We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Bryan Appleyard has some interesting things to say about science fiction (hat-tip, Glenn). As a commenter said in the Times’ letters section though, Bryan focuses a little too much on the dystopian side of SF, on science-out-of-control. There are some nice touches though: he is right to examine how SF has affected the course of science, as well as the other way round.
The problem with a newspaper article like this, unfortunately, is that you can only really skim the surface of the subject. SF is pretty vast – hey, like the universe itself! There are bound to be vast tracts of land that get overlooked. Appleyard does not mention the more positive, life-affirming side of hard science fiction in the works of people like John Varley or Vernor Vinge, for instance (two of the best writers of the lot, in my opinion). And he barely mentions Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Ken MacLeod and R.A. Heinlein. Mention of the latter, of course, brings us onto the fact that SF has often been quite daringly political; it has used imagined futures to play around with cultural, social and ideal political scenarios (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Stephenson’s Snow Crash, etc).
But, to be fair to Appleyard, he takes SF seriously. As he points out, there seems to be more interest in fantasy instead: the enormous popularity of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, being just two examples. Maybe I am missing something, but I have never been interested in that side of the genre. My wife keeps badgering me to read Pratchett. Another sub-genre is what one might call “techno-military” SF; Heinlein wrote some of this in things like Starship Troopers; a good current example are the writings of John Scalzi.
Here’s a pretty good dictionary of science fiction.
For most of my life I have been fascinated by two-man teams. Much is written in the management books about the decision making and leadership skills of individuals. Much is made of teams, of about six to a dozen or so people (a dozen being reckoned by most to be about the upper limit before factionalism sets in), and about the skill of building effective teams. But less, it seems to me, is made of the partnership of two, despite the fact that everywhere you look in the world of human accomplishment, you see two-man teams, often famously named: Rolls Royce, Gilbert and Sullivan, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressberger, Pratt and Whitney, Rogers and Hammerstein, Flanders and Swan… trust me, the game of naming two man teams goes on for as long as you have time to devote to it. I could have machine-gunned this posting with links, but Google is Google – another now famously accomplished two-man team runs that, I believe – and I could not be bothered. Partly this is because this is, be warned now, a rather long posting, and doing proper links would have taken me the whole day.
Even when a single creative genius seems to stand in isolated splendour, more often than not it turns out that there was or is a backroom toiler seeing to the money, minding the shop, cleaning up the mess, lining up the required resources, publishing and/or editing what the Great Man has merely written, quietly eliminating the blunders of, or, not infrequently, actually doing the work only fantasised and announced by, the Great Man. Time and again, the famous period of apparently individual creativity coincides precisely with the time when that anonymous partner was also but less obtrusively beavering away, contributing crucially to the outcome, and often crucially saying boo to the goose when the goose laid a duff egg. If deprived, for some reason, of his back-up man, the Lone Genius falls silent, or mysteriously fails at everything else he attempts. Think Elizabeth the First and … damn, I can not remember his name, but he was crucial, and Elizabeth was never the same after he had died. Cecil, that was him.
That literature and showbiz are so full of two-man teams is evidence of the enormous emotional importance that we all attach to these partnerships. Every TV detective, for instance, seems to have his Dr Watson figure, less inspired, but perhaps emotionally more adult, who buys the pint afterwards, soothes the frazzled nerves of the great detective, and who generally carries the can and tidies up after. For every Holmes there is a Watson, for every Morse, a Lewis. And for every Regan, a Carter. Major kudos to the late John Thaw for having participated in – having lead, actually – two very different but equally famous two-man teams of British TV coppers. → Continue reading: On two-man teams (and on the current travails of Mr Brown)
Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:
“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of ‘betraying’ it by… doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.
If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do… On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don’t believe in. Make up your mind.
A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any ‘phobic’ way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.
One of my fellow Samizdatistas recently told me that whatever business model the porn industry is following now is what Hollywood is about to follow. To see the future of Hollywood, look at porn now. Porn, so I was told, now, already, distributes itself by being given away, and then if you like something you see for free you go to the originating porn site and pay a bit, either in cash or in advertising attention or for individual products, because that turns out to be an even better deal, and worth paying a bit for. Hollywood is slowly learning this lesson.
But is it actually too late for them to learn? Look what is apparently now happening to the porn industry:
DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart – only worse.
So, is that what is about to happen to Hollywood also? Will movie and TV entertainment of the clothes-mostly-on sort also be overrun soon by amateurs?
WIth thanks to Instapundit for the link.
I keep telling my wife that she bears a certain physical resemblance to this eyeful. I am not sure if Mrs Pearce wants to spend her life as an opera singer, mind. (Latin dance is more her thing). Anyway, compared with most of the over-rated warblers of modern music, Cecilia Bartoli knocks the competition into the proverbial cocked hat. Her continued excellence helps assuage music-lovers’ grief at losing Luciano Pavarotti earlier this year. It is one of my regrets I never saw him live.
Here are some wonderfully good photographs, ideal browsing for a grey Sunday afternoon.
I went to watch Elizabeth – the Golden Age – as I had mentioned a few weeks back and I was pretty impressed, despite a few jarring notes (Francis Drake barely gets a mention in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rather like overlooking Nelson at Trafalgar). But the film was overall good entertainment, if not dead-accurate scholarship. One thing stuck in my mind on the way home: the man who played Philip II of Spain was very convincing in the role of a religious maniac, a man swinging between rhapsodies of hatred for Elizabeth and tearful despair. I thought to myself: “This guy looks like a stunt double for the current leader of Iran”. I mean, he really does. Creepy.
I find this Hollywood writers strike fascinating but puzzling. On the one hand, we have long been told, Hollywood crawls with waiters who serve scripts to movie people with the coffee, lift attendants who type deathless dialog during their lunch hours. On the other hand, Hollywood is grinding to a halt, because the Union, and all those sympathetic to unions, really can withdrawn a great chunk of the raw material essential to the entertainment industry.
Rather than announce the answer to the what’s-going-on? question, I will simply ask it of the Samizdata commentariat. What’s going on?
Is this an industry in decline, having a quarrel about a diminished pie? Or is it a quarrel about new territory (digital rights), in other words a quarrel about an increased pie? Is this TV and the movies on their last legs, or TV and the movies getting the ground rules established for marching profitably forwards into the internet age? Is that actually what the quarrel is about? The studios say: it is a famine out there. The writers say: it is a feast.
My heading says one thing that I do observe with confidence, which is that if you want small screen entertainment, perfectly crafted to fit in with your exact preferences and prejudices, there is still plenty of it out there, which is not going to go away or stop being made any time soon. So, is not this a rather bad time for Hollywood to be strike-bound? Are not the professionals simply handing the future to the blackleg amateurs? Or am I missing something?
I want the strike to last for ever, on politico-philosophical grounds. As a libertarian I am not against strikes in principle. An individual should be allowed to withdraw his labour. So should an organised group of individuals, and attach any conditions they like to ceasing to withdraw that labour, just so long as organised does not mean violent (the alternative to such rules is slavery). Nevertheless, the kind of writers, and the kind of people generally, who like striking, unions, etc., and who believe that striking, unions, etc., is what has made the word rich (rather than productive work), mostly have the kind of opinions I would like to see severely muted, indefinitely.
I could get my wish, at any rate for quite a while:
They want more money for their work when it is used online than Hollywood studios are willing to pay. Because the strike is over matters of principle, not just dollars and cents, it could last for months.
But what are these principles exactly?
If this film, a sequel, is half as good as Elizabeth, then it will be one to wait for. Blanchett was simply outstanding in the first movie.
I was interested in the comment by the actor, Clive Owen, who said he was not bitter at being passed over for the role of 007. I am not sure I entirely believe him – but then there was a lot of spying going on in Elizabethan England, so instead of holding a Walther PPK, he gets to use a rapier sword instead. Arguably, M16 and its cousins can trace some of their origins back to that period.
And let’s face it, Cate Blanchett is certainly easy on the eye.
“We all have to compromise,” says Walt Chalmers (played by Robert Vaughn)
“Bullshit,” replies Frank Bullitt, (Steve McQueen).
From Bullitt.
I like to read paperback thrillers as well as the supposed more “serious stuff” out there. Authors that I willingly take to the beach or read on a train, the Tube or for that matter, while curling up on the sofa in my flat are ones that many people will recognise: Frederick Forsyth, Ian Fleming, Alastair Maclean, Eric Ambler (a much under-appreciated writer), Mickey Spillane, Roger Simon, John D. McDonald (Travis Magee stories, etc), and many more. And I am never more grateful than when I stumble upon a new author who has the ability to keep the pages turning. One such example is Lee Child, a TV journalist from the West Midlands who has emigrated to the States and become an accomplished thriller writer via his superb Jack Reacher stories. If you haven’t read them, start now. There’s no excuse. Reacher is simply one of the most engaging characters I have come across in years. Reacher embodies the sort of “loner hero” one gets in the best Westerns (think of the great movie Shane or Clint Eastwood’s terrific Outlaw Josey Wales) and the very modern up-to-date know-how of a criminal investigator. He has a manly, no-nonsense attitude towards dealing with the bad guys with a very smart understanding of women but does not fall into fake sentimentality or over-the-top macho posturing one gets in certain kinds of movies. Reacher has his demons – he cannot deal with being tied down in any sort of relationship – but he is blessedly free from the “flawed hero” syndrome of much popular culture. He is a hero, full stop. If ever there is a series of novels crying to be made into movies, this series is it, although part of me hopes that it does not happen, given how Hollywood often royally buggers up fine material.
Now, gentle reader, you are wondering why I referred to the “power of blogs” in the headline. Well, I wrote that because I owe Robert Bidinotto, a blogger, academic and magazine editor a large ‘thank you’ (if we ever meet, the beer’s on me, Bob) for praising Lee Child’s writings to the skies. Bob’s literary judgement is normally laser accurate, so almost as soon as I read his interesting interview with Child, I made sure that the next time I passed a bookshop, I got one of Child’s novels (Bob’s blog can be found here).
For spending a week on the seaside in Malta and Gozo, as I have been this week, there is not a better writer to stick in the rucksack for the trip to the beach than Lee Child.
Of course, there are some who would argue that the greatest thriller ever written, certainly in terms of its sweep and scope, is the Count of Monte Cristo. I am not going to contest that.
Last Friday night I went to the theatre. The play was about a group of people who played poker with each other for life-damaging stakes, and my feeling about such people is that they deserve every misfortune that they bring upon themselves. So I couldn’t get involved in the play or care about what happened to any of the characters in it. (It didn’t help at all that they were all men.) Poker for serious money has apparently been on the up-and-up in recent years, and especially since the time when this play, Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber, was first written and performed just over ten years ago. But for me all that this proves is that there are, now as always, lots of people around with more money than sense. People who merely gamble about which of them ends up taking home all the money leave me cold, and this play left me correspondingly refrigerated.
I mean, if you’re going to gamble, gamble about something. Do something where your knowledge of the world and ability to predict its happenings will benefit others. Why not, for instance, gamble on the stockmarket, or on commodity prices. Contrary to widespread opinion, these are immensely valuable activities (as Johnathan Pearce regularly explains here), which help to create a world of rationally negotiated prices for just about everything, and which enable other people (people like farmers particularly spring to mind) to avoid the very risks that you so like to take.
Or do something more creatively hazardous, which, if you can bring it off, will amount to more than mere money in your wallet, which in any case, if you are the kind of gambler I saw in the theatre last Friday night, you will probably squander within the month with more vacuous betting.
Why not, for instance, open a theatre – a theatre which doesn’t depend for its survival on state hand-outs but entirely on the number of bums on seats you can contrive and the quantity and quality of other goods and services you can ply the bodies attached to the bums with, like food and drink in appealing surroundings?
Which is exactly what my friend and host for last Friday evening, Don Riley, did do. His theatre, which is just up the road from London Bridge tube station, is called the Menier Chocolate Factory for the most obvious of reasons, which is that this is what it used to be.
When it came to the play we saw last Friday, deal me out. But as for the Menier Chocolate Factory generally, count me in. I’ll definitely be going again, and I enthusiastically recommend the place.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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