there's no other way to go about it I'm afraid. To say that a living language, any language, has rules is fallacious - a language has conventions. That whole business about split infinitives that so concerned old school grammarians - it's a throwback from Latin, it has nothing to do with English. There is no good reason not to split an infinitive in English, and the very powerful one that infinitives should indeed be split, if it adds power and clarity to what is being communicated. To boldly go is to show the pioneering spirit; to go boldly is not to forget one's galoshes.

While the conventions are not rules set in stone like the Ten Commandments, that does not excuse for one instant people being either ignorant or oblivous to them. The reasons these conventions exist is so that everybody can tell what everyone else is talking about. We must agree on what words mean, and what punctuation marks mean, for, if we don't, then we build our very own Tower of Babel, and we're reduced to hieroglyphics.

Always presuming we're not reduced to hieroglyphics already, as those cursed emoticons invade all forms of communication and correspodance. I've just thought of my own emoticon for the correct treatment of the emoticon devotee:

>:{-

Can you guess what it is yet?

If anybody has trawled south this far, I presume that you have some interest in the language, its future and its correct use. As such, may I reccomend the finest guide to punctuation that I ever came across. These Notes on Punctuation are from a book called The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas, and it's Thomas' genius to use the punctuation symbols to illustrate their meanings, and all in less than one thousand words. In five minutes, the secret to correct punctuation is yours, and then the world is at your feet.

Thomas Boswell on Warren Spahn

Anyone who doubts that Thomas Boswell is one of the great sportswriters of his generation, if not ever, just has to read his eulogy on the late Warren Spahn in today's Washington Post. Beautiful, beautiful writing.

Intolerable Cruelty

Intolerable Cruelty is a wonderful movie. But beneath that wonderful Coen brothers romantic fantasia lie the rotting remains of the really terrible movie that the inchoate Intolerable Cruelty must have been. The remains of that stinker are like the Tell-Tale Heart in the Edgar Allan Poe story - every so often, you hear the thump-thump, thump-thump, that tells you the Coens have buried something under the floorboards.

I don't buy into the auteur theory of cinema. As William Goldman points out in Adventures in the Screen Trade, there are so very many things that can go horribly wrong in a movie, there are so many people involved in the creative process, that to ascribe it all to one eminence grise with jodphurs and a loudhailer is stretching things a bit.

This creative process is visible in Intolerable Cruelty. This is the first movie that the Coens have not scripted themselves, and one of the movie's fascinations is to see how the Coens have taken a so-so formulaic script and dragged it, kicking and screaming, into Coenville, that strange cinematic space that's populated with Barton Finks, Marge Gundersons, Ulysses McGills, and of course, Dudes.

That's the joy of a Coen brothers movie - the Coens take you to a place that only exists in their heads, meaning that when you return to the reality of the world outside the cinema you know more about it after seeing what things are like in a world that is not real, a world that is Coenville.

In their other movies, because the movies were scripted and owed their genesis entirely to the Coens, the traces of the real world never intruded. In Intolerable Cruelty, the real world has left traces - the thump-thump, thump-thump of the Tell Tale Heart is the remaining clunky dialogue or the awkward or cliched mis-en-scenes. But the rest of the movie is either coated in Coenville, or the Coens drag the scenario so far into Coenville that we forgive them the etches of mortality.

What is the essence of Coenville in Intolerable Cruelty? The guitar-playing priest and Billy Bob Thornton's Howard D. Doyle are all elements that can only have been introduced by the Coens, reaching their zenith in Herb Myerson, senior partner. What are the traces of the boring, the mundane, the cliched, the real? That awful Massey Pre-Nup McGuffin, the lazy plotting, the awful moments of less than pedestrian dialogue.

Can we see the joins? Yes, sometimes. Consider George Clooney's speech to the lawyers' convention in Las Vegas. The speech is awful, while Clooney punching the air at the end, with those goggling manic eyes he first used in O Brother, is wonderful. The mundane, the Coen.

Mention of Clooney is a reminder of how much of a collaborative effort film-making is. With any two leads other than Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the film could have sunk to depths so deep that not even the Coens could save it. With these two stars, and I choose my words carefully, it can't go wrong. Clooney is in the pantheon of the Hollywood greats, and, as for Catherine Zeta-Jones, she is a woman for whom luminous could have been invented. As well as being A Star, she can act too, as she showed in Traffic and so magnificently in Chicago.

Intolerably Cruelty is eminently qualified to stand in the Coen cannon - not as sublime as The Big Lebowski or O Brother, but a real return to form after the hideously disappointing Man Who Wasn't There.

Their Hearts Are Cold - They Love Only Gold. Only Gold.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only US President to be elected four times, tried to introduce legislation to move the Thanksgiving Holiday one week early, from the fourth to the third Thursday in November, in order to give trade an extra week's Christmas shopping. The US was just coming out of the depression, Roosevelt was aware of his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge's, remark that the business of America is business, so he naturally thought he was on a winner.

Bizarrely, he wasn't. The people liked the holidays just as they were, and Thanksgiving remains the fourth Thursday in November.

Here in Ireland, where we no longer claim to be religious but do claim to be spiritual (in a Celtic sense, of course), I saw my first Christmas ad on the TV before Halloween. The streets already have lights up, the stores are packed with gifts and gift shoppers, you could easily get stampeded if you're not on your guard on Grafton Street between now and Christmas Eve.

We still have ten days until Thanksgiving in the States. The Business of Ireland is - what, exactly?

Captain Kirk

It's genuinely astonishing to believe that it will be twenty years since New Zealand, the power of International Rugby Union Football since the 1905 tour of the British Isles when they were first christened "All-Blacks," will have last won the Rugby World Cup when the next one rolls around. And what's all the more astonishing is that the reason they've lost is because, hard though it may be to believe, they're chokers.

New Zealand choked against South Africa in 1995, they choked against France in 1999 and they choked last weekend against Australia. New Zealand went into each game not just as favourites, but as a team that were going to revolutionize the way rugby is played and thought of, and each time with a player that was the best in the world at that time - Lomu in 1995, Christian Cullen in 1999 and Carlos Spenser this year.

Is it a co-incidence that all these players were backs? New Zealand rugby was always built on the notion of ferocious and unforgiving forward play - Gareth Edwards wrote in his autobiography that being caught at the bottom of an All-Black ruck was like getting caught in a combine harvester - but those days appear to be over. The people aren't scared of the All-Black jersey and the silver fern any more. New Zealand can't back up the haka no more.

And if you don't believe me, ask David Kirk. David Kirk is the only captain of New Zealand to raise the William Webb Ellis trophy, and it's a honour he's only dying to share. But he doesn't think it that likely.

Miaow!

So Mike Catt is the saviour of English rugby now, is he? They'd be as well off picking Bagpuss.

The Red Star and the Emerald Isle

The country has been captivated - in a narcoleptic sense, of course - by the ongoing Tribunals in Dublin Castle. There's a marvellous feature piece in today's Irish Independent newspaper about the arrival at the Moriarity Tribunal of Ireland's Leading Businessman, Denis O'Brien, home for Portugal to explain how exactly he won the state's lucrative second mobile phone license.

I don't know who wrote the piece - I'm guessing it's the Indo's quite marvellous Miriam Lord, who writes most of these sort of features for them - but she does a lovely job of tying in Mr O'Brien's remarks of a week or so ago about how Ireland is now a communist state because of the way it's chasing down honest capitalists like, er, himself.

No less remarkable are the remarks of Mr Justice Moriarity as soon as Denis appeared before him. It's an interesting thing - you can't report from a court without the court's permission in Ireland. If you do you're in contempt of court, and you will stay in the calaboose at the judge's discretion. But as I'm quoting from the Indo, I hope that getting jugged for repeating Mr Justice Moriarity's remarks in this forum is out of the question. I woudn't be the first Spailpín to see the cells you know.

"Since we last met in this place, you have been significantly involved in the very commendable and great success of the Special Olympics. It would be churlish of me not to acknowledge and commend you for that success and for your own, not inconsiderable, role in it. It is no secret that on occasions in the past two years and some months, relations between yourself and your advisors and the tribunal have had their low moments. I want to assure you that I welcome the opportunity now of hearing your side of these important events."

Remarkable. Quite remarkable.

I Hear a Voice, Crying in the Wilderness

Jimmy Breslin has for years been one of the top newspaper columnists in the USA, if not the English speaking world. What makes Breslin great? Two things: firstly, instead of sitting on his keyster and mouthing off until he reaches eight hundred words and collects a fat cheque at the end of the working week, Breslin gets off his ass and goes out into the world. He talks to people, and gets their stories, which is what newspapermen are supposed to do but often do not.

The second thing that makes Breslin great is his anger. When he's pissed off, you know it. The rage is shot through his columns, and it's very real. Most so-called tell-it-to-straight columnists, like the hateful Richard Littlejohn of the Sun, are as sounding brass or clanging cymbals when it comes to their worked-up frothing at the mouth outrage. But Jimmy is permanently pissed off, and he's not afraid to speak his mind.

Right now Breslin has noted the shameful treatment by the US of its war dead in Iraq. Nearly all other dead from US foreign wars have been flown home and buried with full honours - Breslin is of the opinion that the body bags look a little too real on television for President Bush to feel comfortable about, and are therefore buried with a minimum of ceremony. So every week Breslin lists in his column who's been killed, where they were from, and how they died. Why they died is up to you.

One of the soldier's funerals was in Newark, near New York. Breslin went to it, and wrote this excoriating article on the dead man and why he died. Fantastic, fantastic writing.

Rugger

As Ireland's moment of destiny approaches, I'm going rugger crazy. There's a nice piece about the rivalry between South Africa and New Zealand in the Rugby Heaven site that Melbourne's The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Newspapers seem to be collaborating on.

I also notice that the English press is getting wildly sensitive about the Pom bashing that's going on at the moment, with that clown of a flanker doing his bit for international diplomacy and ratching things up another notch.

The English should be grateful that it's taking attention away from those awful jerseys. I know that the sculpted look is in, but it looks less horrid in black or blue than it does in white. And having to call a prop off the line if you need to take it off, as he's the only one with sufficient strength to wrench the thing off a man? Good God.

Beats me why the RFU (note that's not ERFU - and the English wonder why people think they're arrogant?) don't just send out Johnners and co buck naked, and spray paint the jerseys and numbers on them. There would be a danger of being tackled in the tackle (if you get my drift) but that could easily be aliviated by simply castrating the players before they left Blighty. There would be some objections, of course, rugger players being what they are, but surely it's a small price to pay when a man is playing for Queen and country?

Why Buffy Matters

Within the space of four hours yesterday, Irish TV viewers could delight in the joys of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on BBC2 at 6.30, The West Wing on E4 at 9, and CSI: Miami on Network 2 at 9.30. And the bizarre thing about that trio is that the programmes about forensic science and US politics are phonies, while the show ostensibly about vampire slaying tells us more about the world and our roles in the world than any programme in recent memory.

The West Wing is probably the show with the greatest percentage of snake oil. The West Wing, for those of you that are strictly Ibiza Uncovered men, is a TV show about a fictional Democratic President who wins the Presidency against all the odds and proves to be the greatest and most just President in the history of these United States.

It's possible that one of the reasons that the West Wing became such a success is because President Josiah Bartlett was sworn into his fictional office around the same time that President George W. Bush was sworn into his all-too-real office. The contrast between the two men could not be greater, but it is best summed up thus: President Bartlett is clever, and President Bush, well, Dubya is very, very happy.

So what makes this a fraud? What's so terrible about the perfect President? This is what's so terrible: it's a fairy story. The characters in The West Wing, these people who never take holidays and are on call 25 hours a day, do not exist any more than a unicorn. They are a fantasy. Their dialogue is equally fantastic, as they fire fusillades of GNP percentages back and forth, and then cut to Bartlett who's doing a cute scene about a dog in the rose garden.

What's so terrible about a fairy story? Nothing. When we were children thrilled to them but when we became men we put away childish things, after Paul's advice to the Corinthians. Do we enjoy The West Wing? we do, but it's a guilty pleasure - we know deep down that we're being had. Are there any circumstances in which The West Wing could be considered Art? I'm afraid not, no.

If The West Wing is less than perfect, then CSI is less than good. Every time we watch it we feel dirty and used. CSI has no interest in telling us more about the world - CSI's hook, what makes it addictive, is that it bombards us with facts, facts, facts.

In good drama, dialogue should be used to move the story along, or to reveal more about the characters in the drama, and, by implication, more about the people around us and ourselves. The dialogue in CSI exists only to expose more of this tidal wave of facts. Say a body is brought into the morgue by that fat guy that was in the original Manhunter. He and the coroner then spend the next five minutes telling each other what they themselves already know. There is no need for TFGTWITOM to be told by the coroner that rigor mortis sets in after an hour - he already knows that. It's you and me, slumped in front of our TV, that this dialogue is meant to resonate with.

After a full season of CSI, what have we learned? We are in a position to walk down Dublin's O'Connell and identify, from the splatter marks and the pools of blood, whether any particular murder victim what shot or stabbed. Why would one Dubliner would shoot or stab his neighbour? We'll have to look further than CSI to find that out.

As enthusiasts of the Buffyverse, is there any possibility that we would consider that the Dubliner whose blood now thickens within the shadow of the Millennial Spire has been the victim of a vampire, of one of the Undead, the Legion of the Night?

Of course not - that would be silly.

Vampires in Buffy are metaphors, just as all our fiction has relied on symbolism to get its message across. Even the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church now holds that many Biblical stories are parables, and are not to be taken literally. A pity that they didn't realise this when Thomas de Torquemada was welding those hot tongs in Spain, but better late than never I suppose.

What do vampires represent? In a nutshell, vampires in Buffy represent the old fashioned concept of evil, but evil operates in a much more layered way in the Buffyverse than it does in the canonical vampire stories that you find in Stoker or King, or in movies ranging from Bela Lugoisi in the thirties to Kiefer Sutherland and The Lost Boys in the eighties.

The Buffyverse, that place where Sunnydale, CA, is located, where the action of Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place, is possibly unique in television in that the Buffyverse is a place where bad things happen, and where bad things happen for no reason.

This is a huge conceptual step for Buffy. TV, and especially teen TV that Buffy is mistakenly bracketed with, presents ordered universes. If you work hard, you'll get to College. Those girls that are cruel to you always get found out in the end. Your football team will win because they worked hard for it. This is buncombe - the world is not like that, the world is where you do not get to College even though you sweated blood, where the girls who are cruel at school go on to be women who are cruel in the workplace, where your football team gets stomped in the first round, even though everybody showed up at training.

This capricious world is the world that is reflected in the Buffyverse. Beloved characters, like Buffy's mother Joyce, like Willow's girlfriend Tara, die, and they die for no reason. They don't die in a noble effort to save the world, they die the same, pointless, arbitrary death that awaits us all.

The question of what are we to do in such an arbitrarily cruel world is the question that is addressed by existential philosophers since the nineteenth century. Friedrich Nietzche thought that we must decide whether we are men or supermen, and be governed or govern accordingly. Soren Kierkegaard thought that we must take a leap of faith, that we must embrace God even though we have no rational basis for believing He exists, because the alternative, the reality of our existence in a world that means nothing, is too horrifying to live with.

And then there is Albert Camus. Camus wrote The Plague about a town that is attached by a plague, and how the townspeople react. What interested Camus was: why should one live a moral life when the chief originator of morality, the Divine, is a concept that you cannot believe in?

Another way of phrasing that is: should we do our duty? What is our duty? How are we to behave in this world we are forced to share with other people?

Duty is a less than fashionable concept in our society, but duty is central to understanding what makes Buffy important. Buffy Summers is chosen, "the one girl in all the world," and she has no choice in this. This is her duty in life, a duty she can accept, or a duty she can refuse and rebel against, as Faith, the rogue Slayer, does.

Buffy accepts. Buffy is important, Buffy matters, because life is a continual series of decisions between what's the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do. So why is Buffy so powerful in getting this message across?

Because Buffy Summers runs away.

Like Christ in Gethsemane, it all gets too much for the Slayer. Buffy says, in one of her truly poignant speeches in the final episode of the first ever season, "I'm sixteen years old Giles; I don't want to die."

Buffy doesn't want to be the Slayer. She wants to be a cheerleader, she wants to be Homecoming Queen, she wants to go to ice dancing with Brian Boitano - she wants to be normal. But she cannot - she is the Slayer, the one girl in all the world chosen to fight the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness.

And this is a mantle that Buffy accepts, but she is only human, and she has limits. Four times in the seven seasons of Buffy Buffy turns tail and runs. Buffy runs away after killing Angel at the end of Season Two. Buffy becomes catatonic when she realises that she cannot defeat Glory in the third last episode of Season Five, the greatest season of Buffy. Buffy finds the notion that she's a mental patient in a hospital in Los Angeles and that her entire Sunnydale existence as the Slayer is a delusion more appealing than living her actual life in a harrowing episode in Season Six. And most significantly of all, when Buffy dives to her death in the final episode of Season Five, she is not just saving the world - she is walking away from her role in it. Buffy Summers has been the Slayer for five years - she's had enough, and she wants to rest.

What is this if not our natural reaction to the reverses of the world in which we live? This continual struggle to do the right thing even when we're not always sure what the right thing is. The fact that we, like the Slayer, are fundamentally alone when it comes to the big decisions in our life. When push comes to shove, we are alone, and we must stand alone against our fate, using only such character and courage as time and breeding have left us with.

So, if the Buffyverse is so bleak, why isn't Ray Winstone playing the Slayer, and Ingmar Bergman directing? How can any human being, exhausted after a hard day's work, be expected to be able to stomach such a bleak world after a long day at the office and a hellish commute home?

Because of the quality of the writing. In writing, subtlety and nuance are all. It is the difference between being told and being shown, between knowledge and understanding, between being caressed by an angel and being wrassled by a bear.

The standard of writing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is such that even the writers are hailed by fans, in direct contradiction to the Hollywood starlets' axiom that you should never sleep with a writer, as nobody cares what the writers think.

The writers have been hailed for the hipness of their dialogue, for the constant pop-culture references, for the neologisms such as five-by-five, the uses of -age and -y as suffixes, and for the continually high standard of the jokes ("Did your whole life flash before your eyes? Cup o' tea, cup o' tea, nearly got a shag, cup o' tea?"). But there's more to good dramatic writing than being able to wisecrack. Good dramatic writing consists of excellent dialogue yes, but it must also further develop our understanding of the characters and do so in a naturalistic way in a medium that is obviously not natural.

Consider this exchange between Buffy and Spike from midway through Season Six, the episode titled "Hell's Bells." Buffy has been in a relationship with Spike, but she breaks it off. They meet at Xander and Anya's wedding, to which Spike has brought a date:



CLOSE ON BUFFY, who is about to go get Anya and Xander to start the wedding. She stops when she sees Spike across the room, alone. His "date" nowhere to be found. She moves to him.

SPIKE
Hello, Buffy.

BUFFY
Hey.

SPIKE
Happy occasion. You meet my friend?

BUFFY
Haven't met. She seems like a very nice attempt at making me jealous.

SPIKE
Is it working?

Buffy looks at him a moment.

BUFFY Yes. It doesn't change anything, but if you're wildly curious, yeah, it hurts.

SPIKE
(genuine)
I'm sorry. Or...
(bravado)
Good!
(genuine)
You want us to go?

BUFFY
No, no... I mean, you have the right to... I mean I pretty much deserve...

SPIKE
That's not true, you... God this is hard.

BUFFY
I know.

SPIKE
I think we'll go.

BUFFY
Go where? To your place?

SPIKE
Yeah I suppose... that was the idea.

BUFFY
Yeah.

SPIKE
Evil.

BUFFY
Of course.

SPIKE
But I won't. Or I... I'll just go. Give 'em my best or whatever. The happy couple.

BUFFY
I will.

SPIKE
It's nice, watching you be happy. For them, even. I don't see it a lot. You, um... you glow.

BUFFY
That's because my dress is radioactive.

She sees activity nearby.

BUFFY (cont'd)
I should...

SPIKE
Yeah...

They turn to go--

SPIKE (cont'd)
But it hurts.

BUFFY
Yeah.

SPIKE
(very quiet.)
Thanks.

She watches him go off to his date.

BUFFY
(just as quiet)
Welcome.



The "welcome" at the end, delivered by Sarah Michelle Gellar in just above a whisper, is perfect. What a fabulous show this is.

Television is the epic form of our day. The realistic novel is all but extinct. Poetry hasn't had an epic since Milton, and hasn't had a poet of real stature since Yeats at before World War Two. Film and television are the chief art forms of our day, the fora where creative people try to get their message across to as broad a constituency as they can reach. Television is not epic in scope, but in actual length, in minutes.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons, a total of 156 episodes. Allowing for forty-five minutes an episode, to watch the entire canon of Buffy would take four days and one night. It is impossible to watch four days' television continually and enjoy it. The writing can only lag, as every season will have its fillers, and there will be episodes were the standard dropped a little. It is only those who were lucky enough to turn on to Buffy first, or those with sufficient willpower to ration their Buffy allocation into reasonable chunks, that will be able to look past the poor episodes (the awful Buffy meets Dracula, the brave but flawed musical episode, the dreaded Riley Finn era, the sad fact that Buffy should really have ended after Season Five and the two subsequent seasons are best understood as coda to the series) and see that, in the seven years that she was with us, Buffy Summers was the one girl chosen in the all the world to fight the demons, the vampires and the forces of brainwashing and lowest-common-denominatorism in TV scheduling.

She was the Slayer, and this why Buffy matters.

See Rap

I see where the suits of the Atlanta Falcons American Football team are in a tizzy over their half-time entertainment during a game against Philadelphia last Sunday. According to a report in today's Sports Illustrated, a rapper named Bonecrusher didn't sing about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens - he preferred to give the people a fairly graphic description of what it's like one fellow shoots another fellow in the head.

It's not that nice, apparently.

Anyway, the Falcons are a bit shocked at this. Beats me why - rap has been banging on with the same stuff since it first came on the scene. Whenever rappers are asked about their propensity to glamourise violence, to persistently and doggedly refer to women as bitches and hos, they always looked quite shocked, and explain to the interview that he or she doesn't understand. The rapper is merely in character - he is rapping a part, he is sharing with a his audience a visceral but very real insight into urban life, into what it's like on the streets.

Yeah. How come then it's always the same character that the rappers portray? When Bonecrusher or Youngbloodz get on stage to rap about a sensitive gay boy growing up in the projects, dreaming about getting his poetry published and wearing taffeta, well, I'll be very surprised.

Indomitable Irishry

If George Smyth is going to wear a perfectly enormous handle on his head, I don’t see for one second why he should be surprised if an opposition tackler takes a good strong hold of it.

Smyth is a beautiful rugby player. The man is an animal in the best sense. The changes in the game have reduced one of the great traditional confrontations of rugby, the bullying of the stand off half by the openside flanker, almost to a thing of the past, but old men like Ian Kirkpatrick and Frik du Preez and Fergus Slattery must have had their hearts gladdened when Smyth came roaring off the scrum to ding Irish outhalf Ronan O’Gara good.

And then he did it again. Australia were bossing Ireland completely on Saturday evening in Melbourne, and it looked for a long time (twenty minutes that were as twenty years to the indomitable Irishry) as though the Australians were going to run riot.

And then Brian O’Driscoll hauled Smyth to the turf and the world came tumbling around Australia as a result.

O’Driscoll was penalised for the tackle, as by the letter of the law it was high. But it was a statement of intent, and that intent, to wire it up to the Australians, was carried out by some of the outstanding Irish rugby footballers of their generation, if not ever. O’Driscoll himself had become a target of ridiculous criticism in some quarters of the Irish media, but it never bothered him. It would be easy for a player of O’Driscoll’s stature to become a Luis Figo clone, there for the glory and absent for the work, but Brian O’Driscoll is and has been one of the most consistent tacklers on the Irish team. The talent was always in him and he knew it, and it’s one of the signs of a great player that he does his funky stuff on the great stages. Great players aren’t going to bothered playing for Old Leftfooterstone’s against the President’s XV, but show them the world champions and then slip their leash, and see what havoc will result.

So it was with O’Driscoll. The try from nothing, the most beautiful ugly drop goal of the tournament, and the constant smashing, jarring tackles all over the field of engagement. Add in the pulling of Georgie’s pigtails and the day was almost perfect.

O’Driscoll was not alone. Simon Easterby came of age at blindside flanker. Paul O’Connell bestrides the rugby world like a colossus, one of the stars of the 2003 World Cup. The Bull Hayes is taking over the Claw’s ermine mantle. Kevin Maggs is the unsung hero of the team, but the greatest and bravest and the finest was, is and has been since 1994, the gallant Irish captain, Keith Wood.

This is Wood’s last hurrah, and if old Henry Devil were to rise out of the fiery pit of Hell, Keith Wood would still put down the head and charge. Wood is magnificent. He’s in more places than McCavity the Mystery Cat, and he even kicks. When Ireland’s World Cup comes to an end as it surely must, Keith Wood will walk into the sunset and there will be a void that cannot be filled. Ní bheidh a leithid arís ann.

When the World Cup ends though, is an interesting one. Ireland lost more than a chance to bloody an Aussie nose on Saturday in Melbourne – they lost the easy route to the semi finals, over a dead-but-not-fallen-over Scotland in a quarter-final in Brisbane. Now they must journey through the representatives of that land of Mordor where they drink wine instead of porter, where they eat snails instead of bacon, and on whom your correspondent has invested his ten lids to win the William Webb Ellis trophy.

France start as fourteen point favourites to beat Ireland at an hour when all right thinking Irishmen and Irishwomen will be sitting up in front of their TVs, shivering with the porter sweats. Eddie O’Sullivan is getting annoyed at the plucky Irish tag and rightly so – Ireland have only lost three of their last twenty-one games including three out of four against the French themselves, and are deserving of more than a fighting Irish cliché. Unfortunately, all fighters have limits, and there is a very great danger that this golden generation of Irish rugby players are reaching the bottom of their reserves of strength.

It should not be forgotten that the Irish were already at a disadvantage before a ball was kicked in the World Cup when they lost fullback Geordan Murphy to a broken leg. Now a torn Achilles tendon has cost them Dennis Hickie. Both two of the great attacking players in World Rugby, both men who would walk onto any side. This hugely reduces their scoring threat.

Also, the Irish back row play has been unconvincing, and now that back row must face the Three Musketeers of French loose forward play, the supreme talents of the evergreen Olivier Magne and Serge Betsen, and the terrifying sorcerer’s apprentice at Number 8, Imanol Hardinordoquy. It’s a big ask for any team to face that sort of forward talent, with Fabien Galthie to orchestrate wave after wave of French attack over the no-man’s land that the Musketeers have claimed as their own, but Ireland still have a chance. It’s a slim one, but it exists.

A friend of An Spailpin is convinced that big Donnacha O’Callaghan could be the answer at Number Eight. Why Donnacha? In a nutshell, because he’s a broth of an Irish boy. The fighting Irish tag might be a cliché, but the fact is there is a considerable amount of divil in Big Donnacha, and he could cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war if he got amongst some Frenchmen who really haven’t been tested in the fire so far in this World Cup.

It’s probably too much of a reach – that last minute drop goal that sailed right and wide in Melbourne’s dying minutes probably took the Irish hopes with it. But whatever happens this Irish team, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter are united behind him them now. If they die, they die on their feet. Roll on Sunday.