(22)

Here, via the Flickr blog, is this charming photo (click on that to see it as big as you want), which combines an ancient agricultural procedure with some much more modern civil engineering, somewhere near Treviso, in north east Italy:

Ideal circumstances, all here will surely agree, for a James Bond car chase. Goldeneye, which was shown on ITV2 last night and is on ITV2 again tonight, has a car chase early on, on just such a road. No sheep are involved, but there are cyclists. Bond didn't drive into them, like this, but he did drive past them and they all fell over.

Sadly, I think that the above road is probably too narrow for cars, and is actually a bespoke sheep track. I guess that sheep, in Italy, are objects of political worship, much as cyclists are here.

(40)

The UK Film Council has been scrapped. I am not sure why it was needed. According to a Guardian article, its inclusion in the quango scrappage scheme is a catastrophe. Presumably that is luvvie hyperbole for a bad outcome. Yet, who has come to this conclusion. Tony Hayward, Chief Executive of the UK Film Council. Not an impartial view then. More a biased testament of UK Film Council puffery helped by the Quango Support Group at the Guardian.

One must remember that any industry will gladly accept other people's money if it is doled out to them. It seems that the UK Film Council was indispensable, as a middleman, broking films to ministers:

History tells us that governments do not understand cultural industries: they are too complex, with too many moving parts and too many competing factions. When there was trouble in the film world, the UK Film Council acted as a translator to government and a critical friend to the industry: that function saved the film sector's bacon more than once. But no more – so in that respect, too, it's back to the dark ages.

Words missing from this epitaph include audience, profit, success, blockbuster, and popular. Another example of redistributing taxes to fund elite culture (unwatchable films) under cover of some utilitarian rationale for supporting an 'industry'. One less public sector vacancy to fill.

(17)

Germane to Michael Jennings' post below pertaining to Prince's declaration that the "Internet is completely over", I had a brief conversation with a decidedly winsome 20-something young lady, elegant yet edgy (she was a cut glass accented thoroughbred Sloane Ranger wearing 'All Saints'). She was sitting in a sandwich shop in a well-heeled part of town... expensive Apple laptop open as she availed herself of the free WiFi whilst having luncheon...

The following really happened, serious, not joking.

Samizdata Illuminatus "Did you read that Prince thinks the 'Internet is completely over''? He refuses to release any of his music on it at all"

20-Something-Young-Lady "Really? Umm... I did not even know he was a musician."

SI "Well, yes...he is. He is one of the great guitarists of our time."

20-S-Y-L "Hah, that's funny! I cannot picture that old foggy playing a guitar! I thought he just spent his time playing polo, messing with architects and hugging trees..."

SI "No, no, no, not Prince Charles... "

20-S-Y-L "Prince William? No, I am sure you must mean Harry! Oooo! Yummy Harry with a guitar!"

SI "No, the American musician called 'Prince'."

20-S-Y-L "Oh, I see. And this chap calls himself 'Prince'? That's hilarious!"

SI "He used to call himself 'Squiggle'."

20-S-Y-L "I'm sure I've never heard of him."

SI "I suddenly feel very... old'."

20-S-Y-L "I'll download something of his off Bit Torrent and see if he's any good."

I do not believe she immediately grasped the sheer transcendent irony of the moment.

(7)

Now I am usually harsh in my criticism of the National Health Service and indeed I wish to see it abolished entirely... but credit where credit is due. This was a very, er, uplifting example of 'Enterprise Thinking' by the NHS.

Carry on, Doctor!

(13)

I am addicted to the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child (I have read practically all of them). On Child's website is a nifty collection of the cover art for his novels, taken from all around the world. Cover art is a much under-rated aspect of design, in my opinion.

A few weeks ago, I got my hands on an old Ian Fleming hardback - You Only Live Twice. It is a US first edition that I bought for £25, which I reckon is a serious result. It was printed in the early 60s, and its cover is deceptively simple. (Here is a collection of all the hardback covers of that novel.) The first edition Bond novels that were released first in the UK often go for a bloody fortune. The first edition of Casino Royale will cost tens of thousands. The cover art on those novels is great.

And SF cover art is often excellent. Here are some ones I like on this link.

(62)

Over at Counting Cats, NickM uses suitably salty language to say what he thinks of the actor Jeremy Irons for coming out with "there are too many humans on the planet" sort of comments.

I am not going to add to the post in question - I am pretty certain that we have trodden this ground fairly well already - but I wanted to ask the question as to why is it, that folk in the acting profession, or at least most of them, seem to hold such statist/Greenie views? Maybe it is an impression not based on a lot of hard statistics, but I'd guess that the acting trade is disproportionately full of folk who hold these kinds of opinions. Of course, there are actors who are a bit of a break from the trend - think Michael Caine, Clint Eastwood and the playwriter, Tom Stoppard, but they are often notable for being exceptions to the rule.

Maybe it is because, as actors, they view business, and people with cash, as somehow alien. Or maybe it is because, as actors, they often take on a generally adversarial view to the prevailing culture, and for many, being adversarial is still to be left-wing, to champion things such population control, government aid to Africa, or whatever.

Or maybe it goes right back to when they were at school. They probably were not on the same wavelength, emotionally or socially, with the kind of people who excelled at hard science, or who showed a flair for business and sport. Some may even have been quite badly bullied or put upon by the school "toughs" and took a sort of view that they'd take their revenge on society by the kind of plays/films they would get involved in, or the causes they would espouse.

Like I say, this is all very impressionistic. But the weakness for certain celebrities in the acting business for such causes deserves to have a sort of Phd thesis. I wonder if one has ever been written.

(15)

My old friend, Andrew Ian Dodge, now residing in the chilly US northeastern state of Maine, has a book out, And Glory, which is set in a near future where the EU superstate is in full power (not that far off, then, Ed). He mashes up a a bit of political speculation, SciFi and good rollocking drama to make an interesting read. (As if my reading list was not long enough, aaagrrrh).

I have been thinking about who else has written books where the EU is treated as a sort of malign feature of a novel. One that springs to mind is Andrew Roberts' novel, written a few years ago, called The Aachen Memorandum. I am a fan of Roberts the historian, so this hopefully would be a good read. Sometimes the EU crops up in the science fiction books of Ken Macleod, as in Cosmonaut Keep. And I recall that Peter Hamilton made some glancing, and unflattering references, to the EU in this recent novel, which was quite enjoyable, albeit with a rather unpleasant central character.

Of course, writing any speculative novel about the European Union carries the risk that reality keeps overtaking the story line. I mean, I wonder if either the two Andrews mentioned here or Ken would have envisaged the idea of a German politician suggesting that Greece flog off some of its islands to pay down its debt?

And as an aside, Henry Porter, the British journalist and scourge of this government over its dreadful civil liberties record, also had a novel out recently that I can recommend for mixing a powerful message and a cracking good storyline.

If commenters can think of other novels where there is an EU angle, let me know.

(13)

Rob Fisher, another occasional commenter at our threads who has his own blog, has this to say about a new TV show about border security guards (yes, that's right). On the basis of his comment, I think I will be watching the rest of Mad Men instead.

(7)

I bought a number of pirated DVD's in Malaysia recently and they all include unskippable piracy messages at the start. ...

- A commenter, who unsurprisingly preferred to remain anonymous, contributes to a discussion about how the crap at the beginning of legally purchased DVDs makes pirated DVDs, provided they are of sufficient quality, a happier watching experience. Not always, it would seem. I now copy all my DVDs from the television.

(5)

Over at the Adam Smith Institute blog is this nice item on a recent performance of s Tom Stoppard play, touching on the themes of oppression under the old Soviet Union. Apparently, as the ASI commenter notes, this makes some theatre reviewers a bit sniffy, since all this stuff about the USSR is so, well, dated, dahling. As the blog points out, it is not. The kind of issues that arose under the Soviet Empire are as relevant now as they were during the Cold War. Some of the names have changed a bit, that's all.

Talking of dramatists, here is an old post of mine about David Mamet, who has had a bit of a Road to Damascus political conversion.

(25)

Read about it here. Victorious Afghan Hamid Hassan blogs about it here:

After the match, I had to go to do a post-match media conference and they all wanted to know how it felt to beat USA, but the opposition didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to win another cricket match.

I love getting the chance to play against different countries and this was the first time we had ever played USA in an international match. I could never have dreamed when I was young, that I would one day play them in a cricket game.

I am a big fan of American television and movies and my favourite film is Rocky – I vividly remember watching it when I was growing up – and one of my heroes is Sylvester Stallone.

I think that there is a similarity in the story of Rocky and the Afghanistan cricket team – we both started at the bottom and gradually made our way up the rankings. ...

Gradually? I thought Rocky did it with one fight.

Seriously though, it's fun to see a guy so gripped by the American ideal of the common man excelling, and as a result ... defeating America.

The way Hamid Hassan writes about Rocky and Silvester Stallone and so on makes me also think of this piece, about how the imminent decline into relative insignificance of the USA is once again being oversold, in which Joshua Kurlantzick says:

Most important, the United States is a champion of an idea that has global appeal, and Asia is not.

Although my part of the blogosphere is very anti-Obama just now, what with Obama seemingly hell-bent on ruining the USA's economy, the rise of Obama to being President of the USA must look like a very similar kind of story to Rocky, if you are someone like Hamid Hassan.

(7)

This is an amazing example of one those archetypal political processes, which happens when a regime that still commands the present nevertheless manages to lose all control of the future:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail. They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move. They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

Recently a posting of mine here about an SD card was honoured by a re-run in the comments of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, where they take it in turns to boast with ever greater ferocity about the awfulness of their childhoods, or in this case about the vast expense and extreme non-capaciousness of their very first hard discs. You mean you had a hard disc? - We dreamed of having a hard disc, etc.

Soon, Iran will be entertained with similar jokery, in which Four Iranian Ex-Oppositionists indulge in similarly competitive boasting about their hellish sufferings under the previous regime, thereby justifying their subsequent social and political elevation.

Sadly, they may not need to exaggerate.

(6)

Pure genius.

By the way, here is an old post I did about a superb spoof on 1970s education programmes, which convey a similar sort of feel to some of those old Cold War public information items.

(16)

We should not forget, here in the UK, that dislike of the state-financed broadcasting network of the BBC has been going on for some time. Here is Kingsley Amis, the author and lecturer, writing in 1984:

"In television, as in other departments of national life, the consumer, the customer, the purchaser, is faced wiith a semi-benign semi-conspiracy to foist on him what is thought to be good for him, what other people consider he ought to have, instead of what he naturally prefers. In short, the public is brought education when it wants entertainment."

The point, however, is that the focus on entertainment has arguably increased since the late Mr Amis wrote those words back in the era of Mrs Thatcher. As a consequence, the paternalistic intentions of the creators of the BBC have been frustrated to a remarkable degree. When Amis commented on the BBC, he at least was part of a country in which it was assumed that the BBC's controllers felt that they had some sort of mission to educate and inform - not that this justified coercive funding even then. But the paternalism was at least fairly blatant. Now even that sense of mission appears to be more evident in the breach rather than the observance. The contradictions posed by the BBC's funding model are unendurable.

The quote is taken from The Amis Collection, page 257, published in 1990. I am not sure if the book is still in print.

(47)

"The final irony, of course, is that this entrancing vision of prelapsarian innocence is the product of the most ruthless and sophisticated money-machine the world has ever seen. With a budget of $237 million and with takings already at £1 billion, this exquisite capitalist guilt trip represents one of the great triumphs of capitalism."

- Boris Johnson, in fine form today, on the movie Avatar. I wonder if his mockery of Eden-worship among prosperous, middle and upper class Westerners is a veiled dig at David Cameron.

I am still trying to find a spare evening to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. It may not be for purists, but it sounds terrific. I don't think I will waste my cash on Mr Cameron's (no relation to the Tory Party leader) latest flick.

(6)

Elvis would have been 75 today. I remember the day he died, and he was a megastar way before I was a twinkle in my mother's eye. But I watched a couple of TV shows last night about him, featuring some of his performances, and even with the grainy old TV, some of that amazing charisma comes across.

(56)

I pretty much endorse this list, over at Big Hollywood, of the 10 worst films of the past 10 years, although I am sure Samizdata readers will come up with some more for their own lists. I did not see No Old Country For Old Men, which is one of the derided films on the list, but the way that certain reviewers wrote about it, meant I just knew it was the sort of pretentious, nihilistic waste of several hours that the writer in the article I have linked to said it was. Plus I happen to think the Coen brothers are a bit over-rated anyway, although I quite enjoyed Fargo.

As for the best 10 films of the past decade, name your choices. For my part, I would say that two films I saw last year - The Wrestler and Gran Torino - deserve to be on such a list. Here are my other choices:

The Aviator - the biopic of Howard Hughes.

Serenity - Okay, it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series first, but even so, a fine film.

Casino Royale - Despite some flaws, it marked a triumphant reboot of 007 on the screen. Ian Fleming would have approved.

Sideways - A funny comedy set in California's wine country. My tour of Napa and Sonoma was not quite as eventful.

Spirited Away - Proof that Miyazaki remains one of the world's greatest animators and film artists.

The Incredibles - I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The "designer" character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand.

Gladiator - "Upon my signal, unleash hell". The film that made Russell Crowe a megastar.

The Lives of Others - Brilliant film set in former East Germany, demonstrating the utter evil that is done in the name of the "surveillance state".

(38)

(1) A Cathay Pacific Flight between Hong Kong and Sydney - July 1987

Michael's mother: "I would like a Coke"
Michael "I would like a Coke, too
Flight attendant "Ah… Two".
(Three glasses of Coca-Cola arrive soon afterwards).

(2) An expat bar in Maputo, Mozambique - February 2007.

Michael: "Two-Em", please. Michael points to a beer tap marked "2M". Of course, the name of the beer is actually pronounced "Dos-Em", this being a Portuguese speaking country. The number "Two" is understood, as English is probably the predominant language spoken by expats in Maputo, which is unsurprising given the nature of the world and the proximity to South Africa. However, the beer is named "Dos-Em". That is different.

Two beers are thus placed in front of Michael. He smiles, and hands over a large enough banknote to pay for both of them.

(3) A (literally) underground music club, Cluj-Napoca, Romania - December 2009.

A heavy metal band has been followed by a slightly less heavy metal guitar band with a (good) female lead singer. This is definitely Dale Amon's sort of place. Michael is sitting at a table. He is approached by a waitress.

Michael: "Timisoreana, thanks". Timisoreana is a beer from the beautiful city of Timisoara, perhaps a hundred clicks away, but the beer is widely available throughout Transylvania.
Waitress: "Da". Romanian is a Romance Language, but contains a lot of vocabulary from the Slavic languages, including the word for yes. Given the history and ethnic composition of the country, it probably contains a fair few Germanic and Finno-Uguric words too, but I am not expert enough to know for sure. Michael sits for about two minutes. Another waitress approaches. She says something in Romanian, which Michael does not understand but undoubtedly translates as "What can I get you?"
Michael: "I have already been served by somebody else"
Waitress: "Ah, Ursus". Ursus is a beer produced locally in the city of Cluj Napoca, which (like Timisoreana, and for that matter 2M) belongs to the giant multinational brewing leviathan SAB Miller. The brewery does a rather good dark beer, too. The German ethnic minority have left their mark on this part of Europe. Michael waits another two minutes. Two waitresses return, more or less simultaneously, one with a Timosoreana, and the other with an Ursus. They look at one another in slight confusion. Michael smiles as broadly as possible - not generally difficult when faced with young Romanian women - pays a ridiculously small sum of money to each of them, and finds himself with two beers.

This sort of thing might happen slightly less frequently if I were not a monolingual Anglophone. Or perhaps not. And if it did, I am not sure if it would make things more or less fun. But I love traveling, and one of the most important principles of my kind of traveling is that it is important to have mastered the ancient Confucian principle of going with the flow.

And the problem of having accidentally purchased two beers instead of one is generally a relatively easy one to deal with.

(25)

Anything that p*sses off the mad mullahs is worth seeing twice in my book. In addition to seeing cool special effects you can set 10th century heads spinning in blind hatred as you enjoy a doomsday fantasy!

(4)

The "watermelons" - green on the outside, red on the inside - can sometimes be uncomfortable elements, prone to occasional frictions. The old left, with all its many faults, did at least favour industry and material wealth. And the cause of wealth creation can clash with the Green agenda, though let it be noted that the best way to tackle environmental problems, in my view, is for us to get as rich as we can.

Well it seems that the liberal-leftist film director and actor, Robert Redford, has caused some sharp intakes of breath among the climate change alarmists by airing a "denialist" movie at his Sundance TV channel.

Enjoy!

(H/T: Big Hollywood).

An earlier version of this item referred to the Sundance Festival, not the TV channel. My error.

(8)

Wise words have been heard coming from the lips of someone in the acting profession, to wit multi-talented MILF action babe Milla Jovovich.

"I think parents need to take a lot more responsibility than they do about whether it's OK for their children to go to Resident Evil or any other movie with violence or sex or whatever. It's really easy to blame Hollywood for violence having an effect on kids, but movies would have no power if parents would just set their own standards. And it's the same with video games."

Common sense of course and that she had to even say this is an indication of the extent to which civil society has decayed. Violent art forms are as old as art itself.

(63)

It's no secret. No secret at all. Every second or third blog I read has stuff about it. Film Director Roman Polanksi (Repulsion, The Pianist) did something bad of a rape-like nature to a teenage girl several decades ago, and lived in Europe from then on.

But now they are going to extradite him or not as the case may be, from France or Switzerland (somewhere European), and big cheese lists of Hollywood big cheeses are saying he's a great artist and therefore regular morals and laws and suchlike don't apply to him, ease up, forget about it, freedom of artistic expression, it wasn't really rape ("rape-rape" as Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, Girl, Interrupted, Rat Race) has famously put it), it was her fault, it was her mother's fault, it was the judge's fault, blah blah, and the rest of us are saying: bullshit you evil bastards.

If you care about the details you now know them. I care about the details, a bit, and I too am of the bullshit you evil bastards tendency. Not my point here. No, what interests me about this ruckus is how the internet has so completely changed the rules of such debates, and so completely wrong-footed the big cheese evil bastard team.

Twenty years ago, regular people had opinions, but no obvious way to express them, unless they were paid to do it, or were obsessive opinion-mongers the way I was. But even I, an amateur opinion-monger more obsessive than most, had no easy way to say what I thought about the Roman Polanski thing. I had vaguely heard that he had been accused of something sexually bad and was being chased around the world by American cops, but so what? What was I going to do about it? Sit down and write a Legal and/or Cultural Notes piece for the Libertarian Alliance? Well maybe, but frankly, I didn't care to do that. Spend too long trawling through the details of some rape case on the other side of the world, and you risk being thought a bit too interested in the raping (or whatever it was) of underage (if that's what she was) girls yourself. Writing for the Libertarian Alliance in those days meant either writing something a bit serious, of some length, digging into all the details and making sure to get them right, or writing nothing at all. So, for practical purposes, I was in the same position as all those people in pubs saying: "How about that Roman Polanski then? What's that about? No, I don't know the details either. Hollywood eh? Nice work if you can get it. Well, anyway, who cares what we think, fancy another pint?"

At the time, and for many years since, I too guessed that it may well not have been "rape-rape". That is, I guessed that maybe this was one of those furores where the legal age limit had definitely been transgressed (hence the fuss being made by all those puritanical US cops and judges), and Polanski was indeed a bit creepily old, but that otherwise, well, whatever turns you on and whatever you agree to. Silly girls in Hollywood will consent to all sorts of stuff to get their careers cranked up, and it should be their choice. But more fundamental to my point here: I didn't know, and I didn't care to go to the trouble of finding out. Me and millions of others.

The internet has changed all that. What the internet supplies is a vastly higher class of gossip. Before the internet, finding a piece which listed what you considered to be all the pertinent facts of a complicated, foreign and creepy matter such as this one could take weeks, and the chances were that if you really, really wanted a piece like that, you'd have to write it yourself, and risk being branded a creep yourself. Which would anyway probably never be read by anybody in significant numbers. Too creepy. Now, a few links, and you have all the facts you want.

Facts like: she was thirteen, rather than sixteen or seventeen. Facts like: he drugged her. Facts like: She said no!! Several times!!!! In every respect short of the use of a chair leg or crowbar and there being blood all over the place alongside all the other rape-fluids, this was most definitely rape-rape, and we all now know it.

All over the world, blog postings and think pieces like this one, this one, and this one, and of course this one, are now being penned - in America, by people who have long doubted the accuracy and quality of the Hollywood moral compass, all over Europe, by people who don't want it thought that all Europeans are as "sophisticated" as their damned Culture Ministers are about child rape, and all over the world by people who think that child rape is wrong, dammit.

Who the hell knows what should have been done about all those damned collapsing banks? Who's fault was that? What does that all mean? Not even the internet can sort that out for you in half an hour. But it can sure as hell tell you in fifteen minutes what bloody Roman bloody Polanski did to that poor girl, and admitted to doing to that poor girl, and how old she was, and how she said no no no no no, and it can tell you that it was wrong, and that he should be punished, and that how long it takes to catch him and how good or crappy The Pianist was are absolutely not the issues, and that if Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, Shine a Light) thinks otherwise then Martin Scorsese, fine film maker though he may well be, is a piece of shit who deserves to have his moral compass wrapped around his neck.

It took me way less than two hours, in among boiling a couple of eggs, having a couple of coffees, setting the video to record the Japanese Grand Prix, listening with a half an ear to Martinu's Sixth Symphony, and scanning several other things on the internet that I've already forgotten about, to say all that. Having read and thought, a bit, I then wrote and posted it, a bit, in, for all practical purposes, no time at all, and it's now being read by Americans, maybe even including Instapundit, and maybe even including Martin Scorsese's press agent. A comment on some other think piece or blog posting would only have taken me a minute or two, as many, many others have been demonstrating. It's a different world, my friends.

A final point. Not every member of the Sophisticated Class is being as dumb about this as a lot of them are. Luc Besson, it seems, is not on any of those stupid bastards lists:

But support was not universal; Luc Besson, a prominent French film director and producer, was not on the list, though he describes himself as a Polanski friend.

“This is a man who I love a lot and know a little bit,” Mr. Besson said in a radio interview with RTL Soir. “Our daughters are good friends. But there is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone. I will let justice happen.”

Well said.

(14)

Even though I dislike most Oliver Stone films, Wall Street is one of my favourites, precisely because the "Greed is Good" speech is essentially correct even if the word "greed" is a bit misleading. Which is why I might just take a risk and watch this sequel when it hits the UK.

(10)

"Part of me hopes that Michael Moore’s movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars and that he suddenly wakes up from the slumber of logic he has been in for many years while the opportunity to choose to help the downtrodden and poor has passed him by. But I now see what Moore truly is in a different light, and success will only encourage him to lie to more people and mislead them about the opportunities that await them, should they only dream. After all, he’s a rich and powerful capitalist. The same thing he’s teaching his audience to hate. Irony, in a word."

Michael Wilson, who has made a film about the rotund limousine socialist. If he ever imagines Mr Moore, a truly revolting character, is likely to have an epiphany when his bank account gets ever bigger, he's in for a long wait. Of course, such things do occasionally happen: to wit, the case of playwright and film-maker David Mamet.

(62)

"Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable."

Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged "comedy" programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?

Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:

"Boyle is the show's strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as "edgy" if he courts the porn market."

Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?

(14)

ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:

The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.

In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.

FFS!

(21)

James Bowman on the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, a sort of cartoon treatment of WW2:

"It is important for us to remember that those known to history as Nazis were not cartoon characters. Nor were those who fought and finally defeated them. Nor was that defeat accomplished by a gang of bloodthirsty, free-lancing American Jews in search of revenge who manage to commandeer a ludicrously implausible scheme to assassinate the entire German high command, including Hitler and Goebbels, in a small Parisian cinema by setting fire to a pile of nitrate film. I know, I know. Mr. Tarantino's are not real Nazis, any more than these are real historical events. But that doesn't seem to me enough of an excuse for them when American schoolchildren -- for whose eyes this film is principally intended -- may scarcely be supposed to know what was real."

I think I'll give the movie a miss, having never cared for any of Tarantino's output. A friend of mine once told me that he thought T's films were brilliant, but wicked, morally empty. For balance, here is a slightly more favourable review by Roderick Long.

(20)

You simply have to watch this to believe that a bit of sand could be turned into art of such emotional depth.

I am simply left speechless by the performance artistry of this young Ukranian woman.

PS: I owe many thanks to Sharon Shannon for making me aware of this.

(21)

Like his blogging Highness, Glenn Reynolds, while I love the visual cleverness of Mad Men, the TV series, and the brilliance with which this show has caught the mood of the time, I find the series rather depressing. I mean, the guys who are portrayed as "having it all" in an age of heavy smoking, drinking in the workplace, womanising and the rest seem to be, a rather depressed bunch. It is a series that certainly plays to the stereotype of business as venal and zero-sum - which is what anti-capitalists like to think it is. But these guys and gals certainly knew how to dress snazzily for work.

But whatever one thinks of the sense of life communicated by the series, Jon Hamm, who plays the main character, Don Draper, is unquestionably a compelling actor who has created one of the most memorable characters in TV drama for a long time (he certainly seems to have quite an effect on this lady). It will be interesting to see what he does next.

A thought occurs to me: Hamm makes a potentially good James Bond and even looks more like the character of Mr Fleming's books than Daniel Craig, even though the latter actor did a very good turn in Casino Royale.. But the last film, Quantum of Solace, while brilliant in its stunts, was awfully humourless and bereft of character development. And it would not be that big a shift to cast an American in the role: our Jim is an Anglosphere character, anyway.

(7)

House of Dumb is as sympathetic as ever to film director Steven Soderbergh.

It seems that the viewers of Soderbergh's latest biographical work were indeed inspired to follow the example of the subject of the movie:

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn't get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: "Yank it off, boy, what does it matter." I did so and his possessions were now mine.

(23)

A nice piece by Jesse Walker at Reason about the late Michael Jackson. I think Off the Wall was one of the first pop albums I remember listening to, and of course Thriller, with that unbelievable video, was the one that helped propel MTV as a vehicle for music. Those two records remind us not only of what a great performer Jackson was in his heyday, but also of the musical genius of Quincy Jones. Yeah baby!

I also sympathise with Jonah Goldberg, who is a bit caustic about the whole spectacle of mourning. The weirdness and the allegations of criminality that swirled around Jackson in his life are well chronicled, and should not be brushed under the carpet. And remember that people, who are unknown to all but their family, work colleagues and friends, die of heart attacks every day. The truth is, that unless we take a bet on cryonics and join the Singularity, that the Grim Reaper gets us all eventually.

(23)

This report says that the debut of the latest Star Trek movie has set box office records. I am not a big ST fan - I prefer series such as Babylon 5, Battlestar G., Firefly and so on, but the trailer for the new film looks pretty good.

(24)

Michael Caine, one of the UK's best-known actors, is thinking of emigrating due to the UK government's recent decision to impose a new, top-rate income tax of 50 per cent, which once other changes are taken into account, will be nearer 65 per cent. Iain Martin, writing in the Daily Telegraph story that I linked to, points out how Caine is just one of the more recognisable examples of the sort of person looking to hit the exits. It is often useful, if one's constitution is strong enough, to read the Daily Telegraph comments sections these days, which are sometimes even worse than those of the Guardian. Several people moan about Iain Martin's article that the 76-year-old actor has made his fortune so he should shut up and be grateful, etc. How lovely. The fact is that Caine, while he may not employ philosophical abstractions to denounce the looting intent of such a tax rise, is at root repelled not by the economic stupidity of such a tax hike, but its essential injustice. What a top-rate tax like this says, in effect, is that no-one should be allowed to rise above a certain level of wealth because it might make others envious. It makes a mockery of all that progressive-leftist talk about removing "glass ceilings" to advancement, etc.

Funnily enough, it was Caine, along with his UK film star buddy and working-class-boy-made-good pal, Sean Connery, who first legged it out of the UK back in the 1970s when the-then governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan introduced tax rates of more than 80 per cent on the "super rich". He's done it before, and he is quite prepared to leave again. Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal FC, has warned that many foreign footballers will think twice about playing in the English Premier League. No doubt football fans of a nationalistic bent may applaud this trend if it gives local players more of a chance to play for their clubs, but it arguably will roll back one of the benefits to domestic sport in having talented overseas players strut their stuff here in the UK.

It will be interesting to see whether the acting profession's traditional love affair with the Left shows the strain. I remember reading that Ray Winstone, another English East End boy to have cracked Hollywood, is running out of patience with the tax situation in the UK. And a few years ago, I watched a chat show when David McCallum, who used to star in the 1960s Man From Uncle TV series, vowed that he would only return to the UK when it spurned socialism. And for whatever reason Peter Sellers or Richard Burton chose to live in the Switzerland, it was not for the cuckoo clocks.

(11)

Roderick Long links to some good material about The Watchmen, both of the graphic novel and film made out of it. I saw the film at an IMAX cinema a few weeks ago. Stupendous in some ways; very violent, an interesting morality tale to boot. And not to mention one of the hottest female heroines I have ever seen and er, a blue guy in the buff. (A girl sitting next to me went bright red watching the enhanced Dr Manhattan and she got such a fit of the giggles that it proved dangerously infectious).

Here is a pretty good collection of reviews.

Mr Long also has wise words on the Tea Parties. Talking of which, here are some related thoughts from Maine.

(13)

"There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers."

David Thompson.

(17)

The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday's Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.

But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:

The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).

Yes, that's certainly how I remember the story.

. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.

I don't think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis's plot are strange. "Modernising Labour governments" think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can - capitalism.

See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.

(9)

I came across this fine tribute website to John D. MacDonald, the writer of many crime/mystery novels, most of which were set in the area around Florida, the Bahamas and Caribbean. If you have not come across his writings, which are a sort of mixture of Lee Child, with a twist of Raymond Chandler, a shot of Ian Fleming, a light coating of Eric Ambler and a tincture of Robert Parker, then you should correct that oversight. One thing I love about these old 1950s and 1960s novels is the artwork on the covers. I love those "pulp" covers with pictures of hot dames, tough private eyes, guns, boats, gambling cards with smudges of coffee or whiskey on them. There is a whole genre of design and artwork that went into making these covers that deserves more credit than it usually gets.

Even today, the MacDonald books, especially his Travis McGee stories, which later got a hilarious echo in the crime capers - also set in southern Florida - of Karl Hiaasen - read as freshly and sharply today as when they were first written. Reading them makes me want to jump on a plane and head on down south for a spot of marlin fishing off the Keys. Bliss.

(13)

I am not exactly a great fan of Richard Curtis' films - here is a hilarious spoof of the film, Notting Hill - but this looks like a bit of fun to watch. Radio Caroline, the radio station that was based on an old lightship vessel off the Suffolk/Essex coast in the 1960s, embodied that glorious, British two-fingered gesture at overweening authority that, when allied to a bit of entrepreneurial dash, often explains the rise of many a business sector. It is hard to believe that in a world where radio was dominated by the BBC, that listeners to rock and pop music of the time had to resort to listening to stuff broadcast by a bunch of sea-sick DJs on a boat. Radio Caroline, alas, closed in 1967 when the BBC unveiled what was to become its Radio 1 station. On the television last night, the-then government minister who presided over the old monopoly, the "national treasure", Tony Benn, claimed that shutting the station was necessary since the buccaneering RC station was "messy". It is an example of the Soviet mindset that lurks beneath the infantile grin of that old man.

There are obvious parallels with the current assault on the citadels of the MSM by Internet-based writers and broadcasters. As Patri Friedman, grandson of the great Milton Friedman, prepares to head out East to tell us all about seasteading, the story of how a group of DJs briefly enlivened the airwaves via the North Sea is very timely.

Meanwhile, on the whole subject of radio and the rebellion against state-backed monopolists like the BBC, here is a good American perspective from Reason magazine's Jesse Walker. Recommended.

(4)

I do not like all of Will Farrell's movies. But this one, about a nutty US TV anchorman, is wonderful. I wonder if any actual broadcasters have ever dreamed of doing this? I bet Jeremy Paxman has.

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I guess this is an issue that will not register much outside of this little damp island of the UK, but there has been a small media flurry of interest over the amazing quiz-answering skills of a young woman, Gail Trimble, on the BBC show University Challenge. She has had the outrageous nerve of being very good at answering the questions, and worse, she smiles a bit on camera when she gets the answer correct - which is most of the time. For this, she has been variously attacked for being "smug" etc. It makes me wonder why those who are offended by signs of intelligence bother to watch the programme in the first place. Surely fare such as Celebrity Big Brother might be more their style. They are welcome to it.

As humans, we surely have evolved as creatures to feel pride and happiness in accomplishment. The first human probably grinned when he figured out how to shape the perfect flint arrowhead. Pride, and showing happiness at cracking a problem, overcoming an obstacle or winning a prize is not just right, it is natural to any person of healthy self respect. Pride is the reward one gets for achieving something of value. Smugness or arrogance are unfair charges to make in this sense. Of course, there is a lot more to life than being able to store lots of facts and figures in one's head and answer correctly to a bumptious quizmaster such as Jeremy Paxman, but I find the attacks on this pleasant young lady to suggest a lack of comfort with intellectual accomplishment that is rampant in parts of our culture. In fact, those who wished that the lady could look stony-faced or even miserable are showing a level of aggression, even hatred, for accomplishment. And that I think speaks to a neurotic condition that the abusers of this woman might like to reflect on.

And then again, I will openly confess to having a weakness for brunettes with brains and a cultivated voice. I see the young lady has a few male admirers on the web. Good for her.

(12)

The movie "Pride and Predator" has just gone into production. And yes, the plot is exactly what you think it is.

(8)

This is on my Amazon wish-list. I love the mad, over-the-top style of the late Terry Thomas and from a young age, was delighted by his crazy turns of phrase, his hilarious demeanor and wonderful portrayal of the upper class cad. I must say that every time I am unfortunate enough to see Gordon Brown, The Community Organiser or Sarkozy on the television, it is hard not to shout out in true TT style: "What an absolute shower!"

Where did the expression "absolute shower" come from, by the way?

(4)

Taking a break from the financial tsunami and idiotic politicians, here are some wonderful infra-red photos. (Via David Thompson).

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The UK's National Gallery - a state-backed institution - and galleries in Scotland have secured £50 million to pay to keep a Titian painting "for the nation", using state - taxpayer's money - for this purpose. A Scottish Labour MP has criticised the use of taxpayers' funds on this painting, arguing that such money would be better spent on supporting arts eduction for school children instead. The story is here. Naturally, the idea that a work of art that has been loaned by its owner is private property and should not be thought of as a something that belongs to "the nation" is not addressed in the article I link to, since that is outside the intellectual frame of reference either of the arts bureaucrats who spend this public money, or indeed the Labour MP who criticises them.

Leave aside the hopefully temporary problems posed by the credit crunch. For the past decade or so, there has been a huge amount of money swirling around among the rich and even not-so-rich to be spent on the arts. There is no need, in my view, for a penny of taxpayer's money to be spent on the arts. Leave aside whether you love or loathe the things that public funds are used to support: the point is that these things should not be receiving tax-raised funds at all. Let the rich of today patronise what budding Titians, Raphaels or Turners that might be out there.

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I occasionally will read a big novel, such as a "classic", because I think that it is a mark of a reasonably intelligent person to be on nodding terms with some of the high points of our literature, although I often wimp out and pick up an old R. A. Heinlein or the latest John Varley science fiction novel instead. But I certainly do accept that there is nothing more tedious than plodding through acres of text as if it were somehow proof of moral virtue or literary stamina. Tolstoy's War and Peace is a bit like climbing the North face of the Eiger - more of an effort than I think it worthwhile making right now. And James Delingpole thinks the same. His article on the late John Updike is caustic, if not disrespectful.

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One of my favourite actors, star of the great series, The Prisoner, has died. Here's a great appreciation of that cult 60s television series by the late Chris R. Tame. It goes without saying that the message of that series - the dangers of an all-encompassing state - are more relevant now than ever.

Patrick McGoohan, rest in peace.

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This guy clearly is not impressed by the recent Hollywood film about 'Che' Guevara, which I will not be watching:

I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives.

The quote was seen at the blog of David Thompson.

I have said it before and I will repeat: for all its possible charms, I am not setting foot in Cuba until it becomes a haven of capitalist decadence. Not a minute before. Even if that means paying more for cigars and the booze.

Here is a film about Cuba, starring Andy Garcia, which is much more worthwhile.

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A victory has been achieved in the fight against the disgracefully threatening letters sent by the BBC's TV Licensing arm. The company responsible for sending the letters, Proximity London, was fired by the BBC on Friday after it was found that millions of letters had contained false statistics.

(46)

I love the Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle book, Lucifer's Hammer, which is in my view the best "disaster book" every written.

What is your favourite disaster movie/book?

(7)

Check out this site for some superb photographs.

I was going to think of something profound to say about the news headlines, but every time I read the words "Gordon Brown" these days, a small part of me dies.

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Last night I watched Have I Got a Bit More News for You?, which is the extended Saturday night version of the BBC's popular current affairs and comedy quizz show. Something interesting was said, and even more interestingly, not contradicted. HIGN4Y regular Ian Hislop was commenting on the Mini- Pre- Budget that isn't really a Budget, but really is. He said that the country had got into terrible trouble because of everyone borrowing too much money. And the government's answer is that the government is going to borrow lots more money. General derision, and no contradictions from anybody. I don't know what Germaine Greer's economic policy prejudices are, but going by her other opinions, I thought maybe she might make some attempt to defend the government's economic policy, if only by quickly changing the subject. No. Nothing like that.

Come to think of it, I have all this on my telly hard disc. Bear with me. Yes, here we go:

Hislop: "It's a whole package of measures to save us all! We've got into terrible trouble for years by excess borrowing, so we're going to ... borrow!!!!!" Derisive hand gesture. Derisive laughter from studio audience. "That's it, that's the whole report."

Young Comedian sitting next to Hislop: "Isn't it that we're going to be a trillion pounds in debt, after this?"

Hislop: "Yes."

Young Comedian: "That is an awful lot ... If you bring up your bank balance and it says that, you'll feel pretty crushed, I think."

Hislop: "It's bad, isn't it?"

Young Comedian: "I don't know how I'm going to make that back, Ian."

Hislop: "Well, you're young enough that you will have to make it back. We'll all be dead."

Young Comedian: "I suppose so. I thought no one else looked as worried about it as I was. What was Damien Hirst doing in the middle of that?"

Damien Hirst has been laying off art workers. When the silly price of silly art slumps, you know the economy is tanking. Later, they had a reference to the fact that the bail-out is costing us twice what World War 1 cost us. Paul Merton said that this won't be over by Christmas either, to general laughter. And, as I say, not a peep out of Germaine G about this catastrophe.

The central point is this. We borrowed far too much - Now the government says we must borrow far too much more thereby making our children and grandchildren into tax serfs - How idiotic is that? This is fast becoming the Grand Narrative here. If so, and given that the Conservatives are saying this too, that Labour melt-down is becoming a real possibility.

(5)

Today I am going to do duty as a background extra in a short vampire movie that a friend of mine is starring in. I am to be one of a number of diners in a restaurant. I won't be paid but I will be fed, and I already know that it's a very good restaurant because I've already been there before.

Today I got a look at the email sent out by the production to all whom it concerned, about today's activities. This was, for me, a glimpse into a whole new world of complexity and managerial drive. Here, just as a tiny for-instance (there are three whole pages of stuff like this), is a list of the kit that will be used by the DOP/Grip/Lighting Department:

2 X Sony EX1 (with S XS cards) - 1X Intel Mac Book - 1X S XS card reader & firewire cable - 500GB EXT HD (or equivalent space for backup) - 1X Letus Ultimate Adapter & photographic lenses - 6 X Prime Lenses & PL Adaptor - 1X Manfrotto Tripod - 1X 32in LCD TC & Composite leads - 1X Steadicam Junior - 1X Manfrotto Fig-Rig - 1X 8in Camera Monitor with composite leads - 1X 25m BNC cable drum - 1X Mini-Jib with Tripod & Fluid Head - 2X Paglights and battery packs - 3X Redheads with stands, diffuser/gel kit - 1X Set of 3 dedo lights with stands - 1X 2ft 4-bar Kino-flo with stand - 1X 200W Handheld MSR lamp - Reflectors, gels, diffusers, clips and stands - Blacking for windows

I am looking forward greatly to seeing what this all looks like in practice. I suspect that, in reality, it won't amount to very much at all.

My favourite is the "Manfrotto Fig-Rig". Time was, when faced with a splendid name like that, you just read and wondered. What kind of Rig would that be? And why "Fig"? But this is the age of the internet, and I can immediately tell you the answer:

From initial conception to finished product, Manfrotto worked alongside director Mike Figgis, whose films include Leaving Las Vegas and Cold Creek Manor, to develop a hand held DV camera support system that offers the shake-free stability of a tripod with the framing flexibility of handheld shooting. A circular frame with a crossbar to mount most mini DV cameras, the FigRig mn595 becomes part of the body to produce smooth, steady travelling shots. It is this very fact which is the secret to the Fig Rig. As the operator walks, his/her muscles and tendons absorb all the shocks, transferring only fluid movements to the camera. As there are no straps or harnesses attached to the Fig Rig, quick and wide movements can be made within the same shot from ground-level to overhead, in one smooth movement. The camera, accessories and operator become one, allowing you to film scenes quickly and unobtrusively.

So hats off to Manfrotto, and it is called "Fig" after Figgis.

This piece of kit costs around £150 quid. I still don't quite get how it works, but here's hoping that I find out.

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by Liberty Fitz-Claridge

I am the very model of a modern libertarian;
I'm at the Diamond's farthest corner from 'Authoritarian'.
I'm of the view, in short, that we should do away with all the laws,
Except the ones that thwart the sort who'd harm or take my things by force.

The socialists demand that we ought really to redistribute
The money made by businessmen to help support the destitute.
But those of us who set less store by looting than by Liberty
Would say a man's well-being is his own responsibility!

Would say a man's well-being is his own responsibility,
Would say a man's well-being is his own responsibility,
Would say a man's well-being is his own responsibili-bili-ty!

Ideas which stem from this include that school is not compulsory.
When older, children may attend free-market university.
In short, it is the opposite of life totalitarian,
With free adults and children in a climate libertarian.

In short, it is the opposite of life totalitarian,
With free adults and children in a climate libertarian.

The hoi polloi have rolled their eyes and left us to obscurity,
Since fans of David Friedman cry, "The state, the state is after me."
Indeed, there are among us those who dream of a utopia.
For this they are thought madmen, though it's only hyperopia.

We liberals won't rest until all state-run works are privatised;
From ports to courts, from wealth to health, we want the state to be downsized.
These things are not done well by even loving, caring government;
It loves us at our own expense - and what when all that love is spent?

It loves us at our own expense - and what when all that love is spent?
It loves us at our own expense - and what when all that love is spent?
It loves us at our own expense - and what when all that love-is love-is spent?

And surely no one's worthy of the job of politician
Who does not see the value of untrammelled competition.
In short, you should repudiate the crude authoritarian
And study to become a far superior libertarian.

In short, I should repudiate the crude authoritarian
And study to become a far superior libertarian.

When I have read von Mises' massive tomes from end to end firsthand;
When I've the nerve to voice in English classes that I like Ayn Rand;
When I have studied economics and gone earnestly to FEE;
When I have learnt what progress has been made in private law theory ...

When I've read Hayek, Mill and Smith, my expertise evincible;
And when I know exactly what is meant by 'homestead principle';
In short, when I know politics and all the right philosophy,
You'll say a better libertarian there never was than me.

You'll say a better libertarian there never was than she,
You'll say a better libertarian there never was than she,
You'll say a better libertarian there never was-than was-than she!

Though mainstream folk are loath to recognize or even tolerate
These vital, timeless principles that libertarians venerate,
And though the ignorant consensus is authoritarian,
I am the very model of a modern libertarian.

And though the ignorant consensus is authoritarian,
She is the very model of a modern libertarian.

(16)

The Sunday Times today reports that certain celebrity TV license fee refuseniks are not being harassed, on account of being too famous and too keen on getting the splurge of publicity that they would get if arrested, taken away in chains, thrown into a government dungeon, etc.. Vladimir Bukovsky, noted dissident against an earlier evil empire, thinks the BBC is too biased. Charles Moore doesn't like Jonathan Ross.

Noel Edmonds thinks the TV licence televised threats are too threatening. Personally I don't see how those threatening 'adverts' could do their job if they were not threatening. After all, their purpose is to threaten. If, instead of threatening, and as Edmonds would apparently prefer, they emphasised what very good value the BBC is, and then only slipped in as afterthought that, oh-by-the-way just-thought-we'd-mention-it, you have to pay the license fee whether you agree with all that or not, this would be at least as obnoxious. The threatening messages Edmonds objects to at least tell the story as it is. But, he doesn't like them, and objects to being made to pay the license fee. Fair enough. He shouldn't have to, no matter how unreasonable his objections may seem to others. And nor should anyone else, whatever their disagreements with the BBC may be.

Meanwhile, guilty but too famous is an interesting verdict, nicely calculated to elicit contrasting reactions. On the one hand, one law for the famous and another for the rest, and that's bad. But, at least someone is making this point, and at least some of those doing this are not just getting away with it, but willing to say so in public. I am sure that we all await the BBC's response to this public defiance with great interest.

If the BBC does nothing, then here, surely is a great opportunity for people not just to get more famous, but to get famous from a starting point of more or less complete obscurity. It will not have escaped the attention of obcurities thinking along these lines that one of the refuseniks the Sunday Times reports on is a UKIP guy by the name of John Kelly whom you have probably never heard of in any other connection.

In particular, here is a great opportunity for a blogger. All it needs is for one of our tribe to say, there, I am still watching my telly, but have not paid the license fee, and screw you BBC, and get his mates around to video everything that then ensues, and for the rest of us to link to all the hoopla and make sure that Instapundit and Guido link to it also (the latter being a certainty because it was at Guido that I learned of this Sunday Times piece in the first place), etc. etc., and, well, ... there is surely a big slice of anti-authoritarian pro-libertarian anti-nationalised-industry fun to be had here.

Personally I like the BBC and feel that I get rather good value from it, much as people on the dole (at my expense) and bankers whose jobs have just been saved (ditto) must likewise feel satisfied. I like the classical music. I also like to copy telly movies onto DVDs and much prefer the BBC's output, because it is so much easier not to have to edit out all those annoying adverts. I even like Jonathan Ross. I regard his regular outbursts of rudeness as the price we who like him must all pay (and people like the unfortunate Gwyneth Paltrow especially) for the sake of the less tasteless and more interesting conversations that his wacky/rude style also precipitates.

I do not think that there is much future in the notion that the BBC might one day become less biased. It is a nationalised industry. Only those who favour or at least tolerate that are likely to apply to work for it in any numbers. And those who do not fit that mold but who do show up in the BBC's output are more likely to be caricatures of pro-capitalism than the real thing. No, the only answer is to dump the whole principle of compulsory payment for telly, and in the meantime for all who despise that principle to stir up as much trouble around it as we can. And here is a fine chance to do that.

(6)

Well, I reviewed the previous effort by Daniel Craig, so here we go with the next instalment: Quantum of Solace, with Daniel Craig in his second outing as Ian Fleming's hero. It is the 22nd film in the series, which is quite something in itself, when you think about it. I went to see the film with pretty high expectations after what I thought was a great debut by Craig in Casino Royale.

Quantum of Solace - which has absolutely nothing to do with the short story Fleming wrote in a collection - is a sequel to the first Craig film. Having been betrayed and left heartbroken by the death of Vesper Lynd, 007 goes after the organisation that is behind the death of Lynd. We are led on a series of furious chases and action scenes in Italy, the Caribbean and Latin America. The direction of the movie is handled at an incredibly high tempo, much in the manner of the Bourne films starring Matt Damon. (Poor Matt, I haven't been able to think of him in the same way again since watching Team America: World Police).

This is a very violent film. Craig did several of the stunts himself and got quite badly hurt in some of them. If you want lots of fight scenes, with minimal dialogue and no gags, this is for you. The problem, is that I think that Craig and his directors are trying far, far too hard to react against what they rightly regarded as s the foppish versions of Bond served up by the likes of Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan. QoS is a still a good film but it could have been much better with a bit more variation of pace, and a bit more opportunity for Craig to show how 007 is developing as an agent and as a person.

Supporting actors are generally good, if not as strong as in Casino. I like the chap who plays Felix Leiter, who is not the character of the books but I reckon is going to be a regular feature of future Bond films. Judy Dench is wonderful as M; in fact she holds much of the film together. But the other women in the film are not very strong characters and not a patch on Green's Vesper.

I will give this film seven marks out of a possible 10. I would give Casino Royale 9 stars. The Bond franchise has definitely been rebooted by Craig, but the film-makers must not turn Bond into a humourless brute. The character created all those years ago was a tough bastard all right, but he was a bit more than that.

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I have started reading The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by economist Don Thompson, and it mentions (on page 11 of my 2008 hardback edition) an episode I vaguely remember:

In 2003 a 25-year-old student named Clinton Boisvert at the School of Visual Arts in New York was asked to produce a sculpture project showing how the emotion elicited by art could impact on life. Boisvert created three dozen black boxes each stenciled with the word "Fear." He had just finished hiding the last of these in New York City subway stations when he was arrested. A dozen stations were shut down for several hours while police squads retrieved the sculptures. Boisvert was convicted of reckless endangerment, but received an "A" for the project.

I googled this Boisvert character, but found nothing else except this one episode. I guess there is bourgeois respectability, in the form of lots of things that the imaginary bourgeoisie are imagined still to take seriously and to get outraged about, which art has traded on by treading on for over a century. And then there is actual respectability, the outraging of which causes the actual bourgeoisie - the sort that likes, exhibits in galleries, and buys contemporary art rather than being outraged by it - to want nothing to do with you on account of you being just too much trouble.

More generally, I am reading the book quoted above because I find myself wanting to know more about the phenomenon of Modern Art/Contemporary Art (Thompson says Modern is before 1970 and Contemporary is after 1970). My first thought is that what caused and causes Modern Art etc. - what is Modern art - is complicated, and that there is no one thing that can explain it or describe it properly. See my cascade of self-commenting here, which was where I first blogged about Thompson's book. The rise of photography and then of the cinema and television, the rise of and nature of the modern news media, the demoralisation afflicting European culture as a result of the World Wars, WW1 in particular, the Baby Boom and its serial obsessions, lots of new money, etc. etc. etc. ... there are many reasons why the visual arts in the twentieth century and since have turned out the way they have. The temptation to reduce Modern Art and all its works to one particular sort of annoyingness – modern art is nothing but ... !! – is, well, very tempting. But such temptation should be resisted, because whichever single cause you choose is just not going to be the whole story.

It would not be true, for instance, to say that Contemporary Art, or Modern Art, is only about winding people up and getting lots of outraged publicity, although of course that definitely is part of the story. But, all comments on the above ruminations will be most welcome to me, even foolishly reductive single cause comments, but citing single causes which I had not thought about before.

Just now, my personal favourite contributory cause of Modern/Contemporary Art (because so often neglected in amongst all the complaints about dead sharks) is the demand for quiet spaces which one may visit without being bombarded with multiple advertising messages and reminders of one's disappointing place in the rat race, and where one may consort with other rats who likewise don't like to be reminded of their insufficiently ratlike ratness all the time, for example by portraits of self-important rat race winners of the past. But all this without having to doff one's cap to a religion that one does not believe in. If that's your problem, an art gallery adorned with blank canvasses, or canvasses consisting of big coloured rectangular blobs, could be just what you want. Which means that the very same art objects which outrage some with their meaninglessness can simultaneously soothe others, with that very same meaninglessness.

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Lower Marsh, just beyond Waterloo Station from me, is one of my favourite London streets. It has carts loaded up with goodies from vans, and amongst these goodies are classical CDs sold by a bloke called Neil. A few yards due west from where Neil plies his trade, there is Gramex, a regular shop, which also sells an abundance of classical CDs. These CDs cost far less than downloads from the internet, and unlike downloads they are things, which I prefer. When you drop a Wagner opera on CD on your foot, it hurts. That's what I call real value.

Anyway, yesterday, in the autumn sunshine (finally!) I came across this, which surely says something profound about the current state of the financial markets, although I am not sure quite what:

There was another one next to it, the same only black. These pigs are quite big and very solid, made of cast iron I suspect. Don't drop one of them on your foot. They were going yesterday for a tenner each. Hurry while stocks last.

More banking and piggy banking photos by me here, and further market speculations here. The smiling china pigs are currently on show in the window of a fancy goods (I think they call such places) shop in Strutton Ground, another market street in my part of London, just off Victoria Street.

For some further commentary on what things cost these days, try this very Dail Mail piece by Robert Hughes. Hughes ought to realise that 'artists' these days are like small and badly behaved children. The more you complain, the happier they are, because what they crave most is attention.

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The BBC is running a television series called The Tudors, I believe that the show is in its second series. They seem to think that the Tudor dynasty started with Henry VIII as there were no episodes on his father Henry VII, and the show still seems to be stuck on Henry VIII. Indeed his second wife, Ann Boleyn, has not even been executed yet - sorry if this is a 'spoiler' to people who think the fate of Ann is a cliff hanger.

"Sneer as much as you like about how slow paced this series is," I hear you say, "the BBC is concentrating on telling the story correctly".

Really?

Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention - a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) - introduced to the show with cries of "by God, what is that?", and other such, from the actors.

Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV - some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.

The excuse for the special tax that funds the BBC is that the organization 'educates' the population. This excuse just does not stand up.

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We have of course already alluded here to the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Here is another tribute to this great man, from Theodore Dalrymple twelve days ago, which I think is spot on:

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin's appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others' misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn's achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin's true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising - and, of course, quite right - on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.

But I suspect that this may also be right:

The problem for Solzhenitsyn's literary reputation is that the subjects his books address no longer seem so compelling to younger readers. Astonishing as it may seem to people who lived through the time when Solzhenitsyn appeared as a colossus, many people younger than 30 - not only in America and Western Europe but in Russia itself - have never heard of him or do not know what he did. Of course, literary reputations wax and wane; but his disappearance from the consciousness of young people at least raises the question of whether his achievement was more political and moral than literary.

Ever since I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (out loud on the University of Essex radio station as it transpired), I always had Solzhenitsyn clocked as: Great Writer? - not sure; propagandist – all time great. In this respect, I particular recommend his memoir called The Oak and the Calf, which is about how he did his propagandising, which was all mixed up with how he managed to keep himself alive to go on propagandising, which was a mighty achievement in itself under the murderous circumstances that he described and publicised so well.

Quite aside from the fact that I don't read Russian, this judgement of mine surely has much to do with the fact that I have no very definite idea what a great writer is in any language (although I know very approximately what I like) and am myself scarcely a published writer at all. I'm not saying he was a great writer of literary fiction, and I'm not saying he wasn't. On the other hand, I know quite a lot about propaganda and have myself done it with some glimmerings of success. In rather the same way that if you actually play football in some very lowly division you are an order of magnitude better than I am at knowing just how good Pele was or Ronaldo is, I can tell you that Solzhenitsyn was, when it came to spreading ideas, awesomely good, and that this was no accident. He brought skills like those of a chess grandmaster to the ideological struggle between him (and all his Samizdat allies) and the USSR. and his industry and attention to detail (to say nothing of his sheer courage) was extraordinary. The notion that he won his ideological battle without any hard graft besides the hard graft of just writing it down in some isolated dacha is quite wrong. He was the spokesman for an entire generation of other writers and record keepers. He was the leader of an entire underground movement. He created a fact-shifting machine as surely as any Western press magnate. He quite consciously set himself the task of destroying the USSR using only the power of the written and published word, and more than any other man - with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who also had the awesome military clout of the USA at his disposal - he succeeded.

Not that Solzhenitsyn was himself indifferent to or ignorant of military affairs. Towards the end of his life he wrote several novels about the First World War. He was in the artillery before being swallowed up by the monster that he named the Gulag, and he thought of all the truths that he gathered about the Gulag as ammunition, and the publishing of them as the launching of artillery barrages. If Dalrymple is right, it will be for the war of words that Solzhenitsyn conducted against the USSR, and for the fact that it succeeded so brilliantly, that he will be most admiringly remembered. But now that he is gone, fresh looks will surely be taken from the purely literary point of view at Solzhenitsyn's achievement, and posterity may arrive, as Dalrymple says, at a somewhat different conclusion.

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A new film is out later this year in the US taking the p**s out of Michael Moore. It looks quite amusing. Here's the trailer. Some of the one-liners are excellent.

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"We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?"

Dirty Harry's Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.

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I definitely want to see the new Batman film (it pays to book well in advance, Ed). Here is an interesting take on some of the politics of the film. Another useful review - without spoilers - is over at Bob Bidinotto's blog. In a nutshell, he says he liked the film a great deal but felt the film tried to cram too many themes and plotlines into it.

Mind you, I am looking forward even more to the film based on the Watchmen story series. Bring it on!

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Maybe I'm the last one around these parts to have clocked Pat Condell. If so, apologies. But just in case I'm not and you still haven't heard of this man, well, clock him for yourself, now. He has a YouTube homepage, and I particularly recommend the performance featured here, at the Ezra Levant blog (remember him?), which is how I found out about Condell.

The thing that strikes me about Condell is that if you were to read a transcript of the talk that I've just heard, you might dismiss him as, well, some kind of obsessive, in a word, as a crank. Certainly anyone wanting to dismiss him thus would find it fairly easy. But his manner of talking makes him seem a lot more sane than that, and that makes him a potentially huge threat to the forces of darkness. If I were them I'd be quite bothered, and anxiously trying to think of a way of shutting him up which doesn't risk him becoming a hundred times more famous. Killing him springs to mind, obviously. But what if they fail? And what if they succeed, but turn him into a very, very eloquent cadaver?

Here is an interview he did with The Freethinker which they called Laughing religion off the planet, which I am right now about to read.

UPDATE: On the other hand ...

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There's no doubt that one of life's pleasure's is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of "science fiction" that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.

Jeff Read defends Disch thus:

Most literature is about people. That's a topic that the Asperger's-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don't think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.

And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond ("esr") responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:

This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The "especially modern people" is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about "the terror of the situation".

The subject of "peak oil" then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, "right on schedule". Replies Raymond:

Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later "Peak Oil" models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.

In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I'm not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.

As for copper and platinum - they're not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that's better quality "ore" than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.

Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:

The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don't need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.

Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.

Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?

I did. They're staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they're describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.

In among that there's another potential SQOTD, I think.

There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, ...

And so it goes on. I've lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond's Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.

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I was intrigued by this:

American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero?

Up to a point. There is no doubt that much of what James Bowman says here is true. John Wayne-style movies just do not seem to get made any more, but I am not sure that heroism is dying out completely. I love the film, Apollo 13, for instance, for its realistic portrayal of the mental as well as physical heroism involved in getting the Apollo craft safely back to Earth after the craft suffered a massive loss of oxygen.

His point about "superheroes" is true: I thought the recent Iron Man film had some heroic as well as downright funny moments. As for other stuff, the last James Bond film, Casino Royale, while also not totally realistic, was a much grittier, tougher 007 film than recently, has at its core the fact that Bond is a hero who takes on the baddies.

The trouble is that heroism is often idealised, but I don't have a problem with this if it involves "supermen" characters, like the last Batman film, which was pretty heroic, not to mention 300, the re-telling of the doings of ancient Greece. Outside of Hollywood, there are all those heroic Hong Kong action movies. Not to mention a film that was actually called Hero. Some of the Japanese anime films also are full of strong, uplifting moral themes.

So I do not think the cupboard is bare. But Bowman does make a good set of points about the lack of "real-life" hero films. I suspect that if there is a dearth of heroic figures on screen, some of it is down to how people, in their revulsion against war in general - a perfectly normal reaction - have taken against the military virtues. But as I hope some of the examples show, there is more to heroism than courage under fire.

Where I think there is a real problem, which the article does not really touch on, is the lack of any heroic characters in movies about business. I keep banging on about this, but it is a real pity that almost all businessmen and women are potrayed as morally sleazy or downright evil. A shame: I regard some entrepreneurs and their willingness to take big risks as heroes.

Quiz: name your top 5 most heroic films, of any genre.

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The State of Pennsylvania has made a very old CMU Fine Arts Department tradition untenable. The 89 year old quadriennial Beaux Arts Ball is so well known in the arts community that its passing rated a New York Times story. They call it "the original toga party". That is putting it mildly.

Although the article presents a number of reasons for the passing, the biggest one is Statist intervention. They grey minded, grey suited, grey souled clones killed it:

'The off-campus establishments have liquor licenses and are prepared to uphold the state's liquor laws,'' the dean said. ''Responsibility for alcohol is the main reason the ball was moved off campus.''

At the 1985 ball, which attracted more than 1,200 people, the building received more than $50,000 in damage. The Student Affairs office reported open drug use and under-age drinking. Since then, Pennsylvania passed a law requiring universities to be responsible for drinking on their campuses.

I might add I was costumed as sort of 'Retief' type interstellar adventurer at the 1985 affair, complete with cape, tights, a chestpiece glittering with LED's and a mean looking laser side arm in my quite real holster.

And yes, it was ... quite a party.

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I am very sorry to hear this. I could not give a damn about what his political views are. Fact is, he has been one of the acting greats. The Sting, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke, Harper, The Road to Perdition....that is just a few of them. And he was a pretty mean motor racing driver as well, like his old pal, Steve McQueen, who succumbed to cancer at a much younger age.

At 83, he's already put a lot of miles on the clock, but I hope he can make a few more.

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I watched Iron Man a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Downey is excellent, as are the rest of the cast. And how can you not like a film that starts off with a bunch of US soldiers driving along in a truck listening to AC/DC?

One thing I noticed is that Audi must have wangled some kind of product placement thing: all the main cars that feature are Audis. One of two aspects do not quite work and the physics of the energy system that powers the suit is not something I am fit to judge, but it seems a bit far-fetched. But what the heck.

Jim Henley, a comics buff, has a good review of the film. Mind you, I still have not entirely forgiven Jim for sliming Mark Steyn over the recent Canadian free speech kerfuffle a few months ago. Not his finest hour.

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The other day I referred to a PJ O'Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:

"The pregnant mother of four told the U.K.'s Daily Mail that she owns guns similar to the ones she used in "Tomb Raider." Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are not against having weapons in their house for security reasons, she says."

"If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I've no problem shooting them," she said.

Jolie, 32, has starred as a heat-packing vixen in several action movies - two "Tomb Raider" films, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and the upcoming futuristic thriller, "Wanted."

"I can handle myself," she said. "There's a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there's a side to me that's a mommy. But there's also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns."

If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie.

Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.

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Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones - heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry - they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He's great. I particularly like the tune, "Roadrunner" - ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast.

Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed.

Here's an album of some of his greatest hits.

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If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, "Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money". For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he'd like to f**k her. Classy.

Excerpt:

The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.

The public values talented performers - but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.

The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco's, Sainsbury's or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were "great value for money", and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.

The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.

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"At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree'd square off the King's Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned."

From Russia With Love.

It is a measure of the achievement of what Ian Fleming produced that, for all the criticisms hurled at his 007 adventures for their supposed snobbery, sexism and violence, that no-one ever accused his output of being boring and that he ended up producing the most famous fictional British character of all time, apart possibly from Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Born on this day in 1908, Fleming died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1964, just when the movies made out of his books were going into overdrive. Goodness knows what he'd make of the hoo-ha marking his centenary.

Sebastian Faulk's new book, which he has tried to write in the Fleming style, is in the mail. I'll put up a short review when I get it. With any luck, the book will be fodder for another great film with Daniel Craig.

Update: here is an article in the New York Times about Fleming and the new book. It is pretty harsh about Fleming, calling him a nasty piece work, including the sin of anti-semitism. Really? I cannot remember anything in the books that refers to Jews in a clearly disparaging way. Considering his depiction of the Nazis in Moonraker, I'd say that Fleming was pretty sound, in fact. As far as I know from reading his books or the excellent biography of him by Andrew Lycett, this was not an issue that came up. Was he a racist? Well, his portrayal of blacks in Live and Let Die is a bit condescending. He writes about people of different races, such as Koreans and Turks, in ways that sometimes paint too broad a brush, but I do not get the sense that he damned whole swathes of humanity because they had different skin colour. The NYT reviewer also refers to Fleming as a "failed" journalist. That is flat wrong. He worked for several years at Reuters and covered the Moscow show trials of the early 1930s with considerable aplomb; after the war, he worked as a senior executive at Kemsley Newspapers, responsible for running foreign news and training up staff as well as checking copy; he also had a column at the Sunday Times. Yes, he was not, by his own frank admission, one of the "greats", but to say he was a failure is grossly unfair. At least - unlike the NYT - he did not make up news stories and kept his fictional skills for his novels.

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There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.

- Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.

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"Biopics", or films about the lives of the famous, have their place. According to this report, the US actor Leonardo di Caprio, who played Howard Hughes in "The Aviator" - which I thoroughly enjoyed - is lining up to play Ian Fleming, who would have been 100 on 28 May (the same birthday as your humble blogger). Hmm, not sure whether that is great casting. There was a film made a few years back with Charles Dance that did the job rather well.

For Fleming fans, this biography by Andrew Lycett is strongly recommended. John Pearson's biography is also good.

Talking of famous writers, though, here are some people I reckon would make for quite good biopics:

Victor Hugo
A. Dumas
Tolstoy
Dickens
Saki (Hector Munro)
Robert Byron
Voltaire
Evelyn Waugh
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E. Hemingway
James Baldwin
Jonathan Swift
Shelley
Patrick Leigh-Fermor

By the way, my list does not imply that I necessarily admire or like all the writers, only that they are interesting as subjects of film.

So give your suggestions if you have others.

Update: several writers are unimpressed by di Caprio. I think he was okay as H. Hughes but as I said, I have my doubts as to whether he will be able to play Fleming well. Fleming was an old Etonian, a bit of an eccentric but despite all his possible foibles and failings, a first-class writer and journalist with a great eye for detail. I fear the Hollywood movie-makers will want to focus on his womanising. I suppose this is inevitable.

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Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture... yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.

It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.

And the 'eye thing'... very cool.

But I am not writing this to praise Rhona... well, actually I am...

...no...no... the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.

"Oh yes, that film is a hoot!" he replied, "but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything."

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I just came across this. What's happened is that they've discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:

Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn't there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.

Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn't actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.

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This is what I call gratitude.

On the subject of rare musical instruments, and as a sign of how desperate some investors are to make money away from the standard stock and bond markets, you can even invest in violins. I can see the jokes coming: "So, what do you invest in?" "Violins". "Hmm, I've been on the fiddle myself".

Groan.

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Just straying off the Samizdata reservation for a moment...a pointer for Nine Inch Nails fans: Trent Reznor is giving away his latest record The Slip, and it is 100% free... to download it, go here. Reznor has released it under Creative Commons, which is a very interesting development.

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John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review, the conservative publication, is not a man I always agree with. On the issue of creationism, however, he is wonderfully scornful of some of its advocates. In commenting on the movie, Expelled, put together by Ben Stein, he has this to say:

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility - from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A "thank you" wouldn't go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world - that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: "Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!"

Update: Ben Stein has lost it totally.

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My wife, during a business trip to Arizona, once sat in an aircraft next to the guy who now owns Southfork ranch, the place that achieved legendary status in the hit TV soap Dallas. Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have this rather whimsical piece on how the show, despite portraying most people in business as either predatory villains (JR Ewing), or often losers (ie, anyone up against JR), was effective in inadvertently demonstrating the sheer, material wealth of US capitalism. I remember, as a teen, wanting to have a red Mercedes like Bobby Ewing.

Well, I don't know how much you can really read into shows like this. I must say that Dallas was so full of outrageous storylines and crazy characters that it was compulsive viewing. My mum, bless her, was addicted to it. Watching it today is a bit scary - it reminds me of how far ago the early 1980s now seems.

What is true, though, is that the sort of aspirational message embedded in shows about rich people stands a universe apart from the depressing, tragic vision embodied in UK soaps like EastEnders. I once watched about half an episode of the latter show the other day. It is about 20 minutes of my life I shall never get back.

Meanwhile, here is an old post of mine about Italian daytime TV, which is, er, a phenomenon.

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People say: Is classical music dying? Go to Covent Garden and you can view the corpse.

-Joe Queenan reacts negatively on Newsnight Review earlier this evening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle's new opera The Minotaur

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This is a must-visit for fans of 007 and his literary creator. There are a few events this year to mark what would be Ian Fleming's 100th birthday, 28 May, which also happens to be my own birthday, by weird coincidence. Sebastian Faulks is bringing out a new Bond novel on that day. Most of the attempts to carry on the character by other writers have not really worked, although Kingsley Amis had a good shot at it. I quite enjoy Faulks' writings, so this might be good. Let's face it, the movie-makers have already used up all the original Fleming story lines so they could use some decent new ones without too many corny one-liners or implausible villains.

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The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.

This quote is great:

“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”

Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.

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Gary Gygax, super nerd, all around great guy and hero to a generation of bored collage kids, has died. I weep 2d6 of bitter tears.

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I quite enjoy going to the Proms, the renowned series of concerts held in the Royal Albert Hall, west London during the late summer. As many readers know, the last night of the Proms ends with a rousing performance of some of the best-loved works of Edward Elgar, such as "Land of Hope and Glory". A government minister has claimed that the event does not fit in with the bright, shiny vision of Britain that the Gramiscians of New Labour believe is the one to which we should all aspire.

I could not agree more. It is time to face the fact that Britain, or indeed just England, is no longer a land of hope or much glory. Far better that the symbols of modern Britain be such things as state ID cards, unfunny standup commedians like Ricky Gervais and lumps of dead animals at The Tate.

Ok, rant over.

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Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winning actress and qualified electronic engineer:

Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning French actress, will not apologise over remarks she made describing the 9/11 attacks as a conspiracy and believes that the comments had been taken out of context and misunderstood...

Cotillard said that the towers were destroyed not as part of a terrorist plot, but because it would have been too expensive to rewire them. She also reheated an old conspiracy theory about the 1969 moon landing never having happened.

Of course, working in the entertainment industry does not disqualify Ms. Cottilard from having opinions, nor (heaven forbid) should she ever be restrained from expressing them. However, and equally, I am not disqualified from calling her an ignorant jackass. I hope she spends the rest of her career in French dinner-theatre emoting pointlessly before an audience of coughing, hawking, shouting, farting, senile old-age pensioners who are slupring down a mediocre bowl of bouillabaisse before shuffling home to die alone in a heatwave. How do you like them pommes, Ms. Cotillard?

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A novel based on the Joss Whedon cult SF series, Firefly, which was one of the very best in recent years in my opinion, has been released and you can view it online, thanks to a Creative Commons platform, here.

If you have not seen the TV series, correct that ommission immediately. It beautifully blends western-style cowboy drama with its strong individualistic, screw-authority ethic with science fiction, nifty and authentically grimy spacecraft. There are plenty of dashing men and gorgeous women to please both sexes. And there are sword fights and lots of shooting. What's not to like?

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Oscar for best documentary feature goes to a film, 'Taxi ride to the Dark Side', about how evil Americans torture people to death in Afghanistan - no doubt at the command of the evil Darth W. Bush.

And Oscar for best documentary short goes to a film about lesbian pension rights.

Hollywood has become a parody of itself.

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A friend of mine in San Francisco passed along this video of a marvelous arrangement performed by a classical Japanese orchestra.

It is well worth four and a half minutes of your time.

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I never have seen any of the Rambo movies and who knows if I ever will? Probably not. The day is always full, and they're not on any priority list of mine. Despite all this, the latest picture from Mr Stallone has given me one moment of pleasure. How so? Well, it's being reported here and there that the movie, in which Rambo takes on Burma's military junta, is making an impression with some of the junta's opponents. And this has caused Marina Hyde a moment of irritation. 'Oh, please!' she exclaims. I don't know why I should take satisfaction from it. After all, I have no interest in the quality of Marina Hyde's day; in the normal way of things I'm happy for it to be altogether fine. But there you are: opponents of the Burmese regime don't have the name of some smug little metropolitan liberal on their lips. They enjoy seeing the discomfiture of a tyranny at the hands of ... Rambo. Dearie me, how gross.

- Norm Geras

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There are lots of posters on the Tube and other places about this exhibition of Russian-owned art at London's Royal Academy. Henry Matisse's "The Dancers" is shown in the adverts; I am not a massive Matisse fan, but the sheer variety and quality of the work on show is tempting.

A problem I have, however, is that these works were stolen from their original buyers back in the Russian Revolution or in the 1920s (ironically, Stalin wanted to destroy some of this stuff because he considered it to be "decadent"). I am not really comfortable in looking at something that has been stolen from a private owner; I feel slightly the same way about taking tours around ancient buildings that are no longer owned by their original owners because they have been forced to sell up due to massive death duties, now transferred to such bodies as the National Trust. One might argue, of course, that aristocrats who own massive stately piles are not worth too much sympathy since their families may have come into these lands as a result of earlier hand-outs.

Oh well, I fear my curiosity will overcome my squeamishness. It pays to book early: this exhibition looks to be a sell-out. Thanks to regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor for suggesting that I write about this topic.

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We’d all play like that... if we could.

- John Coltrane, no mean saxophone player, talking about arguably the greatest of them all, Stan Getz. His cool, silk-like style is the perfect cure for a stressful day at the office.

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A long time ago, when I was a wee nip of a lad, my parents would keep me quiet by turning on the television and having me watch such classics as Sesame Street. Little did they know that what I was watching was not suitable for children! I know that now, because the early seasons of Sesame Street have come out on DVD and they have been given a parental advisory, no less.

The first few seasons have just been released and come with, of all things, a warning.

"These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child," the warning reads.

"Sesame was created in the '60s, and it was a bit edgier, if you will," said Sherrie Rollins Westin, executive vice president of Sesame Workshop.

What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.

"We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.

And what's that little girl doing with that man?

"In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."

And rightly so. You wouldn't want your kids to turn out like us dreadful Generation X old fogeys, after all!

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I have just chanced upon a copy of the Review section of the Observer of a week ago. In it there is a double page spread, entitled Is this the best way to run the arts?, which is about how various performing enterprises have now got grants they used not to have or who have had their grants increased, and how various other performing enterprises have had their grants cut or abolished.

As is the way in politics, the ones who are suffering are the ones now making the most noise. They blame horrid men in suits who do not understand art. Politicians in other words.

This almighty row has been brewing since just before Christmas when the Arts Council announced the most radical funding shake-up in its history: 194 organisations and individuals would have their grants substantially cut or completely withdrawn. While some cuts may be sensible, others seemed barely thought through, such as the proposal that the Northcott theatre in Exeter lose its entire grant (£547,000) from 2009. Clarie Middleton, acting chief executive, heard the news the day before reopening the theatre after a major refurbishment - funded in part by an Arts Council grant. 'It's like planting a bulb but as soon as a shoot appears, you cut it off,' she said.

Other victims include new writing powerhouse the Bush (a 40 per cent cut), the London Sinfonia chamber orchestra (100 per cent) and Sheffield's Compass Theatre Company (100 per cent), which had 'absolutely no idea the company was in a precarious position with Arts Council Yorkshire' and has since had to cancel a scheduled tour.

Politicians, especially the ones making the running now, like inflicting a radical shake-up every so often. To feed their friends, they are willing to make enemies, and their "cuts" (i.e. decisions to stop giving you money) are often hastily decided rather than "thought through". And if they do decide to slash or abolish your grant, why would they warn you about this? As for those among them who are genuinely trying to shun mediocrity and to fund only "excellence" etc., how are they supposed to know what that is, or worse, is going to be next year or the year after? Arts funding is either politics, or a lottery.

The bottom line here is: if you place yourself at the mercy of politicians, they are all too liable to behave just like the politicians they are and show you no mercy at all. The way to avoid being at the mercy of these horrid men in suits is not to depend upon them for any of your income. Oh, it takes far longer to build up an arts enterprise which relies on voluntary support from eccentric or socially aspirational donors, and from customers who are actually willing to pay in sufficient numbers for your efforts. But once you have done this, you are far less vulnerable to politics, and you will have to waste far less of your life doing politics. True, the politicians might still shut you down or rob you blind, blinder than usual I mean. We must all live in the shadow of such threats. But at least, if you are not getting a government grant, closing you down ceases to be a routine decision that the men in suits are liable to make at any moment.

Some while ago now, I wrote this and this (also available as an .htm) on the above subject. Both still stand up pretty well, I think.

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There is a new book about Tom Cruise, the American movie actor. Normally this information would not elicit even a groan from me. I simply have no interest in Cruise, movies, Hollywood and the pampered, pathetic world of the modern celebrity. But this new book, on the other hand, seems to be much more interesting then its subject matter.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian bookstores have been denied access to sell the book, not because of any government ban, but because the US distributor has decided that it will not sell the book outside the US or Canada. The distributor, Ingram International, will fulfill existing orders, but will not accept any more orders.

This is a very curious story. What is not said but is left implied is that the most controversial aspect of the Tom Cruise story is his adherence to the Church of Scientology. It seems that the Church came to some sort of legal arrangement with the distributor.

US-based Ingram International, described on its website as "the world's largest wholesale distributor of book product", sent an email to its Australian customers this morning citing unspecified legal reasons for not being able to distribute the book outside the US and Canada.

"Although I recently e-mailed stating Ingram's ability to offer the book to international customers, the position has now changed that we will not sell it outside of the US and Canada," Asia, Australia and New Zealand sales representative Jonathan Tuseth wrote in the email.

However it is another sad retreat from the old position of 'publish and be damned'. The publishers of Salmond Rushdie's book showed some courage in the face of Muslim rage in 1989, but now publishers seem to be willing to retreat at the first hint of a lawsuit.

This is just the sort of case that an aspiring young political figure with a passion for freedom should take up as a rallying cry for liberty, freedom and rationality. Do not hold your breath.

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IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

- The Economist reports on the decline and fall of the music studios.

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I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.

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Christian Michel holds talk-and-discussion evenings at his London home on the sixth and twentieth of each month. If you want know more about these events email him at cmichel@ cmichel.com. I am doing the talk at the next one, the first of 2008, on January 6th. My chosen subject will be: the history of music making in the twentieth century. I have just sent an email to Christian about my talk, from which he will concoct his email invite to all his regulars. I am still thinking about what I will finally say and would greatly appreciate input from the Samizdata commentariat on the subject. So here is my email to Christian:

An extraordinary interlude - an aberration, you might say - in the history of music is now drawing to a close.

The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways.

The "classical" fraternity concentrated first on popularising - and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue.

"Pop" music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics.

The most fundamental effect of electronics on "pop" music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. "Folk" music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long).

Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They're worth a mention).

This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it's still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages.

The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. "Classical" musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won't really be "classical" musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss).

I could go on, and on the night I will, but I'll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I'll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I'll try.

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Bryan Appleyard has some interesting things to say about science fiction (hat-tip, Glenn). As a commenter said in the Times' letters section though, Bryan focuses a little too much on the dystopian side of SF, on science-out-of-control. There are some nice touches though: he is right to examine how SF has affected the course of science, as well as the other way round.

The problem with a newspaper article like this, unfortunately, is that you can only really skim the surface of the subject. SF is pretty vast - hey, like the universe itself! There are bound to be vast tracts of land that get overlooked. Appleyard does not mention the more positive, life-affirming side of hard science fiction in the works of people like John Varley or Vernor Vinge, for instance (two of the best writers of the lot, in my opinion). And he barely mentions Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Ken MacLeod and R.A. Heinlein. Mention of the latter, of course, brings us onto the fact that SF has often been quite daringly political; it has used imagined futures to play around with cultural, social and ideal political scenarios (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Stephenson's Snow Crash, etc).

But, to be fair to Appleyard, he takes SF seriously. As he points out, there seems to be more interest in fantasy instead: the enormous popularity of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, being just two examples. Maybe I am missing something, but I have never been interested in that side of the genre. My wife keeps badgering me to read Pratchett. Another sub-genre is what one might call "techno-military" SF; Heinlein wrote some of this in things like Starship Troopers; a good current example are the writings of John Scalzi.

Here's a pretty good dictionary of science fiction.

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For most of my life I have been fascinated by two-man teams. Much is written in the management books about the decision making and leadership skills of individuals. Much is made of teams, of about six to a dozen or so people (a dozen being reckoned by most to be about the upper limit before factionalism sets in), and about the skill of building effective teams. But less, it seems to me, is made of the partnership of two, despite the fact that everywhere you look in the world of human accomplishment, you see two-man teams, often famously named: Rolls Royce, Gilbert and Sullivan, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressberger, Pratt and Whitney, Rogers and Hammerstein, Flanders and Swan... trust me, the game of naming two man teams goes on for as long as you have time to devote to it. I could have machine-gunned this posting with links, but Google is Google - another now famously accomplished two-man team runs that, I believe - and I could not be bothered. Partly this is because this is, be warned now, a rather long posting, and doing proper links would have taken me the whole day.

Even when a single creative genius seems to stand in isolated splendour, more often than not it turns out that there was or is a backroom toiler seeing to the money, minding the shop, cleaning up the mess, lining up the required resources, publishing and/or editing what the Great Man has merely written, quietly eliminating the blunders of, or, not infrequently, actually doing the work only fantasised and announced by, the Great Man. Time and again, the famous period of apparently individual creativity coincides precisely with the time when that anonymous partner was also but less obtrusively beavering away, contributing crucially to the outcome, and often crucially saying boo to the goose when the goose laid a duff egg. If deprived, for some reason, of his back-up man, the Lone Genius falls silent, or mysteriously fails at everything else he attempts. Think Elizabeth the First and ... damn, I can not remember his name, but he was crucial, and Elizabeth was never the same after he had died. Cecil, that was him.

That literature and showbiz are so full of two-man teams is evidence of the enormous emotional importance that we all attach to these partnerships. Every TV detective, for instance, seems to have his Dr Watson figure, less inspired, but perhaps emotionally more adult, who buys the pint afterwards, soothes the frazzled nerves of the great detective, and who generally carries the can and tidies up after. For every Holmes there is a Watson, for every Morse, a Lewis. And for every Regan, a Carter. Major kudos to the late John Thaw for having participated in – having lead, actually - two very different but equally famous two-man teams of British TV coppers.

Sport is full of two man teams, often because there actually are two men in the team, as with tennis doubles or two man rowing teams. But equally fascinating are the famous two-man teams that flourish within bigger teams, like striking partnerships in soccer, half-back or centre three-quarter pairings in rugby (Sella and Charvet), or opening batting (Hobbes and Sutcliffe) or bowling partnerships (Trueman and Statham, Lillee and Thompson, Ambrose and Walsh) in cricket. England's cricket team has never quite been the same since Trescothick and Strauss were numbers one and two in the batting order, as they were in 2005 when the Ashes were last won. Trescothick left the side, and Strauss went from being a huge force to a huge disappointment. In cricket see also the Middlesex "twins", Compton and Edrich.

Comedians often come in pairs: Martin and Lewis, French and Saunders, Morecambe and Wise, Laurel and Hardy I have already mentioned, and many more that you are no doubt astonished that I have neglected to mention. Comic duos are able to explore the endless conundra involved in being part of a more or less functional or dysfunctional partnership. Because, as most of us know, partners often do not especially like each other. Simply, they both need each other for either of them to accomplish anything. Gilbert and Sullivan could hardly stand the sight of each other by the end, and had a long period when they each tried to make a go of it separately. Only the need for money, and the less well remembered crutch to their two legs, Richard d'Oyly Carte, brought them together again.

In my own line of business two-man teams abound. In the free market activism, think-tank trade, it is noticeable that success and successful partnership have a habit of going hand in hand, if you will pardon that mostly very inappropriate way of putting it. IEA: Harris and Seldon. Rumour had it that they never really liked each other that much, but the IEA has never been the same since age put an end to their partnership. ASI: Pirie and Butler...still going quite strong, but are their glory days over? And, though I say it myself, Libertarian Alliance: Tame and Micklethwait. This latter two-man team got under way in the early 1980s and lasted for somewhat more than a decade. Much of what I know about two-man teams – what they are, how to become part of one, how to operate within one, how they end – I learned from being half of that dynamic (at any rate as I tell it) duo.

I have been calling these teams two-man teams, but of course by man I really only mean person. Many a showbiz team has consisted of a man and a woman, often portraying a romantic magic that was singularly lacking in their real relationship, or which faded far faster than they pretended in public. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were never romantically involved for real. And I often read, although I have never dug into the details, that the real-life relationship between Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn was a whole lot more, er, convenient than it looked on the screen.

Okay, two man teams are very important, but so what? Well, that is it really, they are very important. If you can have a good one in the centre of your life, lucky you, because your life will work a whole lot better and, with further luck, will be a whole lot more fun. But a little more than that can be said, and in this posting, I will end by saying how you can analyse the future prospects of an enterprise by asking a few two-man-team-related questions. Questions like: Is there a two man team at the top at all, or is the boss up there on his own? And, if there is a two man team bossing the enterprise, what sort of two man team is it?

Actually, those two questions merge into one. I recall reading something by the late great management thinker and writer Peter Drucker, to the effect that the only current measurement of the working of a big business enterprise that had any predictive power was the ratio of the top two salaries. The closer that ratio is to one, Drucker said, the better. The absolute level is unimportant. What matters is whether the top two guys are paid roughly the same, or amounts that are seriously different. If the top salary is way above the number two salary, watch out. The top guy probably thinks he is God, and there is no one around to tell him different. Expect hubristic catastrophe. If, on the other hand, the number two man gets three quarters of what the number one man gets, that probably means that number two man can look number one man in the eye and tell him, as and when, that he thinks whatever it is is daft. There is a degree of mutual respect in place. The load is being shared, and each tells the other the truth as he sees it.

Many books have been written that emphasise the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but during the war, there was, I recall reading recently, one huge difference. Hitler never had a single respected number two figure, but Stalin did. Once again, I do not recall the name. Something-ishitskty or -ishinsky or whatever, but maybe quite different. He was the military chief of staff or some such thing, and Stalin talked everything through with him behind the scenes, and never at any point in the relationship had him shot. Churchill had his Alan Brooke, who, when push came to shove, he allowed to keep him on the rails. Roosevelt? I do not know, but I bet there was someone. Harry Hopkins was it? But the point is: Hitler had only insignificant flunkeys – Keitel, known as "Lackeitel", lackey, was one of these creatures, I believe - who dared not tell him any truths at all.

To switch to our own time and our own excitements, and on the clear understanding that I am not calling either of them Adolf Hitler, is it too fanciful to speculate that the fortunes of the New Labour regime have moved from the Blair-Brown era, which, for all its faults and oddities, basically worked, to the Brown era, when the whole box of tricks caves in on top of everyone?

The first half of that equation will be very controversial here at Samizdata. If that Blair-Brown relationship "worked", it did so in the sense that it achieved things that most of us here loathe. It presided over a relentless degradation of the quality of the public sector and an equally relentless increase in its cost. Between them, these two put in place, as Sean Gabb has been saying for a decade, the machinery of a police state. But, for as long as the two of them were in office, they got away with it, more or less. Politically, that means that their relationship worked. Meanwhile, an equally unlovely two-man team of another kind, involving Blair and Campbell, also worked successfully.

Now, politically, the Brown era is a disaster. And I think it entirely reasonable (a) to speculate that Brown's basic problem is that he has no one beside him whose judgment he respects and who is doing anything resembling half the job, and (b) to predict that if Brown does manage to pull it together again and survive his current travails, it will be because he acquires someone to stand next to him who is able to look him in the eye and tell it like it is, and to share the load and the big decisions, not just about the country, but about how Brown conducts himself in his day-to-day politicking.

Maybe Brown's understanding of his current place in the world will make such a relationship impossible, in which case, politically, he is now doomed.

Much more could be said about two-man teams, indeed I have a whole new gob of two-man-teamery already written, but I will leave that to another posting.

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Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:

"I’ve censored myself," Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat."

This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of 'betraying' it by... doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.

If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do... On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don't believe in. Make up your mind.

A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any 'phobic' way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.

(35)

One of my fellow Samizdatistas recently told me that whatever business model the porn industry is following now is what Hollywood is about to follow. To see the future of Hollywood, look at porn now. Porn, so I was told, now, already, distributes itself by being given away, and then if you like something you see for free you go to the originating porn site and pay a bit, either in cash or in advertising attention or for individual products, because that turns out to be an even better deal, and worth paying a bit for. Hollywood is slowly learning this lesson.

But is it actually too late for them to learn? Look what is apparently now happening to the porn industry:

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What's happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what's happening to its Hollywood counterpart - only worse.

So, is that what is about to happen to Hollywood also? Will movie and TV entertainment of the clothes-mostly-on sort also be overrun soon by amateurs?

WIth thanks to Instapundit for the link.

(5)

I keep telling my wife that she bears a certain physical resemblance to this eyeful. I am not sure if Mrs Pearce wants to spend her life as an opera singer, mind. (Latin dance is more her thing). Anyway, compared with most of the over-rated warblers of modern music, Cecilia Bartoli knocks the competition into the proverbial cocked hat. Her continued excellence helps assuage music-lovers' grief at losing Luciano Pavarotti earlier this year. It is one of my regrets I never saw him live.

(7)

Here are some wonderfully good photographs, ideal browsing for a grey Sunday afternoon.

(22)

I went to watch Elizabeth - the Golden Age - as I had mentioned a few weeks back and I was pretty impressed, despite a few jarring notes (Francis Drake barely gets a mention in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rather like overlooking Nelson at Trafalgar). But the film was overall good entertainment, if not dead-accurate scholarship. One thing stuck in my mind on the way home: the man who played Philip II of Spain was very convincing in the role of a religious maniac, a man swinging between rhapsodies of hatred for Elizabeth and tearful despair. I thought to myself: "This guy looks like a stunt double for the current leader of Iran". I mean, he really does. Creepy.

(30)

I find this Hollywood writers strike fascinating but puzzling. On the one hand, we have long been told, Hollywood crawls with waiters who serve scripts to movie people with the coffee, lift attendants who type deathless dialog during their lunch hours. On the other hand, Hollywood is grinding to a halt, because the Union, and all those sympathetic to unions, really can withdrawn a great chunk of the raw material essential to the entertainment industry.

Rather than announce the answer to the what's-going-on? question, I will simply ask it of the Samizdata commentariat. What's going on?

Is this an industry in decline, having a quarrel about a diminished pie? Or is it a quarrel about new territory (digital rights), in other words a quarrel about an increased pie? Is this TV and the movies on their last legs, or TV and the movies getting the ground rules established for marching profitably forwards into the internet age? Is that actually what the quarrel is about? The studios say: it is a famine out there. The writers say: it is a feast.

My heading says one thing that I do observe with confidence, which is that if you want small screen entertainment, perfectly crafted to fit in with your exact preferences and prejudices, there is still plenty of it out there, which is not going to go away or stop being made any time soon. So, is not this a rather bad time for Hollywood to be strike-bound? Are not the professionals simply handing the future to the blackleg amateurs? Or am I missing something?

I want the strike to last for ever, on politico-philosophical grounds. As a libertarian I am not against strikes in principle. An individual should be allowed to withdraw his labour. So should an organised group of individuals, and attach any conditions they like to ceasing to withdraw that labour, just so long as organised does not mean violent (the alternative to such rules is slavery). Nevertheless, the kind of writers, and the kind of people generally, who like striking, unions, etc., and who believe that striking, unions, etc., is what has made the word rich (rather than productive work), mostly have the kind of opinions I would like to see severely muted, indefinitely.

I could get my wish, at any rate for quite a while:

They want more money for their work when it is used online than Hollywood studios are willing to pay. Because the strike is over matters of principle, not just dollars and cents, it could last for months.

But what are these principles exactly?

(6)

If this film, a sequel, is half as good as Elizabeth, then it will be one to wait for. Blanchett was simply outstanding in the first movie.

I was interested in the comment by the actor, Clive Owen, who said he was not bitter at being passed over for the role of 007. I am not sure I entirely believe him - but then there was a lot of spying going on in Elizabethan England, so instead of holding a Walther PPK, he gets to use a rapier sword instead. Arguably, M16 and its cousins can trace some of their origins back to that period.

And let's face it, Cate Blanchett is certainly easy on the eye.

(0)

"We all have to compromise," says Walt Chalmers (played by Robert Vaughn)

"Bullshit," replies Frank Bullitt, (Steve McQueen).

From Bullitt.

(0)

I like to read paperback thrillers as well as the supposed more "serious stuff" out there. Authors that I willingly take to the beach or read on a train, the Tube or for that matter, while curling up on the sofa in my flat are ones that many people will recognise: Frederick Forsyth, Ian Fleming, Alastair Maclean, Eric Ambler (a much under-appreciated writer), Mickey Spillane, Roger Simon, John D. McDonald (Travis Magee stories, etc), and many more. And I am never more grateful than when I stumble upon a new author who has the ability to keep the pages turning. One such example is Lee Child, a TV journalist from the West Midlands who has emigrated to the States and become an accomplished thriller writer via his superb Jack Reacher stories. If you haven't read them, start now. There's no excuse. Reacher is simply one of the most engaging characters I have come across in years. Reacher embodies the sort of "loner hero" one gets in the best Westerns (think of the great movie Shane or Clint Eastwood's terrific Outlaw Josey Wales) and the very modern up-to-date know-how of a criminal investigator. He has a manly, no-nonsense attitude towards dealing with the bad guys with a very smart understanding of women but does not fall into fake sentimentality or over-the-top macho posturing one gets in certain kinds of movies. Reacher has his demons - he cannot deal with being tied down in any sort of relationship - but he is blessedly free from the "flawed hero" syndrome of much popular culture. He is a hero, full stop. If ever there is a series of novels crying to be made into movies, this series is it, although part of me hopes that it does not happen, given how Hollywood often royally buggers up fine material.

Now, gentle reader, you are wondering why I referred to the "power of blogs" in the headline. Well, I wrote that because I owe Robert Bidinotto, a blogger, academic and magazine editor a large 'thank you' (if we ever meet, the beer's on me, Bob) for praising Lee Child's writings to the skies. Bob's literary judgement is normally laser accurate, so almost as soon as I read his interesting interview with Child, I made sure that the next time I passed a bookshop, I got one of Child's novels (Bob's blog can be found here).

For spending a week on the seaside in Malta and Gozo, as I have been this week, there is not a better writer to stick in the rucksack for the trip to the beach than Lee Child.

Of course, there are some who would argue that the greatest thriller ever written, certainly in terms of its sweep and scope, is the Count of Monte Cristo. I am not going to contest that.

(0)

Last Friday night I went to the theatre. The play was about a group of people who played poker with each other for life-damaging stakes, and my feeling about such people is that they deserve every misfortune that they bring upon themselves. So I couldn't get involved in the play or care about what happened to any of the characters in it. (It didn't help at all that they were all men.) Poker for serious money has apparently been on the up-and-up in recent years, and especially since the time when this play, Dealer's Choice by Patrick Marber, was first written and performed just over ten years ago. But for me all that this proves is that there are, now as always, lots of people around with more money than sense. People who merely gamble about which of them ends up taking home all the money leave me cold, and this play left me correspondingly refrigerated.

I mean, if you're going to gamble, gamble about something. Do something where your knowledge of the world and ability to predict its happenings will benefit others. Why not, for instance, gamble on the stockmarket, or on commodity prices. Contrary to widespread opinion, these are immensely valuable activities (as Johnathan Pearce regularly explains here), which help to create a world of rationally negotiated prices for just about everything, and which enable other people (people like farmers particularly spring to mind) to avoid the very risks that you so like to take.

Or do something more creatively hazardous, which, if you can bring it off, will amount to more than mere money in your wallet, which in any case, if you are the kind of gambler I saw in the theatre last Friday night, you will probably squander within the month with more vacuous betting.

Why not, for instance, open a theatre - a theatre which doesn't depend for its survival on state hand-outs but entirely on the number of bums on seats you can contrive and the quantity and quality of other goods and services you can ply the bodies attached to the bums with, like food and drink in appealing surroundings?

Which is exactly what my friend and host for last Friday evening, Don Riley, did do. His theatre, which is just up the road from London Bridge tube station, is called the Menier Chocolate Factory for the most obvious of reasons, which is that this is what it used to be.

When it came to the play we saw last Friday, deal me out. But as for the Menier Chocolate Factory generally, count me in. I'll definitely be going again, and I enthusiastically recommend the place.

(0)

The Brave One is a good film, and I would encourage people to go and see it. Even though this means putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, which is hardly my favourite corporation.

- warning: spoilers follow ...

[Alas, remainder of article was lost in a server crash on 22nd Oct 2007. Bugger]

(0)

I'll be poised to grab a cinema seat for this one when it comes out.

(0)

I liked this film, 3:10 to Yuma. The death of the Western is one of those occasional refrains, but this is fine piece of film-making. There were one or two clichés in it (those evil rotten railroad barons) but those clichés had some basis in fact.

The picture of the old West was almost completely bleak, but it made for great drama, and a terrific set of gunfights. For a rather contrarian view of the West, this book is worth a look.

(5)

I am not a great opera buff but I am very saddened to read about this news this morning. The man's voice was simply amazing.

Rest in peace.

(64)

The film Death Sentence is worth seeing.

As the saying goes "Warning! spoilers below"...

I would like to say that I was attracted to the film by the negative review in the Daily Telegraph (which is normally a good sign), buy I had already been to see the film before I chanced upon the review.

I actually agree with one bit of the review. The lead character does learn to use firearms with rather too little time and effort (although it has already been established that he is a man of application and with a decent level of physical strength and coordination - he is also in a rather focussed frame of mind).

However, that is not the real reason that the Daily Telegraph reviewer sneers at the film. It is the ideas and feelings behind the story that would be disliked by a standard media person.

The main character Nick Hume (played well by Kevin Bacon) is shown as having had an athletic youth but also as being a conscientious executive working in the area of the calculation of risk. Indeed Nick Hume's manner and even appearance whilst in the office (in the early part of the film) reminded me a little of Brit Hume of Fox News (and this is a 20th Century Fox film).

Mr Hume's son is murdered, and the police can only offer him a few years in prison for the murderer, as Mr Hume is the only witness and, therefore, to risk a jury trial would be unwise (better to settle for a deal with the defence).

The father decides that a year or so in jail is not enough for the death of his son. So he pretends that he is no longer sure that the murderer was indeed the killer of his son - so that the man will be released, so that he (Mr Hume) can kill him.

This killing is quite convincing. Mr Hume messes things up rather badly, and basically wins the fight by luck.

However, Mr Hume has also covered his tracks rather poorly so the gang who the murderer belonged to quickly work out that Nick Hume has killed their comrade (who also happens to be the brother of the leader of the gang).

Unsurprisingly the gang then attempt to kill Mr Hume - who (again more by luck than judgement) manages to survive and to kill another member of the gang.

At this point the leader of the gang decides to kill not just Mr Hume, but also his wife and remaining son. The gang leader also informs Mr Hume of what he intends to do, for whilst the gang leader is an evil man (who later kills his own father) there is also a feeling that he longs to be respected, to be thought of as an honourable warrior - not a pathetic street corner drug dealer.

As a policewomen (who suspects Mr Hume of killing the gang members) puts it "you have started a war, everyone thinks they are right in war - and everyone looses".

Mr Hume's wife is also shocked by what Mr Hume is suspected to have done.

Later the gang succeed in killing Mr Hume's wife and leaving his other son in coma - but Mr Hume (although wounded) does not die.

At this point he gives himself totally to the task of revenge. He changes his appearance (a nice touch is that he shaves his head wrong - he misses some hair, which is what tends to happen when one shaves one's head for the first time) buys firearms and ammunition (from the gang leader's own father) and kills the remaining gang members.

Mr Hume's youngest son may recover from the coma (although, as he was shot in the head, he will not have a happy time) but Mr Hume's own life is over, if he does not die of his wounds he will spend the rest of his life in prison (the film ends with him sitting watching a home movie of his family - with the police already having arrived at his home).

So far so "liberal" one might think - "taking the law into your own hands" is shown to have terrible consequences (wife dead, younger son brain damaged and only death or prison to look forward to), but that is not the feel of the film (which is the real reason the reviewers will hate it).

The feel of the film is that there is nothing else Mr Hume could have done. Blood calls out for blood (not a year or so in prison) even if the consequences will be terrible. If a father can not save his son, he must still avenge him - even if this leads to other members of his family being killed.

It is not even a matter of hating the enemy. Near the end of the film the leader of the gang who has murdered Mr Hume's family sits down next to him (the gang leader is bleeding to death at the time) and the two men are almost friendly as they sit there - Mr Hume even asks him if he is ready before shooting him one last time.

And, yes, there is a political message.

Many people say that such things as the Afghan war are pointless because we can not turn the place into a democracy (as the neo-cons want). This may be true - but it misses the point. Just as it misses the point to say that the United States should not be in the Middle East at all - whether the United States should or should not have forces in the Middle East was no longer a relevant question after 9/11.

There is no real distinction between the Taliban and those who launched the attack upon the United States on 9/11. They have the same interpretation of Islam, and they have members who move from one organization to the other without difficulty.

To go after Al Qaeda means to go after the Taliban. And after 9/11 there was no honourable alternative to war, blood calls out for blood.

The consequences of intervention may be bad - but the consequences are not relevant.

(29)

Being the free marketeer that I am, I accept the point that an item is worth what people are prepared to pay for it, not more, not less. But some sort of gremlin in me shouts "that's bonkers!" when I see what people are prepared to shell out for a so-called work of art. The skull, encrusted in diamonds, sold for £50m by Damian Hirst had that little gremlin shouting again in my head.

To think that some folk working deep under the earth's crust dug out all those sparklers for this, when there are so many beautiful women out there who should be wearing things like these.

Ok, rant over.

(6)

If you are in central London and want to see some wonderful art, I can recommend this. The ticket prices are a bit steep and the collection is not quite as big as some, but definitely worth it. It makes me want to get across the Channel and sip wine in a nice restaurant in Normandy or Brittany.

There is something strange about contemplating a peaceful scene on a Normandy beach, painted in say, 1870, to realise that 74 years later, the place was swarming with Allied troops slugging it out with the German Army, or what was left of it.

(7)

It is all too easy to imagine a future in which our grandchildren will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service, or was a District Officer in Bechuanaland.

-Jeremy Paxman, keeping hope alive for millions of Britons

(18)

The Bourne Ultimatum is a crackerjack of a high-adrenalin, fast-paced film. I must admit that I am slightly allergic to Matt Damon but he delivers the goods in this third instalment of the Jason Bourne series. James Bond he ain't: no tuxedos, no rapier one-line putdowns, no Russian Smersh agents called Tanya and definitely no Aston Martins with ejector seats but for excitement, it ranks highly. I was slightly irritated by the constantly jerky film shifts - the director is obviously trying to show how realistic and gritty the whole thing is, and I am not entirely convinced that the CIA's technology is as snazzy as in the film. But these are quibbles.

I expected to see a few cliches in this film, and we were not entirely disappointed. Yes, the CIA is portrayed as riddled with mad, bad people, but on the other hand, justice is done, the bad folk get brought to book eventually, and the film does not imply, as far as I can tell, that the threats to the US are somehow made up or are the figments of imagination. If anything, the message is that overzealous security agencies can easily convince themselves that it is okay to violate the boundaries of the law to do what is necessary. No one is above the law.

I also smiled wryly at the way the film showed how many CCTV cameras there are in Britain. The scene at Waterloo Station, for example, was excellently done, and horribly believable.

(7)

No, I am not talking about the tiresome Lindsay Lohan and her ilk.

Perusing the morning papers, I could not help but wonder who will come under more fire: Kiera Knightley for glamorizing smoking (and looking absolutely stunning while she does so), or Sienna Miller for wearing what appears to be a keffiyeh as a bikini top?

(22)

There is a lovely piece in the Telegraph today about Elvis Presley, who died 30 years ago (Christ I feel old as I type those words). A lot of people get very snooty about the Tennessee lad but I do not. I like most of his early material, am not quite so keen on the Vegas year stuff and have not much interest in reading about his later years. But that he had an amazing voice, charisma and impact on the world of music can only be denied by people who have spent the last few years living on Mars.

For nearly a year, I lived at the flat of the late Chris Tame, whom I very much miss both as a friend and intellectual influence. Chris was a massive Elvis fan. His house in Bloomsbury would be either vibrating to the music of the King or some surf guitar dude like Dick Dale (no deep classical music was allowed). Chris was an atheist and no believer in the afterlife, but I bet that if there is one, he is up there, rockin' to the music of his hero.

Not everyone shares my generally favourable view, such as Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian. He repeats the old, politically-correct crud that Elvis only was important because he "stole" blues from black people, etc. Oh please.

And if I can make a sort of cultural-political "point" here, let's not forget that Elvis is probably loathed by the sort of people that any self-respecting advocate of the pursuit of happiness would be glad to be loathed by: religious fundamentalists and nanny staters of various persuasions.

(12)

Contrary to what people might sometimes suppose "ought" to be the case at a blog like this, I have never felt that I have been under some sort of pressure, imposed either by myself or the editors, to write solely about politics or Big World Affairs. Yes, of course, we bash the various statist intrusions, the general crapness of David Cameron, Green reactionaries, islamofascists, privacy-trashing New Labour politicians, etc, etc, but of course we also write regularly about science, spacefaring and so on. And as regulars will know, I often mention fillms or films that have become part of the public conversation. My last comment about so-called "art house" films drew from one, perfectly polite commenter the remark that "why cannot I write about something important?".

I think films are important, because they are part of culture, and, whether we like or not, the contents of a film, just like a painting, piece of sculpture, novel, ballad or poetry can sometimes - not always - say something interesting about the sort of values that permeate a society. To borrow from Ayn Rand for a moment, art can reveal the philosophy, world view, or "sense of life", of the person who made that book, film or picture. (A person who prefers to listen to atonal music may have a different psychology or outlook to someone who likes rock n' roll, for example). The artist may not himself be aware of that philosophy or be able to articulate it clearly, but it exists. In the case of arthouse films, for example, particularly of the sort that were produced by the Europeans like Bergman, Traffaut and Godard, they they certainly did tell us something about the state of the culture at the time: anti-bourgoios, anti-heroic, not very interested sometimes in actual drama, sharply defined characters or plots; the tone was often ironic (sometimes very funny), amused, but also very dark at times. The films fitted into the intellectual world of the time, to a world still recovering from the long-dominant strains of socialism and collectivism in vogue for much of the 20th Century. There are exceptions and oddities to this sweeping statement of mine, of course, but as a generalisation, I think it holds a fair amount of water.

On one level, arthouse films can and are enjoyed for being quite entertaining, even brilliant (I might rent out Bergman's the Seventh Seal to see if it as good as the commenters say) but the reason why I chose to write what I did was because I agree with the likes of Toby Young and even Jeremy "The Rottweiler" Paxman that a lot of what passes for great art from such film directors is pretty thin gruel indeed. Art is important, because it says something about the civilisation in which we happen to live, often far more so than any number of books in a library.

(28)

Stephen Pollard, the UK writer and BBC Newsnight anchorman Jeremy Paxman may not agree about everything, but these two are certainly on the same page when it comes to a dismissive view of so-called "arthouse" movies. In particular, Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm when he said recently less than complimentary things - Paxman is not exactly what I would call a diplomat - about the late director, Ingmar Bergman. Quite right too. On Tuesday evening's show, Paxman, journalist Toby Young and some film reviewer fellow from the Financial Times were having a right old argument about whether art house films are worth the effort. I tend to side with Toby Young: long after people have forgotten about the likes of Bergman, they will be watching the films made by Hitchcock, John Ford, Coppolla and the rest.

I think the problem are the words "art house". It conveys the idea that the benighted viewer is not just watching a film, but is having some wonderfully clever experience which is likely to be lost on the plebs. There is a lot of anti-bourgeois posturing in such films. Worse, they are self-indulgent. I find most of them unwatchable. I'd rather watch Bruce Willis in Die Hard any day of the week than this stuff. And the point that the FT writer - I forgot his name - seemed to overlook is that films that lack plots, strongly defined characters, a sense of life and drama, do not achieve the lofty goal of somehow making us "think about the big lessons of life". (He probably regards films with a beginning, middle and an end as "popcorn movies.") Arguably, you are more likely to learn a bit about humanity if you watch The Simpsons or The Incredibles rather than some dreary French art flick.

Talking of witch, Die Hard 4.0 is on. I must get some tickets.

(3)

There have been quite a few films made in recent years about singers and musicians' lives. We have had films about the late Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, to name just two. The latest of this type is the biopic of the French singer, Edith Piaf. Even if the film exaggerates a bit for effect, she led an extraordinary and in certain ways very sad life. Edith Piaf, was probably the most famous French person in the middle of the 20th Century apart from Charles de Gaulle or Maurice Chevalier.

There are lots of good things in the film, starting with the performance of Marion Cotillard, who is uncannily good in the lead role and it has plenty of strong supporting performances including a short but strong set of scenes with Gerard Depardieu, who plays the nightclub owner who discovers young Edith singing for cash in the streets of Paris. The scenery is nicely handled; we are given an idea of what early 20th Century France was like for people born on the wrong side of the tracks (at one stage, young Edith was raised in a brothel). She was born during the First World War and lived in Paris during the Second, and according to this Wikipedia entry, helped with the French Resistance. What is interesting, however, is that almost no reference whatever is made to WW2 and occupied France in the film, as if the subject matter is either too sensitive for the supposed audience - the movie is made in French, with subtitles - or some other reason. And yet the way in which such artists managed to survive and even forge some sort of a career during wartime is surely an interesting subject.

To say that she was unlucky in love was an understatement; she was also a serious addict of painkiller drugs and other substances and died of liver cancer in her mid-40s, but the film does not make her into some sort of whining, pathetic victim although it does at times slip into a tragic sense of life - to use Ayn Rand's expression - which becomes a little oppressive at times. On the whole, however, it is quite clear that she made certain choices in her life and benefited and suffered accordingly. I certainly left the cinema with a greater understanding of why this little, charismatic woman from the streets of Paris rose to become one of the greatest singers of all time. Here's to her memory.

(9)

Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, "screwball" movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times - well, at least in the first series - but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there's been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh's novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era).

(11)

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

Steve Martin. (My favourite Martin film is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine.)

(32)

I was switching from television station to television station when I came upon a show (on "Sky 3") called Riverdance In China.

OK, I thought, a group of athletic Irish people dancing in China - I will see what the show is like.

And then an Irish women's voice said something close to the following:

"The Chinese Emperors tyrannically isolated the country from the outside world, but in the first years of the 20th century the Communists under Chairman Mao overthrow the Emperors and the lives of hundreds of millions of people gradually improved..."

Perhaps it got better after this, but I do not know because I turned it off.

Well once the Emperors of China may indeed have isolated China from the outside world, but that certainly was not true in the "early years of the 20th century", when one could, for example, buy Chinese railway bonds on all the major exchanges of the world.

The Chinese Communists did not overthrow the Emperors - the Chinese Communist Party did not even exist in 1911 when Sun Yat-Sen (and his protégé, Chiang Kai Shek) overthrew the Qing Dynasty.

And as for the life of the Chinese people gradually improving under the Communists, in reality tens of millions of them starved to death during the collectivist 'Great Leap Forward' and the rest of it. About 60 million people were murdered under Mao, so perhaps 'gradually improved' might not have been the most appropriate choice of words.

Also even the most statist Emperor never demanded that people make steel in their back yards (you can guess what this steel was like) or launched a campaign to exterminate birds in the demented hope that it would improve the harvest (surprise, surprise, there was a plague of insects).

Perhaps the show introduction was, unintentionally, amusing for people who have read books like Mao: The Untold Story, but remember - a lot of young people (and not so young people) get what knowledge of the world they have from sources like the introduction to this show, which is a great pity.

(3)

On Sunday evening, I returned a rental car at Los Angeles International Airport prior to boarding a flight to London. LAX is one of those airports where the car rental station is some distance from the terminals, and having returned your car, you board a shuttle bus that takes you to your terminal. There were only a small number of people on this particular bus, and the driver asked each of us which airline we were travelling on and hence which terminal we needed to be taken to. One of the other passengers was a young woman - perhaps 30 years old. She told the driver that she was flying on United, hesitated and said "...but it is an international flight. Is that the same?". As is the case with many Americans, she gave the impression that she did not fly internationally very often, so I assured her that she was going to the correct terminal.

I asked her where she was going. She answered "Johannesburg", and told me that she was going via London to get there. I expressed surprise that she had to take such a long route, and she told me that she could have flown to Washington and got a direct flight from there, but that the 15 hours non-stop from Washington to Johannesburg was a longer flight than she wanted to take. Personally, I have done more than a few 15 hour flights in my time, and I would not have made the same choice she did (for me, getting the total journey time down to as small a time is key, but other people's mileage does vary, somewhat literally in this case). I mentioned that I had friends and family in Johannesburg and that I had visited that city earlier this year, and she asked me what it was like. I told her that the rich parts of northern Johannesburg (where she was going) are like southern California but with more fortifications, which may or may not have reassured her.

I asked her why I was going. She said it was "Business", and that she was "involved in the Live Earth concerts". I probably should have asked her how she was involved, or what she did, or something, but connections between LA and the music industry are not exactly surprising. I was tempted to make some snide remark about how the Johannesburg concerts had just been relocated to a smaller venue due to lack of interest, but in truth the discovery as to why this woman was travelling rather caused me to lose interest.

I suppose the real question might have been just exactly how she thought that flying lots of people like her from LA to London to Johannesburg was going to help global warming exactly, but I could not be bothered asking. And in truth it would have been rude to ask, because I was just making friendly conversation with a perfectly pleasant woman before catching a flight.

I fear though, that we are back to "essential" travel for "important" people like politicians, rock stars, and people who work in the music industry somehow not counting. Making sacrifices to save the world is something for the plebs to do.

(8)

Is no-one interested in saving the planet?

The Johannesburg leg of the Live Earth concerts has shifted venues due to lack of ticket sales at original venue...

The Istanbul leg of the event was cancelled last week, due to lack of sponsorship interest.

Wah-haah!

(28)

Of course, you do realise that in 20 years or so, everybody will be smoking again:

WHEN the musical Grease opens in London’s West End this summer, and the teenage sweetheart Sandy draws on a symbolic cigarette, warning notices will be in place around the theatre alerting the audience to the danger she poses.

And that's for a symbolic cigarette! Imagine the danger she would pose if she blazed up a real one?

The West End theatres fought successfully to win an exemption for actors from the ban on smoking in public places, which becomes law on July 1. But some are now concerned that onstage smoking may draw complaints from the audience.

They should put up a warning sign which says:"Anyone who complains about smoking on stage will have the snot beaten out of them".

But whatever signs are erected will be temporary. When things get this deliriously insane, it means that the war on smoking is quite obviously and hopelessly lost.

(6)

OK, I am biassed. NO2ID gets a credit on this film. But having been to a contributors' screening last night, I think you could do worse than drag any friends or relations who are complacent about Britain being 'a free country' along to Taking Liberties (since 1997) when it opens on June 8th. If you have a black sense of humour, you will laugh.

Not much in the film will come as news to Samizdata readers, and to get anything like a coherent story out of so much material it has had to simplify, rather. But I was very pleasantly surprised that in doing so it avoids falling into the usual human-rightist traps of equating liberty with leftism. Teeters on the edge occasionally, perhaps. The sequence on Guantanamo is a little too long, and I think unbalances the section on the Blair regime's complicity in torture. But there are few tendentious statements, and in most ways it is a conservative polemic. If there are heroes on screen they are mild-mannered middle-class pacifists. The off-screen heroes are Winston Churchill and the common law courts.

The points are made gently and methodically, ticking off, one by one, the broad civil liberties supposedly assured by the Human Rights Act, but actually removed by the same government that made such a fanfare of its respect for "our way of life". Boiling the story down from a vast mass of information they could have included makes it very solidly founded. This is polemic, but the antithesis of Michael-Moore-style, concocted illustration of an artificial thesis. I spotted only very few factual errors, and I am an awful nitpicking wonk, as you all know.

What will stay with me, however, is what I had not seen before. Footage of lots of officious political policing and show of official force. Those who think we are softies whining about nothing will no doubt say that actually this just illustrates we are in no danger, Britain is still a healthy democracy (whatever that means). But is it really better to be smothered with a feather pillow than publicly garotted?

PS - Like a lot of small films this starts out in a few screens and hopes for a rolling release, so it is desperately sensitive to opening receipts. If you do go to see it when it opens, you increase the chance that others will get a chance do so too.

(8)

Writers who hate a lot are often more compelling to read than pleasant, nice folk. We want some, if not all, of our newspaper columns to have a fair measure of sulphur, a bit of bile and a pinch of basic malice. Rod Liddle of The Spectator comes to mind. Christopher Hitchens, when he is on form and slaying some religious nonsense or attacking George Gallway, fairly curls the edges of a newspaper. But the supreme purveyor of sustained, gratuitous nastiness is AA Gill. He sometimes hits the target with great accuracy, but there is this level of personal animus that he directs to certain targets that makes me wonder what exactly is eating this man, or whether he is ever so slightly off his trolley ("Nurse!"). Many of his targets seem to come from the same background, in terms of income, culture and education, as himself. There seems to a lot of score-settling between that small, suffocating clique of London media types going on, if you read between the lines of Gill's writings, which must leave a lot of ordinary folk bemused.

Consider this paragraph about a recent TV documentary by Ian Hislop. Hislop profiled the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the movement 100 years ago. Hislop was rather kind to the man, and although he mentioned the imperialistic overtones of the Edwardian times in which B-P operated, generally urged us to admire the old fella. For Gill, who clearly loathes so much about England and its history, Hislop's sin is unforgivable:

Hislop is good at documentary TV. He has a bright, hobbity enthusiasm and is smarter than he looks, which, frankly, isn’t much of a stretch. He comes from a great tradition of English pamphleteers and iconoclasts who are very eccentric and partial about the bits of the Establishment they want to put on the tumbril and those they want to preserve in aspic. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was, predictably, a good thing, though very few of today’s scouts were allowed to sully the halcyon, Hentyesque nostalgia for a simpler, stiffer, perter time.

He has half a decent point, of course. Hislop is editor of Private Eye, which unfailingly hammers away at all manner of targets, not all of them deserved. On the Have I Got News for You satire programme, Hislop and his opposite number, Paul Merton, send up the news stories of the week through a generally left-liberal lens (a lens that I suspect is shared more or less by AA Gill). But occasionally Hislop goes "off the reservation" and says nice things about people, which must clearly upset Gill. Hislop once, memorably attacked the European Union on the show, to the horror of his fellow panelists. Hislop is also a devout Anglican Christian and clearly has a lot of affection for many of the traditions of this country. He comes from the sort of upper-middle class background that formed much of the backbone of institutions like the old Indian Civil Service. Gill's insult about his intelligence is a cheap shot and damaged what could have been an actually quite decent argument (Hislop may be selective in his choice of victims and heroes.) But Gill's vileness gets the better of him and masks the point. A shame. If you read the link to the article and read his first point about another, awful TV programme, you can see why Gill remains the master of sustained and justified invective. But he needs to cut out the personal and thank his lucky stars that the practice of duelling is now outlawed.

(23)

Continuing in movie-talk vein, one force that has swept through the western film industry to greater and lesser degrees is the current hatred of tobacco and the tobacco industry. The Michael Mann film, The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino - with a fine performance also by Christopher Plummer - is a good example. All the pieces are in place: a big, evil ciggie firm makes its products more addictive by dark scientific means; Crowe, who plays a scientist, leaves said evil organisation and blows the whistle on its practices. He is hounded, threatened, his marriage and career collapses. Pacino, as the hero-journalist, tries to expose all this, and in the process gets leant on by his big-bucks media empire bosses. The viewer comes away from the production in no doubt that cigarette companies are just a few inches short of being Nazis.

If you take a random look at any major Hollywood production these days, you seldom see stars light up a cigarette, except possibly some of the more dubious or "troubled" characters. When I watched Steve Martin's hilarious spoof film of 1940s film noir, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, I was reminded of how in the movies of the time, everyone smoked. Even the pet dogs would have smoked, given half a chance. And the cinema audiences smoked like chimneys as well. This is now a distant memory. The modern James Bond in Casino Royale does not smoke his Morland Specials, whereas Connery smoked and of course 007's creator, Ian Fleming, puffed away heroically. Bogart got through several packs of Luckies in a movie, and so did the various hot dames who acted with him. Spencer Tracy was unusual in that he did not smoke. Can you imagine Hugh Grant smoking, or George Clooney?

Of course, there is a bit of a backlash from time to time, creating wonderful satire. Thankyou for Smoking, the film based on the humorous novel by Christopher Buckley, is one such. And the great Denis Leary tries to keep the flag flying. But for real defiance of the health-obsessives, the French cannot be beaten. Last night I watched the French cop film 36, starring the usual roster of craggy-faced Jules and Jacques with their Galoises and Gitanes attached permanently to their lower lips. I counted, or tried to count, the number of cigarettes smoked in the film and gave up at about the 200 mark.

If Sarkozy is to be a great president of France, he needs to smoke.

(15)

It is has been a long-standing complaint from pro-market folk - like yours truly - that business and capitalism tends to get a pretty crummy deal in Hollywood and its equivalents around the world. Even one of my favourite movies, Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas as the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, is normally taken to be an anti-capitalist film, even though there is nothing in the magnificent "greed is good" speech with which I fundamentally disagree (it is like Ayn Rand on acid). In the main, businessmen are treated as shysters, or cold, or boring, and business is regarded as either vaguely venal or not very dramatic. The trouble is, I suppose, that the creative process of forming a business, running it and exploring a new market is not always full of obvious drama the same way that a crime story is, or at least not obvious to people who tend to view business in a hostile light. Some processes of bringing a new product to market might actually be very dramatic, and it is surprising that the arts world has not picked up on this more.

People have of course speculated why business tends to get treated like this. In part, artistic people, including extremely intelligent and creative ones, will regard the process of raising funds for a film or play as a chore, and often resent the process of getting money and having to suck up to people to get it. Also, creative people often do not get close to the grubby necessity of having to pay bills, meet salary payrolls and so on. As a result, a lot of people in the arts world do not really understand business all that well. The results tend to bear this out. Take UK soap operas on television, like the terrible Eastenders, Coronation Street or the US shows Dallas and Dynasty. (The latter two cases were admittedly self-parodies to a degree). In almost every case, the businessman - it is usually a man - is presented as a crook, or brutal, shallow, uninteresting and generally unpleasant. And even in so-called "reality" business tv shows like The Apprentice, starring the Amstrad computer firm boss Alan Sugar, the impression is that being a great businessman means being a total wanker, which alas is the impression that Sir Alan conveys, although for all I know he is a much nicer man in real life and is just hamming it up for the cameras.

So is there any hope? Well, this interesting blog item suggests that things might be brightening up. Why does it matter? It matters, I am afraid, because people these days seldom form their views by reading long books like Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt or Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. For better or worse - and it is usually the worse - we get our opinions, our prejudices and our ideas from watching visual media.

On a qualifying note, I should add that I do not, of course, want television dramas or films to become propoganda for the views that I like, as a reaction to propoganda for views that I detest. Rather, it is just that it would be nice to see entrepreneuriship given a bit of a fairer shake from the luvvies, once in a while.

I can unreservedly plug this film, however, I can also repeat my admiration for this film as well. This old movie, Cash McCall, is worth a look although it might be hard to get hold of easily.

(59)

What is your favourite passage from a novel?

I think mine is that superbly-written scene in Moonraker when Ian Fleming describes how Bond deals out a sequence of cards that in Bridge is known as a Yarborough and as a result, takes the villain Drax to the cleaners. I never thought that a writer could make the game of Bridge sound exciting, but Fleming achieved it.

For second place in this quiz, I think I have to go for the scene in Scoop when William Boot, the hapless correspondent, files his first despatch for the Daily Beast. I still grin whenever I think about it.

(7)

I am sure many of you have heard Carla Howell's song "How Could I Live Without Filing Taxes". Well, now she has a music video!

(71)

Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate - perhaps wisely - to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, "South Park and Philosophy," a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley's assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.

Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. "Too much" choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:

"A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ's sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do."

And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don't have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don't have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don't have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market....I want consumer protection, so I don't have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the "sea monkeys" Cartman buys in "Simpsons Already Did It". I want state utilities, so I don't have to be constantly figuring out the best deal".....

He concludes, "What I am proposing is not so very radical."

No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth - presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is - is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers' best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.

Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport - pretty much anything serious - and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.

There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by "too many" choices - a question-begging notion if there ever was one - they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.

What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the "victim" culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.

Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O'Rourke's wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.

(11)

I thought I'd just put this photo up from the Libertas film blog, simply because, well, I can, dammit.

(16)

If you enjoyed the You-Tube video which Thaddeus pointed out, you can find the main track and much more at the band's web site: Stuck Mojo Media.

As I spent a good chunk of my life on the bottom end of the music business I know what life there is like. Let us just say I never gave up my day job.The cost of instruments, equipment, recording, new strings for each major gig and not to mention the bar tab... make a musicians life a tough one. Even if you do have the day job to live on, you spend your life in deep levels of sleep deprivation. The only thing which keeps you going is the buzz you get from the audience. Please show these guys your gratitude by buying their music or putting something in their tip jar.

Do your part to make sure they can keep doing what they are doing!

(32)

Movies have consequences:

"Iranian commentators are mainly angry, defending Iran's action," the e-mail said. "The reason for that is a) UK does not have a good/positive history in Iran b) Persians have been treated badly by Westerners e.g. in the movie 300 or referring to Persian Gulf as simply Gulf or Arabian Gulf, so now having the poor young sailors captivated by Iran, many Iranians feel proud!!!!!!"

Now what are the chances of Ahmedinejad changing his name to Xerxes?

(6)

Whatever you may be doing this weekend, whether it's playing a few rounds of golf or taking a trip to the seaside or pruning your rose bushes, let us help you to set the mood and deepen your sense of tranquility and peace with this admirably tolerant, progressive and diversity celebrating video.

Relax and enjoy!

(21)

I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers' reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.

Clive has a picture taken from I'm All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove - the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick - as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United's Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.

In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing - "Set the People Free" - while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).

And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show's brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers' brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I'm All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas ("what a fwightful shower!"), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.

The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the 'enlightened classes' at the time, which was that Britain was not 'modern' or 'efficient' enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain's industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain's economic stagnation. The 'fix' was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions' privileges, starting with the closed shop.

I have heard it said that Sellers' portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers' genius to send up the intrusive state of today.

(44)

If it were not for the fact that I saw '300' on its UK opening night (i.e. last night), then this hilariously PC review would have me thrusting my hand into my pocket to whip out the price of a ticket:

It's an ugly business: brutal, racist, homophobic – dare I say fascist? Harmless escapism indeed.

Damn those warmongering Neo-Spartans!

I am sending an email to the producers with my suggested title for a sequel - "300 II: the Persians are back and this time they're Islamic!!" The cultural cringe alone will be worth the budget.

(9)

Behold the depths of your innermost soul
A Minotaur walking in endless despair
Mythical like a dream
Invisible like a soft breath of wind

- Bel Canto, Time without end.

I suppose I just cannot bring myself to give a damn about what is happening in the news today.

(9)

Considering the fashionable wail that Britons are a dumbed-down lot, there is a lot of interest in the fiction of Jane Austen at the moment. BBC and other channels are vying, so it appears, to see which one can carry the most screenings of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility or Emma. More productions are expected. Last night, yours truly and Mrs Pearce went along to see 'Becoming Jane', a film which tries to capture the moment in Austen's life when she fell for a dashing if roguish young London lawyer, tried to elope with him, but failed to carry off her plans when she realised that a whole brood of relations depended on her young beau's uncertain income for support. The lawyer's rich uncle, played with menacing brio by Ian Richardson, blocks the marriage (Richardson is brilliant in the film). Austen ended her days unmarried, channelling her experiences of forbidden love into fiction. Her life sounds quite sad in certain ways although we have some of the finest fiction in the English language as a result.

Some people wax lyrical or get very cross about Jane Austen. I take a fairly sympathetic line. Toby Young, writing in this week's Sunday Telegraph magazine (no web link), argues that she is one of the greatest English novelists, a stylist and master of irony, able to catch the foibles and weaknesses of people and also able to spot the virtues and goodness in the most unlikely people. On the other hand, Frances Wilson, writing in the same magazine, says Austen was a money-grabbing snob, a reactionary (horrors!) whose characters all too often forsook the path of true love and chose money and position instead. That verdict seems unfair. Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett initially recoils from Mr Darcy (this is an age when a man is Mr X rather than Dave or Steve) precisely because she fears he will be a snob and a materialists because of his substantial fortune and large country estate. Wilson, who I suspects projects her own liberal sentiments onto a much more conservative age, cannot imagine why Bennett does not go for the more supposedly hunky Mr Wickham instead. But it is Austen's brilliance as a writer to draw out how an initial lack of attraction can, after a time, turn into something very different.

Irony, and the ability to see through the surface of things, is what makes Austen's fiction so compelling. It is not 'realistic' in the dreary, PC sense that she packs it with large lectures about the Napoleonic War, or the Industrial Revolution, or the tumults in Ireland and the New World. She chose a very particular time and place - rural, Southern England - and the preoccupations of minor landed gentry. It does not try to make grand socio-economic 'points', although clearly, in its reticent way, it is a very conservative form of fiction, like the crime fiction of PD James. We do not, to take a different author, damn Joseph Conrad for being 'limited' because his works are often set at sea.

To go back to my first point, it is remarkable that, at least among what is left of the novel-reading classes, Austen remains so popular, and not just with women, although she is seen perhaps unfairly as a writer on women for women. There is a timeless quality about her stories and her themes. In 200 years' time, I am not sure if anyone will be reading Norman Mailer. They might though, still be reading the woman who wrote this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

(48)

I am not the shockable type but this preamble to an article singing the praises of the tv hit, 24, had a pretty bracing effect on yours truly:

Fox’s hit drama normalizes torture, magnifies terror, and leaves conservatives asking why George W. Bush can’t be more like 24’s hero.

To use the word "normalise" next to the word "torture" is extraordinary. Maybe 24 does raise the issue of using torture as a desperate but necessary act, but I hardly imagine that the viewer is left thinking that there is anything "normal" about it, like brewing a cup of tea in the morning for breakfast or taking out the garbage. From what I recall, torture is seen as shocking, and rightfully so. Think also of the scene in Dirty Harry when Clint shoots and then beats up the psycho. You "know", unlike in real life, that the baddie is a baddie and hence do not feel bad when he gets the Eastwood treatment. Real life is different, which is why we have pesky laws like no jail without trial, etc.

For what it is worth I enjoy 24. I have no idea what the programme-makers would think of their programme being thus described by the American Conservative.

For a brilliant demolition of those who use the "ticking bomb" scenario in movies and books to rationalise torture, this by Jim Henley is a must-read.

(Update: I should in fairness point out that the American Conservative article makes it pretty clear that it loathes the show, although the way in which the introductory paragraph is written sucks the reader into thinking that conservatives support the practice. I guess I fired off my angry post a bit too quick. That said, it does appear that some of the "appeal" of the show is in how it unashamedly portrays the use of torture. Remind me not to ever watch this show again).

(1)

People will bet on anything these days.

(13)

You give me all your love
You give me all your kisses
And then you touch my burqua
And do not know who is it!

Heh. Who says the Germans have no sense of humour?

(h/t: Nick M.)

(2)

Classical music blogger Jessica Duchen yesterday featured a bit of video/audio of the great Grigory Sokolov playing the wonderfully manic third and last movement of Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata, which is marked Precipitato. I have a DVD of Sokolov playing this, plus some Beethoven, and I assume this clip is from that. (The Beethoven on that DVD is also marvelous. I've never heard the somewhat poor relation Op. 14 numbers 1 and 2 sonatas sound better. Or, maybe I've just never listened properly before, and this DVD of Big Bear Sokolov finally got me doing that. Don't know, don't care.)

To succeed, music has to have at least one of: melody, harmony and rhythm. Too much twentieth century classical type music scores zero out of three, and hence will never be widely liked. This Prokofiev movement scores a thunderously successful ten out of ten (to switch marking systems) in the rhythm department, and does pretty well on the other two as well, I think. (Which, come to think of it, is a description that applies pretty well to Prokofiev's entire output.) Do have a listen/look if you've not heard this piece and enjoy white hot piano playing. It is about four minutes long, with lots of understandably noisy clapping at the end that you can ignore.

It helps that this is the kind of music that, I think, easily survives cheap computer-type speakers.

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"...and the nominees in the category of Best Fashionable Issue in a Guilt-Supporting Role are....(pause)...World Poverty (applause)...AIDS (applause)...the Iraq War (bigger applause)...Africa (applause)...and Saving the Planet (huge applause).

And the winner is.....(rustle, rustle, rustle)...Saving the Planet!! (more huge applause, whoops, whistles).

Sadly, the Planet can't actually be with us tonight because its currently on location shooting another movie with Al Gore. But it is going to speak to us now by live satellite link."

PLANET: (by satellite feed) Oh...oh...this is just so...I don't know. What can I say? I'm overwhelmed, you know. I mean, I'm up there with World Poverty and AIDS, I mean, WOW, what competition!! I'm just....I don't know, let me tell you that I am one thrilled, happy, proud biosphere right now. But, you know, this Award isn't for me. It's an Award for all the brilliant people who made it possible to save me, all those NGOs and...especially Al Gore...and let me tell you, I am so in awe of that man. I am totally, unbelievably excited to be working with him again. He is my saviour. Absolutely, you know. And I'm accepting this for him as well. What else can I say? I need a drink. Somebody get me a drink (burst of laughter, close up of Jack Nicholson busting a gut). But, seriously, I really want to thank the Academy and I also want to thank my agent, Murray Felberman....I love you, Murray, I love you man. So, I got to get back to work now but I just want to say that I love you all and when I get back to LA we're going to have a big party (blows kiss).

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And about time too:

One of the world's most popular operas opens in Covent Garden today amid fresh claims of racism, colonial misadventure and outmoded, "sordid" morals...

Professor Roger Parker, a teacher of music at King's College London and a Puccini specialist, suggested that opera audiences could be unwitting participants in racism because of the stereotypes Madama Butterfly contains.

He said: "An authentic production [of the opera] is a racist production. It has a lot of ideas within it that would be seen in any other circumstances as racist. It is not just a question of the words, it also Puccini's music."

"We have become much more sensitive [about racism] and the interpretation of Madama Butterfly is one of those operas that needs to reflect that.

Quite right, I say. This insenstive cultural anachronism is completely outmoded and needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. In fact, I have taken the liberty of writing a short synopsis of a new, modernised version of the Puccini opera which will more accurately reflect the values of a modern-day audience.

Act I

Murderous red-necked robot goon, Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton is sent to Japan by his ZioNazi imperialist overlords on a mission to oppress the indigenous people, steal their natural resources and poison their atmosphere with harmful hydrocarbon emissions.

While engaged in a random and bloody act of ethnic cleansing, Pinkerton happens upon a strong indigenous person of a different but equally valid gender. Unable to resist the impulses of his phallocentric culture, Pinkerton calls her ‘butterfly’ and demands that she love him long time for five dollars.

But she rejects his crude attempt to perpetuate the Western myth of the erotically charged female and, declaring the name Cio-Cio San as her nomme de guerre, she embarks upon a heroic act of resistance by singing a song called ‘The failure to acknowledge historical specificity in the deconstruction of the chauvinist narrative’.

Pinkerton is taken aback by the awakening of her racial consciousness and, despite that fact that he vows never to change his colonialist mindset, Pinkerton is nonetheless forced to reflect upon his own narrow, bourgeois Euro-centric prejudices.

Act II

Following her racial awakening, Cio-Cio San finds a sexual awakening when she meets vegan punk riot motorbike-grrrl, Suzuki. Together, they set about re-discovering the oral traditions of their people in the form a broad, popular coalition for national liberation.

While writing an important essay on the political struggle of the racially oppressed, Cio-Cio San is interrupted by Pinkerton who tells her that he has utterly rejected the Western assumptions of cultural superiority and the masculinist discourse of his upbringing and that he wants to donate his semen to Cio-Cio San and Suzuki so that they can bear and raise a child who will be free from the horrors of resource-grabbing and injustice.

But Cio-Cio San refuses his offer, telling Pinkerton that to accept insemination by him would be nothing less than the perpetuation of the repressive Western Theory and the patriarchal hegemon. Although she does welcome his apparent departure from the exploitative, imperial process and suggests some further reading material.

Act III

Heartbroken, Pinkerton returns home to his Jebusland where he commits his life to the progressive cause and subversion of the Christofascist supremacist gun-toting, gas-guzzling order. However, he finds himself the victim of dark, shadowy forces which crush his dissent and prevent him from speaking out against the prevailing worldview.

In desperation, he decides to sacrifice his life by taping his lips to the exhaust pipe of a Sports Utility Vehicle in the hope that this symbolic/ironic gesture will wake the people from their slumber and incite them to rise up against intolerance and the rape of the earth.

In the final tear-jerking scene, Pinkerton’s aria, a plea for peace and justice, is drowned out by the heckling and cackling of the Reich-Wing noise machine.

Fin.

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I love the BBC TV programme Top Gear but even great men have their weaknesses. Jeremy Clarkson takes the 'Borat' route by making fun of folk in America's Deep South. How jolly original of you, Jeremy. Is not the whole "These guys from the South are thick, whisky-swilling in-breds with mullet haircuts and guns" a bit tired?

Oh well, even the good guys have their off-days (thanks to Andrew for the link). Clarkson should stick to driving insanely quick Bugattis and cheering us all up.

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"I always felt this country was going down the tubes when the television folk replaced Basil Brush with Roland Rat."

My dad, with his finger on the pulse as usual. Here is a tribute page to television's most superior fox.

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Yesterday, I attended a most enjoyable Sunday lunch, with an old school friend and his wife . It began at a civilised time, 2pm, which enabled me, before departing, to hear the winner of CD Review's pick of the best available recording of Haydn's Symphony No. 88 on Radio 3. This delightfully sunny piece is one of my favouries, and Colin Davis and the Concertgebouw played it wonderfully. As I walked across the Thames to Vauxhall Station I took photos, in the perfect early February yet spring-like weather. The train I travelled on arrived at Vauxhall exactly when I reached the platform it stopped at, and was agreeably uncrowded. The walk from Wimbledon Station to my friend's home was most pleasant. So I was in a good mood when I got there, and nothing happened from then on to spoil my enjoyment in any way.

Anyway. One of those present was a rather rich man, and I now know how you can tell a rich man. Ask him how many houses he owns. He hesitates, and then he starts counting on his fingers.

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"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder".

- Alfred Hitchcock, who was always a practical fellow.

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On a Sunday afternoon, when recovering from a close friend's birthday the previous evening - in the Dover Street wine bar - god help my liver and I - there is no better way to resume some semblance of humanity than to listen to this woman. I first chanced upon one of Diana Krall's CDs about a decade ago and she has held a firm place in my music-playing selection ever since. Her version of "Face the Music and Dance" was my choice of first musical piece at my wedding last year, taken from this CD.

Norah Jones is great, Peggy Lee was wonderful and Ella Fitzgerald could charm the birds off the trees, but Krall is as good as any of them - not to mention rather easy on the eye - and hopefully will be around for a long time yet. No wonder Clint Eastwood went nuts when he saw her playing in a local Carmel bar before she became a megastar.

My hangover is fading already.

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The other night I glanced at the television to see an advertisement for a smooth-looking new car by Hyundai. All very clever with a sort of liquid metal effect - due to the wonders of computer generated technology - but absolutely nothing at all about the car. There was no description of how fast the car could go, what sort of gearbox it had, how many seats, how much it costs, what its fuel consumption is. Nothing. It was about as informative as watching a North Korean press release.

The reason, I think, why modern car advertisements are like this is because of a campaign by the UK authorities, with bodies like the Advertising Standards Authority, to remove all reference to the idea that a car is desirable because it goes fast. One must not offend against the Gods of Health and Safety by implying, stating or otherwise celebrating that this or that set of wheels goes like a rocket. No sir. One must not lead the gullible British public into the sin of speeding and other naughtinesses. What we therefore have are adverts that are self-indulgent eye candy, of no more import than a nice piece of modernist artwork. Here is an example of what I mean.

It is, I suppose, a reflection of the society in which we live that advertisements, like old Tom and Jerry cartoons, get bowdlerised or otherwise influenced by the desire to remove all risk from life. But life is not free from risk, and risk is actually one of the ways that you know that you are alive rather than dead.

On a brighter note, Richard Hammond, "The Hamster" as he is known to his Top Gear TV colleagues, is back to the screens this Sunday after recovering from a stunt that went badly wrong. What I continue to love about that show is that you know, you just know, that the serried ranks of the do-gooder classes cannot abide this programme.

Go Hamster!

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Okay, another plug for a funny piece of entertainment following my previous posting. My kid brother bought me the DVD of the first series of 'Look Around You', which is a glorious send-up of the 1970s programmes which were used to teach pupils and college students about science, maths and other subjects. The production styles: slightly fuzzy camera shots, corny old folk music, guys with Frank Zappa haircuts wearing tweedy jackets and black-rimmed spectacles, brought back scary memories of how long ago in style terms the 1970s now appears. I went to primary school in that era of flares, British Leyland cars, Roxy Music and endless labour disputes. The education programmes used to be narrated by some posh-sounding gent, or occasionally woman, normally with a perfect received pronunciation and heavy touch of condescension. The programme-makers would sometimes be a bit daring and let the vowels of Edinburgh or even Wales onto the show.

It may be unlikely material for a spoof, but the show Look Around You is in my view the funniest television comedy I have seen in years. I do not know if someone who was not brought up in Britain when these original programmes were made would 'get' the gag. However, if you are British, aged about 40 and your blood runs cold at mention of the words NHS spectacles or "modular study guides", then rent out or buy this DVD. We like to bash the BBC here at Samizdata because of the tax-financing of it, sorry, the licence fee, but this is a gem and is in the same bracket in my opinion as 'The Fast Show'.

(Health warning: I laughed so much at this show that my jaw is now actually quite painful. Avoid liquids).

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The Monty Python purists may be offended - I tend to find such people awkward company - but if you want to have a fun night out and laugh yourself hoarse, then the crazy musical/panto/ "Spamalot" is a must-see event. It has been running in London's West End for a few weeks now and has already been a smash in Broadway.

"We are the Knights who say neeeee!"

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Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O'Rourke telling me about the history of California's state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger - they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted.

O'Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan's political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O'Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely.

Two things have somewhat distressed me about O'Rourke's career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts.

And the other thing that has somewhat worried me about O'Rourke is that, especially in the last book of his that I read, the CEO of the Sofa, I thought I detected a straining after comic effect with distressingly leaden consequences, and a somewhat disturbing lack of substance, at any rate compared to previous books like Republican Party Reptile to name but one. O'Rourke should be out in the deserts of Libya, the jungles of Borneo or wandering around Russia, not sitting on his own sofa. And the lack of substance, I believe, caused the over-reliance on bad jokes, because when O'Rourke feels that he is not saying anything of interest, he feels the need to tell a joke in order to keep everyone's attention.

O'Rourke's best jokes, I think, are only incidentally humorous. At their heart there is always a deeply serious proposition, one of my favourites being in Parliament of Whores, where he says that the last guy who can stay awake gets to make the law. For, you see, the boringness of the political process is actually central to its nature, and only certain sorts of people (like very well paid people) have the patience to stick at it. Central to the brilliance of that book is O'Rourke's key insight that the Federal Government of the USA is beyond his personal ability to comprehend it, for the simple reason that it is beyond anyone's personal ability to comprehend it. It is just too big for anyone to get his head around it all, and any pompous political writer who tells you that he personally does comprehend it all is lying. Good point, very good point. And funny too, incidentally, but only incidentally. O'Rourke is, in other words, a very witty man, but not a professional comedian, a professional comedian being someone who can tell jokes for no reason and still make them sound funny.

When O'Rourke has a story, he forgets jokes and just gets on with telling it, as he did this evening when he recounted the constantly fascinating twists and turns of Californian gubernatorial politics.

Also, television is a team business, and I suspect that O'Rourke benefits both from the help and the criticisms of others. Deep down, I believe O'Rourke to be somewhat lacking in confidence, which is where those bad jokes come from. But his lack of confidence is often also where his best insights come from. He fears that he is rather dumb, but at his best is not afraid to appear dumb. (In this respect he resembles Ronald Reagan.) "Is it just me or is this very boring?" "Is it just me or isn't there a lot, and I mean a lot of Federal Government?" "Hey, these Russians are a lot like us!", and not at all like these aging lefties who say they love them.

If I am right that O'Rourke rather lacks confidence, he would also be the type to benefit from editorial guidance and encouragement. "No PJ, that was really interesting. It's a good story and you told it. We don't need it to be funnier. It already is quite funny, and quite funny is quite funny enough." And so on. I do not think it a coincidence that O'Rourke's very best writing was done early, when he had to impress editors, rather than later when he just had to write something.

Nor do I do consider it far-fetched to guess that P. J. O'Rourke might be genuinely please to know that I thought this programme was really good. I do not know under what auspices it was originally made, but well done the BBC for showing it. If you want to watch it, it will be repeated this same evening on BBC4 at 11.50 pm, and then again at 7 pm tomorrow evening, and then twice more on Sunday.

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One of my favourite 80s movies, The Running Man, has just started on Britain's Channel Five. The storyline is as follows:

By 2017 the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into paramilitary zones, rules with an iron hand. Television is controlled by the state and a sadistic game show called "The Running Man" has become the most popular program in history. All art, music and communications are censored. No dissent is tolerated and yet a small resistance movement has managed to survive underground. When high-tech gladiators are not enough to suppress the people's yearning for freedom, more direct methods become necessary.

The saviour is the superbly cast Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let's terminate some statists.

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Finally, thirty or so years too late, the Communists have come up with a slogan with makes Communism sound attractive:

Well, not quite. Actually this poster is a send-up of the attitude of the music industry, which is now engaged in suing the Russian-based online music website AllofMP3.com for $165 trillion.

This meme – downloading mp3 files for free is Communism! - is but the latest in a long line of similarly wrong-headed memes collusively created by stupid anti-Communists and not-so-stupid Communists, or not so stupid anti-anti-Communists (also scum in my opinion), which make Communism look and sound far b