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Last night I actually went out, to a cinema, to see a film, with some friends. No pause button, no stopping if bored, no incoming phone calls, no life at all, except watching and listening to and thinking about the film. And then after that, sparkling conversation, in a restaurant. Very peculiar. Very delightful.
The film was The Barbarian Invasions, which was the movie that got the Best Foreign Film Oscar (just as Michael Jennings hoped it would) on account of Lord of the Rings Part 3 (and I seem to recall someone thanking Lord of the Rings 3 for this on Oscar night itself) not having been a foreign film.
Preliminary googling while I gathered my thoughts about this movie got me to this review of the movie by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian back in February, which is one of the most fatuously wrong-headeed pieces of writing I have ever had the good fortune to read and laugh out loud in amazement at. Bradshaw gets hold of the stick all right, but at totally the wrong end.
The story concerns a bunch of reunited lefties left over from an earlier film, which I haven’t seen, one of who is a certain Rémy, who is now … well, let Bradshaw tell it:
Rémy is now grown into his 50s and hospitalised with a fatal tumour in his home town of Montréal, insisting on state care and railing against the barbarians of philistinism and extremism destroying the world. His wealthy merchant banker son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), described by Rémy as a “puritan capitalist” in contradistinction to his own “socialist hedonism”, is still angry with him for breaking up the family home but is nevertheless prevailed upon to return to his bedside, and the slow process of reconciliation begins; Sébastien gets on his mobile to reassemble all Rémy’s old friends and lovers.
So far so good. Nothing wrong with that. That is what happens. But now Bradshaw careers ludicrously off the rails: → Continue reading: The Barbarian Invasions – the future belongs to me (but not to Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian)
Well, it’s Oscar night this evening. The big question seems to be whether Mel Gibson will make an appearance as a presenter, and if so what he will say and what the reaction will be. (If his aim of releasing The Passion of the Christ was simply to make a lot of money, he has succeeded. The film has grossed $118m in five days and as Gibson put up the entire budget himself, almost all of the profits will go to him). However, as I promised I might when I wrote my overlong overview of what happened in the Holiday and New Year film season a couple of weeks ago, here are my predictions as to who are going to win the Academy Awards this evening. Some people might think that the Oscars are too trivial for a Samizdata post, but if you think this, don’t read. If it is good enough for Mark Steyn, it’s good enough for me. (How do I begin my campaign to be the next Spectator film critic).
I have of course refrained from using the special hotline that we Samizdatistas have direct to the Stonecutter World Council to find out in advance who the winners are, so I am just guessing using my judgement here. I will stick to the major categories, with perhaps occasional thoughts on the other categories.
As well as merely trying to predict the winners, as an added bonus, I give you a star ranking. Four stars means I will eat my metaphorical hat if this is not the winner. Three stars means I will be quite surprised if this is not the winner. Two stars means that I think this will be the winner, but that I think that there are other possibilities that would not be an overwhelming surprise. One star means that the category looks very open and I have no idea, but that I am willing to guess. I will give other people I think who are in with some kind of chance in brackets, and if I list more than one such person I list most likely first. I may or may not follow this up with a sentence or two as to why but I will try to keep it brief. In a couple of instances I will elaborate on my reasoning at more length on the special blog I use for that purpose, and will link to those comments.
Anyway, here goes.
The full nomination list is here. → Continue reading: Yes, it’s Oscar Night.
Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson’s acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ
An American Jewish leader met with Vatican officials to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus’ crucifixion. Anti-Defamation League Chair Abraham Foxman says that Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” contradicts the Vatican’s repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. A top Vatican official who met with Foxman said no such statement is planned. Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Vatican’s social-communications office, instead praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.
The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews.
This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying “John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians”.
This is just history, guys! What is the big deal?
I’m listening to an old nineteen thirties recording of some Dvorak symphonies. The conductor and orchestra are both greatly admired for this music, yet I find little pleasure in the experience. For me, symphonies, by their nature, only really work properly if the recording is decent, as the best recordings were from about 1960 onwards, but as these ones, made in the 1930s, are not.
Concertos are another matter. One of the greatest pleasures I’ve recently got from classical CD collecting is from the Naxos historical CD series. True, as with the symphonies, you don’t get the full orchestral picture clearly, but a solo instrument can still come across very clearly, despite the barrier of the decades. What classical music lover would deny himself the pleasure of hearing the teenage Yehudi Menuhin performing the magnificent Elgar Violin Concerto – recorded in 1932 with Sir Edward Elgar himself conducting – just because the recording quality is not quite up to modern standards? The orchestra is not all you’d like, but the solo violin is clear as a bell. → Continue reading: Reflections on the future of the musical past
There are two key times of the year in which Hollywood film studios release what they perceive is their biggest and best movies. One of these is “summer”, which on the present statistical definition from AC Nielsen runs in the US from two weeks before the Memorial Day weekend unto Labor Day. The other is the “Holiday Season”, which runs from the Friday before Thanksgiving Day and finishes the first Sunday after New Year’s Day. Immediately after the end of the summer movie season, I wrote a lengthy piece explaining how Hollywood’s finances now work, and how the summer had gone, which of the movies had been successes and which had not, and which movies that I thought were any good. In this piece, I am going to talk about how the Holiday season went – what went right and what went wrong. (I am not going to give quite as much background on how Hollywood’s finances work as I did in that piece. People who have not read it may want to at least go back and skim the first couple of paragraphs). And, to be honest, a lot went wrong. My piece on summer was entitled “Thoughts on Hollywood’s lousy summer”. Well, the Holiday season was in many ways worse. Much worse.
But hey, I can hear you asking. It’s February. Why is Michael only writing now about a movie season that ended more than a month ago? He is really slack, isn’t he?
The answer to that is yes and no. For the last couple of months my life, as Bruce Wayne might say, has been complex. But it is actually more no than yes. (One other reason is that what he has written is simply long and detailed, and it has taken a while to write). Although the holiday season officially finishes immediately after the New Year, in reality it doesn’t. It really finishes about a week after the Academy Awards. (This year the awards are being presented on February 29). To explain why this is so, I am going to have to talk about the history of Hollywood release patterns, and about the Academy Awards.
Some people may be put off by the fact that I am going to talk about the Academy Awards a fair bit in this post. Many people are often dismissive of the awards and regard them as meaningless. While I am often enraged by the fact that the best film/performance does not win, I am not going to agree with this. They mean a lot to the people who receive them, and to the people who award them. And they have a huge impact on what films Hollywood makes, when it releases them, and how many people actually go to see them. They also have big impacts in the careers of the people who are nominated for and win them. Quite simply, the awards are central to vitually everything Hollywood does between about October and February. It is not possible to understand anything that the movie industry does in this period if you do not explain this in a reasonable amount of detail. So I will.
Traditionally, which means before about 1980, most Hollywood movies were released by what is know as a “platform release”. This means that a film would start out showing on a few cinemas in a few major cities. If it was successful on these few screens, it would then start showing on screens in less important cities, and also on more (or different) screens in the same cities. The total number of screens would probably not exceed a thousand, even for very successful movies.
However, in the 1970s this started to change. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the holiday and new year movie season
There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.
First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.
However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.
It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:
As for smoking bans in “public places”, there are three reasons why they’re unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don’t have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from “second-hand smoke” has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I’ve gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it’s statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I’m not making this up! People who use this sort of “junk science” to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.
So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.
Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about ‘saving the planet’ or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.
My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!
[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Ed Driscoll wrote a piece about evolving guitar technology in Friday’s installment of TechCentralStation, and after searching desperately for any thinly-veiled excuse to write about it, I stumbled across an angle.
With a lot of manufactured goods, their production tends to get ‘outsourced’ to the third world because (1) eventually everyone figures out how to do it and (2) capital markets can finance production almost anywhere on the globe. The only thing more predictable than this evolution is that politicians will never stop whining about it.
One trend that Driscoll does not pick up on is that this is also happening with guitars. Just as American streets are filling up with Korean-made autos (more Korean cars are sold here than German cars) the American guitar shops are filling up with Korean-made (and now Chinese-made) guitars. The Korean manufacturer Samick now accounts for almost half of the world’s guitar production. Even Gibson, best known for its estimable and pricey Les Paul (see photo below) is offering high value from its Epiphone series guitars (which Samick builds for them in Korea.)
If you have ever picked up a surviving ‘bargain’ guitar of the ’60s in a pawnshop or a secondhand guitar store — a Harmony, Kay, Eko, etc. — you would likely find cut-rate construction, weak intonation, mediocre playability and thin-sounding pickups. But today’s ‘bargain’ brands offer workmanship and playability that sometimes give the premium brands a run for their money. Danelectro, for example, makes hip, great-sounding guitars that are easy to play and can be had for about US$200.
To give you an idea as to how far this trend has already gone, I personally own a $40 guitar. I was ordering the Line 6 Guitar Port (the guitar-to-PC interface that Driscoll mentions in the article) when I discovered that the vendor was offering the device a la carte for $160 or packaged with an electric guitar for $200. My curiosity got the best of me – how bad can this $40 guitar be? – and I ordered the package deal. And you know what? The cheapo guitar is terrific. It does not hold its tune as well as my main Gibson, but it is easy to play and sounds good to boot.
Driscoll is right that we are not going to see a lot of major innovations in electric guitars anytime soon, in large part because the players themselves are somewhat resistant to change. (Even the most avant-garde noisemakers tend to prefer traditional guitar designs.) What we are seeing instead is global capitalism commoditizing electric guitars and making quality instruments more affordable than ever for a generation of young players.
The sustain, listen to it!
Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Norah Jones, who’s debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide.
Ms Jones’s success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today’s world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Norah Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means.
And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.
Update: The new album, “Feels Like Home”, which has a more overtly country feel, is excellent, in my view.
Friedrich Blowhard’s latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello “clouds”. Hello “sky”.
Says Friedrich:
It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as “found art” but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.
Indeed.
But now here’s what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I’ve been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description (“cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue”) but not the official title? Can search engines now – or will search engines ever be able to – respond intelligently to a query like that?
And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go “you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh …” and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?
Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction does not appear to be the stalwart stronghold of libertarianism that one would expect from an Ayn Rand or L. Neil Smith. Nevertheless, writing in Texas when the Wild West was a living memory, not a history book, Howard found plenty of material for his fantasies. The battles of the Aquilonians and the Picts were an odd Old World confection of cowboys and Indians.
The American values of small government and individual freedom have very little to do with Conan’s lax attitude towards property, usually appropriated after cleaving a few skulls. However, as King Of Aquilonia, Conan employed his own brand of statecraft, as he explains to Amalrus, King of Ophir, Strabonus, King of Koth and Tsotha the Wizard as he stands chained and defeated in their hall.
From ‘The Scarlet Citadel’ by Robert E. Howard.
I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you – one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons and the people cried out under suppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of my people are lighter than anywhere else in the world.
What of you? Your brother, Amalrus, hold the eastern half of your kingdom and defies you. And you, Strabonus, your soldiers are even now besieging castles of a dozen or more rebellious barons. The people of both your kingdoms are crushed into the earth by tyrannous taxes and levies, And you would loot mine -ha! Free my hands and I’ll varnish this floor with your brains!
May all those who raise taxes share the same fate!
On a long drive, this morning, I came across an interesting piece on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week programme on BBC Radio Four, a radio station I still cannot quite give up. The thrust of the piece was that free market producers in London’s West End are creating shockingly ‘commercial’ and ‘unoriginal’ shows, and that something should be done about it to make life more interesting for London’s chattering classes. → Continue reading: Krapp’s last government intervention
Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night’s episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the “Colossus” computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his “difference engine”. Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage’s machine, and it worked.
But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.
I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.
For many years now, I’ve been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage’s restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … “it worked”, which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.
So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.
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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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