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 movie based around the death of Princess Diana and focussing on how Queen Elizabeth II dealt with the whole sorry business is not something that yours truly would expect to see, to be honest. However, having read so many rave reviews about Helen Mirren’s performance as the British monarch, I gave in and went to see it tonight. Definitely worth a look, is my verdict. Mirren is brilliant, uncannily believable. (Better get that Oscar speech ready, Helen). This film is surprising in a number of ways. The Queen comes across as a sympathetic character, bound up in a sense of duty that puts her at odds with the manic celebrity culture that developed around Diana. You sense, as the film goes on, that the qualities that have stood this lady in good stead for most of her life will ultimately prove more valuable than the meritricious arts of media manipulation and spin that have become associated with the court of Tony Blair.
Oddly, I will admit that the portrayal of Tony Blair surprised me by showing that this man, whom most Samizdata writers will regard with fair levels of loathing, comes across fairly well: someone who realised that the Queen was being bullied by an almost-deranged media and part of the British public. The guy playing spin-doctor-in-chief, Alastair Campbell, was also very good, showing that Campbell was, and is, one of the most malevolent persons to have held power in British life for many years, admittedly quite a feat.
I have fairly mixed views about monarchy. I suppose, given my brand of post-Enlightenment liberalism, that I should take a dim view of this institution and its representation of hereditary power, but one has to recognise that if we are to have a head of state at all, then there are distinct advantages if that head is a person who is not elected and hence a necessarily controversial figure but someone who gets the job through the lottery of birth and is restricted by checks and balances of a constitution. (There is a case for arguing why we need a head of state at all. The Swiss seem to have a sort of revolving mayoral system, which works fine). This film may not persuade people on either sides of the argument on the case for or against constitutional monarchy, but it is a thought-provoking film and also has the merit of being relatively short.
On the pipe again!
I can’t wait to get back on the pipe again.
I’ve got some mushrooms for my friends
But I just can’t wait to get back on the pipe again.
On the surface the story that veteran country singer Willie Nelson has been arrested for marijuana possession is nothing more then a bit of comic relief. Especially when you read that his sister Bobbie was arrested as well. One visualises these people, well into their 70’s in age, sitting round the camp fire, having a puff, tripping out on a few pharmaceutical mushrooms, and polishing their ‘geriatrics for grass’ buttons.
It is all rather ludicrous. However, even though I care little for country music and even less for marijuana, my own feeling is, well, good on them; people that get to their ‘Golden Years’ are entitled to as much enjoyment in life as the rest of us, after all.
However, we are not talking about your everyday geriatrics here. This is not your Aunt Mabel pottering around her back yard, but a popular entertainer who has a history of political causes behind him, and is by no means inactive in politics even at this late stage of his career.
Before the bust, the Farm Aid founder and his band were in his native Texas to headline Saturday’s Austin City Limits Music Festival. Nelson gave an interview there in which he urged politicians to scrap criminal penalties for pot possession.
Those sentiments echoed the platform of his pal Friedman, a singer-songwriter turned politician who’s mounting an independent bid for Texas governor and has called on the decriminalization of marijuana to help clear clogged state prisons of nonviolent offenders. Nelson has actively supported Friedman’s candidacy, hosting a $1,000-per-plate fundraising dinner and signing a petition to get Friedman on the ballot.
“The hundred times that Kinky and I have talked during his campaign – we talked about energy, health, biodiesel, immigration, war – and the pot thing has never come up. Of course, I felt always that I knew where Kinky stood on that, and he knew where I stood, but I also knew that it was very risky to bring that out politically, but what’s Kinky got to lose?” Nelson said.
Louisiana police will deny that they are in any way trying to ‘send a message’ but in their latest arrest of the country music legend, they have done nothing but highlight the utter uselessness of drug laws. That these laws are useless is as well known as the fact that the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. Yet to get anywhere in reforming them, Nelson has to throw what prestige he has behind an oddball candidate like ‘Kinky’ Friedman.
What is wrong with this picture?
I’ve been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a bestseller… my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that’s going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen’s lavatory.
– David Niven, actor, writer and soldier.
Okay, it is very late on Thursday evening and I thought I would pose this question to our commenters for a bit of a Friday quiz before I go to bed:
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
(This thought was inspired by seeing a short trailer for a movie starring Jennifer Lopez).
Not much time to blog today… blame AnorakLight, Lynch Rider Lulu and Victoria Hume live at the Troubadour. Well recommended.
If you love innovative photography, particularly of landscapes and modern, soaring buildings at day and night, go and have a look at this. Wow. (Hat-tip, Andrew Sullivan).
I don’t find taking my clothes off difficult, it’s the acting that’s really hard!
– so said Elena, who is a thespian, last night after dinner at Samizdata HQ
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen.
I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women).
Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out.
In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers?
Well shall see.
In the past I have lambasted famous actors, singers and sporting ‘heroes’ who have allowed the (frankly remote) threat of terrorism involved in a long distance flight to cause them to change their travel plans. You do not have to be a great warrior to do something to help defeat Islamic terrorism… you just have to refuse to let yourself be terrorised.
And so it is nice to see a Hollywood A-lister made of sterner stuff than some that could be mentioned. The precarious state of things in the Middle East has not stopped Natalie Portman going to Israel to visit friends and family. Bravo, Ms. Portman, good for you.
Tougher than Schwartzenegger, harder than Willis, only a little larger than a well-fed wombat
I have never been to the Edinburgh Festival, which has been, over the years, a launchpad for standup comedians and musicians such as Denis Leary. James Glassman, who went to the event this year, observes that Jew-bashing and “gags” about the Holocaust is going down a storm. Quite what that says about the organisers and the clientele, heaven only knows. Being an ardent defender of free speech, Glassman rightly points out that the way to deal with jerks like the “comedian” mentioned its contempt. I hope a fair amount of contempt is indeed delivered.
A while ago I briefly referred to a book by Simon Winder about Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The book takes the idiosyncratic approach of looking at post-war Britain through the prism of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. I cursorily flicked through the pages and it appeared to be an amusing and quite cleverly-done piece of work. Winder seems to have added something fresh to what is already a crowded cottage history of Bond studies. Winder’s book, at first glance, looked like a zany and rather affectionate recollection of what it was like to grow up as a young English middle class boy in the era of Meccano toys, WW2 comics and James Bond film premieres.I can identify with some of Winder’s own upbringing and views. So I bought the book and sat down to read it to pass away a few hours. What I read was in fact rather different, more serious and more annoying than what I had expected.
Winder makes a lot of astute points about post-war British history but a lot of his book is spoiled by an insistent, splenetic hatred of the English upper classes and Britain’s colonial history. He is determined to lay it on a bit thick, in the manner of a rather earnest sixth-former trying to creep up to his leftwing history master.
In fairness, he does grasp how Britain, victorious in the war but materially and financially shattered, rapidly lost its global position, overtaken not just by the already-mighty USA but also by France, West Germany and Japan. While Konrad Adenauer was helping to turn the devastated western half of Germany into an economic dynamo – with a little help from Hayek-influenced economics minister Ludwig Erhard – Britain built its ‘New Jerusalem’ of a welfare state, nationalised industries, crushingly-high income taxes, currency controls and a still-heavy military spending burden. Winder gives an easy pass to the Labour government after 1945 and is savage to the Tories under the elderly Churchill and his deputy, Anthony Eden. For Winder, the Tories are a bunch of old pin-stripped duffers more used to shooting grouse in the Scottish highlands than wrestling with Britain’s supposedly rightful position as a meek European power. His attacks on the Tories seem to be more about their accents and backgrounds than on what they actually did or did not, do. He misses the chance to make what I think is the really serious charge against the Tories of the time, as made for example by historian Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians: these men failed to even make the slightest dent in the Attlee socialist creation. They accepted, for example, the trade union legal privileges and regulations that helped pave the way for the economic near-collapse in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is a harsh charge, but Winder does not make it as it would not, I think, occur to him to do so if my judgement of his political views is accurate. → Continue reading: An entertaining but infuriating book about British post-war history
I’m sorry to say that the latest on carrying hand-baggage on flights to/from Britain is that violins appear to be a no-no.
– Jessica Duchen writing today about the difficulties now being faced by itinerant classical musicians
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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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