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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I’ve just got off the phone with my mother, who included in among all the family chat some grumbles about this year’s Christmas stamps. She prefers more obviously Christmassy imagery, and she said the people at her local Post Office didn’t much care for them either. What are they? – she said. I’d heard distant grumblings about these stamps, and had seen the one with the ice twiddling around a tree because presumably that was the one which people were particularly grumbling about. Controversial blah blah. But I hadn’t seen all of them, or given any of them any thought until my mother mentioned them.
I should guess that there is a sort of ideological agenda here, in the form of a non-agenda. They avoid anything very Christian. Like most readers of this blog I should guess, I utterly despise the notion that Christian Christmas stuff should be set aside in order not to upset Muslim stroke atheists. (a) No sane Muslim stroke atheist could possibly be upset. (b) If insane Muslim stroke atheists are upset, to hell with them.
Nevertheless, and perhaps because I am myself a devout atheist, I actually quite like these particular stamps, although I do agree that the ice twiddle one is rather silly. I especially like the ice star. But I’m guessing others might prefer something more along these lines.
On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:
A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica”, by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …
Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler’s love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little’s posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.
…I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.
See what I mean? Little continues:
Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.
This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.
Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.
That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.
By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. “The best performance I’ve ever heard, I think.”
More great news, this time on the Ozzy Osbourne front. He’s not going to die:
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne is breathing unaided for the first time since his quad bike accident a week ago.
The former Black Sabbath singer has been taken off a ventilator and has been able to speak to his family.
And with his old verbal fluency unimpaired, I trust.
Not long ago I caught Ozzy and daughter Kelly doing their Christmas single Changes on Top of the Pops, which is now number one in the hit parade apparently. And then immediately after that Ozzy had to be rushed to hospital following his prang, and Kelly rushes there to see him. You can’t buy publicity like that, because you can’t fake it.
This tune, for me, personifies the way that pop music these days, at least the sort of pop music you see on British telly, has become more and more something that your granny can recognise and sing along with. Not like it was in my day. In my day we used to drive elder brothers and sisters crazy, never mind our parents and grandparents. But now the man who used to bite the heads off bats is in that same celebrity category that used to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now also accommodates England’s rugby darling Jonny Wilkinson. (Although, it seems that many elder brother types are angry about Changes. This angry bloke reminds me of how my contemporaries at Essex University in the early seventies reacted to Donny Osmond.)
With his latest effort Ozzy has apparently set a new pop record, of the Guinness-Book-of variety:
The singer has set a new record for the longest time taken to reach number one during a career, reaching the top of the charts 33 years after his first hit with Black Sabbath, Paranoid, got to number four in August 1970.
Ah, Paranoid. Those were the days, eh? Who would have thought that Ozzy Osbourne of all people would live long enough to break a record like that?
About a month ago, Norwegian blogger Bjorn Staerk composed a sumptuous satire of the marxoid mentality in a parodistic review of the Lord of the Rings:
Working hard to foil the plans of these good, decent white folks are the “evil” Saruman, and the even more “evil” Sauron, rulers of two countries called Isengard and Mordor. Both are portrayed as near-demonic in their hatred of our white heroes. Sauron is no more than a big, red eye, hovering in the air, clearly implying that he’s some kind of “Devil”. Both have massive armies at their disposal, consisting entirely of filthy, ugly monsters that happen to be black, every single one of them.
I wonder how many people read that, chuckled and thought to themselves that, in reality, no respectable left-wing commentator or pundit could ever possibly plumb the depths of such absurdity?
If you were one of those people, you were wrong, because Bjorn Staerk’s creation was both witty and remarkably prescient.
British socialist and Independent columnist, Johann Hari has not only risen to the bait, he has grabbed hold of it and ripped it to shreds in a feeding frenzy. Perhaps Mr Hari also read the Bjorn Staerk piece, got entirely the wrong end of the stick and decided to follow its lead. More likely, though, that he thought this up all by himself.
In an editorial he has called ‘Oppose Tolkein!’ (which itself sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of the Student Trotskyite Handbook), Mr Hari warns the world that the Tolkein classic is, in fact, a thinly-veiled Nazi screed:
The most obvious is racism. The purely evil Orcs are, in Tolkien’s words, “squat, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant-eyes”. The enemy is the Dark Lord and he lives in the Black Land. The heroic hobbits and elves are, by contrast, uber-Aryan and ethnically pure. Ideals of “blood” and its purity are always sloshing around his narrative. For example, the Men of Gondor – “the high men” – are descendants of the Numenorians, the greatest of all warriors. Over the centuries, they have become “degraded” because of breeding with inferior races. When their bloodline is pure, as in Aragorn’s descendants, the strength of the original Lords of the West is retained.
Read Bjorn Staerk and then read Johann Hari. Can you tell the difference? No, neither can I. Mr Hari has provided definitive proof for what we have all long suspected: that no satire on the thought processes of the modern left can be regarded as exaggeration.
As well as writing for the Indie, Johann is also a regular contributor to Harry Hatchett’s blog where he and his fellow travellers are forever accusing free market campaigners of holding views which are ‘out of touch’ and ‘unpopular’. Deliciously ironic then that Johann should elect to publish his laughable denunciation not 24 hours before the British public votes ‘Lord of the Rings’ as their ‘favourite ever book’.
I am also given to believe that he is considered in many circles to be something of a rising star of the British left. Judging from this kind of form, I can only concur.
I often make predictions, and with a kiss of Mafia-like death, virtually all of them fail to come true. I have a gift.
However, it gives me great pleasure to announce that at least one of them has come true. Lord of the Rings has been voted, against all the muttered displeasures of the socialist London-based diners of the BBC cognoscenti, and the great and the good, as the United Kingdom’s favourite ever book.
Which reminds me of the following quote:
Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-Earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all spurious BBC competitions to fill up the airwaves with cheap programming, so the money saved can be used to prop up the useless lives of BBC socialist parasites, are an evil.
If this book can win, against all the railings of the government worshippers who rule this country, then I have hope. One day we will destroy their ring of power and free ourselves from their tyranny. In the meantime, let’s just hope Mr Jackson gets the film rights for ‘The Hobbit’, to give us something to watch next Christmas.
Running short of last minute Christmas ideas? Want to understand what it’s like to be a ruthless statist? Look no further than Medieval: Total War. I was at a loose end last week, alone with a laptop, a CD drive, a hotel bedroom, fifteen quid burning a hole in my pocket, and a nearby South London branch of WH Smiths. There are many terrible things such a situation can tempt a man into, so I leapt into one of them regardless. Finding a bargain-basement copy of Medieval: Total War, for £14:99, I loaded up the sucker and got going. I started as the English, on the easy level, from 1087 onwards, my mission to conquer the whole of Europe by 1487. Three hundred and fifty years later, virtually the whole of Europe is now dominated by England, I’ve destroyed the French and the Germans, almost as good as beating Australia at Rugby, and I’m about to conquer Constantinople. Unfortunately, I remained unable to do any of this without keeping the provincial tax levels at ‘Normal’, i.e. 50%, rather than ‘Very Low’. Though as an Austrian, I did resist going for ‘Very High’ taxes, at 70%, to pay for my insatiable desire for more troops, better weapons, Royal Knights, and Welsh Longbow men.
If you do get the game, try to get up to the Halberdier and Swiss Pike men level of building technology. Both soldier types are lethal, especially at cutting up enemy cavalry.
In a two-way split game, you first of all play a game of strategy, sort of like a complex form of chess, on an Olde Worlde map of Europe, with the construction of buildings, fleets, the training of soldiers, assassins, princesses, and various alliances. You have to build up certain levels of technology, based on your provincial castles building program, before you can train up certain types of more professional soldiers. You then press an ‘end of year’ button, a bell tolls, and you move into the second stage of the game where your campaigning soldiers go into full 3-D battles, with opposing armies, with the same battle engine currently being used in the Time Commanders television series.
What I really liked about the game was its insistence that you look after trade, and keeping your provincial populations happy. Yes, only in order to keep your tax levels up, and to avoid expensive rebellions from the serfs, but Professor Hoppe’s analysis that monarchy is better than democracy, though still much worse than proper liberty, becomes more persuasive by the day.
Is the game addictive? I’ll say. I’ve had to ask my wife to hide the disks when I got home. But have no fear. I have a sneaking feeling I’m getting Railroad Tycoon for Christmas, so I can pretend to be Dagny Taggart. I wonder if it has a John Galt extension pack? Should a man my age be doing such things? I have absolutely no idea. But it certainly beats watching television, especially the vacuous rubbish on the BBC. I wish I could give up the BBC completely. Has anyone in the UK tried it? I’d miss Top Gear, of course, but virtually all of the rest of it you can keep. Except for John Humphries on the radio, this morning, when he literally laughed in Chancellor Gordon Brown’s face, as El Gordo tried to persuade the Welsh Rottweiler that his new open-ended National Insurance tax is in some way different from income tax. It was almost worth the licence fee. Almost, of course, but not quite.
In the week of the increasingly embarrassing Turner Prize, here (I found it via these people) is news of some art that Samizdata can really get behind:
Since 1998 Italian artist Antonio Riello has been making very special weapons as artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military guns are restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies.
And for a certain sort of gentleman, I’m guessing. (Although those ball and chain things at the top of the picture collection don’t look to me like they’re for self defence at all.)
Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others. Recently also armours in steel, plastic and Kevlar are made to protect ladies against urban dangers.
Globalisation. Good.
In this artproject the glamour of fashion system is mixed with the common perverse and morbid fascination for weaponry.
Yeah yeah. They have to say that.
These works – made using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colours, jewels, furs, trendy fabrics and special technological appliances – play along the thin line between fashion and trash.
Miami Vice aesthetics you might say.
LADIES WEAPONS are a sort of hybrids born from the most outstanding contemporary Italian features: the obsession for personal security and the passion for elegance and fashion.
I would have preferred passion for personal security and obsession for elegance and fashion, but like I say, they have to say that guns are bad. This is Italy remember, not Arizona.
Every artwork has a name of a woman (“CLAUDIA”, “TAMARA”,….) and exists only in one exemplar.
Where is allowed the artist uses real weapons, in the countries where is forbidden artworks are based on perfect replicas.
“Where is allowed.” There’s your problem. And of course, “perfect replicas” are only allowed “where is allowed” also. This art is presumably illegal wherever replica guns are flaunted in places “where is not allowed”. Oh well, it all adds to the buzz.
My guess is that the Art Nazis, to coin a phrase, won’t allow this stuff to qualify, because it is itself far, far too “obsessive” about guns to be allowed into polite Euro-society. As “art”, it will never catch on. It’s typical Euro-trash half-baked goodness/uselessness, in other words. More work is needed.
This guy should stop titting about with “only in one examplar” nonsense, go to America, and mass produce these things. Forget art. Embrace the gun culture, and help to make it (even more) fashionable.
When he gets there, he will course have to deal with the fact that in America they presumably have a lot of this kind of kit already, selling healthily (not to say obsessively), with no thought of art at all.
(By the way, and flying off at somewhat of a tangent, “Art Nazis” is a phrase I recently invented, which I think may have a future. I say invented, but I googled for it after thinking of it for myself, and I did find this use of the phrase, to describe the idiot/villain art critic at the centre of Tom Wolfe’s splendid little book The Painted Word.)
Lawrance M. Bernabo, Amazon reviewer #2 with 6700 reviews behind him faces a Hamletesque (Hamletian?) dilemma:
To review, or not to review: that is the question:
Whether ’tis better to post reviews and cover
The pros and cons of action figures,
Or to write reviews about best sellers,
And by reviewing diss them? To critique: to review;
No more; and have a life again we end
The long-nights and the thousand misspeeled words
and buy things instead, ’tis a consumption
Amazon devoutley wish’d. To critique, to review;
To review: perchance be voted: Yeah, there’s the fun;
For in those votes for reviews what ranking may come
Whence we may achieve a cute little badge,
Must make us crazed: such obsession
Surely makes such big time fun of reviewing life;
For who would bear the wit and scorns of posts,
The counter review, the second page oblivion,
The pangs of negative votes, posting delay,
The insolence of edits and revisions
The steady rise of the unworthy reviewer,
When anyone might their ascension make
With some extra accounts? who would freebies take,
To read and review someone’s new book,
But that the fun of something never reviewed,
The undiscover’d product for the nounce
No reviews critique, inspires the mind
And makes us rather review everything we have
Than review those things that we know not of?
Thus ranking does make competitors of us all;
And thus the constant cry re: ranking
Is debated o’er with constant call for reform,
And reviews of great length and insight
With words counts the elves judge too high,
Do lose the chance of posting.– Submit you more!
Fair Amazon.com! Jeff, on thy pages
Be all my reviews spotlighted.
We conclude that he needs a blog. Now!
Via Many-2-Many
The time of year has arrived for the annual Turner Prize for modern art: an exhibition of dreary, talentless, post-modernist rubbish fawned over and slobbered upon by a carnival procession of dreary, talentless, post-modernist critics, groupies, poseurs and assorted hangers-on (lots of ‘dog-turd-in-a-bottle’ type installations, hailed as a ‘devastating social critique’).
I don’t care who won it or why but I could not possibly let this scandalously hypocritical bit of dreck pass by without comment:
Described by some critics as “a deeply weird artist”, Perry makes classically shaped pots, which now fetch between £8,000 and £15,000.
But his decorative motifs – transfers, photographs and squiggly drawings – are anything but traditional. Inspired mostly by what he calls his unhappy childhood in Essex after his father left home, many are scenes of child abuse or erotica or angry social comment on class or the consumer culture.
Obviously the ‘deeply weird’ Mr Perry is so angry about ‘consumer culture’ that he could not possibly let one of his home-made pots go for less than 8000 smackers!
Not only am I trying to cope with the steady flow of work related parties that have started to appear in my diary in the run up to Christmas, but I agreed to go out on Friday with Andrew Dodge to the Monster Magnet launch party at the Barfly in Camden, not that it takes much persuading when there is free beer and good music on the agenda. We were treated to a live set from Monster Magnet, and if you have ever been to the Barfly you will know it is not a big place, so it was a real treat considering they were playing the Forum the next day (and that’s a big place). As Andrew points out in his posting covering the same gig we were mixing with the likes of Kelly Osbourne and Die So Fluid , however what he does not mention is that he had the hots for Grog, their lead singer,
so we spent a large proportion of the night chatting to her, not that I was complaining until the next day when I discovered I had lost my voice.
The following night was spent at the Brixton Academy watching The Darkness play. Again I was with Andrew with the added value of Anna of leather catsuit fame from the bloggers party, although this time it was not planned as we had both got tickets separately. I have seen them live before, and they did not disappoint on a second viewing. Their mixture of Rock and Irony (give me a D… Give me an Arkness…) is refreshing in the current world of dance and manufactured pop music you hear on the radio all the time. On the way out we bumped into Nik who had arranged the Monster Magnet party and his voice was worse than mine. At least I was able to talk by Saturday evening!
I linked to this story earlier today on my Culture Blog. And then I had supper at Perry’s earlier this evening, consisting of the leftovers from the Blogger Bash on Saturday, and I told him about it. He laughed, so here it is here. It’s from the Guardian, which has a Strange Things section:
In Romania, local media report that the country’s “first” institution of higher learning, the University of Arts, in Iasi, was the scene of an official investigation this month after police removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself on the campus. Builders and students at the university had initially mistaken it for a modern work of art.
According to Reuters, the body hung for a whole day in a sculpture-laden garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers twigged to what it was and called the cops.
Cue commenters with stories about how granny went to sleep in Tate Modern and got confused with an exhibit. These are old gags now, in fact they go back to Duchamp’s Urinal, but as long as Art goes on being ridiculous, they will go on being funny.
Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear program is, without any shadow of a doubt, the finest piece of current broadcasting on British television; I will brook no argument here. It is also the only place on the BBC where, except for the Hutton affair and the related war against Iraq, fierce dissent against the centralising thrust of New Labour’s Euro-loving socialism is both tolerated and welcomed.
I would love to see Jezzer’s contract, the one he signed a couple of years back, to revive the moribund Top Gear franchise. ‘I want a race track,’ he will have said. ‘I want a large garage-cum-showroom for a studio, and I want to make as many closet libertarian and anti-Tony Blair statements as I damn well please.’
The BBC won’t have liked it, but with one of their biggest money-spinners, the Top Gear Magazine, in a probable sales decline, without its matching TV series, and programs like the cunningly titled Fifth Gear picking up multi-million sized audiences on rival terrestrial channels, there was only one option for even the BBC, that car-hating, carrot munching, First Class train riding, pampered elite of Old West London town. Even with the compulsory tithe of the BBC license fee, even they, the chosen ones, have to sometimes make programs which Jonny Englander, at home with his shotguns and his bulldogs, might actually want to watch, to stop them turning off the BBC altogether in favour of such exotic delights as Men and Motors. → Continue reading: Jeremy Clarkson: Surely God in disguise
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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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