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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. December 14th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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. December 12th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“‘We’re not heroes. We’re from Finchley”. A line from the film Narnia, based on the C.S. Lewis fantasy adventures. Strongly recommended. December 11th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. December 7th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. December 6th, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. December 6th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 30th, 2005 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.) → Continue reading: Roman virtues and vices… and ours November 28th, 2005 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. November 16th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 10th, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hark! Hark! It is the sound of Norman Lebrecht hitting nails on their heads, but also his fingers and thumbs, leaving blood everywhere:
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. → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht discovers DVDs November 10th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. November 1st, 2005 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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