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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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.
They weren’t able to save the Taliban, they won’t be able to save Saddam Hussein but, by gum, they’re going to dig their heels in and fight to the last drop of precious blood to save the French film industry:
“French directors and intellectuals say American films are producing a generation of “stupid children” in the country.”
And, to compound matters, they’re now running the place.
“I go very often to schools, and I have found a lot of young kids have difficulties in analysing a concept, an idea, in a film.”
Maybe that’s true but Hollywood would not be my prime suspect here.
“If we look at what the United States is exporting to the world that is creative, it has to do with computer, it has to do with software, it has to do with other kinds of technology – not the ideas.”
Well, you don’t need boring old ideas when you’re inventing new technologies and software and things, do you.
“But Phillipe Rogier, author of L’Enemie Americain, said the French were not willingly accepting the increase in American culture in their society.”
Except for French kids apparently, who can’t get enough of it.
“The French would not call it a culture – it is a non-culture, a non-civilisation, just a way of life,” Rogier contends.”
A merest, meanest existance. A hollow, empty sham. A pointless, soulless skimming over a vast ocean of nothingness. So primitif, so barbare, so SIMPLISME!!!.
“This has been central to French attitudes towards America.”
No kidding!!
“Ultimately, Tavernier insists, the films are the first step of an American takeover of France.”
What’s the second step and when it is scheduled for?
“They always understood that the first way to occupy a country was to impose their films.”
Oh damn!! Somebody call the Pentagon, quick. They’ve gone and spent all these squintillions of dollars on Cruise Missiles and Aircraft Carriers when they could occupy Iraq by just sending in Martin Scorsese.
Note: The linked article on the BBC website is not satirical.
I don’t suppose that anybody outside Britain or Greece has even heard of the Elgin Marbles and in neither country are there a great many people who are likely to be get exercised over them.
That said, these ancient Greek artifacts are something upon which a small number of people have quite robust opinions and I happen to be one of them.
The ‘Elgin Marbles’ are currently housed in the British Museum in London and are made up of 56 sections of the frieze sculpted by Phidias around the Parthenon. They were acquired and brought to London by the British diplomat Lord Elgin early in the 19th Century from their original home in Greece and where, despite their grandeur and beauty, they had been abandoned to the twins corrosions of the elements and indifference.
For many years, the Greek government has been campaigning for the return of the Marbles to their original home in Greece. In this, they are supported by a large section the British arty/literatti/celebrity set who approach the issue with the same kind of fuzzy-headedness and sophistic feel-goodery that they approach everything else.
Much of the left in Britain has also taken the side of the Greeks in this issue, not out of any particular fondness for Greece but because, for them, the Marbles are a rude reminder of British imperial acquisitiveness and arrogance and their continued presence in the British Museum a standing affrontery to the culture of self-abasement and guilt that they have so assiduously fostered on these shores.
However, the entire matter has been off the radar-screen for some time and it may be because the ‘usual suspects’ are otherwise noisily engaged in the matter of preserving Saddam Hussein’s regime, that we have been treated to a rather bold announcement from the British Museum’s director:
“The director of the British Museum has said that the Elgin Marbles should never be returned from Britain to Greece.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Neil MacGregor said the sculptures, which once adorned the Parthenon temple in Athens, should remain in London.
He has also ended discussions with a British campaign group seeking their return to Greece.”
Good for you, Mr.McGregor. I was not only delighted by this announcement but also (pleasantly) surprised, given the recent low-profile of the issue. It has set my mind to wondering whether Mr.McGregor has at all chanced upon a very recent essay on the matter by Sean Gabb:
“Needless to say, I am strongly opposed to returning the Marbles. If I had my way, they would stay in London forever – preferably joined by anything else we might in future be able to bribe out of the Greeks or the other successor states of antiquity. Indeed, if Lord Elgin did anything wrong, it was to leave too much behind when he finished his work in Athens. He should at least have taken all the pediment sculptures and another caryatid. He might also have dug up some of the statues buried after the Persians destroyed the old Acropolis in 480BC. The world of culture would be all the better had he done so. Just compare the Caryatid he took away with those he left behind, and ask if he really did wrong. However, rather than continue with its mere statement, let me try to justify my opinion. I will review the case for returning the Marbles.”
I usually make a point of arguing a given matter from my own bat, but I am not averse to using someone else’s bat in circumstances where their bat is both bigger and wielded with such admirable adroitness. Sean’s tightly argued and highly learned essay is quite the most the comprehensive and definitive case for retaining the Elgin Marbles in Britain and I do not hesitate to strongly recommend it to everyone regardless of whether they are British or not.
Of course, I can only speculate as to whether or not Mr.McGregor has read the essay and was inspired by it in the same way I was. Probably not. More likely it is just coincidence in which case it is a welcome synchronicity and an indication that level-heads are starting to fight back on this issue.
Hurrah for remainder shops. A week or two ago I found a copy of Tom Wolfe’s little book of essays entitled Hooking Up, after the first essay in it (which I thought was the least good one), for £2.99. It is crammed with interesting and very readable stuff, including a wonderful piece called “My Three Stooges”, in which the Wolfe man rips the pants (first in the American sense and then in the British) off three critically acclaimed but not much read (compared to him) novelist rivals of his (John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving). I do love a good literary row. Lots of hits below the belt. Lots of quasi-military calculation, on both sides. These Stooges, by the time Wolfe has finished devouring them, come across, to switch metaphors, as giant structures that occupy the spaces that ought to be occupied by real writers of real substance, but with nothing inside them, like that design to replace the Twin Towers with giant empty children’s climbing frames. By going for Wolfe in a gang the stooges hoped that they’d flatten him. By counter-attacking against all of them instead of just picking on one and ignoring the others, Wolfe comes over as Errol Flynn, as the outnumbered hero, rather than just as a rougher and tougher bully.
The piece I’ve just finished reading is the one called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died”, which is about the collapse and replacement of Freudianism and Marxism by “Neuroscience”, as Wolfe terms it. Neuroscience is the catch-all name he gives to the fact that Neuroscience (minus inverted commas) is, he says, the new hot scientific frontier, together with the claim that it and other closely related theories (such as Evolutionary Biology) explain everything that people think and do. → Continue reading: Tom Wolfe on Nature, Nurture, Individual Responsibility and How to Write Novels
So the British TV tax has gone up by another £4.00 (1.5% above inflation) to provide the unelected lefty-establishment BBC with an extra hundred million for lavish lesbian costume dramas and unintelligible Open University nonsense.
As someone who could rather do with a cheque for £116 (the new license fee) right now, I seriously resent the assumption that tricking ever more money out of people is justified or good. As a capitalist, I think stealth-taxing is undermining our economy, putting people out of work and creating extra poverty. And as an arty-farty, I can see with my own eyes that the BBC does not deserve the cash: there is nothing on BBC1 that one can not find on ITV, and nothing on BBC2 that Channel 4 does not do just as well and with the exact same political bias.
I went to the BBC’s own website to see what they had to say about it, and found this:
“Why doesn’t the BBC take advertising? Because this keeps the BBC independent of advertisers and other commercial pressures.”
Actually, the BBC is stuffed full of advertising: mostly advertising for itself and its own products. But do the plotlines of ‘Coronation Street’ (ITV soap) get bent out of shape by endless sponsorship references, while ‘Eastenders’ (BBC soap) remains impartially naturalistic? Of course not. And I doubt that all the commercial TV and radio stations would accept that their news is rubbish because their journalists are influenced by advertisers, either.
“The BBC’s Governors ensure instead that it is run in the general public interest. They are accountable for the BBC’s independence, and also ensure that it reflects British culture and minority interests.”
So the BBC’s governors know what is good for us better than we know ourselves: paying them £116 a year is good for us, and choosing to watch the independent, erm, commercial channels clearly rots our minds. Minority groups don’t buy advertised products, therefore they don’t watch non-BBC TV, therefore non-BBC TV does not show anything they might like to watch.
“If the BBC carried adverts or sponsorship, commercial pressures would dictate its priorities instead of the general public interest.”
But people choosing what to buy is the general public interest: it’s ordinary people doing what they want with their own money. If people don’t buy any more revolting liqueurs because of “Sex and the City” sponsorship, the sponsorship will stop and the annoying mini-ads will go. But the point is, however annoying those ads, who do you know who would choose to pay £116 a year to opt out of seeing them? Exactly. Which is why it’s illegal not to pay for the BBC, even if you only ever watch commercial channels and cable.
What I loathe most of all, however, is the idea that living off coerced money rather than earning it like everyone else makes you a superior benevolent authority better able to judge and further the ‘interest’ of the people you stole from. That’s why Marxism is the same as organised crime, except worse.
I want my £116 back.
The music industry has just been hit with a massive class action suit for price fixing. Fox News reported on the details today.
Glenn Reynolds, a law Professor at the University of Tennesee, has been expecting this for ages. He’s gone so far as to say even industry insiders feel they are vulnerable to a RICO.
Kudos to Glenn and his crystal ball!
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
– Tom Stoppard in his play Artist Descending a Staircase
I’m listening to Radio 3, and I’ve just heard a rather celebrated lady novelist (Elizabeth Jane Howard) and a slightly celebrated composer and broadcaster (Michael Berkeley), in between reminiscing about other celebrities (such as the late Kingsley Amis, to whom Ms. Howard was married) and introducing a very nice Scarlatti recording by a somewhat celebrated lady pianist (Nina Milkina), denounce the “Cult of Celebrity”. If I heard right in among embarking on this, the two of them are plugging Ms. Howard’s newly published autobiography.
I’m getting very sick of this. I’d love to be a celeb, and am doing the best I can to be one within the limits set about me by the indolence of my personality. My view of those who already are celebs is what many others (but not me) feel about those ex-officio hereditary celebs, the Royal Family. They earn their money! → Continue reading: Celebrating celebrity
On Thursday, February 06, 2003, Paul Marks of Northamptonshire wrote on Samizdata some views on the history of modern science fiction that I found very interesting (especially since they mentioned me). The following is not so much to correct him, as to add to what he said.
Modern science fiction began as little more than another way to popularize left wing socialism. Both H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy wrote socialist Utopias, and Wells wrote allegorical attacks on capitalism and individualism. Ironically, they (and Ayn Rand) inspired me to do what I do.
I generally exclude Rand as a science fiction writer only because she didn’t know that Anthem and Atlas Shrugged are science fiction — and that science fiction is the “literature of ideas” that she erroneously believed detective fiction to be.
Anthem and Atlas Shrugged are science fiction, all right. But Rand — at least consciously — was not a science fiction writer. I realize I may be splitting hairs. For that matter, I’ve never been sure whether Kurt Vonnegut is a science fiction writer, more because of the way he’s marketed than anything else.
On the other hand, Frank Herbert was definitely a science fiction writer who, after many years of unspeakable struggle (after being rejected by every American house: Dune was eventually sold to an English publisher, for an advance of $1000) was finally published in the mainstream.
But I digress, as usual. → Continue reading: L Neil Smith responds
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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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