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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One of the strangest things to have happened to twentieth century Britain is that pop music done by British people is almost all of it now sung in an American accent. It really is very peculiar to watch, say, the Frank Skinner TV show here in Britain, and to watch a man (Frank Skinner) as English as the House of Lords or an Ealing comedy sing the song “Fun Time Franky” as “Fern Tum Frankair”. Then he finishes singing the song, and goes back to talking in his normal midlands English voice, and no one present, not a single solitary person, thinks that this is in the slightest bit odd. Me, I find it very odd indeed.
There are a very few, very eccentric British pop singers who sing with their real accents. The Proclaimers (“I would walk five hundred miles …”) not only hailed from Scotland. You could actually tell this by listening to them sing.
Many Irish singers sound Irish, as opposed to American, although the Irish accent is well on the way to being American, to my English ears. For example that loathsome humanoid who sings at the front of The Pogues, the one whose teeth make my teeth look like Julia Roberts’ teeth – he sings like an Irishman rather than an American. Or he used to. I like to think that he’s dead now.
→ Continue reading: The American Voice in Britain
In a depressingly predictable turn of events, Michael Moore has received the Academy Award for Best Documentary for his mendacious anti-self-defence agit-prop effort Bowling for Columbine.
Equally predictably he used the occasion of the acceptance to do a bit of Grand-standing:
“Fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president… mean we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons – shame on you Mr Bush.”
The ‘Oscar’ ceremony is showing here live in the UK right now so I was treated to the singular displeasure of watching the Michigan Land-Cow being given both an award and a platform. I have to add though, and in fairness to the audience, the initial standing ovation did turn into a resounding wall of boos and jeers and somebody or other wisely grabbed the microphone off him and ushered him off the stage before the whole thing descended into an irredeemable farce.
I daresay that none of that will phase Mr.Moore though. His fictitious documentary has been endorsed with the highest possible accolade with the bonus that he was given a global audience (albeit briefly) for his steaming pile of insights. What more could he possibly desire?
A quick detour from the war – I came across this fine new blog under the intriguing name Banana Oil (eeerrr, right!) while flitting around the Web. Excellent blog put together by film nut and anti-idiotarian Ian Michael Hamet. Give it a look. His latest post starts with this sentence:
Some things just honk me off. People who refuse to admit reality are one of them.
My god that is so true.
He then goes on to deconstruct the odious Michael Moore, who sadly, could pick up an Oscar from those luvvie airheads in a few days’ time.
War looms but life goes on. I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Quite a few surprises already. I didn’t realise quite how vicious and unscrupulous the hostility towards sociobiology has been. But some of the book has been tough going, and in the toilet this morning I dipped into the later stuff I haven’t yet got to officially. I found myself in what I later identified to be Chapter 20, entitled “The Arts”, and in it I came across this (on page 416 of my 2002 BCA paperback edition):
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them.
What is startling is not the sentiments themselves. They are all pretty obvious stuff, certainly to me. What is pleasing is who is saying them, and in what context.
Pinker is a respected scientist and scholar, and a fearless and extremely capable defender of his scientific speciality – and scientific decency in general – against the attacks on it, both from the left (who accuse him and his ilk of being “genetic determinists”) and the religious right (who accuse him and his ilk of reducing the soul to a mere bodily function). The Blank Slate is only one of several very good books that Pinker has written. He’s relatively young, a personable and winning TV presence, and a terrific scientific synthesiser and populariser. To encounter notions that you usually expect to find only in the windy and ignorant writings of people who have swallowed the entire right-wing package and nothing else, and are booming forth with it in something like The Daily Mail or The Sun, is most pleasing. → Continue reading: Steven Pinker on modern art
Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can’t take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can’t be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can’t do any of that.
So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don’t like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.
Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?
Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don’t get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don’t get stuck.) Above all, trains don’t need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.
Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.
In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people’s eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. → Continue reading: The aesthetics of car parks – let’s have some!
I’ve know for some time that there was a modernised movie version of Hamlet out there, starring Ethan Hawke. Yesterday, for just £9.99 I finally got my hands on a DVD copy of it, and although I haven’t yet had time to watch all of it, I have watched the first few scenes of it. So far, I’m impressed.
For starters, I wasn’t sure if they’d even kept the original Shakespeare text. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the plot but updating the script of a Shakespeare play. It happens all the time. But I wanted it to be the original script by Shakespeare, and it is.
The trouble with ‘authentic’ productions, which make it very clear that the original Hamlet lived in earlier times than ours is that although you can revive the old language and the old costumes, you can’t revive the old audience. And that means that actually even the language and the costumes have to change. The more linguistically impenetrable lines get cut, and the costumes aren’t so much genuinely ancient as ancient-looking-to-us.
I once saw a production of Hamlet in which they all wore genuine Elizabethan sticking-out trousers. It looked utterly ridiculous. Shakespeare done in merely antique looking (but in fact totally anachronistic) tight-fitting modern leather trousers can look splendid, however daft it would have looked to an Elizabethan audience.
But there is a deeper problem than mere costumes. In order to understand all the private griefs and calculations of characters in a play like Hamlet, you have to take their public power struggles seriously and to have an instinctive sense of how important and overbearing these struggles can be and how brutally they can intrude into the would-be ‘private’ lives of the characters. → Continue reading: A Hamlet for our time
Here’s a story we didn’t see in 1975:
“The Screen Actors Guild is raising the specter of “McCarthyism” and lashing out at people who urge boycotts of pro-South African wine and krugerand importers. “SAG said suggestions that ‘well-known individuals who express “unacceptable” views should be punished by losing their right to work’ was a ‘shocking development’ which recalled the 1950s House Committee on Un-American Activities,” Variety reports. SAG is especially upset that “hate-mail critics” have demanded the cancellation of wine purchases from South Africa.”
→ Continue reading: The one that got away
As a dissent-crusher of some repute, I think I have found a truly inspired means by which this noble art may be perfected.
Perversely, my inspiration was provided by the insistent bleatings of one of our commenters offering his tale of purported woe in response to this posting by Perry.
According to the commenter, Mr.Briant, Hollywood celebrities who have engaged in anti-war activism are now being subjected to ‘McCarthyite’ persecution. It has to be said that Mr.Briant is not alone in this view:
“McCarthy is riding again,” declares Glenda Jackson, Oscar-winning actress turned Labour Party member of parliament.”
To all normal people this is, of course, rubbish on stilts. Anti-war campaigners are not being hauled before tribunals or thrown into gulags. All performers trade on their popularity and their worth is measured by the extent to which the public will pay good money to watch them perform. If the public are unwilling to pay as aforesaid, then it is only natural for producers to re-evaluate said performers contract. It isn’t called ‘showbusiness‘ for nothing. I would expect similar consequences to befall any film-star who spoke out in favour of, say, the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Fame has its price.
But I daresay that neither Mr.Briant nor Ms.Jackson will be the slightest bit moved by these distinctions. Neither will anybody else for whom ‘disapproval’ constitutes ‘repression’ and I wholly expect the cry of ‘witchhunt’ to be ringing around the corridors of the Western leftist pantheon for the foreseeable future.
That being the case, I am prompted to propose that we bring back McCarthyism for real. I don’t just mean the regular anti-idiot fisking with which the blogosphere has become so intimately associated. No, I mean a real actual honest-to-goodness UnAmerican Activities Committee complete with powers of subpoena and blackballing. We, in Britain, could have our own version aimed at clearing out the Augean mess of the BBC. We already have the historical precedents to go by so all we need to do is copy them:
“CHAIRMAN: Mr.Sheen, are you now or have you ever been, an apologist for Saddam Hussein?
SHEEN: Well…I…I.. just want to say…
CHAIRMAN: Answer the question, Mr.Sheen
SHEEN: But…but…my rights….
CHAIRMAN: Never mind your rights. Just answer the question.
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Mr.Chairman, I believe Mr.Sheen is being deliberately evasive with this committee.”
The vista is so easy to conjure; the cigar-chomping Chairman, the occasional thwack of the gavel, the murmuring from the public gallery, the flashes from the cameras of the photo-journalists. It isn’t just public affairs, it’s high drama! They could even televise it on pay-per-view thereby enabling the subject film-stars to continue earning a living from the all the legions of people who would tune it to watch them squirming for real. No ‘method’ required.
I realise of course that a lot of solidly anti-idiotarian people might feel a little squeamish at the thought of a proposal such as this but I do urge them to give it serious consideration. Politics is, and always has been, a practical business and resurrecting the legacy of Joe McCarthy is, I submit, quite an elegant solution. Since the Hollywood activists and their supporters sincerely believe that they are being persecuted for their beliefs there is nothing to be lost politically or tactically by actually persecuting them for their beliefs.
Breathing life into a new and serious McCarthyite revival gives the American conservatives a second run at clearing up Hollywood and leaves the radical-chic crowd no worse off than they currently perceive themselves to be anyway. It really is a win-win situation and I thoroughly commend it to the house.
Modern Architecture just gets better and better – although when you think how bad it was three or four decades ago this has not been hard to contrive. It looks as if I will be writing about new London architecture a lot on my new Culture Blog, and my most recent post there is about a superb new London building that is now nearing completion.
This is 30 Saint Mary Axe, formerly know as the Swiss Re Building (Re meaning Re-insurance), and still known unofficially as The Gherkin, which is a bit unkind because it is a deal more elegant than that, I think. My congratulations to Sir Norman Foster and his partners. This elegant new tower makes a distinctive contribution to London’s skyline, and is just as impressive close up.
I know that these things are a matter of opinion, but I think that this building is extremely beautiful. I also believe that the chances – on the whole and with many exceptions – are improving all the time that the next big new building where you live will be likewise. It didn’t use to be at all like this, but now, it is.
Why all this beauty, all of a sudden, and in a style that used to be the very definition of brutish ugliness? Big question. Short answer: they are now, at least, trying to do beauty.
Two delightfully silly things, no doubt with strangely profound cultural over- or do I mean undertones attached to them if only I could think of them, are to be found linked to and exhibited at 2Blowhards today. There are singing horses (be sure, as Michael says, to click on the various horses), and there is the Americanised Mona Lisa.
Alice agrees. (And while you’re there check out her libertarian defence of the Stone Age – press “HOME” on the left if you are doing this so soon that the Blogger archiving idiocy blots it out because it’s the newest posting – google are you listening? I’m bored with libertarian arguing, so I haven’t commented on this, but all those still excited by libertarian arguing should comment away.) Alice and I also seem to agree that the LOTRhymes rappers aren’t so good. Personally I dislike rapping and am also Bored of the Rings, as the pun goes, never having been that excited by them in the first place, so I think it’s a LOT of cRap.
But the horses are great, as is the ML’s new cleavage.
If you have played the computer game America’s Army, now you have the opportunity to try a… different… sort of real-life based first-person-shooter game:
Hizbullah has launched a computer game allowing players to simulate its fighters during military operations on Israeli soldiers prior to the liberation of the South. Special Force, which took two long year s of development by the Hizbullah Central Internet Bureau, hit the market on Feb. 16. The game consists of different stages all inspired by actual Hizbullah operations in the South. Players face the same conditions as Hizbullah fighters, including geographic locations, mines, the number of Israeli troops and even the weather conditions. Special Force also offers a training simulation, where players can practice their shooting skills on targets such as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli political and military figures.
The medium of computer games is neutral… what next? A mod for a civilian airliner flight sim that re-creates some rather well known flights on September 11th? I would not be surprised. After that, maybe a ‘role playing computer game’ set in Poland in 1943 called Einzatsgruppen?
Unfortunately the good guys do not have a monopoly on creativity.
Samizdata has in the past said some uncomplimentary things here and here about Hollywood actor and Republican Party supporter Bruce Willis, so maybe he is trying to redeem himself by laying into the various celebrities who have been opposing the case for war these last few weeks. It turns out that Willis volunteered to serve in the military, but was turned down due to his age.
There is a particularly good, but rude quote from his first Die Hard movie that springs to mind when I imagine what the white-vested Willis would say if he ever met the moustached villain of Iraq. Movie-goers will know the expression I mean. (Heh-heh).
On a totally different note about movies, I wonder how many readers have seen the Roman Polanski film, The Pianist? I saw it the other evening and although a harrowing film, contained some beautifully poignant moments as well. The terrible plight of Poland’s Jews is all too stark a reminder of the cost of appeasing evil. And the lessons of that time for our own are equally only too apparent. I urge those who haven’t to see this film.
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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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