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.

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?

What European unity really means to most people.

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.

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.

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.

Prominent movie actors; under-informed and over-exposed since 1898.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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

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?

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.

"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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A complete translation of the text used in Orff's Carmina Burana can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the one place in the movie which does not feel it has been shot as itself, which is intriguing given that the setting is clearly indicated as being the real place. (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak turn down a road down which a sign points to "San Juan Bautista" on their way to the final scene of the film). Rather than being isolated, the church is in the middle of the town. Watching the DVD of the movie again, Hitchcock makes no attempt to hide the fact that the church is in the middle of a town, and yet somehow I never got that sense until visiting the location. And the bell tower: the bell tower which looks enormous and looms over everything is in fact in reality quite small. The real church tower is shown in the film, but it is shot in such a way as to hide its true lack of size. One suspects that if Kim Novak fell off it in reality she might perhaps hurt herself, but she would have to be unlucky to die. And of course, there is the small matter that the inside of the tower seen in the film is clearly a set. The characters go round and round a seemingly endless spiral staircase, and there is no possible way that this would fit inside the exterior of that particular bell tower.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

Oh I am soooo up for this...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I did not want to hit the guys over the head with the beliefs I laid out above, so I asked them if they thought that TV series on DVD (which they all seemed to agree was the best thing to happen to TV in a long time, even if the lack of leadership in the Writers' Guild means that they get screwed out of decent earnings, receiving only 2 or 4 pennies per DVD sale), TiVo, and that greater choice of personal relevance is going to affect what they do in any significant way. Every panel member had something to say about that, but the most interesting answer came from Paul Feig, who said that the bottom line is that the show that draws the most advertising revenue wins, and it will always be that way.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.