zotz | So farewell then, Myra Hindley . . .

. . . a woman who should have received an OBE many years ago for services to the British newspaper industry. A generation of tabloid journalists are going to have to find a new meal ticket. Who or what will they dine out on now? One last splurge of stories and sales, and then Murdoch-et-al's minions are going to have to start working for a living.

A sorry sorry day.

This is the sort of thing weird French philosophers go on about. If he lived here, Baudrillard would be saying that the Moors Murders never happened. When (inevitably) challenged, of course, he'd explain that what he meant was that the media coverage had created an illusory awareness of the "Moors Murders" that was vastly more intense and common than awareness of the actual events, and far enough from the truth that it would be true to say that it didn't happen. This only goes to show that nobody who grows up with French as a first language should be allowed to indulge in philosophy - put the second way it's accurate.

The Grauniad is running a picture of Hindley today - but not the standard photograph. As befits the newspaper of trendy pseudointellectuals (Hi mom!) they have a photo of Marcus Harvey's portrait from an exhibition ("Sensations"?) at the Royal Academy a couple of years back. This picture, made using a stamp cast from a child's hand, also caused a media furore and earned huge amounts for the proprietors of tabloid papers - the same papers who had made Hindley's face so iconic in the first place. It's all so self-referential and ironic. If I was a mood to be post-modernist, I'd be celebrating this as a fantastic kitsch moment. As it is, I want to put all the journalists, editors and proprietors involved up against a wall and machine-gun them. It would be a mercy killing.