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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Although Australia and the US have signed a free trade agreement, it is an imperfect document, with many exemptions on both sides. In Australia, there has been a loud campaign to have existing ‘local content’ rules for Australian television excluded, and this campaign has been successful.
The ‘local content’ rules mean that a certain proportion of television programmes that are broadcast on Australian television must be locally made. The scrapping of this rule was an American objective in the free trade negotiations, as it meant that US television companies were restricted in their access to the Australian television market by what in effect is a quota.
Australia resisted this; we should not have.
Australian television has had local content rules for a long time, they provide that at least 55% of the programming on Australian television between 6am and midnight must be locally produced. This creates a local internal market for television, which is actually quite a cut-throat industry. The economies of scale mean that Australian television products are not cost-competitive, but they do rate well. → Continue reading: Cultural protectionists win in Australia
It is not difficult to sneer at the new King Arthur movie. One can sneer at its historical errors – for example where is the mention of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who even writers who believe in the existence of Arthur admit was the original leader of British (or Briton or Romano-British or whatever you prefer) resistance to the Germanic invaders (dividing people into neat tribes ‘Angles’, ‘Saxons’ and so on is harder than might be thought). And Ambrosius Aurelianus was certainly a leader of south west Britian (his centre of power would have been in areas like the Cotswalds – places like Cirencestor). Nothing ‘northern’ about him.
And one can sneer in simple film-story terms. For example if going north of Hadrian’s wall is so dangerous, why is there such a lightly defended villa (containing such important people) doing up there?
But to sneer is to miss the point. This is a very brave film.
For example to make the point that there were different sorts of Christian in Britain and that the ideas of Pelagius on free will and moral responsibility might have political importance is to touch on matters that most films seem to assume are well above the heads of the audience.
The avoiding of “all Christians good, all Pagans bad” or (more likely in a modern production) “all Christians bad, all Pagans good” is brave.
Also brave was the direct treatment of de facto serfdom in the late Roman Empire. Whilst formally free men, peasants had been tied to the soil (originally for reasons of tax collection) since the time of the Emperor Diocletian. The Emperor Diocletian (with his price controls and semi serfdom) did not rule Britain at first (there was great resistance to him in this province), but his writ eventually ran here. → Continue reading: King Arthur: a brave movie
Yes folks, this is a quiet Friday and it is Strange Photographs by Brian time.
This time, what we have is a fake Thunderbird rocket, which has been temporarily installed in Trafalgar Square in honour of the new Thunderbirds movie, which opens in London around now. I took the photos yesterday.
There have been all kinds of ideas floating around about what objects to put in Trafalgar Square, next to Nelson, and (I think) Havelock, and the lions. I think this is one of the better ones.
Here is the general context, which means lots of tourists clambering about on the lions and photographing one another:
Here is the one where the rocket is dwarfed by an earlier and more famous erection:
Here it is looking a bit like a rival church. What this also shows is that actually not much attention was being paid to the thing, because it is actually rather small:
And here is the Samizdata friendly shot:
Apparently quite a few of the scenes in the movie are set in London, and feature many of London’s famous landmarks, old and new, including the new local politician hutch that London has just recently had inflicted upon it.
It seems that you can make a very popular movie (apparently it was described in the New York Times as his best so far – could well be) without it being popular everywhere:
When singer Linda Ronstadt praised Michael Moore’s anti-war movie Fahrenheit 9/11 during a concert at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, the audience walked out.
What’s more, hotel president Bill Timmins was in the audience and took action himself.
Says a spokeswoman: ‘Her suite was cleaned out, her things were collected and security escorted her. She wasn’t happy, but we were very polite.’
She might have been wiser to say a few nice things about Spiderman 2, which has been described by Mark Steyn as:
… the spinning, squirting, swinging antidote to the stunted paranoia of Fahrenheit 9/11 …
Showbusiness. You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time, but …
Yes. The day approaches. Tech work all across planet Earth will grind to a halt. Programmers will twitch in their sleep (if they sleep at all). Network centers will groan under the load and there will be no answers from helpdesks. All this and more will happen in a mere fifteen days. A bit more than two weeks… DOOM 3 hits the stores on August 3rd!
Linux and OSX versions are to follow soon thereafter.
Used with the kind permission of Idsoftware
Addendum: Buying Doom3 makes money for Idsoftware. One of the Idsoftware founders is John Carmack. John Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace, perhaps the number two contender for the X-Prize behind Scaled Composites. So… buy Doom3 and support your capitalist future in Space!
I could not possibly let the day pass by without reference to the death of Marlon Brando.
As far as I am concerned, there are actors, good actors and then there are stars. Brando was a star. But of all the roles he played, I will remember him best for his potrayal of mafia boss, Vito Corleone, in the Godfather. Not only did his enormous screen presence seer itself into every frame, but he took this character and turned it into a genuine cultural icon.
R.I.P Marlon Brando.
Rob Fisher has discovered a foolproof plan for getting invited to our famed Blogger Bashes…
…advertising Samizdata.net at the Glastonbury festival 
Michael Moore bans Michael Moore?
It seems the new stupid campaign finance regulations in the USA (the result of Michael Moore’s years of vomit among others) are about to be used to restrict distribution of Moore’s latest wind-up.
Because the law attempts to prohibit all sorts of ‘in kind’ donations to the Republicans [I meant political parties], making a movie that plugs one candidate at the expense of another in election year could be ruled “interference” by the Federal Electoral Commission. I wonder how Michael Moore feels being felt sorry for by the US Libertarian Party.
Of course it is a shocking abuse of the US constitution. (sigh) How sad!
You may have wanted to know the REAL reason that ‘Friends’ has been taken off the airwaves. The ‘official’ reason is that the show’s makers wanted to quit before the show became too stale.
The truth is rather more sinister.
In Lyle, the California Court of Appeal held that creative discussions in which writers of the popular sitcom Friends developed ideas and created scripts could constitute sexual harassment of individuals listening to the sometimes bawdy banter of the writers.
So now we know.
[Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link.]
It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it.
I have been doing my bit for the War against woman-hating, religious bigotry by checking out the Miss Universe finalists. Personally I think the registered Republican Miss USA looked much better than Miss Australia, the eventual winner.
Useful sociological experiment: check out Miss Sweden and try to focus on horrible tax rates in that country. So if Sweden had the burqah, perhaps they would have lower taxes. Tough call.
The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics used by the major studios until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.
However, this year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. Or perhaps the summer movie season is now always going to start three weeks before EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account. Perhaps in a few years “summer” will be statistically redefined to start in February). That first move was Universal’s Van Helsing. That was now three weeks ago, and we can start to see the first few indications of what the summer would be like.
The story of last summer has been told. Hollywood released lots of sequels, lots of high concept movies based on comic books, old television series, video games and theme parks. With one or two exceptions grosses were down from the summer before. There was lots of speculation as to whether the advent of DVDs meant that people were less likely to go and see movies in the cinema, or whether it just meant the year’s movies weren’t very good. Certainly, though, people were and are watching lots of movies on DVDs, and Hollywood was making unexpectedly immense amounts of money due to this, which sort of made up for the decline in box office revenues. (Of course, when the DVD format was introduced in the first place a few years back, a number of Hollywood studios waited a couple of years before releasing any movies on the new format. Studio people were frightened that the high quality digital nature of the new format meant that releasing films this way would make them more vulnerable to piracy, and they could not see any upside, as obviously all that would happen is that people would rent movies on DVD the way they had on VHS until then, and giving people a high quality digital experience at home would not cause them to rent or buy more movies. Obviously. Hollywood always runs away from new technology like this, and has an amazing inability to see upside in it. But the upside almost always seems to come).
Hollywood went into last summer believing that sequels were going to gross substantially more money than did the original films they were sequels to, but it didn’t happen and they get their noses bloodied a little. It takes two years for the lessons of a bad summer to sink in to Hollywood, but none the less this summer has fewer sequels and the like scheduled than last summer did. The lesson they should probably have learned is that sequels to good films can gross more than sequels to bad films, but the trouble with Hollywood being run by corporate types rather than people who genuinely love movies is that they are sometimes slow to see things like that.
One other thing that has been happening this year is what is often called “day and date” international programming. Traditionally, films were released in the US first, and would be rolled out throughout the rest of the world over a period of months. This is now happening less and less for big movies. Films are being released on the same weekend in most major markets. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Hollywood as always is afraid of piracy. Certainly they are losing some money to pirates. Once upon a time I was frequently offered illicit CD and VCDs and VHS tapes when walking down the streets of Asian cities, but if I wanted them in developed countries they would be harder to find. These days I cannot walk down Oxford Street in London without encountering someone selling illicit DVDs of movies current in the US that have probably not been released in the UK yet. Releasing movies in large swathes of Europe and Asia on the same weekend as in the US certainly reduces the window in which this activity is profitable, and this is the main reason given for the fact that there are now simultaneous worldwide releases.
But in reality this is more of a symptom than the cause. → Continue reading: The Summer Movie Season gets going
This is tragic. Truly tragic. In fact I am extremely surprised that David Carr has not had a chortle about it at least six hours ago:
Today a painful task will begin in Leyton, east London: picking through the remains of a devastating fire which destroyed a huge warehouse containing priceless works of art.
Many of the lost works are from the collection of Charles Saatchi. It is thought that they may include Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell.
Tracey Emin’s famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With may be another: the tent appliquéd with the names of her past lovers was the star of the famous Royal Academy Sensation! exhibition and to many became emblematic of the endeavours of a generation of young British artists. “I don’t know what specific pieces have been lost,” Mr Saatchi said yesterday. “So far it has been a day of many rumours.”
The warehouse belonged to Momart, the country’s leading art handlers, who undertake storage and transport for the Tate, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, as well as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.
The confusion about which pieces have succumbed stems partly from Momart’s uncertainty about what was stored in the building, Mr Saatchi said. Work by Sarah Lucas, famed for substituting parts of the human body with poultry, fried eggs and vegetables in her pieces, was also feared to have been destroyed.
No no no. This was not “devastating”. This was an art happening. These people need to dispense with their outdated ways of seeing so-called “reality” and instead look at the world in a new way. This fire did not destroy, it merely moved some objects from one state of being to another … We need to think beyond “specific pieces” to the totality of life …
As for all this “uncertainty”, well, what I say is can one ever really be “certain” about anything? Surely we have learned by now not to seek an illusion of certainty in an inherently uncertain world. There is no certainty. There are only different ways of looking at things. We need to get away from the single point of view, the one fixed, bourgeois way of seeing everything, within one fixed frame … blah blah blah … etcetera etcetera etcetera … insert Carr-isms at will.
Sometimes Modern Art contrives a happening which really hits the spot and grabs the headlines. Sensational or what?
Although, I would advise Buckingham Palace to think about making other arrangements for its art transport needs.
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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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