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Well, this does not come as a great surprise, to be honest:

The US television audience for the 78th Academy Awards was down by eight per cent compared with last year. The ceremony, which saw Crash shock the favourite Brokeback Mountain by taking best film, was watched by 38.8m people, the third lowest audience in 20 years.

I do not know to what extent this decline has been caused by the decline in the number of adults watching movies, as has been reported in various parts, or the increasing refusal of ordinary people to sit watching preening showbiz types mouth platitudes while receiving their gongs. Probably some combination of the two, I think. The film industry is fracturing, partly I think because of technologies that mean you can watch great films in the comfort of home in tremendous quality. A friend of mine recently bought a high definition big screen television for just over one thousand pounds and the quality was magnificent. And there were no annoying chatty couples sitting behind me, bad air conditioning and annoying preliminary announcements and adverts.

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The Oscars are nearly upon us. (Okay, please try to keep reading) One thought prompted by this circus and what goes on in films is how films can carry messages very different from the intentions of the film-maker. A classic example is the 1987 film, Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas gave what I thought was his greatest performance as Gordon Gekko. Gekko is what your average lefty Hollywood producer imagines is a capitalist: incredibly greedy, callous and crooked, stamping the lives of good honest hardworking people, blah, blah, blah. And yet we know that in the course of the speech, Gekko gives his tremendous "greed is good" speech, which I sometimes think reads like Ayn Rand on acid.

A friend of mine, Libertarian Alliance founder Chris Tame, once told me that during this stage of the movie, he burst into applause, much to the surprise of the other cinema-goers. I wonder how many other folk have had the same reaction to a speech or line in a film where without realising it, a pro-capitalist point has been made in a way the director probably had not intended? Has anyone got any examples?

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What European unity really means to most people.

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Very nice writeup here of a vast retrospective of the paintings of the Frenchman Ingres, who worked around the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Even as I put aside my distaste for Bonaparte, I cannot but admire the man who painted so much of life in Napoleon's era so cleverly. A good excuse to take that long weekend to Paris and check out some art (not that I usually need many excuses). And meanwhile it is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt. A nice appreciation here by Robert Hughes.

Oh, and I can seriously recommend this to China art fans.

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I watched a bit of The Apprentice on the BBC last night, the show featuring UK tycoon Sir Alan Sugar, who among other things owns a large stake in Tottenham Hotspur FC. The programme, like the American version, is engrossing and it nicely builds up the tension as Sugar confronts his teams of wanna-be businessfolk with their performance and fires one of them.

I have mixed views overall about the show. As pure entertainment, it succeeds in drawing the viewer in, although I am not sure in fact how well it really explains the qualities needed to be a good entrepreneur. The message seems to be that business is a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum game in which if some people win, others must lose. Which is wrong since everyone benefits from trade, otherwise why else trade in the first place? If a person who is smarter than me gets a job I covet, then the overall economic pie gets bigger than it otherwise would, so we all benefit, even though I might feel disappointed.

The Apprentice also seems to celebrate aggression to a considerable degree, and yet businessmen and women in my experience come a cropper if they stop listening to what their customers want and refuse to learn from experience. A degree of humility is actually smart. A quality I do not see much of in the show is that of sheer courage in taking business risks, something that is not sufficiently appreciated except by writers such as George Gilder.

I wonder whether Sugar (what an ill-suited surname he has!) is really a great advocate of business, at least as far as this show goes. Yes, I can admire how he rose from nothing in London's East End to become one of Britain's richest men (he has a net personal worth of 800 million pounds, according to the TV commenter), but he comes across as a bit of a braggart, the sort of bore one might encounter in a pub bragging to his mates about how 'ard he is and how ruthless he can be. Yawn. I suspect that many of the greatest businessmen, while undoubtedly workaholics, ruthless and driven people, have to be able to rub along with other people. Maybe in Britain's anti-business culture someone like Sugar stands out and he feels the need to put himself about.

Or perhaps Sugar is just hamming it up for the cameras and is a delightful fellow. You can never tell with these sort of 'Reality TV' shows. I would certainly watch some of the other shows in the series.

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Here is a powerful new rationale for gun control from the macho actor, Daniel Craig, who is playing 007 in the upcoming James Bond release. Perry, it is time to change that Samizdata banner pic. Argument over:

I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other <...> Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that's what's scary about them.

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In 1982, Disney released the movie Tron, the first film incorporating large amounts of computer graphics. (Actually it only included about 15 minutes of actual graphics. The rest of the film was drawn art designed to look like computer graphics, whereas today's films are often full of computer graphics being used to look like more naturalistic things). The film was not successful at the box office, possibly because as well as being made by computer nerds, the film was also about computer nerds, and what might be referred to as the Silicon Valley culture was at that point extremely marginal, particularly in pop cultural terms. (Having said that, the film was set in Los Angeles, but I will forgive it that). However, for those of us that saw it, the film was rather mind blowing. It became a tremendous influence on many people working in computer animation and special effects today, and on people who were inspired by that technological culture in general. When these things did become mainstream, many of the people who were behind the scenes were people who had loved Tron.

However, the people who made Tron itself generally did not prosper from it. The film was too far ahead of its time, and Hollywood did not know what to make of it or what to do with the people who had made it. In what now seems staggering given that this is possibly the most groundbreaking film ever made from a special effects point of view, the film did not receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. This was partly because the film was perceived as a failure, and the academy doesn't often reward failure, but it also had to do with a peculiarity of the Academy Awards nomination process, which is that (usually) the people who nominate films in a particular category are those who have been nominated in that category before. In 1982 "Special Effects" meant mattes (ie drawn artwork) and models. Using computer graphics was seen almost as "cheating", and as a minimum an entirely different thing from what members of the Visual Effects branch of the Academy did. So, no nomination. (Things have changed since then. A couple of years ago I made an observation to another blogger that Master and Commander had excellent effects, and in response I was told that they were "not special effects", because it was done with models in a tank in Mexico rather than with computer graphics.

To many people today, "special effects" means computer graphics, and that is that). That said, Master and Commander does use some computer graphics, just nowhere near as intensively as, say, The Lord of the Rings). However, as far as I am concerned Master and Commander does use special effects, computer based or not, and in fact it uses them dazzlingly, as I felt that a 19th century ship in the Royal Navy was really like that. Getting this kind of thing right is breathtakingly hard, which is why that film a couple of years ago deserved the visual effects Academy Award. But (although it was nominated) it didn't get it. (It did win a very well deserved Academy Award for cinematography, however).

If Tron had been nominated for an Academy Award when it was released in 1982, it might or might not have actually won. And this may even have been fair. It would have been up against Blade Runner, possibly the greatest achievement ever in matte based special effects. However, although that film was nominated, it didn't win either. (Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial won). Such once again is the academy's reluctance to give awards to movies not perceived as successes. But in retrospect the lack of a nomination was a travesty.

And as sometimes happens in Hollywood, it has been decided to acknowledge retrospectively that it was a travesty. Gary Demos, who was largely responsible for the computer graphics in "Tron", has been awarded an honorary Academy Award this year. This may be ultimately unimportant and trivial, but it is nonetheless about time.

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From the ever informative Dave Barry blog, I learn that a Hollywood type superhero is joining in the fight against al-Qaeda:

Batman may utilise his extensive knowledge of caves to fight his latest foe - al-Qaeda.

Batman writer, Frank Miller, has told a comic-book convention that his upcoming novel, "Holy Terror, Batman!" is a piece of propaganda.

"Batman kicks al-Qaeda's ass," Miller said.

Miller said the comic was: "an explosion from my gut reaction of what's happening now" and "a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we're up against."

So how many Batman movies have there been so far? Is it four? What's the betting that the next one does not feature al-Qaeda as the villains?

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As a bit of a diversion from fretting about Britain's slide into a police state, take this quiz and see which sci-fi series you would be most comfortable in. Perhaps not surprisingly, Firefly turned out to be the one for me, followed closely by Battlestar Galactica. I feel comfortable about that. Thank goodness it was not Star Trek.

(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer).

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I have always had a particularly soft intellectual spot for David Friedman, the economist, for it was he who wrote the first book I ever read which seemed really to describe for me how I wanted to think about the world. It is called The Machinery of Freedom. (David Friedman has a father, called Milton, who also dabbles in economics.) And I now like David Friedman's blog, which he calls simply Ideas.

However, I do not always agree with David Friedman. Here are some recent thoughts of his:

Finding presents for friends and relatives is often a problem, made harder by the economist's puzzle of why one should give presents instead of giving cash and letting the recipient, better informed about his own preferences, decide how to spend it. A possible answer is that although I know less about the recipient, I know more about the gift. Acting on that principle, I occasionally pick a book that I and my wife particularly liked, buy a bunch of copies, and give them out as Christmas presents.

What giving money and giving the same book to several different friends have in common as present giving strategies is that they both exhibit an unwillingness to think about the individual desires of the person receiving the gift. "It's the thought that counts" is no empty slogan. And the particular thought that matters is: "What particular kind of person is he, and what might he really like?"

In one of my very favourite movies, The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine character's rich and uncaring married man lover, chillingly played by Fred MacMurray, gives Shirley MacLaine a twenty dollar bill as a Christmas present. He does not even put in a pretty envelope. He just gets it out of his wallet and hands it over. Soon after that, she dumps him, and quite right too. Why? Because this moment proved that he did not care enough about her to give any thought, before meeting with her, to getting her a real present, of the sort that she would like, and which would show that he had thought about what she would like. He simply hadn't been thinking about her.

Were I one of David Friedman's friends and I got the same book last Christmas from him that several of his other friends had also got, I would feel ever so slightly slighted, and for the same reason. "He has thought about his own opinions, but he has not thought about mine." (A copy of The Machinery of Freedom with a carefully composed and hand-written message inside the front cover would be another matter entirely.)

Blog postings, however, are different. Those, like Christmas presents, also come free of charge to the receiver. Yet I do not feel in any way slighted because a blogger has failed to craft an individual thought entirely for me, but has instead given the same thought away to all his readers. On the contrary, incoming emails full of individual thoughts, just for me, can be rather scary, because, like Christmas presents, they can imply an obligation to reciprocate, also individually, which may be unwelcome.

However, notice that a similar principle applies, and in a good way, to blog postings with which one happens to disagree, by thoughtful people like David Friedman, as applies to Christmas presents. A present that shows that the giver has done some thinking is welcome, even if one already has that CD or that book, or happens not to like that kind of chocolate. The "wrong" thing is still right, because it's the thought that counts. I feel the same way about David Friedman's occasional wrong (as I think) thoughts in his blog. These mistakes, if mistakes they be, show that he is at least always thinking. Far better lots of thinking, and the occasional consequent disagreement between me and him, than no thinking, and a mere string of truisms.

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"You can't fight in here - this is the War Room!"
- Peter Sellers, playing the President of the United States in Dr Strangelove.

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Big selection of essays, some long, some short, about the great composer who was born on this day 250 years ago. Even if you care little for the rather overblown commemorations in Saltzburg and the associated commercial circus, it is hard not to join in the Mozart mania if you are a music fan, as I am.

I particularly enjoyed this essay by Terry Teachout. He asks the question to which there is probably no easy answer: how did such a man churn out such a fantastic and enduring collection of music?

Out of balance, there is also a rather sour piece by Norman Lebrecht . He obviously feels the need to break wind at the party, so to speak.

He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak"

Oh, what a magnificent put-down! After all, great music is supposed to be difficult, not easily understood by the great unwashed (sarcasm alert). But why should 'easy-listening' music be inferior to the supposedly hard-listening sort? He also argues that Mozart was not an innovator in the way that J.S. Bach was. Now Bach was a genius, but I am not aware that originality - assuming we take Lebrecht's argument at its face value - is always the virtue that it is cracked up to be.

Anyway, I think that attempts to define some kind of objective judgement on music is fraught with difficulty, but I do know in my own heart that the Austrian composer has the capacity to speak to me as he does to millions of people, and I rather suspect that is likely to remain the case as long as music is played.

Quick quiz: which of Mozart's pieces of music do you like the best?

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One of my favourite actors, Michael Caine, achieved one of his early breakthroughs in the film, The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton Cold War thriller of the same name. (I love the fact that Deighton, a fine historian of the air campaigns in the Second World War, used to write a cookery column for the Observer. Very hip). Anyhow, without spoiling the plot of either the book or the film, it hinges around the use of “brainwashing” techniques to make people do one’s bidding or erase the memory of certain information.

How much of this could ever be based on fact or indeed, did either side in the Cold War use such techniques? There is a long entry in the now-indispensable Wikipedia site on this topic, pointing to the origin of the word “brainwash” in the early stages of the Cold War during the Korean campaign. The entries raise some doubts about how widely used such techniques were, or whether the term simply refers to a particularly fierce form of propoganda. I have come across the term in various films of the period, such as the first version of the Manchurian Candidate (forget the remake, which is a pale imitation of the original). But to what extent were such techniques really all that effective in moulding minds? Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”, which I have just finished reading and enjoyed immensely, queries the idea of an infinitely malleable mind, arguing that there are limits to how the brain can be influenced by certain techniques.

If this is true then it is encouraging that there are limits to how far the mind can be moulded in any way that those in authority, whether benign or malign, wish.

Anyway, I can strongly recommend readers rent out the Caine movies based on the Deighton books. Highly entertaining.

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"As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class - personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighbourhood, avoiding macho violence, respect for liberal democracy - are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's none of our damn business."

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (page 416), hitting some practitioners of Modern Art between the eyeballs.

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Since we are talking about MP3s, music and the like - okay, a degree or two of separation exists here - I want to point out a rather fascinating music video clip that I saw recently. It is a dance track by British group Faithless, called I Want More (link for streaming video). The song will not be to everyone's taste, but the video clip offers a pretty remarkable view of the preparation and execution of a North Korean propaganda spectacular. Parts of it are surprisingly candid - in one shot of the Pyongyang skyline, the viewer catches a shadowy glimpse of the sinister-looking Ryugyong Hotel.

I am led to believe, by a fellow I know who has visited the North, that this monument to collectivist misallocation of resources officially does not exist in the Hermit Kingdom (despite the highly convincing optical illusion) so it is surprising to see it turn up in a clip that must have been sanctioned by the authorities. I like the way the vision of a gymnast with a sore back is juxtaposed with an onlooker writing down presumably critical pointers in a notepad. The expression on the boy's face when he is late to turn a page in his giant colour display book made me laugh. I also like the shot of the utterly bored and po-faced military brass clapping along like robots.

As the track rolls on, the show starts getting highly impressive. However, by the time the song's over the sinister and tragic undercurrents are resonating the most. So much talent - such potential - is wasted celebrating the hideous reign of men who routinely deny their people the basic necessities of life, like food and freedom. It surprised me how such a dazzling display of skill and synchronicity could provoke such a combination of fascination and revulsion.

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I have been poking around AllofMP3.com, a Russian music site with a huge catalogue and an excellent interface and even better prices (a typical track can be downloaded typically for around 12¢). The way the system works is you pay 'by weight' of the music file: the tracks are coded-to-order to your exact specifications via a vast CD jukebox, thus if you download an mp3 file with a bit rate of 192 (excellent sound quality), you will pay more than if you download the same file in smaller size at a bit rate of 64 (fairly crappy sound quality). The system can be accessed either via a web front-end or an excellent browser application.

It occurred to me that I more or less stopped buying music CD's about eight years ago and went from someone who maybe once dropped $2000 per year on music to someone who spent pretty much nothing. Yet in the last month, I have spent $70 at AllofMP3.com because the service is good (and secure: they use Chronopay who are totally above board), the interface is intuitive and the price per download makes hunting around fly-by-night peer to peer networks simply not worth the hassle. I have no pecuniary interest in this operation (sadly) but I cannot recommend them highly enough.

This is the future of the music business and it does not matter a damn whether or not Sony or BMG like it. It is here and it works really well.

Music business: adapt or die... music buyers: enjoy like never before!

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The other night, while getting better from having been rather ill (which was why I contributed so little here over Christmas), I channel-hop-watched TV.

Here were the two best things I heard on my travels up and down the channel numbers.

First, during a reshowing of an earlier Dr Who episode, a very anxious person said:

"That Dalek just absorbed the entire Internet! It knows everything!"

And the second fun snippet I heard was from a show about crumpet, i.e. nice looking and happy looking ladies with fine cleavages but not much to say for themselves in seventies comedy shows and horror movies. The unashamedly excited interviewer asked the one and only Ingrid Pitt if she ever had any reservations about taking her clothes off? Replied La Pitt:

"Only if it was cold."

I am not yet a hundred per cent. Still coughing, alas, and with my ears afflicted by tape hiss, although the headache is largely gone. But those two snatches of chat did help me get a bit better.

TV also tells me that I am not the only one thus suffering. The cold cure adverts do not sell anything that will cure you, but they do provide definite evidence that you have only got a dose of what lots of other people have also got.

I could have had it far worse, and far scarier. Patrick Crozier was recently struck down by appendicitis. In Japan.

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He was controversial for other reasons, too. Brubeck's music was too optimistic for the critics' taste. There was and still is nothing cool about being an optimist. Cool, rather, is supposed to be about seeing the dark side, the essential absurdity of life, and taking pains to numb yourself against the existential angst of modern civilization. But here was modernism with a smiley face. Crazy Daddy-O.

Excerpt from a delightful piece marking jazz legend Dave Brubeck's 85th birthday. The great man is still playing live gigs decades after many of his supposed "cooler" contemporaries have faded from the scene.

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Yesterday, while briefly surfing Britain's terrestrial TV channels in hope of something amusing to watch, I came across a film based on the old UK "comedy", On the Buses, which chronicles the life of a bunch of London bus drivers and conductors. Made in the late 60s and early 70s, the series adopted the leery, bawdy humour of the Carry On Films, although unlike the Carry On movies at their best, (like the wonderful Carry on Up the Khyber) lacked the sort of great gags that to this day can make me laugh out loud. On the Buses can be safely relegated to a footnote of British television history, thank goodness.

It was quite a shock watching the film. It was a reminder of how greatly Britain has changed since the early 70s. For starters, the constant leeriness towards women, the assumption that any vaguely attractive woman was nothing more than mattress-fodder, makes even yours truly - no fan of political correctness - feel uneasy. One of the main themes of the story is how the manager, in a drive to improve the efficiency of the layabout male staff, decides to hire a group of women drivers. The men regard this move as a disaster and a threat to "their" jobs (probably correctly). What is particularly striking is how the shop steward of the bus-drivers' union makes it clear that as far as his union is concerned, women have no place in a bus, except either as a customer or as someone he can molest. For any trade unionist watching this film today, the message must be most uncomfortable in that it reinforces the important idea that free markets and competition are in general good news in particular for women as well as racial groups often subject to discrimination, as noted U.S. economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have pointed out.

There were a few good things about the 1970s - although it is sometimes hard to think of any - but watching this low-point of British cinema only made me realise how much life has improved since then.

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From all of us at Samizdata to all of you, our valued readers and commentariat, a very Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and a Happy New Year. May the blessings of liberty shine upon your every endeavour!

Belfast City Hall Christmas display
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved

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I am dipping into the Bach Christmas that BBC Radio 3 is now indulging in. I am not disorganising myself to listen to particular items, if only because I already have all the big stuff on CD. But I am taking in occasional gobs of what comes, whenever it is convenient and I feel in a Bach mood.

And what I am getting from it all is how extremely religious it all is. I realise that this is a very obvious thing to be noticing. But hearing cantata after cantata introduced with its German wording, and then being told in English what it all means and why the contralto aria in particular is so deeply felt and beautiful and then what the chorus will be singing about at the end, has connected all this music to religion in a way that I have preferred to – not ignore exactly – just not pay all that much attention to. Of course I know what the St Matthew Passion is about, but for me the harmonies and melodies are the reason for listening. The religion of it is, for me, merely the platform Bach used to build the thing, even as I am aware that for Bach religion was the point. Bach also wrote a lot of purely instrumental music, such as the Brandenberg Concertos, the violin and the keyboard concertos, and the solo works for violin, for cello and for keyboard, and of course I cannot get enough of those.

But if you want to understand Johann Sebastian Bach, as opposed merely to enjoying him, you cannot ignore religion. Here is yet another historical circumstance which twentieth century atheists like me are now able to understand that little bit better, now that once again we have in our midst people who really believe in this kind of stuff, and who believe in combining their beliefs with the exercise of secular power, in ways that Christians mostly now do not. Listening at around midnight, early on in the proceedings, to one march-like tune from a cantata, and remembering what the announcer had just said that it was about, I suddenly felt scared. My God, I am being attacked by an army of True Believers. In short, I got the message.

The Bach story illustrates what artistic treasure can come out of things like the current time of Islamist, er, enthusiasm. Once - although, as with Protestantism, this is a big once - this latter enterprise stops deluding itself that it can take over the world, or even very much of the Middle East or the North of England, it will settle back into its mosques and resort to more peaceful methods of propagandising, and of keeping up the spirits of its faithful. I do not say that there will necessarily be an Islamic Bach, in the sense of a great musician. For starters, I do not know just what the attitude of Fundamentalist Islam is towards music. I rather think they may disapprove. Whatever. But I do confidently believe that Great Art of some sort will result, even though I will not live to see it or hear it or read it. I know what the commentariat will say. Islamism now is about as philistine and artless as it is possible for a bunch of artless philistines to be. They do not create art, they destroy it. I know that. But first generation Protestants were little better. The point is, artistically, what happens when their original True Vision fails to materialise, and they then have to apply their energies to more peaceful methods of spreading their True Faith.

Meanwhile, the religious enthusiasm that animated Bach's inner life and which paid for his musical career goes a good part of the way to explaining his greatness. Would Bach even have been able to manage things like the 48 Preludes and Fugues, or the Double Violin Concerto, without the expressive momentum drawn from him by his God? We can never know, of course, but my guess would be: not.

For artists to be great, greatness needs to be demanded of them or at the very least permitted to them, by their surrounding culture. Art does not work properly if there is no contemporary response to it. The starving artist in his garret, his genius recognised only by posterity, is largely a myth. Almost all the great artists had at least periods in their careers when they were all the rage. Yes, they would often go out of fashion and fall on hard times, but they almost all of them had some good times as well, when they could really feel that they were getting through to people in a big way, and they could then feel inspired by that response, or by the recent memory of it, to attempt more great things.

And for Bach, his licence to be great, so to speak, was the greatness of his God and of his religion, and his determination to express this, to God, and to and on behalf of his contemporaries and fellow believers.

This, paradoxically, is what makes Bach so modern, to our ears. Bach had a kind of musical ambition – a demand to be attended to, as it were – that separates him from his contemporaries, and puts him, to our ears, alongside the likes of Beethoven and Wagner. In giving full voice to German Protestantism, Bach brought to his task a combination of mathematical intricacy and rigour and lyrical depth of feeling that has never since been surpassed. (When I hear the music of Bach's contemporaries, like Telemann or Vivaldi, I sometimes say to myself: I could do that. Silly I know, but I do say it. I never say that when I hear Bach.)

To his musical contemporaries and to his immediate successors, Bach was an old-fashioned figure rather than any sort of pioneer, somewhat as the Victorians were thought of during the twentieth century. All that ponderous and high-minded seriousness! All those fugues and hymns! All that intricate counterpoint! Relax old man, said those musicians of the later eighteenth century who still knew about him, as they supplied elegant musical wallpaper for the aristocracy. Actually, there is, in among all the fervour and solemnity, a lot of dance in Bach, a lot of salon gracefulness and jollity. Nevertheless those later composers were right to regard Bach as not really part of their team. He was indeed out on his own.

What we now thrill to, they found technically admirable, but also rather embarrassing. It was left, appropriately enough, to the post-Beethoven nineteenth century to rediscover Bach, and he has been adored ever since.

But Bach did not do it only for us. He could not have done it only for us. To do what he did for us, he also had to be doing it for God.

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Earlier this month, I wrote:

Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media.

So it is only fair that I point to this welcome exception to the rule - the mediocre Woody Allen:

"I've disappointed myself most of the time.

"People think I'm an intellectual because I wear glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money.

"My relationship with the American audience is exactly the same as it has always been. They never came to see my films, and they don't come now.

"I've often said that the only thing standing between me and greatness is me."

I have a similar problem with greatness, and I'm glad to see that I am not the only one!

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My least favourite radical chic interviewee: the talented but humourless Ute Lemper. Ensconced in a luxury suite at the Savoy, she embarked on a lecture about the downtrodden masses, and was so busy talking about how East German workers were exploited that she forgot to even acknowledge the existence of the maid who'd put a tray of tea in front of her.

- Clive Davis commenting on this.

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One of the oldest themes in science fiction writing has been the idea of eternal youth. Robert A. Heinlein wrote arguably the definitive book on the subject, Time Enough For Love, which I have read several times. Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years also takes eternal youth as a driving theme. And in recent years techniques such as cryonics have been in movies and books such as the interesting crime thriller Chiller, by Sterling Blake.

One of the most recent treatments of the issues of anti-ageing and its impact on society is Peter F. Hamilton's Misspent Youth, which like a lot of his books is set in the near future in deepest Cambridgeshire, where he lives. I rather like that. He projects an age, set about 20-odd years from now, where our understanding of genomics and nano-delivery of medicines has partly halted the ageing process and also made it possible for some very rich folk to have decades removed from their lives. It also raises issues that are extremely relevant now: such as what happens to tax-funded state pensions if people live for far longer.

Hamilton nicely shows how a father - in his 70s in Earth-time - has decades wiped off his physique and how this affects his relationship with the rest of his family and friends. I love the twists and turns of the plot, showing how the main character, Jeff Baker, has troubles dealing with his teenage son and family. The story works so well since the technology is kept to a minimum in order not to intefere with the human story.

Hamilton also holds up a picture of an England now totally absorbed in a Euro-superstate, while much of human life is now subject to draconian environmental laws regulating things like transport and energy use. There is a violent British separatist movement and culture dominated by fear of risk and danger. Yes, it does not become all that long before one realises that Hamilton ought to be writing for this blog. If he is not a free-market libertarian then I would be very surprised.

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"'We're not heroes. We're from Finchley".

A line from the film Narnia, based on the C.S. Lewis fantasy adventures. Strongly recommended.

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The recent death of the footballer George Best has seen an outpouring of sentimental remembrance about the skill and talent of one of Britain's greatest ever footballers. It has also seen a sober reflection of the darker side of Best's life. As Sue Mott pointed out:

As a sportsman, he was ruinously worshipped as a god. As society's golden boy, gloriously handsome, funny and highly intelligent, he enjoyed all life's little luxuries in conveyor-belt quantities. He was a Hollywood film star from Belfast and while we may now lament the wine, women and song, if you had been there at the time, could you have been the one to say: 'Shall we put the cork back in the champagne, George, I think we've had enough?"

It is a common theme of society that those who are blessed with extraordinary talents at one discipline are allowed special leeway in manners, morals and behaviour that are not bestowed upon lesser mortals. Had Best not been such a great footballer he would undoubtedly have been shunned by society as a drunk and a lecher. But because he was once a truly great footballer, he was treated as something different. People tolerated his drunkenness and women gave themselves to him sexually because he was genuinely seen as being cut from a higher cloth then other men. This may seem unfair, and in a way it is, but it was also the root of his downfall.

George Best, and footballers in general, though, are hardly the only sort of celebrity to take advantage of the special rules of society that are afforded to those touched by genius. And it has been going on for a long time.

Nearly 200 years ago, the poet Lord Byron made use of his fame as a poet to indulge himself in all manner of peccadillos, most of them sexual. That was perhaps not so uncommon for a Peer of the Realm back then, but it was mirrored by the behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A more dramatic example is in the personal life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Poor health, deafness, depression, loneliness and financial troubles made him a very difficult man to deal with, but he was indulged by many people precisely because he was obviously the greatest musical talent of his day.

Poets and classical composers do not have the influence on society in this day and age as they used to. The place of Byron and Beethoven has been taken by sports stars and actors and television celebrities. Some of these people, like Shane Warne are as gifted in his field as Byron was as a poet; and Warne has been noted for womanising on a considerable scale as well. Some are, in sober fact, non-entities, but we live in a vacuous time where everyone gets their 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

Many not so talented people have also exploited their celebrity to get away with actions that would not be tolerated in others; Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media. A similar fate has befallen many popular musicians over the last forty years. This sort of bad behaviour takes many forms, not just in terms of sexual self-indulgence, but substance abuse, or simply by being a difficult and unpleasant person to be around. The life and times of John Lennon reflect this- he confused his musical talent with wisdom, and spent his latter years pontificating about a society of which his understanding of seems have been very limited indeed. However, because he was such a fine musical talent, no one was willing to stand up to Lennon and tell him that he was talking nonsense.

Why? Why do we allow this select group of people, not all of whom are that talented, to get away with this sort of thing. Why can't we "put the cork back in the champagne" as it were? There seems to be something innate to many people who must feel that they can reflect the glory of the star's achievements by indulging them in their foibles. This can not be healthy for us any more then it is healthy for the stars. Just look at George Best now.

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If people want to make a fuss about what a cultural phenomenon the Beatles were, and comment on their innovative and interesting music, well that is just peachy and not at all hard to understand. What is a bit baffling is why so many folks are trying to suggest John Lennon was anything more than a talented musician.

I just watched part of the old recording of his peace-bed thing with Yoko Ono and I was reminded of an old Dirty Harry quip: a man's got to know his limitations.

"All we are saying is give peace a chance". And it was true, that really is all he was saying. Lennon said it over and over again. Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace... and presumably felt that just repeating the word over and over again was a better way to convince people that is was a mistake to oppose the communist take-over of South Vietnam... rather than, say, a geo-political critique of US involvement or, say, arguing that preventing communist domination of South Vietnam was not worth American lives or in fact articulating any sort of coherent argument at all. I too would like to imagine a world without war, but I would like to imagine it without tyranny first.

The guy was a buffoon. A talented, gifted, artistic, charismatic buffoon. Just stick to celebrating his art.

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I have this unusual mp3 file (mp3 file now removed to save on bandwidth) on my hard drive and I have no frikking idea where the hell I downloaded it from, what it is called or who the artist is. Does anyone out there have an idea? Please let me know if you have any clues.

It has quite a low bit-rate so I would guess it is a sampler track dumped on-line to promote a CD (so you would think the information tags would be filled in but nooooo).

Update: I have removed the mp3 file to save on bandwidth now that the question has been answered by the commentariat.

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Whilst on my recent trip to the USA, I saw a computer game called Cold War that looked interesting. I am sooooo tired of brainless run-n-gun FPS games that this looked like something work trying.

Alas, once I got back to Britain and started to install the game, I saw that it was about to install StarForce copy protection.

So I hit cancel, removed the disc from my computer and threw the game in the rubbish bin where it belongs. Most annoying is that nowhere on the box does it say that the game uses StarForce.

Why does that matter? Well a few months ago, my nifty and hitherto perfect Alienware computer suddenly died without warning a few hours after I installed Splinter Cell 3, which also uses StarForce copy protection. Am I certain StarForce was to blame? No, I am not but I am bloody suspicious and not without good cause. I wish I had thought to check this site before I dropped $39.99 because I would have never purchased it if I had known.

Is the new-and-improved StarForce better at not blowing up your system than the previous versions? I am not sure but it only has to happen once for me to never ever allow a firm's products on my hard drive again. If a games company wants my money, it had better find a way of protecting itself that does not put my operating system at risk because there are plenty of other games out there to choose from.

I would recommend you not make the same mistake I just did. Spend your money on something else.

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Yesterday I chanced upon a short interview on some children's TV type show called T4, with the actor James Purefoy. "Purefoy" is, I now finally know, pronounced "pure-foy", rather than "pure-i-foy", which I have often wondered about.

Anyway, James Pure-foy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue.

To many readers here this will seem a banal and obvious observation, but I have never heard it put quite like that, or if I ever have I was not paying attention. Perhaps the clarity of this observation can be attributed to the fact that although the actors in this series are British, the producers are Americans. Americans do love to nail down in a few words what a show is all about. (Until Purefoy went on to say this, I did not even know that Rome was an American production rather than British.)

This cruelty-is-a-virtue meme pulls together lots of different things about the Romans that have never previously made proper sense to me. Basically, why were they such total and utter bastards, and at the very same time so amazingly smug about how virtuous they were? Did they like torturing each other, and even being tortured? Answer: no. But they did believe in it. They were not indifferent to pain. They believed in pain. They believed in inflicting it, and believed that being able to endure it was one of the highest virtues. A lot falls into place once you (by which I mean I) get that.

Given the kind of world that the Romans inhabited, you can see how such beliefs would answer the Darwinian necessities of that time. But perhaps because the Roman political system had such a modern feel to it, the ancientness of their ethical beliefs seems somehow jarring. But yes, the Romans spent a lot of their time – in particular a lot of their education – actively trying to be more cruel than their natural inclinations inclined them to be. (See also: Sparta.)

I think this distinction goes a long way to explaining how Christianity fitted in to Roman civilisation, and in particular the kind of difference it made. You can agree about that, even if, like me, you regard Christian theological claims as crackpottery.

I think that this cruelty-as-virtue idea throws into particular relief the particular kinds of blunders that we now make. The basic Roman blunder, it seems to me, and judged by our standards rather than theirs, was that they were just too damn destructive. They killed too many people, shut down too many worthwhile rival civilisations, slaughtered too many of the extras in their version of Hollywood entertainment. Whether you explain the collapse of Rome by its destructiveness, or by the weakness of Christianity, like Gibbon, I do not see how all that destruction could possibly have helped.

The virtue we aspire to is kindness, and in everyday life this usually works pretty well. But the vices of our civilisation are mostly also related to that aspiration, it seems to me, and now more than ever before. Even as Christian theology is now laughed to scorn, by me among many thousands, Christian ethics are triumphant in our civilisation as never before. But the underside of kindness is weakness, meekness, sentimentality, thoughtlessness – niceness as a substitute for competence and for thinking it through. Instead of thoughtful and because of that all the more hideously destructive brutality – the Roman vice – we indulge in impulsive and frivolous orgies of unthinking niceness.

This, if you think about it, is the running argument we have here at Samizdata with the zeitgeist of our time.

Some of our more vocal commenters think that our world is ruled by sinister power grabbers, who know exactly what they are doing. I think, in contrast, that we are ruled by sentimentalities which vaguely indicate what would be nice, but a not nearly sufficient idea of how actually to contrive such niceness. The power grabbers are merely the insects that thrive in the resulting chaos, rather than the instigators of the chaos itself.

To put the point in terms of a prominent British political personality, Tony Blair is and has for some time been our Prime Minister because, and unlike his Conservative predecessors, he is thought to be, in a word, nice. If he is now losing his grip, this is because the ideas he has tried to follow do not by their nature provide him with grip, rather than because he is some kind of secret Mark Anthony in our midst.

I actually suspect that, just as there is lots of surreptitious nastiness in our world, there was in ancient Rome, on the quiet, lots of surreptitious niceness going on. To oil the wheels, so to speak. The equivalent in Roman times of Peter Mandelson, screaming down a telephone threatening to chop your balls off and eat them at the latest posh restaurant du jour, was a Roman politician looking both ways down the street to make sure no one saw him at it, and then smiling at you and doing you a nice little favour. Niceness was, I suspect, a Roman fact but also a Roman secret. (How else could Christianity have ever caught on?) And then our nice Roman fixer would be back to the Senate to make blood-curdling speeches about the need to suppress with the utmost brutality whatever little challenge Rome faced that week.

I said above that "we" aspire to the virtue of kindness. Maybe that is a rather European view. Americans may be wondering quite where they fit into this dichotomy. In particular, they may be noting that it is precisely in the Christian bits of the USA that the semi-Roman virtue of cruel-to-be-kind foreign policy precision is still aspired to, and in the non- or anti-Christian bits of the USA where the kind of incompetent niceness I have been complaining about is most popular. Maybe Christianity has its own built-in safeguards against Christian and especially post-Christian feeblemindedness and sentimentality.

One of the shrewder things that the actor and (sometimes) wit Peter Ustinov used to say (he said everything he had to say many times over) was that the Americans were like Romans, and that he, the Brit, felt very Greek in their company. (I suspect he meant, in particular, Athenian.) Ustinov also used to say how impressed he was at the crispness with which Americans would sum up the central themes of the movies which they produced and directed, and which he acted in.

I see that John Milius was involved in the creation of Rome. I have always felt that there was something particularly Roman about that man. Milius is also the living embodiment of the notion that, faced with the choice between a politically correct miss and a politically incorrect hit, Hollywood always goes with the money, but that is another story.

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After a long overdue cleanup I rediscovered and enjoyed listening to Carmina Burana, composed by Carl Orff. This is an operatic piece of music set to texts from a collection of 13th century Bavarian poems and songs, mostly in Latin.

The music is famous for its first (and last) section, O Fortuna, which has been used in an enormous range of settings in the last fifteen to twenty years. I first heard it in an advertisement in Australia in the late 1980s. However the work is much more then that, and no doubt serious music fans could provide a far more comprehensive discussion of its merits then I am capable of. But I find both the instrumental and choral sections very lovely.

The texts are sung in their original Latin/Low German that they were composed in, and refer to themes common to people of that age and ours- the pleasures of spring, the pleasures of the tavern, and the pleasures of love. In that respect, it is not so different from much of today's music, although The Roast Swan suggests more imagination (it is the lament of a swan who has been roasted on a spit). When we are in the tavern ends on a strikingly modern note:

Six hundred pennies would hardly suffice, if everyone drinks immoderately and immeasurably. However much they cheerfully drink, we are the ones whom everyone scolds, and thus we are destitute. May those who slander us be cursed, and my their names not be written in the Book of the Righteous.

Orff himself was as much a music educator as much as a composer, and Carmina Burana is the only work of his that is widely known to the general public.

And of that work, it is O Fortuna that is most widely recognised, by its use in advertising and movies. Most recently, it was used as the base for The Big Ad in Australia, and it has been modified by all manner of musicians, in all sorts of styles. Given that US creative industries keep pushing to expand copyright protections over their works, people with a creative bent that wish to base their work on a familiar cultural item are going to look increasingly beyond US shores and beyond US culture. This trend in turn helps to devalue the value of the copyrighted material. Which once again underlines the delicate balance of rights management, a lesson rights holders seem slow to learn.

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Hollywood Director James Orr points out some interesting factoids about how megacorporate movieland is seeing the game shifting before their very eyes.

The internet changes everything... we just do not know precisely how yet.

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Hark! Hark! It is the sound of Norman Lebrecht hitting nails on their heads, but also his fingers and thumbs, leaving blood everywhere:

Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme's 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original DVD would be around in the public hands, Demme's studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update.

Lebrecht is right about DVDs having been a big change. As usual he has a nose for a big story. Read the whole thing, as we bloggers say. But the original Manchurian Candidate has been out for years on DVD. I owned it on DVD ages before the Denzel Washington remake emerged.

One of Lebrecht's several follies here is to imagine that all generations are like his generation, and that all generations will thrill to Bergman and Godard just as his version of his generation did. It is hard for old crusties like him, or like me, to imagine a world in which a whole generation has grown up neither knowing nor caring about The Manchurian Candidate, the original one, the proper one, with that woman who now does Murder She Wrote on the telly playing the Evil Witch Queen, but there it is, such a generation now exists, and there is business to be done. Curious oldies who want to see the remake or own the DVD of it, just to check it out and to be able to sneer at the new version having actually seen it, will add a few thousand bums on seats and a few hundred thousand in DVD sales. Meanwhile the plot is a proven entity, Denzel Washington is a proven star, and Meryl Streep, who brings an older following with her, fancies doing a turn as the Evil Witch Queen, knowing she won't come near the Murder She Wrote woman, but hypnotically drawn to the part nevertheless. So, the project can go ahead.

And millions of Young People These Days will actually prefer it to the original! It is, for starters, in colour instead of black and white. And Laurence Harvey? He was not everyone's Anglo-American cup of tea even the first time round, I can assure you.

I remember the same kind of moans about the Charlton Heston Ben Hur when that first came out, when I were a lad. An expensive and inferior rehash of the Roman Novarro original, said the culturati. I think it was Roman Novarro, but I really do not care and have yet to see that jerky, black and white, silent, and utterly absurd relic of a bygone age, which is what I assume it to be. What could possibly compare with Heston and Stephen Boyd going at it wheel to wheel, in grand technicolour panawidescreeneramavision, covered in orange blood?

Generations. They come. And they go.

I wondered if Lebrecht would mention computers. He does at the end, presumably when it occurs to him that some might imagine computers to have some kind of big future, with possible consequences for DVDs. Better answer that objection:

The DVD won't replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture. The internet, the I-pod and other new-tech marvels will challenge for precedence as entertainment carriers, but none can rival DVD for instant access and archival use. DVD has got the movies bang to rights and gives them equal status with music and printed arts. It is the medium of the Noughties, the remaking of our memories.

Oh dear. The DVD will hurt the audio-only disc? How? It has not done that so far, because they do different things.

The internet will challenge for precedence? "None can rival the DVD for instant access"? When they put me into an old people's home, will I have to listen to people saying things like that?

Lebrecht, you poor old thing. You seem to have just about heard of the computer, and presumably you even use one, to thrash out your half baked but often tasty notions. You could not possibly thrash out so much stuff with a mere typewriter. But do you have any inkling of what else computers can already do, let alone what they will soon be capable of?

We of the Lebrecht/Micklethwait generation love CDs and DVDs because they are so much better than 78s, LPs, cassettes, video tapes, etc., which even we could tell were technically imperfect and able to be improved upon. But the idea that future generations will amass vast collections of such pre-manufactured plastic discs, at many pounds or dollars a go, with each disc only containing one separate hour of music or one movie, and with each separate one-hour-of-music or one-movie disc encased in its separate (and in the case of DVDs absurdly vast) plastic casement . . . well, it is just daft, completely daft. Pre-recorded DVDs in boxes will in due course become about as bang up to date as silent movies are to me.

When I did amateur dramatics at university, I was in a play called A Resounding Tinkle, by someone called N. F. Simpson, an absurdist playwright in the Spike Milligan mould. Two of the characters in it were called The First Comedian and The Second Comedian. These two gents wandered about together in and out of the action, having pointless arguments with each other, being send-ups of Conservative and Labour politicians. (I played "Bro Paradock", who was a Whig, I kid you not. At one point he went out cavassing for them.)

Anyway, the First Comedian, the Conservative Comedian, was especially funny, I thought. His stock in trade was being crazily just or totally behind the times, madly enthusiastic about trends which to everyone else had been clear for quite a while, grabbing hold of every shiny new stick in sight, too late, and often at the wrong end completely. Some things never change.

At one point the First Comedian announced with feverish excitement that he believed the world to be, not flat, as most argued, but round, and that given a decent sailing ship he believed he could prove it, by circumnavigating the world!!

"Hasn't all this been gone into before?" muttered the Second Comedian.

I love to read Norman Lebrecht, because I share his fascination with the ongoing saga of classical music about which he often tells great stories and provides superb gossip, about mad conductors, greedy soloists, etc. But he does often remind me of that First Comedian. Which, or course, I also enjoy a lot.

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It appears that prohibitionists in the United States are winding up the pressure against computer games for allegedly turning the nation's young into violence-crazed monsters. This article in Wired nicely points to some of the absurdities involved in the position of would-be banners of such games like Jack Thompson. Another article here in libertarian monthly Reason makes an even stronger case against the moral panic brigade here.

This issue reminds me of an unusual book I read a few years ago, called Killing Monsters. The book makes the argument that children - and adults - often use games as ways of acting out roles in ways that can help them to overcome fears and grapple with issues, rather than as just passive recipients of violent messages while watching a movie. This is not psychobabble. Children have played games involving rough-house action, or staged plays, or dressed up as cowboys and fighters, since time immemorial. What the moral scolds of our present age tend to overlook is that with some modern computer games, the players get to shape the plot, even down to the point of adding their own ideas to how games should be run and developed.

As the Reason article points out, turnover of gaming has shot up enormously over the last decade in sales volume, from $3.2 billion in 1995 to $7 billion in 2003, while levels of youth violence in the United States have gone down. Whatever else may be going on to explain the drop in some categories of crime in the U.S., video games don't seem to be making the problem worse.

In fact, computer games may even make us smarter.

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It turns out that Daniel Craig, the latest man to play 007, might not be cut out of the sort of material that Ian Fleming might have imagined. The guy doesn't even like the Bond-style martinis!

Never mind. Whatever happens to the series, we will always have the early Sean Connery films to treasure.

Bob Bidinotto is unimpressed.

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I have been playing this CD by John Scofield a lot lately. The ace guitarist and fellow band-members punch out a glorious series of songs written by the late, very great Ray Charles. It pretty much blows much of what I think is the dull contemporary fare into the dust. I can also strongly recommend these fellows as well.

Music. It is such a personal thing that judging music invites deserved smackdowns. In my subjective view, though, I do think that a lot of the current pop music scene is well, dull as proverbial ditchwater. It does not exactly get the foot tapping, the heart racing, or the head spinning. I cannot imagine trying to seduce some lovely to the latest dirge by Coldplay (can you?). Some of the acts seem so lifeless. Brendan O'Neill, in this week's Spectator, takes vicious aim at the whole group of bands, in particular Coldplay, for the heinous crime of not just being bland, but also being cringeing, embarrassing Blairites at the same time. (More stupidly, O'Neill attacks such groups for being middle class, as if that should matter a jot).

Poor Chris Martin. I almost felt sorry for him after reading the Speccy. Well, almost. I am sure the fair Gwyneth offers considerable consolations, along with that surging bank balance.

Check out this hilarious fellow, Mitch Benn, for some side-splitting parodies of everyone from Eminem to Coldplay.

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My contempt for the Nobel Prize for anything grew dramatically today when I read that Harold Pinter won the award for literature. The fact he is an apologist for Europe's most prolific mass murdering socialist since Joseph Stalin, namely Slobodan Milosovic, is apparently is not something which bothers the worthies in Sweden.

A contemptible prize for a contemptible man.

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Compared to this disaster in Pakistan, that has killed tens of thousands of people, this story is pretty tiny in the big scheme of things, but by god, it still sucks:

A fire has destroyed the Bristol warehouse containing the theatrical props for the plasticine film characters Wallace and Gromit.

Fire at factory The news comes at the same time figures show their latest movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, topped the American box office over the weekend.

The story does not contain any suggestion as to what caused the blaze, although on a BBC 6 pm news item I saw, it was suggested that arson might, just might, be a factor. If so then I hope the perpetrators suffer some very unpleasant outcome indeed.

We seem to be talking rather a lot about cool movies at the moment and jolly right too (as the film critic Barry Norman used to say). I intend to see this film in the company of some fellow Londoners as soon as possible.

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No prize for now guessing why not much blogging got done today...As Paul Marks got his review up first, I will content myself with just a few observations about Joss Whedon's magnificent Serenity.

It is what the last three Star Wars movies were trying to be but failed. Serenity has an engaging story, good direction and brilliant writing (it is a tour de force of quips and memorable one liners) and as Paul points out, it is extremely sound politically.

It is also very well cast, with Nathan Fillion truly marvellous as the charismatic Captain 'Mal', playing it every inch the Wild West hero (for this movie is nothing if not a Western which just happens to be set in outer-space). Also convincing is the bizarrely named Summer Glau, whose strange looks and lithe moves are well suited to the demented character she plays.

Highly recommended! Run, do not walk, to your nearest cinema. Do not wait for the DVD!

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When first hearing of the film Serenity, people are most likely to say something like "it is made by Joss Whedon, the man who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

This is true and the film does indeed have some touches that are in tune with this - for example a young women with unusual fighting ability, and characters who sometimes talk in a flippant way at very serious moments (although, of course, people sometimes do talk that way at very serious moments).

However, Serenity is rather different from "Buffy". It is a serious science fiction film (yes there are such things) rather than a fantasy work (although I have nothing against fantasy works).

Serenity is based upon Joss Whedon's short lived science fiction series "Firefly".

It is about a group of people aboard a space ship named "Serenity" after the battle of Serenity Valley in which the Captain of the ship fought - on the losing side.

The ship is a borderline economic case, often in need of repair and the Captain undertakes jobs that are semi-legal or downright criminal.

The crew are a ragbag of people of different backgrounds and temperaments, brought together by a mixture of their own choices and force of circumstances.

In the film many of the questions raised in the series are resolved.

The film is also a good piece of work, well plotted, well acted and well filmed.

It does have some of the problems that plague so many Hollywood productions today - such as a tendency for people to say too much and too quickly (this may be hard for a British audience especially as many of the characters, unusually for an American film, speak with southern-western accents indeed more than accents, they use different words than people in the metropolitan areas of the English speaking world normally do now - although one of the experiments that Mr Whedon makes is to try and explore how ways of speech would change, and change back, over time).

However, what is interesting from a political standpoint is the basic story of the film.

The characters are lead, for a variety of reasons, in to a head on clash with the government - "The Alliance" its Parliament and those who serve it.

They are not fighting the government because it does not spend enough on welfare or education, or because it does not issue enough fiat money (indeed many people in the outer planets do not accept the government's credit money, it has to pay in cash even some of the security forces who work for it), nor are they fighting the government because it is a selfish or corrupt dictatorship.

No, in the end, the characters are fighting the government because it wishes to create a better, more civilized world (or rather worlds) and because it is prepared to violate the nonaggression principle in order to achieve this objective.

Of course the film is not "realistic" all the time (even if one accepts the existence of technology that we do not have yet and people who hate science fiction will not do that - although there is less "high tech" stuff in this film than in most science fiction films). Some of the characters, sometimes, win fights that they most likely would not win.

However the basic feel of the film is realistic and good people die. The "baddies" have noble motives, and some of the "goodies" are far from saints.

The characters do not destroy "The Alliance" but they try and do what they can, and the film shows they are right to try.

Joss Whedon is sometimes considered a baddie because he does not like President Bush, and I certainly doubt whether he would call himself a libertarian (although there are not many reasons why a libertarian should like President Bush), but Mr Whedon could call himself a Maoist for all I care - he has still made a libertarian film.

And every libertarian (and non-libertarian for that matter) would be well advised to go and see Serenity.

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"I've had enough of running...It's time to misbehave".

"Mal" Reynolds, captain of the very excellent Serenity.

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I am feeling well disposed towards Mark Holland just now, because he quite often links to and comments at my personal blog (now mercifully back in full picture posting business). So go and have a read of this, featuring a classic collection of fun lines that Mark found here.

Particularly good bit, political and Samizdata friendly:

There was a fire at the main Inland Revenue office in London today, but it was put out before any serious good was done.

That is Ronnie Corbett exchanging scripted banter with long time Two Ronnies partner Ronnie Barker, who died yesterday.

Barker, for benighted foreigners who do not know about him, was for several decades a dominant force in British TV comedy, starring in such classics as Porridge and Open All Hours. He also wrote lots of funny stuff.

I know it is always said that whoever it is will be sadly missed when they die, but he really will be.

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Comrades!

I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people!

Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!

Angered

- J Nelson reacting to this - thank you Mark Holland

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I love the internet. I went from this, which I posted here, to this, to this, to this, to this:

. . . to this:

. . . . which is the work of Ha Qiongwen. Of this particular poster, Stefan Landsberger says:

The design reproduced above was at the root of Ha's problems: why had he depicted a bourgeois woman instead of a female proletarian? Where was Chairman Mao? Why didn't the poster praise the Chairman more explicitly? Every time the literature and arts world held a criticism session, he was dragged out as an object of public abuse. As a result, Ha was publicly beaten and humiliated more than thirty times.

Personally I think the Red Guards were on to something. I think these delightful and amazing Chinese propaganda posters and China's current, rampantly aspirational and bourgeois rise towards superpowerdom are cause and effect.

I offered further thoughts along these lines in this ASI blog posting . This is the bit that is relevant:

I recently encountered, in a remainder shop, a big book containing hundreds of Chinese Communist propaganda posters, much like these ones. They depict a vivid and colourful fantasy world of industrial excellence and economic triumph, of collective progress and personal fulfilment, of joy. The people who now preside over China’s current economic miracle were teenagers when posters like these were at the height of their influence, and I think this is no coincidence. It makes perfect sense to me that the more imaginative and impressionable people brought up on imagery like this would turn away in disgust from the lumbering state centralism that these posters were intended to sell, once they realized that state centralism could never deliver such wonders, and instead switch to being enthusiastic pro-capitalists and even capitalist entrepreneurs. After all, only if China switched to capitalism could a real future like this be even hoped for, let alone rationally anticipated.

If you follow the link in that and scroll down to the bottom, you get to this:

Red Guards eat your hearts out.

(I now possess that book.)

Did Ayn Rand have anything to say about these Chinese posters? She should have.

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The BBC is reporting that the British film industry - however defined - cut its total payroll by about 20 percent in 2004, caused in part by uncertainties over the future tax treatment of said industry. It is a familiar tale.

British governments, especially the current Labour one, liked to attract the plaudits of the film-buff classes by promising to shower grants and tax breaks on the film business, but the returns on all this activity have been mixed at best. I am not sure whether tax is the prime reason for choosing to avoid Britain or not. Surely the availability of top talent, on both sides of the camera; good locations, ease of access and relatively decent labour market conditions also play a big part in all this. The latter point gets overlooked, particularly given the still-severe armlock on the industry by the acting union Equity, which operates a closed shop system on the industry.

Another thing - far too many British films try to go for the "quirky" or period-piece route and I suspect that the industry is now saddled with a fairly set image. Brits continue to ply their trade around the world - some of the best movie directors, special effects artists and so forth are Brits - so maybe some concerns are misplaced. Film-making is a global industry anyway and I would not be at all surprised if a lot of work is getting outsourced to cheaper locales like India.

I do not believe the government should dangle even bigger tax breaks under the noses of our would-be Spielbergs or Ridley Scotts to get them to make movies here. Cutting taxes overall and keeping labour costs free of regulatory red tape would be a better long-term bet. The film industry is a nice thing to have but it does not deserve and should not get, special treatment from the State.

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If you have any interest at all in the history of classical music, then I warmly recommend this fascinating article by Jane Glover in last Friday's Guardian (linked to yesterday by Arts & Letters Daily). I already know Jane Glover as an excellent conductor, and before writing this I played a CD of her conducting some of my very favourite Mozart symphonies. Wonderful. But, I had no idea until yesterday how much of a Mozart expert she is.

Her article, which doubles as a plug for her forthcoming book called Mozart's Women, concentrates on Mozart's wife Constanze.

Glover states the Constanze problem succinctly:

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus brilliantly explores the confrontation between genius (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and mediocrity (Antonio Salieri). But there is one person to whom his take on Mozart's life does no favours at all: his wife Constanze. Portrayed as a vulgar, bubble-headed sex kitten, lacking any appreciation of her husband's phenomenal gifts, Constanze shares and encourages only the immature aspects of Mozart's personality.

What is more, in portraying Constanze like this, Shaffer only echoed contemporary gossip about her, now believed to be utterly without foundation, to the effect that she had no idea to whom and to what she was married.

But it turns out that Constanze was a hugely more formidable figure than that. She thoroughly appreciated her husband's genius, and it was during their very happy marriage that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his finest works. Coming herself from a famous musical family, the Webers, she was in fact the ideal composer's wife, assisting and inspiring in equal measure.

Even more important from the point of view of posterity is that after Mozart's tragically early death – which most scholars now agree to have been accidental, despite how Peter Shaffer tells the story – Constanze did everything she could to ensure that Mozart's music was made available to posterity. All who love Mozart's music are in her debt.

The history of art is shot through with horror stories of lost masterpieces, of destroyed manuscripts, of mislaid musical scores, and nowadays, of things like destroyed tapes from the early days of television. That nothing like this happened to the wondrous creative output of Mozart is due to the industry of many people, not least to that of Constanze's second husband, whom she got to know because they worked together to preserve and publish husband number one's compositions. But pride of place in ensuring that Mozart remained for ever Mozart, so to speak, goes to his beloved Constanze.

As for the "sex kitten" stuff, I cannot believe that, musically speaking, this did any harm either. On the contrary, even the smallest acquaintance with Mozart's music – especially his operas - suggests quite the opposite.

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A new film is to be made about Che Guevara, the man whose image adorns the T-shirts of many a young student "radical" or someone trying to appear hip (even if they haven't much clue about his real life). This story, drawn from a report at the Venice Film Festival, suggests that the man will be portrayed warts an' all, making use of declassified CIA files. Good. It is something of a pet issue here at Samizdata that while the monsters of Fascism are rightly excoriated in film and print and unthinkable of a youngster to wear a picture of Adolf Hitler on his shirt, it is considered okay to do the same with the portrait of a mass murderer like Lenin or Chairman Mao. Of course in some cases the results of this mindset are unintentionally amusing.

Maybe the message is getting through. Totalitarian socialists are not hip, and not clever.

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Compared to the overall scale of the disaster, this tale about part of the costs of Hurricane Katrina may not seem that big a deal. But as a music-lover and fan of blues and jazz myself, one cannot fail to be moved by this story.

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David Herman, writing in Prospect, does not think the Old Media are giving way to the New Media. He just reckons that some of the Old Media are crap:

The reason the Guardian's circulation is falling is not because of the internet or because young people have gone blog-crazy but because G2 is full of uninteresting new columnists and the op-ed page has a kind of infantile ultra-leftism that no sane person would go near. Similarly, ITV is haemorrhaging viewers not because of the challenging new multi-channel environment but because it keeps making programmes like Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. After all, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times do not seem to be losing too many readers and the viewing figures for BBC2, Channel Four and Channel Five are remarkably stable. Interestingly, it is the losers in the ratings wars who tend to be the hardcore technological determinists.

But hang on. If the numbers for some of the Old Media are "remarkably stable", while other bits of the Old Media are "haemorrhaging" viewers and readers, does that not mean that the total amount of attention being paid to the Old Media is in decline?

It makes sense to me that the New Media should be better at supplying infantile ultra-leftism and uninteresting new columnists for free, than they are at replacing the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. So, if infantile ultra-leftism is what you want, you no longer have to pay for it. However, free substitutes for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail will be a bit longer in catching on, not least, I should guess, because their readers are more conservative in their reading habits as well as more Conservative in their opinions. The picture that Herman sketches is entirely consistent with the notion that the New Media are losing out, starting with their youngest readers and viewers.

And when the brains of all the not-so-infantile not-so-ultra-leftists cut in, as Blue Peter loses its influence over them and as Real Life impinges, will they suddenly switch back to reading newspapers, in the form of a smartened up Guardian, or the Sunday Times, or the Daily Mail? It seems improbable. They will surely carry right on with their New Media, and the New Media will expand to accommodate them, as viewers, as readers, as writers, and in whatever other ways develop.

David Herman sounds to me like he is saying that sailing ships will sail on unscathed, and that this steam stuff will never catch on. His title is: "Am I missing something?" Yes he is.

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Although I spent the bulk of my recent trip to northern California north of the Bay Area, on my final day I went south, as there was one particular place I wished to visit. This was the town of San Juan Bautista, just inland from Monterrey, and in particular I wished to visit the historic Mission San Juan Bautista, whose bell tower from which Kim Novak falls to her death around halfway through Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), and then again at the very end of the movie.

This particular movie is a favourite of many film nerds, although it was not a box office success when it was released. Possibly it is the theme of the film - it isn't really a thriller but is more a study of the descent into madness of the character played by James Stewart, as his obsession with Kim Novak becomes more and more weird and destructive. This is perhaps the movie in which Hitchcock's various obsessions came closest to the surface, and is perhaps about a kind of obsessiveness that those of us who spend a lot of time watching movies in dark rooms understand. I certainly do. It is perhaps my favourite movie.

Or perhaps it is just the beautiful way that Hitchcock used his locations. San Francisco may have been shot better in other movies, but it has seldom been shot in a way that captures the feel of the city as much as does this one. You wander round the various locations in the city, you feel the steepness of the hills, and the coldness of San Francisco Bay and you feel, even today, that Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak might walk down the corner. It's a slightly less genteel city than those on the east coast. You can tell it is the city of gold rushes, and the characters in the movie, who in some instances have great wealth or work for people who do, but who none the less act from rather depraved motives, seem to belong there.

Hitchcock was famously disdainful of actors - once referring to them as "cattle", but he was none the less brilliant at getting great performances out of stars. None of these were better than those he got out of Jimmy Stewart in this movie and in Rear Window. In both cases, Hitchcock created characters who were almost the classic James Stewart everyman, and which certainly drew on this aspect of his stardom, but cracks appeared in the persona as the movie went on, as the characters became warped and twisted. (Oddly, Hitchcock's use of Stewart in a third movie, Rope is in my mind a failure. In that case the character is clearly required to be warped and twisted (and gay) in the script, but Stewart plays the character far too clean cut). Kim Novak was not Hitchcock's first choice for the role of Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo, Vera Miles having had to pull out because she was pregnant, and Hitchcock apparently was unable to hide his displeasure about the fact that he was directing his second choice, but Kim Novak plays fragile, scheming, vulnerable, caught up in the consequences of her own machinations, and does so beautifully. I personally cannot imagine anyone else in the role.

In any event, I had visited the San Francisco locations of Vertigo on previous trips to the cities. I wanted to visit the location where the climactic events take place at the end. Watching the movie, I have always got a sense of the church in which the finals events occur being in a place of isolation, and almost unworldly place, but when you get there, you realise it is not so.

But it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter for a very particular and clever reason. Jimmy Stewart's character has suffered from vertigo ever since watching his police partner fall to his death from a high building in the first scenes of the movies. A lot of the film is seen through his eyes, and Hitchcock shows his vertigo through doing interesting things with the camera. He simultaneously moves the camera forwards and zooms out, causing the relative positions of objects to appear to change.(Hitchcock is often given credit for inventing this shot. That may be true, and if it isn't he is certainly the person who brought it into mainstream movies. It has been used endlessly since). Objects such as the bell tower are very distorted, and we just see this as part of the mental state of the character. The fact that the location makes no sense in reality is largely lost on us. And Hitchcock understood that this would be so when he made the movie.

But when you visit the location, this is immediately obvious.

(I have actually written about Vertigo before, in the context of Terry Gilliam's film 12 Monkeys, which is sort of a simultaneous science fiction remake of Vertigo and Chris Marker's La Jetee all crossed with James Tiptree Jr's The Last Flight of Dr Ain. People who were interested in this post might also find that one interesting).

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You do not expect top of the range black comedy in a movie like My Girl. But they showed it for the umpteenth time on TV the other day, and I caught this line, spoken by Jaime Lee Curtis, playing a make-up artist anxious to get a job in a mortuary. Forgive me if my memory has got this a bit wrong, but the way I remember it, it went like this:

I'll take real good care of these people, Mr Sultenfuss. They deserve it. They're dead. All they have are their looks.

At the end of this successful search for the line, you find only the last two sentences that I searched for. But I think it helps to have the two before as well. The point is, this is a nice movie, about nice people, being nice to each other. This lady is not cracking a joke about dead people just to get a laugh. She really wants them to look their best before they make their final exits.

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For the first decade and a half of my life I remember thinking that if your schooldays are the happiest days of your life, then I was going to have a wretched life. Things were not much better at my first university (Cambridge – nothing but the best for me), where I failed to work nearly hard enough, at architecture, and from which I retreated ignominiously.

It was only when I switched to another less grand university (Essex) that the connection between educational institutions and being happy started to make sense to me. I learned a lot about politics, but I did it mostly by watching, listening, and reading. I did not participate in politics, if only because what I was being urged to participate in was, I increasingly realised, mindless sub-Marxist twattery. No, what got me going was the university drama club, rather grandly known as the Theatre Arts Society, TAS (pronounced TASS) for short. We were the TAS Clique, and we loved it. It turns out that TAS is still going, and is still called that!

Although I acted, my particular speciality to start with was ticket selling, which was how I first got seriously stuck into using the then-as-now ever-changing technology of communication to get maximum impact for your message with the minimum of cost. (I first started to learn, you might say, how to do Libertarian Alliance publications.) I can still remember the thrill of my first, first night, full house. From that moment on, and for the first time in my life, I was somebody.

As for my acting career, a friend said to me after my last bit of acting at Essex: "You know Brian I've seen you in lots of things, but I never knew you could act." That was after I had played one of the junior Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, during the performances of which I finally learned what decent acting felt like. Ah, happy days.

And happy days that soon ended. Having decided not to become a real actor, I dabbled briefly in the idea of doing amateur acting as a hobby, and signed up to be in a production of Noel Cowards's Private Lives for the local drama club near where my family home was. But the magic had gone, and I gave up drama and switched to political stirring and scribbling, which I have been doing ever since. As the decades passed I occasionally pondered if I might even get back into drama, in some capacity or other, but the opportunity never arose. Shame, but there you go. You get old. You stop doing things.

But then, a few weeks ago, suddenly, everything changed.

A friend of mine (Elena Procopiu – the babe on the top right here) is herself a would-be actress. She is realistic about her chances, but is giving it as much of a go as she can fit in with earning a living, having a life, etc. In pursuit of her drama ambitions, Elena recently signed up, and paid, for a short course in radio drama. The course itself fell through and she feared a rip-off, but in fact she (a) got her money back, and then (b) found herself taking part in reading and recording plays for this operation, which is at least as good a drama training as regular training would have been. (She has already been, among other things, Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.)

The state of play with this operation is that at the moment they are better at technical sound manipulation than they are at recruiting actors so ambitious and or so desperate or enthusiastic as not to need paying, and in particular, as always when acting for peanuts is the agenda, there is a shortage of good men. I presume that because of that everyone was asked if they knew any more good men, and Elena thought of asking me if I was interested. Which I absolutely was. Would I like to join in a production of … A Midsummer Night's Dream? You bet. I went along to my first read-through/rehearsal/casting session, expecting to be a junior Mechanical again, but hoping for something grander like Peter Quince, the organiser of the Mechanicals, or maybe even Theseus, King of Athens. By the end of that day I found myself doing Theseus and Oberon (!!). (Elena is Titania.)

This activity is the answer to my personal drama prayer, and I now realise that I had been waiting for something like this to turn up for about thirty years.

Because we are reading into microphones, there are no lines to learn by heart, which is always a desperate worry for amateurs like me. (The reason I finally learned to act at Essex was that I finally got given a part with few enough lines in it for me to really know them, and thus to have spare brain capacity available to do some actual acting.) And because it is radio there are no costumes or make-up to bother about, which always were my least favourite aspects of stage acting anyway. Besides which, I have a good voice, but look like a rather spotty pudding.

Compared to regular amateur dramatics, recording plays takes up very little time. Occasional Sundays is all this is occupying. Compare this with the nightmare week-after-week and finally night-after-night schedules that amateur actors must endure, and which are so hard to combine with having any kind of regular life.

True, I do need to do some homework, learning how best to read my scarily numerous lines (in two different voices), but for me that is also a plus. I have always wanted to study literature, and now I finally have the incentive to do this that a show-off like me needs. The trouble with literature, I find, is making sense of it, which is why I tend to seek actual reading pleasure in contemporary low-brow fiction and contemporary higher-brow non-fiction, about such things as history. But I know that I am missing a world of fascination and erudition by not reading Shakespeare, Dickens etc. (After MSND, the next production they are talking about is an adaptation of Oliver Twist.) Well, now I have a motive to study literature. For me, there is no better way to study literature than to be in it.

All of which is utterly fabulous, darling, but I have not even got to the best bit of all about my new hobby, which can be summed up with one word: ambition.

What I now realise that I loved about university acting was that we had delusions of grandeur, and a few of us had actual plans to become grander. We entered competitions. We went to student drama festivals and got denounced patronisingly The Observer drama section. Some of us applied for Arts Council grants and tried to make a go of being professionals, running progressive theatre companies which would perform in schools and prisons. Some of us had friends in the real theatre. One of our number even got an actual paying job at the local rep. I still wonder what became of him. There was one hell of a barrier to surmount, between am-dram such as we did and real drama complete with an Equity Card, but given time, some of us might climb over this barrier. And we had time, because we were young.

Old-fashioned amateur dramatics of the village hall, not-slagged-off-in-the-local-paper-no-matter-how-crap-it-is variety is entirely different. With that you cannot possibly delude yourself that any of you are going anywhere at all. This is it. This is as good as it gets. This is as far as we go. You are not going to be spotted by any movie producers, slated by any real drama critics in real newspapers. You are not going to win any competitions or go to the Edinburgh Festival. No matter how good you are, you'll never really be any good.

The horror of this kind of amateur dramatics was summed up for me by something that was said to me at the party after Private Lives (the only truly well organised thing in the entire experience). One of the husbands present turned out to be a lighting expert working for the BBC, or some such grand thing. It's a pity, I said to another member of the cast, that we didn't have him helping us out. Oh no, said the other caste member, he's far too good for us.

That bloody did it. I was out of there. Too good! There was, he was telling me, an upper limit of quality in everyone's minds higher than which it was simply not worth bothering to try to go. And do you know the really ghastly thing about what that bloke said? He was right. I now realise that I was being given words of wisdom by an old lag, Porridge-style. Dreaming of being "too good" was like dreaming of getting out of prison instead of serving your time, and you would only make yourself unhappy if you indulged in such fantastical fantasies. Know you place, or get out. I made my choice. And I assumed that from then on, given that I did not want to be a real actor, acting would be a closed book to me.

This radio thing, on the other hand, and in addition to all the other huge attractions and conveniences of it that I have emboldened above, has that vital spark of ambition about it that I remember from Essex.

Oh it's the usual shambles. This Sunday's recording of MSND had to be postponed because the recording studio we were originally going to use is now unavailable. Promptness was not good, for the last rehearsal a fortnight ago. A few of us were there on time, but we only got properly started over an hour later. And I still do not know who my Puck is going to be, without whom I (Oberon!) cannot get MSND's plot going properly. But, they will get another studio. We were read the riot act about promptness by the supreme boss, in a scarily quiet voice. And the director, who after a worryingly late arrival chucked his weight around very encouragingly, will do Puck if we are still Puckless come recording time. I know all this because I know that these people want to go places with this enterprise. They want this on their CVs, and they want it to look good there. Nothing will be "too good" for them.

All of this, of course, has been made possible by the new technology of recording and of communication, and by the fact that so much of it is now cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for amateurs like me to make meaningful use of it. However, it is worth stressing that the blurring of the distinction between amateur acting and real acting that I am experiencing could only work if the new technology also encouraged some of the professionals to go slumming with the likes of me. The people running this show know what they are doing, when they twiddle their knobs and fade in their musical effects. The supreme boss will probably be switching us to a radio studio which he personally constructed. And the actors, who are mostly quite young (hence me doing two of the big older guy parts), are all trying to be professional actors, even though they are mostly still at the stage of having real world jobs of the sort they will later want to discuss with Jonathan Ross but which in the meantime they really need. Elena is one of these young actors, and the only reason it never occurred to me to volunteer for this before she asked me to was that I assumed I would not fit in, what with having had no proper training as a actor, and having little in the way of serious acting ambitions. Anyway, my point is that all this new technology (the internet, internet downloads, cheap CD copying etc.) is mingling with older technology, in the form of that decent recording studio that they are borrowing at the weekend, and in the form of people who know how to scrounge such a place and how to operate it. In my opinion, if there were no aspirational professionals to guide the newly enthused amateurs like me and the young starters-out like Elena and the other bright young acting things, operations like this would not work. The new technology, that is to say, is not just a way for a whole new bunch of alert amateurs and tyros to break through the ceiling between them and really going somewhere. The new technology also creates new opportunities for alert old-style professionals.

If that were not so, then as I say, things like this would not work nearly so well. We lesser beings all want to do our best, and for that we need technological expertise and dramatic guidance, especially with a play like Midsummer Night's Dream, which absolutely depends on good sound effects (it is saturated with musical references) and on being, you know, really well spoken.

The new technology is also, of course, creating equal and opposite horrors and scary monsters for other old-style professionals. Imagine a world in which your average drama critic compares, e.g., something like our best shot at MSND with the similar effort just done by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and says that in some ways ours is better. We are almost there.

The parallels between all of the above and blogging are obvious, I think. And as a blogger I have been reading about things like this happening, or being about to happen, for many years now. Arguably, pop music has been in this state of fluidity ever since the tape recorder was invented. And see also this piece, which I personally published, about a corresponding process that is going on with film-making, by our own David Carr, or for that matter this earlier piece, by David Botsford, which David Carr's piece was a response to. See also this attempt to market with a blog a decidedly different but very professionally made movie, already mentioned here a few times. Once again, you see the mixing of old-style professionalism with the opportunities created by the new digital technology.

But it is one thing to read about history, quite another to actually experience it, even if it is of the peaceful, "social" variety. I always knew I would be some kind of writer, so when a new kind of writing came along, it changed things for me, big time, but it did not utterly transform them. But with acting, the new technology has been for me the difference between a whole new world of fun, aspiration, effort and potential achievement, and bugger all. That is a huge difference, I think you will agree. And it all happened very suddenly. I went from zero to Oberon in the space of a few days.

Am I the only old bloke who shone a little as a student actor but who then recoiled in dismay from the futile grind of old-style amateur dramatics? Surely not. Other amateurs are bound to come crawling out of the woodwork, once they see that there is now a new world out there, in which they might have the chance to do something truly excellent, and in time that they can truly spare.

Maybe, following on from those two pieces by the Davids, I will even find myself doing movies some time soon. And although I am not in this for money, I will take any that is offered eagerly, and will attentively listen to any plans that Mr Spielberg might have for me.

I am starting, in short, to have those delusions of grandeur again, without which, in my opinion, showbiz is no fun at all.

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A minority of musicians not only dislike the capitalist world, but they believe they can eschew it. Some of them have set up the sort of micro-firms that capitalism makes so easy to do. So they have spurned being sub-contractors or suppliers to large firms, and have become entrepreneurs instead - and think of it as rebellion.

- Richard D. North in Rich is Beautiful

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I gather from the front of The Sun on this morning's news-stands that there is some kind of scandal in relation to the umpteenth series of the voyeur's soap opera. One of the competitors, an exceedingly pretty young women called Makosi, turns out to be an actress. She may have been acting at some point, possibly in covert collaboration with the producers of the show.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. If they are selecting people for good-looks, exhibitionism, emotional incontinence, and absence of that untelevisual thing, interior life, then surely a crew of poets, pharmacists, dustmen and bankers is more likely than actors? And they are bound spontaneously to generate gossip for gay men and teenage girls without outside intervention. You only have to retell the uproarious stories of the last seven weeks at the office to realise that.

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Odd, how the meaning of a term changes over time. To people over a certain age (which age is likely less than my own), "gaming" refers to gambling, wagering, betting, etc. To the younger set, gaming refers to video and computer games.

Which games are likely to drive a larger market than the movie industry, real soon now. Numbers are notoriously hard to come by, given Hollywood's penchant for lying, cheating and stealing, but already the gaming industry is probably roughly on par with the movie industry, in terms of revenue.

I have had a pet theory, based as they usually are entirely on projection, that what really drives home computer sales is computer games. The vast majority of home computer users will run no software that is even remotely as demanding as a computer game, and certainly nothing that requires a dedicated sound and video card. If all I did was email/word processing/spreadsheets, I would still be using my third computer ago. Speaking from personal experience, and in the fond hope that my wife does not read this, I know what has motivated me, on at least three occasions, to announce that our current computer was junk and urgently needed replacement.

I will leave to others to expound on the social and spiritual significance of the emerging "Gamer Nation." With the new laptop in hand, and Warhammer loaded, updated, and ready to rock and roll*, I have better things to do.

*enter birthday, play movie.

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And that is exactly what Kamal Aboukhater, the producer of the movie Blowing Smoke, has just done. He has produced the film his way - deeply un-PC screenplay about cigars, men and women using cutting-edge digital technology - and now he is releasing the movie via the Blowing Smoke blog.

So having done all that, getting good people on my side working with me, I didn't want to become a slave to anyone. I didn't want to wait for my movie to travel up the long and tedious chain of command until someone finally made a decision to release it.

... There will be no waiting. I can, audience willing, get immediate response and won't be at the mercy of a movie studio or distributor. One thing I have learned about audiences, thanks to blogs, is that they are not a unified mass of "consumers." They are individuals, choosing something (like what to watch) for many and varied reasons. Some might want to watch Blowing Smoke because they like cigars, some might be drawn to the poker, and others may want their opinions about women and men confirmed. Whatever the reason, now they can do so easily. And, if they feel like it, they can let me know their reactions and opinions.

And he really does not like the studios, but he seems to like bloggers:

Major studios seem to be the last to adopt and adapt to innovation and trends. And, just like with video and DVDs, they are again missing the boat, unaware of the new possibilities for reaching their audiences. They might have caught glimpses of the future, such as Firefly, Global Frequency, and Garden State. This is thanks to a new band of warriors, better known as bloggers, who add strength to the voice of the fans, fighting for more choice for themselves and, in the end, all of us.

The point is that he can go all the way to his audience, by-passing the intermediaries. Sure, the path is not clear, the journey may be either uneventful or too bumpy, but Kamal is aware of the experimental nature of what he has done. He is enjoying the comments from those who understand and appreciate what he is trying to do. As he said after the 'launch':

It's no longer just about the movie but about an opportunity to add another dimension to the infrastructure that's already there - the blogosphere and the internet.

It has taken a while to get to this point both in terms of understanding and then realising the idea. I feel privileged to have been part of that process and enjoy working with Kamal whose open mind has been instrumental in this adventure. In return, he can be blamed for my blossoming addiction to cigars, the quality of which would make any cigar afficionado weep with joy. Whilst discussing the final details of the Blowing Smoke 'release operation', I savoured a particularly good Hoyo de Monterrey. Who says the days of plotting in smoke-filled rooms are over...

I shall leave you with an exhortation: Boxed BS available now! Get your own! Oh and, BS download is Coming Out Real Soon Now!

cross-posted from Media Influencer

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Matt Devereux has some very sensible views regarding the clamour in the media about the latest notorious computer game

The recent US furore over Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas serves to expose the real agenda behind moralist media censorship in the 21st Century: sex. On July 27th it was announced that 85 year old Florence Cohen of New York is taking the games manufacturer to court over a hidden modification for the game entitled "Hot Coffee". The file, downloadable over the Internet, inserts a new element into the game allowing players to have graphic sex, including a variety of positions. Cohen claims that this new element is unsuitable for her 14 year old grandchild and therefore contravenes the terms on which she bought the game. The insinuation is that had she known the game contained sexual material she would never have bought it in the first place.

Yet this is a game in which shooting innocent people in the head is actively encouraged. Drug dealing, prostitution, stealing, criminal damage, assault and affray are all part and parcel of all three GTA games. As any self-respecting GTA aficionado will tell you some of the most enjoyable activities include decapitating police officers and repeatedly driving over the elderly. How can it be that this sort of material is acceptable for a 14 year old whilst sex (in which no-one is harmed) is frowned upon? Hopefully, the District Court will see the irony.

Furthermore, the file needed to unlock the pornography was illegally hacked and distributed over the internet. In other words Ms. Cohen's grandchild would have had to have voluntarily downloaded the unsactioned file in order to access the sexual material. If she really wants to protect her young relative she might more sensibly start by checking his internet history. Predictably, Congress has jumped on the outrage bandwagon, issuing statement after statement brandishing Rockstar as "pornographers" and "out of control." On July 15th the Federal Trade Commission announced it would investigate the "Hot Coffee" modification.

Who is spearheading this investigation? None other than Hilary Clinton - the woman whose husband is largely responsible for the words "oral sex" being introduced to every American living room. In reality, this is just another case of business and the media being blamed for poor parenting and parental control. Rockstar Games are not responsible for keeping kids in check. Neither is the government. Do we really want our choices to be taken away by people who can not control their own children?

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Sometimes talented, sometimes monumentally untalented assailants of one's ears: yes, the phenomenon of the public "busker" seems to be alive and well on the London Underground. A guy at Chancery Lane station this evening was dressed in what must have been a hot and thick red jacket, with a sort of Elvis haircut and was belting out Sinatra hits. (Not bad, actually). The sound of Old Blue Eyes followed me down the Stygian depths of the platform until the racket of the train overwhelmed it. A strange evening. The station was full of police with their yellow jackets on on high alert four Thursdays on from the mass murders of July 7. Cops and Sinatra on a Thursday night. A rum combination.

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I suppose most readers around these parts would reckon that actors should stick to acting, and keep their political opinions to themselves.

But what about these opinions?

"People think more aid will help, but it won't," said Ms. Driver, an actress who is working on her second music CD. "Trade is the surest way of decreasing the savage amount of poverty in our world. These countries have got to be able to trade fairly."

And the point is, by "fairly", she does not mean being paid artificially high prices; she means getting rid of agricultural subsidies in the rich countries.

It was never a practical project to silence the acting profession. These people are famous. Having acquired their fame, they then want to use their fame to do good, and in the process to become even more famous. This is only natural, especially when you consider that doing good and being heroic is what, according to the entertainments these people spend their lives making and acting in, life is all about. Trying to stop famous actors from expressing what they consider to be virtuous and heroic opinions in public is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the sea from being wet.

No, the task that faces us is not to silence the acting profession from ever opining about goodness. That would be impossible, to say nothing of censorious and unpleasant. Rather is our task to change the definition of goodness that actors of sufficient fame to care about such things reach for when they get to the public virtue stage in their careers, and to make goodness really mean goodness.

Ms. Driver's pronouncements concerning the superiority of trade over aid as a means of rescuing the world's poorest people is evidence that some progress is being made along these lines.

Many actors surely already believe such things, on the quiet. But it is still a fine step forward when one of them feels able to say such things in public.

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People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people

Oh I am soooo up for this...

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I have just returned from just over two of the funniest hours spent at the cinema for quite a while. Wedding Crashers, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, is an outrageous, politically incorrect, deplorable romp of a movie, the perfect tonic for these unpleasant times.

Vaughn is also refreshingly free of the political posturing that tends to colour my views of Hollywood these days.

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Sales of the sixth Harry Potter adventure by J.K. Rowling have reached 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours. Repeat slowly: 6.9 million copies. That puts this novel - and I am not a great fan, it has to be admitted - up in the sort of league that used to be associated with sales of Beatles albums or Michael Jackson tunes.

6.9 million copies sold in 24 hours. Egads. Those who decry Potter as lowbrow nonsense can spare their rage. (Yes, that includes you, Stephen Pollard). This is a cultural phenomenon we have not seen from these islands for years. As Brian Micklethwait pointed out not so long ago, Rowling has created a character to rival an earlier, very British-but-also-transferable-character - James Bond (I am an unashamed Ian Fleming fan).

I mentioned Michael Jackson a bit earlier. Strange to relate, but has anyone noticed that Johnny Depp, starring as Willy Wonka in the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Tim Burton, looks just like the Faded One? I presume this has to be some sort of Hollywood in-joke.

Update: latest figures put Harry Potter sales at 8.9 million.

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I have just got in, hot and tired after my trudge back from the office. Flicking on the television, and, behold on BBC 1, is the first night at the Proms, commencing the famous series of music nights held for a period of weeks at the Royal Albert Hall.

The orchestra is bashing out a piece by Edward Elgar right now, a composer associated - not entirely correctly - with brash British patriotism. In the current climate, it makes me smile rather wryly that this supreme genius of British music should be beamed into our homes on this sultry Friday evening, and via those lovely people at the BBC.

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I have just been watching Panorama, on the subject of Islamic terrorism, and according to an investigator in Morocco, Al Qaeda has a new dress code. To start with, you must wear a beard and robes. You only switch to ordinary western clothes, to blend in, when you switch to "active service".

This reminds me of a snatch of dialogue I recall from the movie Ice Station Zebra, which went approximately as follows. (I only saw it a long time ago, so what follows may be somewhat approximate.)

Patrick McGoohan (yes - The Prisoner himself) plays a secret service agent, and he is asked what he thinks of one of the people on the expedition, or at the base, or whatever.

"Yes" says the McGoohan character, "we've been watching him."

What do you make of him?

"Oh," says McGoohan, "he's immaculate."

How long have you been watching him?

Replies McGoohan: "Ever since he became immaculate."

UPDATE: "Impeccable." See comment 4.

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I can only assume that Michael Moore was too busy:

Nearly four years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will direct a film based on the story of two police officers who were trapped in the rubble on Sept. 11, 2001.

And in that rubble, the two stricken men will miraculously find 'proof' that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a CIA-Halliburton-Zionist-BushHitler conspiracy. But the evidence will all mysteriously disappear after thay hand it in and some snarling unidentified suit with a Texan accent will warn them to "keep their big mouths shut".

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The last pub covered in this series is one I have known for the longest time: Paddy Reilly's. I first came to it whilst traveling with Irish bass guitarist Dee Moore a decade ago. There has been some remodeling since then, but Tony DeMarco's Thursday session goes on. I have no idea how long he has been at it but he has become a New York institution. He is also a very fine fiddle player, known and welcome in any session in Ireland.

The session in full flight. Tony DeMarco on fiddle at left.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

I arrived a bit early tonight and while sipping my first pint of the evening overheard a fellow I had never seen before. He told a couple at the bar how tightly knit the global traditional music scene is: how you can go to a session anywhere and in a few minutes chat with a new found trad player find people you know in common.

I put it to the test and I hit it in one. In fact, of the first six people I named there was only one who was not well known to us both. Later in the evening the fellow's name, Jon Hicks, finally clicked in my mind. The aforementioned old friend, Dee, produced his first CD.

Jon is from Northern England; he lived in the West of Ireland for a number of years and is now on the road to becoming a permanent New York resident. From the quality of picking I heard, I believe he will be a welcomed addition to the local music scene.

Singer-Songwriter Jon Hicks.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

It was a lovely session, typical of the decades long run of Tony's session. Whether due to the events in London or just vageries of the summer holidays, the crowd was thin tonight. Not too thin though. We had a lively young woman who had her first introduction to Irish traditional music and was totally enthralled by the skilled musicianship involved. I think she will be back.

Trad music seems to attracts beautiful women.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

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I woke this morning to the sad news posted here by Brian and David and there is little I can add from far off Manhattan. Maybe I will be moved to pontificate later, but for now I will continue on with life as planned.

Last night was not a session bar night. I only have one more night in New York before becoming buried in R&D work again and The Scratcher is a must visit. It is my Manhattan local of eight years standing. Until a few years ago it was also the site of the Wednesday session so I can at least claim a figleaf on its inclusion in the five day crawl.

The bar has always been more a trendy den of iniquity than a trad place. The staff are Irish and Scottish; the clientele are an eclectic mix of models, actresses, musicians, filmmakers and young professionals during the pre-midnight hours. As the clock ticks into the morning hours the american percentage falls precipitously until in the wee hours, by the sound of the surrounding accents, one could as well be in a London or Dublin pub as New York.

The secretive outer aspect of the Scratcher.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

The staff are good people and include a number of musicians who work here when not gigging or touring. The owner is a big supporter of music and this is one of the ways he helps the New York music scene.

Brendan O'Shea, like several other staff bartenders has been here since the late nineties. It is a nice feeling to come back to a place year after year and have a nod and a smile as you walk in the door.

Brendan at work... or perhaps play?
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

Some of the staff I would call friend as well. If you drop into my New York local I ask that you tip really well. If you misbehave Natalie will tell on you and I will personally ban you from Samizdata!

Natalie at work covering the family bills.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

If you are looking for intellectual chatter, come after midnight or early on a weekday night and you are bound to find someone to go on at length about just about anything. If you come by during the weekend night madness, pick up a model and end up bonking your mutual brains out in the interchangeable sex loos, just remember where you heard about this marvelous little place. There is something for everyone here.

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It is Tuesday night and I am still standing. It is actually not the drinking that does you in. It is the late night navigation of the New York subway system. Last night it took me an hour and a half to get home. Partly it is that fewer trains are running; but it is also all the repairs and shifting around of trains that happens at night. I often wonder if the City is in cahoots with Yellow Cab to make getting home late at night on the subway such a miserable prospect that you would rather reach into your pocket book for $30 to travel the length of the island.

Nonetheless, I arrived at the Swift Bar with time to spare: time enough for a warm up pint or two before the music. Even without music it is a fascinating bar to drink in. The place has a Victorian look in keeping with the Jonathan Swift theme.

An impressive old style bar
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

The truly unique part of the bar are the murals. I photographed one small section of the main mural. It is filled with detail and humour enough to keep your eyes wandering over it until you have had too many pints to focus or until they have settled on something lovely and drinking beside you.

A ghostly presence in the mural
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

The session itself is usually quite large and with an audience to match. This particular night was pretty dead although the music was as good as ever. I have been in this bar on standing room nights with musicians several seats deep around the main table. It is also not unusual for touring musicians to stop by. The last time I was here I came by with singer Niamh Parsons (an old and dear friend of many years standing, so go buy her records!) after her tour gig. Athena O’Lochlainn, a well known fiddle player once with Sharon Shannon's band also happened to drop in. It is that kind of session (Yes, I know Sharon too).

Eamon O'Leary plays piano... as well as his usual banjo, guitar and Mandolin.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

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Hundreds of thousands of tourists and New Yorkers headed for the extravaganza riverside fireworks display last night. I was not one of them. I have done it before and did not tonight feel a herring-like desire to join the tightly packed school of fellow hominids on the riverine Manhattan coast. What I did have a desire for was a quiet pint of well-pulled Guinness and some good music. I knew exactly where to find it on a Monday night: Mona's.

Mona's is a small pub in the Lower East Side. It is a local in every sense of the word. There is no big flashing "Monas" sign outside. There is, in fact, no sign at all. Just a window through which you can see a very dark pub that is decidedly not ferns and chrome. No wimpy idiotic 'theme'. Just a place that has grown organically around its central purpose of beer, music and pool for a neighborhood clientele. When I first lifted a pint here some eight years ago, it was in a neighborhood which had transitioned from broken glass and junkies in the doorways to one which was merely for the adventurous, a hangout for musicians and a hodgepodge of starving artists, writers, actresses, bikers and Irish expats. Since then the neighborhood has changed. It seems like almost the whole of Avenue B has gone way upscale. The tide of new bars has not yet reached 14th Street and the clientele is still neighborhood... but you are now more likely to run into a med student outside than a junkie.

The session at Mona's is a very informal and relaxed affair. There is usually a core of fine musicians, but anyone who loves the music can join in. Some of the better musicians take time over a long break to show newcomers a few tunes and techniques.

As you can see, it is a very homey session:

A very traditional session at Mona's
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.

Traditional music attracts classy fiddle players
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.

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The New York traditional music scene has been a home away from home for me for almost a decade. My familiarization with it began when I toured with a band and sang here in 1994; it expanded greatly when I worked on a series of internet webcasts and spent a good chunk of 1998 living in the East Village. During that hot summer of 1998 I had a weekly pub schedule to follow. The crowd of musicians I got to know so well floated in an eternal circuit from the Monday Session through to the Sunday Session. Many of the same people are still to be found on the same weekly rounds and only one of the Sessions has died off over the last seven years.

So... Sunday night. That's the Doc Watson's night. For the hardcore musicans, the Sunday drinking actually starts in the afternoon at the Thady Con's Session, but I had engineering notes to prepare.

Doc Watsons is in the Upper East side and not the easiest place to get to from where I am staying in the Upper West. This business trip has been going well so I splurged on a taxi rather than the usual long A train and crosstown bus trip. The first taxi to stop was from a Car Service, not one of the metered Yellow ones. I have been around the city long enough to know to dicker the price before one goes anywhere. The ride is nicer but you could be in for a surprise if you have not got the price set first. If you are a stranger to the city you won't know whether a price is reasonable or not so I would probably not recommend it without the advice of a local friend. The Yellow ones are safer for tourists.

I have sung at Doc Watson's myself, although not in many years. I have been too busy surviving as a consultant to keep any material up to what I would consider professional performance standards. Since I have been there and done that, I have more to lose making a complete fool of myself on stage than most. One never knows: perhaps the day will fall when I must survive at it. It is best I not leave bar owners and public with memories of blue notes and effed lyrics to replace older,better memories of mostly competent performance. Instead, I competently hold up the bar and drink Guinness.

The pub has a Sunday anchor band that is usually John Redmond and Peter Rufli, fellows I know from years past. This Sunday John was not present and Peter had several other fine musicians with him.

Right to left: Davie Ryan, Banjo; Peter Rufli, flute & whistle; Dominic Cromie, guitar and vocals
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.

In addition to the craic of old acquaintances, Doc Watson's has very good food and pulls a decent Guinness. I particularly like their Buffalo Wings platter.

If you have not spent time in New York, you are missing the real meaning of cross-cultural fertilization. The following photos show how Chinese culture has improved upon traditions long a part of the Irish music scene:

Traditional Irish beer balancing technique
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.

Chinese improvement
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.

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Yesterday I visited Hampstead Heath, to renew my acquaintance with the magnificent view of London that you can see from there, and also to see this rather entertaining sculpture, installation, visual pun, prank, call it what you will. Basically, it is a giant table and chair. It is called "The Writer", because your average writer uses a table and a chair when writing. Hampstead Heath was chosen by The Writer's creator, Giancarlo Neri, because of Hampstead's literary associations. It will be on the Heath until October.

Click on these squares to get bigger pictures:

   

   

You cannot please everybody when it comes to public sculpture. Personally, I reckon just about anything is better than the kind of meaningless lumps that used to disfigure London - in fact more or less everywhere - in the sixties and seventies, until the fashion for sculpture that is of something came roaring back. The meaningless lumps were ugly as sin, and took themselves about as seriously as a religious cult, which they were. Neri's installations, on the other hand, have a bit of wit and fun about them, like most public sculpture these days. And if you hate it, relax. It will soon be gone. I have my photos and I am happy. You can forget about it.

I particularly like where The Writer has been put. It nestles modestly at the bottom end of Parliament Hill Fields rather than strutting its stuff at the top of Parliament Hill. From Parliament Hill you can see the top of the table (top left) the way you cannot when you are closer to it (top right).

The view through it and back up towards Parliament Hill, with all those even smaller figures on the horizon (bottom left) is a particularly nice one, I think.

The Writer makes good use of the people who flock to gaze at it. It then looks much more amusing than it would be if there were no people under or around it. The joke of how big the table and the chair are only comes alive when there are normal sized people around to dramatise it.

Inevitably, because these are the times we live in, there is a website (bottom right), although I found this BBC report more helpful.

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The first choice to be faced when making a Batman film (or any other superhero film) is to whether it should be played for laughs or played straight. This Batman film tries to play it straight and I think that is the right choice. It is harder to play a superhero film straight but that is the spirit in which the stories were written and enjoyed.

Critics will not tend to like a straight superhero film (for example they hated the Bruce Willis film Unbreakable, which I would argue is a very fine film indeed), but it is the way to go, and the Spiderman films showed that critics and public can accept it (sometimes). The character of Batman is less difficult to present in one way, in that he is a superhero with no superpowers.

So one is left (in the comics) with a man of great inherited wealth, who is man of practical invention, physical action and great public spirit. Well John Walton (who died a few days ago) was a man of great inherited wealth who choose to join the army and served (as a medic) with U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam, he was also an inventor (no sneering about how he died in an aircraft he built himself - his stuff was good quality), and a man who administered the Walton family charitable activities. Of course John Walton did not go out and fight crime, in the big city, in an armoured suit shaped to scare the criminals (for a start he did not like big cities), but the rest of his life story shows that the Bruce Wayne character idea is certainly not "unbelievable"

Batman Begins decides that all of the above is too much for one man and so has Mr Wayne helped by a scientist in his company - but again that is hardly an absurd position. Where the film does stain belief is that Mr Wayne owns his company and in these days of inheritance tax and capital gains tax, having a man inherit control and keep it even after a determined effort to "take the company public" (i.e. hand over ownership to the pension funds and other financial institutions) by the hired manager... that strains belief.

A man may build up a big company from scratch (in spite of all the regualtions and taxes) as the first Mr Walton of Walmart showed, and has such men as Mike Dell or (for all their faults) Warren Buffett or Bill Gates have shown - but it is a full time job. Also a family that does not own a majority of stock can still try and make its presence felt, but again it is a full time struggle.

The modern "business model" is for hired managers to boost a companies profits by borrowing vast sums of money to fund investment (and just about everything else), boost the stock price and then move on (having cashed in their stock options) before the matter of paying back the loans becomes pressing. Their pay and perks are secure because such things (for hired top managers) are decided by committees of other hired top managers (and they sit on their remuneration committees).

Should a family member start to worry that products are unreliable, and that asset buying orgies (and...) have been financed by building up vast debts he will find it a major effort to try and regain control. The example of Henry Clay Ford springs to mind - such journals as the "Economist" are still outraged that the wicked Mr Ford turned against the hired managers on the grounds that the cars were unreliable and the company had been loaded down with debt.

The idea of a man inheriting a vast company, still being in control of its broad line of policy, but having time for very intense private interests smacks more of late 19th century or early 20th century America when taxes were lower and the eldest son of a big businessman was more likely to find himself the true owner of a concern, than to find himself a "trust fund kid" with enough money to live his life in idealness, but not enough for a very expensive undertaking (such as Batman's war on crime).

The film does make one nod to this reality. In talking of Batman's father one of the characters (and a good guy character at that) does make the point that the late Mr Wayne's efforts to help the poor almost bankrupted the company.

The late Mr Wayne had told his son that he did not work in the Wayne Tower (he works in the hospital). In such an environment the hired manager has to take over - and if he is not perfect, the man who choose him (the late Mr Wayne) is partly to blame.

Generations of Waynes (like generations of Du Ponts) have built up vast company with enough top quality products and top quality people to let them use some of their time to do other things - but even in fiction a man who neglects his company is doing more harm to the poor than any amount of work in the hospital or building a mono rail is going to balance out.

The leading bad guy in the film tells Bruce Wayne that his father was responsible for his own death and for the death of Bruce Wayne's mother - because he would not fight. The late Mr Wayne tried to reason with the criminal (after all he was a poor victim of the depression), but sometimes there is no reasoning with people and the "reasons they are doing this" simply do not matter.

The argument is cruel (after all, the late Mr Wayne was unarmed and untrained - as his son points out), but it has more than a grain of truth in it. And the film is right to expose the flaws in the late Mr Wayne - he is less of a cardboard cut-out that way.

However, to spot all these points is difficult as (at times) the film makes the standard modern Hollywood mistake of indistinct speech. Dialogue is no good if people can not hear it, and I am not prepared to accept that is just because I am middle aged man. After all I can hear every word of Hollywood films made before the last few decades.

Not having the camera on the person who is speaking is dumb (and it does happen sometimes), as is not pushing down background noise when someone is speaking. Certainly such a thing is "unrealistic" - but this is film, and it is an accepted artistic convention of film (or used to be) that explosions and shooting go quiet when someone has something important to say. This is because we are not actually with the person and can not say things like "what was that?"

And of course a few of the actors fail to project their lines (this is better than most modern Hollywood films, where many of the actors fail to project their lines). The arch non-projector is Katie Holmes. The final lines when she states that the reason she can not be with Bruce Wayne because his face is a mask (the real face being the face of Batman), should be powerful - but their power is undercut by the fact that they are so poorly delivered.

Katie Holmes is indeed (as the reviewers have pointed out) more of a milk monitor than an assistant D.A. No adult could regard her as a threat (regardless of her taser) and she would be more likely to inspire mirth than plots to kill her. However, at one point Holmes is let down by the film. Her character is drugged with a chemical already shown to drive people insane with terror, and she is given a super strong dose - which makes her stare a bit whilst being a passenger in a car chase and then makes her a bit sleepy (sorry she is about to die, accept that it does not seem like that at all).

Everyone else who is given the drug (including Batman) has terrible visions, but Katie Holmes character does not seem to have any visions at all - at least there are no special effects for her (as there are for every other victim),

Another place where special effects (or at least some ordinary scenes) would be useful, is near the end of the film where we are told (again indistinctly - this time by honest cop Gordon) that although Batman has saved most of the city from the gas that drives people insane "we have lost the Narrows", i.e. the district where the gas was first released.. As the bad guys wanted, the people have turned on each other in the horror of their madness.

However, we are not shown what is left of the Narrows - and that would bring home to us that Batman's victory has not been total (nor should it be - Batman is the 'Dark Knight', not a fairy godmother who can fix everything by waving a wand).

Lastly the chief bad guys themselves.

These are not organised crime (although they are certainly an evil force in the city), or even corrupt businessmen (the chief hired manager at Wayne Enterprises does not really do anything really evil at all - he just tries to cover things up and protect his own backside, he may have side-lined and then fired Wayne Industries' best scientist - but he does not want to kill anyone). It is even confessed near the end of the film that the economic problems of the city (the depression) had nothing to do with greedy businessmen. True the film does not say "the depression was created by the Fed, generating a boom-bust credit bubble cycle", any more than it says "lawyers are more important in modern corporations than engineers, because of all the regulations and corrupted tort law" - but one can not have everything.

The chief bad guys are a nice choice (for all that they are sneered at by the reviewers).

The "League of Shadows" are what the "Sith" should have been - bad guys who seem to be good guys.

They rescue you from despair, they train you in the arts of combat, they stress their absolute devotion to justice. And only when you have killed for them do you find out that they are prepared to tell any lie and make up any story to further their power - and that are prepared to destroy anything that does not live up to their standards.

The City is corrupt? Fine, destroy it utterly (killing millions) and do so in such a way that will inspire horror all over the world. Do not use a stolen microwave weapon to kill everyone - no, they use it to set spread a gas that will drive them mad so they kill each other. A love of horror for its own sake and for a practical purpose - to inspire fear.

One can snear that this is "unrealistic", but actually it is a very realistic mindset indeed, one we have seen all too often.

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Bob 'give-us-yer-fokken-money' Geldof must be losing his touch:

Berlin's planned Live8 concert next week threatens to turn into a fiasco because it has failed to attract the support of politicians or business sponsors, the event's German organiser has admitted.

Marek Lieberberg, a friend of Bob Geldof contracted to run the Live8 concert in Berlin, said the lack of support meant the rock bands appearing at the event risked having to pay for the €1m (£663,000) show themselves.

A risk? Surely not a 'risk' but a heaven-sent opportunity for the socially-conscious cream of the rockeratti to put their own money where their big 'fokken' mouths are.

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The BBC are now bingeing on Beethoven, which is fine by me. (And yes, I quite agree that if you do not care for Beethoven, you should not have to pay for it, blah blah. Let us take that as a given, shall we?)

On Saturday night BBC4 TV showed three videos of the first three symphonies, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington in One (which I missed), the late Otto Klemperer in Two (in 1960s black and white), and Rattle doing the Eroica with his old City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1995. Rattle's Eroica was, for me, as gloriously invigorating as Klemperer's Second was cloddish and over-solemn. Watching a very obviously heart attacked, slack-jawed Klemperer sitting like someone in a hospital waiting room waving one finger vaguely in the air while the New Philharmonia tried to divine some musical sense out of these wobbly gestures suddenly did not seem funny any more, although on another night I might have been entranced.

But Rattle's Eroica was fabulous. All his calculatedly wide-eyed astonishment and arm-waving, armpit-flaunting drama-queening made perfect sense, given that he was conducting what is probably the single most astonishing and dramatic piece of music ever written. This is amazing, said Rattle's every look and gesture, and it was.

It helped a lot that Rattle was conducting his Birmingham orchestra, rather than his more recently acquired Berliners. In Birmingham, Rattle took a decent orchestra and, over a period of about two decades, wheedled, arm-twisted, blackmailed, begged, charmed, ordered, sacked and replaced, politicked, terrorised and seduced and generally all round made them play out of their collective skin. He also made Birmingham build them a brand new and very fine concert hall to play in. All the podium posturing Rattle likes to go in for accordingly seemed justified, in front of these lucky and adoring people (the cameras were especially keen on two very nice looking lady violinists), for he had earned the right to conduct them any way he wanted to. On the other hand, all that Great Conductor stuff in front of the Berlin Philharmonic looks, to me, rather embarrassing. Am I the only one who fears that Rattle may now have reached his level of incompetence? I mean, what can he tell those guys that Abbado, Karajan and the rest of them have not?

The BBC also recently aired two other Beethoven shows that I found of extreme interest, and which complemented one another very nicely.

First, there was the rerun of Eroica, last Monday on BBC4 TV, which all takes place on the day of the first performance, June 9th 1804, of that symphony, and centres on that first performance itself (re-performed in its entirety), at the Vienna home of Prince Lobkowitz.

I enjoyed Eroica a lot, but had doubts. The performance of the symphony itself, invisibly conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, was too polished and polite and safe sounding. I cannot believe that the first performance of the Eroica was as efficient and as error-free as this one was. In this respect, it was the polar opposite of 'authentic', for all that Gardiner is the original instruments, original performing practice maestro par excellence. Basically, the Gardiner soundtrack was conducted, in the Simon Rattle sense, while the original performance itself was not. It was merely kept in reasonable time by the lead violinist, with occasional scowlings and arm wavings from Beethoven himself.

And even if this was exactly how the Eroica Symphony sounded at its premiere, there is one item of originality that it is nearly impossible to conjure up out of the distant past, and that is the audience. It is one thing to hear the first two chords of the Eroica for the hundredth time, in an age of stadium rock and hi-fi volume knobs on our CD players; quite another to hear these two explosions when they were the loudest and most bad-mannered musical noises that anyone had, until then, ever heard indoors. To communicate musical and social disruption like that takes acting, and acting is hard when all you are doing is listening along to classical music. We did get a sense of what a musical revolution it all was, but more from what was said than merely from how they smiled, or looked severe and disapproving, during the music itself.

Ian Hart played Beethoven like a north of England cotton factory manager, which may well have been what he was like, I suppose, although from what I have read, he was a bit more eccentric than that. And Beethoven's deafness was talked about – by Beethoven to his much put-upon assistant, and by such people as the aristocratic young lady who was refusing to marry him – but it still did not really come across as the dominant fact of Beethoven's life at that time, from which all else was to flow. Ian Hart's Beethoven seemed too much in control to get that across.

I mean, imagine it. You have it in you to be the greatest composer ever, and you know it, and you are already a huge worldly success as a composer and musical performer. And you are going deaf. And what is more, it is the kind of tormenting deafness that comes with a relentless, unavoidable, un-switch-offable sound attached. Imagine being Beethoven, and having to live with that, all day and every day, until death do you part. And then tell me that anything else in your life is going to matter a damn by comparison, aside from music itself.

Napoleon, revolutionary democrat, or betrayer of revolutionary virtue when he proclaimed himself Emperor? Well, yes, all very unfortunate, and Beethoven was duly enraged, and duly tore up the dedication page with Napoleon's name on it. Silly aristocrats loftily lecturing him about how to compose music, as of right, when he, Beethoven, regarded himself as their social equal and as their human superior. More bad temper. But what was really enraging Beethoven at that time was that he was being betrayed by his most important musical organs, his ears.

All of which is extremely well explained here, in the website attached to the TV show. But the show itself didn't quite drive this point home:

1802, however, was a year of crisis for Beethoven, with his realization that the impaired hearing he had noticed for some time was incurable and sure to worsen. That autumn, at a village outside Vienna, Heiligenstadt, he wrote a will-like document, addressed to his two brothers, describing his bitter unhappiness over his affliction in terms suggesting that he thought death was near. But he came through with his determination strengthened and entered a new creative phase, generally called his "middle period". It is characterized by a heroic tone, evident in the "Eroica" Symphony . . .

That is the bit of the story that really matters.

By focussing all our attention on one day of Beethoven's life, after he had pulled himself together and resolved to tough out his deafness, and by Beethoven being placed in an inevitably social setting, we got to see the outer Beethoven, so to speak, the mostly stoical, occasionally exasperated, face that he presented to the world, rather than the inner man. Which was interesting, but which did not get to the heart of the matter. And it especially did not get to the heart of the matter if you did not know the Heiligenstadt part of the story that came earlier.

In this respect, I found episode one of Beethoven, shown on BBC2 on Friday evening, more telling. In many ways this programme was a muddle compared to Eroica, and featured a deal too much of Charles Hazelwood strutting about and opining for my liking. At the very beginning, we saw Hazelwood gazing soulfully into the distance, for all the world as if he, or someone, thought he was Beethoven. But for all its faults, from this docu-drama film you got a stronger sense of what a catastrophe Beethoven's deafness was for him, both socially and professionally.

That the young Beethoven was a social and musical lion was splendidly illustrated with a scene in which he was shown trouncing some other bloke you have never heard of in a piano improvisation contest, to tumultuous acclaim. But, faced with the horror of his deafness, Beethoven had to give up all that, and he withdrew into a parallel musical universe, and in the process decided, by a supreme effort of will, to become the Beethoven who has ever since then been loved and celebrated. As Frank Finlay's Haydn was shown explaining, when he showed up half way through the premier of the Eroica (in Eroica), Beethoven turned music from being the mere supply of aural wallpaper for aristocrats (albeit often superbly well done) into the supreme vehicle of personal artistic expression. Not even Mozart ever went as far as Beethoven did with the Eroica. Beethoven never turned his back on the classical style, but he used it to serve altogether new artistic purposes. As Haydn said, everything is now changed.

While Sir Simon Rattle's career may or may not illustrate the dangers of reaching one's level of incompetence, Beethoven's career illustrates an opposite process, which is that many people have to reach up to their level of competence before they can truly shine. Beethoven (like many politicians, I think) is an example of the late Sir Peter Ustinov's dictum that top people are those without sufficient qualifications to detain them at the bottom. Deafness smashed up any plans Beethoven had for overwhelming and immediate worldly success, and for getting himself a pretty aristocratic wife and having a pretty aristocratic family. All he had left, and only in a very weird and other-worldly form, was music. In Heiligenstadt, he decided that, musically, he would go for broke, and write music of a greatness never before heard, and which he himself would scarcely hear, and later on not hear at all, except in his mind's ear. What else could he do?

In an earlier posting here, I speculated that Shostokovich might not have been such a fine composer had Stalin not tormented him. Something very similar applies, I think, to Beethoven's deafness.

Chance, God, destiny, call it what you will, created in Beethoven the archetypal Great Composer. It equipped him with supreme musical and compositional talent, adding into the starting mix a vilely bad tempered, drunken and financially incompetent father, thereby ensuring that Beethoven got into the habit of relying on his own economic and his own inner psychological resources from an early age. It then allowed Beethoven to taste enough worldly and conventional success, or as near to conventional as Beethoven was capable of, for him to get everyone's attention. And then, with one evil disability, it snatched away everything except his ability to compose and people's willingness to attend to his compositions. It dealt Beethoven a hand which combined personal ecstasies with personal agonies, with both disaster and with the inner courage he needed to struggle ceaselessly against disaster, together with a sublimely flexible artistic language with which he could universalise these experiences. Out of all this emerged a social misfit, who picked his nose with candlesticks, who moved house over fifty times, whose outbursts of rage and frustration echoed those of his ghastly father and who terrified everyone he had anything to do with, but who was also . . . Beethoven.

The Heiligenstadt testimony reeks, understandably, of self-pity. But as I recently read in a CD sleeve note by George Tintner, Beethoven – like Bruckner, whom Tintner was writing about, but unlike Mahler or Tchaikovsky – purged all trace of self-pity from his music.

Thanks to the BBC, and also to such things as the Internet (which finally had me actually reading the Heiligenstadt Testament for the first time), I now understand all this a whole lot better than I did a week ago.

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The Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today's art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced.

In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly.

Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway.

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The artistic version of the Labour Theory of Value is restated, at its natural home, here:

One song hails from an album that took years to craft and perfect, the delays in its conception seriously denting profits for EMI as fans across the world awaited its release. The other was obviously whipped up in a matter of minutes by a dodgy German dance act with an 80s record collection and a sampler.

Nevertheless, following the cliche that there is no accounting for taste, the Crazy Frog ringtone appears to be jumping over Coldplay's Speed of Sound towards this week's number one spot.

And appearances did not deceive. Yes, this was the big Frog head-to-head over the last few days. An electronic rehash of the dominant tune of Beverly Hills Cop: would it get to number one? Yes? Or no.

The samizdata.net meta-context is sometimes a bit hard to work out and apply, but in this contest, I think we all know where our sympathies lie. Do we vote for the oh-so-late album of a bunch of dreary navel-gazing complaint rockers, aimed at dreary ageing complainers (a big market, I do agree), or for a spirited up-beat can-do problems-are-there-to-be-solved need-for-speed aquatic cartoon creation? I think we know the answer to that one, don't we girls?

Normally, I would not myself be so partial to the Crazy Frog, if only because I also quite like his deadly rival Sweety. But the Frog does seem to get up all the right noses, so all power to his legs.

Next stop for the goggled one, Korea.

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I just saw Revenge of the Sith with a group of chums and I must say it was interesting to see how varied the reactions were. For me, anyone looking for profound meaning in a George Lucas movie is well and truly in the wrong place. With that in mind I went expecting breathless fights, awe inspiring battles between vast starships and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) wearing interesting outfits. And that is exactly what was delivered.

Lucas is at his best when the battlecruiser starships are blowing the crap out of each other whilst the heroes weave their nimble fighters in and out with guns blazing in cheerful disregard of the laws of physics. He also knows a thing or two about choreographing some pretty nifty lightsabre duels. The Yoda vs. Palpatine showdown is a particular eye-popper... who would have thought a 2 foot high gremlin could actually look plausible in a swordfight!

But, and you knew there was going to be a 'but', when it really comes down to it, George Lucas is just not that skilled a director. He does fine until it requires people to actually interact other than when they are trying to slice each other in two. At which point he proves that he can produce weak performances even from a splendid actress like Natalie Portman (who was from good to great in everything else I have ever seen her in) and Ewan McGregor (who is debatably my favourite actor). The 'doomed romance' between Natalie Portman (Padmé) and Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker) is central to the whole story of the creation of Darth Vader and yet I could not escape the impression that neither of them really cared for each other, for which I mostly blame Lucas' leaden hand more than the actor and actress in question. Ewan McGregor is a splendid Obi Wan Kenobi when it comes to laying waste to the bad guys with his lightsabre but again, when it comes to his relationship with Anakin, it all seemed a bit unengaged. Only Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) really managed to transcend the stilted feeling of much of the dialogue and sound like he really meant when he said.

And although I said one does not go to a George Lucas movie to seek profundities, there was one rather splendid line uttered by Padmé whilst in the senate chamber listening to the delegate enthusing whilst Palpatine seizes power to ensure 'justice and security':

"This is how freedom dies. To thunderous applause."

Pity the rest of the movie did not have more such memorable lines. 7.5 out of 10, mostly for the sheer spectacle.

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I share the general enthusiasm for the so-called London Eye (I prefer to think of it as The Wheel), and so I hope that this little spat fizzles out quickly:

The London Eye could close down after being served an eviction notice after a £1m rent demand - an increase of more than 1500%.

Its landlords, the South Bank Centre (SBC), said they are not getting enough rent from the land that holds part of the wheel's supporting structure.

If the rent is not paid they say the Eye will have to be removed in a month.

None of the parties wished to comment but said negotiations are taking place in the hope of reaching a settlement.

According to a document seen by Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall, SBC sent out the eviction notice after issuing a demand for the increased rent.

She told BBC London on Thursday: "I find it quite outrageous that the South Bank Centre has now turned around and is trying to be like a greedy developer.

"It will not go down very well with people in my area and Londoners and the country as a whole."

Oh well, there you go, that's politics for you. And it must be politics because an MP is involved, and the South Bank Centre is being accused by that MP of trying to be like a greedy developer, which would never have been said if it was a real developer.

I have no idea of the details of the agreement between whoever now runs the Wheel and the South Bank, but personally I think that the Wheel is by far the most beautiful object on the South Bank, and that anything calling itself the South Bank Centre ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself for even pretending to threaten to get rid of it. Presumably it is strapped for cash, for some reason associated with all the other abominable structures on its patch.

Come to think of it, it occurs to me that there is a big plan in motion to try to rescue the now grotesque acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. As this Guardian piece says:

They're awful. Simon Rattle once said that playing there "saps the will to live". Even the RFH's resident orchestras, who have historically been defensive about their home, now openly admit it "leaves a lot to be desired" (that's David Whelton, who runs the Philharmonia).

I once heard Rattle conduct Mahler's mighty Resurrection Symphony in the RFH. It sounded like a very bad recording.

Anyway, has this wild attempt to gouge more money out of the Wheel got anything to do with this RFH plan? The attempt to turn the RFH into a proper concert hall will apparently be costing quite a lot.

The Royal Festival Hall (RFH) in London will close after its last performance on 26 June to undergo a GBP71m, 18-month refurbishment. The work is part of a wider GBP91m development of the South Bank Centre on the River Thames.

GBP71m? GB91m? Yes. I do believe there might be a connection there.

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Globalisation does funny things:

Former Baywatch star David Hasselhoff has been named international star of the year at the Bollywood movie awards in Atlantic City in the US.

He received the award because his shows, including Knight Rider, are among the most popular on Indian TV.

That is the BBC story. I also recommend this Reuters report on the event, which packs a lot of information into a small space. Such as, that:

Rani Mukherjee won the best actress award for her role "Hum Tum."

What does Hum Tum mean? Is it a medical condition? Or is that the name of Rani Mukherjee's character?

And I did not know that they have Bollywood awards in Atlantic City. What is that about?

Says Reuters:

The event was held in the old U.S. East Coast gambling resort of Atlantic City as part of Bollywood's bid to be a global force in cinema.

Interesting. And I did not know this either:

Bollywood churns out around 1,000 movies a year but despite a fan base that extends to the Middle East, Europe and Asia, few movies make money and the industry is under financial pressure. Bollywood films have not had much commercial success in America.

But Shammi Kapoor, who was given a lifetime achievement award, said better technology was leading to more and better films. "They're getting to be more topical," he added. "They aren't the happy, happy movies of yesteryear."

Indians will soon be complaining that Bollywood is becoming a fifth column Frankenstein's laboratory Trojan Horse turncoat snakepit of anti-Indianism that panders to the global market and apes its worst excesses.

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Ooooh..I am so excited! It will not be long now before I will be able to gorge myself on yet another body of incoherent babbling:

When the website huffingtonpost.com launches on May 9, it will eventually see contributions from Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Harold Evans, Tina Brown, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the woman who played Elaine in Seinfeld. They will offer a "round the clock commentary on our life and times"...

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but I am positively aquiver with anticipation to discover what Diane Keaton has to say about my life and times. Yet, my enthusiasm is perhaps somewhat tempered by the inexplicable absence (thus far at any rate) of the great Professor Streisand.

I submit that huffingtonpost.com will prove to be a one-stop, on-line resource for all serious students of thespianomics (advanced module). For everyone else it should be a 'target-rich environment'.

Enjoy!

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Here is proof that Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow petrolheads have definitely got under some green skins, if you get my meaning:

Environmental campaigners have called for the BBC's Top Gear programme to be scrapped as they claim it promotes irresponsible driving. But how fair is this criticism?

For many motoring enthusiasts it is among the highlights of the television week.

But, with its irreverent style and penchant for high-speed stunts, Top Gear attracts fans and critics in equal measure.

Now the BBC Two programme has come under fire from the Transport 2000 pressure group, which has called for it to be taken off the air and replaced with a show that promotes "sensible driving in sensible vehicles".

Yes, that will pack them in.

Greenies: try to understand. Most drivers spend their lives driving sensibly in sensible vehicles, except when you lunatics have stuck bumps in the road, in which case they are obliged to drive senselessly, accelerating and decelerating and generally spoiling the air and the neighbourhood. The idea that TV's premier driving show should surrender its position as TV's premier driving show by doing nothing but reflect this dreary reality is crazy, and cruel. Kill Top Gear, and you will have alienated yet another big brick in the human wall that is Middle England.

Transport 2000, which is committed to reducing the environmental and social effects of transport, argues that Top Gear falls short in its responsibility to educate viewers and acknowledge the interests of women drivers.

Personally, I am in favour of the "social effects" of transport, the main ones being that because we are able to travel, we can get to see interesting places and appealing people, and get and do far better jobs than would otherwise be possible. And as for the environmental effects of transport, I know what they mean, but once again, I think transport makes the environment far more congenial, not least because we can travel about in it and see what it all consists of.

Obviously the most environmentally friendly thing, in the sense these people mean, that humans could do would be to drop dead en masse. But most of us, thank goodness, are not these people. For most of us, life is for living, and life would be very lifeless if we were to do away entirely with exciting cars, and drove only sensible ones, and worse, if we were not even allowed to watch crazy cars being driven crazily on TV.

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Michael Blowhard's latest posting is one of his link fests, to video clips this time. He says he now prefers internet video bits to regular Hollywood movies.

It saddens this longtime film buff to say it, but I'm having a better time these days browsing video clips on the Web than I am watching most new movies.

I know the feeling. I do not indulge in internet video clips, but I am finding the movies duller and duller as the years go by. But I do not think this is because the movies are necessarily any worse. It is just that I have learned all I want to from the movies, and I have seen all the stories. I know the formulae. I now actually tend to prefer clever movies from Europe with subtitles, because I do not know how they are going to end, and because the people in them now seem more interesting and more real. Time was when it was the subtitled movies that were dull and the Hollywood stuff that was exciting. So has Hollywood changed? I doubt it. Have I changed? That seems far more likely.

Friedrich, the other Blowhard, has a similarly low opinion of current Hollywood mainstream fare, and reckons it may be something to do with the fact that the big studios now make their real money not in the cinemas, but from DVDs, and other spin-off products such as video games. But a launch platform, to do that job well, still has to be good, does it not? If so many other kinds of business rest on these platforms, all the more reason to do them well, surely.

I tried a few of Michael's links to video clips, although I fear that investigating the porny ones too enthusiastically would be to invite all kinds of nasty Dark Side forces to encamp themselves on my hard disc.

My favourite one was the first one linked to, which features a most unusual species of octopus:

When walking, these octopuses use the outer halves of their two back arms like tank treads, alternately laying down a sucker edge and rolling it along the ground. In Indonesia, for example, the coconut octopus looks like a coconut tiptoeing along the ocean bottom, six of its arms wrapped tightly around its body.

Apparently, this is a fairly recent discovery:

"This behavior is very exciting," said Huffard, who first noted it five years ago in the coconut octopus but only recently was able to capture both types of octopuses on film. "This is the first underwater bipedal locomotion I know of, and the first example of hydrostatic bipedal movement."

Although, I have to say that one of the best things about this item was how little time it took to enjoy it, unlike a Hollywood movie like Miss Congeniality 2, which is the one that Friedrich Blowhard was especially complaining about.

I really liked Miss Congeniality 1. If Miss Congeniality 2 is boring tripe, no more amusing than being told the same joke all over again, this should be no particular surprise. The surprise is when Whatever It Is 2 is really good, like with Godfather 2 or Terminator 2, or with James Bond number 2. Why? Because making a film good enough to have a sequel is very hard, and for the follow-up to be as good or better is a huge coincidence. I reckon Friedrich B was just particularly angry about MC2 and blamed all of Hollywood, instead of just the people who made MC2.

Relax, mate. Pour yourself a drink and have a look at the walking octopus.

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Kamal Aboukhater, producer of the independent film Blowing Smoke (full disclosure: he is a tBBC client), has put an invitation out to readers of the movie's blog to come to a special screening of the film on April 21 in Los Angeles.

I think this is a first of its kind invitation from a film producer via movie blog - very exciting stuff. Blowing Smoke is a provocative film - the New York Post's Richard Johnson called it "the most politically incorrect movie ever made" - and well worth checking out. Definitely not for the easily offended or faint of heart, though.

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I have just got back from a trip to the Tate Britain art gallery at which such wonders as the works of Turner, Monet and Whistler were on display. The Turner pictures of Venice, London and the Seine Valley of northern France bowled me over, as they do every time. One stray observation: many of the pictures brought out the effect on light of heavy air pollution. Monet was a master at this, particularly in his paintings of the Houses of Parliament. Some of the Monets and Whistlers were painted in the late 19th century when London's smog levels were notoriously bad. As an adopted Londoner I am of course delighted that the chronic air pollution which once ravaged the lungs of our forbears has been reduced. I wish our modern artists could produce something as great as Turner, though.

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Saturday night's American Cinema Foundation panel at the American Film Institute in LA, moderated by media critic Cathy Seipp, was fascinating on several levels.

The theme of the event was "Mass market, smart content," and featured four TV writers/producers/directors: Paul Feig (creator and executive producer: "Freaks & Geeks;" director: "Arrested Development;" director and writer, the feature film "I Am David;" author: "Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence" and the upcoming "Superstud: How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin"), Scott Kaufer (executive producer: "Boston Legal;" writer: "Gilmore Girls," "Chris Isaak Show," "Murphy Brown"), Rob Long (co-creator and excecutive producer: "Men, Women & Dogs," "Love & Money," "George & Leo;" executive producer: "Cheers") and Tim Minear (executive produer: "The Inside," "Wonderfalls," "Angel," "Firefly"). Together, they tackled the issue of how successful television writers manage to keep their distinct viewpoints when writing for the mass market.

I believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as 'the mainstream,' and that the mass market is dead, and being replaced by a mass of niches. I also believe that the mass media is not being destroyed, merely altered radically, and individuals are being liberated from the mass by the unprecedented choice of personal relevance that (thanks to things like blogs, mp3s, TV on DVD, podcasting, and TiVo) they have today - and that choice of personal relevance is increasing exponentially at a rapid rate. So the topic of the panel was extremely appealing to me as a total geek on the social ramifications of emergent technology tip.

I guess I forgot that these guys write some funny stuff, and that they were going to make me laugh - which they did, in a big way. Some of my favourite exchanges and lines:

CATHY SEIPP: How do you react to people who say they never watch TV?
TIM MINEAR: I run them over with my Mercedes.

SCOTT KAUFER: After seeing [the movie] JFK, I thought, "Why don't I make a movie called Oliver Stone, and just invent shit?
ROB LONG: What would you have to invent?!
PAUL FEIG: That he's nice, he's respectful of women...

TIM MINEAR (on not being allowed to have a serial killer character use the word retard): The network thought the serial killer was being awfully insensitive.

Except I am sure that it will not always be that way, and that the advances in emergent technologies and the rebirth of niche will bring about that dramatic shift a lot sooner than we may think. The business model of broadcast must change if it is not to die (and with only 12 per cent of US viewers getting their TV via antenna these days anyway, ripping it down is not a bad idea). As viewers (read: customers) get used to having that personal choice of relevance, they will throw their attention (read: value) to the places where they can get it: cable, satellite, and the internet. And if you think advertisers will not pick up on that and move their ad spend accordingly, I have some stock in broadcast that I would just love to sell you.

The kicker being, I do not believe that advertising revenue is going to be the bread and butter of TV on cable, satellite, and the internet. Sure, there will be ads in the world as long as there are lazy, clueless companies who believe in "just in case" marketing. But the costs of that kind of marketing are rising, the effectiveness declining, and profits down as a result.

Which brings us to my point: This drive to niche dovetails very nicely with the need of companies to put customers at the beginning of the value chain instead of at the end of it. The increasing emphasis on the individual also means a move from push marketing to engagement marketing. So instead of wasting a great deal of money on a TV ad, a company can spend a fraction of that on, say, developing great blogs to provide value and engage the niche they are targetting. (They can throw some podcasts up there while they are at it.)

So here is the question I really wish I had asked the panel: Ten years from now, who exactly is going to be spending the kind of money on network TV ads that they need to maintain this broken system? And if that money isn't there, will you be running over non-TV-watching freaks with your Kia instead of your Mercedes?

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I watched the beginning of Dirty Harry on the telly (before remembering that I already have it on DVD), and have just heard Clint Eastwood deliver the first version of the do I feel lucky? speech. And I just want to say something that I have long felt, which is that he delivers the line, at least on that first occasion, very badly. They should have done a retake. The actual "do I feel lucky?" bit is gabbled, and you can hardly hear it. There should have been a slight pause between "you've got to ask yourself a question" and "do I feel lucky?", but there is no pause. The sentences just before are fine, but this particular bit sounds like an uncomprehending read-through, not a performance at all. I realise they did not want to upstage the rerun of the same lines later in the movie, when the real Bad Guy is asked the same question, but I reckon they downplayed it too much.

Not that I blame Clint Eastwood. Or, I blame him only if he was the one who chose this particular take. But I presume that this was the director, or maybe the producer. Actors are usually helpless in circumstances like these. Time and again, they get called bad actors, when it was really bad directing and bad editing.

Otherwise, excellent movie entertainment, full of good sense about the deterrent value of chasing and punishing criminals and the pointlessness of worrying too much about what makes them become criminals. The important thing is to hunt them down and lock them up, or worse. (One of the biggest reasons why they become criminals being that they do not expect this to happen.) This is a lesson which the USA's rulers now seem to be learning fast but which our rulers here in the UK (see the comments on Tuesday's murder posting) are still only groping towards.

Most of the mere people in both countries have of course always known this.

Thank goodness for the movies. On this particular issue, insofar as they have argued anything at all, they have mostly argued very sensibly.

And let no one kid you that movies like Dirty Harry are just "mindless" entertainment. When people call a movie mindless, it generally means that it is actually rather mindful, but that the mindfulness involved is something that the complainer would rather not face. So, he claims that there is nothing to be faced. It was the same with the (ridiculously titled) Death Wish series. Those movies are crammed full of ideas.

And mostly very good ones. When Bronson chalked up his first kill in the first of these movies, cinemas everywhere erupted with spontaneous cheering.

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Since I am already on the subject of Mars... the X-Plane flight simulator now includes a number of Mars ports at which you can land your SpaceShipOne. Here is a recent announcement of the Mars extensions to the X-Plane product:

Trans-global flight on the planet Mars is now available to X-Plane pilots. If you don't have the Mars Data CD set....go to x-plane.com and buy it! Over 70 'marsports' have been constructed, several with ILS and GS, to provide the Mars enthusiast (like myself) an opportunity to explore the future home of human beings...today!

X-Plane users may either download the complete Mars X-perience package, or simply the apt.dat and nav.dat files. The MXP .zip file contains Custom Scenery, maps, and the "Cydonia Station" shuttlecraft. The SS1MARS is a modified version of SpaceShipOne engineered to tackle the thin Martian atmosphere (original X-Plane flight model created by Curt Boyll).

This data has not been tested on XP-8, but Robin Peel has indicated he will be giving it a run very soon.

You can find out more about it here.

Credit: Dreamsenses

I wish I could afford the hardware upgrade so I could play too!

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Jim Plaxco of the National Space Society tried some creative processing of Mars image data with artistic rather than scientific goals in mind. Some of the results are quite to my taste; others are more for lovers of the abstract.

I cannot help but imagine art such as this in the lobby of some Martian corporate headquarters or perhaps in the Marsport Bigelow reception area.

Jim has a website for his artistic renderings. This is a web site under-construction and at present contains only a fraction of his work. I recommend you check back every few weeks.

With permission of the artist, Jim Plaxco

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Mark Holland is, as Instapundit would say, on a roll just now. I wonder if some things that were said at that Friday meeting I seem to want to keep mentioning has something to do with this. Mark was there, and seemed genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his blog is held by all those of us present who are familiar with it. Maybe that encouraged him. It would be good to think so. If so, this nicely illustrates the value of old fashioned face-to-face contact. "I really like your blog" is not the kind of message that carries quite as much conviction if you cannot see the whites of your admirer's eyes.

Mark writes about (and/or links to) many things (crappy old British sex comedies, the sport of bicycling, politics in Slovakia) but he told me something rather intriguing that I do not recall reading about at his blog, although this could just be me.

Mark and some friends attended a Bruce Springsteen concert some years ago, in a Manchester football stadium. He and his mates arrived early for the thing, and took their seats way up high in the stands, about a quarter of a mile from where the performance was going to be given. Then, a Big Person approached them. They were unnerved. But no. The Big Person guided them from way back and way high up, right to the very front of the assembly, into Bruce Springsteen Heaven. And they duly watched it all, feet away from The Man. (Sorry, Boss. Sorry.)

Thinking about this some more, I reckon that it makes sense, is probably often done, and is therefore not news to those readers and writers of Samizdata who are also regular attenders at rock gigs. But I am not such, and if you are not this either, allow me to reinvent the wheel for you.

What do you absolutely not want in the front few rows of the crowd at a major pop gig? Two things, I suggest. One: Uncool People (old, ugly, dressed in corduroy jackets, etc.). And worse, two: empty seats. Such horrors would completely spoil any video footage of the event. When everyone is standing in a scrum, this is no big problem. (Presumably uncool people can simply be dragged backwards from the front, and cool people dragged forwards.) But in an all-seater stadium, such as this was, with individual seats booked, there is the real threat of horrors in those vital front few rows.

So how do you prevent these? Answer, you do not sell the front few rows, but instead handpick the people at the front from the early arrivals, like a night club queue minder picking out cool people for a club. Mark, being cool and several degrees cooler back then, I dare say, was, together with his (I assume) comparably cool mates, selected for the front.

You might at this point be expecting one of those blue MORE things, after which the significance of this is explained in more detail and its relevance to lowering income tax etc. is all gone into with proper thoroughness. But, that is all.

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I bought a DVD of Nabucco the other day. It's the usual story: boy meets girl; girl's father attacks Jerusalem; Hebrews carted off to Babylon. "Sack, burn the temple," says the King of the Babylonians. "This cursed race shall be wiped from the earth." But first, let's all have a sing-song.

I saw it in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It was the Latvian National Opera, so I was watching Latvians, in China, pretending to be Jews in Babylon, and singing in Italian. Well that's all right. I can take a joke.

- Harry Hutton last Friday. More about Nabucco here.

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I am watching the BBC's Culture Show, and they are telling a sad little story. Apparently, the regional theatre companies of Britain have, during the last five years or so, enjoyed a bonanza of government money. There has apparently been a mini theatrical renaissance in the provinces. Hurrah!

But now, the horrid government is imposing a pay freeze, and this "great achievement" is in jeopardy. For the sake of a few more million quid, this great achievement could all collapse. Woe!

I could have told them. Never, I would have said to them (had they thought of asking me), depend upon government money and the promises of politicians. Never get addicted to the contents of the public purse, for they can be snatched away from you without warning. Renaissances funded only by politicians have a way of dying very prematurely. Getting money from mere customers may be harder in the short run, but once you learn the trick, you have a foundation you can build on more confidently.

Probably all this is just the political machine doing what it does. It spends. It cuts back on its spending. Occam's Razor says that this is what is happening here. But, although it was not discussed on the show, I wonder if the end of the romance (that is to a Times on Line piece, which may be a problem for some, but it tells this story better than any other I could find) between New Labour and the Luvvies – caused by such things as New Labour going to war in Iraq, and the Luvvies going to war against the war in Iraq – might have something to do with this story of theatrical feast and threatened theatrical famine.

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Last night I started to get into the mood for the Capitalist Ball (that being a link to David's piece about it last year), which will take place in Brussels this evening, by playing waltzes by Johann Strauss II, on my medium- to lo-fi hi-fi machine.

And what lovely music it is! I remember reading that when Herbert von Karajan got hired to conduct the New Year's Day concert in Vienna, in 1987, he experienced a sense of both musical and personal renewal. This makes perfect sense to me.

With these waltzes, marches and dances, the symphony orchestra had its one great age of pop superstardom. Before then, pop music was played in taverns and in the open air, and classical music was for the aristocracy. As the audience for orchestral music widened, and as the symphony orchestra widened with it, composers like Brahms and Dvorak, in among grander works like piano and cello concertos, and symphonies of course, also wrote dances for the orchestra. But there was about these pieces an air of down-market music being ever-so-slightly elevated by these grandees of the concert hall. The music of the Strauss family was the genuine, popular article, the purest example of orchestral popular dance music ever created.

In Italy, opera was enjoying a similar period of genuine popularity, where high art and popular art were similarly united.

With arrival of the twentieth century, and the age of electronic recording, and then of electronically enhanced instruments, pop music and classical music again went their separate ways. While the classical musicians concentrated on recording what would now be called their back catalogue, the popsters switched back to more raucous sounds, more suited to the limitations of early recording, and then more attuned to their new audiences, no longer beholden to the musical conventions of an earlier epoch. And opera also divided, the torch of popularity being handed on, via operetta, to the stage 'musical'.

Meanwhile, the once imperial city of Vienna has been dining out on the music of the Strauss family just about ever since, first for real as it were, and then – and now, still – in reaction to the very different and disappointing reality by which it was increasingly engulfed, and to which it made its own baleful contribution, in the form of the influence and perverse inspiration it supplied to the young Adolf Hitler. No wonder the Viennese still prefer the Beautiful Blue Danube version of their past to more recent horrors. (The moment of transition, when what had been a joyous reality was sliding into history, was memorably captured by that other Strauss, Richard, no relation, in the waltzes he wrote for his opera, Der Rosenkavalier.)

But the music of the original Strausses still plays on. As the centuries pass, it seems all too possible that, horrifying though they were, the wars and massacres of the twentieth century may eventually be topped by later and greater horrors as yet unimaginable. The slaughters that now seem to us so uniquely evil may in due course seem only banal, like the murders and feuds of the Italian Renaissance, which we now think of as the mere backdrop to all those wondrous paintings. But those waltzes, dances and marches of the century before the one just concluded – the waltzes especially – will never be bettered.

At the Capitalist Ball, one of the organisers has just told me, there will be a French swing band in action. A different and later style of dance music, but one I am greatly looking forward to hearing.

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Until today I knew nothing of Pete Doherty, but this poor woman knew far too much about him. She had the extreme misfortune to live next door to him.

Ms Latteck, who shared a wall of her maisonette in Bethnal Green, east London, with Doherty, said she had decided to speak out after being incensed by the glorification of the singer as a modern rock legend. "He is presented as some kind of hero. He is not. The truth is that he made me very sick with incessant loud music, day and night," she said. "It was like having a 100 watt speaker at full volume in my bedroom. The walls and furniture would shake."

That is the Telegraph version of this horrible creature.

Here is the kind of thing that Ms Latteck was complaining about:

He went into jail rambling and incoherent, but is set to emerge as a poet. Pete Doherty, the drug-addict pop star, will find himself pursued by publishers as well as paparazzi when he emerges from HMP Pentonville tomorrow after being jailed following a rumpus that left a documentary-maker with two black eyes and a broken nose.

Already famous for his drug-fuelled antics as the former frontman for The Libertines, as well as his on-off relationship with the supermodel Kate Moss, Doherty is being seen as a hot property after agents learnt that he had been scrawling volumes of verse since his teens. Publishing houses are bidding to sign up the wayward star, who is due to be released tomorrow on bail after being charged with robbery and blackmail. A source close to Doherty, 25, said that he had been approached by a number of publishers.

Now I know what you are thinking. How good is the Horrible Creature's poetry? Well, ask a stupid question.

I would like to see the Horrible Creature's poems make an enormous amount of money, and for all the money to be given to Ms Latteck, with just enough set aside to enable the Horrible Creature to buy enough drugs to kill himself. That is surely what the wiser sort of publishers would prefer. The Horrible Creature is the kind of person who does more good for his fellow humans when dead. When he does die, which surely will not be long now, those who want to can enjoy his poetry and have fun telling each other what it all means, without anyone having any longer to put up with him. Art is often like that, I think.

Rows of dutiful school children in matching desks and matching school uniforms can then study his poems for their GCSE English exams.

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Tonight, for about the twentieth time, they showed the movie Pretty Woman on the TV, on ITV2. I like this movie, but I do not like the slurs cast upon the ancient and noble, and thoroughly beneficial, art of asset stripping.

The Richard Gere character is an asset stripper. He buys companies, takes them apart and sells the bits, for more than he paid for all the bits when they were bundled together. This character is contrasted unfavourably with the old man whose warship building company the Richard Gere asset stripper character is busy buying as the movie proceeds. The asset stripper wants to take over the warship company and turn the land it occupies into a place where people will live, in houses and flats. But eventually, we are asked to believe, the asset stripper sees the error of his asset stripping ways, and switches to helping the old bloke to make yet more warships.

Yes, you got that right. Asset stripping is presented as worse than arms manufacturing. And the Pretty Woman herself, the Julia Roberts character, says that the Richard Gere character is just like her. Both screw people for money. This is a cheap shot, based on two different meanings of the word "screw". But screwing - as in having sex for money - is not that terrible either. And assets strippers do not screw people in a bad way. They buy their property, usually for a better price than they would get from anyone else.

Just where prostitution fits into the wider economic scene I will leave for another day and another argument. No doubt it contributes to economic wellbeing in all sorts of ways that I cannot now think of, although it is not a job I would fancy. But what I do know is that asset strippers do something very valuable. When economic resources are tied up in activities with an insufficient economic future to justify their use in this way, it makes perfect sense for someone to unbundle them and release them into the wild, separately. That there are people who specialise in doing this, who are always on the look-out to ply their trade, injects huge vitality into the economy of the world. Asset strippers ensure that existing resource uses are always questioned, and that the future, when it does emerge unmistakably, is not smothered by the past.

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A song called London Underground is currently being spread all around the Westminster political elite by e-mail. The song represents public sector workers not as altruistic heroes, but as "wankers" and "lazy".

The London Evening Standard says:

London Underground was penned by Adam Kay, 24, a junior doctor at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and Suman Biswas, 26, an anaesthetist....

"Having lived in London all my 24 years you get used to the Tube service," said Mr Kay.

"Once in a while you are three hours late after what should have been a 20-minute journey. It has struck a chord with people. They also like the swear words, they seem to get people going." Mr Kay is receiving around 1,000 emails a day from people asking for copies of the record.

You can download it here.

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This is beyond the pale. It is completely insensitive and at a time like this, what idiot would shoot an advertisement for TV that used suicide bombers? Appalling...

...Yeah. But I must confess, I howled with laughter.

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It would be fair to say that when I heard that 70's space opera "Battlestar Galactica" was going to be remade, I was dubious: face it, the original made Star Trek seem like Shakespeare. Moreover when I later discovered that a leading character in the original series called 'Starbuck' (well before the term became synonymous with coffee) was going to be 're-imagined' as a woman, I became downright contemptuous: "Oh gawd, another sickeningly politically correct bit of drivel spewing forth from Hollyweird". Moreover womanising hard drinking cigar smoking Starbuck was one of the few engaging characters from the original series.

In a sense I acquired the DVD of the mini-series more as something to blog about, so I could actually say I had seen a piece of science fiction that was worse than that hymn for a limp-wristed California vision of 'inclusive transnational socialism' (well, maybe not all that inclusive), called Star Trek, a series which hit its nadir with the execrable Enterprise. So yes, I fired up this disc with extremely low expectations.

The show starts slowly, setting the scene in some detail, such as the fact we foolish humans were the ones who actually created the Cylons, the show's homicidal robotic bad guys, and that Battlestar Galactica itself (more or less an aircraft carrier in space) was an obsolescent relic of a pervious war against the Cylons some 50 years earlier and was due to be retired from service after many years of peace. We see the back story of Gauis Baltar, who in the original series was a comical pantomime style 'villain' and arch-traitor, and who is this time 're-imagined' as a deeply flawed genius (sort of a cross between Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, brilliantly acted by James Callis) who is psychopathically self-centered and thus tricked by an all too human looking 'female' Cylon into unwittingly dooming humanity. All better acted, better directed and far better written than I expected but only Baltar was particularly engaging initially.

But then the Cylons make their move...

Wow. A show which truly, truly, truly does not pull any punches and proffers a middle finger to the sugar coating of so much of Hollywood's offerings that are aimed at the mainstream. We see nothing less that genocide: the steady nuclear annihilation of the human race. We see men women and children (yes, children) killed pitilessly in one of the darkest bits of sci-fi TV drama I have ever seen: the Götterdämmerung on 12 planets. Moreover we see the handful of dazed and traumatised survivors on the Galactica and the refugee fleet which forms around this last remnant of the human military, act like, well, people who have just seen their entire civilisation and 99.9% of their species exterminated by an implacable enemy.

In many ways this is a story that owes much to the dramas set in World War II that were made in the 40's and 50's and posit that there is a great deal more to being in command than saying "Make it so". Even the look of the Galactica itself is a million miles away from the antiseptic interiors of Star Trek's spaceships: it has manually opened pressure doors, old fashioned wire cable intercoms and chinagraph pencil plotting tables that would not have looked out of place on USS Yorktown during the Battle of Midway. As in that earlier genre of movies from a less timid era, heart rending decisions are forced on characters, and not just the military commanders (who I am pleased to say actually act like real military commanders in Battlestar Galactica) but also the new president of the colonial government (very well played by Mary McDonnell), who is faced with desperate no-win life and death choices. The biggest surprise for me however was the character of Starbuck, who I was simply determined to hate. Actress Katee Sackhoff plays Starbuck as a hard drinking cigar smoking tomboy and does so with an almost feral gusto and real panache. Her hard bitten mocking grin, snappy dialogue and the almost maniacal gleam in her eyes had me won me over within about 15 minutes.

I have no idea if the series following the mini-series will live up to its potential but damn, it is nice to see such a refreshing bit of drama in the science fiction genre.

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"We're reckless arrogant stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks because pussies get fucked by dicks, but dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just wanna shit on everything. Pussies may think that they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn't appropriate, and it takes a pussy to show 'em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves. Because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy crazy world. But I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're gonna have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit"

- said by a member of Team America in the movie of that name. Says Christopher Price, who posted this in a comment here this morning: "Its got one of the best explanations of US foreign policy that I've seen in a long time. Kind of like what Condaleezza Rice was saying yesterday, but more succinct."

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Echoing what our own Johnathan Pearce said about The Aviator, an emailer to Instapundit, Doug Levene, said this about the movie:

What struck me about the Aviator is that it's the first Hollywood movie I've seen in quite a while that portrayed a business man – a filthy rich, ruthless entrepreneur yet – as the hero, and the crusading, anti-war-profiteering, corruption-exposing Senator … as the villain. Am I the only one to have noticed this peculiarity?

Well, Johnathan certainly got the hero bit of that in his review, but the only villains he referred to were Katherine Hepburn's ghastly family.

The Aviator has just been nominated for 14 BAFTAs, i.e British Oscars, and looks set to do very well at the real thing.

Will there now be more wacky but true-life entrepreneur movies? If there is one thing Hollywood loves even more than its own silly lefty opinions, it is money.

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There are a lot of big shiny 1940s-era aircraft zooming across our cinema screens at the moment. Yeh! We have had Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, we are due to get the remake of The Flight of Phoenix, based on the wonderful old movie starring James Stewart, and I have just returned from watching The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio as mogul, test pilot and eccentric, Howard Hughes. It is a fine film, and makes a number of important points about the man himself, the nature of doing business in America in the mid-20th Century and the evolution of modern air travel.

The story is quite well known of how a rich young oil family son becomes a major player in the aviation industry, challenges rivals like PanAm, produces smash-hit movies, before descending into madness and solitude. Director Martin Scorcese has long been fascinated with Hughes' tale and gets DiCaprio to convey the mixture of driving ambition, brilliant engineering skills, bravery and craziness. Hughes could be seen, from one vantage point as an almost Randian-style business hero, challenging rivals like PanAm, whose boss was played with appropriate menacing charm by Alec Baldwin.

There are two great scenes which get the pro-enterprise, unpretentious side of Hughes across. He drives with his then girlfriend, Katherine Hepburn, excellently played by Cate Blanchett, to see Hepburn's family. At lunch, Hepburn's mother, instantly declares to Hughes that "we are all socialists here", and "I do hope you are not a Republican", and Hughes, bless him, looking around the vast mansion and its grounds, is too dumbstruck at these comments to make a fast and smart reply. Recovering his composure, later Hughes tells the preening Hepburns that his favourite reading is technical engineering reports on planes, which of course has the welcome effect of shutting the ghastly Hepburns up.

In a later scene, set in 1947 when Hughes is fighting for the future of his airline TWA against the monopolistic ambitions PanAm in cahoots with the U.S. Senate, Hughes makes a number of fine points about competition and business risk-taking that almost got me cheering in the stalls. Hughes wins his battle and PanAm is forced to concede.

Hughes was a troubled man and spent the last two decades of his life in circumstances so lonely and depressed that it of course will colour one's view of his life in the round. But I came away from the film feeling a certain admiration for Hughes in how he was willing to challenge the status quo. Long after people have forgotten corrupt U.S. senators and complacent airline bosses, they will remember the man who built and flew some amazing planes. I also cannot help but wonder whether people will think something similar in future about our contemporary airline boss and daredevil man of action, Britain's own Richard Branson. We shall see.

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Maybe I am making too much of this, but see what you think.

This is the blurb, from a leaflet that fell out of the latest edition of the Radio Times (so no link), for a movie that has just come out on DVD about the musician Ray Charles:

MUSICAL BIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA The early life of celebrated musician Ray Charles, from 1930-1966. Charles loses his sight at the age of seven – two years after his brother's tragic drowning. Encouraged by his mother, he forges a successful career as a pianist and singer, fusing together gospel, R'n'B and soul. But despite overcoming his early setbacks, Charles becomes dogged by drug problems and the complications arising from his numerous affairs.

The bit I object to is where it says that Ray Charles was "dogged by drug problems". I do not know the exact circumstance in which Ray Charles turned to drugs and do not know to what degree he is to be blamed for his drug problems, but one thing is surely true, namely that these problems were set in motion by things which he himself did, and by choices which he himself made. Yet the blurb writer (who I do think is blameworthy) makes these "problems" read like entirely separate creatures who sneaked up behind Ray Charles and mugged him, without him doing anything to provoke them at all. To use the phrase "dogged by drug problems" to describe Charles' drug misfortunes is to imply that these misfortunes were not in any way self-inflicted. It is to switch from the active to the passive, from responsibility for action, to excuse. At least those "complications" that arose from his affairs are described as arising from his affairs, rather than just from thin air. And of course Ray Charles gets all the credit that he surely deserves for forging (in a good way) his career, for fusing this music with that (ditto), and for overcoming early (and horrendous) setbacks. So why the "dogged by drug problems" stuff? Why not "problems caused by his drug-taking"?

You hear this kind of language - the passive evasive tense, and the relabeling of forces actually set in motion by the victim of them, into external life forces with minds of their own - a lot. (I recall this man referring to such language a lot - link anyone?) And this matters, because if individuals are not going to be described as at all to blame for what are actually their – at least partly – self-inflicted misfortunes, it is all too likely that someone else – someone who at worst only contributed somewhat to these problems - will be held entirely responsible for them. Which is unjust.

When things are said badly, they are liable to be done badly.

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Personally I read the first Harry Potter, then started the second one and said: enough, I am too old for this. Nor are Harry Potter movies the kind of movies I now like and I have seen none of them. So, I am a Muggle and proud of it. But for all that, I am very impressed by this:

The sixth book in the hugely successful Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, is already among the bestsellers on the Internet more than six months before its publication.

US online retailer Amazon says advanced orders for the book, written by British author JK Rowling, have propelled it to number one on its list of 100 bestsellers.

It is the sheer economic scale of the phenomenon that I find so amazing. How many people, I wonder, now make a permanent living from the Harry Potter books, and associated industries?

This is the sixth book, and there is another one due, plus there have already been three movies, right? So, four more to come? And will they then just carry on making HP movies with their own made-up stories? It would make sense. (Not that the JK Rowling ones are un-made-up, but you get my point.)

It reminds me of an earlier British cultural export-stroke-industry, as I am surely not the first to have observed.

Seriously, there must be interesting parallels between the Harry Potter phenomenon and the James Bond phenomenon. Both use magical toys. Both battle against evil, set in architecturally impressive surroundings. Both were made into mega-successful movies. But, what do I know? Or care? I leave all that sort of chatter to those who have read it and seen it.

Of whom there are, as I say, quite a few.

Maybe, when JKR has ceased her labours and has simply parked herself in a deck chair under her personal banknote Niagara, I will even give the books another go myself.

Okay that was originally the end, but here is another thought. JK Rowling should build herself a gigantic castle, made of huge lumps of stone, with turrets and battlements and flying buttresses and bridges high up in the sky, like they used to build in Scotland and like Mad King Ludwig used to build in Bavaria. It really is about time the construction of places like that was resumed, and for real rather than just in Disneyworlds and such places. And she is just the woman to do it. God knows, she can afford it.

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Home Office minister for race equality, Fiona Mactaggart refuses to condemn the fact Sikhs have used intimidation and violence to force the closure of a play they find offensive because...

In my experience, very often the consequence of that [violent protests] is that the ideas of the play gain a wider audience than they would have had, had there not been such protests. That people feel this passionately about theatres is a good sign for our cultural life. It is a sign of a lively flourishing cultural life.

So British culture is better off because rioters have forced the closure of a play they disagreed with? Britain is clearly governed by people who are either immoral or demented or both.

But I am curious... would the 'minister for race equality' have thought it an equally healthy sign that British theatre is alive and well if a mob of angry white Scotsmen has stormed the theatre, smashed windows and forced the plays to close because they found something in the works of a Sikh playwright offensive?

Well given that Fiona Mactaggart is the 'minister for race equality', I guess she would take the view that all races are equally permitted to use violence to prevent freedom of expression, right? Right?

I mean, the races would hardly be equal if only when Sikhs riot is was "a sign of a lively flourishing cultural life".

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I have not read Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, but I have just read this review of it, which I found via Arts & Letters Daily. It is a story with heroes and with villains, but here is the twist:

We soon learn that such skulduggery is being coordinated, or so it seems, by Nick Drake, a Ralph Nader clone – intense, single-minded and (apologies to Mr. Nader's many fans) unhinged. He is president of the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), an organization founded by lawyers, not scientists, and devoted to pushing a radical environmental agenda. The fund is clearly modeled on the real-life Natural Resources Defense Council, whose annual budget is about the same: $44 million.

To keep the donations rolling in, Drake is trying to induce a perpetual state of fear in the public by marketing the hell out of predictions of catastrophic global warming. Global warming – as we are all too well aware these days – results from burning fossil fuels that load the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Drake's problem is that people just aren't alarmed enough to send in those vital checks. But Drake has a plan; he'll force nature to cooperate with him.

To get his plan rolling, Drake needs seed money, so he wheedles millionaire playboy George Morton, heir to a forklift fortune, into donating $10 million to NERF. But Morton has the audacity to withdraw his gift when a scientist at MIT apparently sets him straight about the science behind Drake's claims. Drake is livid. Shortly after Morton takes his money back, he crashes his Ferrari through an oceanside guard rail and plunges down a cliff to his presumed death. No body is found. Is this an accident or yet another murder?

It will be extremely interesting to watch what happens to this book. Will it be picked up and run with by anti-environmentalist types like me? Well, here I am doing my bit for that process. Will this book perhaps be made into a movie? More generally, will the idea which it embodies, that greenery can be combined with villainy, be echoed in other stories, including the stories that emerge from Hollywood?

Hollywood has to have villains, and I have been willing to accept that the profusion of environment-destroying capitalist in the movies in recent years is caused at least partly by the fact that to get drama you need bad guys, and, well, environment good, people harming it bad, right?

And if you do not have a human villain, then you must have an inhuman force for the heroes to battle against, such as: environmental disaster.

But now that Crichton has explained – and in a best seller type book that will be sold in airports, that there can also be enviro-villains, and that environmental disasters might be lies told by enviro-villains, then we ought in due course to be seeing at least some Hollywood heavies who are decked out in green plumage. And it might well happen. All I am saying is: let us keep our eyes and ears open, and track this story as it unfolds.

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The man who gave us New Journalism, The Right Stuff, A Man in Full, From Bauhaus to Our House, the Painted Word, and of course such classics as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, has suddenly crashed against the buffers of British satire. Yes, Tom Wolfe, one of the grand men of American fiction, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award for a truly cringe-making passage of sexual dialogue in his latest novel.

Can he recover? Does this titan of American literature, who has mocked the lunacies of modern art, brilliantly described the feats of Chuck Yeager and the Mercury astronauts, bounce back from this potentially mortal blow? Let's hope so.

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If foreign aid is the process of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries, then Band Aid is the process of taking money from gullible people in rich countries and giving it to cunning people in those same rich countries:

The new version of the Band Aid song Do They Know It's Christmas? has gone straight in at number one in the UK singles chart.

The charity record is also tipped to be this year's Christmas number one.

Two decades after the original Big Top and the Circus of Guilt comes rolling into town again though I am relieved to note the distinct absence of national fanfare and clappy-happy exultation that accompanied the first great feast of famine back in the mid 1980's. Twenty years on and my stomach is still churning from the experience.

But this time I have even further cause for complaint. Christmas? Christmas??!!. Just what message are these insensitive, monocultural, fascist bastards trying to send here? This is just Vocal Imperialism, pure and simple.

Less pure and less simple, I wager, are the motives of the organisers. Two of the prominent names are Bob Geldof and Bono, both ageing rockers who have managed to sustain lucrative careers long past their sell-by dates by successfully reinventing themselves as saviours of the planet. Hey, it's all about getting down the with kidz, man. Or something. To me, they have more in common with American TV evangelists. They also promise salvation provided you send them your money.

Lining up alongside them are a rabble of pasty-faced no-talents, has-beens, wannabes and never-wases: a million mediocrity march. But together they can make a big noise and that matters a lot in an industry where the noisiest wins. In fact, if they owe anything to Africans at all then it is not spurious Christmas wishes but a royalty cheque and a big thank you for being the best marketing tool in the world.

I will be keeping my loose change in my pocket where it belongs this festive season. I have not lost a single night of sleep over Africa and I never will. In fact, I could even cash in on my conscience by starting a record label called 'Truth in Music'. My first single release will be called 'I Don't Give a Hoot About The Starving'. All profits go to me. It may not be the stuff that dreams are made on but, by George, it will have integrity.

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Fritz Werner is may all time favourite conductor of Bach choral music, bar none, and yesterday I got this CD set of (get this): the St John Passion, the St Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the B Minor Mass, plus a Motet, plus a Cantata (the one with Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring). Ten brand new CDs for £22 the lot.

Is capitalism great or what? – asks JP in the previous post. I reply that capitalism is definitely not in the Or What? category. (Trivia digression: In what movie did actor Clu Gulager say that he was in the Or What? category?)

People who say that money cannot buy happiness are just no good at shopping.

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I feel the fluttering of the wings of history in this decision. Cultural history, anyway.

Top of the Pops is being relegated to BBC2 after 40 years as BBC1's bastion of chart music, the broadcaster announced yesterday.

Once required viewing for generations of teenagers, a slump in viewing figures has pushed the pop music chart programme on to the second channel. In the 1970s the show had audiences of 14 million but last week it pulled in just 3.1 million viewers.

The first episode, broadcast on Jan 1, 1964, was presented by Jimmy Savile and the first act to perform were the Rolling Stones with I Wanna Be Your Man.

Since then, the theme music and presenters have changed but the formula remained the same, with artists considering an appearance on the show a sign that they had officially "made it" in the British pop world.

Although a relaunched edition was watched by 5.5 million viewers last November, nearly three million had deserted the show by the summer.

Now the BBC hopes that it can win back audiences with a new version which is to go out next spring on Sunday evenings.

Historic? Yes, I do truly think so. For I think what this is a symptom of is the end of the Age of Pop Music. Internet downloads, computer games, and the fact that half the tunes were composed when your granny was in her teens mean that Youth, as it has been for some time now, is wandering off into different directions altogether, of a nature that I, and the kind of people who run Top of the Pops, cannot possibly divine. Taste is fragmenting, and what is now Number One is no longer a matter for the BBC to decide on behalf of the Youth of the Nation. We each decide for ourselves. It no longer matters to each of us what anyone else likes.

Personally, I have just lately been listening to a terrific little country and western tune called "Tell Me About It", with great c&w guitar and drums backing by who knows what instrumental combination of musicians, and in which the vocals are shared by the glorious Tanya Tucker and one Delbert McClinton, of whom I had not previously heard. It is track number 13 on The Very Best of Tanya Tucker ("Another European compilation – I don't think there's anything unusual here" – Amazon.com). This is my current favourite pop tune, but you will not hear it any time soon on Top of the Pops, because none of us any longer need Top of the Pops to find out about our current favourites.

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Dave Barry, of all people, links to this delightful news report of a surprising French legal judgement to the effect that a very French film indeed, called A Very Long Engagement, is not actually French.

The film was made with the help of state funds from France's National Centre for Cinematography. In its decision, the court said that 2003 Productions was a Trojan horse, a company founded by Warner Bros. "to benefit from financial help even though [the fund] is reserved for the European cinematographic industry."

So, a Trojan film. Sneaky people, those Trojans.

Jeunet is known in North America as the filmmaker behind 1997's Alien Resurrection and 2001's Amélie.

A man with previous, perpetrating popular movies.

French actress Audrey Tautou, who played the title role in Amélie, also stars in A Very Long Engagement.

And we all know that Amélie was so good it is not even put in the foreign language racks at Blockbuster. That was not a French film either. It was a film.

"This film, which tells a French story, adapted from a French novel, filmed entirely in France, in French, with the participation of more than 2,000 French people, over thirty French actors and actresses and about 500 French technicians for 18 months, is suddenly no longer considered a French film!" 2003 Productions said in a press release.

The good news is that, assuming I understand this petit contretemps (if contretemps is a girl that should be petite) correctly, this means that this movie will not be getting French government money. Which is nice. This being the case, I feel sure that I speak for us all here at samizdata.net when I say that there ought not to be any French films at all.

Yes, that assumption is correct. Here is confirmation of that, from comingsoon.net, which they got from Variety:

A Paris court has ruled that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement is really a Hollywood movie, and therefore not sufficiently French to qualify for public subsidies …

If foreigners, British foreigners especially, continue buying up French real estate maybe it will eventually be decided that France is not French either.

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I have just got back from seeing The Incredibles, the computer animation movie about a family of superheroes and superheroines. I have read good things about this film and was not in the least bit disappointed. It proceeds at a crackling good pace, is often extremely funny, includes some rather clever and sly digs at America's litigation culture, and is endowed with a wonderfully positive, life-affirming sense of life throughout. It also has great, brassy backing music.

To state the obvious, what really stunned me was just how good computer animation now is. Some of the scenes in the jungle, the big city and the sea just took my breath away. It is easy to get blase these days, given just how good film making now is, but this film goes even further than that other great animation hit of recent years, Finding Nemo.

Go and see it. You know you want to.

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Given the disproportionately high incidence of entertainers who march in lockstep with the fashionable leftoid tendency, I think it is forgiveable to regard to the word 'actor' as being synonymous with the word 'moonbat'.

And mostly this is true. Mostly, but not entirely. Earlier in the week, I was watching a BBC 'Hardtalk' interview with Oscar-winning British actor, Jeremy Irons, who served up a welcome surprise:

Irons also spoke passionately about his defence of hunting. Irons hunts in Ireland and said he believes that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they don't harm other people.

"I'm appalled that really for political reasons Tony Blair is allowing his back benchers, who are bored, who have no power and want to stir it up.

"They want to get back at the way the Tories dealt with the miners, so they think they'll ban the nobs hunting."

I doubt very much that Mr. Irons is shaping up to become the British Ronald Reagan but it is gratifying to know that he is out there anyway. Creative talent and the power of reason are not mutually exclusive characteristics.

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I am sure that when many regulars here, readers and writers, read this, they will decide that finally and irrevocably, the country that grabbed itself an empire over which the sun never set, invented the steam engine, saw off Hitler, and used once upon a time to eat ball bearing for its breakfast, has finally gone so soft that nothing will save it:

The Princess Royal has unveiled a memorial sculpture to the animals who have served and died alongside British and allied troops.

The monument, in Park Lane, central London, depicts two mules, a horse and a dog, together with lists of the numbers of animals lost in conflicts.

But I do not think this is straightforward evidence of softness. I think that we just live in rather soft times. If the times harden, we would harden up with them pretty quick.

The irony is that this apparently soft-as-slush BBC story actually harks back to a much harder time, when men were men and pigeons were pigeons. (Do you think Blackadder when you follow that previous link? I do.)

Anyway, on with the BBC story:

The monument pays special tribute to the 60 animals awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal – the animals' equivalent of the Victoria Cross – since 1943.

They include 54 animals – 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and a cat – commended for their service in World War II. Among these heroes were:

Rob, a para-dog who made more than 20 parachute drops while serving with the SAS on top-secret missions in Africa and Italy.

Ricky, a canine mine-detector who continued with his dangerous task of clearing a canal bank in Holland despite suffering head injuries.

Winkie, a pigeon that flew 129 miles with her wings clogged with oil to save a downed bomber crew.

… and many more gutsy beasts, protected, one suspects, by having only the dimmest idea of what they were actually engaged in, and of the risks they were taking.

Nevertheless, these are arguably statues in a similar vein to this one, or even this one.

If you want further evidence of the hardness that lurks just beneath the soft surface of human nature in soft old Britain just now, take a look at another piece of sculpture I spied this evening, on my travels along Oxford Street.

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The 'mainstreaming' of the blog phenomenon continues apace as more applications for blogging start to join political prognostication, cultural commentary, demimonde diaries (warning: X-rated), technical tantrums, hitting things with hammers and paeans to beloved pussycats. New neighbourhoods of the blogosphere are springing up every day.

And now an independent Hollywood movie called Blowing Smoke, which is still undergoing some final post production editing, has set up a blog to which the director, producer and cast members have started to post, talking about the extremely politically incorrect nature of the movie.

The blog is still in its very early days, the site is still being tweaked and the users are at the stage where they are just getting to grips with blog publishing software but I think this could quite interesting if blogs like this catch on. As a movie enthusiast myself I would love to get more peeks behind the scenes and not just the same old marketing agency hype.

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A remake of Do They Know It's Christmas? has just been recorded.

Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.

[…]

Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.

It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.

Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:

Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.

As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as 'wheat militias'.

Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory...

And so on.

And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.

Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the 'aid' goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his 'aid' may indeed do some serious harm.

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There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or 'Bollywood' as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.

It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Globalisation in action, perhaps?

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I am really looking forward to seeing the new Alien vs. Predator movie, the tagline of which is...

Whoever wins... we lose

But I also find it very appropriate to see those sentiments applied here as well regarding the other big fight epic due to be released a few weeks hence. No, I am really not looking forward to that one.

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I must say I am quite a sucker for the recent spate of films based on comic strips. I liked the Spiderman films, the Hulk, and even quite enjoyed the Batman films (the one with Michael Keaton, anyway). Well, another one off the conveyor belt is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

It has been panned by the critics, which is usually a promising sign given the nature of most snarky film reviewers these days, and I hugely enjoyed it. It has numerous fine qualities: WW2 fighter planes which can go underwater; futuristic aircraft carriers in the sky with great big Union Jacks on them; spiffy uniforms with Angelina Jolie wearing them; hot female journalists in classic 1930s garb with rakish hats and wavy hair (Gwyneth Paltrow), and big, biiiiiiig metal robots that do not talk but stomp menacingly around New York.

The film has no great 'message', I suppose, apart from showing how in the middle of the 20th century mankind, or at least the western bits of it, dreamed of a mechanised, high-tech future. The vision appears a bit comical to us now, but perhaps our age, with our interests in the Web and so on, will appear no less bizarre to generations hence.

But never mind all that highfalutin' stuff. Go and see the film and have a feast of art deco kitsch with two of the most ravishing actresses now working. What's not to like?

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It has been a while since I have visited the Dave Barry blog. So I had good reason to hope that when I went back there this evening I would find things of splendour and significance. I did. This, I think, was the best thing I found.

Garry I hate to break it to you. But the world is on the brink of disaster. World crime is at an all time high. And the only thing standing between order … and chaos … is us.

And then, the bit that really got my attention:

From the creators of South Park.

Relax. This is a movie. The world is not really on the brink of disaster. It just has to seem that way for entertainment purposes. It opens, somewhere - in London also perhaps? - on October 15th.

"Hey terrorists. Terrorise this."

Indeed.

I also found this quite encouraging.

Spiders are more scary than terrorists - at least according to a survey of a thousand Britons released Monday.

Household creepy crawlies frighten Britons more than terrorist attacks, or even death, the survey found.

Which makes sense to me, and fits in with my experience. I am, I feel, far more likely to be terrorised by a creepy crawly than by a terrorist. After all, the War Against Terrorism has, in London, so far, touch wood and hope not to die, been going quite well, in the sense that none of London has been blotted out by terrorists recently.

On the other hand, we all know that the War Against Creepy Crawlies can only ever be a holding operation, and is doomed to eventual failure.

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The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:

After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city – just to see the place where his hero was born...

I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else's life besides his own, right? Perry?)

It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.

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I have always liked J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (though I must confess I have only seen the movies and not read the books). She writes about wizards and magic and yet the world she creates is populated by characters who still act like real people.

Moreover she is the anti-thesis of the sugar coated Disney pabulum of recent years. Not only do her characters act like real people, when the story calls for it, they die.

l have long loathed Disney for presenting some of the classic children's stories of Western literature in such a sanitised and castrated form that Disney's use of the titles is close to being fraudulent (such as the completely inverted 'Little Mermaid'). J.K. Rowling is made of far sterner stuff and she realises what the focus-group addled hacks at Disney do not... children are also made of sterner stuff.

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Fame at last. Thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.

More from me about the glorious Vicky Pollard...

...here, here and (only yesterday) here.

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I had never seen the infamous GULAG system; the Soviet authorities were not keen to document their crimes. But in 1946 they incarcerated an artist, Nikolai Getman, and he survived.

Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.

Getman explains what happened to him:

In my third year I was called up to join the Red Army, which was where the war found me. I saw military action in the 24th Army. On Victory Day I was on the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, a lieutenant technician. Marshal Tolbukhin sent me to Romania as an art specialist to serve on the Soviet Commission for the return of art treasures stolen by the Germans.

I returned home to Kharkov in October 1945 where I became one of the millions of Stalin’s victims. My crime was meeting with other artists in Dnepropetrovsk, where I was visiting my father, and exchanging memories of what we had seen in the towns we liberated. Remnants of fascist propaganda, posters, leaflets, cartoons. One of the artists took a cigarette box and drew a caricature he had seen of Stalin with a play on the abbreviation SSSR (USSR): Skoro Smertrt’ Stalinskomu Rezhimu (Sudden Death to the Stalinist Regime). An informer reported the sketch, and the whole group of us were arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. I was arrested on October 12, 1945. In January 1946 I was convicted and sent to Taishetlag in Russia’s Irkutsk Oblast.

The Dnepropetrovsk Oblast court condemned me under article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. In Russia this is known as article 58. I was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and five years’ suppression of civic rights. I spent about eight years in Siberia (Taishetlag) and Kolyma (Svitlag). Labor camps records show that I was held in custody for seven years, ten months and eighteen days. I was freed on August 30, 1953.

From the very day I was released, I began to implement my plan to paint a series of pictures on the theme of the Gulag, but because this was a forbidden topic, I had to do my civic duty in secret. And so, in complete secrecy, beginning in 1953, I painted pictures about camp life that I recreated from memory. I told no one about this work—not even my wife—because this sort of activity was punishable by imprisonment or even death. I undertook the task because I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not be forgotten.

Getman produced 50 paintings about the GULAG, and they can be viewed here. I must advise that some of the paintings are extremely distressing, since Getman simply tried to recreate what he actually saw. However, they are also of huge historical value as a rare record of what the horror of Soviet 'justice' actually meant.

Getman dedicated his works thusly:

I dedicate my collection to the memory of those who survived the Gulag and to those who did not. Light a candle in memory. The living are in need of it more than the dead. Bow your heads.

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RC Dean correctly identifies the blog-banging of Rather and his forged document as an exercise in distributed intelligence. So, can this model for cooperative intellectual activity be applied to other tasks? Can the combined power of the Internet be brought to bear on other creative tasks, rather than just the destruction of the pretensions of forgers and their mainstream media dupes?

Open Source software famously makes use of distributed intelligence. And I seem to recall hearing on the British BBC1 TV show The Sky at Night that the Internet is also already used to do combined astronomy. Also, I recall reading, but do not recall where or when, about a list of famous maths problems that have baffled the greatest maths minds for centuries, which have now all had cash prizes attached to them.

But in the case of those maths problems it is only the publicising of the problem that uses the Internet. The solutions will pretty much come from individuals. Or is that wrong? Will major proofs of major theorems get themselves constructed line by line, in public, with dozens of different mathematicians chipping in with their own pennyworths, with each step not being enough to justify a journal article, but the combined effect being mathematically stellar?

Could a film script perhaps be concocted in this way?

Consider this, from Terry Teachout on Wednesday:

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they've done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn't thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds' worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: "I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it."

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who'd stepped in it up to his eyebrows? Would his candor be greeted by a wholehearted roar of astonished approval? Or would he be buried under the inevitable avalanche of told-you-sos from his sworn enemies and their robotic surrogates, amplified well beyond the threshold of pain by the 24/7 echo chamber of the media, old and new alike? …

Teachout then alludes to a movie that made a big impression on me also when it first came out, Network not least because of the amazing scene where Faye Dunaway has sex while continuing to rant about her latest TV ratings strategy. But I digress. Back to Treacher on Speaking Truth With Power. Now comes this:

... it occurs to me that such a scenario might well make for an interesting movie. …

… Imagine, then, a film about a present-day public figure who screws up in a big way, calls a press conference, admits his errors, and throws himself upon the mercy of the public. It's not hard to see how a socially aware writer-director like, say, John Sayles might weave the resulting tangle into a smart story about imperfect people who get caught up in the whirlwind of circumstance.

Treacher himself isn't going to write the screenplay of the drama he has sketched out. But suppose someone else did. And suppose, instead of mass-laser-printing-it and bombarding Hollywood with it, they instead simply stuck their script up on the Internet.

And suppose others then joined in, with technical assistance about the nuances of news conferences and of the particular milieu our Candid Hero was operating in ("that would never happen, but what you could do is …"), and with snappier dialogue, and with casting suggestions, and with observations about plot non-sequiturs, and with suggested solutions. Home movie makers might even get to work on actually shooting rough versions of some of the scenes using lesser known actors eager to show what they can do. People could suggest cheaper locations, the best available person to direct, report on suitable buildings which which are about to be demolished (Hollywood loves demolishing buildings).

In short, amateurs could horn in on the work now done by movie professionals, at such vast expense and with such huge travelling budgets.

The reason I like the idea of applying Distributed Intelligence to movie making is that the best movies are rather like maths theorems. They have a rightness to them, a quality of having been discovered rather than merely created, of having been dug up in their finished state rather than merely thrown together. I am not saying that they are dug up, merely that they feel like this. (All the best art is like this. Discuss.)

There are many advantages to putting a movie together like this, not least that financing it and (perhaps above all) publicising it might be pretty much taken care of.

It just, as they used to say in older movies, might work. (Because I believe this, and because I like thinking of movie ideas myself, I have a category at my Culture Blog called Movie ideas. Not as in ideas about movies, but ideas for movies.)

One particular skill that ,ight particularly be needed in the world of distributed, yet paid, intelligence would be the skill of tracing the history of an idea and of a creative process (whether it is a movie, a maths theorem, a chemical formula, or a new idea for a cheap gadget or an new kind of car or airplane) so that key contributors could be appropriately rewarded. Because, once key contributors do get appropriately rewarded a few times, this will enormously increase the willingness of all manner of people to make appropriate contributions.

You get a taste of how this rewarding process would work when you read the better mainstream media articles now being written about how the Blogosphere Got Dan Rather. "The story began when CBS unveiled Document X on 60 Minutes last … whichever night it was, whereupon a commenter at Blog A said … whatever he said, about proportional spacing, and Blogger B then did an exhaustive analysis of Microsoft Word and Blogger C lashed up that oscillating graphic. Meanwhile ex-National-Guardian P spoke to Blogger D …". You know the kind of thing. Once the history of the creation has been established, then the final makers of the thing (movie, car, whatever) could divvy up whatever profits they might make, on a "do you agree? – and if you do, and promise not to sue us if it makes ten times more money than any of us now dream of, do we have a deal?" basis. Tricky, I agree. But doable. Hollywood already has skills along these lines now, does it not?

Or then again, maybe, the whole idea of distributed intelligence movie-making (in particular) will separate itself out from money-making movie-making, and the whole process will be done for free, and distributed for free, and watched for free. What are the odds that the smash summer holiday hit of 2012 will be a blog-movie, on super high definition DVD, playable not only in home cinemas but also in cinema cinemas (by any cinema that wants to show it), while Hollywood is stuck with its latest unsellable Dinosaur Sequel and snarls, Rather-like, that civilisation as Hollywood knows it is at an end. Which it very possibly would be.

The general principle here is that – Vinegar Joe Stilwell style – you set about solving your problems, or, in more peaceful times, seizing your opportunities, by first stating in public just what they are, and inviting Distributed Intelligence to get to work on them, rather (Rather!) than by keeping your problems secret until your secret hirelings have solved them, or can plausibly claim to have solved them. And only then does Distributed Intelligence go to work second guessing, or improving on, or making monkeys of the hirelings.

Think of it as Western Civilisation only more so.

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I cannot help but suspect that Babbage and Turing never really envisaged the marvellous uses to which computing devices would be set.

Cats? Fish? Click here.

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And no, I did not rearrange anything for the photo.

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Perhaps it is just sloppy editing or slipshod reporting that turns what is supposed to be a serious news article into an exercise in bladder-evacuation. Or perhaps it is meant to be funny?

Who knows? Just enjoy the results:

The leading showbiz lights of the anti-globalisation movement descended on Venice this weekend, amid complaints that the world's oldest film festival has sold out to the Hollywood glamour industry.

Surely, if they wanted to oppose globalisation they would be better off staying put?

Actor Tim Robbins and author Naomi Klein will tomorrow launch the Global Beach, an alternative "festival" down the road from the main event, which is expected to get the backing of actor-director Spike Lee and gay indie-punk star Gregg Araki.

Oh, that Gregg Araki. Illustrious star of such notable films as...er, give me a minute here...

Both Robbins and Klein are noted critics of Hollywood mores and of the failure of actors to criticise their corporate bosses.

That may have something to do with the lear jets and limos provided by those corporate bosses.

Naomi Klein flew in yesterday morning to promote her film The Take, an account of a co-operative business set up by Argentine workers after the 2001 economic collapse, directed by radical Canadian journalist Avi Lewis.

With action, adventure, thrills, spills, ingenious plot twists, dazzling special effects and a stellar cast, 'The Take' is set to be the blockbuster hit of 2004. A total sell-out everywhere. Queues of film-lovers round the block. Get your tickets now!

Supporters of the Global Beach project caused disturbances at the premiere of The Terminal, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, which opened the festival on Wednesday. Members of the group parked a car disguised as a pirate ship near the red carpet, a protest, one of them claimed, against "ostentatious show of Hollywood wealth and power".

Wow! A car disguised as a pirate ship. That is so...significant: a devastating critique of crass commercialism that will really force people to sit up and take notice.

They are not actors, they are clowns.

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On the very first occasion that I saw the advert on my TV, I knew, I just knew that is was going to set the fur flying. I was right.

Scenario: a man picks up his car keys and leaves the house to get into his brand, spanking, new Land Rover Freelander Sport motor vehicle. A woman (presumably his wife) spots him leaving. She rushes up to the bedroom, opens the dresser drawer and pulls out a starting pistol. She rushes downstairs again and runs outside just as her husband is getting into the car. She points the gun up to the sky and fires a single shot, thus giving him signal to get started.

Pretty innocuous stuff. But still far too traumatic and disturbing for some people:

A television advert for Land Rover featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by watchdogs for glamourising gun culture....

The agency behind the advert said it was intended to promote the message "that the Freelander Sport triggered sporting behaviour".

But 348 viewers complained to media regulator Ofcom, meaning that the advert is in the top 10 of the most complained about commercials.

Most viewers were concerned that the commercial glamourised or normalised gun culture despite the fact handguns are illegal in Britain. Many also pointed out that the gun was stored irresponsibly.

Yes, you are reading that right. People might be encouraged to store the guns which they do not possess irresponsibly. Priceless!

The right to keep and bear arms is not a debate in this country. Nor is it an issue or an idea or an argument. It has all been subsumed into a deep national psychosis for which I see no prospect of any cure.

What would make you think we are trying to provoke?

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Alice Cooper, that paragon of conservative values and restraint is... backing George Bush! Methinks the more wingnut elements of the Republican Party will probably have rather mixed feeling about that particular endorsement.

Well at least his reasons are hard to fault. Why? Because so many musicians are backing Kerry and...

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn't already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that's a good reason right there to vote for Bush.

Not quite enough to get me swooning for Dubya, but damn, one can find strangely compelling wisdom in the most unlikely places.

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Perry de Havilland has pointed out previously that film critics seem to regard it as safer to sneer at films than to praise them.

Praise a film (at least praise a serious but non knee-jerk leftist film) and you run the risk of being considered weak minded. Sneer at the film - and you are a sophisticated person who is not taken in by commercial tricks.

The film critic of the Daily Telegraph is one of the sneering school of critics (that a Conservative newspaper allows its cultural coverage to be dominated by the standard knee-jerk crowd is, sadly, normal). In his review of The Village he duly sneered at the film - and, for good measure, sneered at The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable as well.

Well this got my attention (which, I suppose, is the point of a review) as I liked both of these films. Many people got to see the Sixth Sense - but, and in my opinion unfortunately, most people followed the far stronger and more unified critical attacks on Unbreakable and did not see the film.

Recently Unbreakable has been shown on British television and many people have said to me that they thought it was a good film. "Did you go and see Unbreakable when it was on at the cinema?" - "No, because the critics said..."

It seems to me that what the critics really hated about Unbreakable was that it was not 'tongue in cheek' or a 'good romp for the kids' but also did not make any 'serious' (i.e. leftist) political points. Unbreakable was essentially a non political but serious film which examined the question of what if a man really did have 'special powers', why would he deny them - and what would make him not deny them.

Of course one could say "Of course old Paul Marks liked the film - the hero is a bald security guard" as I am a bald security guard. However, the film stands up in the view of most people who have seen it (and most of these people are not bald security guards).

As for The Village itself:

Well yes, I liked the film (so thank you to Daily Telegraph reviewer for sneering at it - otherwise I would not have gone to see it). There are a couple of twists in the film (one fairly mild another more radical), but the film is well made, does make sense (and the more you think about the film, the more sense it makes that certain things happen the way they do) and was a good film to watch.

If you go to see the film (because of what I write here) and do not like it - well I am sorry to have badly advised you. However, at least I am giving my honest opinion - not just sneering to seem hip.

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The latest engagement in the file sharing wars is a victory for the forces of, well, file sharing.

The makers of two leading file-sharing programs are not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works swapped online by their users, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday in a stinging blow to the entertainment industry.

So far, so good. Those using file-sharing software to violate property rights are, after all, personally responsible for what they do. File sharing software has legitimate uses, and its makers should no more be held responsible for illegitimate uses than a camera manufacturer should be held responsible for child pornography.

Among other reasons, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., unlike the original Napster, were not liable because they don’t have central servers pointing users to copyright material.

One begins to suspect that the court is straining a tad to distinguish its earlier decision shutting down Napster, but let that pass. One is always surprised to find the reliably statist Ninth Circuit signing paeans to the market, but whatever gets them through the opinion, right?

“History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,” [Judge] Thomas wrote. “Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories.”

Finally, a quote from the Ninth Circuit that I hope to find cited in other cases. Full opinion here, and hat tip to Hit & Run.

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The other day the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper written for the statist right prejudices of 'Indignant of Tunbridge Well', called for certain video games to be banned. This resulted is a rather splendid riposte by Benet Simon in The Spectator called Ban this evil rag!':

But before you panic, remember that you’re better off trusting your child than the Daily Mail. Over the last few days I have been checking the Mail’s website discussion board to see what sort of response they have been getting to their call for a ban. At first, scores of anti-censorship postings appeared, many of them pointing out a fact that the Mail had omitted to mention in either of its two front-page stories: the murderous game, Manhunt, wasn’t in fact owned by the killer Leblanc but by his victim. Another popular complaint was that the Mail had entirely ignored a statement by the police which said that Leblanc’s motive for the so-called ‘Manhunt murder’ was certainly robbery. The kid had debts, it seems, was into drugs and killed to pay for his habit. The police went on to assert that they had never made any connection between the crime and the video game. The Mail’s response to these letters was to delete them while leaving the comments from concerned mothers who won’t let their children watch Spiderman for fear that they’ll think they can climb down walls.

Indeed... my comments were amongst those they deleted from the thread on the Daily Mail forum entitled Discuss: Should violent video games be banned?. And now that it has turned into an embarrassing fiasco for them given the overwhelming response to the contrary, they seem to have since deleted the entire thread.

It seems that 'Indignant of Tunbridge Wells' is a gamer too.

* = 'Gib' being an expression used by computer gamers for blowing a person into bloody chunks.

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Judging by the many dreadful reviews I have seen regarding Catwoman, this should be a turkey of epic proportions.

Well... bollocks to that.

It actually is not that bad. Sure, even a connoisseur of B-movies such as myself can see that it is not a great movie... the special effects were pretty good in places but during some scenes it was painfully obvious that they were computer generated. The dialogue was serviceable rather than inspiring, the story was derivative and predictable with some feminist claptrap tacked on. The acting was of variable quality - Halle Berry's job was to shake her 'thang' and be alternatively sexy, confused, sexy, predatory, sexy, all of which she did to perfection; Ben Bratt's job was to shake his 'thang' and be a 'tough-but-nice-guy', which he did engagingly; Sharon Stone's job was to be sympathetic, unsympathetic, menacing and sexy, all of which she utterly failed to deliver which was rather disappointing.

But what strikes me is not the failings of this flick, which are indeed many, but the fact I found it vastly better than the reviews would have lead me to believe. It was by no means a waste of a few quid/bucks/euros and just confirms my suspicions that for most reviewers, sneering at things is a safer and more 'credible' option, a default mode in fact.

It is not a great movie, or even a particularly good movie... it just does not suck. Bored this weekend? You could do far worse than look at the exquisite Halle Berry strutting her stuff very effectively in Catwoman.

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This is without a doubt the movie I have most anticipated seeing since spotting a certain trophy in the background of a few frames at the end of Predator 2 back in 1990.

Oh yeah. I mean, OH YEAH!

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This is exactly the time one one should avoid writing: immediately after being poured out of a Belfast taxi on a Saturday night. But it is also the time when "In Vino Veritas" holds most true and one will say what comes to mind rather than considering details like flow and cute turns of phrase.

I go out for music. If a woman happens to fall into my lap during the search, that is certainly a plus, but not a prerequisite. Tonight, I decided on the Shaftesbury Square/Botanic Avenue area rather than the usual good chat and trad music at my local. For a bit of a change I started at Madison's. A couple pints, a bit of girl watching... but after three or four songs I simply could not take the music. Not that it sounded bad. Au contraire. It sounded marvellous. The problem was... it was a Milli Vanilli band: karaoke tracks with occasional backup from live guitar, bass guitar and maybe vocals. To most of the audience I am sure it was just two guys making a lot of music. Never mind there was no drummer or cowbell or keyboard player on stage; never mind that sometimes the guitarist was playing a D chord when the sound was lead guitar. The guys on stage were making their nut; the audience was happy... capitalism at work.

But I was not a happy camper... and despite the pulchritude surrounding me I decamped for a more classical low down rock bar.

I found what I was looking for. Not that it was much of a search. I knew where I was going. I would tell you except I do not wish to get them into trouble. They had the real thing. Five live musicians with driving Rock and Roll so loud a Brussell's regulator would have pissed herself. "If it is too loud, you are too old". I was, naturally, up close to the stage where I could feel the volume. That is the proper way to experience AC/DC and Judas Priest covers... up where your clothes are vibrating.

Now I may have an advantage over some. I probably blew out half my hearing long ago standing in front of a Fender amp in a Pittsburgh bar band; or perhaps from that time I half laid on the stage at a Patti Smith concert at the Leona Theater in the South Side, my head resting inside the lower Altec Lansing. That was a good few years and a lot of substance abuse ago.

One thing you need not worry about. The rockers will simply not obey the regulators. I have said it here before. 'Turn it down' is simply not in an electric lead guitarist's vocabulary. "Fuck off", on the other hand, is definitely there.

You can only be enslaved if you are actually willing to obey the law... or, as Robert Heinlein said: "You can never enslave a free man. The most that you can do is to kill him."

Oh yeah... I went out for a cheeseburger with bacon afterwards. Dripping grease and ketchup... yummy. Screw the Health Nazi's too...

I am sure David Carr would have approved.

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Although Australia and the US have signed a free trade agreement, it is an imperfect document, with many exemptions on both sides. In Australia, there has been a loud campaign to have existing 'local content' rules for Australian television excluded, and this campaign has been successful.

The 'local content' rules mean that a certain proportion of television programmes that are broadcast on Australian television must be locally made. The scrapping of this rule was an American objective in the free trade negotiations, as it meant that US television companies were restricted in their access to the Australian television market by what in effect is a quota.

Australia resisted this; we should not have.

Australian television has had local content rules for a long time, they provide that at least 55% of the programming on Australian television between 6am and midnight must be locally produced. This creates a local internal market for television, which is actually quite a cut-throat industry. The economies of scale mean that Australian television products are not cost-competitive, but they do rate well.

That is the rub- many of the people involved in the industry here do not wish to concern themselves with anything so grubby as 'ratings'; but would rather follow their artisitic vision. A noble thing, to be sure, but television is a business. Local variants of the 'reality tv' genre have been ratings winners and have made a lot of money for their networks through advertising sales.

The local lobby present a 'nightmare' scenario where Australian television is totally dominated by US television product. This seems curious since Australian television networks are more worried by market share rather then raw cost. But then the local content lobby are more about emotion then cool business sense. In point of fact, the ratings show that many of the best rating programs are local productions.

But there is a strange sense of values in the local content lobby. Their catchphrase seems to be 'telling Australian stories with Australian voices'. But this is a remarkable way to be going about it. It is almost like forcing a 'book quota' on Australian readers, making Australian readers read a set proportion of Australian written books.

What is screened on Australian television screens should be decided by the television networks, who make (more or less) rational decisions based on the ratings of what people want, rather then by a government directive decreeing what is best for them. It is most unfortunate that this principle has been lost again.

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It is not difficult to sneer at the new King Arthur movie. One can sneer at its historical errors - for example where is the mention of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who even writers who believe in the existence of Arthur admit was the original leader of British (or Briton or Romano-British or whatever you prefer) resistance to the Germanic invaders (dividing people into neat tribes 'Angles', 'Saxons' and so on is harder than might be thought). And Ambrosius Aurelianus was certainly a leader of south west Britian (his centre of power would have been in areas like the Cotswalds - places like Cirencestor). Nothing 'northern' about him.

And one can sneer in simple film-story terms. For example if going north of Hadrian's wall is so dangerous, why is there such a lightly defended villa (containing such important people) doing up there?

But to sneer is to miss the point. This is a very brave film.

For example to make the point that there were different sorts of Christian in Britain and that the ideas of Pelagius on free will and moral responsibility might have political importance is to touch on matters that most films seem to assume are well above the heads of the audience.

The avoiding of "all Christians good, all Pagans bad" or (more likely in a modern production) "all Christians bad, all Pagans good" is brave.

Also brave was the direct treatment of de facto serfdom in the late Roman Empire. Whilst formally free men, peasants had been tied to the soil (originally for reasons of tax collection) since the time of the Emperor Diocletian. The Emperor Diocletian (with his price controls and semi serfdom) did not rule Britain at first (there was great resistance to him in this province), but his writ eventually ran here.

By the 5th century it was not considered illegal for a local notable to chain up peasants he thought might run away (formally upheld by Constantine as early as 332) or to use physical pain against those peasants that defied him. And such folk as landlords had to watch out for themselves - as Imperial officials used such things as torture against them (if the officials thought tax collection was poor, or if other orders did not seem to be obeyed correctly).

The film showed that the condition of the 'coloni' (tenants) who were tied to the soil was little different from that serfs or slaves (and, of course, taxes and other dues forced peasant free holders into becoming coloni - they had to borrow to survive a sudden collection and became trapped in debt, and even peasant freeholders were tied to the soil anyway).

But the film did not make the mistake of showing the Germanic invaders as 'liberators' - they were anything but that.

On Britain itself the film may have been mistaken in showing the various groups of Britons near Hadrian's wall as being anti Roman - most scholars would argue that the local 'tribes' (if I may use this word) of the area were pro Roman (unlike the 'Picts' further north).

Such British kingdoms as Strathclyde continued for centuries after the Romans (the great stronghold of Dumbarton 'Fortress of the Britons' fell to the Vikings in the late 9th century and the Kingdom limped on till absorbed into Scotland in the 11th century).

However, again the film was making an interesting point. The various groups of Celts in Britain (at least in the north and west) were far less pacified than local people elsewhere in the Empire.

Of all the Western Empire only in Britain is there long term resistance to the Germanic invaders - indeed what is now Wales never fell to the 'Anglo-Saxons'. And this is because only in Britain was there still a tradition of using weapons (at least among certain groups of people).

Since the time of Augustus it had been illegal for civilians to train in arms in the Roman Empire - only the army was to keep and use weapons. But in the far north of the province of Britannia (on both sides of Hadrian's wall) this was not the policy - both in the north and to some extent in the west of Britannia the Romans allied with certain groups and these groups continued to practice in arms. Of course Britain had not been part of the Empire in the time of Augustus - but the law was still valid here.

Heavy cavalry may have been important. The old notion was that "Roman cavalry could not charge, as without stirrups they would fall off their horses" never seemed to fit in with the existence of lances and horse armour - and consideration of the Roman saddle shows that (even if "Romans did not have stirrups" is true - rather than "Romans did not use metal stirrups") certain types of Roman cavarly could charge.

There was heavy cavalry stationed in Britain right from the time of Marcus Aurelius (and, yes, they were originally drawn from Eastern peoples) and evidence for heavy war horses ("first created in the middle ages") has been found in the Roman period in such places as what is now Austria.

So, contrary to the mockers, one can even have 'Arthur and his knights'.

However, a bit of heavy cavalry is not going to achieve much on it's own. There is a lot of evidence for light cavalry in Britain - an ancient Celtic tradition. And some people must fight on foot.

The relationship of the Celts of Britain (the P. Celts to give the name for the Celts who spoke the local dialects, as opposed to the Q. Celts of Ireland who gave rise to the Scots) is complicated. Some were indeed crushed by the Romans, but many were neither crushed not eternally hostile and they varied greatly.

Roman civilization seems to have (for example) to have been thin in what is now north Wales but very strong in what is now south east Wales - especially in what is now the county of Monmouth - where the 'Citizens' (as the Welsh called themselves) were still maintaining some Roman buildings (and not just military ones) in the 11th century - 600 years after the Romans left Britain.

The language of what is now Monmouth may have been Welsh (which comes from P. Celtic), but the people did not hold Latin civilization to be an enemy - far from it.

So even the King Arthur film's mixture of Celtic language with surviving classical influences may not be so far from the truth.

Lastly the "absurd P.C. notion of women fighters". Well perhaps, although there were female gladiators in the Roman world and some strange examples of females fighting in the Celtic world - and if a women is to fight she should avoid armour, only by avoiding a blow rather than going 'toe to toe' with a man is she going to survive - yes there is even a justification for the half naked look.

However, this raises another point. Forget female fighters and there is still the difference between the legal status of women between the Celtic Britons and the Germanic peoples. For example adultery could result in divorce under Welsh law - it could be punished by the death of the women under various Germanic codes.

Also a women could inherit land under Welsh law - but not Angle law (or that of most Germanic peoples). Although interestingly enough under Saxon law a women could inherit land.

Of all the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain (and mixed with each other and with the locals) 'Saxons' is the word that seems to carry the most hatred down the centuries (including in this film) which is a bit unfair on the Saxons (who were a complex and interesting people. But that will have to wait for another time.

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Yes folks, this is a quiet Friday and it is Strange Photographs by Brian time.

This time, what we have is a fake Thunderbird rocket, which has been temporarily installed in Trafalgar Square in honour of the new Thunderbirds movie, which opens in London around now. I took the photos yesterday.

There have been all kinds of ideas floating around about what objects to put in Trafalgar Square, next to Nelson, and (I think) Havelock, and the lions. I think this is one of the better ones.

Here is the general context, which means lots of tourists clambering about on the lions and photographing one another:

Here is the one where the rocket is dwarfed by an earlier and more famous erection:

Here it is looking a bit like a rival church. What this also shows is that actually not much attention was being paid to the thing, because it is actually rather small:

And here is the Samizdata friendly shot:

Apparently quite a few of the scenes in the movie are set in London, and feature many of London's famous landmarks, old and new, including the new local politician hutch that London has just recently had inflicted upon it.

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It seems that you can make a very popular movie (apparently it was described in the New York Times as his best so far – could well be) without it being popular everywhere:

When singer Linda Ronstadt praised Michael Moore's anti-war movie Fahrenheit 9/11 during a concert at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, the audience walked out.

What's more, hotel president Bill Timmins was in the audience and took action himself.

Says a spokeswoman: 'Her suite was cleaned out, her things were collected and security escorted her. She wasn't happy, but we were very polite.'

She might have been wiser to say a few nice things about Spiderman 2, which has been described by Mark Steyn as:

… the spinning, squirting, swinging antidote to the stunted paranoia of Fahrenheit 9/11 …

Showbusiness. You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time, but …

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Yes. The day approaches. Tech work all across planet Earth will grind to a halt. Programmers will twitch in their sleep (if they sleep at all). Network centers will groan under the load and there will be no answers from helpdesks. All this and more will happen in a mere fifteen days. A bit more than two weeks... DOOM 3 hits the stores on August 3rd!

Linux and OSX versions are to follow soon thereafter.

Used with the kind permission of Idsoftware

Addendum: Buying Doom3 makes money for Idsoftware. One of the Idsoftware founders is John Carmack. John Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace, perhaps the number two contender for the X-Prize behind Scaled Composites. So... buy Doom3 and support your capitalist future in Space!

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I could not possibly let the day pass by without reference to the death of Marlon Brando.

As far as I am concerned, there are actors, good actors and then there are stars. Brando was a star. But of all the roles he played, I will remember him best for his potrayal of mafia boss, Vito Corleone, in the Godfather. Not only did his enormous screen presence seer itself into every frame, but he took this character and turned it into a genuine cultural icon.

R.I.P Marlon Brando.

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Rob Fisher has discovered a foolproof plan for getting invited to our famed Blogger Bashes...

...advertising Samizdata.net at the Glastonbury festival

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Michael Moore bans Michael Moore?

It seems the new stupid campaign finance regulations in the USA (the result of Michael Moore's years of vomit among others) are about to be used to restrict distribution of Moore's latest wind-up.

Because the law attempts to prohibit all sorts of 'in kind' donations to the Republicans [I meant political parties], making a movie that plugs one candidate at the expense of another in election year could be ruled "interference" by the Federal Electoral Commission. I wonder how Michael Moore feels being felt sorry for by the US Libertarian Party.

Of course it is a shocking abuse of the US constitution. (sigh) How sad!

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You may have wanted to know the REAL reason that 'Friends' has been taken off the airwaves. The 'official' reason is that the show's makers wanted to quit before the show became too stale.

The truth is rather more sinister.

In Lyle, the California Court of Appeal held that creative discussions in which writers of the popular sitcom Friends developed ideas and created scripts could constitute sexual harassment of individuals listening to the sometimes bawdy banter of the writers.

So now we know.

[Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link.]

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It's a tough job but somebody has to do it.

I have been doing my bit for the War against woman-hating, religious bigotry by checking out the Miss Universe finalists. Personally I think the registered Republican Miss USA looked much better than Miss Australia, the eventual winner.

Useful sociological experiment: check out Miss Sweden and try to focus on horrible tax rates in that country. So if Sweden had the burqah, perhaps they would have lower taxes. Tough call.

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The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics used by the major studios until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.

However, this year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. Or perhaps the summer movie season is now always going to start three weeks before EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account. Perhaps in a few years "summer" will be statistically redefined to start in February). That first move was Universal's Van Helsing. That was now three weeks ago, and we can start to see the first few indications of what the summer would be like.

The story of last summer has been told. Hollywood released lots of sequels, lots of high concept movies based on comic books, old television series, video games and theme parks. With one or two exceptions grosses were down from the summer before. There was lots of speculation as to whether the advent of DVDs meant that people were less likely to go and see movies in the cinema, or whether it just meant the year's movies weren't very good. Certainly, though, people were and are watching lots of movies on DVDs, and Hollywood was making unexpectedly immense amounts of money due to this, which sort of made up for the decline in box office revenues. (Of course, when the DVD format was introduced in the first place a few years back, a number of Hollywood studios waited a couple of years before releasing any movies on the new format. Studio people were frightened that the high quality digital nature of the new format meant that releasing films this way would make them more vulnerable to piracy, and they could not see any upside, as obviously all that would happen is that people would rent movies on DVD the way they had on VHS until then, and giving people a high quality digital experience at home would not cause them to rent or buy more movies. Obviously. Hollywood always runs away from new technology like this, and has an amazing inability to see upside in it. But the upside almost always seems to come).

Hollywood went into last summer believing that sequels were going to gross substantially more money than did the original films they were sequels to, but it didn't happen and they get their noses bloodied a little. It takes two years for the lessons of a bad summer to sink in to Hollywood, but none the less this summer has fewer sequels and the like scheduled than last summer did. The lesson they should probably have learned is that sequels to good films can gross more than sequels to bad films, but the trouble with Hollywood being run by corporate types rather than people who genuinely love movies is that they are sometimes slow to see things like that.

One other thing that has been happening this year is what is often called "day and date" international programming. Traditionally, films were released in the US first, and would be rolled out throughout the rest of the world over a period of months. This is now happening less and less for big movies. Films are being released on the same weekend in most major markets. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Hollywood as always is afraid of piracy. Certainly they are losing some money to pirates. Once upon a time I was frequently offered illicit CD and VCDs and VHS tapes when walking down the streets of Asian cities, but if I wanted them in developed countries they would be harder to find. These days I cannot walk down Oxford Street in London without encountering someone selling illicit DVDs of movies current in the US that have probably not been released in the UK yet. Releasing movies in large swathes of Europe and Asia on the same weekend as in the US certainly reduces the window in which this activity is profitable, and this is the main reason given for the fact that there are now simultaneous worldwide releases.

But in reality this is more of a symptom than the cause.

The fact is, the world is rapidly becoming one global media market. Legally the world is divided into countries, and copyright law and other media regulation goes to great trouble to segment the world into separate markets. This has strange consequences sometimes (a customer in France cannot buy a subscription to Rupert Murdoch's (British) BSkyB satellite television business, even though the signal reaches France, BSkyB has only purchased British rights for the programming it shows and even though the producers of the programming would ultimately receive a share of the revenue, they are not allowed to. Hence also unencrypted satellite television causes legal tangles so complicated that it often just isn't worth bothering with, even if a broadcaster wants to transmit it). Traditionally movie producers have managed to segment advertising campaigns and everything else into these national markets, but it is working less and less. Publicity campaigns now cross borders at high speed. Teenagers in Australia know by Friday afternoon whether a movie just released in the US is any good. People read reviews from foreign newspapers' websites. If there is a delay between release in the US and release elsewhere, the media buzz may have died by the time the fim gets there. People on British websites such as this one might be writing for largely American audiences, and it is counterproductive if the movies they are talking about are two months old in American terms. All this means that segmented national releases no longer work. And Hollywood is learning to deal with that. (If simultaneous worldwide releases are going to happen, one of the chief problems is expense and logistics. It costs a lot to strike that many prints of celluloid, and getting them around the world is expensive and time consuming. Thus this trend is also an impetus for digital distribution and projection systems to come into being to facilitate this that is not really there for the domestic market. This is particularly so in rapidly developing countries where there are no large networks of existing conventional cinemas already. And indeed we are seeing this, particularly in China, where quite a large network of digital cinemas has been built in the last couple of years).

In any event, this makes writing about the summer movie season much easier for me, since I can now see most of the movies at the same times the Americans do. Of the first five big summer releases this year, four of them have or will be released in the UK within two days of the release in the US. The exception is an exception for a reason, which I get to in a while.

But on to the movies. The first movie out of the blocks was Van Helsing, which was actually the second movie inside a year that features a number of characters from the genre fiction of various Victorian authors all blended into one story. The first such film was last year's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which Alan Moore's brilliant and delicately conceived graphic novels were turned into a horrendous incoherent mish-mash of special effects. I found that film really offensive due to the way in which the contempt for the audience of the studio and filmmakers ("they won't understand the literary references anyway") was allowed to wreck the original material (The graphic novels worked precisely because the audience was literate and educated enough to get the references). Van Helsing was probably just as bad a film as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I found it less offensive, perhaps because it just went straight to the source material, rather than screwing up a pastiche that somebody else got right. The movie was an absurd mixture of Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, British actors doing absurd eastern European accents, James Bond spoofs and lord only knows what else, mixed in with the idea that the supernatural must now have Ridley Scott Alien style ickiness. This movie really sucked, and after three weeks it has limped to $103 million in North America. This is not perceived as especially good, given that the film cost at least $160m to make, but the studios are making so much money from DVDs these days that the film will probably make money. It's a break even proposition though.

That film was followed this weekend by Wolfgang Peterson's Troy, which has managed a slightly better but similarly middling $93 million after two weeks. Historical Greek and Roman epics were once a mainstay of Hollywood, but they fell into obscurity when casts that large became too expensive. Special effects have made them at least somewhat affordable again, and after the success of Gladiator three or four years ago it was inevitable we would see a couple more. We have now had Troy and an assortment of Alexander the Great movies are in production, so things will go on for a little while yet. (And indeed, we have a new King Arthur adaptation from überproducer Jerry Bruckheimer coming very soon that fits in the genre too - this film appears to be making an effort to be as historically accurate as possible, and is set in around 500AD when Britain was clearly Roman-Celtic in culture, whereas many adaptations of the story have been given quasi-medieval settings).

To be honest I rather enjoyed Troy. The screenplay was a bit of a mess and it was a bit hard to tell who was the hero, Homer was messed with a bit too much and the events of ten years seemingly went by in a couple of weeks, but I enjoyed the spectacle. And hey, it had Peter O'Toole in it. Yes, I should probably just go and watch Lawrence of Arabia one more time, but they don't make actors like that any more. (On the other hand, how do you cast the part of Helen of Troy without disappointing the audience?). Warner Bros are admitting to a $150m budget for this film, but it is rumoured to be much higher. I have heard $250m mentioned, and although I don't think I believe this that would make it the most expensive film of all time, in nominal dollars at least. On that budget the gross so far is quite disappointing, although the DVD factor again comes into play and the film will make money in the end. Once again not a huge return on the investment, but not a train wreck either

And that was where we were a week ago. The summer had started in a rather lackluster fashion. Rather worse than last year in fact, when the summer started really well with the X-Men sequel. Perhaps it was true that people were about to stop going to the cinema, and the days of DVD and other home viewing in preference to cinema were upon us.

Still, however, there was one more week before Memorial Day. The film scheduled for that weekend was Dreamworks' Shrek 2, the sequel to the hugely successful animated film of 2001. This was a Wednesday release last week.

It is usual for films in the US to be released on a Friday. This is surprisingly non-uniform across the world. In my native Australia new films are released on Thursdays, and in France they are released on Wednesdays. In Japan they are released on Saturdays. These differences have never been a problem in the past, but it causes occasional problems now that Hollywood is releasing more and more films on the same weekend throughout the world, as it sometimes means (for instance) that the French release would thus be two days before the American release.

However, it has become common in recent years for films expected to do very big business to be released earlier in the week, usually but not always on a Wednesday. That way there can be more tickets sold before the first Sunday (when the first widely publicised box office numbers are published), the studios can go into the first weekend promoting box office records broken on the Wednesday (if that indeed happened) and entertainment news programs can show people in long queues waiting for tickets a couple of days before the main release. (Also, if means that the French and Australian and other releases can go out on their normal days and not pre-empt the American release). And if the film is genuinely good, positive word of mouth can boost Friday to Sunday grosses.

In any event, Dreamworks released Shrek 2 this way last week. The film went out on Wednesday, and grossed $11.8 millon on Wednesday and $9.2 million on Thursday. For a heavily promoted Wednesday release that is good but not great. Dreamworks could only talk about relatively feeble box office records like "Biggest opening day gross by an animated movie opening on a Wednesday". Expectations (including mine) were that the film would gross about $65m over the weekend - "weekend" in Hollywood speak meaning Friday to Sunday.

And what happened? Well, everybody was surprised when the film's grosses went completely off the charts on the weekend. It grossed $28.4 million on Friday, an estimated $44.8 million on Saturday, and a projected $31.1 million on Sunday. Box office results released on Sunday evening don't have any actual Sunday data, but feature a projected Sunday gross based on how previous films with similar box office patterns on Friday and Saturday have done. They are particularly uncertain for films with unusual grossing patterns, and for films with especially high grosses, due to the fact that there are relatively few films with high grosses, and because a 5% margin of error is obviously a larger number of actual dollars if the gross is $50m than if it is $10m. (They are also uncertain if other unusual events happen on Sunday, from the Superbowl to bad weather to a big news story breaking). If a film has particularly good word of mouth, then the actual Sunday gross released on Monday will often turn out to be better than the projection released on Sunday. This is often a good sign that a film is going to be a big hit by the time its theatrical run has finished. And this indeed happened. The actual data released on Monday showed the Sunday number revised upwards from $31.1 million to $34.9 million, which is a stunning result.

So why did the film do so well over the weekend, when it looked like it would not do so during the week? One possibility is simply that word of mouth was extremely good. (Reviews were good but not spectacular, on the other hand. Personally I did not really care for the original film's not very funny Michael Eisner jokes and advance word on this one suggested that it was more of the same). Another is that anticipation was very high, but Dreamworks did a bad job of promoting the fact that the film opened on a Wednesday. Another is that the "animated film" record did mean something, and that parents waited until the weekend before taking their children to see the film. (However, the film did not skew towards family audiences to the extent that some might expect - apparently over the weekend about 60% of the audience was in groups that included children, whereas 80% is more typical for animated films on their first weekend). I can't say just yet. I haven't seem the film. Animated films are one genre that Hollywood is not applying the "day and date" mantra to yet, as they tend to release them during school holidays. (Possibly also they are less concerned with children or parents buying pirated DVDs than they are for young single adults).

In any event, the $108 million that Shrek 2 grossed over the weekend is the second largest three day gross of any film, and only the second time a film has grossed over $100m over a weekend. (The first time was Spiderman's $114.8 million two years ago).

Shrek 2 now stands a real chance of being the highest grossing film of the summer. This would actually be the second year in succession that an animated film had been the highest grossing film of the summer (after Finding Nemo last year). It would also be only the second time ever that an animated film was the highest grossing film of the summer (although The Lion King's grosses would have made it the highest grossing summer film of almost any year of the 1990s other than the year in which it was released (1994), when it grossed very slightly less than Forrest Gump). Shrek 2 is clearly going to gross at least $300m, substantially more than the original. (Finding Nemo's record gross for an animated film of $339.7 m is clearly vulnerable, and $400m is a possibility. Animated films traditionally last at the box office longer than live action films, due to the fact that parents are less likely to feel as concerned with taking their children to see a film on the opening night than are teens and twentysomethings, and due to the fact that children are much more likely than adults to want to see a film more than once. And of course, back in the days of VHS, animated films were a gold mine for Disney especially due to the fact that this was the only segment where VHS tapes were bought rather than rented (as children like to watch the same thing more than once....). This is still true, and animated films still sell stunningly well (although now mostly on DVD). (Possibly the most interesting trend of recent years in Hollywood economics is that most other classes of films have switched from rental to sell through being dominant with the switch from VHS to DVDs, and Hollywood's revenues have risen accordingly).

Given that Shrek 2 had a budget ($70m) that was probably about a third of that of Troy this is going to be one of the most profitable films in living memory.

So what, if anything can we draw from this? There has been lots of discussion lately as to whether the rise of DVDs and the drop in cinema admissions in 2003 were related. Or was it just that the movies weren't very good? At this point in the summer, we don't have much in the way of definite answers. We have two not very good action films, both or which have done only so-so at the box office. And we have one huge box office hit, but an animated movie. After the success of Finding Nemo and now Shrek 2, one theory is that box office is indeed in decline, but that this does not apply to animated films.(Perhaps the late teen early twenties audience of action films has gone away, but the younger (and parent) audiences of animated film have not. The demographics of the Finding Nemo or Shrek 2 audiences doesn't really support this theory though, as it includes the teens and twentysomethings as well as the other demographics). Or it could be just that there have been a couple of exceptionally good animated films released lately, and other films have been less good.

As it happens, we should have a better picture within about ten days. There are two more big summer releases between now and then. Tomorrow we get The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich's utterly absurd "Global Warming is going to flood most of the United States, and then an Ice Age will start, and all by next Wednesday" disaster movie. However, the film is saiid to be spectacular looking. I actually rather like disaster movies, and I think this may be one of my guilty pleasures of the summer. In any event, it has the exact sort of trailer and publicity campaign that appeals to the late teen male demographic that has been missing later. If this film is a big hit, we can pretty much say that audiences are not departing the cinema in a big way, at least not yet. If it is not, well things are harder to figure out. We can just contine concluding that action films haven't been very good lately, and can continue waiting for a better one, which might be Sam Raini's Spiderman sequel over the fourth of July weekend, or perhaps the aforementioned King Arthur a week later, or perhaps the amazing looking Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will finally turn Jude Law into the huge star he has looked like he might become for some time. Or perhaps some other film will be a more unexpected big hit. (If Pixar's The Incredibles over Thanksgiving is the other big hit of the year and the live action relatively fails, then the "animation exception" theory would be picking up more evidence).

My gut feeling is that The Day After Tomorrow will be a big hit - certainly bigger than Van Helsing and Troy but not as big as Emmerich's previous Independence Day. The jury will to some extent still be out.

However, there will be a very big hit the week after. Perhaps the biggest thing that the exhibition industry (ie cinema owners) complained about last year was that there was no Harry Potter movie, for the previous two years the end of the year had featured huge numbers of younger filmgoers coming to see the previous two movies, and spending large amounts of money on drinks, popcorm, and merchandising. The third film was delayed six months due to the production schedule being a bit too tight, and it is finally to be released next week. Director Chris Columbus, who made the first two films, either stood or was pushed aside for the third, and Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron directed the third film. Columbus is basically a hack. He is a competent director who was never going to screw up, but he made rather obvious, very literal films of the first two books. (The second grossed somewhat less than the first, possibly because the audiences had seen everything the first time). Cuaron is a much finer film-maker, probably most famous for Y Tu Mama Tambien, although it was probably his superb (but not greatly watched) 1995 adaptation of A Little Princess that got him the job. (There are certain qualities in his interesting but not entirely successful modern day version of Great Expectations (1998) that may have suggested he was right for the job, too). In any event, all evidence is that he as done a fantastic job of adapting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Advance word is that the film is just great, and I expect it will be a huge hit, probably bigger than either of the first two Harry Potter films. Just the same, this film also skews younger than your typical action movie, and its success still won't tell us if those late teens and early twenties males are still going to the movies.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that in two weeks time the film studios and the cinema owners are likely to be happy, and Variety will be full of articles saying that we are headed for a record summer. That doesn't necessary mean we are going to have a record summer as the demographics of the successful films will not have been those of the general filmgoing audience. And in any event, Hollywood almost always does badly in Olympic years. Once the games start, audiences drop considerably. It didn't really happen in 2000 because the Olympics were later in the year as they were in the southern hemisphere, but it did in 1996 and 1992. And it likely will this year. And in addition, European grosses are also likely to be dampened by the European football championships, which are starting soon. (Ideally, the film studios would prefer the Olympics to be called off because the stadium isn't finished, and for England, Germany, France, Italy and Spain to be eliminated from the football in the first round).

So, inevitably, Hollywood will have found something to complain about by September. It always does.

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This is tragic. Truly tragic. In fact I am extremely surprised that David Carr has not had a chortle about it at least six hours ago:

Today a painful task will begin in Leyton, east London: picking through the remains of a devastating fire which destroyed a huge warehouse containing priceless works of art.

Many of the lost works are from the collection of Charles Saatchi. It is thought that they may include Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell.

Tracey Emin's famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With may be another: the tent appliquéd with the names of her past lovers was the star of the famous Royal Academy Sensation! exhibition and to many became emblematic of the endeavours of a generation of young British artists. "I don't know what specific pieces have been lost," Mr Saatchi said yesterday. "So far it has been a day of many rumours."

The warehouse belonged to Momart, the country's leading art handlers, who undertake storage and transport for the Tate, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, as well as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.

The confusion about which pieces have succumbed stems partly from Momart's uncertainty about what was stored in the building, Mr Saatchi said. Work by Sarah Lucas, famed for substituting parts of the human body with poultry, fried eggs and vegetables in her pieces, was also feared to have been destroyed.

No no no. This was not "devastating". This was an art happening. These people need to dispense with their outdated ways of seeing so-called "reality" and instead look at the world in a new way. This fire did not destroy, it merely moved some objects from one state of being to another … We need to think beyond "specific pieces" to the totality of life ...

As for all this "uncertainty", well, what I say is can one ever really be "certain" about anything? Surely we have learned by now not to seek an illusion of certainty in an inherently uncertain world. There is no certainty. There are only different ways of looking at things. We need to get away from the single point of view, the one fixed, bourgeois way of seeing everything, within one fixed frame … blah blah blah … etcetera etcetera etcetera … insert Carr-isms at will.

Sometimes Modern Art contrives a happening which really hits the spot and grabs the headlines. Sensational or what?

Although, I would advise Buckingham Palace to think about making other arrangements for its art transport needs.

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Michael Moore must surely rank as one of the hottest properties in showbusiness. The guy only has to show up to get an award:

Michael Moore's controversial polemic Farenheit 9/11 became the first documentary for nearly 50 years to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival last night.

The film, which contains scathing attacks on the business dealings of President George Bush as well as the first footage of American soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq, beat off competition from more famous directors, including Wong Kar-Wai, Emir Kusturica and the Coen brothers to scoop top prize.

Moore, who was given a standing ovation by the Cannes crowd, told them: 'I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci.'

So they chose a wanker over a Wong Kar but it is pointless to pretend that there was ever going to be any other outcome. And giving him yet another gold-plated bit of object d'art to place on his buckling mantlepiece is one thing but a standing ovation??!!

In truth this was not merely a nod of recognition but an act of worship by a gathering of the faithful. Nor is this starry-eyed circus any longer about the merits (or otherwise) of any particular manifestation of Moorish propoganda for the detail is irrelevant. It is the 'vibe' that counts.

No, this is not about the films or books of Michael Moore, it is about Michael Moore himself and what the luvvies believe he represents. He is the icon and the muse of anti-everything who tells them what they want to hear and dresses it up as revealed truth. His flock gathers at ceremonies to offer up their tributes and commune with him while he bestows his benedictions upon them.

He is St. Michael of Moore. Peace be upon him and may flowers bloom where he treads.

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Our "Quote of the day" below, links to an information page about a new film called 'Slap her... she's French'.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the title to inquire further and, judging from the serious reviewer, it would appear to be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill, formulaic teen comedy which I shall most likely never see.

But, for some people, it is something far more sinister. Beneath the professional review is a comments box where members of the public (and the clinically insane) can leave their own reviews and where I stumbled upon this hilariously deranged rant:

Hollywood has always been very good at serving Republican propaganda. In the 80's we had brainless flicks such as Rambo 2, Rocky 4 and Top Gun, just to name a few of them.

Since Bush Junior took the presidency in a quite dictatorial manner, his team and him have separated America from the rest of the world at a point never reached before.

From late 2000 till 9/11, they started spreading hateful propaganda against Russia (trying to wake up ghosts of the cold war?) and racist propaganda against Chinese people, calling US citizens not to treat them as full American citizens. Mr. Bush was desperately looking for an ENEMY. Their ARROGANCE and VIOLANCE is matched only by the one of the Islamist terrorists.

On September 11, 2001, he and his team were served the best pretext they could have ever dreamed of, by people as crazy as them. Instead of analyzing the situation in a pro-active way and fighting terrorism cleverly in order to eradicate it, the reacted like dumb, immature, arrogant teenagers and preferred bombing innocent civilians.

The order given to Hollywood was to use the nations preferring peace than war as villains in their industrial products they deliver to the rest of the planet they so ARROGANTLY SCORNED. Part of this was the `French Bashing' of which we have excellent examples in NO-BRAINERS such as "Slap Her She's French" (no comment), `Master&Commander' (In the book, the villains are British. France saved America from the British invasion in late 18th century; remember La Fayette), `Johnny English' (ha, ha, ha, a French King trying to take over the British Queen), `Matrix Reloaded', `SWAT', `Along came Polly', etc.

Let's hope that when Mr. J.F. Kerry has been democratically elected in 2004, this virulent arrogance should come to an end, and America is part of the world again.

But, apart from that, how was the film?

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Something rather remarkable has just happened. I am watching Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and they have just had a serious discussion about how they really did not like the fact that the Government can tell exactly which internet sites you have just been visiting, and read all your emails, and send you to prison if you encrypt them and do not tell them the key, or whatever it is. Baddiel and Skinner never have serious discussions.

A bloke in a beard (of the trimmed sort rather than ZZ Top style) asked a question about this, and instead of him being laughed out of the studio, they found themselves discussing it quite seriously. Bearded bloke was allowed to add a further comment (about the emails). Baddiel in particular seemed quite upset.

Interesting.

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After taking in a movie in Times Square a few days ago, I was suddenly struck by a desire for that most classic of New York City cuisine: the hot dog. I had visions of a fat, juicy frank, smothered in cheese and dripping chilli. I was near drooling at the thought. New York, Coney Island, Baseball, Times Square, Hot Dogs. They are stream of consciousness free associations central to Gotham; icons of the Apple, core Americana.

One can argue whether this was caused by subliminal advertisements placed in 'Troy' by evil global fast food capitalists. Or perhaps it was the recent cable TV ad for 'Girthy' hotdogs starring a beer bellied, back yard barbecuing, flag saluting All American character named Frank. Regardless of the source of this sudden desire there was but one problem.

I could not find any.

Now this is not to say I canvassed every restaurant and fast food place from 42nd and Broadway to 57th and Broadway. Yes, there were probably one or two street carts selling them, but nowhere could I find a place where you could buy a big, sloppy, messy, dripping 'dog and sit down to eat it.

As this was merely a sudden urge and not at all like the biological need for essential nutrients (eg. Diet Coke, Guinness, Starbucks Coffee), I gave up the search upon reaching 'The Moonrock Diner'. Until recently its decor included large photos of the Apollo moon landings. My first ever visit there was for a meeting with a friend who writes extensively on Property Rights in Space. I returned again and again simply because it was cool to sit by a photo of Harrison Schmidt standing by a lunar boulder. I could chortle to myself that I knew the guy in the picture. Think of it as an internalized ego trip.

But enough! I am talking about frankfurters today. As we return to my story we find a burger smoothered in blue cheese has given me temporary amnesia about the apparent endangered species status of Canis Frankfurteris. Only temporary though... we fast forward from Friday to Sunday afternoon.

It was hot and cheerful outside, the streets of Washington Heights filled with multilingual life of a sort I associate with New York more than anywhere else. Nationalities are like sedimentary rocks here. There is an Irish layer; a Jewish layer and a recent heavy wash of Dominican. The day started innocently enough. A few days ago I had spotted 'hot dogs' on the wall menu in a tiny bagel and pizza place. As it has an all Hispanic staff, I had to overcome the language barrier to discover that although 'dogs are on the menu... they do not sell them! A leftover from some prehistoric time I presume. When Hotdogs Rule The Earth.

My resolve hardened. Today was the day. I would go In Search of the Lost Hotdog! I would let no hardship block me from my goal! Perhaps Leonard Nimoy would join me along the way!

Some thirty blocks of walking later I had still found nothing. Mexican, American, Dominican, Chinese, Indian, Deli, EvilCapitalistGlobalist Fast Food, Diners, Burger houses... oh, there were one or two false leads from persons who claimed 'dog sightings on this block or that block, but all ended in failure until an Irish restaurant and pub near 168th. The blond bartendress told me they did not have any. Then, from the dim light a grizzled daytime drinker spoke. He had not only seen the wild hotdog; he knew where to find the best of the breed in all of Manhattan! I simply had to go outside and hop the A train to 72nd Street. I would there find that which I seek.

I rushed to the nearest subway entry only to find the kiosks were temporarily not accepting bills. So, I had to make my way aboveground to the other end of the station near Columbia Medical School where a human could handle the transaction. With that sorted, I found myself doing a grid search of the area about 72nd and Columbus. I passed restaurant after restaurant: places which served food from the far corners of the planet. None had the magical word 'hotdog' on the posted menu's.

I waited in line at an outdoor Tex-Mex so I could ask there. No. No dogs... but the girl told me to go up to 72nd again and one more block over and I would find the holy grail, the Best Hotdogs in Manhattan! I thanked her and moved rapidly despite the very non-Irish afternoon temperature. This was it! I couldn't see the sign but I knew it was near. Half a block away and the scent of hordes of grilling franks already wafted over me.

And there it was! No sign. A queue ran out onto the sidewalk from between the plywood sheets of construction work which hid most of the shop. I waited my turn and then stood at a window counter with my 3 hotdogs with everything... and a very unclassic but lovely papaya juice drink. A New York radio station was playing 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' and all was right with the world.

Papaya King. 72nd and Amsterdam, directly off the '1' train. Remember that. Do your part to Save The Hotdog.

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Last night I watched the latest episode of Make Me Honest, in which Howard, a night club entrepreneur, completely and totally failed to make Lawrence honest. "Lawrence" is a fat young Jamaican conman, born and raised. (Last week I watched the previous episode in the same series.)

Nevertheless, Howard, for all the fatuous optimism that he brought to the project and to a large degree because of it, did a job on Lawrence and on all the other Lawrences who now infest Britain, and on the present pathetically feeble legal arrangements in Britain that make life so easy for all the Lawrences, that was sweetness itself.

As an exercise in trying to rescue Lawrence from the errors of his ways, it was an abject failure, with ABJECT FAILURE stamped all over it, from day one. It was never going to work. But the last laugh in this saga may not be Lawrence's, because Lawrence's true character is now nailed down in video for all the world to see and complain about. Lawrence's life is probably now about to get a lot more complicated and nasty. In short, the tabloid pack will now be after him.

The key to understanding the "mentoring" relationship that is the basis of this programme is that it is entirely voluntary, on both sides. If the mentor gets fed up and give up (as Howard eventually did give up), end of story. If the "mentee" gets fed up and gives up, ditto. So the problem Howard had with Lawrence was how to string Lawrence along. How was Lawrence to be kept interested in the "mentoring relationship", given that Lawrence at no point had the slightest interest in turning over a new leaf, indeed had no understanding of what they would mean? Howard did it by by dangling the prospect of yet more easy money in front of Lawrence by promising to hire him as some kind of night club DJ floor-manager something-or-other, all the while flattering Lawrence that he had what it took, despite the fact that it quickly became clear that he had nothing of the kind. Lawrence, meanwhile, had is eye on stealing Howard's expensive car for a week or two, so that helped as well. If there had been no expensive car, I suspect Lawrence would have disappeared far sooner. Two conmen, in other words, a good one and an evil one, circled each other for the fifty minutes or so of the programme. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Howard's softly softly, one thing at a time approach did nothing to improve Lawrence's morals, but it did ensure that the video footage of Lawrence weedling and boasting, lying and smiling, buying conspicuous consumption items ("bling") with other peoples' credit cards, phoning his conman Jamaican friends to fix for them to do all this, so that he could claim, absurdly, that that he was not doing it, and, when Howard was out of the way, blaming his victims for his own crimes, just piled up and piled up.

So the good news is that Lawrence is now nationally famous as a conman, and the tabloid newspapers will now have him in their sites. Because the result of this apparently completely pointless exercise in non-reform is that there is now enough evidence of Lawrence's total dishonesty on videotape for it to be extremely clear that the only thing to do with this fat, lazy parasite is to put him in prison for really quite a long time, let him out, keep a close eye on him, catch him after his next con (i.e. after about two days of freedom), put him in prison again for even longer, etc. – and repeat until Lawrence dies of disappointment or drug abuse, whichever comes first.

My man Greg Foxsmith appeared again in this programme, in a cameo role as Lawrence's defence lawyer, as did, standing next to Greg, one of the semi-heroes (Mike - with his instantly recognisable terrible British teeth) of the previous episode in which Greg also starred. What this tells me is that Greg's law firm is supplying all the sinners, repentant or otherwise, for this show, and that there is a little clique of creators at work of whom Greg Foxsmith himself is one. It is therefore of even greater significance than I realised last week that politically, Greg is not a centre leftish collectivist, but a centre rightish conservative/libertarian. My belief now is that they all are.

And whereas the political (in the broad sense) message that they got across last week was that individuals – both Greg Foxsmith and the people he was trying to help – can, by their individual efforts, change both themselves and by extension the world for the better, this week the message was: that the law is an ass.

Lawrence, it seems, is known as "lucky Lawrence", because at the critical moment, when a half-sensible legal system would be sending Lawrence to prison for six months, with a stern warning to the effect that if (when) he did it again it would be more like six years, our actually existing legal system would, in the form the risible (in this show anyway) "Crown Prosecution Service" would either lose the papers, or, more basically, simply fail to do the necessary work. Lawrence would walk out of the court, having promised to pay some risible sum of money like £24, happy as could be, a ready at once to embark upon his next piece of thievery.

As a result, Lawrence was so confident of his ability to carry on conning indefinitely, untouched by the law, that he was in the mood to give the camera crew everything they wanted in the way of memorable monologue, given also that he was so very keen to enjoy himself right now that he would sell his soul for a good one-liner to camera, no matter how much trouble it might make for him in the far distant future, like: tomorrow, and: for the rest of his life.

At the risk of yet again upsetting the equilibrium of David Carr by yet again mentioning Charles Dickens, I have to tell you that, yet again, this did all remind me of … Charles Dickens. Lawrence was, at any rate by the time the editors of this programme had finished with his various performances, a classically Dickensian character, in the sense that he embodied certain human characteristics taken to an absurd extremity, and in that he revealed all this with his own highly individual vocabulary and general take on the world. He was, whatever else you might want to say of him, a truly extraordinary character, oozing charm, and then suddenly spewing forth foulmouthed malevolence as soon as anything went wrong and he was not trying to impress anyone. Lawrence being Lawrence, he had quite forgotten about the longer-term consequences of being foulmouthed and malevolent on camera. It was enough that Howard was not present. Amazing! The final scenes, where Lawrence berated Howard for not "trusting" him, when he had spent the previous forty minutes being totally untrustworthy, were quite remarkable. He would, he said, "prove Howard wrong". Somehow I think not.

And the utter absurdity of the legal system in its fumbling efforts to deal with such people as Lawrence was a regular Charles Dickens theme. (And, to link to David yet again, this stuff is, I think, also wondrously Dickensian.)

Our present government has reached the stage in its history, if that is not too portentous a word for something so mediocre and trivial, when blaming everything stupid on the stupidity of the previous government no longer words quite as well as it used to a couple of years ago. Six or seven years, or whatever it is, is long enough to have corrected at least some of the ills of the world. So if such ills as those shown in this programme, and what is more ills that definitely relate to what the present government promised it would administer some kind of cure for (remember "tough on crime - tough on the causes of crime"?), remain obstinately with us, that is clearly the government's fault, and more to the point, it will now be widely seen as the government's fault. Programme's like this one strike at the heart of the New Labour project. It showed a legal system that was weak on Lawrence and weak on the causes of Lawrence. It was weak on Lawrence by letting Lawrence get away with it again and again, and it was weak on the causes of Lawrence - the main one that matters, because unlike the island of Jamaica it can be changed, being that: Lawrence can get away with it again and again – by letting Lawrence get away with it again and again.

That other Howard, Conservative Party Leader Michael Howard, upper class Satanist that he is (or is thought to be), might not be very good at jollying old age pensioners along at photo-opportunities, but he is just the fellow to sack everyone now working for that "Crown Prosecution Service" and replace them with semi-competent people, and hence, eventually, to put Lawrence behind bars for all but about a month of the rest of his worthless life. If Lawrence and all the other Lawerences now roaming our land are between them too fat to fit into our existing prisons system, then more prisons should be built.

British conservative/libertarians wonder gloomily why there has been no British conservative/libertarian media revolution to put alongside the Thatcher political revolution, and to put alongside the Reagan and media revolutions that have happened in the USA. When they say media, what they mean is broadcasting, and in particular TV. Well, this programme is the best, most sophisticated, most cannily crafted piece of deliberately and self-consciously conservative/libertarian TV I have seen in Britain in a very long time, and what is more, I believe it to have been deliberately created, by conservative/libertarians, to achieve exactly the effect that it did achieve. Not least of its virtues was that it did not scream "conservative/libertarian TV" out of every frame, and as a result of that it actually got broadcast.

This could, in other words, be the beginnings of that media revolution, to put alongside the best efforts of Jeremy Clarkson. Conservative/libertarians ought to be able to do better than this and, I am happy to report, they are beginning to.

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For several decades now I have been seeing people I was at school with become semi-famous, the most completely famous of whom is now Richard Branson, with whom I shared a prep school, and even a rugby team for a term. (I was the worst in the team. He was a force of nature whom you really did not want to get in the way of, even then.)

Now, something else along similar lines is happening to me again. I am starting to notice what you might call graduates of the Alternative Bookshop/Libertarian Alliance/Free Market Think Tanks operation of the 1980s. And Greg Foxsmith is definitely a name I recall from those days. He was a customer, subscriber, name I remember in filled in forms, and I think I must have met him quite a few times, although I could not put a face to him until last night. How completely his thinking aligns with mine on all those precious issues, I do not know and do not care, but I would be very surprised if he did not pass the Perry de Havilland metacontext test with some ease. He is, in short, One Of Us.

And last night, Greg Foxsmith was on the telly, and I would have missed it had not a friend (thanks – she knows who she is) rang me and made me watch it. The programme was called Make Me Honest, and if you follow that link and you get to this:

Programme Three: Greg, Carla & Michael - Thursday 6th May 21:00, BBC Two.

Greg, an experienced criminal lawyer, took on two mentees – 21-year-old Michael who had convictions for football violence and theft, and Carla, an ex drug-addict. Greg offered Michael work experience in his own office to help him back into the real world. Greg knew that the first few hours out of prison were crucial for ex-addicts and kept a close eye on Carla and continued to phone her everyday.

With Mike the story was very mixed, and by the end Greg was no longer in touch with him, and was fearing the worst. But Mike had been shown making some progress, and there was definitely cause for hope at the point in the story where the programme left things, as well as foreboding.

With Carla, both the story and the outcome of the story were positively Dickensian, and by "postively" Dickensian, I mean Dickensian, but in a very, very good way.

Charles Dickens is often denounced by the One Of Us team (see above) for recommending such things as the expansion of state welfare and state education. But Dickens is also often criticised by the One Of Them team, for believing in the redemptive power of individual human intervention into the often cold and cruel realities of life, and especially life for the poor, unfortunate, feckless and unhappy. Dickens believed passionately in altruism. But he was much more cautious about collectivism, and refused to criticise individualism.

Foxsmith came over as the best sort of Dickens father-figure/hero, who reached down into the ranks of the doomed and, with the help of the (here) much reviled BBC, gave a couple of them the chance to do better. And one of them definitely did. The thankyou letter that Carla sent Greg at the end, about how she now lived in a nice house with a nice man, instead of wondering where her next fix was coming from, literally brought tears to my eyes.

The help that Greg offered wasn't anything very profound. He set up meetings, and phoned around for people willing to give interviews, and then nagged his two charges to make sure they showed up. If meetings were missed, he squared probation officers by getting his two delinquents to apologise, and by assuring said officers that things were nevertheless going okay. What he did that made the most difference was that he simply took a relentless interest in the two of them. He praised where praise was due, criticised when that made sense, but did neither to excess. He gave them an audience to act good to, a gallery to play to, in a good way.

At no point in these stories was it ever suggested that punishment was not an appropriate collective response to crime. After all, if they faced no punishment, these people would have had far less of an incentive to pull themselves together. Greg Foxsmith is himself a criminal lawyer, and never suggested for a minute that he thought the criminal law to be other than completely necessary.

But nor, for that matter, were we treated to any diatribes from Greg in favour of free market capitalism, or even set piece speeches about individual personal responsibility, either in the sense that people like Greg owed a helping hand to the less fortunate, or in the sense that, in the end, it was up to the less fortunate to make better luck for themselves by behaving more wisely and less self-destructively. But the message that individual action can make a profound difference to the world nevertheless shone through brightly. (Although, caveat, maybe there were such speeches right at the beginning, and I missed them.)

I tend to resist what is called, often very oddly, reality TV. It seems to consist either of pathetic would-be celebs making public fools of themselves, or pathetic would-be Richard Bransons ditto, and all of them being sniggered at by the despicable TV apparatchiks who set them up for all this humiliation. But this was different. This was TV both showing reality, and simultaneously changing it for the better, or at the very least trying to. These programme makers, you sensed, did not despise the people they were filming.

Well done the BBC, and well done Greg Foxsmith. Something tells me that we have not heard the last of this man.

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The notorious right-wing, Reaganite, propoganda machine of Hollywood is crushing the dissent of Michael Moore:

Walt Disney on Wednesday found itself the focus of a controversy over its refusal to allow the group's Miramax studio to release the latest film by Michael Moore, the gadfly Oscar-winning director.

Mr Moore, director of the anti-gun Bowling for Columbine, proclaimed himself a victim of censorship in an open letter on his website on Wednesday that said Disney had this week "officially decided to prohibit our producer, Miramax, from distributing my new film, Fahrenheit 9/11."

According to Disney, the subsidiary's independent-minded managers Harvey and Bob Weinstein were told a year ago that the production, exploring alleged links between the family and government of president George W. Bush and Saudi Arabians, including relatives of Osama bin Laden - would not be allowed into cinemas under a group brand.

A sobering day indeed when even the 'limousine-liberals' of Hollywood decide that Mr. Moore's recipes of fabrication and manipulative agit-prop are too much even for them to stomach.

In his website posting Mr Moore indicated that he intended to keep the controversy simmering. "The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on".

And right there is Mr. Moore's next best-selling book ("Stupid Movie Moguls").

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Here is an excellent piece of political and cultural commentary, about the excellent TV show South Park and its excellent political and cultural commentary, from Michael Cust.

A brief survey of some of the more salient libertarian episodes bears this out:

Episode 713 takes aim at Hollywood director Rob Reiner and the anti-smoking movement. The movement – and especially Reiner – is portrayed as, and called, fascist, controlling, and deceitful, while big tobacco is portrayed as honest, hardworking, and well-rooted in American history.

In Episode 616 drug war propagandists are labelled "ultra-liberals" who operate on the principle that "the end justifies the means."

In Episode 614, political correctness is condemned. When the boys (the main characters) refuse to tolerate their intolerable homosexual teacher, their parents take them to the Museum of Tolerance, where tolerance of everyone (except tobacco smokers) is taught. When this fails, the boys are sent to a gulag called "Death Camp of Tolerance," where they are forced at gunpoint to produce arts and crafts that don’t discriminate along the lines of race and sexual orientation.

In Episode 301, the boys travel to the Costa Rican rainforest as members of an environmentalist choir. While there, they learn how dangerous and deadly the natural world can be – as a snake kills their tour guide and aboriginals kidnap them. Upon their return to civilization, the boys put on a musical performance that admonishes smug first-world environmental activists. (In this episode, Friends star Jennifer Aniston guest stars.)

But this is just scratching the surface of a fruitful and deep social commentary that comes out libertarian on pressing current events. Just about any issue that libertarians hold up as an instance of state excess or market success is portrayed in the show …

All of which is very noble and very true. But what I like about South Park is that it is so damn funny.

What I believe this shows is that "Hollywood" is not nearly as biased against our kinds of opinions as people with our kinds of opinions, who happen to be talentless bores, often claim. It is just that Hollywood is biased against them and against all other talentless bores, for being talentless bores. What Hollywood is biased in favour of, as is often pointed out here - especially by this Samizdatista in these two much admired postings - is making money. If people with our kinds of opinions can help Hollywood to do that, Hollywood will welcome them with open arms.

Hollywood, like Cartman's mother, is a dirty slut.

Cust also has some interesting and provokingly positive things to say about Michael Moore, and about the fact that South Park's Matt Stone contributed (in a good rather than anti-gun way) to Bowling for Columbine.

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I do not understand how this works, but it sounds like fun, or at any rate like a ripple of the future:

A band from Germany has adopted a novel approach to getting their music heard by millions.

Super Smart have turned their backs on vinyl and CDs and instead have decided to just release their album as ringtones.

The album, Panda Babies, is published by a German company that focuses on digital music for mobile phones.

So if there's there is no CD, what does the word "album" mean in this connection? And, if Super Smart are a "band", what is a Super Smart live gig like? A bunch of Germans waving their portable phones at the audience?

The identity of the four-piece from Munich is shrouded in mystery and in photos they appear with giant panda heads.

"Shrouded in mystery" presumably means that Super Smart is actually one person, and anybody can be a Panda for the photo shoots. The individual, by wearing a uniform, is subordinated to the Greater Whole, dominated by one "Super Smart" individual. Germans eh? – they never change. But I suppose much the same could be said of the Wombles.

I have yet to acquire a mobile phone, so none of this will make any difference to me. But I do have some questions. For example: Can mobile phone music play more than one note at a time, or is it like solo violin music without any double stopping? How long can it go on for? Is any of it any good?

And can I buy a compilation CD of mobile phone Greatest Hits?

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Feeling cheerful? Have a read of this:

In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these "surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men's aggressive energies.

"In 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause," says Ms. Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

With luck, if the two armies do go to war, it will be against each other.

Apart from that, what is the answer? Homosexuality via genetic modification, administered with magic gamma rays beamed in by satellites? Male death, ditto? An immediate plan by someone to test-tube a lot of girls, now? Polyandry? When confronting such a problem we generally find that the answers have a way of mutating into grisly restatements of the problem. How can we avoid …?

In the words of Noel Coward, there are, as always, bad times just around the corner, although that song (recently covered with what appear to be somewhat rehashed words by Robbie Williams) was originally only about places like Kettering (where I believe this Samizdatista lives), Hull and the isle of (because it rhymes with Hull) Mull.

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I have not seen The Passion of The Christ, and don't plan to. A friend of mine told me that after a while The Passion just became boring, and I think that is probably how it would be for me. It is not so much that I am opposed to Christianity (although I am), more that I do not like horror movies, although of course part of the reason I am opposed to Christianity is that the crucifixion parts of it are to me a lot like a horror movie already.

But as a movie phenomenon, The Passion is fascinating. Mel Gibson has made a fortune with this movie not because he was trying to make a fortune, but because he was trying not to. He wanted other people to invest in it. But everyone else thought it would be money down the drain, so they refused. So Gibson invested great gobs of his own money, and now he gets this Niagara of profit. From a film about Jesus Christ. The ironies just pile up.

Hollywood also disapproved of the The Passion on ideological grounds, because an accurate presentation of the Gospels version of the crucifixion sets the Jews up, yet again, as the villains of Western Civilisation. The Gospels, as far as Hollywood is concerned, are anti-Semitic. I agree with Hollywood about this. This is yet another reason why I am not a Christian. But none of that stopped Mel Gibson from doing The Passion. The great thing about the free market is that anyone can join in.

Changing the subject only somewhat, I note that James Lileks today ruminates about why there has not been much in the way of movie making about or around the subject of the 9/11 attacks. Basically, he says, the reason is that Hollywood disapproves of what such movies would have to say. Arabs bad. America good. George W. Bush good. Israel not part of the story. And Hollywood does not believe any of that. So, no 9/11.

It would anger people anew, and we're supposed to be past that. It would remind us what was done to us instead of rubbing out noses in what we do to others – I mean, unless you have a character in the second tower watching the plane approaching and saying "My God, this is payback for supporting Israel!" it’s going to come across as simplistic nonsense that denies the reality in the West Bank, okay? It would have to tread lightly when it came to the President, because even though we all knew that he wet his pants and ran to hide, we'd have to pretend and do scenes in Air Force One where he's taking charge instead of crying help mommy to Dick Cheney, right? I mean the idiots in flyover people believe that stuff, and you'd have to give it to them or they write letters with envelopes that have these little pre-printed return address stickers with flags up in the corner. Seriously. Little flag stickers. Anyway, we would have to show Arab males as the bad guys, and that's not worth the grief; you want to answer the phone when CAIR sees the dailies of the guys slitting the stewardess' throats? And here's the big one: if we make a patriotic movie during Bush's term, well, it doesn't help the cause, you know. People liked Bush after 9/11. Why remind them of that? Plus, you can just kiss off the European markets, period.

I think "the idiots in flyover people" should be something more along the lines of "the idiots in flyover states". Apart from that, I think this is a definite part of what is going on here.

In the first version of this posting I asked at this point: why can't some gung-ho pro-war-on-terrorism guys do with 9/11 what Mel Gibson did with the crucifixion? As in: some such people could do with 9/11 what Mel Gibson did with the crucifixion, minus the question mark. Why does "Hollywood" have to agree with this story? Why does "Hollywood" have to make 9/11, any more than "Hollywood" made The Passion? There would, of course, have to be Republicans who know how to make movies, just as Mel Gibson is a Christian who knows how to make movies, and that might be asking a lot. But surely there are some.

But actually I think there is another reason why there is no Hollywood version (or version by anybody else) of 9/11, which is that there already is a fantastically dramatic 9/11 movie, upon which it would be nearly impossible to improve, namely the TV footage that was shot of 9/11 at the time.

Few successful movies have been made about major sporting triumphs, real or imagined. There have been some, but not compared to the number of potential subjects for them, and many of those that have been made have been very bad, mixing movie stars and real sports stars in ways that make you want to cringe.

The obvious contrast here is between sport and crime. Crime is more important than sport. It is, for example, more often a matter of life and death. But there is also the fact that criminals – and the policemen who chase after them – sneak around unfilmed, until Hollywood gets to work. So Hollywood has gone into overdrive about crime, and shows no sign of ever easing up.

Major sporting triumphs, on the other hand, have, by their nature (major equals televised), already been filmed, when they happened. What is there to add?

Sometimes there is a fascinating behind-the-scenes, before-the-race, before-the-fight, after-the-fight, drama, which can make a good movie. But when it comes to big, grand, complicated games like baseball or all the various variants of football, or all the various ways you can race racing cars, what is there to add? Everything of importance has already been shown.

Who needs other stars to rehash the doings of the original stars? Why have some wimp actor redo the life of Jonny Wilkinson during the recent Rugby World Cup, climaxing with Fake Jonny kicking a fake drop goal in the final minutes of fake extra time to clinch the win for England, when there is already perfectly adequate video footage of Real Jonny kicking the real drop goal? You just don't need it.

And that, it seems to me, is the other problem about 9/11. The already shot, as-it-actually happened TV footage of 9/11 is so dramatic that we scarcely need any more stuff to watch. We have already seen the story that matters. We have all of us seen this movie, when it opened with such stunning impact on September 11th 2001.

To put it another way, if the original crucifixion had itself been televised, would Mel Gibson's Passion have even been made, let along been made and been a huge commercial hit? I don't think so.

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Arts & Letters Daily links to two articles, both protesting against the absurdities and cruelties of political correctness.

David Mamet writes in the Guardian in connection with the forthcoming London production of his play Oleanna, the central character of which is a young woman who falsely accuses a man of raping her:

The play's first audience was a group of undergraduates from Brown University. They came to a dress rehearsal. The play ended and I asked the folks what they thought. "Don't you think it's politically questionable," one said, "to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?"

I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn't realise it was my job to be politically acceptable. I'd always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error - in effect, rendered her other-than-human. For if the subject of art is not our maculate, fragile and often pathetic humanity, what is the point of the exercise? And if the writer is capable, why enquire, let alone obsess about his sex? No one ever said of a comedy, "I laughed myself sick until I discovered the sex of the writer."

But as Theodore Dalrymple makes clear, there are limits to the notion that a woman can do no wrong. If the wrong is done to her by her own ethnic minority, and even in particular by a male member of it (her father), then it is all her fault.

… One father prevented his daughter, highly intelligent and ambitious to be a journalist, from attending school, precisely to ensure her lack of Westernization and economic independence. He then took her, aged 16, to Pakistan for the traditional forced marriage (silence, or a lack of open objection, amounts to consent in these circumstances, according to Islamic law) to a first cousin whom she disliked from the first and who forced his attentions on her. Granted a visa to come to Britain, as if the marriage were a bona fide one – the British authorities having turned a cowardly blind eye to the real nature of such marriages in order to avoid the charge of racial discrimination – he was violent toward her.

She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.

I’ve heard a hundred variations of her emblematic story. Here, for once, are instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties – feminism and multiculturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

The silence cannot be preserved. Something has to give. And it is giving.

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Living in a seriously totalitarian country is an experience that someone who has never lived in a seriously totalitarian country inevitably finds it extremely hard to imagine accurately. As with today's religious topic du jour, crucifixion, I can only guess at a tiny fraction of what it must have been like.

As I understand it, each person lives in his little personal, private pod (assuming he gets to live at all, that is). Totalitarianism creates a degree of individualism, if that is the right word, that people in a free country can never experience. This is because you simply cannot afford to allow strangers any glimpse of what is going on in your mind, let alone speak your mind to them. (As for telling the truth to visiting foreigners whom you do not know extremely well … that is absurd.) You can trust nobody out there. Intimate friends whom you do trust, and family of course, are everything in such a world.

Do the true feelings of the people ever express themselves? Well, when the lid is well and truly screwed down, no. But if things do loosen up a little, then there is one kind of event where truth can begin to make itself felt, namely at an artistic event of some kind.

Clearly, you cannot write and perform a play about what total shits the people who rule your country are, (British) National Theatre style, complete with actual names and actual ranks and actual serial numbers, any more than you can found an anti-totalitarian political party and run candidates for public office. But you can perform, I don't know, Hamlet, and give the audience a chance let out a collective gasp or do a round of stifled applause or a burst of muffled cheers when some Shakespeare character just happens to say something about how things are just now.

When Hamlet itemises the rottenness of "Denmark" – "… the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely … the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes …" – there can be a collective frisson saying: yes!!!, and if the authorities complain and want to shut the play down, well, it's only a play by some dead English bloke from long ago, what's the fuss? No, no, no, this isn't politics, this is culture. File under people, opium of the. Besides, what will they think in London and New York and Washington about censoring Shakespeare?

Two recent events reminded me of all this. First, I was a Samizdata dinner gathering not long ago, and I said something about culture under Communism which provoked one of my fellow Samizdatistas into an impassioned speech (based on personal experience) along the lines of what I have just tried to say in the previous few paragraphs.

And the other event which got me thinking about this was, of all things, a CD of some Beethoven piano sonatas, including the so-called Appassionata, No 23 in F minor op. 57.

This is a famous piece and I have heard it literally hundreds of times. I possess lots of CD performances of it, often coupled with such other Beethoven piano sonata favourites as the Pathétique sonata and the Moonlight sonata.

But the trouble with listening to CD recordings of something like the Appassionata is that the very perfection with which the piece is necessarily played when a studio recording is being made does a fundamental disservice to this music. This is music that is out of control, music that is throwing a tantrum, music that makes rage public.

Knowing this, our young piano competition winner with his brand new recording contract strides into the recording studio in a mood to conquer the world, and rips through the piece in a suitably impassioned manner. Excellent, they say. Really excellent. (And it was.) But, they say, could we please do it again? And he does do it again, and again, and again, and then they splice together all the "perfect" bits, and they have their perfect recording. Only trouble is, what they have is not quite the Appassionata any more. It's not rage any longer. It is rage with all the words coming out perfectly. Rage with the spit missing.

But what I found myself listening to the other day was a performance of the Appassionate that made me drop everything and listen in astonishment. It was a recording of a live performance given by the great Russian pianist Emil Gilels, in January 1961. I do not know where it was given, but based on what I do know and what is know about other such performances by Gilels, it was almost certainly given in Russia.

And what a performance it is! Gilels tears into it, and had me listening to it as if for the first time ever.

It really is a weird piece, let me tell you. It is like a classical painting, covered in stab wounds, real ones I mean. Time and again, an infinitely tender phrase right out of the moonlight bit of the Moonlight Sonata (by the way, try the third movement of that as well!), which would normally end with a single chord, is yanked out of itself by the final soft chord being turned into a tantrum of extremely loud chords … and then, as if shushed by an armed policeman, it goes back to another tender phrase as if nothing had happened. Knowing very roughly the kind of world this piece was being played in, and very roughly the sort of lives the people in the audience were living, in 1961, it made me think of beloved relatives snatched away and lost for ever, and of the rage that those left behind felt about what had been done to their loved ones and to themselves.

By 1961 – I'm still guessing – the word was starting seriously to get around about what had been going on and was still going on in Russia. Such horrors were no longer completely private events, in the sense of those subjected to them having no clear idea of what the hell had been happening to the country as a whole. There had been a "secret" speech from Khruschev, which must by then have resulted in all kinds of rumours and compared notes, especially among the kind of people in an audience like this one. The picture was starting to become clear. Mistakes had been made. Errors of Leninist interpretation had been committed. Communism had harmed itself, and The Party had done itself severe damage. It still was not safe to talk about it all, but it was starting to be that everyone knew very roughly what had been going on.

Into such a world, this performance of the Appassionata by Emil Gilels erupted.

It is full of wrong notes, and played on what sounds like a decidedly dodgy piano, and for all I know, the only thing that Gilels was angry about (and by God is he angry) was the fact that it was a bad piano and that by his reckoning he was, notes-wise, having a bit of an off day playing it. It begins with a grotesquely late edit, as if they only just remembered that they were supposed to be recording the damn thing.

And for that matter, the only thing that Beethoven himself might have been thinking about when he wrote the piece in the first place was some spat he had had with a pompous aristocrat who considered himself to be a superior person to him, Beethoven. Or perhaps Beethoven – pathetic self-pitying Beethoven this time – was angry about having been gently but firmly rebuffed romantically (I missed out "the pangs of despised love" from that Hamlet list of complaints above) by one of his aristocratic lady pupils. (They now say that Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, the last, slow movement of which sounds like funeral music for at least a thousand very significant people, was really just Tchaikovsky feeling sorry for himself about being gay.)

But I really do not see how anyone in the audience, that January day in Russia in 1961, could have missed the universal import of this extraordinary piece, and the kind of universal experiences which it immortalises. They would, in short, have completely understood it.

I also possess the official studio recording made by Gilels in 1973 for Deutsche Grammophon, in Berlin. Before setting about writing this, I put that on the CD player as well, to compare and contrast.

As I suspected, the comparison is no comparison. It is the difference between an early evening BBC2 TV documentary about some battle, with a little bloke in gum boots striding about in some fields, in among the cows, talking about it, and … the battle.

The bad news is that this extraordinary performance is, I think, only available in the form of a six disc box set of Beethoven recordings by Gilels. But the good news is that they are all terrific. They include all the piano concertos, the Hammerklavier Sonata and two more sonata discs, and the entire box only cost me a mere £15 in HMV Oxford Street.

Happy Easter everybody, when it finally arrives.

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The other night I finally got around to watching the DVD of Love Actually. And I believe that netiquette demands that I now flag up a "spoilers" warning, for all those millions of Samizdata readers who have not see this movie yet but fully intend to, so that these people read no further and have some of the various plots spoiled for them.

I liked it, on the whole, although I preferred Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary, all of which I thought were quite special. I will probably have another look at Love Actually some time soon, but my first impression of it is that it was just forgettable fun by comparison. In regular romantic comedies, you have a gorgeous hero and gorgeous heroine, but reality is nodded to in the form of a cast of not so gorgeous other people. Not so in Love Actually. Here almost everyone was gorgeous, and almost everyone was indulging in a happy-ending romance. Which meant that reality could not ever be suspended and you could never, even as a pretend Friday night self deception, forget that this was just made up fantasy entertainment nonsense. And that is not so entertaining.

A further source of non-entertainment, for me, was that, wearing my political glasses, I could not help noticing that Love Actually contained a characteristic type of movie political propaganda. Not for the first time in the movies (and that is putting it very mildly) we were presented with a fantasy version of the President of the United States, and what is more a fantasy version which reflects little credit on either its creators or on the audience at whom it was aimed.

Remember that President played by Michael Douglas in The American President? Well maybe not. Maybe you do not care for romantic comedies and prefer your movies to have more action and fewer discussions about which flower is the state flower of Virginia. But I did see that movie, and I recall that President Michael Douglas was several notches to the left of Clinton in his politics (i.e. gung ho for the whole global-warming ban-car-exhausts thing and gung ho against private gun ownership), but that in his personal conduct (i.e. his sex life) he behaved impeccably.

The Republicans, however, in the person of wicked Richard Dreyfuss, attacked this American President just as they actually attacked the real American President when that movie was first shown, President Bill Clinton.

But the Republicans did not, in reality, attack Clinton's in reality not very left wing at all and hence rather unattackable politics. They went instead for Clinton's in reality extremely sordid sex life.

In other words, the Republicans in The American President behaved as they had for real, but this time with no excuse and despite the fact that this time it made no sense. Despite the fact that President Michael Douglas was politically very vulnerable and personally untouchable, they attacked him on personal rather than on political grounds. They mostly ignored his (presumed popular) left wing opinions (apart from a few complaints about Annette Bening burning a flag twenty years ago), and instead attacked his (still presumed sordid by warped Republican standards but in reality blameless to Republicans as to all others) sex life. Clinton supporters in the audience (and most of the audience for this particular genre of movies would appear to be left of centre, if they are anything at all politically, judging by all the political assumptions such movies have embedded in them) were thus able to wallow in righteous indignation not just at the badness of Republicans, but also at their factual wrongness and political absurdity. The excuse for pandering thus to the Democrat demographic is that this is fantasy, just a happy little date movie, a night at the cinema, and they are the people who will mostly be watching the movie. But this was fantasy touched with serious, in reality, self-deception. It was a window into the warped thinking about the nature of Republicans of the average Democrat supporter.

It says quite a bit about American political culture that the writer of The American President, Aaron Sorkin, then went on to write The West Wing.

Not that any of that stops me from like The American President very much. Michael Douglas and Annette Bening were between them almost enough to make me love the Tokyo Treaty, gun control, and girls being christened Sydney.

In Love Actually, the American President appears only as a cameo, played by Billy Bob Thornton. But this time he is a mirror image of President Michael Douglas. This time he is the personification of everything evil, both politically and personally. Politically, his stance towards Britain is "here is what we want and if you get in our way fuck you", without any attempt to explain that what the actual American President now wants and is determined to get might actually make some sense, or any suggestion that Americans are capable of being polite while being firm. Plus President Billy Bob Thornton makes a Clintonian lunge for Downing Street tea lady Martine McCutcheon, already the object of the affections of Prime Minister Hugh Grant. (President Bush has been much criticised, but never, so far as I am aware, for making random passes at the help, and I don't believe that even Clinton would have behaved like this at Number Ten Downing Street, although I could be wrong about that.)

Anyway, PM Grant gets jealous and proceeds then to denounce President Billy Bob in public, thereby trashing the Special Relationship, to assumed universal (i.e. Emma Thompson) approval, but which had me fearing for the future of my country. Once again, a national leader lunges leftwards, Michael Douglas style, and that is supposed to be a happy ending.

All of which just added to the sense of unreality of the whole thing, and made it that much less enjoyable.

I recall critics mostly trashing this movie. The left of Blair politics of it didn't save it in their eyes, I guess because as far as they are concerned Hugh Grant can do no right. They damned the movie with faint praise by saying that only the couple who met by being nude body doubles together were any good or any fun. But the bloke in this particular duo claimed to have had a job earlier as Brad Pitt's body double, and he would have looked about as convincing doing that as I would. Nevertheless, a nice idea.

And a nice little movie, despite its (for me) sneaky politics. There were lots of good little scenes I have not mentioned, my favourite one that I will now mention being where the idiot English bloke, who goes to America because he imagines that over there, gorgeous chicks (last spoiler warning!) will love him, gets everything he dreams of. This is played most entertainingly, with what is rapidly becoming his trademark goofy grin, by this guy.

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Stephen Pollard publishes an honest obituary to British actor Peter Ustinov:

I have tried to fathom how else a man with Ustinov's record of excusing tyrants and defending tyranny could have been so eulogised. The butchers of Tiananmen Square, Stalin, Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam: he defended or gave succour to the lot.

There were some people he did want to convict, though: businessmen. "The formation of the committee for the World Criminal Court is very important because there are corporations more powerful than many governments." Stalin: OK; business: criminal; al-Qaeda and the US: moral equals. Murdering Chinese dissidents: good; removing tyrants: bad. That was the world view of Sir Peter Ustinov, "humanitarian".

And now for sanitised BBC version:

He worked as an ambassador for charity Unicef, whose executive director Carol Bellamy said: "The children of the world had no greater champion."

And neither did its despots and thugs.

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My friend Bernie emailed me with the link to this short Radio Times film review of The Godfather, shown last night on Channel 5. Spot the anti-capitalist bit.

This crime drama and its 1974 sequel are among American cinema's finest achievements since the Second World War.

The production problems are well documented — how Paramount wanted a quickie, how Francis Ford Coppola came cheap and how he turned the picture into an epic success, a box-office hit that was also an artistic triumph.

His first masterstroke was casting Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, four relative unknowns and one known risk; his next masterstroke was to keep cool under fire, like Michael Corleone himself, turning Mario Puzo's pulp novel into art and showing how capitalism and crime go hand in hand.

It's thrilling, romantic, tense and scary – a five-course meal that leaves you hungry for more.

"… capitalism and crime go hand in hand." Another of those implied solutions that dare not spell itself out clearly. Wanna get rid of crime? Rub out capitalism. But if thus challenged, the anti-capitalist replies: "but I never said that". If unchallenged (which is how most readers will get the message), he did say it.

This is why we need our own publications, to edit out sneaky little innuendoes like that, and to insert our own.

It would be truer to say that the legal creation of victimless crimes goes hand in hand with crime, and that the state (a) claiming a universal monopoly in the supply of law and order but then (b) not supplying it anything like universallly goes hand in hand with crime.

Will this get a link from Biased BBC?

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One of the great pleasures and advantages of living in Pimlico, in central London, is its proximity to one of the world's great art galleries, The Tate, a fine classical building looking over the Thames. Recently my girlfriend and I went around two separate exhibitions and had two contrasting experiences not far different in extremes from the North Pole and the Sahara Desert.

The first exhibition was a display of Pre-Raphaelite art, from that group of talented, romantic and at times eccentric group of artists in the middle of 19th Century England. They took their inspiration, as the word pre-Raphaelite suggests, from the Renaissance artist Raphael. Some of them were intensely religious, while others took a passionate interest in the natural world.

I must say I have mixed reactions to their art. Some of the paintings, particularly the coastal seascapes and the depictions of the Swiss Alps, were stunning. Others, while rendered with incredible attention to detail, left me rather cold. There is something almost rather mannered about this art, as if it was produced by someone trying too hard to impress. On the whole, however, I could not fail to be struck by the descriptive lust of these artists, their desire to convey the world as they saw it and as it could be.

And then, after a slurp of wine - we were at a private viewing - we set off to another part of the Tate for an altogether different experience, namely, a selection of 'art' (I will explain the inverted commas a bit later) by some of the world's newest artists, including the so-called enfant terrible of the Brtitish art establishment, Damien Hirst., and Sarah Lucas, about whom I had not heard before.

Some of the exhibits featured dead animals inside tanks containing fluids, bits of sausages, live fish, a brain, bottles of wine, a bucket, and other bits and pieces I could not readily identify. Two exhibits were models of people undergoing surgery, with nothing showing apart from their genitals. Several large oval-shaped boards were covered with hundreds of dead butterflies. An empty full-size truck cab, plastered in its interior with tabloid newspapers, had a man's arm pumping up and down in a familiar sexual act. In fact, several exhibits seemed to portray human bodily functions, as if the exhibits had been assembled by a sniggering, slightly conceited 12-year schoolboy trying to shock his elders.

I will not deny Hirst and others like him are folk with a certain talent. They are talented in much the same way that pickpockets can be said to be talented. But to what effect? So much of his art seems to shout, "I am taking the mickey out of you stupid, repressed middle class wankers"......No doubt Hirst thinks he is being ever so clever and subversive, and judging by the large audiences for his work, he probably is. What perhaps is forgotten is that the image of the artist as the mocker of bourgeois sensibilities, far from being daring and new, is in fact very dated, and bang in line with the ethos of the Modern Art establishment. They are the bores of our age.

There you have it. About 150 years from the Pre-Raphaelites, we have gone from the ability to portray nature with passionate concern for accuracy, and an essentially warm embrace of human life, to lumps of meat in tanks, and to images of human beings sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. Perhaps these folk really have caught the meaning of Blair's Britain, after all.

Addendum: if you are as disgusted as I am by the bogus nature of much modern art, but cannot always put that disgust into words, then I strongly recommend the book, What Art Is, written by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi. It unashamedly defends representational art, questions whether certain forms, such as abstract painting, really can pass muster as art, and perhaps controversially, argues that photography does not pass the test. I do not agree with everything in the book but it is well worth the attention.

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Jack Vettriano may sound like a Sicilian mobster but, in fact, he is this country's most popular and successful artist.

Born in Scotland, he started out his working life as a mining engineer before a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolour paints for twenty-first birthday. He taught himself to paint and embarked upon a career as an artist. Today, reproductions and prints of his work massively outsell those of Monet and Van Goch and originals hang in the collections of the wealthy and famous (making Vettriano pretty wealthy and famous himself).

Only the Deepest Red

Vettriano's deeply evokative work is rich in art deco erotica noir: elegant, sexy and (in this day and age) subversive. While many artists use a canvas to tell a story, Vettriano uses his to write a seductive novel full of unambigiously masculine and feminine characters.

In short, Jack Vettriano is a Capitalist Hero. He has used his gifts to make art which enchants, engages and enriches people's lives to his (and their) benefit.

And it is for those very reason that, in certain circles, he is so loathed:

Prints of his paintings outsell those of master impressionist Claude Monet, making Jack Vettriano a very rich man. But he is still stung by the disdain with which the art establishment treats him.

"I would be lying if I said that some of the things they have said over the years haven't bothered me. They have," he told Reuters. "They have a fairly arrogant stance."

"There is jealousy, envy, the fact that they had nothing to do with training me, and the fact that I am popular. All of these things fuel their attitude," the self-taught former Scottish coalminer said in an interview in his London studio.

The reason he is so good is most assuredly because these people had no part in his training. Nor should Mr. Vettriano take their naked contempt as anything other than the finest compliment. It is, per se an affirmation of his quality.

What he refers to as the 'art establishment' in this country is actually a tax-funded clique of 'gatekeepers' whose power rests on their self-defined status as members of an aesthetic order that is way above and beyond the 'crass populism' of genuine creative endeavour. This avant-garde elite live by their grip on state purse-strings and if you can find significance and 'art' in a jarful of pickled dogturds, so much stronger is your claim to membership of this 'Priesthood of Understanding'.

It is in their interests to perpetuate the myth that without government funding there will be no art or culture. The success of Jack Vettriano is a standing refutation of that myth. Small wonder that they despise him.

So Jack Vettriano paintings will continue to change hands for huge sums of money while the scions of the Royal Academy refuse to touch his work with a bargepole. Good. I like it that way. And so should Mr. Vettriano.

However, for fans (and for those who have yet to discover him) the Portland Gallery in London is mounting an exhibition of Jack Vettriano's work starting on June 19th Next.

I will be there (along with thousands of others).

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Yesterday evening I was channel hopping by way of relaxation and chanced upon a UKTV History programme about the Cold War, and in particular about the doings and sayings of the rocket scientists. (Here is the UKTV History home page, but I can find no internet reference to this particular programme.)

The programme seemed fairly good, on the whole, but towards the end of it there was one glaring – not to say outrageous – non sequitur.

We had reached the Star Wars phase of the story. US and Soviet rocketeers had been shadow boxing for a couple of decades, and the Americans, in the person of President Ronald Reagan, decided that the time was now right to put and end to this thing. Rockets are particularly vulnerable just when they are taking off and just after they have taken off. They are then highly visible, because this is when they make their greatest commotion (until they strike!), getting themselves up to speed and up into the sky. So, said the Americans, let us zap them at this point, with laser beams and such like.

The bewilderment of the Soviet strategists and scientists was described vividly, with quotes and interviews with their rocket men, military and scientific. We simply did not know what to do, they said. They needed a national effort, in which the entire resources of the Soviet economy were brought to bear on the problem, the way they had mobilised their entire economy to get them seriously into the rocket race back in the fifties and sixties, first scaring the Americans into building the Minuteman rocket (much quicker to launch and much more accurate than their previous efforts) and then matching the Minuteman with their own version (the Minuteman's plans presumably having been stolen by them, although that was not discussed at all). Well, now they needed to counter Star Wars with their own version.

Trouble was, they simply could not. This was an arms race they just did not have the resources to win.

And at this point in the story, the programme announced that 'politics' then took over. We will never know, they said, if Star Wars would have worked, or if it would have done any good, because, thanks to 'politics', the USSR retired gracefully from the field and the Cold War ended, seemingly of its own accord.

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, or rather, what I was not hearing.

At no point was it even discussed whether the fact that they were going to lose the next phase of the Cold War, had it continued, and that they knew that they were going to lose it, had it continued, had any bearing whatsoever on the decision of the USSR's leaders to quit the entire contest. No, there was no connection. A connection was not even denied. It was simply ignored. Rockets is rockets and politics is politics, and they have no connection with each other. Rockets (bad) kept the Cold War going. Politics (good – and in the form of an 'internal' Soviet collapse/decision-to-quit that had nothing to do with the external pressures the Soviet system was being subjected to by its adversary) ended the Cold War.

Yet the evidence that there was a very close connection between Star Wars and the Soviet collapse had all been assembled by this same programme. The evidence that what the programme then said about Star Wars was a fatuous lie had all been presented to us, just before the lie itself was presented.

If the Soviet rocket scientists had been queueing up to say; "We were winning! We were stabbed in the back by our damned politicians!", well, that might have counted for something. But they did not say that. They said: "We were losing! We had lost! It was all over!"

This was bias of a very particular sort. It was not cunning, seriously duplicitous, well crafted bias, with any evidence that might undermine the lie being told being quietly suppressed. No, this was extremely public wrong-headedness bias, barefaced, public stupidity bias. Had they hung a big sign on the show saying: "this is totally biased", it could not have been more obvious or more risible.

What, if anything, were they thinking?

My guess is that the people who made this programme were so completely eaten up with the notion that Ronald Reagan was a buffoon of no significance to anything whatever, who was by his very nature – Republican, B movie actor, rabid anti-communist, etc. – incapable of doing anything even vaguely smart or well-timed or well-executed, let alone anything as portentous as, you know, Winning the Cold War – that they just were unable to consider the possibility that he did just this, and on purpose and that Star Wars was all part of it.

And I further believe that the UK History people believed similar things of the American rocket scientists, the men whom Reagan unleashed – along with many other highly competent Cold Warriors in all kinds of other places and with all kinds of other skills. Oh sure, these guys knew how to lob bits of metal and explosive hither and thither, and to fake up pretty laser beam videos. But when it came to actually thinking through what the larger consequences of their gizmos might be for anything or for anyone, well, that was obviously beyond their one-dimensional brains to grasp and is a job for people such as those who work at the UK History channel. We get the wider picture. They do not.

But rocket science? Is that not supposed to be rather difficult? Do you not have to be rather clever to do this?

They did an interview with Jerry Pournelle, for heaven's sakes. Is he just some dumb fuck rocket guy with no grasp of the wider picture? The pronouncements of Edward Teller, both as an old many being interviewed, and as a younger man arguing his corner when in the thick of the action, were prominently featured. Did he give no thought to the wider picture? Well yes, but the thoughts of a man like that are so obviously wrong that they were obviously wrong. I guess.

Idiots.

As I believe Ronald Reagan himself said: It is astonishing what you can accomplish if you do not mind who gets the credit.

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Trafalgar Square is located at the geographical centre of London and, next to 'Big Ben' and the Houses of Parliament, it is probably this country's most famous landmark.

Named after the 1805 battle, the Square is dominated by a 200 foot column on top of which is perched a bust of the Horatio Nelson, the Admiral who let the Royal Navy to victory over the French and thereby saved Britain from Napoleonic invasion. The column that bears his name and image was built from donations offered up in tribute by a grateful nation.

In the four corners of the Square there are four plinths. Three of them are occupied by statues of King George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock. The fourth plinth is empty and has been since around the middle of the 19th Century.

A few years ago I became vaguely aware that there was something of a campaign to find an appropriate monument to place on the fourth plinth. I say 'vaguely' because I paid little attention to this campaign, partly because I have better things to do with my time and partly because I learned that the process was to be decided by means of a competition under the auspices of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. I anticipated that I would most likely disapprove of the outcome.

My instincts proved trustworthy yet again for, this last week, the winner was unveiled.

As you may already have guessed from the image, Ms. Lapper has never led anyone into battle nor has she ruled a kingdom. Instead, she has managed to bear a child despite being quite severely disabled.

Apparently, this makes her worthy of iconic status. Or, perhaps that should be ironic status, as the sculptor (someone called Marc Quinn) explains:

The artist, Marc Quinn, says the 15ft marble sculpture of Alison is an antidote to the men in Trafalgar Square. He wants to introduce some femininity among Landseer's lions, because he believes Nelson's Column is the epitome of a phallic monument. After 160 years during which no one could decide what to put on the fourth plinth, this is a victory for women.

I was not aware that anyone was clamouring for an 'antidote' to the triumphal Nelson or the glowering Charles Napier but nonetheless Mr. Quinn's testimony is valuable because it gives us an insight in to the reasons why 'Alison Lapper, Pregnant' so appealed to the Social-Working Classes who were running this operation. They wanted, no needed to find something sufficiently post-modern, post-British, non-judgemental, diverse, inclusive, multi-this and inter-that and what could possibly fit the bill more sweetly than a pregnant, disabled artist of no particular note or renown. She is just too deliciously deconstructionist to warrant anything other than pride of place.

As per usual with these things, the unveiling has been accompanied by a wave of breathless, excitable mummery about 'representing 21st Century Britain' and so forth but this carving is not about the future, it is about the past. More particularly it is about rudely and pointedly rejecting the past. As much as the organisers might like to think of themselves and their project as 'new' and 'bold' and 'different' there is, in fact, a wearily familiar pattern here.

New regimes that have triumphed over old regimes often have it within their gift and their desire to physically erase all symbols of that old regime from the landscape. It would not, therefore, surprise me in the least to discover that the Mayor of London had at least toyed with the idea of removing Nelson and Napier and Co and having them shipped off to be broken up. Possibly they felt that the time was not yet right for such radical surgery. More likely the cost was prohibitive. But if they cannot destroy the symbols of the past then they can at least desecrate them and desecration is precisely the function of 'Alison Lapper, Pregnant'.

I have no desire to be disparaging to Ms. Lapper herself. I do not know this woman but I do sympathise with her for the struggle she has to endure to her unfortunate disability. I wish nothing but well for her and her family. However, her representation does not truly have the power that her sponsors hope it will have. She has not sufficient moment or significance around which a new identity can be forged. In fact, I am confident now, that Nelson will still tower over Central London when her craven image has been toppled from its pedestal and sold for scrap.

Nelson and Napier were not just war heroes and grand imperial adventurers. They were members of the then ruling class and their statues are symbols of the ruling order; spatial representations of their imperial grandeur and permanent reminders of who was boss. 'Alison Lapper, Pregnant' is precisely the same thing. It is a symbol of conquest commissioned by members of a new ruling class to remind the public of exactly who now has power over them. She will only last as long as they do.

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I was and am a devout anti-Communist. I rejoice that civilisation won the Cold War, detest the evil folly that was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-decrepitudism, and regret that the Russian Revolution was not strangled at birth. But (and you could hear that coming couldn't you?) as far as I am concerned, Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 ("A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism") to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin's denunciation of him, I don't think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called 'crossover' music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death – while it was being composed, and whenever you listen to it. Stalin turned Shostakovich into a kind of musical gladiator, a man who knew that every day might be his last. Not many composers get that kind of intense attention.

One of my little hobbies is giving career counselling advice, and like many career counsellors, I often ask people: what would you do today if you knew that today was to be your last day on earth? The point being that the guy would live well. He would do the things that mattered to him most, that he most believed in, that he was meant to do, so to speak. In religious language (in which as an atheist I am not fluent), he would do what God had put him on this earth to do. Stalin created those circumstances for Shostakovich for real.

How does an artist function if he lives permanently on Death Row? Most would have buckled, but Shostakovich functioned very well. He was a naturally nervous man. Indeed, someone should write a narrative song about the life of Shostakovich with the chorus "and Dimitri Shostakovich was a very nervous man" at the end of the each verse, the point being (a) that this was his nature, but that (b) the course of his life gave him a hell of a lot more to be even more nervous about. What Stalin did was to make sense of Shostakovich's life, to pull it all together. Stalin gave external validation to Shostakovich's own natural disposition. He made his life much less enjoyable, but he made it count for far more.

None of which could possibly have happened if Shostakovich had actually been killed by Stalin, as Stalin killed so many others. Death Row is not Death Row if nobody actually does die.

Enjoying the music of Shostakovich is the moral equivalent of making use of the research discoveries made by Nazi experimenters in concentration camps who studied how people died by killing them.

All that intensity and consequent intense meaningfulness, if that's what it was, was paid for with an ocean of the blood of other artists, of other human beings. Still, it is worth pointing out that some good did come of all the horror. The price was absolutely not worth paying, but given that it was paid, I am glad there is something to show for it.

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Samizdata's commentariat sometimes irritates, but I generally find that when I ask it a technical or factual question, then in among the waffle I get good and pertinent answers, and now I have another question, concerning copyright. It was provoked by a phone conversation between me and Findlay Dunachie (who is a real person and who does live in Glasgow) about culture (harking back to my posting about that talk I am to give), by which we both meant music, pictures, etc. (rather than the incoming tide of brown people that threatens to bring all of civilisation to a standstill). I said I was interested in … whatever it was, and Findlay replied that, on the other hand, one of the cultural things that particularly interested him was why, although we can all now own cheap CDs of great symphonies and concertos and operas and oratorios, we cannot drop into a museum and view full size, electronic reproductions of all the world's great artistic masterpieces. Why cannot museums get that organised? Is it original object fetishism? Are we only staring at vast sums of money when we look at paintings, so would copies not count?

I do not know anything like all the reasons why this cannot or does not happen. But here are some guesses.

Good copies of great paintings are technically quite hard to contrive, especially at full size. There is a comment about that from Alan Little on this Brian's Culture Blog posting, which was about colour variations between different electronic versions of the same painting on the internet, and about the closely related matter of colour variations between different computer screens.

Also, there does seem to be a difference between, say, my willingness to pay £5 or even £10 for an old recording, and my utter unwillingness to pay as little as 5p for an electronic copy of the Mona Lisa to stare at on my cheap computer screen. Maybe there are actually plenty of fabulously good copies out there, but at a price, and I am a cheapskate. And maybe I am not the only one. But even if all that is true, you would think that museums could do deals amongst themselves to get around all that. So maybe us punters do only want to see the originals, no matter how great the potential copies.

But, and this is where I have a specific question to which I seek a specific answer, I rather think that there is another inhibition at work here. Pictures stay in copyright for ever, unlike sound recordings.

It is perfectly possible for a business like Naxos Historical to flourish, and it does, no matter how much its very existence may enrage the great recording enterprises whose recordings it (perfectly legally) makes use of, after the passing of only a few decades (my understanding being three, but maybe the Europeans will change/are changing/have changed that to five). But no matter how many decades elapse, with pictures it is different. With recordings, after a few decades, all bets about the legality of copying are off. With paintings, no matter how long ago – how many centuries ago – they were painted, all those bets remain on. And it is the same with imagery of any kind, that is to say with photographs (which are a more exact equivalent of sound recordings than paintings are).

The central question to which I seek a definite answer is, simply: is that right? I have been running my Culture Blog now for well over a year, and I am rather ashamed that I still do not even approximately know the answer to this question about the legality of image copying, but better late than never.

There is also the question of whether the legal facts of image copying ought to be the legal facts. Is what now happens right? In general, and assuming that I am very roughly right about this, what on earth is the justification for treating imagery so extremely differently from sound recordings? I am sure that there are good reasons for this sharp difference, but I have never thought about what they might be, and it is time I did.

My thanks in advance to any commenters.

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In just over a week's time I am to give a talk in Brussels, courtesy of the Centre for the New Europe, on the subject of Why Libertarians Don't Talk About Culture - And Why They Should.

When you are extremely grand, you let things like this come and go with no comment from you other than the occasional "oh yes, that, yes, I think it's on the fifteenth, I'm not sure" (it is on the fifteenth), or "oh that, yes, I'd forgotten all about it". But if you are me, you make the most of these sort of invites. If I don't tell everyone I am doing this talk, who else will?

Here is the blurb I sent to my hosts about it:

Libertarians don't believe in either subsidising or censoring cultural activity, so for libertarians it often doesn't matter what they personally think about any particular cultural object or enterprise. Good or bad, it should neither be encouraged nor prohibited by the political process. So long as you don't infringe against the rights of others, you can enjoy "culture" any way you like, or in no way at all.

For collectivists on the other hand, the goodness or badness of a particular cultural enterprise is a burning issue, because the collective must decide what sort of culture to encourage or discourage. So, they talk about culture a lot.

The result is that libertarians often appear philistine, shallow and one-dimensional, while collectivists can seem far more cultured and attractive. So, we libertarians ignore culture at our peril.

I have already ruminated on this topic here, in this posting, and the blurb above owes much to those ruminations.

Maybe another reason why libertarians are a little reluctant to talk about culture is that we fear that quarrels about inessentials, like how good the Lord of the Rings really is, are liable to undermine team spirit amongst us to no purpose. That is a mistake, I think, but maybe some libertarians feel that.

I think that the claim in part one of my talk's title, that libertarians do not talk about culture, may now be becoming obsolete. With the Internet, blogging etc., we libertarians now have a means of chatting away about movies and literature and stuff, in a very congenial and magazine-like setting, yet without all the bother of anyone having to put together an actual magazine – which is a total nightmare compared to running a blog. The reason we used not to talk about culture was simply that it was too difficult. It was all we could manage to bang away with our core agenda. Now, simply, we can do culture talk, and we do.

Well, those are my thoughts so far. Does anyone here have anything else to say about all this? I would really welcome the input.

UPDATE: This very recent comment on this posting might have something to do with why libertarians don't discuss cultural themes. When they do, they get denounced by people saying things like this:

What does this have to do with libertarianism? I come to this blog to read libertarian views and issues, not artistic commentary.

This, to me, is a perfect example of a libertarian (if that is what Telemachus is) being boring and philistine.

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Last night I actually went out, to a cinema, to see a film, with some friends. No pause button, no stopping if bored, no incoming phone calls, no life at all, except watching and listening to and thinking about the film. And then after that, sparkling conversation, in a restaurant. Very peculiar. Very delightful.

The film was The Barbarian Invasions, which was the movie that got the Best Foreign Film Oscar (just as Michael Jennings hoped it would) on account of Lord of the Rings Part 3 (and I seem to recall someone thanking Lord of the Rings 3 for this on Oscar night itself) not having been a foreign film.

Preliminary googling while I gathered my thoughts about this movie got me to this review of the movie by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian back in February, which is one of the most fatuously wrong-headeed pieces of writing I have ever had the good fortune to read and laugh out loud in amazement at. Bradshaw gets hold of the stick all right, but at totally the wrong end.

The story concerns a bunch of reunited lefties left over from an earlier film, which I haven't seen, one of who is a certain Rémy, who is now … well, let Bradshaw tell it:

Rémy is now grown into his 50s and hospitalised with a fatal tumour in his home town of Montréal, insisting on state care and railing against the barbarians of philistinism and extremism destroying the world. His wealthy merchant banker son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), described by Rémy as a "puritan capitalist" in contradistinction to his own "socialist hedonism", is still angry with him for breaking up the family home but is nevertheless prevailed upon to return to his bedside, and the slow process of reconciliation begins; Sébastien gets on his mobile to reassemble all Rémy's old friends and lovers.

So far so good. Nothing wrong with that. That is what happens. But now Bradshaw careers ludicrously off the rails:

We are supposed to think that they're adorably life-affirming, unreconstructed old scamps, but I have never seen a more charmless and conceited bunch. The young second wife of one is giggled at (behind her back) for her large breasts; her husband defiantly responds (in her absence) that she has, at any rate, given him two children and makes him "hard as a bull with a brush of her hand". Such gallantry.

No we are not you cardboard brained moron. We are supposed to think that they are extremely imperfect human beings, part charming old scamps and part selfish, self-indulgent, home-wrecking idiots. Which they are. They are shown being charming, and being charmless and conceited and immoral, just like real people in other words.

These horrible people are exceeded in smugness only by Sébastien, who bribes unionised staff to get his dad a private room away from the other poor saps. From the junkie daughter of Rémy's ex-mistress, he coolly procures street heroin to ease Rémy's final hours - thus revealing the movie's naivety about what money can buy, and at what risk.

And that reveals your naivety about what money can buy, matey, and about just how competent a competent capitalist can be when he sets to work to accomplish something. Are you saying you can't bribe people with money, or get drugs with money? Are you saying that everyone who does buy drugs gets caught and punished? Are you saying that welfare states don't degenerate into Third World enclaves of corruption and chaos and incompetence and economic irrationality, within which bribery – and threats, which Sébastien is too morally upright to resort to – are the only ways to get sanity and good service? Yes you are, you pompous, ignorant ass. Sure, you need a lot of money to bribe people safely, but the whole point of Sébastien is that he has a lot of money and more to the point the ability to make an ocean more of it. Sébastien is actually the opposite of smug. He is simply calm and methodical and careful, which is all part of why he is so good at making money and at bribing people.

Unlike Bradshaw, who is … I was going to say totally fucking useless at what he does, but that is not right, because he does describe this film fairly accurately, and makes his total misunderstanding of it clear for all to read, and even deduceable by many who have not seen it. Bradshaw is like those charming, charmless friends of Rémy's. He is flawed and human, getting some things reasonably right and other things severely wrong. He thinks that this film is ludicrously over-rated because he has a completely wrong idea of what it is actually about.

What gives? Probably a political disagreement with Denys Arcand, the maker of this film. Bradshaw simply doesn't want to be told the unwelcome truths about actually existing socialism and actually existing socialists that Arcand is so determined to face. Charmless socialists? That cannot be. That Arcand actually meant these particular socialists to be rather charmless (for a lot of the time) seems never to have entered Bradshaw's one-dimensional head.

As for all those home truths about socialised medicine, well, again, Bradshaw just doesn't want to have to face all that. It is hard to tell whether Bradshaw is a pompous right winger (who doesn't want films sending the wrong message about drugs) or a pompous left winger (who can't recognise rueful socialist self-criticism even when it is staring him in the face). A bit of both, I rather suspect. In practice, it makes little difference.

On the other hand, you can see why I, a libertarian, would love this film. Basically, Denys Arcand is saying that the future belongs to me. Arcand celebrates Rémy's "sensuality", and general love of life, love, sex, art, etc., just like a libertarian. But he notes the utter failure of socialist economics, and the excellence – both institutionally and personally – of capitalist economics and of capitalists, in the work and person of Sébastien, again, just like a libertarian. Arcand reckons Rémy and Sébastien can both teach each other a thing or two about life, and I wholly agree on both counts.

There is even an explicit reference to my political agenda and its relentless rise to global hegemony. There is a retrospective moment when we see Rémy announcing that because of ill health he is not going to be able to complete his teaching obligations for the rest of the academic year, and that he is therefore handing his class over to another person, a black lady academic who immediately starts talking about the "Whigs", and about how they rose to prominence way back when. Now, nothing in movie scripts is accidental. Everything is there for a reason. You have less than two two hours, and you do not have a second to waste. So if the Whigs get mentioned they get mentioned for a reason, and the reason is that Arcand thinks the Whigs are on the way back.

So two out of two. But actually, two out of three, because the over-arching conceptual framework of this film is that whereas the future does belong to me, Arcand regrets this.

I want the good "barbarians", like Sébastien, and like the ethnically diverse entrepreneurs by whom Civilisation, as always, is besieged - who now have to resort to drug dealing but who could do a lot better - to win. But while I see humanity slowly shaking itself free of idiotic collectivist delusions, hanging on to the good stuff that socialists at their best wanted (like great art and great sex) but dumping the rest, Arcand sees the collapse of a noble ideal, which could and should still be attempted, if only mere humans could one day become noble enough to make it work. He wants all the barbarians, one day, next time, to be driven back, by entirely charming, perfectly competent socialists, who never treat the public sector as a cash cow, and who are able, unlike our present shabby lot of socialist bunglers, crooks and parasites, to make nationalised medicine work perfectly for ever and to make life uninterruptedly charming.

And I say he's wrong. In ten year's time, after idiots like Peter Bradshaw and Whig illuminati like me have laid into him a few more times, Arcand may have got there. Maybe Part 3 of this saga will be called The Triumph of The Barbarians and a Jolly Good Thing Too, or some such thing. Meanwhile, he has a little way to go.

But the best art often results from unclarified political agendas, because unclarified political agendas supply genuine dramatic tension. The artist genuinely sympathises with both sides, and portrays both sides accurately and sympathetically. The unresolved baggage is the stuff of the drama. So, great movie. But don't put Arcand in charge of the Canadian film industry. He would then degenerate into one of the idiot supporting cast bribees in The Barbarian Invasions.

There is so much more I could talk about. I haven't even mentioned (but will now of course) the fascinating policeman whom Rémy has to manoeuvre around when buying his heroin, or the junky daughter of one of the silly socialist women (reminiscent of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club but not so manic) who actually administers the heroin to Rémy, or the wonderfully sinister-stroke-comic trade unionists who are the secret government of the hospital, or the jargon-spouting bureaucrat woman who personifies the delusion that the insertion of "management" into a national health service can actually help (instead of merely flooding the place with an endless gush of verbal vomit). Or the beauty of the photography, or the regular product placement plugs for Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, or the fact that Arcand is plainly in favour of the right of the individual to die at a time and in a manner of his own choosing, and to seek and get whatever help he needs and can get from those around him, or the fact that I want very much to own this thing on DVD and watch it through several more times, and urge you all to vote for it with your wallets also.

Magnifique, formidable, and maybe even a chef d'oeuvre.

Addendum: I have just watched this advertising trailer, which is as wrongheaded in its own way as Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review, in that it merely asserts the perfect charmingness of the silly socialists and nothing else. Maybe it was this kind of rubbish that had Bradshaw thinking that he was "supposed" to think all kinds of things which he was clearly, if you only go by the actual movie, not supposed to think at all. Not that this would be any excuse.

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Well, it's Oscar night this evening. The big question seems to be whether Mel Gibson will make an appearance as a presenter, and if so what he will say and what the reaction will be. (If his aim of releasing The Passion of the Christ was simply to make a lot of money, he has succeeded. The film has grossed $118m in five days and as Gibson put up the entire budget himself, almost all of the profits will go to him). However, as I promised I might when I wrote my overlong overview of what happened in the Holiday and New Year film season a couple of weeks ago, here are my predictions as to who are going to win the Academy Awards this evening. Some people might think that the Oscars are too trivial for a Samizdata post, but if you think this, don't read. If it is good enough for Mark Steyn, it's good enough for me. (How do I begin my campaign to be the next Spectator film critic).

I have of course refrained from using the special hotline that we Samizdatistas have direct to the Stonecutter World Council to find out in advance who the winners are, so I am just guessing using my judgement here. I will stick to the major categories, with perhaps occasional thoughts on the other categories.

As well as merely trying to predict the winners, as an added bonus, I give you a star ranking. Four stars means I will eat my metaphorical hat if this is not the winner. Three stars means I will be quite surprised if this is not the winner. Two stars means that I think this will be the winner, but that I think that there are other possibilities that would not be an overwhelming surprise. One star means that the category looks very open and I have no idea, but that I am willing to guess. I will give other people I think who are in with some kind of chance in brackets, and if I list more than one such person I list most likely first. I may or may not follow this up with a sentence or two as to why but I will try to keep it brief. In a couple of instances I will elaborate on my reasoning at more length on the special blog I use for that purpose, and will link to those comments.

Anyway, here goes.
The full nomination list is here.

Best Picture: The Return of the King (****).(The Lord of the Rings is a phenomenon. It will be rewarded. This is like rewarding Titanic for pulling off something incredibily difficult and making immense amounts of money. Except that this is a better film than that, although perhaps less in step with Hollywood tradition). (One point against The Return of the King is that NewLine Cinema is not a studio with a history of running Oscar Campaigns and therefore isn't very good at it. If The Lord of the Rings had been produced by Miramax, the first film of the trilogy would have won all the major Oscars. One would hope that Newline would have improved in three years, but as I just attempted to download a publicity photo to decorate this post, and discovered that the Newline website has so many fancy bells and whistles that I am unable to view pictures of the movie at all, perhaps not).

Best Director Peter Jackson for The Return of the King (***) (Peter Weir for Master and Commander, Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation) (I think that Coppola's chances are low but non-zero. Her film is widely admired, but the voters can still give her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay which they almost certainly well. The BAFTA awards went for Weir, interestingly enough, and I would like to see him win because I loved his film and he has now been nominated many times without winning. However, I think Jackson will be awarded personally for the immensity of his achievement. The fact that he once made Heavenly Creatures will count in his favour, too, as it confirms that he is a real film-maker, not just a special effects wizard. Hopefully, though, most of the ageing costume designers who vote for the Oscars have not seen Meet the Feebles).

More elaboration on Best Picture and Best Director, including a discussion of why Peter Jackson could lose because the ending of the film is too long (rather than too short as most Tolkien fans believe) here

Best Actor: Bill Murray for Lost in Translation (**) (Sean Penn for Mystic River. Jonny Depp for Pirates of the Carribean) (Penn was the early favourite, but seems to have been fading. Murray was the other early front runner, and has been strengthening if anything. Depp is the late improving dark horse, having been named Best Actor by the Screen Actors Guild. These three front runners are considered three of the weirdest people in Hollywood, so who knows how this affects voting. And everybody wants to reward Lost in Translation for something, and this is the major category in which it is strongest).

Best Actress: Charlize Theron for Monster (****) (An utter lock. Everyone who has seen it thinks she is amazing, and it will win unless the academy gets really sentimental and gives it to Keisha Castle-Hughes for Whale Rider, who was admittedly also wonderful. Child actors tend not to win in lead roles though).

Best Supporting Actor: Ken Watanabe for The Last Samurai (*) (Alec Baldwin for The Cooler. Tim Robbins for Mystic River). (To tell the truth, I have no idea in this category. Tim Robbins was the favourite for Mystic River, but I don't think the performance is good enough. Alec Baldwin has been firming in recent weeks for The Cooler, although I haven't seen it. Any of the five could win. I just have a hunch on Watanabe. Most people would consider that I am picking a big upset here. Perhaps I am grasping because I really do not want a ghastly Hollywood political speech from either Robbins or Alec Baldwin).

Best Supporting Actress: Renee Zellweger for Cold Mountain\ (***) (Shohreh Aghdashloo for House of Sand and Fog). (This is normally the most unpredictable category, but doesn't look so bad as supporting actor, this year. This is Renee Zellweger's third successive nomination (the others being for lead actress), everyone likes her, and she stands out in Cold Mountain. It isn't a subtle performance though. Aghdashloo's is a suble performance. Holly Hunter was very good in Thirteen too but that film and performance hasn't got the needed attention).

Best Original Screenplay Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation.(***) (If it doesn't win, it could be any of the others, because the quality in this category is superb and all the screenplays are excellent. Curiously, though, this may help Coppola, as she has the only film nominated for Picture and Director that is also nominated here. Voters may want to give her an award for something and votes for the others may be split).

Best Adapted Screenplay Brian Helgeland for Mystic River (*) (The Return of the King, City of God, Master and Commander). (If this goes to The Return of the King this is a good sign that we are getting a landslide to that film. I think a lot of people admired Helgeland's work for Mystic River. City of God has been seen as hard done by by many people, and here is where it can be rewarded. Master and Commander would be a way to give Peter Weir his much deserved Oscar, but he is principally a director and only an occasional screenwriter.

Best Animated Feature Finding Nemo (****) (Belleville Rendez-Vous (aka The Triplets of Belleville) is also a delightful fim, but this category has existed for three years and it has yet to be awarded to Pixar, who are conceded to be unbelievably good as well as unbelievably financially successful by just about everyone. This looks like an oversight, and it will be awarded to Pixar this year. The Academy did give this award to a film from a non English speaking country last year, but the circumstances were unusual).

(A further discussion of this category incorporating lots of Disney Kremlinology here).

That's the major categories. Just a few comments on others. I would like to see Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions win for Best Foreign Language Film, if only because a film in which a wayward capitalist son humiliates his socialist father by paying for better healthcare is something heartily approve of. (And it likely will win. Arcand is a fine film-maker, and has been nominated a number of times before. That said, it's a tricky category, as voters are required to see every nominated film in a cinema, and the voting body is thus small and consists largely of retired people).

In technical categories the nominations are normally much more "right" than the winners, because the nominees are decided by people in the some "academy branch" (mostly former nominees in the same category) as the award, and these people know what they are talking about. The actual awards are voted on by the whole academy, and actors generally don't know anything about special effects. So certain categories (visual effects for instance) consistently go to the wrong nominee out of the ignorance of voters. Bear that in mind. (Some academy branches (notably sound) have attempted to address this by nominating very small numbers of films (eg only two) in each category).

I think The Return of the King should win for Best Art Direction, if only for the fabulous creation of the city of Minas Tirith, and I think it probably will.

For Best Cinematography, I would give the award to Master and Commander, if only because the Galapagos Islands look so beautiful in the film. (A rought rule of thumb is that is something natural looks beautiful in the film, it should win for cinematography and if something artificial looks beautiful it should win for art direcction). However, this one will probably go to The Return of the King too.

Best Visual Effects is a category that almost always goes to the wrong nominee. This is because the award gets given to the film with the most conspicuous special effects, not the best. And in fact inconspicuous special effects are much harder to do. Special effects of alien space ships are not hard to do, because these things are not real and it is impossible to get them wrong. Recreating something real is much harder. This is why, for instance, the special effects in Twister are so much better than those in Independence Day, although on that occasion Independence Day actually won. And this is why this year I would give this award to Master and Commander for its recreation of the 19th Century Royal Navy, and not to The Return of the King good as the special effects of that film are. However, the voters will almost certainly give the award to The Return of the King. I have a further comment on this award here.

But I will stop there. I don't know enough about the sound categories to really comment, and I haven't seen any of the documentary or short films.

Mark Steyn thinks that the major awards will go to Lost in Translation. I am with The Return of the King. We shall see.

Readers are invited to mock me in the comments later after I (inevitably) am shown to have got many things wrong. Have a good evening everyone.

Update: As it happened, this was the year to not look for subtletly and intrigues, but just go for the most obvious favourites (which I did not do). Andy Duncan is no doubt happy, as The Return of the King won in all eleven categories for which it was nominated. The acting awards went to Tim Robbins, Renee Zelleweger, Sean Penn, and Charlize Theron. (Bill Murray's non-victory was my major disappointment of the night, as I thought his was the performance of his career, and I did not quite think that of Sean Penn's). Sofia Coppola picked up the award for Original Screenplay and her great father looked delighted, but she was oddly nonchalent. Master and Commander picked up Cinematography and Sound Editing, but Peter Weir will have to wait for yet another day for an Oscar (he has been nominated six times without winning). Finding Nemo did indeed win for Animated feature, but Pixar's Boundin' did not win for animated short. And The Barbarian Invasions did win a victory for private healthcare.

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Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson's acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ

An American Jewish leader met with Vatican officials to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus' crucifixion. Anti-Defamation League Chair Abraham Foxman says that Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" contradicts the Vatican's repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. A top Vatican official who met with Foxman said no such statement is planned. Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Vatican's social-communications office, instead praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.

The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews.

This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying "John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians".

This is just history, guys! What is the big deal?

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I'm listening to an old nineteen thirties recording of some Dvorak symphonies. The conductor and orchestra are both greatly admired for this music, yet I find little pleasure in the experience. For me, symphonies, by their nature, only really work properly if the recording is decent, as the best recordings were from about 1960 onwards, but as these ones, made in the 1930s, are not.

Concertos are another matter. One of the greatest pleasures I've recently got from classical CD collecting is from the Naxos historical CD series. True, as with the symphonies, you don't get the full orchestral picture clearly, but a solo instrument can still come across very clearly, despite the barrier of the decades. What classical music lover would deny himself the pleasure of hearing the teenage Yehudi Menuhin performing the magnificent Elgar Violin Concerto – recorded in 1932 with Sir Edward Elgar himself conducting – just because the recording quality is not quite up to modern standards? The orchestra is not all you'd like, but the solo violin is clear as a bell.

Of all the historical – by which I mean, approximately speaking, recordings made before about 1950 – I think that the one I have most enjoyed is a performance by Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Feuerman of the Brahms Concerto for Violin and Cello, made in 1939 with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. This is a lovely piece, but I often don't enjoy it much, for the simple reason that it is so diabolically difficult to play properly. Often it sounds choppy and scratchy, and just plain ugly. (I'm afraid I didn't warm at all to the performance of it on this recent recording of this piece.) So here Heifetz, with his still unsurpassed violin technique, really comes into his own.

But there is more involved than this. I sense that when I listen to this old performance I am listening to a performing tradition, which Brahms had in his ear when he wrote the piece. It isn't just how accurately and how well blended Heifetz and Feuermann play, they both play in the same very particular way, and that very particular way is how the piece has to be played if it is to work at all. Solo concertos, such as the Brahms solo violin concerto, will come alive even if played in a rather different manner to what Brahms had in mind, but for some reason, the Brahms Double has to be done just so.

Of all the modern violinists, the one who seems to be keeping this style of playing alive most vividly and expertly, to my ear, is a chap by the name of Frank Peter Zimmermann. I have an EMI CD of him doing the Brahms solo concerto, but the particular beauty of that CD is the Mozart Violin Concerto (No. 3 in G, K. 216) which he also plays on it. This CD is now available at bargain price, as is worth that for the Mozart alone. The usual way that violin virtuosi play nowadays is with a big, beefy sound. Zimmerman's playing is more what you'd call "silvery", that is to say thinner and less insistent, but nevertheless very beautiful, especially if intonation is perfect and phrasing is appropriate, as always seems to be the case with him. I see that Zimmermann has recently recorded the Brahms Double, with Heinrich Schiff playing the cello. I must keep an eye open for that in the second hand shops.

Nevertheless, there's nothing quite like hearing the genuinely old recordings. And going back to those earlier recordings, I think that any decade now something rather interesting, and artistically controversial, could happen with them. As you can imagine, there is already quite an industry in place to try to make the most of these old recordings, to get rid of the hissing and clicking without getting rid of all the things you want to keep. And there are magazines that now discuss the contrasting merits and demerits of different CD versions of the exact same original recording, without giving recordings made by people now of the same music any attention whatever. These sorts of skills can only get better asn the years go by. So much so that one can foresee the day when you will be able to put an ancient recording into a super-computer, and a modern recording made by a similar or even identical group of musicians in the same place (say), and give the computer the general instruction to make that sound like that. This is bound to cause rows, but personally, if I could listen to that old Dvorak symphonies recording, but in up-to-date sound, I'd be very happy.

If and when such modern recreation of ancient recordings becomes possible, it will cause particularly ferocious rows in the world of opera recordings. "Make it sound like she's doing the phrasing and the intonation and the 'interpretation', but have her do it with her voice, and with him conducting." The logical end point would be something like a Wagner Ring Cycle, with a dream caste, cherry picked from the entire back catalogue of all recordings, of everyone, done anywhere. Musical purists will go berserk, but why not?

Factor in the already rapidly improving (and converging) arts of computer animation and movie-making (both of which will sooner or later make the leap into three dimensions), and we can see that the current available crop of operatic DVDs are only the start of a long, long project to bring opera at its finest to the world's living rooms.

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There are two key times of the year in which Hollywood film studios release what they perceive is their biggest and best movies. One of these is "summer", which on the present statistical definition from AC Nielsen runs in the US from two weeks before the Memorial Day weekend unto Labor Day. The other is the "Holiday Season", which runs from the Friday before Thanksgiving Day and finishes the first Sunday after New Year's Day. Immediately after the end of the summer movie season, I wrote a lengthy piece explaining how Hollywood's finances now work, and how the summer had gone, which of the movies had been successes and which had not, and which movies that I thought were any good. In this piece, I am going to talk about how the Holiday season went - what went right and what went wrong. (I am not going to give quite as much background on how Hollywood's finances work as I did in that piece. People who have not read it may want to at least go back and skim the first couple of paragraphs). And, to be honest, a lot went wrong. My piece on summer was entitled "Thoughts on Hollywood's lousy summer". Well, the Holiday season was in many ways worse. Much worse.

But hey, I can hear you asking. It’s February. Why is Michael only writing now about a movie season that ended more than a month ago? He is really slack, isn’t he?

The answer to that is yes and no. For the last couple of months my life, as Bruce Wayne might say, has been complex. But it is actually more no than yes. (One other reason is that what he has written is simply long and detailed, and it has taken a while to write). Although the holiday season officially finishes immediately after the New Year, in reality it doesn't. It really finishes about a week after the Academy Awards. (This year the awards are being presented on February 29). To explain why this is so, I am going to have to talk about the history of Hollywood release patterns, and about the Academy Awards.

Some people may be put off by the fact that I am going to talk about the Academy Awards a fair bit in this post. Many people are often dismissive of the awards and regard them as meaningless. While I am often enraged by the fact that the best film/performance does not win, I am not going to agree with this. They mean a lot to the people who receive them, and to the people who award them. And they have a huge impact on what films Hollywood makes, when it releases them, and how many people actually go to see them. They also have big impacts in the careers of the people who are nominated for and win them. Quite simply, the awards are central to vitually everything Hollywood does between about October and February. It is not possible to understand anything that the movie industry does in this period if you do not explain this in a reasonable amount of detail. So I will.

Traditionally, which means before about 1980, most Hollywood movies were released by what is know as a "platform release". This means that a film would start out showing on a few cinemas in a few major cities. If it was successful on these few screens, it would then start showing on screens in less important cities, and also on more (or different) screens in the same cities. The total number of screens would probably not exceed a thousand, even for very successful movies.

However, in the 1970s this started to change.

The idea of a "summer movie season" really got going with Steven Spielberg's Jaws in 1975 and George Lucas' Star Wars in 1977. Television advertising started to be used to advertise movies, and this meant that release patterns could be and had to be shorter, as marketing hype was created on a national basis. More television channels came to being, some devoted to entertainment gossip and the like. Mass market entertainment magazines were invented, newspapers became more national, and film hype became steadily more simultaneous throughout the US. Technology made it easier to distribute and release films on thousands of screens simultaneously. Also, the advent of home video rental as a second channel for film distribution meant that the period of time over which a film had to make its cinema grosses became shorter, as studios wished to release the film on VHS within a reasonable period after the cinema release. This all meant that by the end of the 1980s, most films used what is known as "wide release", where they were released on the same day on thousands of screens throughout the US, promoted by a barrage of television advertising. Further promotion channels such as the internet meant that word of mouth got around faster and faster, and film grosses became more and more "front loaded" (ie a larger and larger proportion of the film's total gross came in the first ccouple of weeks of release. This was particularly so in summer, and summer has evolved into a situation where big budget action films are released every weekend to enormous advertising campaigns, which gross enormous amounts in the first fortnight and then fade away. (All these factors also meant that successful platform releases would end up showing on more screens at the same time, and that even their runs would be shorter).

That is summer. What about the Holiday season? Well, some of the movies are released exactly like summer movies, on thousands of screens at once to enormous advertising budgets. But none the less, the release patterns are more complex. For one thing, fewer weekends are devoted to action movies. Many more children's films, or at least family-friendly films are released than in summer. Animated films are more likely to be released in the Holiday season. Christmas themed films are often released and are often surprisingly successful. And, films of which it is expected might win Academy Awards are often released between October and the end of December.

But, as well as that, there is one other unusual thing about the holiday season, which is that publicity for movies does not fade away quite the same way that it does in summer or at other times of year, at least it can if the film is the sort of film that critics like and which gets nominated for awards. There are three main events that can boost the box office of films that are already in release. The first comes in early December, when critics normally release “Ten best” lists, and similar. The hype from these continue through December and into January, when Golden Globe nominations, awards from Hollywood guilds, and similar keep up the hype and everyone speculates as to what films will receive Academy Award nominations. The second is the release of the actual Academy Award nominations, traditionally in mid-February. This can boost box-office for nominated films considerably, and nominated films are often released (or re-released) onto a substantial number of screens the weekend after the nominations are released. This can boost box-office considerably on nominated films before the actual awards. When the awards are announced, box office dies off very soon afterwards and Hollywood gets back to promoting commercial non-awards minded movies Actually winning awards can give a film a boost for another week or so, but in terms of box office boost the awards are less important than the nominations. This is because most nominated films have been in release for really quite a while by the time of the awards, and have just about worn out their welcome in most cinemas.

However, the opposite is true in the rest of the world. In foreign countries there is no requirement that awards minded films be released by the end of the year, and therefore they tend to be released later to capitalise on the actual awards. Often, awards minded films will go into release in January or February, and the marketing campaign will really kick in for the Best Picture winner immediately after the Academy Awards. This is one reason why I haven’t seen all the awards nominated films yet, however much I might like to. Whereas in the rest of the world one can see most summer movies by the end of summer, one has to wait until about April to see all the end of year movies.

Typically, there are two release patterns for awards minded films. In the case of small independent films, the idea is to generally release on a few screens in September and October, hopefully receive good reviews, and steadily increase the number of screens on which the film is showing through to December, then get a boost from critics groups in December, and the whole awards process through February. Essentially, the idea is to go for a traditional platform release. This release pattern is anachronistic over the rest of the year, but it works in the Holiday/award season because publicity does not die down as it does in the rest of the year.

The other pattern is the one that applies for studio films that are aimed for awards consideration. These typically release on a larger number of screens than independents (but not as many as in summer) and do so later than independent releases. These have traditionally gone into mid December, hopefully get a boost from ten best lists, and then they gross well throughout January, get a boost from awards nominations, and continue grossing well until awards night, before really making a killing in the rest of the world). Sometimes studios only open in Los Angeles and new York in December in order to be awards eligible, and then only open wider in January. (There is nothing wrong with films that go wide only in January, but films that have no release until January generally suck).

At least, that was the pattern until this year. This year the Academy Awards have been brought forward from late March to late February, ostensibly because the Academy considers that Oscar campaigning has become too dirty in recent years and that bringing the awards forward would clamp down on this. The nominations were correspondingly released earlier, at the start of Februrary. In this regard it appears so far to have worked. Campaigning this year has been less dirty than last year's somewhat legendarily underhand campaign. However, it has had another side effect, which the studios are less happy with. This has meant that films released in mid to late December have had a shorter period of time to promote themselves before the Oscar nominations were announced, and then a shorter time in theatres before the actual awards. (The principle victim of this appears to have been Miramax's Cold Mountain, and given that Miramax ran by far the dirtiest campaign last year, some would say this has served them right). However, we will likely see studio releases aimed at Oscars released a few weeks earlier next year. This may get in the way of the end of year blockbuster type movies. We shall see what happens.

In any event, all this means that it is a bit harder to talk about movies on a week by week basis than I did last year. However, I shall try. I will go through the major studio releases sequentially, and then I will talk about platform releases and other small independent films at the end. But first, the state of the world.

People who read my summer article will remember the gist of present Hollywood financing. DVD sales are doing wonderfully well for the studios. This, and the thought that sequels and television derived films were sure things at the box office led the studios to make lots of lowest common denominator films with enormous budgets, many of which in 2003 were terrible. Audiences responded by not going to see the movies, but the studios finances were to some extent saved by still improving DVD sales. However, many of the 2003 films were something of a write-off. The holiday season was a continuation of that. The films still had enormous budgets, and people still didn't go to see them. Thankfully, there were fewer sequels and television derived properties, and the films were in my mind on the whole better, but still audiences didn't go to see them in huge numbers.

For those who have not figured this out, when I do not say otherwise I will be talking about US release dates and so called "domestic" (ie US and Canada) grosses. I discussed how foreign grosses relate to all this last time.

In any event, the official first weekend of the Holiday season is the weekend before Thanksgiving, and normally there is a really big studio release for thanksgiving weekend, and studios release genre material in the month or so prior to that, often coinciding with Halloween and hoping that this will still have decent grosses going in to the holiday. In this case, the genre movies did surprisingly well. A remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was apparently execrable, but grossed $80m on a $10m budget for New Line. Scary Movie 3 was a strange amalgam of the Airplane/Naked Gun school of parody or the 80s and the Scream/Baby Boom Echo school of the 1990s, but it was also successful, grossing $110m on a $45m budget. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Part 1 was a victory of style and technique over everything else, but the man's technique and grasp of genre takes the breath away (or at least it takes my breath away).

However, the first real holiday movie of the season was Disney's animated Brother Bear, which went into wide releas on October 31. The non-key release date and lack of promotion illustrates Disney CEO's lack of faith in Disney's own 2D animated product. This is a shame: the film came from Disney's Florida animation studio that was set up in the 1990s, and while not one of the best Disney animated products, was better than most. It grossed $85m in total, not bad given the lack of publicity. In January Disney announced that it would close the Florida studio, a decision that many people regretted, given that this film and the other two features it made in Florida (Mulan and Lilo & Stitch) were profitable and above average, although not masterpieces. Conspiracy theorists claimed that the decision was made due to the fact that Florida was too far away from LA for Disney CEO and legendary control freak Michael Eisner to micromanage. But anyway, the film was a modest success and quite worth seeing.

But all this was a prelude to the Thanksgiving weekend itself, for which the big film was the third Matrix movie, Matrix Revolutions. At least, it was supposed to be.

However, before I talk about that, I am going to talk about Harry Potter. This may seem a little odd as there was no Harry Potter released in 2003, but this is a bit like Sherlock Holmes noticing that the dog was not there. The last thanksgiving weekends were hugely successful at the box-office, and this led to great Holiday seasons in general. This was because in both cases there was a Harry Potter movie released, and this is exactly the sort of thing that theatre owners love at the end of the year. Huge grosses, and in numbers much larger audiences than grosses imply (because children's tickets cost less than adult tickets). This means lots of popcorn, drinks, and candy solde, and theatre owners make their money from these things. (Most of the actual ticket price goes to the studio).

Warner Brothers managed to buy the rights to make Harry Potter films and the rights for just about everything else in the Harry Potter universe except the books themselves before the books really took off. When the books did take off, they realised that they were incredibly valuable as a film product, and their plan was to make seven movies in seven years and to release one every Thanksgiving. Bingo, we will have a blockbuster at Thanksgiving every year without having to apply much actual thought. And in 2001 and 2002 that worked. The Harry Potter movies were big hits (although the second not quite as big as the first), they made lots of money for cinema owners and the film studios, box office records were set, lots of popcorn was sold, and everyone was happy. However, Warners ran into trouble. It takes approximately two years to make a film from commissioning the script to releasing the film, and to release a film every year therefore requires the post production of one film to overlap with the preproduction of the next. And on top of that the films used child actors, and there are strict rules concerning hours and other conditions for child actors. After two movies the principal actors wanted a rest, and the director Chris Columbus was exhausted. The third film was therefore delayed six months and a new director (Alfonso Cuaron, the Mexican director best known for Y tu mamá también (2001) , but who got the gig probably as much for his superb but little seen adaptation of the children's bookA Little Princess (1995)) was drafted for the third film. This meant that there was no Harry Potter film this Thanksgiving, despite the fact that the release of the fifth Harry Potter book a few months earlier would have provided a good lead in for it. It seems that the release of the next film in a couple of months will be about as badly timed with respect to the book releases as possible. In addition, the fifth book was perceived as a disappointment and the level of hype and interest may be less by the time we finally see the fourth and fifth films. Plus, the fourth book was apparently very difficult to turn into a screenplay that is less than four hours in length, so it may be that it is hard to get later films right. (The fifth book shouldn’t be that hard to film, however, for although it is seven thousand pages long, very little actually happens). All this means that the later Harry Potter movies may not be as sure a thing as Warners hopes. Whatever happens, Warners hope that they would have something to boost their box office consistently every year for seven years looks like it was too optimistic.

But this is all in the future. What is really relevant here is that Warners did not have a Harry Potter movie to release for Thanksgiving 2003. At the time that they made this decision, they had thought that this would not be a huge issue. For their 2003 plans were all centres around the two sequels to The Matrix, and the third of these Matrix Revolutions could be released for Thanksgiving. Sure, it was more a summer film in tone than a Thanksgiving film, and a family film would have been better. But it would be so big a hit that it wouldn't matter, even if children wouldn't be there to buy so much candy for the cinema owners. The original had been a big hit at the box office, but a giant hit on DVD, and the sequels were the most anticipated movies of the year. The hope, or possibly even the expectation was that they would gross $400m each domestically and possibly $1bn each worldwide, would then sell mountains of DVDs, and huge amounts of money would be made. However, that was until people saw the films. As has been covered previously, the second film was released in summer and was a disappointment: pompous in a silly Philosophy 101 way, overlong, badly acted, and bloated and at time incoherent. In it’s defence, it did contain one or two cool set pieces, and it was the middle of a trilogy, which is always the hardest part to get right. Still, palpable disappointment. It grossed a little under $300m, which was below expectations. (Nobody expected an animated film about a fish and a supernatural pirate move to outgross it, but they did). Things could, however, be made up at least mostly if the third film was any good. But it wasn’t.

Whereas The Matrix Reloaded was a disappointment, Matrix Revolutions was a pile of steaming excrement, pretty much entirely abandoning the central conceit of the matrix, the humour, the Alice in Wonderland analogies, the ambiguity about what was real and what wasn’t, and instead gave us two ours of stupid rotating phallic symbols penetrating the earth towards people fighting with utterly ludicrous waldo machines. (Hey, where are the computers to coordinate your battles when you need them. This was supposedly a series of films about the computer age. World War two style weapons and weapons targeting was stupid when George Lucas did it in Star Wars. It is much more stupid now). A fable of the computer age had in three movies turned into a really, really, really dumb conventional action movie for which the special effects weren’t very good, and which departed entirely from what made the first film good. Seldom have I seen young film-makers grow so self-important and so contemptuous of their audience so fast. It took Lucas three movies. It took the Wachowskis only two.

At the box office, well, Matrix Revolutions was a colossal disappointment. Rather than grossing the $400m that Warners may have hoped for at the start of the year, it topped out at a miserable $139m. So, Warners were disappointed. The exhibition industry (ie the people who own the cinemas) was really disappointed.

But there was a little bit of a silver lining. New Line Cinema (which shares corporate ownership with Warner Brothers, although there is no love lost between the two studios) released a family movie, Elf as counterprogramming. This starred Will Ferrel as a man who had been raised as an elf at the north pole by Santa Claus and who comes to New York to find his true family. There he meets an attractive young woman and ..... It sounds and was silly, but it was surprisingly well done, and was the surprise hit of the season, grossing $173 million on a budget of $33m, and was extremely profitable do to the releatively low profile of the star and film-makers. The lesson from this was that Warner Brothers should have released a family movie on Thanksgiving, but fortunately for them their corporate sibling bailed then out.

So up to then we had one trainwreck, but things were otherwise going reasonably. The following weekend, however, things started to go wrong. But, sadly, they did so with a good movie, one of the best of the year. It took three studios (Universal, Miramax, and 20th Century Fox) $150m to bring one of Patrick O'Brien's Jack Aubrey novels to the screen, and the result (Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World directed by Australian Peter Weir) made me fell that the Napoleonic era Royal Navy was really like that. Although it had the odd ghastly and grisly moment, it lacked Hollywood sensationalism - no silly mutinies or gunfights or anything like that. Russell Crowe was good in an understated way as Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany was excellent opposite as Dr. Maturin. (It's a shame Hollywood couldn't countenance an American enemy ship as in the novel, however). The locations in the Galapagos Islands were spectacular, and the level of realism achieved by filming in the same tank in Mexico used for Titanic really blew me away. Some people found the movie dragged a little in the middle, but that depends on how much you were impressed simply by the realism and great visual qualities of the movie. I was hugely impressed. Audiences on the whole were not as impressed as I was, or if they were the mesage didn't get out, because the film has grossed $91m in the US, disappointing given the $150m budget. (Films set on water always cost a lot to make, the simple reason being that if your shot doesn't work the first time, it is hard to immediately refilm because everything has floated away. Note that the two most famous out of control budgets in recent decades are Waterworld and Titanic). Master and Commander probably will not lose money - its non-US grosses are better than domestic, and it has been nominated for Best Picture and other major Academy Awards, which will help the DVD release (especially if Peter Weir wins Best Director, for which he is some sort of decent chance). However, it will not make much of a return on its budget, which means we are unlikely to see any more Jack Aubrey novels on screen. Jonathan Pearce and Alan Little will be disappointed.

Things got worse the next weekend, and the films were much less good. Universal released a family movie with a higher profile, an adaptation of Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, starring Mike Myers. This film was much more expensive, costing $109m to make, and by all reports it was one of the worst films of the year. (I haven't seen it). It ended up grossing just on $100m, and may well make a loss. This was one more example of what we saw too much in the summer, expectations that were too high and a budget that consequently got out of control.

On the same weekend, Warner Bros released the thriller Gothica starring Halle Berry. This is notable as it is probably the first film she chose to make with her increased cachet after winning the Best Actress oscar. It was not a very positive move, as the film was only so so and didn't make much money ($59m on a $40m budget). It probably didn't lose money, but was completely unremarkable.

There was a third release that weekend that is worth commenting on. American mass market audiences are generally reluctant to see non-American films. British films tend to be restricted to specialty audiences. However, this does not apply in most foreign countries, who are more open to British films than are the Americans. Thus there is a certain class of British film that can make large amounts of money worldwide to mass audiences if it piggybacks off Hollywood's international distribution and marketing system, but will only show to relatively small audiences in the US. (Rowan Atkinson is a big star in most of Europe and Asia for instance, but not in the US. As another example, Bend it Like Beckham was released to mass audiences in Europe, but it was a specialty release in the US). One subcategory of these movies is the romantic comedies written by Richard Curtis: Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill being the two most famous. These films have been successful in the US but on a smaller scale than in many foreign countries. Love Actually, released on November 7 in the US, was the latest. It grossed $59m in the US, which was quite good but not blockbuster numbers, but has so far grossed $172 million in the rest of the world, which makes it a very big hit abroad. (It must have cost a lot less to make than the average US film, too). The film contains a large number of narrative threads, some of which work better than others. I didn't think it was as good as the two previous films, but it was pleasant enough. A lot of audiences thought this, and I suppose I can expect another Richard Curtis romantic comedy in two years time.

November 14, The Haunted Mansion starring Eddie Murphy, The Missing starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, and Timeline, the latest Michael Chichton adaptation were all released, and all flopped. There is really little to say about these. None of them were any good, and a large amount of studio money was poured down the toilet, particularly in the case of Timeline which grossed $19m total on an $80m budget. However, the studios perhaps expected this. This was the fallow weekend halfway between the Thanksgiving holiday and the big effort leading up to Christmas. December movies tend to be more series, their producers at least hope they will win awards, and the expectation is that they will continue grossing well into January.

The first of these was the year's Tom Cruise vehicle, The Last Samurai, released on December 5. Tom Cruise plays a burnt out Civil war veteran who is summoned to Meiji restoration Japan to teach modern fighting techniques to the Emperor's soldiers, who are fighting against a group of Samurai who are holding out against the greedy capitalists who are modernising Japane. Cruise's character is captured by the samurai, who teach him a sense of spirituality and .... blah, blah, blah. Some have compared this film to Dances with Wolves, but it didn't annoy me nearly as much as that one. The samurai weren't presented as noble savages in quite as an extreme way, and while I normally am on the side of people who want to build railways, the subsequent history of Japan is too complicated for me to as unambiguous about it as I am in some other countries. However, the film has a stupid and historically inaccurate Hollywood ending, and was in my mind a badly flawed movie. It was one of those studio pictures aimed at the academy awards that wasn't good enough to be nominated, and it cost $130m to make and only grossed $109m, and that would normally be a big problem, but Cruise is too big a star around the world for that to matter. (He is also tireless in travelling around the world promoting his films. The film has grossed nearly $300m abroad (including more than $100m in Japan) and it is in international terms a major hit. (The film is full of famous Japanese actors, and the Japanese advertising campaign emphasised Ken Watanabe and Masato Harada almost equally with Tom Cruise).

December 12. Something's Gotta Give. Jack Nicholson. Diane Keaton. Oscar bait aimed at older audiences. It found the older audiences and got Diane Keaton an Oscar nomination. (She's really very good in this, not to mention most of the other films she has ever been in). Pretty good film. Made money. Not much more to say than that.

2001 and 2002 were of course boosted by Harry Potter films. But what really made them hugely successful seasons was that these were followed up by the first two installments of The Lord of the Rings. Whereas the success of the Harry Potter movies was expected, the success of The Lord of the Rings was much less expected by Hollywood. Those of us who had been inhabiting geeksville had been whipped to a frenzy, but this is not necessarily so for actual Hollywood types.

With the failure of the Matrix sequels, everybody expected The Return of the King to be the highest grossing film of the year. Everybody expected it to be as good as the first two movies. Everybody was anticipating a fine moviegoing experience. And that is exactly what they got. The film was essentially more of the same, but was visually more spectacular than the first two movies. The orc armies were bigger, the battles were bigger, the special effects locations were more spectacular, the one ring was destroyed, the king returned, the hobbits went back to the Shire and went to the pub. The Shire was not scoured, but more on that later.

However, from a financial point of view, the film was a triumph, just like its two prequels. It is usual for sequels to gross less than the movies that came before them, but the Lord of the Rings films have bucked this trend. The first one grossed $313m in the US, the second one grossed $340m, the third has presently so far grossed $357m, but will end up with about $380m before it is pulled out of cinemas. The revenues from foreign markets will be about double that, meaning that the whole world wide box office from the three movies will be almost $3bn before all is done. With the various regular and extended DVD releases and other revenues, the total income to New Line Cinema and its subsidiaries before everything is finished rather boggles the mind. The films are a triumph for director Peter Jackson, and for New Line Cinema head Bob Shaye who gave Jackson the money to make them. With the profit share arrangement that he personally has, Jackson himself is likely to personally have made something like $200m from the movies, although nobody is quite sure how much. He has done what George Lucas did in 1977, which is without leaving home he has managed to become one of the biggest players in Hollywood.

He has signed a deal to make a remake of King Kong for Universal as his next film, and this (and not actually The Lord of the Rings) is his dream project. For this his agents have negotiated a financial deal which was the talk of Hollywood when it was first negotiated. Jackson has negotiated a deal of a $20m advance plus 20% of the gross of the film. No director has been granted a deal like this before. The thing that is unusual about this deal is the $20m up front. The 20% of the gross is by no means unprecedented. Steven Spielberg probably gets a similar amount do that, and doesn’t greatly care about an upfront amount, as he no doubt believes that he can produce a big hit whenever he wants and that there is no real need to worry about risk. Jackson’s agents did negotiate such a deal, because of his shorter track record. I don’t think there is much risk for Universal. Regardless of whether it is any good, lots and lots of people will go and see King Kong on the first weekend because it is Jackson’s next film after The Lord of the Rings. That is, the film will "open" in Hollywood jargon, because of the name of the director.

What the deal does resemble closely is the sorts of deals that stars negotiate with studios. $20 million up front against 20% of the gross is the sort of deal that Tom Cruise negotiates with studios (although his advance is more like $25m-$30m). The reason for this is that studios believe that Cruise is recognisable to filmgoers, and that people will go to see the film on the first weekend regardless of whether it is any good because he is in it. That is, there is relatively little risk in the $20m because Cruise’s name will make it back. If you consider that Jackson has been given the $20m for much the same reason (his name will make the money back) the deal makes a fair amount of sense. Why it terrifies Hollywood is that they think that other directors will ask for similar deals. And there is at this point really only one other director who can open films with his name in the same way. And he is the man I mentioned before: Steven Spielberg. He doesn’t want or need money up front, but lots of other directors will be asking their agents to negotiate for it from now on.

But another way of looking at it is that internet movie sites and similar have raised the profile of creative talent in a new way. At premieres for The Return of the King, and at awards like the BAFTAs last night, Peter Jackson has been getting practically mobbed by the crowds outside – the ovations he has been getting are of film star quality. It may be that his participation in a film (for now at least) has a similar impact as the participation of a top star like Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise. How long that shall last, we shall see. But it is interesting to observe how the advent of the internet and its widespread information has made audiences (particularly those under 25) more familiar with the issue of just how films are made than was once so. Directors have fan sites. Television writers have fan sites. Once upon a time the only creative people with popular followings were the stars. But that is changing. And this kind of deal might be a precursor to more of this.

The last time anyone pulled off anything like this was when George Lucas made Star Wars in 1977. Lucas made a larger hit than anyone realised was possible, and did so in a place far from Hollywood. (Northern California in that case, but it was probably harder to run a Hollywood operation from northern California in 1977 than it is to run one from New Zealand in 2004. Nobody who was making Star Wars was able to carry the special effects around on their iPod, which quite seriously happened for the Lord of the Rings). Lucas managed to launch his own special effects company on the strength of the movie, which spent the next two decades being virtually the only company in town for people who wanted extreme effects heavy movies. The second such company was Digital Domain, which was launched and belongs to James Cameron, who managed to launch it in the early 1990s on the strength of Terminator 2 and True Lies, and to use it very effectively to make Titanic. The third such company is Jackson's Weta Digital, which did effects work for several of the other major releases of the season (for instance Master and Commander and Peter Pan) as well as for The Lord of the Rings

Of course, Lucas did one other thing in 1977, which was he did a deal with 20th Century Fox in which he forewent up front payment in return to owning most of the intellectual property rights for Star Wars. (Fox owns the copyright on the negative of the first movie, but Lucas owns the rights to everything else in the Star Wars universe, most notably the sequel and merchandising rights). If not the best deal in human history, this one must have been fairly close, as it has since made Lucas multiple billions of dollars,

Compared to that, Jackson’s $20m against 20% looks pretty modest.

Okay, so that was the biggest hit of the year, as expected. As counterprogramming on the same weekend, Columbia released Mona Lisa Smile in which Julia Roberts plays a free spiriited teacher at Wellesley College a few decades ago, in which she teaches upper crust young women (played by a number of Hollywood's finest young actresses) to have some ambition of their own, and....blah, blah, blah. This is actually Julia Roberts' first lead role in America's Sweethearts in 2001. (She has had a couple of supporting parts since. Roberts is the only woman actor who can command the sorts of salaries that the top male starts can command, which is at least partly why Mona Lisa Smile cost $65m to make. However, it was perhaps overshadowed by the other film released the same weekend, and ended up grossing $63 million, probably enough to break even, but no more than that. It may be that Julia Roberts' star is fading (life is harsh for female movie starts), or maybe she just needs a good film. She has made bad films before, and has come back from them.

And then we were on to films released on Christmas Day. This is normally the day for the final fling of the season. Films where the production is running really, really late will desperately get the prints into the cinemas on this day. Normally you get five or six films released on Christmas day, and this year was no exception. This year we got four. This consisted of one family film, one action film, one piece of Oscar bait, and one comedy.

The family film was a new adaptation of Peter Pan, by Australian director P.J. Hogan (most famous for My Best Friend's Wedding and Muriel's Wedding). This cost $100m to make, and took the efforts of two studios (Universal and Columbia) and one independent production company (Revolutions Studios), and it is in my mind a remarkable film. Rachel Hurd-Wood, who plays Wendy and was cast at an open casting call, is a wonder, although Jeremy Sumpter, who plays Peter Pan, is a little flat. Jason Isaacs is a good Captain Hook, and Olivia Williams is very fine as Wendy's mother. The art direction is also marvellous, giving us a very lush and ovegrown neverland. The film is unusually faithful to J.M. Barrie's original writing. The story is essentially about fear of adulthood and growing up, and there is inevitably a sexual aspect to this. This has often been left out of film adaptations, but not in this case. This film doesn't overemphasize it, but it is there, just as it is there in the works of Barrie. I confess that I loved this film, but audiences on the whole did not go and see it. It has grossed just $47 million and will clearly lose money.

The second Christmas Day film was a Steve Martin comedy, Cheaper by the Dozen, in which Martin plays a father of 12 children who has to look after them by himself when his wife goes on a book tour. I haven't seen this, but it has been very successful, grossing $134m on a $35m budget. Steve Martin is very popular on screen though - he always has been. This is one more example.

The third film is the traditional Miramax Oscar bait film. Typically the studio gets a reasonably upmarket but hopefully still accessible recent novel, preferably one that features some locations that will look good on film, casts some well known British actors, gets either Anthony Mighella or Lasse Hallström to direct, aims the film at the middle aged middlebrow audiences that make up a fair portion of oscar voters, positions the film as a little apart from most of what Hollywood puts out, and hopes for fine critical treatment and Oscar nominations to boost the box-office trough January. This year it was Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's Civil War novel. This film had an over earnest quality about it at times, and although I enjoyed it, it was rescued by the supporting characters, particularly those played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Renee Zellweger. The film did not get the Oscar nominations for Best Picture and director that Miramax had hoped for. Possibly the Oscars dates being brought forward did not help, and the film had not been in theatres long enough when the nominations were voted on. Or perhaps the film wasn't good enough. In any event, the film did pick up acting nominations for Jude Law and Renee Zellweger. Zellweger may well even win for Best Supporting Actress. Even without major category Oscar nominations, this film has done reasonably, grossing $88m so far on a $78m budget. The film will gross a bit more and will make money, but it was one of those cases where to be a real success the Oscar nominations were needed, but they didn't come. Miramax will likely release similar films a little earlier in future years.

And there was one last Christmas Day movie, Paycheck, directed by Hong Kong action director John Woo and adapted from a Philip K Dick short story, and starring Ben Affleck as a "reverse engineer" with the intriguing name of "Michael Jennings". This got bad reviews and probably just about broke even on its $63m budget, but was kind of surreal to watch. Ben Affleck played me as too much of a dweeb, I thought, although it was nice that Michael Jennings' love interest was played by Uma Thurman. The film was reasonably faithful to the source material for much of the movie, but (as with most Dick adaptations) had a silly ending in which lots of things got blown up. The original story also had much more morally ambiguous characters than the film, too. (Being faithful to it would have required America to become a police state, and the film-makers apparently didn't want that). But despite all that, I didn't think the movie was nearly as bad as many people claimed.

And after this, there is one other movie that can be claimed to be belonging to the holiday movie season, Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton and starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, and Billy Crudup. This was released in LA and New York on December 10 for Oscar eligibility, but did not go wide until January 9. This was a relatively simple story. Son who doesn't speak to his father goes home when he hears that his father is dying, and tries to figure out who his father actually was, and what of the elaborate stories his father told about his life are actually true. Most of the film consists of the stories told in flashback. Burton is a great visual stylist, and seems only interested in the visual style of the flashbacks. The father/son dynamic has little in the way of emotional depth. Which is a shame, as the film contained a lot of acting talent. Audiences didn't really go for this, and the film was yet another holiday film that didn't really live up to expectations.

And that was the studio releases. I will also talk briefly about the four or five most successful independent or small films that have ridden the platform release momentum of the awards season the best. This is not meant to suggest that these were the best independent films of the time period, just that these were the ones successful enough to impact the consciousness of Hollywood. (Another problem is that these types of films take longer to come to Britain than studio films, so I am less likely to have seen them.

Firstly, Lost in Translation. Sofia Coppola has managed to avenge the negative press she once received for her acting in The Godfather Part 3 by making a gentle movie that is all about mood, in which two lost souls meet and emotionally connect in the foreign culture of Tokyo. She managed to use the connections she had gained through the Japanese success of her previous movie The Virgin Suicides to obtain a subject, locations, and funding for this movie and retain complete creative control, and made a movie that was so well received that she will have no difficulty being given creative control by Hollywood for her future movies. She also managed to incorporate a rather stinging criticism of her estranged husband into the movie, just as a bonus, as well as to personally obtain oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, and will probably win for screenplay. (The film cost $4m to make, and by the time is is done will end up with about a $50m gross, plus perhaps the same amount again overseas).

Clint Eastwood's Mystic River is actually a studio picture, but was released like an independent picture. It features great performances from Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Back, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laura Linney, and is an example of good old fashioned storytelling, basically. Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland found a good novel and filmed a character driven story (with almost Shakespearean overtones at times) to make a fine film. This too has got a lot of Oscar nominations, and its grosses continue to pile up. (It will probably manage close to $85m on a $25m budget). It would probably win a lot of Oscars if Eastwood had not won before for Unforgiven, but its best chances are in the acting categories. (Sean Penn and particularly Tim Robbins).

Monster, Patty Jenkins' film of the career of Lee Wuaronos, "America's only female serial killer", apparently features an extraordinarily strong performance from Charlize Theron (previously famous mainly for light romantic roles) in the lead performance, and she is an unbackable favourite to win an Oscar for Best Actress. On the strength of this the film will likely end up grossing $35m or so, which will make it very profitable.

Finally, Alejandro Innaritu made 21 Grams as a follow up to his very well received Amores Perros. 21 Grams (which again I have not seen yet) apparently features a similar combination of brilliant editing, a non-linear structure, and great acting, but audiences seemed slightly more irritated with this and less impressed that they did the first time. Still, the film was widely liked, particularly the acting of Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (who got the Oscar nomination for this that she deserved but did not get for Mulholland Drive), and the film continues to plug gradually away at the box office.

And that was the story of the season, really, and indeed the story of the whole year. Lots of films did not live up to expectations, despite the fact that budgets were higher than in previous years. Total box office was down by 0.5% over 2002, and adjusted for ticket price inflation it was down by 4.5%. This was not good. There has been considerable speculation since as to why this was? There has been lots of speculation in the trade press that the effects of DVDs and home theatres are starting to have an affect on film-going. The belief is that people are waiting to see the film at home. I am not sure about this. Cinemagoing is a social experience. There are still plenty of queues to see films on opening night. The home theatre experience is a different kind of social experience. Many advances in home entertainment have been predicted to kill cinemagoing before, but it has never happened. We have just had 20 years of growth, and the growth may just have topped out. And, it may simply be that the films were not very good this year. If the two Matrix movies had performed to expectations, or if there had been a new Harry Potter movie) then the number of tickets sold would have been flat rather than substantially down.

It is the case though that DVD sales are up. Studios are earning enormous amounts of money from their back catalogues the way that the music companies were in the 1990s, so the corporate parents of the studios are not that unhappy. (The studio with the most misfires this year was Warner Brothers, and the flipside was that New Line Cinema, which also belongs to Time Warner, had an absolutely stellar year. So Time Warner management probably thinks things are okay on aggregate). The music companies responded to this by losing their focus and really losing the plot with respect to new product, amongst other things. One hopes that the film studios will have learned something from this. Certainly it is the case that people from the DVD department of the studios are gaining more influence than was once the case. Traditionally they have had very little influence, but this is changing as their share of the revenues increase. We shall see what this means.

But the people who are really angry are the cinema owners. They have really suffered due to the fall in box office. And it will be interesting to see if this is a trend or a one off.

I was planning on also giving a list of who I thought was going to actually win in the various categories at the end of next week's oscars. However, I have gone on far too long already. If I choose to write that, it shall have to wait.

Want to employ someone who can write articles like this, about many other subjects as well as movies, who can do highly quantitative modelling and who can knock up a financial model with the best of them, or know someone who might? If so, read this, and feel free to take a look at my CV

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There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.

First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.

However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.

It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:

As for smoking bans in "public places", there are three reasons why they're unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don't have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from "second-hand smoke" has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I've gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it's statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I'm not making this up! People who use this sort of "junk science" to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.

So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.

Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about 'saving the planet' or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.

My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!

[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

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Ed Driscoll wrote a piece about evolving guitar technology in Friday's installment of TechCentralStation, and after searching desperately for any thinly-veiled excuse to write about it, I stumbled across an angle.

With a lot of manufactured goods, their production tends to get 'outsourced' to the third world because (1) eventually everyone figures out how to do it and (2) capital markets can finance production almost anywhere on the globe. The only thing more predictable than this evolution is that politicians will never stop whining about it.

One trend that Driscoll does not pick up on is that this is also happening with guitars. Just as American streets are filling up with Korean-made autos (more Korean cars are sold here than German cars) the American guitar shops are filling up with Korean-made (and now Chinese-made) guitars. The Korean manufacturer Samick now accounts for almost half of the world's guitar production. Even Gibson, best known for its estimable and pricey Les Paul (see photo below) is offering high value from its Epiphone series guitars (which Samick builds for them in Korea.)

If you have ever picked up a surviving 'bargain' guitar of the '60s in a pawnshop or a secondhand guitar store -- a Harmony, Kay, Eko, etc. -- you would likely find cut-rate construction, weak intonation, mediocre playability and thin-sounding pickups. But today's 'bargain' brands offer workmanship and playability that sometimes give the premium brands a run for their money. Danelectro, for example, makes hip, great-sounding guitars that are easy to play and can be had for about US$200.

To give you an idea as to how far this trend has already gone, I personally own a $40 guitar. I was ordering the Line 6 Guitar Port (the guitar-to-PC interface that Driscoll mentions in the article) when I discovered that the vendor was offering the device a la carte for $160 or packaged with an electric guitar for $200. My curiosity got the best of me - how bad can this $40 guitar be? - and I ordered the package deal. And you know what? The cheapo guitar is terrific. It does not hold its tune as well as my main Gibson, but it is easy to play and sounds good to boot.

Driscoll is right that we are not going to see a lot of major innovations in electric guitars anytime soon, in large part because the players themselves are somewhat resistant to change. (Even the most avant-garde noisemakers tend to prefer traditional guitar designs.) What we are seeing instead is global capitalism commoditizing electric guitars and making quality instruments more affordable than ever for a generation of young players.

The sustain, listen to it!

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Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine's Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Norah Jones, who's debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide.

Ms Jones's success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today's world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Norah Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means.

And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.

Update: The new album, "Feels Like Home", which has a more overtly country feel, is excellent, in my view.

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Friedrich Blowhard's latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello "clouds". Hello "sky".

Says Friedrich:

It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as "found art" but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.

Indeed.

But now here's what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I've been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description ("cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue") but not the official title? Can search engines now - or will search engines ever be able to - respond intelligently to a query like that?

And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go "you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh ..." and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?

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Robert E. Howard's pulp fiction does not appear to be the stalwart stronghold of libertarianism that one would expect from an Ayn Rand or L. Neil Smith. Nevertheless, writing in Texas when the Wild West was a living memory, not a history book, Howard found plenty of material for his fantasies. The battles of the Aquilonians and the Picts were an odd Old World confection of cowboys and Indians.

The American values of small government and individual freedom have very little to do with Conan's lax attitude towards property, usually appropriated after cleaving a few skulls. However, as King Of Aquilonia, Conan employed his own brand of statecraft, as he explains to Amalrus, King of Ophir, Strabonus, King of Koth and Tsotha the Wizard as he stands chained and defeated in their hall.

From 'The Scarlet Citadel' by Robert E. Howard.

I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you - one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons and the people cried out under suppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of my people are lighter than anywhere else in the world. What of you? Your brother, Amalrus, hold the eastern half of your kingdom and defies you. And you, Strabonus, your soldiers are even now besieging castles of a dozen or more rebellious barons. The people of both your kingdoms are crushed into the earth by tyrannous taxes and levies, And you would loot mine -ha! Free my hands and I'll varnish this floor with your brains!

May all those who raise taxes share the same fate!

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On a long drive, this morning, I came across an interesting piece on Andrew Marr's Start the Week programme on BBC Radio Four, a radio station I still cannot quite give up. The thrust of the piece was that free market producers in London's West End are creating shockingly 'commercial' and 'unoriginal' shows, and that something should be done about it to make life more interesting for London's chattering classes.

It was revealed, by the complainer, that the West End is really suffering on the 'quality' end of the market because of the government's own National Theatre, which keeps putting on 'fantastically original work' for really low subsidised prices.

Arts-loving punters are finding these prices, such as £10 pounds, too good to resist, and so the West End is being driven to produce either endless film adaptations, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or endless musical compilations, mostly by Ben Elton. And something should be done about it!

All the program contributors banged on about it, for about ten minutes, without reaching any satisfactory conclusion. They stopped short of saying the government should introduce a regulation to make private West End producers run a minimum percentage of 'quality' plays, but I could it feel in my water that that was the direction they wanted to head in.

But what nobody contemplated, for even the briefest Mephistophelean moment, was that to get original work back into the West End the National Theatre should have its lucky government subsidy guillotined down to a figure of absolute zero. A free market for highbrow plays would then spring up, in place of a subsidy-deadened one, and the subsequent related tax cut would then help fund it, if this is what people actually wanted to pay for with their own money, rather than having a resident of Henley-on-Thames funding it for them.

Fat chance, obviously, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of this libertarian gig. I just wish my friends on the equally subsidised Radio 4 would, too. All those Oxbridge degrees between them and even the most obvious free market interference, which they freely brought up themselves, remains but an opaque wall of Kafkaesque complexity. One feels one could wait for Godot to put in a late appearance at the economists' ball, before the penny will finally drop.

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Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night's episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the "Colossus" computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his "difference engine". Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage's machine, and it worked.

But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.

I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.

For many years now, I've been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage's restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … "it worked", which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.

So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.

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There is a story in today's Guardian about a new kind of musical gizmo, the sinfonia, which is striking terror into the hearts of West End theatre musicians:

Theatre musicians held opening talks last night with the millionaire impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh in what they suspect may be a battle for survival against his plan to introduce an electronic "magic box" in place of part of the orchestra for musicals.

Champions of the device, called the Sinfonia, maintain that it "gives more bangs for the buck" than musicians. Musicians say it "steals jobs and cheats audiences".

First reports made it sound to me like a glorified backing tape. That really would be creepy, with the conductor having to keep time with a predetermined tempo, with a predetermined performance in fact.

However the Sinfonia does seem to be a bona fide musical instrument:

The Sinfonia resembles a synthesiser but consists of two powerful computers and keyboards. It was developed by two professors of music technology.

Older versions, presumably, of that music geek in Fame who played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (I think it was) all on his own at his high-tech keyboard.

Using a keyboard, the operator controls the instrumental output while watching the conductor's baton on video.

Virtual orchestras were a factor in a recent Broadway strike. This led to compromise on a minimum of 19-26 musicians for each production.

It occurred to me while reading the story that if costs can be reduced, maybe it will become possible to put on more musicals, thereby creating as many jobs for musicians as ever, and many more for singers and dancers. But the Musicians' Union cares not for such speculations, and the union-friendly Guardian man ends his piece not with such economic optimism but with this decidedly menacing final sentence:

Last night the Musicians' Union said it understood there were no trained Sinfonia operators in Britain.

Expect it soon, a remake of that old Kazan classic, this time called In the Orchestra Pit, with the guy in the Brando part now saying: "I could have been a concert pianist."

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U.S.-based music download business Napster, which is now a paid-for service after its chastening battles in the law courts against the music companies, is extending its services to European customers, according to this report. Well, when it comes to stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy, few subjects generate more angry buzzes than the case for or against the right to download music on the net, in my experience.

If the record companies ever thought that Napster would vanish without trace, they were deluding themselves. Personally, while I have my questions about the intellectual property right aspects to Napster-style downloading technology, there is no doubt that it has thrown traditional business models into the dustbin. But does it mean the death of music recordings, orchestras, book authors and film-makers? I don't really think so.

As a related point, there is an interesting article here on the website of science fiction publishing house Jim Baen, making a good point about how downloading can, in the medium to long run, raise rather than cut book sales. I suppose that the argument works for music and possibly films as well.

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I have no time to expand, because I'm about to go out and about for the rest of the day, but just to say that this, by Julia Magnet for City Journal, is a terrific piece, about the great American movie maker (and about to be novelist, I read somewhere on my googlings for this) Whit Stillman. I adore his movies, especially Metropolitan, but the other two also. (Too bad they are still not yet available on DVD.)

Incidentally, my tastes in Stillman are shared in my corner of the blogosphere. See Patrick Crozier, and Stephen Pollard, who also links admiringly to the Magnet piece.

I won't comment at length about Stillman, but I will just rattle off a few thoughts about why a devout libertarian like me adores the work of a deeply conservative critic of recent non-judgemental, post-modern, sexually liberated trends in bourgeois behaviour and thinking.

I am conservative in my tastes, in art, etiquette, manners (at least in aspiration), morals (ditto), drug use (for real – I never inhaled because I never touched it – too scary – the case for legalising drugs cannot be that they are harmless). It is merely that I am profoundly anti-conservative in politics, if by this is meant the imposition of my – superior and judgemental – tastes and opinions upon others. Political compulsion corrupts, and should always be regarded with suspicion, especially when what is being compelled is – to start with – genuinely virtuous and admirable. Why? Because then that which is genuinely virtuous and admirable will be corrupted, which is clearly far worse then when something silly and meretricious and wrong-headed is imposed, and corrupted. (That imposing something silly will probably do more immediate harm is true, but that is a different kind of argument to the one I just made.)

I believe that a Stillmanian attitude to social life will eventually win through in the free market of ideas and of institutions. I don't believe that it has any chance in a world of politically imposed good manners.

That is the kind of conservative I am and the kind of libertarian I am. If libertarianism means assembling a panty collection from one's sexual conquests and boasting about it, or in saying the first thoughtless thing that comes into your head no matter how hurtful, or in abandoning one's children for the sake of personal liberation and pretending that one is doing them a favour, then to hell with libertarianism – that is to say with "libertinism". It is just that the way to spread ideas like mine is to spread them by following one of them, which is not to force people to do things or think things against their will. It won't work. Be eloquent. Don't hit people. Argue with them, politely. Take a stand, but try not to be hurtful. Use words.

To put it another way: freedom creates civil society. Political compulsion destroys it.

Commenters please be kind, this was written in rather a hurry. Postings here have been a little thin lately, and I judged that something hasty, about and provoked by the thoughts and movies of Whit Stillman, would be better than nothing. I hope that at least some of you agree. For the kind of thing I would like to have managed, read the Julia Magnet piece.

My thanks to Tim Evans for drawing it to my attention with an email.

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There's a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I'm not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.

Final two paragraphs:

Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan's movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn't, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.

I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.

This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.

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I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I'm glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)

To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:

It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.

Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.

As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we're as bad … But, if we don't, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.

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In the pre-Christmas rush I have missed an email from someone at Ofwatch, who describe themselves as promoting the interests of adult subscription service viewers in the UK.

The BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification) are conducting a survey asking people if they agree with the way sex and violence are currently classified at all levels including R18. The last time they did this they were forced to relax the censorship of 18 classification film a little as most people were in favour of more choice for adults.

The survey opens up in a popup window the first time you visit www.bbfc.org.uk (and only the first time unless you clear your cookies). It is a simple multiple-choice form that doesn’t take long to fill in and can be completed online or even better, printed and posted (printed responses may carry more weight).

If you can spare a few minutes it is well worth completing it. I can guarantee that the likes of Mediawatch will be asking all their moaners to fill it in, so we desperately need a few open minded people to help balance things out and prevent the corrosive influence of the rightwing fundamentalist Christian groups who are opposed to just about everything and anything with an 18 certificate (or even a 15 certificate in many cases).

Apologies and hope that those interested in such matters still have a chance to participate in the survey.

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Norman Lebrecht is a name familiar to all classical CD geeks, of whom I am definitely one. He has written vast books full of rage. The air is thick with the sound of nails being hammered on the head, and of thumbs being crushed with that same hammer. Excellent explanations charge headlong into ridiculous explanations for the same phenomenon, the phenomenon to be explained usually being the "death of classical music", which is the phrase Lebrecht sometimes gives to the current travails of the classical music performing and recording enterprise. He sometimes gets that distinction right, and then in the next sentence quite forgets about it. He knows something important is happening to something important, and he hits nail after nail into the wood pile, hoping eventually to nail it all down. (He reminds me of how I write about Modern Art.)

Take this latest broadside. One moment Lebrecht is referring to corporate execs complaining about the lack of new classical repertoire, which is definitely one of the real reasons why classical recording is coming to the end of its current phase of activity. Then a couple of paragraphs later he blames the excellence of digital recording, as if hearing a train going past a recording studio a quarter of a century ago is going to put me off listening to classical CDs for ever. On the other hand, he is right that if digital recording is excellent enough for the super-latest formats like SACD or whatever the hell they are called to be superfluous, then indeed, that excellence is a terminus, because there's now no excuse - let alone reason - to re-record everything.

As to that lack of repertoire, here is an excellent piece about that, by … Norman Lebrecht.

Of all the turning points in the history of music, one is instantly audible to the innocent ear. Shortly after the soprano starts singing in the third movement of Arnold Schoenberg's Second string quartet, the music takes leave of its key of F-sharp minor and veers off into an atonal abyss. In that instant, the harmonic laws that governed European music for 500 years are declared null and void. The rule that C, E and G can go sweetly together in a row but not B, C and D has been shattered. Beauty is no longer a musician's highest aspiration. It has been superseded by the abstract.

You have to understand that when people like Lebrecht talk about the "history of music" they mean the history of their (our) kind of music. Music as such was doing fine around that time. It was just newly composed music done with violins and violas etc. that took a wrong turn. But apart from that little detail, the wrong turn is nicely described.

In other words, to refine the point a little, what we're talking about here is lack of new classical repertoire that people want to listen to in sufficient numbers to pay the classical bills. Having lost all touch with its musical foundations (tunes, dancing, pop songs, etc.) new classical music wallowed about in that Schoenbergian abyss for fifty years, while the serious classical musicians were recording their Beethoven symphony cycles and their complete works of Orlando Gibbons (that latter aspect of the job is still being completed), and then when the recording industry surfaced from that and said: right then, what's new that it would be nice to record? – they got their answer. Nothing. Not a sausage. No pieces whatsoever. Bugger all.

That's an exaggeration for effect, Lebrecht style, but only a slight one. You can't feed fifty world class orchestras only with the latest recordings of this year's output by James Macmillan. The blunt truth is that those orchestras are there to celebrate and redo Beethoven, and those days will soon be gone. Oh, there is lots of classical music activity still to come, but most of it will be asset stripping. And Lebrecht is one of those typical artistic types who blames asset strippers for the collapse in value of the assets which the strippers are rescuing those other – still valuable – assets from. He blames the messenger for the message.

High in corporate towers, overpaid executives blame a lack of compelling new repertoire, of charismatic artists and of public tolerance for long-winded classics – in short, they blame everything except their own failure to invest in talent, allowing it to grow a personality as it steadily acquires a following.

Bollocks basically. Invest? This is the word always used by people recommending that other people should waste their money. I am as tolerant of long-winded classics as ever, and so are millions of others. It is merely that if you already own seventeen recordings of Dvorak's New World Symphony, you do not need an eighteenth in order to indulge your habit.

Corporate greed? Corporate greed is a rude phrase meaning the recognition of economic reality. Corporate greed didn't stop classical music recording getting started. In fact it encouraged it. But now the job is done, and Corporate Greed says: right guys, time to stop now. Sorry. Off you go. Time to turn these fancy classical studios into something else. If you want to carry on, do it in your spare time and at your own expense. (Which is what is now happening with those complete sets of Orlando Gibbons.)

Aside from digital recording being a potential terminus of excellence, the other thing that makes digital sound such a source of classical havoc is that it is so much easier to transmit, and store, and play half reasonably, than is analogue sound. I have already raved here about my new digital radio. Friends of mine are already turning all there CDs into computer files. One day I'll do that too. But the problem is not passing trains. The problem is that people will have all the music they could ever desire either on their hard discs, or else on that great Collective Hard Disc in the Sky called the Internet. In that world, charging £17 for a bit of plastic in a shop with the latest Berlin Phil Beethoven Fifth on it makes no sense.

But what joy to be able to trawl through the collected nail hittings and thumb crushings of Norman Lebrecht. Sooner or later the idea of typing the words "Norman" and "Lebrecht" into Google would have occurred to me. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, I got straight to his latest piece. To say nothing of trunk-loads of other goodies such as this.

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Maybe mankind, even in these dumbed-down days, can take only so much dreck. That, in my 'umble opinion, is one lesson we can reasonably draw from figures showing a fall in the sales of Hollywood-made movies in north America. Yes, Lord of the Rings 3, Finding Nemo and some others have proven a big hit, but all too often the formula of big action movie has proven a dud.

Of course, certain factors are involved here. Remaking comic strips into films is bound, after the early flurry of excitement, to leave audiences cold. DVD sales and rentals may also be playing a part, though heaven knows it is difficult to work out if there is a direct cause and effect.

I would be willing to bet, though, that one factor which Hollywood film executives are missing is the changing demographic profile of our culture. All too many films are still pitched at teens and twentysomethings, but surely as populations age, as they are in parts of the West, film producers need to take account of a more mature audience.

The Peter Weir historical drama movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and based on two seafaring novels by the late Patrick O'Brien, was my favourite of the year, and much better than I had come to expect of literary screen adaptations. It has not shot the lights out at the box office, but deserved to do so.

Or maybe films made in Asia and elsewhere are going to pick up the slack from Hollywood over the long term. We live in interesting times.

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Italy is of course renowned for its great public architecture, its dazzling roster of artists and sculptors, its fantastic food and wine, elegantly-dressed citizens and of course some of the most crooked politicians on the planet. Well, last week, during a trip to Malta when I had a chance to surf over some television channels, I realised that there is an even greater glory of Italian culture - its tv shows.

OK, I am being only half-serious, but Italian television is so funny, so crass, so brassy, and so choc-full of dazzingly gorgeous women and cheesy male presenters that I grin whenever I think about it. You cannot fail to feel good and be amused by it.

One of the things I dislike about much British television is just how depressing it is. Our terrible soap operas, with their tragic sense of life and victim culture, are the worst, but much else is also awful. Not so with Italian television.

Of course it is brazenly vulgar and silly. The moral scolds of the far left and far right would loathe it. But such folk, who share more in common than they would like to admit, miss the point that a certain amount of vulgarity is a sign of health, a suggestion of a level of dynamism in a culture. And judging by Italian tv, Italy is in rude good health.

And of course much of it is owned by the arch-villain of the Guardianista classes and my favourite Italian politician, Silvio Berlusconi. Belissimo!!!!

(Mind you, this guy takes a different view)

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I staggered blearily back to an Internet connection this morning and looked for the Samizdata Lord of the Rings review so I could add my comment of a single word, 'Triumph', before staggering even more blearily through to the New Year.

But though I looked high and low in the Gladden Fields of Micklethwaitian cultural commentary, this review appeared to have rolled down the Anduin bit pipe and down into the sea of review history long ago. Or had it even appeared at all? A bit more searching and still nothing appeared. So it seemed the task had fallen to a simple Oxfordshire resident, rather than one more worthy.

I must apologise in advance if this review starts falling apart in its latter stages. I watched most of the last twenty minutes through a tearful blur of homoerotic emotion just glad the lights were down so nobody could see the big blubbing bloke in the corner.

So where do we begin? The start is usually traditional, and what an opening. Andy Serkis finally revealed in the sunlit flesh as the younger Smeagol, remorsefully commiserating for almost a whole second, over the murderous death of his friend Deagol, before giggling at his acquisition of the Ring. Then follows the descent of Smeagol into hell at the roots of the Misty Mountains before we see Frodo descending into a similar hell at the roots of the Ash Mountains to, as Douglas Adams might have once put it, counterpoint the surrealism of his relationship to both Slinker Stinker Gollum and Master Samwise Gamgee.

This direct foray into the destructive evil of power, right at the start of the film, and the way such power destroys both individuals and their relationships to other people, marks the film out, for me, as a truly great work.

But how on all of Middle-Earth did Peter Jackson manage to cram so much in? I felt I'd been in the cinema for the entire period of Frodo's climb up the stair of Cirith Ungol, though in a fully absorbed and attention-glued way, before any of the real serious battle-schmattle scenes got underway. How long is this film, I thought, briefly returning to Earth for a moment about halfway through. It must be about fifteen hundred years, almost the total length of the Third Age itself!

But still it went on, smacking me over the head with giant rocks and cave trolls, creeping ever closer towards the furnace lip of the lava cliff inside Sauron's Mount Doom ring-making factory.

Gimli, of course, got all the best comedy lines. I'll try to avoid spoiling them for anyone with the misfortune not to have been to see the film yet, but keep an eye out for the one with Legolas and the Oliphant. Absolutely priceless, and worth getting the DVD for just by itself. Indeed, at one point I almost expected Gimli to turn into Scotty of the Enterprise, with Aragorn as Captain Kirk, and Legolas as Spock, all sharing a bit of Transporter Room banter before they beamed down to inevitable death on the planet below. I suppose you could've cast Elrond as Bones McCoy, but hey, let's not stretch an analogy too far.

Given that Mr Jackson had to cram in almost one and a half book volumes into three hours, or less, having given the whole of his second film to just the first half of the original 'Two Towers' book, he did have some stretching and cutting of his own to do, to get it all in.

I've often felt in the past that the Paths of the Dead was J.R.R.Tolkien's own desperate way out of a self-imposed novelistic impasse, to avoid splitting the Riders of Rohan into two thin weak columns, one necessarily sent round the back to attack the rear of Minas Ithil's attacking Orcs. But Mr Jackson manages to improve on the original use of these dead soldiers, IMHO, once again providing Gimli with an excellent opportunity for a punch line.

What I did miss from the cuts were Gandalf's direct personal confrontations with evil. His major set pieces to break Saruman's staff at the Tower of Orthanc, to repel the Witch King of Angmar from the gates of Minas Tirith, and to dismiss the quailing Mouth of Sauron before the gates of Mordor, all got cut at either the script editing level or the film editing level. Which I think is a pity. Though few cinemagoers, I'll admit, would've tolerated the four hour film required to get all this in, plus the extended return to the Shire I also missed, with its expulsion of a New Labour-like Sarumanian government bent on taxation, wealth destruction, and regulation. Jackson concentrates instead on the three-way power relationship between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, to give the movie greater focus.

And who's the movie director? Is it moi? Or is it Mr Jackson? I think the bloke with the beard and the glasses wins.

Though I must say, if these missing scenes are in the special extended DVD, I'll be forced to acquire it, and then of course the first two special extended discs, to make up the set. So perhaps Mr Jackson is no Wise Fool after all, for missing out these confrontations.

The box office returns will tell, in the end, bolstered by my Christmas present acquisition of a Gollum mug bearing the inscription, 'My Preciousss'. And what an ending for Smeagol! Tremendous.

For those who've neither read the book nor seen the film, who're planning to see it soon, I'll say no more on the plot, except, the hobbits are the ones with the hairy feet. And the final scene at the Grey Havens is one even Mr Jackson didn't dare cut, filled with the final majestic Middle-Earth words of Tolkien's Maiar of Manwe, alternatively known to his friends as Gandalf, Olorin, or Mithrandir.

Which brings us to the Tolkien family. What a strange bunch of folk. For decades now they've been living off the genius of J.R.R., cackling and spitting at each other, not speaking to each other, having bust-ups, and generally living the lives of ungrateful malcontents. Come on, get a grip. You sold the film rights off decades ago, for that half-finished cartoon, so you've only got yourselves to blame. Just count up the book sale proceeds and be grateful. What Peter Jackson has done is simply incredible. And if I were you, I would hand him 'The Hobbit' film options, right now, and even gratis, on the sole condition that he drops all of this King Kong nonsense and starts making 'The Hobbit' straightaway, instead. Clean up on the book sales royalties, and stop complaining. In a few years time you'll lose copyright anyway, under the fifty year rule, so make a few quid now while you can, before some of those Austrian economists succeed in their plan to remove all intellectual copyright protection even earlier from all kinds of software, including books and films.

Oh, and by the way, you'll also be giving me something to watch next Christmas, or the Christmas after, so I must declare this selfish interest. Though I fear it will be a many years yet before even the redoubtable Mr Jackson takes on 'The Silmarillion'. Now that really would be an epic.

And almost at the end of all things, a word for Mr Howard Shore, the driving force behind this incredible trilogy's Wagnerian music score. From the braying of the trumpets for Barad-Dur and Sauron, presumably inspired by Morgoth's intervention in the Music of the Ainur, to the Irish-feel brogues for Rohan, and the theme for the Fellowship itself, the music behind this film is a true work of genius in itself, matched only by the inspirational qualities of Alan Lee and John Howe, Mr Jackson's conceptual designers, and the two illustrators who in the last three decades have brought the world of Middle-Earth to life more than anyone else, after the death of J.R.R., and before the advent of Mr Jackson.

Gentlemen, Ladies, and anyone else who had anything to do with the making of this movie trilogy, I salute you. Though I do have just this one final question.

Did Aragorn really have to sing? It must have been the return of Tom Bombadil, in disguise.

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I've just got off the phone with my mother, who included in among all the family chat some grumbles about this year's Christmas stamps. She prefers more obviously Christmassy imagery, and she said the people at her local Post Office didn't much care for them either. What are they? - she said. I'd heard distant grumblings about these stamps, and had seen the one with the ice twiddling around a tree because presumably that was the one which people were particularly grumbling about. Controversial blah blah. But I hadn't seen all of them, or given any of them any thought until my mother mentioned them.

I should guess that there is a sort of ideological agenda here, in the form of a non-agenda. They avoid anything very Christian. Like most readers of this blog I should guess, I utterly despise the notion that Christian Christmas stuff should be set aside in order not to upset Muslim stroke atheists. (a) No sane Muslim stroke atheist could possibly be upset. (b) If insane Muslim stroke atheists are upset, to hell with them.

Nevertheless, and perhaps because I am myself a devout atheist, I actually quite like these particular stamps, although I do agree that the ice twiddle one is rather silly. I especially like the ice star. But I'm guessing others might prefer something more along these lines.

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On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:

A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the "Eroica", by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …

Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler's love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little's posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.

...I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.

See what I mean? Little continues:

Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.

This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.

Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.

That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.

By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. "The best performance I've ever heard, I think."

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More great news, this time on the Ozzy Osbourne front. He's not going to die:

Rock star Ozzy Osbourne is breathing unaided for the first time since his quad bike accident a week ago.

The former Black Sabbath singer has been taken off a ventilator and has been able to speak to his family.

And with his old verbal fluency unimpaired, I trust.

Not long ago I caught Ozzy and daughter Kelly doing their Christmas single Changes on Top of the Pops, which is now number one in the hit parade apparently. And then immediately after that Ozzy had to be rushed to hospital following his prang, and Kelly rushes there to see him. You can't buy publicity like that, because you can't fake it.

This tune, for me, personifies the way that pop music these days, at least the sort of pop music you see on British telly, has become more and more something that your granny can recognise and sing along with. Not like it was in my day. In my day we used to drive elder brothers and sisters crazy, never mind our parents and grandparents. But now the man who used to bite the heads off bats is in that same celebrity category that used to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now also accommodates England's rugby darling Jonny Wilkinson. (Although, it seems that many elder brother types are angry about Changes. This angry bloke reminds me of how my contemporaries at Essex University in the early seventies reacted to Donny Osmond.)

With his latest effort Ozzy has apparently set a new pop record, of the Guinness-Book-of variety:

The singer has set a new record for the longest time taken to reach number one during a career, reaching the top of the charts 33 years after his first hit with Black Sabbath, Paranoid, got to number four in August 1970.

Ah, Paranoid. Those were the days, eh? Who would have thought that Ozzy Osbourne of all people would live long enough to break a record like that?

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About a month ago, Norwegian blogger Bjorn Staerk composed a sumptuous satire of the marxoid mentality in a parodistic review of the Lord of the Rings:

Working hard to foil the plans of these good, decent white folks are the "evil" Saruman, and the even more "evil" Sauron, rulers of two countries called Isengard and Mordor. Both are portrayed as near-demonic in their hatred of our white heroes. Sauron is no more than a big, red eye, hovering in the air, clearly implying that he's some kind of "Devil". Both have massive armies at their disposal, consisting entirely of filthy, ugly monsters that happen to be black, every single one of them.

I wonder how many people read that, chuckled and thought to themselves that, in reality, no respectable left-wing commentator or pundit could ever possibly plumb the depths of such absurdity?

If you were one of those people, you were wrong, because Bjorn Staerk's creation was both witty and remarkably prescient.

British socialist and Independent columnist, Johann Hari has not only risen to the bait, he has grabbed hold of it and ripped it to shreds in a feeding frenzy. Perhaps Mr Hari also read the Bjorn Staerk piece, got entirely the wrong end of the stick and decided to follow its lead. More likely, though, that he thought this up all by himself.

In an editorial he has called 'Oppose Tolkein!' (which itself sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of the Student Trotskyite Handbook), Mr Hari warns the world that the Tolkein classic is, in fact, a thinly-veiled Nazi screed:

The most obvious is racism. The purely evil Orcs are, in Tolkien's words, "squat, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant-eyes". The enemy is the Dark Lord and he lives in the Black Land. The heroic hobbits and elves are, by contrast, uber-Aryan and ethnically pure. Ideals of "blood" and its purity are always sloshing around his narrative. For example, the Men of Gondor - "the high men" - are descendants of the Numenorians, the greatest of all warriors. Over the centuries, they have become "degraded" because of breeding with inferior races. When their bloodline is pure, as in Aragorn's descendants, the strength of the original Lords of the West is retained.

Read Bjorn Staerk and then read Johann Hari. Can you tell the difference? No, neither can I. Mr Hari has provided definitive proof for what we have all long suspected: that no satire on the thought processes of the modern left can be regarded as exaggeration.

As well as writing for the Indie, Johann is also a regular contributor to Harry Hatchett's blog where he and his fellow travellers are forever accusing free market campaigners of holding views which are 'out of touch' and 'unpopular'. Deliciously ironic then that Johann should elect to publish his laughable denunciation not 24 hours before the British public votes 'Lord of the Rings' as their 'favourite ever book'.

I am also given to believe that he is considered in many circles to be something of a rising star of the British left. Judging from this kind of form, I can only concur.

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I often make predictions, and with a kiss of Mafia-like death, virtually all of them fail to come true. I have a gift.

However, it gives me great pleasure to announce that at least one of them has come true. Lord of the Rings has been voted, against all the muttered displeasures of the socialist London-based diners of the BBC cognoscenti, and the great and the good, as the United Kingdom's favourite ever book.

Which reminds me of the following quote:

Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-Earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all spurious BBC competitions to fill up the airwaves with cheap programming, so the money saved can be used to prop up the useless lives of BBC socialist parasites, are an evil.

If this book can win, against all the railings of the government worshippers who rule this country, then I have hope. One day we will destroy their ring of power and free ourselves from their tyranny. In the meantime, let's just hope Mr Jackson gets the film rights for 'The Hobbit', to give us something to watch next Christmas.

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Running short of last minute Christmas ideas? Want to understand what it's like to be a ruthless statist? Look no further than Medieval: Total War. I was at a loose end last week, alone with a laptop, a CD drive, a hotel bedroom, fifteen quid burning a hole in my pocket, and a nearby South London branch of WH Smiths. There are many terrible things such a situation can tempt a man into, so I leapt into one of them regardless. Finding a bargain-basement copy of Medieval: Total War, for £14:99, I loaded up the sucker and got going. I started as the English, on the easy level, from 1087 onwards, my mission to conquer the whole of Europe by 1487. Three hundred and fifty years later, virtually the whole of Europe is now dominated by England, I've destroyed the French and the Germans, almost as good as beating Australia at Rugby, and I'm about to conquer Constantinople. Unfortunately, I remained unable to do any of this without keeping the provincial tax levels at 'Normal', i.e. 50%, rather than 'Very Low'. Though as an Austrian, I did resist going for 'Very High' taxes, at 70%, to pay for my insatiable desire for more troops, better weapons, Royal Knights, and Welsh Longbow men.

If you do get the game, try to get up to the Halberdier and Swiss Pike men level of building technology. Both soldier types are lethal, especially at cutting up enemy cavalry.

In a two-way split game, you first of all play a game of strategy, sort of like a complex form of chess, on an Olde Worlde map of Europe, with the construction of buildings, fleets, the training of soldiers, assassins, princesses, and various alliances. You have to build up certain levels of technology, based on your provincial castles building program, before you can train up certain types of more professional soldiers. You then press an 'end of year' button, a bell tolls, and you move into the second stage of the game where your campaigning soldiers go into full 3-D battles, with opposing armies, with the same battle engine currently being used in the Time Commanders television series.

What I really liked about the game was its insistence that you look after trade, and keeping your provincial populations happy. Yes, only in order to keep your tax levels up, and to avoid expensive rebellions from the serfs, but Professor Hoppe's analysis that monarchy is better than democracy, though still much worse than proper liberty, becomes more persuasive by the day.

Is the game addictive? I'll say. I've had to ask my wife to hide the disks when I got home. But have no fear. I have a sneaking feeling I'm getting Railroad Tycoon for Christmas, so I can pretend to be Dagny Taggart. I wonder if it has a John Galt extension pack? Should a man my age be doing such things? I have absolutely no idea. But it certainly beats watching television, especially the vacuous rubbish on the BBC. I wish I could give up the BBC completely. Has anyone in the UK tried it? I'd miss Top Gear, of course, but virtually all of the rest of it you can keep. Except for John Humphries on the radio, this morning, when he literally laughed in Chancellor Gordon Brown's face, as El Gordo tried to persuade the Welsh Rottweiler that his new open-ended National Insurance tax is in some way different from income tax. It was almost worth the licence fee. Almost, of course, but not quite.

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In the week of the increasingly embarrassing Turner Prize, here (I found it via these people) is news of some art that Samizdata can really get behind:

Since 1998 Italian artist Antonio Riello has been making very special weapons as artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military guns are restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies.

And for a certain sort of gentleman, I'm guessing. (Although those ball and chain things at the top of the picture collection don't look to me like they're for self defence at all.)

Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others. Recently also armours in steel, plastic and Kevlar are made to protect ladies against urban dangers.

Globalisation. Good.

In this artproject the glamour of fashion system is mixed with the common perverse and morbid fascination for weaponry.

Yeah yeah. They have to say that.

These works – made using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colours, jewels, furs, trendy fabrics and special technological appliances – play along the thin line between fashion and trash.

Miami Vice aesthetics you might say.

LADIES WEAPONS are a sort of hybrids born from the most outstanding contemporary Italian features: the obsession for personal security and the passion for elegance and fashion.

I would have preferred passion for personal security and obsession for elegance and fashion, but like I say, they have to say that guns are bad. This is Italy remember, not Arizona.

Every artwork has a name of a woman ("CLAUDIA", "TAMARA",….) and exists only in one exemplar.
Where is allowed the artist uses real weapons, in the countries where is forbidden artworks are based on perfect replicas.

"Where is allowed." There's your problem. And of course, "perfect replicas" are only allowed "where is allowed" also. This art is presumably illegal wherever replica guns are flaunted in places "where is not allowed". Oh well, it all adds to the buzz.

My guess is that the Art Nazis, to coin a phrase, won't allow this stuff to qualify, because it is itself far, far too "obsessive" about guns to be allowed into polite Euro-society. As "art", it will never catch on. It's typical Euro-trash half-baked goodness/uselessness, in other words. More work is needed.

This guy should stop titting about with "only in one examplar" nonsense, go to America, and mass produce these things. Forget art. Embrace the gun culture, and help to make it (even more) fashionable.

When he gets there, he will course have to deal with the fact that in America they presumably have a lot of this kind of kit already, selling healthily (not to say obsessively), with no thought of art at all.

(By the way, and flying off at somewhat of a tangent, "Art Nazis" is a phrase I recently invented, which I think may have a future. I say invented, but I googled for it after thinking of it for myself, and I did find this use of the phrase, to describe the idiot/villain art critic at the centre of Tom Wolfe's splendid little book The Painted Word.)

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Lawrance M. Bernabo, Amazon reviewer #2 with 6700 reviews behind him faces a Hamletesque (Hamletian?) dilemma:

To review, or not to review: that is the question:

Whether 'tis better to post reviews and cover

The pros and cons of action figures,

Or to write reviews about best sellers,

And by reviewing diss them? To critique: to review;

No more; and have a life again we end

The long-nights and the thousand misspeeled words

and buy things instead, 'tis a consumption

Amazon devoutley wish'd. To critique, to review;

To review: perchance be voted: Yeah, there's the fun;

For in those votes for reviews what ranking may come

Whence we may achieve a cute little badge,

Must make us crazed: such obsession

Surely makes such big time fun of reviewing life;

For who would bear the wit and scorns of posts,

The counter review, the second page oblivion,

The pangs of negative votes, posting delay,

The insolence of edits and revisions

The steady rise of the unworthy reviewer,

When anyone might their ascension make

With some extra accounts? who would freebies take,

To read and review someone’s new book,

But that the fun of something never reviewed,

The undiscover'd product for the nounce

No reviews critique, inspires the mind

And makes us rather review everything we have

Than review those things that we know not of?

Thus ranking does make competitors of us all;

And thus the constant cry re: ranking

Is debated o'er with constant call for reform,

And reviews of great length and insight

With words counts the elves judge too high,

Do lose the chance of posting.-- Submit you more!

Fair Amazon.com! Jeff, on thy pages

Be all my reviews spotlighted.

We conclude that he needs a blog. Now!

Via Many-2-Many

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The time of year has arrived for the annual Turner Prize for modern art: an exhibition of dreary, talentless, post-modernist rubbish fawned over and slobbered upon by a carnival procession of dreary, talentless, post-modernist critics, groupies, poseurs and assorted hangers-on (lots of 'dog-turd-in-a-bottle' type installations, hailed as a 'devastating social critique').

I don't care who won it or why but I could not possibly let this scandalously hypocritical bit of dreck pass by without comment:

Described by some critics as "a deeply weird artist", Perry makes classically shaped pots, which now fetch between £8,000 and £15,000.

But his decorative motifs - transfers, photographs and squiggly drawings - are anything but traditional. Inspired mostly by what he calls his unhappy childhood in Essex after his father left home, many are scenes of child abuse or erotica or angry social comment on class or the consumer culture.

Obviously the 'deeply weird' Mr Perry is so angry about 'consumer culture' that he could not possibly let one of his home-made pots go for less than 8000 smackers!

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Not only am I trying to cope with the steady flow of work related parties that have started to appear in my diary in the run up to Christmas, but I agreed to go out on Friday with Andrew Dodge to the Monster Magnet launch party at the Barfly in Camden, not that it takes much persuading when there is free beer and good music on the agenda. We were treated to a live set from Monster Magnet, and if you have ever been to the Barfly you will know it is not a big place, so it was a real treat considering they were playing the Forum the next day (and that’s a big place). As Andrew points out in his posting covering the same gig we were mixing with the likes of Kelly Osbourne and Die So Fluid , however what he does not mention is that he had the hots for Grog, their lead singer,

so we spent a large proportion of the night chatting to her, not that I was complaining until the next day when I discovered I had lost my voice.

The following night was spent at the Brixton Academy watching The Darkness play. Again I was with Andrew with the added value of Anna of leather catsuit fame from the bloggers party, although this time it was not planned as we had both got tickets separately. I have seen them live before, and they did not disappoint on a second viewing. Their mixture of Rock and Irony (give me a D… Give me an Arkness…) is refreshing in the current world of dance and manufactured pop music you hear on the radio all the time. On the way out we bumped into Nik who had arranged the Monster Magnet party and his voice was worse than mine. At least I was able to talk by Saturday evening!

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I linked to this story earlier today on my Culture Blog. And then I had supper at Perry's earlier this evening, consisting of the leftovers from the Blogger Bash on Saturday, and I told him about it. He laughed, so here it is here. It's from the Guardian, which has a Strange Things section:

In Romania, local media report that the country's "first" institution of higher learning, the University of Arts, in Iasi, was the scene of an official investigation this month after police removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself on the campus. Builders and students at the university had initially mistaken it for a modern work of art.

According to Reuters, the body hung for a whole day in a sculpture-laden garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers twigged to what it was and called the cops.

Cue commenters with stories about how granny went to sleep in Tate Modern and got confused with an exhibit. These are old gags now, in fact they go back to Duchamp's Urinal, but as long as Art goes on being ridiculous, they will go on being funny.