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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Personally I read the first Harry Potter, then started the second one and said: enough, I am too old for this. Nor are Harry Potter movies the kind of movies I now like and I have seen none of them. So, I am a Muggle and proud of it. But for all that, I am very impressed by this:
The sixth book in the hugely successful Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, is already among the bestsellers on the Internet more than six months before its publication.
US online retailer Amazon says advanced orders for the book, written by British author JK Rowling, have propelled it to number one on its list of 100 bestsellers.
It is the sheer economic scale of the phenomenon that I find so amazing. How many people, I wonder, now make a permanent living from the Harry Potter books, and associated industries?
This is the sixth book, and there is another one due, plus there have already been three movies, right? So, four more to come? And will they then just carry on making HP movies with their own made-up stories? It would make sense. (Not that the JK Rowling ones are un-made-up, but you get my point.)
It reminds me of an earlier British cultural export-stroke-industry, as I am surely not the first to have observed.
Seriously, there must be interesting parallels between the Harry Potter phenomenon and the James Bond phenomenon. Both use magical toys. Both battle against evil, set in architecturally impressive surroundings. Both were made into mega-successful movies. But, what do I know? Or care? I leave all that sort of chatter to those who have read it and seen it.
Of whom there are, as I say, quite a few.
Maybe, when JKR has ceased her labours and has simply parked herself in a deck chair under her personal banknote Niagara, I will even give the books another go myself.
Okay that was originally the end, but here is another thought. JK Rowling should build herself a gigantic castle, made of huge lumps of stone, with turrets and battlements and flying buttresses and bridges high up in the sky, like they used to build in Scotland and like Mad King Ludwig used to build in Bavaria. It really is about time the construction of places like that was resumed, and for real rather than just in Disneyworlds and such places. And she is just the woman to do it. God knows, she can afford it.
Home Office minister for race equality, Fiona Mactaggart refuses to condemn the fact Sikhs have used intimidation and violence to force the closure of a play they find offensive because…
In my experience, very often the consequence of that [violent protests] is that the ideas of the play gain a wider audience than they would have had, had there not been such protests. That people feel this passionately about theatres is a good sign for our cultural life. It is a sign of a lively flourishing cultural life.
So British culture is better off because rioters have forced the closure of a play they disagreed with? Britain is clearly governed by people who are either immoral or demented or both.
But I am curious… would the ‘minister for race equality’ have thought it an equally healthy sign that British theatre is alive and well if a mob of angry white Scotsmen has stormed the theatre, smashed windows and forced the plays to close because they found something in the works of a Sikh playwright offensive?
Well given that Fiona Mactaggart is the ‘minister for race equality’, I guess she would take the view that all races are equally permitted to use violence to prevent freedom of expression, right? Right?
I mean, the races would hardly be equal if only when Sikhs riot is was “a sign of a lively flourishing cultural life”.
I have not read Michael Crichton’s latest novel, State of Fear, but I have just read this review of it, which I found via Arts & Letters Daily. It is a story with heroes and with villains, but here is the twist:
We soon learn that such skulduggery is being coordinated, or so it seems, by Nick Drake, a Ralph Nader clone – intense, single-minded and (apologies to Mr. Nader’s many fans) unhinged. He is president of the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), an organization founded by lawyers, not scientists, and devoted to pushing a radical environmental agenda. The fund is clearly modeled on the real-life Natural Resources Defense Council, whose annual budget is about the same: $44 million.
To keep the donations rolling in, Drake is trying to induce a perpetual state of fear in the public by marketing the hell out of predictions of catastrophic global warming. Global warming – as we are all too well aware these days – results from burning fossil fuels that load the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Drake’s problem is that people just aren’t alarmed enough to send in those vital checks. But Drake has a plan; he’ll force nature to cooperate with him.
To get his plan rolling, Drake needs seed money, so he wheedles millionaire playboy George Morton, heir to a forklift fortune, into donating $10 million to NERF. But Morton has the audacity to withdraw his gift when a scientist at MIT apparently sets him straight about the science behind Drake’s claims. Drake is livid. Shortly after Morton takes his money back, he crashes his Ferrari through an oceanside guard rail and plunges down a cliff to his presumed death. No body is found. Is this an accident or yet another murder?
It will be extremely interesting to watch what happens to this book. Will it be picked up and run with by anti-environmentalist types like me? Well, here I am doing my bit for that process. Will this book perhaps be made into a movie? More generally, will the idea which it embodies, that greenery can be combined with villainy, be echoed in other stories, including the stories that emerge from Hollywood?
Hollywood has to have villains, and I have been willing to accept that the profusion of environment-destroying capitalist in the movies in recent years is caused at least partly by the fact that to get drama you need bad guys, and, well, environment good, people harming it bad, right?
And if you do not have a human villain, then you must have an inhuman force for the heroes to battle against, such as: environmental disaster.
But now that Crichton has explained – and in a best seller type book that will be sold in airports, that there can also be enviro-villains, and that environmental disasters might be lies told by enviro-villains, then we ought in due course to be seeing at least some Hollywood heavies who are decked out in green plumage. And it might well happen. All I am saying is: let us keep our eyes and ears open, and track this story as it unfolds.
The man who gave us New Journalism, The Right Stuff, A Man in Full, From Bauhaus to Our House, the Painted Word, and of course such classics as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, has suddenly crashed against the buffers of British satire. Yes, Tom Wolfe, one of the grand men of American fiction, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award for a truly cringe-making passage of sexual dialogue in his latest novel.
Can he recover? Does this titan of American literature, who has mocked the lunacies of modern art, brilliantly described the feats of Chuck Yeager and the Mercury astronauts, bounce back from this potentially mortal blow? Let’s hope so.
If foreign aid is the process of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries, then Band Aid is the process of taking money from gullible people in rich countries and giving it to cunning people in those same rich countries:
The new version of the Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas? has gone straight in at number one in the UK singles chart.
The charity record is also tipped to be this year’s Christmas number one.
Two decades after the original Big Top and the Circus of Guilt comes rolling into town again though I am relieved to note the distinct absence of national fanfare and clappy-happy exultation that accompanied the first great feast of famine back in the mid 1980’s. Twenty years on and my stomach is still churning from the experience.
But this time I have even further cause for complaint. Christmas? Christmas??!!. Just what message are these insensitive, monocultural, fascist bastards trying to send here? This is just Vocal Imperialism, pure and simple.
Less pure and less simple, I wager, are the motives of the organisers. Two of the prominent names are Bob Geldof and Bono, both ageing rockers who have managed to sustain lucrative careers long past their sell-by dates by successfully reinventing themselves as saviours of the planet. Hey, it’s all about getting down the with kidz, man. Or something. To me, they have more in common with American TV evangelists. They also promise salvation provided you send them your money.
Lining up alongside them are a rabble of pasty-faced no-talents, has-beens, wannabes and never-wases: a million mediocrity march. But together they can make a big noise and that matters a lot in an industry where the noisiest wins. In fact, if they owe anything to Africans at all then it is not spurious Christmas wishes but a royalty cheque and a big thank you for being the best marketing tool in the world.
I will be keeping my loose change in my pocket where it belongs this festive season. I have not lost a single night of sleep over Africa and I never will. In fact, I could even cash in on my conscience by starting a record label called ‘Truth in Music’. My first single release will be called ‘I Don’t Give a Hoot About The Starving’. All profits go to me. It may not be the stuff that dreams are made on but, by George, it will have integrity.
Fritz Werner is my all time favourite conductor of Bach choral music, bar none, and yesterday I got this CD set of (get this): the St John Passion, the St Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the B Minor Mass, plus a Motet, plus a Cantata (the one with Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring). Ten brand new CDs for £22 the lot.
Is capitalism great or what? � asks JP in the previous post. I reply that capitalism is definitely not in the Or What? category. (Trivia digression: In what movie did actor Clu Gulager say that he was in the Or What? category?)
People who say that money cannot buy happiness are just no good at shopping.
I feel the fluttering of the wings of history in this decision. Cultural history, anyway.
Top of the Pops is being relegated to BBC2 after 40 years as BBC1’s bastion of chart music, the broadcaster announced yesterday.
Once required viewing for generations of teenagers, a slump in viewing figures has pushed the pop music chart programme on to the second channel. In the 1970s the show had audiences of 14 million but last week it pulled in just 3.1 million viewers.
The first episode, broadcast on Jan 1, 1964, was presented by Jimmy Savile and the first act to perform were the Rolling Stones with I Wanna Be Your Man.
Since then, the theme music and presenters have changed but the formula remained the same, with artists considering an appearance on the show a sign that they had officially “made it” in the British pop world.
Although a relaunched edition was watched by 5.5 million viewers last November, nearly three million had deserted the show by the summer.
Now the BBC hopes that it can win back audiences with a new version which is to go out next spring on Sunday evenings.
Historic? Yes, I do truly think so. For I think what this is a symptom of is the end of the Age of Pop Music. Internet downloads, computer games, and the fact that half the tunes were composed when your granny was in her teens mean that Youth, as it has been for some time now, is wandering off into different directions altogether, of a nature that I, and the kind of people who run Top of the Pops, cannot possibly divine. Taste is fragmenting, and what is now Number One is no longer a matter for the BBC to decide on behalf of the Youth of the Nation. We each decide for ourselves. It no longer matters to each of us what anyone else likes.
Personally, I have just lately been listening to a terrific little country and western tune called “Tell Me About It”, with great c&w guitar and drums backing by who knows what instrumental combination of musicians, and in which the vocals are shared by the glorious Tanya Tucker and one Delbert McClinton, of whom I had not previously heard. It is track number 13 on The Very Best of Tanya Tucker (“Another European compilation – I don’t think there’s anything unusual here” – Amazon.com). This is my current favourite pop tune, but you will not hear it any time soon on Top of the Pops, because none of us any longer need Top of the Pops to find out about our current favourites.
Dave Barry, of all people, links to this delightful news report of a surprising French legal judgement to the effect that a very French film indeed, called A Very Long Engagement, is not actually French.
The film was made with the help of state funds from France’s National Centre for Cinematography. In its decision, the court said that 2003 Productions was a Trojan horse, a company founded by Warner Bros. “to benefit from financial help even though [the fund] is reserved for the European cinematographic industry.”
So, a Trojan film. Sneaky people, those Trojans.
Jeunet is known in North America as the filmmaker behind 1997’s Alien Resurrection and 2001’s Amélie.
A man with previous, perpetrating popular movies.
French actress Audrey Tautou, who played the title role in Amélie, also stars in A Very Long Engagement.
And we all know that Amélie was so good it is not even put in the foreign language racks at Blockbuster. That was not a French film either. It was a film.
“This film, which tells a French story, adapted from a French novel, filmed entirely in France, in French, with the participation of more than 2,000 French people, over thirty French actors and actresses and about 500 French technicians for 18 months, is suddenly no longer considered a French film!” 2003 Productions said in a press release.
The good news is that, assuming I understand this petit contretemps (if contretemps is a girl that should be petite) correctly, this means that this movie will not be getting French government money. Which is nice. This being the case, I feel sure that I speak for us all here at samizdata.net when I say that there ought not to be any French films at all.
Yes, that assumption is correct. Here is confirmation of that, from comingsoon.net, which they got from Variety:
A Paris court has ruled that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement is really a Hollywood movie, and therefore not sufficiently French to qualify for public subsidies …
If foreigners, British foreigners especially, continue buying up French real estate maybe it will eventually be decided that France is not French either.
I have just got back from seeing The Incredibles, the computer animation movie about a family of superheroes and superheroines. I have read good things about this film and was not in the least bit disappointed. It proceeds at a crackling good pace, is often extremely funny, includes some rather clever and sly digs at America’s litigation culture, and is endowed with a wonderfully positive, life-affirming sense of life throughout. It also has great, brassy backing music.
To state the obvious, what really stunned me was just how good computer animation now is. Some of the scenes in the jungle, the big city and the sea just took my breath away. It is easy to get blase these days, given just how good film making now is, but this film goes even further than that other great animation hit of recent years, Finding Nemo.
Go and see it. You know you want to.
Given the disproportionately high incidence of entertainers who march in lockstep with the fashionable leftoid tendency, I think it is forgiveable to regard to the word ‘actor’ as being synonymous with the word ‘moonbat’.
And mostly this is true. Mostly, but not entirely. Earlier in the week, I was watching a BBC ‘Hardtalk’ interview with Oscar-winning British actor, Jeremy Irons, who served up a welcome surprise:
Irons also spoke passionately about his defence of hunting. Irons hunts in Ireland and said he believes that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t harm other people.
“I’m appalled that really for political reasons Tony Blair is allowing his back benchers, who are bored, who have no power and want to stir it up.
“They want to get back at the way the Tories dealt with the miners, so they think they’ll ban the nobs hunting.”
I doubt very much that Mr. Irons is shaping up to become the British Ronald Reagan but it is gratifying to know that he is out there anyway. Creative talent and the power of reason are not mutually exclusive characteristics.
I am sure that when many regulars here, readers and writers, read this, they will decide that finally and irrevocably, the country that grabbed itself an empire over which the sun never set, invented the steam engine, saw off Hitler, and used once upon a time to eat ball bearings for its breakfast, has finally gone so soft that nothing will save it:
The Princess Royal has unveiled a memorial sculpture to the animals who have served and died alongside British and allied troops.
The monument, in Park Lane, central London, depicts two mules, a horse and a dog, together with lists of the numbers of animals lost in conflicts.
But I do not think this is straightforward evidence of softness. I think that we just live in rather soft times. If the times harden, we would harden up with them pretty quick.
The irony is that this apparently soft-as-slush BBC story actually harks back to a much harder time, when men were men and pigeons were pigeons. (Do you think Blackadder when you follow that previous link? I do.)
Anyway, on with the BBC story:
The monument pays special tribute to the 60 animals awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal – the animals’ equivalent of the Victoria Cross – since 1943.
They include 54 animals – 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and a cat – commended for their service in World War II. Among these heroes were:
Rob, a para-dog who made more than 20 parachute drops while serving with the SAS on top-secret missions in Africa and Italy.
Ricky, a canine mine-detector who continued with his dangerous task of clearing a canal bank in Holland despite suffering head injuries.
Winkie, a pigeon that flew 129 miles with her wings clogged with oil to save a downed bomber crew.
… and many more gutsy beasts, protected, one suspects, by having only the dimmest idea of what they were actually engaged in, and of the risks they were taking.
Nevertheless, these are arguably statues in a similar vein to this one, or even this one.
If you want further evidence of the hardness that lurks just beneath the soft surface of human nature in soft old Britain just now, take a look at another piece of sculpture I spied this evening, on my travels along Oxford Street.
The ‘mainstreaming’ of the blog phenomenon continues apace as more applications for blogging start to join political prognostication, cultural commentary, demimonde diaries (warning: X-rated), technical tantrums, hitting things with hammers and paeans to beloved pussycats. New neighbourhoods of the blogosphere are springing up every day.
And now an independent Hollywood movie called Blowing Smoke, which is still undergoing some final post production editing, has set up a blog to which the director, producer and cast members have started to post, talking about the extremely politically incorrect nature of the movie.
The blog is still in its very early days, the site is still being tweaked and the users are at the stage where they are just getting to grips with blog publishing software but I think this could quite interesting if blogs like this catch on. As a movie enthusiast myself I would love to get more peeks behind the scenes and not just the same old marketing agency hype.
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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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