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]
|
Australian pop singer and possessor of one of the world’s finest rear ends, Kylie Minogue, says she is shocked and aghast at the amount of sex in today’s pop culture.
I am rather partial to the Aussie songstress, so I won’t be cruel but, bejeesus, on what planet has the lovely lass been residing these past few years? A convent? Ever since the days of Jazz, Blues and the rest, sex and All That has been central to pop music. That is why the ‘moral’ scolds are always against it.
Oh well, next we will be hearing from the Pope on how he is shocked at how Christianity has got too much stuff about miracles and Jesus in it. Or how there is too much contemplating of violence in the armed forces.
Kylie strikes a demure pose to discourse on sex, of all things!
It sucks.
Really, really sucks.
Mark Steyn has a equally damning review of the film in this week’s Spectator (no link, I am afraid) where he also has no time for the portentous, and pretentious, manner in which everyone speaks:
“I’m afraid hope is an indulgence I don’t have time for”. Or maybe “Indulgence is a hope I don’t have time for”. Or “time is a hope I don’t have indulgence for”. Makes no difference. It’s modular furniture.
Oh, and plenty of cod theology, just like in the last one…
The only good moment in the film is during the fight between Neo and Agent Smith who angrily and hatefully asks Neo the big WHY. Why does he fight him, why does he fight at all?! Himself, other people, duty, honour, or even something as insipid as love? The answer is Because I have a choice.
And. you. dear reader. have. a choice. of not. going. to see. the film.
One of the many hats and t-shirts I wear is that of the National Space Society (NSS). We need a cultural component to our spaceward movement. It is not just to bind the ‘oldtimers’ together. We must spread the ‘frontier meme’ where it is extinct and nurture it where it still lives. It takes more than talk to do this. It takes art.
Prometheus Music in conjunction with NSS will soon release To Touch The Stars. It is now available for pre-release order.
I think this is a fascinating site, specialising in before-and-after plastic surgery star photos, which I found via one of my regular favourites, b3ta.com. “Crap plastic surgery”, they call it, but I say that there’s a bit more to all this than just the chance to jeer at silly celebs with fat lips and boobs that go in an out from one year to the next. As always, where the celebs go now, millions more will follow.
One of my absolute favourites, Meg Ryan, as is pointed out at the site itself, has been made to look like Susan Dey (of LA Law fame). I adore both these ladies, but even so, what Ryan has done to herself is to me off-putting. She’s just not Meg Ryan any more, which I suppose it the whole idea. Presumably Meg Ryan was fed-up with making dark, serious, scary, explosive movies, packed with implausible action and profound human wickedness, and everyone saying “We preferred you in When Harry Met Sally“, so she decided to smash up her original face and change herself into something else.
When I first saw the MR “trout pout” on the cover of a trashy made-up-news-mag, I thought, ugh!! But maybe the magazines had photoshop-enhanced it. According to this it’s not too bad.
However, according to this, she’s turned herself into Molly Ringwald.
What Britain’s TV equivalent of Meg Ryan, Leslie Ash, has had done to herself is, however, truly scary. Google google. See what I mean.
What makes the Ryan and Ash lipo-enhancements so unnerving is that we’ve got used to these ladies with their regular faces. So when you see them now, you can’t forget that that isn’t the real shape of their faces and they’ve got bits of their bums in there. That’s not good.
And would you believe: Al Pacino? He seems to have said: “Make me look more like Dustin Hoffman!”
On the face of it this is all down-market tittle-tattle of the trailer-trashiest sort, of interest to the kind of lunatics who (like me) enjoy all the mad rubbish that b3ta links to, but to nobody else. But as so often with b3ta there’s deadly serious stuff in among the photoshopped squirrels with eagle-heads and pictures of weird people with huge eyes for no reason. It’s clear that something very profound is going on with our culture here. We have entered the age of the artificial body.
What’s going on? It starts with the obvious, which is that people who now want to change their bodies now can change their bodies.
It reminds me a bit of what Alice Bachini was blogging about yesterday, which got a lot of admiring attention. That posting was about a person changing their entire voice and become a different person, without necessarily meaning to. With plastic surgery, you change your entire look, and become a different person while very much meaning to, in much the same way that Meg Ryan seems to want to be a different sort of actress.
The strangest transformation of all which I found at Awful Plastic Surgery is that the charming Marie Osmond has had herself re-engineered into the monstrous Ruby Wax. Why would anyone want to make that transition? The answer is probably: she didn’t. Plastic surgery is still only a bet that it will turn out better than before rather than worse. (Ask Leslie Ash!) But already it’s a bet that millions are placing.
Personally I think it is all most undignified, like changing your name because you don’t like the one you’ve got.
I’ve been watching a series on BBC-2 called “The Seven Industrial Wonders of the World”. Tonight’s episode was the story of the Hoover Dam which was built during the ‘made in Washington DC’ depression era of the 1930’s. The Beeb did a mostly bang-up job and filled in much interesting detail on the harsh and dangerous condition the workers endured.
They showed the Bosses versus the Union. The organizer and everyone with him got fired and run off the job site. Many workers had serious health disabilities caused by working in improperly ventilated tunnels with gasoline powered machinery packed to the rafters. The company claimed illnesses were pneumonia when they were plainly caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
One worker sued and claimed, among other things, sexual dysfunction. The nasty old bosses set a prostitute on him… and she later testified in court that his function was quite satisfactory!
The Beeb told us the heroic Union organizer was from the IWW or International Workers of the World. The Wobblies. They left out a ‘minor’ detail: the IWW was a Communist front organization. I happened to be quite aware of who they were because I gigged in a Pittsburgh South Side Bar called “Wobbly Joe’s” for many years. To those not familiar with the Pittsburgh that once was, the South Side was Steel Worker country. [Remind me to tell you the story about the night I got my tires slashed after beating a local in an impromptu drag race in my souped up MGB]
The Wobbly’s of the 1930’s were widely known to be Communists. This is no conspiracy theory. They were Reds, pure and simple. Just try a google on the terms: “IWW Communist”.
I know how Communists operate albiet (fortuneately!) not as well as some here at Samizdata who grew up under them. If this was the source of information on the Union strife at the Hoover Dam, then the information is likely as truthful as a Pravda editorial. That the BBC neglected to inform the viewing audience of this places a very big question mark on all the rest of their historical information about the working conditions and worker mistreatment.
I do not doubt things described in the documentary could be true, but I require a more trustworthy source than 1930’s Marxist-Leninists to convince me.
Says Alice:
(I considered putting this on Samizdata, then thought maybe it wasn’t quite The Thing).
This is from Blackadder Goes Forth, a quite brilliant vintage British TV series set in WWI. Lord Flashheart is instructing a class of soldiers training to fly in the Royal Air Corps. Flashheart is the ludicrously loud and oversexed character played by Rik Mayall. George is the idealistic upper-class soldier played by Hugh Laurie.
And here it is:
Lord Flashheart: Treat your machine like you treat your woman!!
George: What, you mean, invite her home at weekends to meet your parents?
Flashheart: No! I mean, get inside her five times a day and take her to heaven and back!!
What a series that was.
There have been a great many animated films produced in the last 15 years. Many have been ordinary, but a surpringly large number have been good to wonderful. This article is an overview of these movies.
In the world of animation, once in a while see an animator or an animation studio going through a wonderful creative period. Over the last fifteen years, we have had three or four such hot patches. They do, I think, all owe a lot to the resurgence in animation that occurred due to the first of these, at Disney.
Until the late 1980s, Disney’s animation division had appeared to be in terminal decline. However, this somehow changed: Disney went through a stunning (but relatively brief) period of drawn animated musicals at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, thanks to the wonderful musical work of Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin. In retrospect I think there were two great movies that came out of this, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but these changed animation forever. The two Disney movies that followed these (and which were as anticipated as they were because of them) were more financially successful, but I don’t think they were quite as good. Aladdin was an Ashman/Menkin movie, but the influence of Robin Williams made it a little uneven, in my opinion. And, very sadly, Howard Ashman was dying when he wrote the music, and it is not as finished and polished as on the earlier movies. The Disney movie that followed that was The Lion King, which had its music written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and although I think this movie is nicely made, it lacks the style of the earlier ones. After that, Disney’s drawn animation went into a steep decline, from which it has not recovered. (Just out of interest – the music and choreography of the first song – Going Through the Motions – of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deliberately intended to look like a number from an Ashman/Menkin musical).
Financially, these four movies were extraordinarily successful. Prior to these movies, animation was considered to be something of a niche business, but these movies changed that idea utterly. They grossed far more than anyone had believed possible. Still, though, the audience was mainly children, and this fact made them some of the most financially successful films ever made. This was because they were made after VHS video recorders were ubiquitous. VHS video was a rental business, as people generally only wanted to watch movies once. However, the exception to this was films aimed at children. Children would (and will) watch the same movies over and over, and therefore parents would actually buy VHS tapes for their children. At the time, the prices of such tapes were high, and stunning numbers of the tapes of these four animated movies were sold. (Low quality direct to video sequels were made of these films as well, and these raked in even more). The films had not cost all that much to make (animation was not an art held in high regard just prior to The Little Mermaid) and the levels of profitability were just amazing. (The profit on The Lion King is in the billions of dollars, on an investment of maybe $50 million). Even better, children’s films are hugely valuable things in studio archives, as a new generation of children comes along every few years. (The Ashman/Merkin films also were helped by the fact that they coincided with the arrival of the baby boom echo generation of children. Hollywood was too dumb to be actually aware of this, and didn’t actually figure it out until after the release of the horror film Scream in 1996, but that is a different story, although one well worth telling some other time).
Disney’s competitors saw all this, and felt that they wanted a part of this profit. → Continue reading: Waiting for Miyazaki, or Thoughts on the state of animated movies.
I’ve just bought a new digital radio and it’s wonderful. Finally, I can receive BBC Radio 3 without analogical interruptions, which are perpetual where I live, in London SW1. You’d think that London SW1 would get good radio signals, wouldn’t you? But no. Too many towers? Too much electro-wizardry protecting the Queen and her Ministers? The weird weather conditions here in inner London? You tell me. (Truly, do tell me. We have a famously informed commentariat here.) Whatever the reason, until now I simply could not listen confidently to a Prom, say, without having to get up and fiddle with the damn radio every ten minutes, and as often as not all my fiddling would be powerless to stop the bonfire noises and the distortions.
But the new radio is fabulous. The sound is damn near as clean as a whistle, with no hint of an interruption. And it is especially fabulous when attached to my existing lo- to medium-fi CD playing system, thereby enabling me to tone down the treble and tone up the bass, which is how I prefer things. For some annoying reason, portable radios and CD players no longer seem to have treble or bass nobs built in to them. Is this the influence of the rise of Pop and the fall of Classical? (There goes another opportunity to distinguish yourself with a pertinent and informative comment.)
Talk of treble and bass makes me sound like a hi- rather than medium- to lo-fi-er. But so long as the sound meets my minimum quality threshold, I’m content, and my minimum quality doesn’t cost that much. The main thing is that treble/bass thing. I certainly don’t need to spend the many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds that you see mentioned in the review pages of hi-fi magazines, or in the hi-fi pages of the classical CD mags at the back, where loudspeakers look more like Daleks than the rectangular little boxes that I have.
The new radio is little handbag type object and it only cost a hundred quid, reduced by twenty at Dixon’s. It also has a built-in CD player, which means, what with my previous portable CD player having conked out, that I can now again play CDs quietly in my bedroom or living room, instead of having to switch up the main system in the kitchen whenever I want to listen outside the kitchen, and infuriate my neighbours. The treble/bass thing is a nuisance, but some kinds of music are more vulnerable to this limitation that others, so I’ll be fine. Harpsichord music, for example, doesn’t seem to worry about what would normally be too much treble.
So this is a quantum leap in my listening pleasure, like being given a vanload of unfamiliar CDs. And I also think that my pleasure throws light on three apparently rather separate sonic issues of the last few decades.
� First, hi-fi-ers were disturbed by what they regarded as the sonic imperfections of CDs compared with the old vinyl gramophone records.
� Second, the recording industry itself is infuriated by the apparent indifference of the public to the new Higher Figher formats like SACD.
� And third, there is the fact that the fastest growing sector of the music business is “historic” reissues on CD.
What gives? → Continue reading: Adequate sound is adequate: what matters is not being interrupted: thoughts on digital radio, SACD and the historic reissue business
This is an article about a movie that I rather like, but it is also about how not to write a film review.
I am werewolf, hear me roar… No, I am sure I remember that name of that daft Helen Reddy song all wrong, but that does seem to be the message of a review of Underworld in the Sierra Times by the colourfully named RadioFree Rocky D… this movie is just a pinko feminist tract.
To which I say… nonsense.
Underworld, the film in question, is in essence a version of Romeo and Juliette, but set against the backdrop of a war between not Montagues and Capulettes, but a clan of werewolves and a clan of vampires! This has everything for the trash movie aficionado: monsters, perpetual gloomy atmospherics, high tech weapons, chick-in-latex-with-guns (the breathtaking Kate Beckinsale)… need I say more? As an extra added bonus, it even has a decent and fairly complex storyline!
The review on the worthy Sierra Times dislikes this movie because it was being ‘politically correct’:
Women and men are physical equals. Anything a man can do, a woman can also do. Anyone who points out that men are physically stronger than women should be forced to undergo government-sponsored sensitivity training. Worse yet, telling the truth just may be sexual harassment. I know this, because Hollyweird tells me so.
I’m guessing that Beckinsale weighs in at a whopping 115 pounds – including her bootiliscious leather getup and her ho’ boots. I warm up with more weight than that. Be-otch come near me, and I’ll squish her. Good thing for her she carries twin Glocks.
Well for a start Selene, Beckinsale’s character, does not go mano-a-mano with the werewolves when she can avoid it… in fact she runs like hell to put some distance between them so she can shoot the hell out of them with silver bullets. And for another, she is not a 115 pound woman, she is a 115 pound immortal vampire, so why the hell should she be constrained by the limitations of a normal woman? I am sure that mighty jock RadioFree Rocky D could kick Kate Beckinsale’s delectable behind, but I doubt he is bulletproof regardless of how much weight he warms up with, so who cares?
The fact she casually steps off a ledge 20 floors up is a
fair indication the movie does not expect you to see
Selene as a feminist representation of ‘everywoman’
But then the review gets really weird:
More PC oozes out when someone wonders aloud, “Who started this war …?” This is Hollyweird’s way of saying that all wars are stupid and meaningless. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tell any veteran the war he fought in was for nothing, and you’ll get a face full of knuckles – and you’ll deserve it. Hollyweird has its hate-America-first panties in a bunch over the fact that President Dubya was the man at the helm when our troops totally stomped Saddam’s jackbooted civilian-killers into the sand. Where were the liberal’s objections when Weak Willie was Presidunce and sent troops to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti? Where were the socialist street protests then?
Huh? Now I quite like the Sierra Times and no doubt RadioFree Rocky D and I would probably agree on a great many issues (I was an outspoken supporter of the armed overthrow of Ba’athism in Iraq for example), but this review is what happens when one’s ideology starts to distort everything one sees. That paragraph seems to suggest that to question the legitimacy and sanity of any war makes you some pabulum puking whining pinko. I guess RadioFree Rocky D must have thought any Russian who questioned the wisdom of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was some sort of weak kneed girly-boy.
And from this position he takes the view that questioning the wisdom of a war between vampires and werewolves is somehow criticism of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Funny but I must have missed the ‘No Blood For Oil’ speech coming from one of the vampires (vampires… blood… get it? Oh never mind).
Use GUNS when fighting werewolves!
Anyway, this review tells us a lot about the author who rejoices in the name of ‘RadioFree Rocky D’ but tells us jack shit about the movie called Underworld… which happens to rock big time.
The ayes eyes have it!
Alex Singleton over on the Adam Smith Institute blog does not think much of the cinematic renditions of Lord of the Rings and asks:
Is the Lord of the Rings the most boring series of films ever? I sat through the second in the trilogy, The Two Towers, and just wanted to go to sleep. The pointless dialogue, endless battle scenes and lack of a story made this quite possibly the worst film I have ever watched at the cinema.
Well it takes all tastes but I for one enjoyed both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers thoroughly and disagree with almost every word of Alex’s critique. The dialogue was true to the story, the battles gripping and best of all for me, the characters were almost exactly what I had in my head for over 30 years since I first read the books. In fact I think the films cut out a lot of the ‘flabby bits’ in Tolkein’s epic (such as editing out the completely superfluous Tom Bomberdil interlude) without doing a great violence to the substance of it.
Although as you may have gathered, I have long been a great fan of Tolkein’s works, the Lord of the Rings has always held deeper meanings for me and the big screen versions have just reinforced my views as to what it all really means.
I eagerly await the third part later this year.
Art criticism is something about which I only rarely touch on when something particularly interests me. But in today’s Sunday Telegraph (print version only), Ian Hislop has written an interesting piece called Now I’ll be labelled a pervert on how playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber has been scorned and derided by the British ArtCrit set because he has the temerity to not just collect Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but to actually exhibit them to the public.
Having consented to display his collection at the Royal Academy last week, Webber was duly given a good kicking by the critics, who lined up rubbish both the pictures and their owner. The pieces ranged from the hysterical, in the case of Brian Sewell1, to the merely critical, in the case of the critic of this newspaper.
[…]
What appears to really annoy a lot of the critics is the literalism of the paintings: the idea that there is a story or a message, or even something as vulgar as a moral in the artwork, rather than just an impression or a mood or an emotion. Brian Sewell says that Webber has “a literal eye” and that this “has nothing to do with Art”. Nothing at all? This seems rather harsh
1= free registration required
And for me, therein lies the rub. Most art critics hate literal art because literal art can be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn a bit about the context within which the art was created. Now I am not someone who thinks ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron but it is true than much of what passes for art these days is so obscure that it requires an ArtCrit, such as Sewell or Saatchi, to give it some meaning. I guess what I am really saying is that much of what the likes of Tracy Emin does is so devoid of intrinsic meaning that only a professional arbiter of artistic values and taste can tell us poor muggles what the hell it means. No wonder art critics love ‘cutting edge’ modern art!
And now for some art you might be able to figure out for yourself…
The movie moguls and their sidekicks in the film industry are being urged to tone down their campaigning to win the forthcoming Oscars.
Presumably the heads of the film industry in the U.S. and elsewhere are concerned that an unseemly rush by actors, actresses and others to plug their films is already annoying the public. I honestly don’t know if people really are all that concerned if, say, Cameron Diaz or Russell Crowe are on the stump advocating the merits of their films. (If Ms Diaz wants me to interview her about her work, she is only too welcome).
The film industry, both in the States as well as elsewhere, has become so large in its financial strength that it is hard to see how much can, or should be done to restrain artists from doing their all to grab one of the golden statues. It may be crass, but what can you do, apart from ask for polite restraint? Personally, I nurse a slight antipathy to the Oscars, which usually provide an opportunity for blowhards like hard-left progagandist Michael Moore to harangue the audience with his paranoid views at the reward ceremonies, or else give the back-scratchers in the business a chance to do what they know best.
But really, in the big scheme of things, it is hard to get too upset. The Oscars have become a circus and they look set to remain that way, barring a catastrophic drop in the movie industry’s fortunes. Michael Jennings of this parish had some good things to say in this vein in his superb piece here a few days ago.
Of course the surreal nature of lobbying for Oscar slots gets even more Daliesque when juxtaposed next to the recall election in California. Here’s a poser for you – which is more out of touch with reality, the Oscars, or California’s politicians? Discuss.
|
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.
|
