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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

But if you want money from politicians, you ought not to be surprised when those same politicians take an interest in the money they are giving to you. After all, they were the ones who stole it, and they have to justify this thievery and to ensure that its proceeds are distributed in a way that satisfies their supporters and quiets their critics. True, the men in suits probably do not understand art very well. But these artists could do with a crash course in politics. They are getting it.

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.

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.

If so, it seems to be hardly worthwhile- anyone who wants to read the book, anywhere in the world, can do so by ordering through Amazon.com.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

From Bullitt.

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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