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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A few weeks back yours truly and Mrs P. decided to find out what all the hype was about and went to see the film Borat. I guess unless you have been living on the South Pole or some other remote part of planet Earth, you will not have heard of this film. Borat is a spoof “journalist” character created by Sasha Baron Cohen, the Jewish comedian who also created characters such as Ali G. The basic idea is that Borat goes to different places and countries and tricks folk into either revealing more about themselves and their views than they would otherwise do, or to simply make assholes of themselves. A few of his victims do misbehave although most seem to emerge with most, if not all, of their dignity intact.
I have mixed opinions about the film. Some parts of it were so funny that I laughed along with the rest of the cinema audience. He does want to send up the insanity of anti-Semitism, which seems to be the serious core of this film, if it has one at all. There is always the risk, I suppose, that some of the thicker viewers will not get the joke and think that anti-semitism has been legitimised by this movie, but you would have to be pretty dense to do so. Beyond that, though, I did not think the movie was all that funny, and not much beyond scatalogical humour of a basic sort. Part of the idea is to play on the natural desire of the victims – in this case, ordinary Americans – to be polite to strangers, even a crazy-looking chap with a big moustache claiming to come from central Asia. Some of the victims on the New York subway tell Borat to go away, but pretty much most of the victims put up with it up until the point when the behaviour gets too bad to ignore.
I guess if you want to see a film that makes you want to experience a deep fuzzy glow of superiority to supposedly simple redneck Americans, this is the movie for you. On the other hand, for comedy of genius that does not target the ordinary Joe but tries for genuine wit, I’ll be relying on my beloved Monty Pythons and Blackadder collection. And for the silly stuff, there is always Peter Sellers, Terry Thomas and those supremos, Laurel and Hardy. Their brilliance will never fade.
Richard North shares my opinion, although he is a bit harsher.
I must admit that the stuff about the Russian poisoning story is reminding me of when the Cold War was pretty chilly. It is also, its perverse sort of way, a reminder of what the world was like when a former naval officer, journalist and stockbroker began to churn out thrillers at his Jamaican holiday home back in 1953. Casino Royale, the first and one of the best James Bond adventures has been turned into a film that yours truly will be seeing on Thursday night. I admit that when Daniel Craig was first cast in the role, I had my doubts, but the reviews so far have been mostly favourable. Craig, even though he looks like a well-groomed football hooligan, seems to have conveyed the darker side of Fleming’s creation, showing that Bond is a bit more than a dude in a suit, as well as keep most of the bits that cinema viewers have come to expect, such as amazing stunts, special effects and the odd witty one-liner.
Alan K. Henderson has some seasonal musing to share on this day, the fifth of November. Warning… contains critique and therefore spoilers for ‘V for Vendetta’
This graphic novel V for Vendetta was first published as a comic book series which began in 1982. Many readers will laugh at author Alan Moore’s second-guessing of future history. In the story, the Thatcher government’s loss in the 1993 elections sets up a Labour government whose unilateral disarmament measures somehow keep Britain on the sidelines during a US-USSR nuclear confrontation. The war is triggered by an un-detailed situation analogous to the Cuban Missile Crisis – and there’s even a Kennedy in the White House (which Kennedy we are not told). Why a non-nuclear Africa gets wasted and a non-nuclear Britain survives is not explained.
The likelihood of the next major event – the rise of the Norsefire party into power – is debatable. Post-holocaust Britain would still have a strong domestic military presence. It would have to be weakened significantly for an insurrection to succeed. The story mentions that there were several insurgent factions; perhaps Norsefire sat back while these multiple rebellions sapped the military of its strength. It is also possible that some of these insurgents drew their membership in part from the military.
The story does accurately portray the function of a Fascist state. The church is nationalized but powerless, serving a mere ceremonial function. Surveillance cameras are everywhere (hey wait a minute, some social democracies are like that…) The government also conducts audio in addition to video espionage against its citizens. Separation of powers between executive, legislators, and judiciary is vastly diminished or non-existent. The economy is planned. Propaganda is pervasive. Citizens are forcibly resettled, and some like Evey are forcibly sent to work in certain industries. Undesirables are deported or incarcerated (and sometimes experimented upon). Policemen are granted latitude to allow certain criminals to ‘disappear’, as in Evey’s case. To formally prosecute her for prostitution makes it a matter of public record that the State is not meeting her economic needs as government propaganda promises.
Enter V… His identity unknown, he is one of the last four survivors of the Larkhill Resettlement Camp, where he was subjected to medical experiments involving hormone injections. having escaped, he now dons a Guy Fawkes costume and is orchestrating a vendetta against the Fascist government.
While Alan Moore himself allows the reader to determine whether or not V’s actions are warranted, many have described V as a morally ambiguous character. Such people are wrong; the direction of his moral compass is crystal clear. → Continue reading: Vendetta vs. Just War
Andrew Sullivan has been gently poking fun at 80s music recently. Steady on Sully, I am a proud 80s-era teenager (although I never sported a mullet haircut, honest). In my ‘umble opinion, you can keep your droning Coldplays, Travises and thuggish Oasises, for me, nothing comes close to the brio of Madness, the wonderful, cleverness of the Stranglers or for that matter, these dudes from Norway.
And of course, one should always remember to buy Danish!
(I originally said that Aha is from Denmark. Several latitudes of error. Thanks for the eagle-eyed reader for pointing this out).
Politics makes artists stupid.
– Terry Teachout reviews the Rachel Corrie play
This film will lure me to a cinema – in the unlikely event that any of them run it, that is. I do not think it megaplex fodder, and no doubt it will be widely ignored by the artistic community; the diversion from the party line is just a tad wide for most arthouse patrons. Call me cynical, but I cannot envisage Gheorghe receiving a standing ovation at Cannes. Oh well, have to wait until it is released on DVD.
(Via Tim Blair)
Just so you all know, and in case even Guy Herbert missed it, Joanna Lumley (who played the crazy blonde who lived on vodka in Ab Fab) has just said, on the Graham Norton show (BBC1 TV):
“Prepare my cell now, because I shall not have an ID card.”
She also took a swipe at surveillance cameras, and anti-smoking laws, and the fact that you cannot get within a mile of Number Ten to say boo. To quite enthusiastic applause. I would not imagine that this means very much, but it presumably means a little.
A while ago I wrote a posting here about how Stalin had maybe made Shostakovich a better composer. Deeper, less flippantly modernistical, more soulful, more significant, that kind of thing. In one way, Soviet repression certainly made Shostakovich preferable to me, because I dislike opera, that is to say, I dislike the sound that it makes. Political repression meant that Shostakovich wrote less opera and more instrumental music. There is no doubt that if Shostakovich had had his way, he would have felt safe enough to write more operas, and that would surely have meant fewer symphonies, concertos and string quartets. All of which I adore, except when the symphonies burst into song, as they did towards the end.
I just do not like the way that most classical music singing is done. All that wobbling and bellowing. This style was developed to fill opera houses before microphones, and during the pre-microphone era this was all that there was, if people were going to be able to hear it at the back of the hall. But now, when I compare the average din, so to speak, of this this style with the best of the twentieth century microphone-savvy singers, I find the operatic manner very off-putting and a serious barrier to my enjoyment of and understanding of classical music as a whole. See also this recent posting over at my personal blog about Sting doing a CD of some songs by John Dowland, which I of course welcome. Since writing that posting I have actually heard Sting sing Dowland in a broadcast concert. Frankly, I thought his voice sounded far too strained and I did not enjoy it. But many clearly did, and maybe the CD will sound better. Either way, the attempt was definitely worth making, and I hope other pop singers follow his lead. This concert can be listened to courtesy of the BBC for the next week or so.
Ironically, one of the things about the operatic style of singing that particularly annoys me is that even if you do know the language they are supposed to be singing in, you often cannot hear the damn words, and have to resort to reading along with a little book if you want to know what is being said, just as if it was in a foreign language. This drains much of the spontaneity out of the experience. But, even if I can hear the words, I still hate all the wobbling and bellowing. On the other hand, if there is little or no wobbling or bellowing I often love it, even if I cannot understand the foreign words. I just listen to the sound of it, as if the singing was a violin or something.
If you, on the other hand, like the way the typical opera singer sounds, then I am very happy for you. I am absolutely not arguing that you should make yourself suffer from my dislike of opera singing even if you now do not. Lucky you.
But meanwhile, I personally wish some way could have been contrived to have made Shostakovich’s great English compositional contemporary Benjamin Britten write more symphonies, concertos and string quartets, and fewer operas, without ruining the political culture of the country where he happened to be born and to live, which happens also to be mine. I love Britten’s concertos, symphonies and string quartets, such as they are. But almost anything of Britten’s involving singing, particularly solo singing (classical choral singing I find less annoying), especially if the solo singing is being done by Peter Pears, causes me to switch off. Ironically, had Britten lived half a century later than he did, he might have felt a lot more inhibited about expressing his true ideas, given that so many of them involved the fact that he loved beautiful boys! He might instead have written fewer operas and more string quartets, and critics might then have argued about the alleged paedophilic sub-text of said quartets. And I could have ignored all that and loved the music a whole lot more than I now love Britten’s operas.
Anyway, I now want to speculate that maybe this Shostakovich/Britten contrast can be generalised, to throw light on the bigger story of Western classical music. → Continue reading: Political repression and the development of Western classical music
US blogger Jim Henley has some interesting thoughts about the politics of ace science fiction adventures series Battlestar Galactica. In my typically languid British way, I have just about started munching my way through series 2, which I find rather dark and depressing compared to the excellent series 1, but I am savouring the programmes even so, and looking forward to the third series, already now showing. My addiction to this series is worse even than Babylon 5 or, to roll back the years and to a very different genre, to Blackadder. The acting and the plots are consistently enthralling and entertaining.
It got me thinking about drama and storytelling more generally. If you tell a certain type of person that your favourite television show is Battlestar or Firefly, you are sometimes put in the ‘geek’ category, but it seems to me that in terms of quality and ability to describe the human condition, SF television shows can hold their own with the most pretentious dramas. In some ways, they are the final redoubts of romantic realism in drama.
Now, I wonder if that guy on the Tube was a Cylon…
[Editors note: for some previous thoughts on Battlestar Galactica on Samizdata, see here]
I am so tired of having to roar about the latest provocation-of-the-day from some Islamic barking moonbat that I really need to write about something else… so how about a paean to one of my favourite artists?
As a big, no, huge Frank Miller fan, delighting in the way he has darkened up an entire art form, rescuing it from both Disneyfication and political correctness, it is interesting to see how his influence has started to spread into other areas of the arts. However I was apprehensive that when I heard that Sin City was going to be turned into a movie… “unfilmable” was all I said when I heard. I was completely wrong and Sin City was a tour de force, unlike the attempt to translate Miller’s Elektra onto the screen, which was a disappointing mess inspite of featuring one of my favourite actresses.
So with the debacle of Elektra in mind, my reaction was rather dubious when I heard they were going to make 300 into a movie… oh me of little faith… having just watched the trailer, well, I am not used to having a film clip lasting 1 minute and 46 seconds sent a shiver up my spine quite like that. This is clearly one to watch on the largest screen possible.
Frank Miller has been one of the leading people adding a harder edge to US comics since the 1980’s, reclaiming a place in a medium in which I have always felt France and Japan lead the world. That he is now proving a source of interesting movies for Hollywood just increases my admiration for the man.
Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Dogg. Scott Joplin would have regarded today’s “black culture” as an oxymoron. To eliminate a century and a half’s tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isn’t “keepin’ it real”; it’s keepin’ millions of young black men and women unreal in ways the most malevolent bull-necked racist could never have devised.
– Mark Steyn
… bit of hugely entertaining fun. Heh, and you thought I was about to put the boot into the hideous and unspeakable David Cameron again, didn’t you? Not at all. I was introduced to H.P. Lovecraft’s works by an erudite Jamaican friend many years ago, who took a perverse delight in the author’s often insanely racist Neo-Gothic between-the-wars horror stories.
But now a band (or perhaps ‘cult’) of enthusiasts for Lovecraft’s lavishly adjectival genre of occult-cum-SciFi horror have made a 1920’s style silent movie called The Call of Cthulhu. It captures the spirit of the story and style of the era perfectly. I just received the DVD today and it was simply a delight to watch (if a tale of madness and horror can be thusly described). You too can view the full length version and have your sanity blasted away for the very reasonable sum of $20 + pp, simply by making the ‘voorish sign’ with your mouse here…
‘Fan art’ (for that is most certainly what this is) is often very turgid and accessible only to the initiated hardcore (be they ‘Trekkers’, ‘Xphiles’, ‘Whovians’ or whatever) but this splendid silent movie shot in ‘Mythoscope’, a process that makes it look like, well, a 1920’s silent movie, should delight enthusiasts not just of the narrow Cthulhu genre but fans of horror and silent movies generally.
In truth if the movie has a failing, it is actually rather too good to be a genuine 1920’s creation. Highly recommended.
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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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