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.
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I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers’ reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.
Clive has a picture taken from I’m All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove – the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick – as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United’s Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.
In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing – “Set the People Free” – while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).
And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show’s brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I’m All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas (“what a fwightful shower!”), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.
The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the ‘enlightened classes’ at the time, which was that Britain was not ‘modern’ or ‘efficient’ enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain’s industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘fix’ was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions’ privileges, starting with the closed shop.
I have heard it said that Sellers’ portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers’ genius to send up the intrusive state of today.
If it were not for the fact that I saw ‘300’ on its UK opening night (i.e. last night), then this hilariously PC review would have me thrusting my hand into my pocket to whip out the price of a ticket:
It’s an ugly business: brutal, racist, homophobic – dare I say fascist? Harmless escapism indeed.
Damn those warmongering Neo-Spartans!
I am sending an email to the producers with my suggested title for a sequel – “300 II: the Persians are back and this time they’re Islamic!!” The cultural cringe alone will be worth the budget.
Behold the depths of your innermost soul
A Minotaur walking in endless despair
Mythical like a dream
Invisible like a soft breath of wind
– Bel Canto, Time without end.
I suppose I just cannot bring myself to give a damn about what is happening in the news today.
Considering the fashionable wail that Britons are a dumbed-down lot, there is a lot of interest in the fiction of Jane Austen at the moment. BBC and other channels are vying, so it appears, to see which one can carry the most screenings of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility or Emma. More productions are expected. Last night, yours truly and Mrs Pearce went along to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a film which tries to capture the moment in Austen’s life when she fell for a dashing if roguish young London lawyer, tried to elope with him, but failed to carry off her plans when she realised that a whole brood of relations depended on her young beau’s uncertain income for support. The lawyer’s rich uncle, played with menacing brio by Ian Richardson, blocks the marriage (Richardson is brilliant in the film). Austen ended her days unmarried, channelling her experiences of forbidden love into fiction. Her life sounds quite sad in certain ways although we have some of the finest fiction in the English language as a result.
Some people wax lyrical or get very cross about Jane Austen. I take a fairly sympathetic line. Toby Young, writing in this week’s Sunday Telegraph magazine (no web link), argues that she is one of the greatest English novelists, a stylist and master of irony, able to catch the foibles and weaknesses of people and also able to spot the virtues and goodness in the most unlikely people. On the other hand, Frances Wilson, writing in the same magazine, says Austen was a money-grabbing snob, a reactionary (horrors!) whose characters all too often forsook the path of true love and chose money and position instead. That verdict seems unfair. Take Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett initially recoils from Mr Darcy (this is an age when a man is Mr X rather than Dave or Steve) precisely because she fears he will be a snob and a materialists because of his substantial fortune and large country estate. Wilson, who I suspects projects her own liberal sentiments onto a much more conservative age, cannot imagine why Bennett does not go for the more supposedly hunky Mr Wickham instead. But it is Austen’s brilliance as a writer to draw out how an initial lack of attraction can, after a time, turn into something very different.
Irony, and the ability to see through the surface of things, is what makes Austen’s fiction so compelling. It is not ‘realistic’ in the dreary, PC sense that she packs it with large lectures about the Napoleonic War, or the Industrial Revolution, or the tumults in Ireland and the New World. She chose a very particular time and place – rural, Southern England – and the preoccupations of minor landed gentry. It does not try to make grand socio-economic ‘points’, although clearly, in its reticent way, it is a very conservative form of fiction, like the crime fiction of PD James. We do not, to take a different author, damn Joseph Conrad for being ‘limited’ because his works are often set at sea.
To go back to my first point, it is remarkable that, at least among what is left of the novel-reading classes, Austen remains so popular, and not just with women, although she is seen perhaps unfairly as a writer on women for women. There is a timeless quality about her stories and her themes. In 200 years’ time, I am not sure if anyone will be reading Norman Mailer. They might though, still be reading the woman who wrote this:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
I am not the shockable type but this preamble to an article singing the praises of the tv hit, 24, had a pretty bracing effect on yours truly:
Fox’s hit drama normalizes torture, magnifies terror, and leaves conservatives asking why George W. Bush can’t be more like 24’s hero.
To use the word “normalise” next to the word “torture” is extraordinary. Maybe 24 does raise the issue of using torture as a desperate but necessary act, but I hardly imagine that the viewer is left thinking that there is anything “normal” about it, like brewing a cup of tea in the morning for breakfast or taking out the garbage. From what I recall, torture is seen as shocking, and rightfully so. Think also of the scene in Dirty Harry when Clint shoots and then beats up the psycho. You “know”, unlike in real life, that the baddie is a baddie and hence do not feel bad when he gets the Eastwood treatment. Real life is different, which is why we have pesky laws like no jail without trial, etc.
For what it is worth I enjoy 24. I have no idea what the programme-makers would think of their programme being thus described by the American Conservative.
For a brilliant demolition of those who use the “ticking bomb” scenario in movies and books to rationalise torture, this by Jim Henley is a must-read.
(Update: I should in fairness point out that the American Conservative article makes it pretty clear that it loathes the show, although the way in which the introductory paragraph is written sucks the reader into thinking that conservatives support the practice. I guess I fired off my angry post a bit too quick. That said, it does appear that some of the “appeal” of the show is in how it unashamedly portrays the use of torture. Remind me not to ever watch this show again).
People will bet on anything these days.
You give me all your love
You give me all your kisses
And then you touch my burqua
And do not know who is it!
Heh. Who says the Germans have no sense of humour?
(h/t: Nick M.)
Classical music blogger Jessica Duchen yesterday featured a bit of video/audio of the great Grigory Sokolov playing the wonderfully manic third and last movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, which is marked Precipitato. I have a DVD of Sokolov playing this, plus some Beethoven, and I assume this clip is from that. (The Beethoven on that DVD is also marvelous. I’ve never heard the somewhat poor relation Op. 14 numbers 1 and 2 sonatas sound better. Or, maybe I’ve just never listened properly before, and this DVD of Big Bear Sokolov finally got me doing that. Don’t know, don’t care.)
To succeed, music has to have at least one of: melody, harmony and rhythm. Too much twentieth century classical type music scores zero out of three, and hence will never be widely liked. This Prokofiev movement scores a thunderously successful ten out of ten (to switch marking systems) in the rhythm department, and does pretty well on the other two as well, I think. (Which, come to think of it, is a description that applies pretty well to Prokofiev’s entire output.) Do have a listen/look if you’ve not heard this piece and enjoy white hot piano playing. It is about four minutes long, with lots of understandably noisy clapping at the end that you can ignore.
It helps that this is the kind of music that, I think, easily survives cheap computer-type speakers.
“…and the nominees in the category of Best Fashionable Issue in a Guilt-Supporting Role are….(pause)…World Poverty (applause)…AIDS (applause)…the Iraq War (bigger applause)…Africa (applause)…and Saving the Planet (huge applause).
And the winner is…..(rustle, rustle, rustle)…Saving the Planet!! (more huge applause, whoops, whistles).
Sadly, the Planet can’t actually be with us tonight because its currently on location shooting another movie with Al Gore. But it is going to speak to us now by live satellite link.”
PLANET: (by satellite feed) Oh…oh…this is just so…I don’t know. What can I say? I’m overwhelmed, you know. I mean, I’m up there with World Poverty and AIDS, I mean, WOW, what competition!! I’m just….I don’t know, let me tell you that I am one thrilled, happy, proud biosphere right now. But, you know, this Award isn’t for me. It’s an Award for all the brilliant people who made it possible to save me, all those NGOs and…especially Al Gore…and let me tell you, I am so in awe of that man. I am totally, unbelievably excited to be working with him again. He is my saviour. Absolutely, you know. And I’m accepting this for him as well. What else can I say? I need a drink. Somebody get me a drink (burst of laughter, close up of Jack Nicholson busting a gut). But, seriously, I really want to thank the Academy and I also want to thank my agent, Murray Felberman….I love you, Murray, I love you man. So, I got to get back to work now but I just want to say that I love you all and when I get back to LA we’re going to have a big party (blows kiss).
And about time too:
One of the world’s most popular operas opens in Covent Garden today amid fresh claims of racism, colonial misadventure and outmoded, “sordid” morals…
Professor Roger Parker, a teacher of music at King’s College London and a Puccini specialist, suggested that opera audiences could be unwitting participants in racism because of the stereotypes Madama Butterfly contains.
He said: “An authentic production [of the opera] is a racist production. It has a lot of ideas within it that would be seen in any other circumstances as racist. It is not just a question of the words, it also Puccini’s music.”
“We have become much more sensitive [about racism] and the interpretation of Madama Butterfly is one of those operas that needs to reflect that.
Quite right, I say. This insenstive cultural anachronism is completely outmoded and needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. In fact, I have taken the liberty of writing a short synopsis of a new, modernised version of the Puccini opera which will more accurately reflect the values of a modern-day audience. → Continue reading: Lepidoptera Grrrl
I love the BBC TV programme Top Gear but even great men have their weaknesses. Jeremy Clarkson takes the ‘Borat’ route by making fun of folk in America’s Deep South. How jolly original of you, Jeremy. Is not the whole “These guys from the South are thick, whisky-swilling in-breds with mullet haircuts and guns” a bit tired?
Oh well, even the good guys have their off-days (thanks to Andrew for the link). Clarkson should stick to driving insanely quick Bugattis and cheering us all up.
“I always felt this country was going down the tubes when the television folk replaced Basil Brush with Roland Rat.”
My dad, with his finger on the pulse as usual. Here is a tribute page to television’s most superior fox.
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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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