Some great examples of hand-painted movie poster art from Russia. I think Eric Bana comes off better than Brad Pitt and Drew Barrymore here. Not sure I get the Kill Bill one...
As for Adam Sandler, he looks like Sugarus Daddius, the Caucasian pimp!
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Singapore Laksa
In Melati last night with Cuz celebrating the fundamental webbiness of all things over a steaming bowl of Malaysian coconut soup - which really ought to carry the same sort of cautionary advice as the Barefoot Doctor's splash page: "Warning: Can produce sudden unexpected bouts of existential levity and general Magnificence".
Cuz has started to write a regular online column for Barefoot, who last grabbed my attention when he was hounded off the pages of the Guardian by a salivating mob of sceptics. Now the shoeless one plans to set up his own Internet radio channel, and Cuz has been sounding me out on the likely start-up costs. I did my best to explain why a blog supported with occasional podcasts might be an even better strategy.
Cuz has started to write a regular online column for Barefoot, who last grabbed my attention when he was hounded off the pages of the Guardian by a salivating mob of sceptics. Now the shoeless one plans to set up his own Internet radio channel, and Cuz has been sounding me out on the likely start-up costs. I did my best to explain why a blog supported with occasional podcasts might be an even better strategy.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Azumi
One of the unique aptitudes of Frank the killer gaijin from In the Miso Soup is the knack of cutting throats without setting off a massive multi-directional bloodspray. You can see why the Japanese might be impressed with this - in Azumi nobody seems to have acquired this singular skill.
Yet the first 'crimson shower' comes as something of a surprise. Before then the build-up has been a bit unpromising - ten boistrous, high-fiving, trainee assassins frolicking in the forest, dressed like characters from SEGA's Soul Caliber, sequestered in preparation for a series of remedial warlord whackings "over the mountains", which are aimed at restoring stability to the Tokugawa Shogunate. More like Monkeh! than Kill Bill. Then suddenly, almost out of the blue, it gets rather dark.
As Azumi, the lone gal of the group, Aya Ueto is very good on the eye - in spite of the efforts of her costume designer. She even picks up her own lesbian love interest in the shape of travelling performer Yae, played by the also quite lovely Aya Okamoto. The campness is compounded by the murderous nutjob that the warlords release from prison to counteract the political re-modelling of Azumi and her chums - he's styled like a cross between a member of the Human League and that girl that crawls out of the TV in Ringu.
This is effervescent pulp. It has no business really being such great entertainment, but it is. Some movies like Cold Mountain pose as epics only to end up naff. The reverse is the case here. Director Ryuhei Kitamura was responsible for that entertaining zombie movie Versus, which also extracted a powerful sense of bizarre originality out of essentially commoditised situations. Both films are at once hysterical spoofs and deadly serious.
This is not something that Hollywood film-makers are especially good at, not even les enfants terribles. Even when is he trying VERY hard (say when he scripted From Dusk 'Till Dawn) Tarantino never gets particularly close to the seemingly effortless and unpredictable fucked-upness of Japanese cinema.
Yet the first 'crimson shower' comes as something of a surprise. Before then the build-up has been a bit unpromising - ten boistrous, high-fiving, trainee assassins frolicking in the forest, dressed like characters from SEGA's Soul Caliber, sequestered in preparation for a series of remedial warlord whackings "over the mountains", which are aimed at restoring stability to the Tokugawa Shogunate. More like Monkeh! than Kill Bill. Then suddenly, almost out of the blue, it gets rather dark.
As Azumi, the lone gal of the group, Aya Ueto is very good on the eye - in spite of the efforts of her costume designer. She even picks up her own lesbian love interest in the shape of travelling performer Yae, played by the also quite lovely Aya Okamoto. The campness is compounded by the murderous nutjob that the warlords release from prison to counteract the political re-modelling of Azumi and her chums - he's styled like a cross between a member of the Human League and that girl that crawls out of the TV in Ringu.
This is effervescent pulp. It has no business really being such great entertainment, but it is. Some movies like Cold Mountain pose as epics only to end up naff. The reverse is the case here. Director Ryuhei Kitamura was responsible for that entertaining zombie movie Versus, which also extracted a powerful sense of bizarre originality out of essentially commoditised situations. Both films are at once hysterical spoofs and deadly serious.
This is not something that Hollywood film-makers are especially good at, not even les enfants terribles. Even when is he trying VERY hard (say when he scripted From Dusk 'Till Dawn) Tarantino never gets particularly close to the seemingly effortless and unpredictable fucked-upness of Japanese cinema.
The Mañana Approach
Someone has captured a great image of the mañana approach to fire-fighting in Madrid this week!
Apparently there is still some debate amongst inspectors as to whether or not they will have to demolish this. They sneaked this one in just before Kyoto.
Who needs Mayor Ken ?
Apparently there is still some debate amongst inspectors as to whether or not they will have to demolish this. They sneaked this one in just before Kyoto.
Who needs Mayor Ken ?
Antigua Spa
Looks like V has come up with a creative solution to our house problem in Antigua. Up until now it seemed that we had a fairly limited set of options, none of which was exactly ideal.
- Live in it ourselves
- Rent it out to a stranger
- Have a member of the family 'look after it'
- Hire a guardian
- Sale
- Demolition
However, the woman that runs the Antigua Spa Resort Hotel located just around the corner is looking for a property to handle their regular overflow - an annexe of sorts. The Spa would maintain the patio and accommodate guests in the four bedrooms whenever the main hotel is fully booked. And she isn't that much of a stranger as she's a good friend of V's sister.
She is in fact the adopted daughter of non-Guatemalan multi-millionaires who returned to the land of her birth in order to set up a range of businesses, and unlike many wealthy Guatemaltecos is refreshingly natural and unspoiled. The Spa is a top notch hotel and a very successful venture.
For the past few days V has been getting up at 6am and working long hours picking coffee on the terrenos she inherited from her mother. On Saturday she and her sister gathered 2 quintales (approx. 400lbs) of beans which they later sold - though this activity has very little to do with economic need. It's a spiritual sisterly thing - communal and communing - with each other and with their dearly departed. I am already being encouraged to get with the programme when I arrive there next week.
- Live in it ourselves
- Rent it out to a stranger
- Have a member of the family 'look after it'
- Hire a guardian
- Sale
- Demolition
However, the woman that runs the Antigua Spa Resort Hotel located just around the corner is looking for a property to handle their regular overflow - an annexe of sorts. The Spa would maintain the patio and accommodate guests in the four bedrooms whenever the main hotel is fully booked. And she isn't that much of a stranger as she's a good friend of V's sister.
She is in fact the adopted daughter of non-Guatemalan multi-millionaires who returned to the land of her birth in order to set up a range of businesses, and unlike many wealthy Guatemaltecos is refreshingly natural and unspoiled. The Spa is a top notch hotel and a very successful venture.
For the past few days V has been getting up at 6am and working long hours picking coffee on the terrenos she inherited from her mother. On Saturday she and her sister gathered 2 quintales (approx. 400lbs) of beans which they later sold - though this activity has very little to do with economic need. It's a spiritual sisterly thing - communal and communing - with each other and with their dearly departed. I am already being encouraged to get with the programme when I arrive there next week.
Hyper-Feet 1
Last night I met up with Frode in The Blue Room in Broadwick Street for a brief chat about his project proposal. I explained why I think interactive text is less like "having feet" (which after all most of us have from birth) than suddenly having a new device that enables a limited set of opportunities to visit an near limitless list of destinations. With this metaphor the opportunity costs involved are more explicit.
In spite of all the problems associated with non-information overload and bad interface design most people are used to muddling through one way or another. However, any system with the word "hyper" in it contains the promise of not having to muddle through, I suggested. It has to clear that it improves the user's situation relative to their situationally scarce resources of time and attention rather than contributing to the overhead. In essence that was the concern brought up by the journalist last week.
In the last few days I have been skirting around the issue of whether it would be possible to develop a media analysis model alternative or complementary to the decompose-recompose approach; one that combines the disciplines of statistical analysis with whatever it is that professors of Media Studies know about.
Such a system would aim to encompass the links as well as the units - offering a dynamic and relativistic view of mediaspace. (Autonomy focusses on logical inference which although it sounds like something that will result in clarity actually muddies things further.)
Of course it's rather easier to conceptualise than formalise! But it isn't entirely unrelated to Frode's problem.
Before we left the cafe he asked me to give some thought to how you could integrate architectural constraints into the interactive text system itself. The best model we are both aware of for this would be Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, though Frode is probably most familiar with Kevin Kelly's more pragmatist interpretation in Out of Control.
The blind old librarian from BA was a famed architect of labyrinths and ease of use was never very high on his agenda. His kind of wisdom is just beyond the reach of rational understanding. I have got stuck in that one before, so before going back there I will pursue another line of association that has gripped my fancy lately. More on this later...
In spite of all the problems associated with non-information overload and bad interface design most people are used to muddling through one way or another. However, any system with the word "hyper" in it contains the promise of not having to muddle through, I suggested. It has to clear that it improves the user's situation relative to their situationally scarce resources of time and attention rather than contributing to the overhead. In essence that was the concern brought up by the journalist last week.
In the last few days I have been skirting around the issue of whether it would be possible to develop a media analysis model alternative or complementary to the decompose-recompose approach; one that combines the disciplines of statistical analysis with whatever it is that professors of Media Studies know about.
Such a system would aim to encompass the links as well as the units - offering a dynamic and relativistic view of mediaspace. (Autonomy focusses on logical inference which although it sounds like something that will result in clarity actually muddies things further.)
Of course it's rather easier to conceptualise than formalise! But it isn't entirely unrelated to Frode's problem.
Before we left the cafe he asked me to give some thought to how you could integrate architectural constraints into the interactive text system itself. The best model we are both aware of for this would be Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, though Frode is probably most familiar with Kevin Kelly's more pragmatist interpretation in Out of Control.
The blind old librarian from BA was a famed architect of labyrinths and ease of use was never very high on his agenda. His kind of wisdom is just beyond the reach of rational understanding. I have got stuck in that one before, so before going back there I will pursue another line of association that has gripped my fancy lately. More on this later...
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Spirited Away
Describing this movie is like talking about one of those forever-memorable trippy dreams of childhood. People will listen politely and think "how imaginative you are in your sleep" or "you are one fucked-up dude" but never fully understand how utterly immersive and affective the experience was...and continues to be for you.
Not being a drug-taker myself, it's a long while since my sense of everyday possibility was unsettled in this way. When I was around seven I did have a dream that was more or less in this genre. In it I was on a train bound for Timbuktu where the carriages were all weird little houses full of singular characters.
The obvious comparisons will be with Alice in Wonderland, but Japan's anime God Hayao Miyazaki sports his western influences with pride - Labyrinth, The Secret Garden, Where the Wild Things Are and The Odyssey, amongst others. (And If I, Robot had been made before you might even point to the in-yer-face product placement for Audi!)
It has to be petty to quibble about inconsistencies when the storytelling is so spiritedly dream or nightmare-like in its conception - stream of unconsciousness if you like. Yet as in a real dream the sense of incongruity deriving from both gaps and deviations mounts up and creates a lingering anxiety at the end. Why do some characters like Lin not have a story to tell? Why doesn't Chihiro hug both Lin and Kamaji before returning to the Human world?
Yet a character like No Face is so poignant precisely because he is a shady outline without final explanation. In Labyrinth Terry Jones provided the narrative discipline that framed Jim Henson's riotous imagination. It is the absence of similar tight scripting here that makes Miyazaki's work so mesmerising. The blue of that sky - it's all so touchingly, ineffably beautiful.
Before renting Spirited Away from Blockbuster last week I added it to my Amazon shopping basket. As a result the bots at the online retailer recommended Bambi to me today!
Not being a drug-taker myself, it's a long while since my sense of everyday possibility was unsettled in this way. When I was around seven I did have a dream that was more or less in this genre. In it I was on a train bound for Timbuktu where the carriages were all weird little houses full of singular characters.
The obvious comparisons will be with Alice in Wonderland, but Japan's anime God Hayao Miyazaki sports his western influences with pride - Labyrinth, The Secret Garden, Where the Wild Things Are and The Odyssey, amongst others. (And If I, Robot had been made before you might even point to the in-yer-face product placement for Audi!)
It has to be petty to quibble about inconsistencies when the storytelling is so spiritedly dream or nightmare-like in its conception - stream of unconsciousness if you like. Yet as in a real dream the sense of incongruity deriving from both gaps and deviations mounts up and creates a lingering anxiety at the end. Why do some characters like Lin not have a story to tell? Why doesn't Chihiro hug both Lin and Kamaji before returning to the Human world?
Yet a character like No Face is so poignant precisely because he is a shady outline without final explanation. In Labyrinth Terry Jones provided the narrative discipline that framed Jim Henson's riotous imagination. It is the absence of similar tight scripting here that makes Miyazaki's work so mesmerising. The blue of that sky - it's all so touchingly, ineffably beautiful.
Before renting Spirited Away from Blockbuster last week I added it to my Amazon shopping basket. As a result the bots at the online retailer recommended Bambi to me today!
Gohatto (Taboo)
A movie about unresolved issues and emotions that left me with a few of my own too. Indeed I hadn't reviewed it sooner simply because I wasn't sure that I had actually understood it.
The action is set in late-stage Tokugawa in the near obsolete all-male Shinsengumi samurai militia school in Kyoto. Hearts and swords are a flutter when Commander Kondo picks the geisha-like rich-kid Sozaburo Kano from amongst 1865s Bushido wannabes. His influence could best be decribed as disruptive in an austere environment unaccustomed to serious emotional disturbances off the battlefield.
Reading a few reviews by American critics didn't exactly help me to decipher Gohatto - they're all fixated on the idea that this is all about the issue of gays in the military. But it would have been easy enough to introduce a don't ask don't tell subplot into a more mediocre film like The Last Samurai to bring these sort of simplistic political points as much to the fore as they need to be brought.
Director Nagisa Oshima on the other hand is a master of erotically-subtle, enigmatic film-making. Most notably he has given us Ai No Corrida (1976) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), which like Gohatto featured the marvellous music of Riuichi Sakamoto and introduced Beat Takeshi to Western audiences.
Last night Frode had his Japanese phrasebook and wanted to practice asking for a table at a number of packed-looking sushi joints. I suggested he should also practice Takeshi's ominous twitchy look for when they tried to turn him down! It looks like Gohatto was made fairly shortly after Takeshi's moped accident which left one side of his face partly paralysed. It gives him a slight emotive edge over Ryuhei Matsuda who, as the elusive prettyboy Kano, attempts to squeeze every last drop of icily sinister coquetry out of the impassive look.
Impassive, but not passive as several critics have insisted. My take is that Kano is a bloodthirsty sociopath that is playing them all for kicks.
Nagisa Oshima's intent I believe is to tease us with imagery that offsets the placidity and serenity of the place, the people and the lifestyle with the chaotic passions seething beneath. There's surely a message in there for modern Japan, and it isn't limited to the issue of what to do about occasional homoerotic spasms in the ranks.
I suspect there are also significant elements of farcical comedy and leanings towards the supernatural in Gohatto that require greater immersement in Japanese culture to grasp completely.
The opening Kendo practice scenes reminded me of my years in the fencing salle. It's one of the unusual conjunctions of my relationship with V that we had both been swordspeople - though she was actually a very good one, becoming junior national champion. We didn't know this about each other until she came to London and found my gear at the back of a cupboard.
It might be fun to have a go one day at writing a provocative film script about that licentious apostate 'queen' William Rufus, with a view to radically challenging the Hollywood simulacrum of the Middle Ages. It's actually surprising that nobody has had a go at this before - an atheist homosexual that comes to a very mysterious and cinematic sticky end. Might be hard to craft any worthwhile "best actress in a leading role" opportunities though. Maybe the Prof would collaborate.
The action is set in late-stage Tokugawa in the near obsolete all-male Shinsengumi samurai militia school in Kyoto. Hearts and swords are a flutter when Commander Kondo picks the geisha-like rich-kid Sozaburo Kano from amongst 1865s Bushido wannabes. His influence could best be decribed as disruptive in an austere environment unaccustomed to serious emotional disturbances off the battlefield.
Reading a few reviews by American critics didn't exactly help me to decipher Gohatto - they're all fixated on the idea that this is all about the issue of gays in the military. But it would have been easy enough to introduce a don't ask don't tell subplot into a more mediocre film like The Last Samurai to bring these sort of simplistic political points as much to the fore as they need to be brought.
Director Nagisa Oshima on the other hand is a master of erotically-subtle, enigmatic film-making. Most notably he has given us Ai No Corrida (1976) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), which like Gohatto featured the marvellous music of Riuichi Sakamoto and introduced Beat Takeshi to Western audiences.
Last night Frode had his Japanese phrasebook and wanted to practice asking for a table at a number of packed-looking sushi joints. I suggested he should also practice Takeshi's ominous twitchy look for when they tried to turn him down! It looks like Gohatto was made fairly shortly after Takeshi's moped accident which left one side of his face partly paralysed. It gives him a slight emotive edge over Ryuhei Matsuda who, as the elusive prettyboy Kano, attempts to squeeze every last drop of icily sinister coquetry out of the impassive look.
Impassive, but not passive as several critics have insisted. My take is that Kano is a bloodthirsty sociopath that is playing them all for kicks.
Nagisa Oshima's intent I believe is to tease us with imagery that offsets the placidity and serenity of the place, the people and the lifestyle with the chaotic passions seething beneath. There's surely a message in there for modern Japan, and it isn't limited to the issue of what to do about occasional homoerotic spasms in the ranks.
I suspect there are also significant elements of farcical comedy and leanings towards the supernatural in Gohatto that require greater immersement in Japanese culture to grasp completely.
The opening Kendo practice scenes reminded me of my years in the fencing salle. It's one of the unusual conjunctions of my relationship with V that we had both been swordspeople - though she was actually a very good one, becoming junior national champion. We didn't know this about each other until she came to London and found my gear at the back of a cupboard.
It might be fun to have a go one day at writing a provocative film script about that licentious apostate 'queen' William Rufus, with a view to radically challenging the Hollywood simulacrum of the Middle Ages. It's actually surprising that nobody has had a go at this before - an atheist homosexual that comes to a very mysterious and cinematic sticky end. Might be hard to craft any worthwhile "best actress in a leading role" opportunities though. Maybe the Prof would collaborate.
The Tao of Blog 2: Just add water
Unlike knowledge the bill of wisdom cannot be itemised. Wisdom is knowledge plus the bits in between - the connections.
The way we currently go about the media analysis process is akin to the manufacture of instant coffee. We filter all the connections, context and meaning out of the media until we have our granules of data, then add water and the end product is a passable imitation of the real thing. But wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to lose the wisdom to get at the knowledge?
Scientists were for a long time prone to the same basic error- attempting to understand the universe by breaking it down into its component parts and then reassembling it theoretically through the medium of mechanical models. In "the zone of middle dimensions" this approach provides a fair approximation of our sensory experience. But I'm not sure that Information is scaled the same way.
We used to think that space and time were fixed phenomena and that everything within them was either a material object or 'empty space'. Now we know that the universe has an organic structure in which the concept of 'empty space' is largely meaningless.
You might think that knowledge is best understood as a collection of discreet information objects located at a given time and place in media space, but any attempt to objectively measure these units will, for the time being at least, necessarily discard all the invisible bonds between them.
The two parts of Queens College in Cambridge on either side of the river Cam are linked by the Mathematical Bridge. Punting beneath its span "unscrupulous" (i.e. student) tour guides in straw boaters will confidently repeat the "baseless myth" that surrounds its earliest construction - that Issac Newton designed it and had it erected it without the use of nails. His reductionist heirs later had the bridge disassembled in order to better understand this marvel, but when they tried to put it back together found to their dismay that they couldn't get the structure to hold firm and had to bang in some nails. Baseless it may be, but like a lot of myths it packs a relevant little allegory - in this instance one about the inherent dangers of all intellectual disassembly.
Computers hand an awful lot of power to the un-wise. That's why they are being used predominantly to pull mathematical bridges apart before anyone has a reliable model of how they were built in the first place.
The way we currently go about the media analysis process is akin to the manufacture of instant coffee. We filter all the connections, context and meaning out of the media until we have our granules of data, then add water and the end product is a passable imitation of the real thing. But wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to lose the wisdom to get at the knowledge?
Scientists were for a long time prone to the same basic error- attempting to understand the universe by breaking it down into its component parts and then reassembling it theoretically through the medium of mechanical models. In "the zone of middle dimensions" this approach provides a fair approximation of our sensory experience. But I'm not sure that Information is scaled the same way.
We used to think that space and time were fixed phenomena and that everything within them was either a material object or 'empty space'. Now we know that the universe has an organic structure in which the concept of 'empty space' is largely meaningless.
You might think that knowledge is best understood as a collection of discreet information objects located at a given time and place in media space, but any attempt to objectively measure these units will, for the time being at least, necessarily discard all the invisible bonds between them.
The two parts of Queens College in Cambridge on either side of the river Cam are linked by the Mathematical Bridge. Punting beneath its span "unscrupulous" (i.e. student) tour guides in straw boaters will confidently repeat the "baseless myth" that surrounds its earliest construction - that Issac Newton designed it and had it erected it without the use of nails. His reductionist heirs later had the bridge disassembled in order to better understand this marvel, but when they tried to put it back together found to their dismay that they couldn't get the structure to hold firm and had to bang in some nails. Baseless it may be, but like a lot of myths it packs a relevant little allegory - in this instance one about the inherent dangers of all intellectual disassembly.
Computers hand an awful lot of power to the un-wise. That's why they are being used predominantly to pull mathematical bridges apart before anyone has a reliable model of how they were built in the first place.
Earthquakes and Echinoderms
I consumed my first echinoderm last night, a sea urchin, or rather the gonads thereof - a slimy amber-coloured glob that slithered around my molars and for a few instants delivered an intense tartness like the compacted flavours of all the creatures of the sea.
Frode swallowed his rather quickly and then reflected ruefully on the cost-benefit ratio. Fleur insisted however that these little seaweed-wrapped packets of uni were good for us.
A couple of nights ago V was shaken at 2:30am by a strong tremor. It richtered between 5 and 6, hardly strong enough to even merit a mention in the local papers, but a scary thing to wake up to. The first few moments are experienced as a dream. Then you are conscious but unable to move, unlike everything around you. By the time your mind and body have un-clotted it's usually almost over, and the rumble of moving earth is replaced by half an hour of yelping by every mangy mutt in the valley. She has vivid recollections of Guatemala's great quake of February 4, 1976, which left 23,000 dead. Her exit from her bedroom that fateful night was very nearly blocked by a toppled shelving unit.
Frode swallowed his rather quickly and then reflected ruefully on the cost-benefit ratio. Fleur insisted however that these little seaweed-wrapped packets of uni were good for us.
A couple of nights ago V was shaken at 2:30am by a strong tremor. It richtered between 5 and 6, hardly strong enough to even merit a mention in the local papers, but a scary thing to wake up to. The first few moments are experienced as a dream. Then you are conscious but unable to move, unlike everything around you. By the time your mind and body have un-clotted it's usually almost over, and the rumble of moving earth is replaced by half an hour of yelping by every mangy mutt in the valley. She has vivid recollections of Guatemala's great quake of February 4, 1976, which left 23,000 dead. Her exit from her bedroom that fateful night was very nearly blocked by a toppled shelving unit.
Monday, February 14, 2005
The Tao of Blog 1
As the Zen Buddhists say, you need a finger to point at the moon, but once you have located it, you no longer need the finger. The problem around here isn't so much pointy-haired bosses as pointy-fingered peers. Our tools are getting in the way, the map is being confused with the terrain. There's also a great deal of pseudo-science around which reveals itself through a reluctance to admit to its relative, conditional, and approximate nature.
Now I am what Frode would call a Knowledge Worker, and I do recognise that blogs can be useful part of productive knowledge work. But this blog has never been strictly about the management of knowledge, rather it is intermitently dedicated to something that is almost never mentioned in the context of intelligence in this industry, wisdom.
This is a lesser-trodden path - a less fashionable route to interpretation. Yet it is still a research-based project as opposed to a meditative one. I'm not suggesting that we should all start chanting "om" at our screens, but I would like to promote a kind of non-conceptual awareness which I believe can be achieved by approaching things a little more indirectly.
The most interesting connections live in the void- the stuff that goes missing between all the discriminations, abstractions, measurements and classifications. In Buddhism the measuring and categorising mentality is known as avidya - ignorance. You might think that it follows that the monks had to be fairly ignorant themselves to come up with a category like that! It's certainly a bit harsh, given that conceptual ways of thinking underly so much of human inventiveness. Not all of it however - taken to extremes they lead to humourlessness - and activities conducted without humour are invariably activities deficient in insight. This is because a mind that is receptive to jokes is usually also a mind that is capable of making rapid connections between thoughts that might appear tangential to others.
Now I am what Frode would call a Knowledge Worker, and I do recognise that blogs can be useful part of productive knowledge work. But this blog has never been strictly about the management of knowledge, rather it is intermitently dedicated to something that is almost never mentioned in the context of intelligence in this industry, wisdom.
This is a lesser-trodden path - a less fashionable route to interpretation. Yet it is still a research-based project as opposed to a meditative one. I'm not suggesting that we should all start chanting "om" at our screens, but I would like to promote a kind of non-conceptual awareness which I believe can be achieved by approaching things a little more indirectly.
The most interesting connections live in the void- the stuff that goes missing between all the discriminations, abstractions, measurements and classifications. In Buddhism the measuring and categorising mentality is known as avidya - ignorance. You might think that it follows that the monks had to be fairly ignorant themselves to come up with a category like that! It's certainly a bit harsh, given that conceptual ways of thinking underly so much of human inventiveness. Not all of it however - taken to extremes they lead to humourlessness - and activities conducted without humour are invariably activities deficient in insight. This is because a mind that is receptive to jokes is usually also a mind that is capable of making rapid connections between thoughts that might appear tangential to others.
Canal Nueve
The Gaping Void quotes a snippet from The Economist's piece on why Microsoft's director of platform evangelism Lenn Pryor hired A-list blogger Robert Scoble.
"Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly."
I'm due to fly United next week and I hope we don't run into any tipping points! But I am one of those people might find realtime pilot chat quite distracting, to a point.
However, in an earlier posting I recounted the experiences of my brother-in-law who used to fly jump seat in the jets belonging to his then employer Mexicana. He said he would have preferred to be one of the unsuspecting ungulates in the back reading the WSJ. For some people listening to bloggers like Hugh must be a bit like tuning into el Capitano!
"Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly."
I'm due to fly United next week and I hope we don't run into any tipping points! But I am one of those people might find realtime pilot chat quite distracting, to a point.
However, in an earlier posting I recounted the experiences of my brother-in-law who used to fly jump seat in the jets belonging to his then employer Mexicana. He said he would have preferred to be one of the unsuspecting ungulates in the back reading the WSJ. For some people listening to bloggers like Hugh must be a bit like tuning into el Capitano!
Hyperthoughts
It seems that you can't open a mainstream newspaper or magazine these days without coming across an article about Frode and his hyperwords.
Sarah Boxer of the NY Times is the latest crash-test dummy, and she voices her concerns that unleashed text might be inclined to do a runner and not come back.
Yet not all lines necessarilly carry us onward to tangents of tangents; many lead to interesting intersections. Werner Heisenberg put it well: "It is probably quite generally true that in the history of human thinking, the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet."
So it's probably also quite generally true that more fertile linking strategies will be those that are associated with a good thinking strategy: a mode of conceptualising I will christen Hyperthoughts for now, and come back to in due course.
Sarah Boxer of the NY Times is the latest crash-test dummy, and she voices her concerns that unleashed text might be inclined to do a runner and not come back.
Yet not all lines necessarilly carry us onward to tangents of tangents; many lead to interesting intersections. Werner Heisenberg put it well: "It is probably quite generally true that in the history of human thinking, the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet."
So it's probably also quite generally true that more fertile linking strategies will be those that are associated with a good thinking strategy: a mode of conceptualising I will christen Hyperthoughts for now, and come back to in due course.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
In The Miso Soup
In recent separate conversations with both Gibnut and Miseryguts the idea that Japan has stepped into the breach left by the Soviet Union has come up - the notion that it might be the last place on Earth where you can feel the ultimate sense of displacement, the sensation of no longer being on the same Earth at all.
In The Miso Soup is a novel in three parts, narrated by Kenji, a 20 year-old student who makes good money in the evenings guiding foreigners around the neon-soaked backstreets of Kabuchi-Cho, a red light district that sits within a labyrinthine system of alien etiquette.
In the first part Kenji relates how he met 'Frank', a visiting American pyscho with a repertoire of disturbing facial expressions and a knack for putting people into a trance. During their first night together Kenji facilitates stops at a peep show, a lingerie pub and a baseball battting range and his suspicions that Frank was the author of a gruesome murder-dismembering on these very streets the night before grow steadily more tumescent.
The thriller format is suddenly and bloodily dropped on the floor of Omiai pub in part two when Frank gets unambiguously down to business, whipping out his long sashimi knife and slicing up the venue's occupants, while Kenji looks on paralysed by fear, disgust and as he later admits, an odd sense of passive complicity. This is quite a squirmfest, worthy of that other notorious splatterbook, American Psycho and of course the cinematic oevre of Takeshi Miike, with whom Ryu Murakami collaborated on Audition, another of his stories. (review coming shortly).
In part three the roles of tourist and guide are reversed as Frank leads Kenji back to his layer, a partly demolished clinic that the cops won't go near for fear of toxic waste. There he transforms into the talking bad guy, relating his bloodsucked childhood and how he later set about his "mission". Frank now lives to murder. He kills to avoid senility, to dull with the sensation that the world is both at his feet and yet utterly disconnected from him. He's at his most focussed and clearheaded when he's erasing lives. And the lives he erases at the Omiai pub had already started to fade on the page, Kenji later reflects, ultimately finding it hard to regret the loss of these "imitation human beings", who behave like "automatons programmed to portray certain human stereotypes".
Frank asks Kenji which is the greater bane on society - the psycho or the bum? He visualises his own role in society as that of a virus - "malignant but necessary", not just an agent of morbidity and disease, but also a stimulant of evolution through diverse mutation. The bum on the other hand is a devolutionary type: "If you reject society you must live outside it, not off it." In the affluent world people that have given up trying actually have the easiest of lives, Frank asserts, but they also suffer from sluggish brain circulation which broadcasts "please kill me" messages that people like him can pick up and act upon.
Frank recounts how the psychologists his parents sent him to see were convinced that his collection of Horror videos was the root cause of his aberrations. Yet as far as he is concerned there would be more people like him wandering the streets if people leading boring lives were unable to relieve "the anxieties of the imagination."
This section of the novel contains more explicit sociological observation than that provided by Brett Easton Ellis in American Pyscho. It is here that you begin to appreciate that In the Miso Soup is an exercise in self-examination and criticism that itself segues into outright self-loathing.
Many of Frank's analyses have the ring of genuine insight and Kenji eventually characterises him as something akin to a member of the resistance, but of course, as Kenji also correctly points out, who is Frank to set himself up as judge and jury? Yet this man who makes "murder with all the drama of picking up a fallen hat" is in many ways a fictional stand-in for the author himself, able to cut through the dead flesh of urban Japan leaving only a gory metaphorical mess in our imaginations to be cleaned up afterwards.
Murakami seems to be suggesting that just as paedophile nirvana can be found on the beaches of Thailand and Sri Lanka the natural destination for the slash-tourist is his own native land. Why is this?
Frank has a non-lethal interaction with a Peruvian hooker who tells him that she has come to believe that Jesus loses his power in Japan - as if its dislocated culture acts as some sort of massive jamming device against the Divine signal. The communications problems extend to the relationships between the individual nodes of the social network beneath this shield: "When people are fucked up their communication is fucked up". Kenji familiarises Frank with some Buddhist terminology that can help frame the problem- Bonno, or "bad instincts" which foster Madoa, "losing your way". In Buddhist thinking enlightenment is part of our original nature, something that we have forgotten. So perhaps Murakami is hinting that the modern pace of forgetfulness is leading us towards oblivion.
Frank's interactions with Kabuchi-Cho undermine the basic duality of killer and victim, just as the duality of amateur and professional is already pretty shaky in these parts. In the West the cultural barriers that we have established between amateur online dating and the professional escort trade are apparently more robust. But Kenji appears to be warning us that the basis of prostitution in Japan is not, as elsewhere, destitution. It is instead isolation and loneliness that robs people of their outline and sets them up to be finally rubbed out by the likes of Frank. Perhaps we too are starting to live lives perilously close to the shadows and are in danger of reaping the consequences of not living our lives in earnest.
We may yet have nothing quite as fuzzy as "compensated dating" but across the world technology has become a powerful enabler of both deceit and all too easy relief from the atomised existence. As Kenji says of his peers: "More and more young dudes can't be bothered to look for a girlfriend or fuck buddy. Overseas these guys would probably turn gay, but Japan has the sex industry."
In The Miso Soup is a novel in three parts, narrated by Kenji, a 20 year-old student who makes good money in the evenings guiding foreigners around the neon-soaked backstreets of Kabuchi-Cho, a red light district that sits within a labyrinthine system of alien etiquette.
In the first part Kenji relates how he met 'Frank', a visiting American pyscho with a repertoire of disturbing facial expressions and a knack for putting people into a trance. During their first night together Kenji facilitates stops at a peep show, a lingerie pub and a baseball battting range and his suspicions that Frank was the author of a gruesome murder-dismembering on these very streets the night before grow steadily more tumescent.
The thriller format is suddenly and bloodily dropped on the floor of Omiai pub in part two when Frank gets unambiguously down to business, whipping out his long sashimi knife and slicing up the venue's occupants, while Kenji looks on paralysed by fear, disgust and as he later admits, an odd sense of passive complicity. This is quite a squirmfest, worthy of that other notorious splatterbook, American Psycho and of course the cinematic oevre of Takeshi Miike, with whom Ryu Murakami collaborated on Audition, another of his stories. (review coming shortly).
In part three the roles of tourist and guide are reversed as Frank leads Kenji back to his layer, a partly demolished clinic that the cops won't go near for fear of toxic waste. There he transforms into the talking bad guy, relating his bloodsucked childhood and how he later set about his "mission". Frank now lives to murder. He kills to avoid senility, to dull with the sensation that the world is both at his feet and yet utterly disconnected from him. He's at his most focussed and clearheaded when he's erasing lives. And the lives he erases at the Omiai pub had already started to fade on the page, Kenji later reflects, ultimately finding it hard to regret the loss of these "imitation human beings", who behave like "automatons programmed to portray certain human stereotypes".
Frank asks Kenji which is the greater bane on society - the psycho or the bum? He visualises his own role in society as that of a virus - "malignant but necessary", not just an agent of morbidity and disease, but also a stimulant of evolution through diverse mutation. The bum on the other hand is a devolutionary type: "If you reject society you must live outside it, not off it." In the affluent world people that have given up trying actually have the easiest of lives, Frank asserts, but they also suffer from sluggish brain circulation which broadcasts "please kill me" messages that people like him can pick up and act upon.
Frank recounts how the psychologists his parents sent him to see were convinced that his collection of Horror videos was the root cause of his aberrations. Yet as far as he is concerned there would be more people like him wandering the streets if people leading boring lives were unable to relieve "the anxieties of the imagination."
This section of the novel contains more explicit sociological observation than that provided by Brett Easton Ellis in American Pyscho. It is here that you begin to appreciate that In the Miso Soup is an exercise in self-examination and criticism that itself segues into outright self-loathing.
Many of Frank's analyses have the ring of genuine insight and Kenji eventually characterises him as something akin to a member of the resistance, but of course, as Kenji also correctly points out, who is Frank to set himself up as judge and jury? Yet this man who makes "murder with all the drama of picking up a fallen hat" is in many ways a fictional stand-in for the author himself, able to cut through the dead flesh of urban Japan leaving only a gory metaphorical mess in our imaginations to be cleaned up afterwards.
Murakami seems to be suggesting that just as paedophile nirvana can be found on the beaches of Thailand and Sri Lanka the natural destination for the slash-tourist is his own native land. Why is this?
Frank has a non-lethal interaction with a Peruvian hooker who tells him that she has come to believe that Jesus loses his power in Japan - as if its dislocated culture acts as some sort of massive jamming device against the Divine signal. The communications problems extend to the relationships between the individual nodes of the social network beneath this shield: "When people are fucked up their communication is fucked up". Kenji familiarises Frank with some Buddhist terminology that can help frame the problem- Bonno, or "bad instincts" which foster Madoa, "losing your way". In Buddhist thinking enlightenment is part of our original nature, something that we have forgotten. So perhaps Murakami is hinting that the modern pace of forgetfulness is leading us towards oblivion.
Frank's interactions with Kabuchi-Cho undermine the basic duality of killer and victim, just as the duality of amateur and professional is already pretty shaky in these parts. In the West the cultural barriers that we have established between amateur online dating and the professional escort trade are apparently more robust. But Kenji appears to be warning us that the basis of prostitution in Japan is not, as elsewhere, destitution. It is instead isolation and loneliness that robs people of their outline and sets them up to be finally rubbed out by the likes of Frank. Perhaps we too are starting to live lives perilously close to the shadows and are in danger of reaping the consequences of not living our lives in earnest.
We may yet have nothing quite as fuzzy as "compensated dating" but across the world technology has become a powerful enabler of both deceit and all too easy relief from the atomised existence. As Kenji says of his peers: "More and more young dudes can't be bothered to look for a girlfriend or fuck buddy. Overseas these guys would probably turn gay, but Japan has the sex industry."
Highwaymen
D was due a visit from the SKY engineer on Sunday morning, a charming man that arrived in the Thames Valley from West Africa via Southampton. The lack of signposting in our bit of the countryside delayed his arrival and D was soon hyperventiliating at the thought of turning up five minutes late for lunch. He passed the phone to M in the hope that she could provide more decisive directions:
- Where are you?
- I don't know
- You could be in Australia then
- There are some trees on my left
- This being the country those aren't very good landmarks
- There's a bend in the road?
- No
- I just passed a farm
- No again...
They kindly held the table for us at The Highwayman, for the time being at least still the second best eatery in the Berkshire village of Checkenden. I started with scallops in a cauliflower cheese sauce with chopped bacon followed by some yummy crabcakes. We shared a bottle of Los Caminos 2003, a delicious blend of merlot, malbec and the Chilean carmère grape.
M kept up the low PH values of her chatter. Referring to a couple we know, the male half of which is a less than avid devotee of the social whirl she observed that "she drags him around like a dead dog on the end of a lead."
Last time round I noted how this joint welcomes a dowdier clientele than its stylish local rival The Crooked Billet; and then tends to bully them with its strident antipodean waitresses - half a world away from the eye-popping lovelies in lycra leggings usually found gracing the tables over the other side of the village. This time though, an intent to mix it up a bit was signalled by the presence of Simone, our black-clad, densely-accented, South African server, a lithe embodiment of sophisticated gastropub comeliness.
Indeed, with the bill came notification that The Highwayman, which opened around the time when Charles I first sat precariously on his throne, will close for about 12 weeks for extensive refurbishment from February 15. We all suspect that the end result will be something rather samey, reportedly with floors and walls lined with reclaimed wood. Gone will be the plush red carpet, the not quite straight landscape paintings adorning the old brick walls, the brass bugles and the ceramic beer mugs. Here's hoping that they refurbish the bossy aussies too while they're at it.
- Where are you?
- I don't know
- You could be in Australia then
- There are some trees on my left
- This being the country those aren't very good landmarks
- There's a bend in the road?
- No
- I just passed a farm
- No again...
They kindly held the table for us at The Highwayman, for the time being at least still the second best eatery in the Berkshire village of Checkenden. I started with scallops in a cauliflower cheese sauce with chopped bacon followed by some yummy crabcakes. We shared a bottle of Los Caminos 2003, a delicious blend of merlot, malbec and the Chilean carmère grape.
M kept up the low PH values of her chatter. Referring to a couple we know, the male half of which is a less than avid devotee of the social whirl she observed that "she drags him around like a dead dog on the end of a lead."
Last time round I noted how this joint welcomes a dowdier clientele than its stylish local rival The Crooked Billet; and then tends to bully them with its strident antipodean waitresses - half a world away from the eye-popping lovelies in lycra leggings usually found gracing the tables over the other side of the village. This time though, an intent to mix it up a bit was signalled by the presence of Simone, our black-clad, densely-accented, South African server, a lithe embodiment of sophisticated gastropub comeliness.
Indeed, with the bill came notification that The Highwayman, which opened around the time when Charles I first sat precariously on his throne, will close for about 12 weeks for extensive refurbishment from February 15. We all suspect that the end result will be something rather samey, reportedly with floors and walls lined with reclaimed wood. Gone will be the plush red carpet, the not quite straight landscape paintings adorning the old brick walls, the brass bugles and the ceramic beer mugs. Here's hoping that they refurbish the bossy aussies too while they're at it.
The BAFTAs
I don't know how I could ever have been underwhelmed by The House of Flying Daggers. Perhaps it was the ending that drained away all the awe. I watched the Peony Palace scene again on DVD this morning. You don't have to know anything about the characters or the plot to enjoy this whole sequence as an astounding standalone set piece - in fact it actually doesn't make much sense at all in the context of the rest of the story!
Last night this film was pipped to the best non-English language film BAFTA by The Motorcycle Diaries, just about on merit. Walter Salles came up with his whole gang and ended his acceptance speech with "oh and thank you very much for inventing football."
He was the only speaker that night that managed to get a laugh out of the audience, largely because Stephen Fry's relentless squirm-inducing unfunniness had turned this stage into a comedy death row.
Salles' triumph prevented us from seeing much of Zhang Ziyi apart from her smile and the odd little perm she was sporting. There really was quite a lot of eye candy on display. For the ladies there was the compact and toothy Gael Garcia Bernal sitting beside his old charolastra buddy Diego Luna, who surprisingly hadn't received a nomination for Dirty Dancing 2, Havana Nights. Ho ho.
Juliette Lewis' secure self-caricature as a spaced out hillbilly seems almost as well-practiced as Stephen Fry's unctious British twat. The gooey praise he dollopped on every set of award presenters kept everyone on the verge of vomitation, but the real finger down the throat was assertion by one actress that all the nominated performances by male actors were "great and transforming".
"Vera who?" could be read clearly in the magnified eyes of Martin Scorcese and most of the other visiting self-lovers from the States.
Last night this film was pipped to the best non-English language film BAFTA by The Motorcycle Diaries, just about on merit. Walter Salles came up with his whole gang and ended his acceptance speech with "oh and thank you very much for inventing football."
He was the only speaker that night that managed to get a laugh out of the audience, largely because Stephen Fry's relentless squirm-inducing unfunniness had turned this stage into a comedy death row.
Salles' triumph prevented us from seeing much of Zhang Ziyi apart from her smile and the odd little perm she was sporting. There really was quite a lot of eye candy on display. For the ladies there was the compact and toothy Gael Garcia Bernal sitting beside his old charolastra buddy Diego Luna, who surprisingly hadn't received a nomination for Dirty Dancing 2, Havana Nights. Ho ho.
Juliette Lewis' secure self-caricature as a spaced out hillbilly seems almost as well-practiced as Stephen Fry's unctious British twat. The gooey praise he dollopped on every set of award presenters kept everyone on the verge of vomitation, but the real finger down the throat was assertion by one actress that all the nominated performances by male actors were "great and transforming".
"Vera who?" could be read clearly in the magnified eyes of Martin Scorcese and most of the other visiting self-lovers from the States.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Tastings
Friday night in Nicolas winebar in the Wharf knocking back Fischers with the boys from the Sunday paper. They've had a good week as it involved a big bash to celebrate their recent rise in circulation - thrown in part, they confided, to give the birdy to their colleagues at the daily, whose numbers are travelling in the opposite direction.
The plates being tucked into all around me all looked very tasty, but I had already eaten.
Fish had a copy of Decanter with him. He's planning a wine raid on Germany quite soon. In preparation for the spoils he recently took the tub out of his bathroom with a view to replacing it with both a shower and a wine cupboard, but when the shower was delivered and installed it didn't fit and has had to be taken out again. His bathroom is a bit Ian Schrager sized.
Towards the back of the magazine there were some ads for neat but expensive looking "Wine Storage Solutions". In my field of expertise the term solution is often deployed as a handy euphemism for remedy for difficulty you didn't know you had (and possibly don't actually have). "We're not the sort of people for whom wine storage is the biggest problem we face in life" chipped in T with more than a hint of acidity.
"Why, when you have found a bottle of wine that you absolutely love would you ever drink anything else?" asked J. Now you do need a beautiful woman like Maya in Sideways to answer questions like that. All that stuff about how it evolves in the bottle and how the experience of drinking it will be different at any moment on any given day. "Yeah drinking the third bottle can be like snorting the third line." someone helpfully suggested.
From my own experience I think it can be like listening to a song on the radio that has tickled your fancy. You hear it again and again until you no longer feel that ticklish when it plays. Anyway it's as good example as any of how we can never really be fully and lastingly satisfied, not even by a product with undeniably more depth and complexity than a Rachel Stevens track.
And so to a weekend in the country, away from all this. And my second visit to Paddington in a week. Raj said that arriving there makes you feel like you're in a Harry Potter novel. So much for the outmoded furry dude.
The plates being tucked into all around me all looked very tasty, but I had already eaten.
Fish had a copy of Decanter with him. He's planning a wine raid on Germany quite soon. In preparation for the spoils he recently took the tub out of his bathroom with a view to replacing it with both a shower and a wine cupboard, but when the shower was delivered and installed it didn't fit and has had to be taken out again. His bathroom is a bit Ian Schrager sized.
Towards the back of the magazine there were some ads for neat but expensive looking "Wine Storage Solutions". In my field of expertise the term solution is often deployed as a handy euphemism for remedy for difficulty you didn't know you had (and possibly don't actually have). "We're not the sort of people for whom wine storage is the biggest problem we face in life" chipped in T with more than a hint of acidity.
"Why, when you have found a bottle of wine that you absolutely love would you ever drink anything else?" asked J. Now you do need a beautiful woman like Maya in Sideways to answer questions like that. All that stuff about how it evolves in the bottle and how the experience of drinking it will be different at any moment on any given day. "Yeah drinking the third bottle can be like snorting the third line." someone helpfully suggested.
From my own experience I think it can be like listening to a song on the radio that has tickled your fancy. You hear it again and again until you no longer feel that ticklish when it plays. Anyway it's as good example as any of how we can never really be fully and lastingly satisfied, not even by a product with undeniably more depth and complexity than a Rachel Stevens track.
And so to a weekend in the country, away from all this. And my second visit to Paddington in a week. Raj said that arriving there makes you feel like you're in a Harry Potter novel. So much for the outmoded furry dude.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Donzoko
Not the Kurosawa movie from 1957, but the great little Japanese cafe in Kingly Street of the same name where Gibnut and I had planned to have a catch-up meal last night, and also apparently the capital's Best Bohemian Joint - though it's hard to imagine what a Bohemian Japanese would actually be like. Anyone met one? They can't just look Bohemian!
The plan was changed however when Surfer called up shortly before seven to say that it wouldn't be a bad idea after all if we joined him and H at the Oxo Tower Brasserie. Shiny and stylish, but no place for poets I would have thought.
There would still be some uncertainties to disentangle. Who was H, this visiting American that needed to be shown the town? Surfer had called from the tea-room at Fortnum's, so he was going about this commission quite assiduously. Yet why risk introducing us into the equation?
The smart diner overlooking the Thames was fully booked so in the end we agreed on another restaurant that I hadn't tried before, Portrait atop the National Portrait Gallery. On walking in I immediately recognised the rooftop vista through Trafalgar Square towards Westminster from Closer, and it's even more startling at night.
I'm always a bit suspicious of menus dotted with superfluous adjectives, but the only obvious offender here was "Belgian". (Belgian Endives - and they were off.) Yet the fusion on this menu seems to extend to the way the food is described- everything is a bit jumbled and connected to the point that I found it hard to settle anywhere. I think I made the right choices in the end though; my main course was an unusual but delicious mix of salmon and chorizo in a red piquillo broth.
H gradually took charge, flashed her platinum Amex and declared the evening a corporate jolly, which was an unexpected boon. (Guatemalan men would normaly put a pistol to their temples before allowing a woman to pay for them, or at the very least required H to write an affidavit assuring them that her boss was the ultimate sponsor! None of us are that macho!) She ordered a fairly alcoholic but velvety Cabernet-Shiraz and recounted how she met Surfer at St Andrews. Like my own girlfriend at the time she originally came over for a one year stint from an all-girl college in New England. Maths was her major (which seemed like news to Surfer), and she now works for NYC's biggest independent financier, a job that entails 4am starts in order to maintain her alignment with the European markets and regular flights to the old world to meet up with the CEOs of leading financial institutions.
The conversation somehow turned to online dating with Gibnut talking us through the heterogenous range of asignations he'd obtained through Dating Direct. "I'm shallow, I go by the pictures", he openly confided. This hadn't however stopped him trying out a tattooed and muscular señorita from the US Navy. "I always give them a second date", H chipped in. Surfer's dating disasters are well documented, but up until last night he's kept pretty quiet about the time he narrowly avoided the conventional consequences of upsetting an entire brood of Sicilians by "disrespecting" one of their number.
Surfer also sang the praises of Taghazout, the Atlantic village in Morocco where he recently rode "perfect wave after perfect wave".
I should have come here with J-Boy last week - he would love this spot.
The plan was changed however when Surfer called up shortly before seven to say that it wouldn't be a bad idea after all if we joined him and H at the Oxo Tower Brasserie. Shiny and stylish, but no place for poets I would have thought.
There would still be some uncertainties to disentangle. Who was H, this visiting American that needed to be shown the town? Surfer had called from the tea-room at Fortnum's, so he was going about this commission quite assiduously. Yet why risk introducing us into the equation?
The smart diner overlooking the Thames was fully booked so in the end we agreed on another restaurant that I hadn't tried before, Portrait atop the National Portrait Gallery. On walking in I immediately recognised the rooftop vista through Trafalgar Square towards Westminster from Closer, and it's even more startling at night.
I'm always a bit suspicious of menus dotted with superfluous adjectives, but the only obvious offender here was "Belgian". (Belgian Endives - and they were off.) Yet the fusion on this menu seems to extend to the way the food is described- everything is a bit jumbled and connected to the point that I found it hard to settle anywhere. I think I made the right choices in the end though; my main course was an unusual but delicious mix of salmon and chorizo in a red piquillo broth.
H gradually took charge, flashed her platinum Amex and declared the evening a corporate jolly, which was an unexpected boon. (Guatemalan men would normaly put a pistol to their temples before allowing a woman to pay for them, or at the very least required H to write an affidavit assuring them that her boss was the ultimate sponsor! None of us are that macho!) She ordered a fairly alcoholic but velvety Cabernet-Shiraz and recounted how she met Surfer at St Andrews. Like my own girlfriend at the time she originally came over for a one year stint from an all-girl college in New England. Maths was her major (which seemed like news to Surfer), and she now works for NYC's biggest independent financier, a job that entails 4am starts in order to maintain her alignment with the European markets and regular flights to the old world to meet up with the CEOs of leading financial institutions.
The conversation somehow turned to online dating with Gibnut talking us through the heterogenous range of asignations he'd obtained through Dating Direct. "I'm shallow, I go by the pictures", he openly confided. This hadn't however stopped him trying out a tattooed and muscular señorita from the US Navy. "I always give them a second date", H chipped in. Surfer's dating disasters are well documented, but up until last night he's kept pretty quiet about the time he narrowly avoided the conventional consequences of upsetting an entire brood of Sicilians by "disrespecting" one of their number.
Surfer also sang the praises of Taghazout, the Atlantic village in Morocco where he recently rode "perfect wave after perfect wave".
I should have come here with J-Boy last week - he would love this spot.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The Void
Went along last night for a private view of Russian Contemporary at the Collyer Bristow Gallery. Simon Kojin's The Church of Christ the Saviour, Moscow which featured on the front of the invitation - an impressionistic oil on board rendition of shimmering gilded onion domes turned out be rather small and set within a truly hideous wooden frame. I remember the same sense of disappointment on arriving at the Thomas Jones in Italy exhibition in 2003. "er...that's it?"
There wasn't much to get particularly acquisitive about. There was an interesting almost full body portrait of an oddly-disengaged young woman in a plain red dress - Katya Gridnev's Natalia, captured with the kind of inward eyes that wouldn't follow you around a room. (This painting by the same artist that I found online is of a different girl, but the dress and the introspection are similar.)
There were three other Russian girls that caught the eye, still possibly teenagers and brazenly kitted out in shiny black cocktail dresses and fishnet stockings with a low nylon to skin ratio. They circulated buoyantly amongst the pinstripes making a lot of eye contact. Stringy little capillaries glistened on the crimson cheeks of the leery old soaks whose eyes were certainly following this little trio around the room.
Evie pointed out a little old lady wearing a claret mac and headscarf - "She's at every private view in London, she just goes around from one gallery to the next", an amusing example of the sort of observation that rebounds straight back onto the person with the outstretched finger.
Afterwards we went for a drink at the Cittie of Yorke a nice old pub let down by its colourless, mainly male clientele. We sat in one of the wooden booths that Evie called a "confessional" and so it was in a way. Life's a bit like an 800m race I slurred - the moment you hear the bell is most often the moment the midlife crisis springs. How you position yourself in the straight leading up to the bell will determine how well you handle that crucial moment of transition. Middle Youth, it's certianly an important phase. You can't run the second lap the same way you ran the first - attempts to do so tend to result in abject failure and the loser's journey to the line is far from pleasurable. My parents and their affluent friends have provided me with numerous examples of ill-considered strategies for the last lap.
One of the more disconcerting things about middle to late youth is the void. You meet up with an old friend, look them in the eyes, listen to their prattle about how they plan to get themselves all sorted, and you realise that they already have a little void bulking up inside them like an intestinal parasite. In some cases you will have a chance to observe them feeding their void, filling it up with stuff that just makes it grow ever bigger until the person you used to know has become a big slack-skinned sack of emptiness. These days I'm less inclined to stick around and watch this process unfold. It might be just a little void right now (as opposed to a gaping one) , but you know there's no real hope for them or for the relationship. Best to clear out now and leave them to carry on scrounging around the city streets for void-food. ( "We are hungry. Meaning is the prey" chugs the Hughtrain. "This is the real shit. The shit that matters." Still shit though.)
Coincidentally V also went to an exhibition opening last night too at the 'Panzón Verde' in Antigua. Their artist of the month is Erwin Guillermo - "actually one of the best representatives of Guatemalan art" according to artintheamericas.com.
Actually, the art on that page is representative of the very worst of the stuff he churns out - strictly for the Isabelle Allende readers. His darker more "retrograde thoughts" are shown off to better effect in these works.
When I got home I watched a few scenes from Lost in Translation, a film I am trying to come to like by approaching it as less than the sum of its parts. One of the most striking aspects of the movie is the way it sounds. When it comes to the home cinema experience sound seems to matter more than screensize.
There wasn't much to get particularly acquisitive about. There was an interesting almost full body portrait of an oddly-disengaged young woman in a plain red dress - Katya Gridnev's Natalia, captured with the kind of inward eyes that wouldn't follow you around a room. (This painting by the same artist that I found online is of a different girl, but the dress and the introspection are similar.)
There were three other Russian girls that caught the eye, still possibly teenagers and brazenly kitted out in shiny black cocktail dresses and fishnet stockings with a low nylon to skin ratio. They circulated buoyantly amongst the pinstripes making a lot of eye contact. Stringy little capillaries glistened on the crimson cheeks of the leery old soaks whose eyes were certainly following this little trio around the room.
Evie pointed out a little old lady wearing a claret mac and headscarf - "She's at every private view in London, she just goes around from one gallery to the next", an amusing example of the sort of observation that rebounds straight back onto the person with the outstretched finger.
Afterwards we went for a drink at the Cittie of Yorke a nice old pub let down by its colourless, mainly male clientele. We sat in one of the wooden booths that Evie called a "confessional" and so it was in a way. Life's a bit like an 800m race I slurred - the moment you hear the bell is most often the moment the midlife crisis springs. How you position yourself in the straight leading up to the bell will determine how well you handle that crucial moment of transition. Middle Youth, it's certianly an important phase. You can't run the second lap the same way you ran the first - attempts to do so tend to result in abject failure and the loser's journey to the line is far from pleasurable. My parents and their affluent friends have provided me with numerous examples of ill-considered strategies for the last lap.
One of the more disconcerting things about middle to late youth is the void. You meet up with an old friend, look them in the eyes, listen to their prattle about how they plan to get themselves all sorted, and you realise that they already have a little void bulking up inside them like an intestinal parasite. In some cases you will have a chance to observe them feeding their void, filling it up with stuff that just makes it grow ever bigger until the person you used to know has become a big slack-skinned sack of emptiness. These days I'm less inclined to stick around and watch this process unfold. It might be just a little void right now (as opposed to a gaping one) , but you know there's no real hope for them or for the relationship. Best to clear out now and leave them to carry on scrounging around the city streets for void-food. ( "We are hungry. Meaning is the prey" chugs the Hughtrain. "This is the real shit. The shit that matters." Still shit though.)
Coincidentally V also went to an exhibition opening last night too at the 'Panzón Verde' in Antigua. Their artist of the month is Erwin Guillermo - "actually one of the best representatives of Guatemalan art" according to artintheamericas.com.
Actually, the art on that page is representative of the very worst of the stuff he churns out - strictly for the Isabelle Allende readers. His darker more "retrograde thoughts" are shown off to better effect in these works.
When I got home I watched a few scenes from Lost in Translation, a film I am trying to come to like by approaching it as less than the sum of its parts. One of the most striking aspects of the movie is the way it sounds. When it comes to the home cinema experience sound seems to matter more than screensize.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Wrong about Japan
When I bought this book I thought the title referred to the fact that Peter Carey had used this little jaunt to the Japan that existed in the imagination of his twelve-year-old son in order to revise his earlier preconceptions about this singular nation. The Japan in his son's imagination is clearly much the same as the one I have in mine, so I was looking forward to Carey's adroit observations.
I soon realised though that the title in fact refers to the repetitive experiences of wrongness about Japan that the Australian novelist had during this visit. He really would have had an easier time of it if only he wasn't so pig-headedly determined to be right about Japan in the first place. It reveals itself to him literally as a floating world - every time he moves in with this penetrating analyses it simply floats away out of reach. "Better to know nothing than just a little" they taunt him as he struggles to de-codify everything and everybody around him.
V gets the arse too when she detects this sort of presumptuous scrutiny - when people seem to want to probe beyond her individuality for her share of encoded collective trauma, death squads, dictators et al.
Each time his agent sets up an interview with an eminent mangaka Carey probes for repressed memories of fireballs and calcified children, and is parried masterfully almost every time. (Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of Gundam cannily insists he only drew robots to feed the market for spin-off toys.)
It's true though that a number of separate American WWII air-raids, both conventional and nuclear, each left death tolls in excess of 120,000. So, compared with the fire-bombing of Tokyo, 9-11 was arguably a pissy little event, but punched above its weight symbolically. A friend that's a massive fan of Japanese popular culture but let slip the other night that he thinks the Americans should have finished the job completely and bombed Japan off the cultural map. They are by no means the strangest fish in the Earth's Aquarium, but they do seem to have a certain kind of weirdness that gets everybody else's back up. And one aspect of this is a steadfast unwillingness to admit to a gaijin that their subconscious fears and fantasies can be read like a comic.
The author and his entourage also meet Mr Yoshiwara the master sword maker, much like the character in Kill Bill Vol. 1. This encounter sets me up rather nicely for Gohatto, a film that Miseryguts has keenly recommended, as Carey uses it to get out a little history of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This was an era when the Samurai made up for the unavailability of women by developing a taste for young boys, and made up for the unavailability of actual warfare by slashing away at the bodies of the dead and the condemned with their fancy swords.
Carey then tries to pin down the meaning of the term Otaku - not quite interchangeable with our own nerd. He concludes that otaku belong to a generation of Japanese young people disciplined into being reflex data hoarders - "socially-inept information junkies" who spin themselves a web of non-intimate connections with a multiplicity of self-selected peers.
Before setting off from Manhatten Carey promised his son that they would steer clear of "the real Japan" - meaning amongst other things Kabuki, temples and tatami. Carey doesn't quite keep this promise as he seems determined to disclose the continiuity between the old world and the brash new one of Electric City. Yet there's another kind of Japan that's also quite hard to avoid, and Carey's account of being on holiday with his young son is given a bit of sharp edge by the contrastingly fuzzy line that separates the safely adolescent and the (often disturbingly) adult in Japan.
I soon realised though that the title in fact refers to the repetitive experiences of wrongness about Japan that the Australian novelist had during this visit. He really would have had an easier time of it if only he wasn't so pig-headedly determined to be right about Japan in the first place. It reveals itself to him literally as a floating world - every time he moves in with this penetrating analyses it simply floats away out of reach. "Better to know nothing than just a little" they taunt him as he struggles to de-codify everything and everybody around him.
V gets the arse too when she detects this sort of presumptuous scrutiny - when people seem to want to probe beyond her individuality for her share of encoded collective trauma, death squads, dictators et al.
Each time his agent sets up an interview with an eminent mangaka Carey probes for repressed memories of fireballs and calcified children, and is parried masterfully almost every time. (Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of Gundam cannily insists he only drew robots to feed the market for spin-off toys.)
It's true though that a number of separate American WWII air-raids, both conventional and nuclear, each left death tolls in excess of 120,000. So, compared with the fire-bombing of Tokyo, 9-11 was arguably a pissy little event, but punched above its weight symbolically. A friend that's a massive fan of Japanese popular culture but let slip the other night that he thinks the Americans should have finished the job completely and bombed Japan off the cultural map. They are by no means the strangest fish in the Earth's Aquarium, but they do seem to have a certain kind of weirdness that gets everybody else's back up. And one aspect of this is a steadfast unwillingness to admit to a gaijin that their subconscious fears and fantasies can be read like a comic.
The author and his entourage also meet Mr Yoshiwara the master sword maker, much like the character in Kill Bill Vol. 1. This encounter sets me up rather nicely for Gohatto, a film that Miseryguts has keenly recommended, as Carey uses it to get out a little history of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This was an era when the Samurai made up for the unavailability of women by developing a taste for young boys, and made up for the unavailability of actual warfare by slashing away at the bodies of the dead and the condemned with their fancy swords.
Carey then tries to pin down the meaning of the term Otaku - not quite interchangeable with our own nerd. He concludes that otaku belong to a generation of Japanese young people disciplined into being reflex data hoarders - "socially-inept information junkies" who spin themselves a web of non-intimate connections with a multiplicity of self-selected peers.
Before setting off from Manhatten Carey promised his son that they would steer clear of "the real Japan" - meaning amongst other things Kabuki, temples and tatami. Carey doesn't quite keep this promise as he seems determined to disclose the continiuity between the old world and the brash new one of Electric City. Yet there's another kind of Japan that's also quite hard to avoid, and Carey's account of being on holiday with his young son is given a bit of sharp edge by the contrastingly fuzzy line that separates the safely adolescent and the (often disturbingly) adult in Japan.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Solas
"A mi madre, a todas las madres" (For my mother, for all mothers.) Very similar words brought up the credits for another Spanish film of recent years, but in Solas there isn't a single redemptive transsexual in sight! Almodovar will probably never make a film this powerful. His best work lies way back in his Banderas and pre-Banderas days, before he set about inflating himself as a born-again cine-auteur. The compassion oozing out of Benito Zambrano's Solas is heart-rending. In comparison, that with which Pedro cloaks his pederastic priest in Bad Education is rather superficial and easy. (Those ridiculous Almodovar brothers had a hissy fit and resigned from the Academia de Cine last December when that film missed out on nominations for the Goyas. Solas was awarded five back in '99)
The action in Solas is based around a defining few days in the relationship between Madre and daughter María. Yes there's a quaint little old lady, but she's a shuffling symbol of restrained sadness, nothing to get especially cheerful about.
The unenlightened despot of the family, Padre, lies morosely in a hospital bed in Seville. Madre has come to town to stay with her daughter while her repugnant husband recuperates. María is intelligent but combustible like her authoritarian parent and her attempt to escape from both him and the countryside has left her in the deepest of blue-collar ruts. Her course of self-destruction includes cigarettes, alcohol and getting knocked up by her heartless trucker boyfriend. Madre brings just a hint of love and light into her daughter's battered existence, but she too is a wounded soul.
If in Tempus Fugit we had the smiling face of underachievement, and in Sideways mediocrity as distressed by incipient failure; here in Solas it's full-on loserdom without any of the laughs.
Last week I cackled when Peter Bradshaw showed off his emotional scars from his multiple viewings of Sideways: "Audiences at the screenings where I have been present may have heard something like a fusillade of gunshots from the auditorium; it was the sound of my heart breaking into a thousand pieces."
Get a grip man! By all means feel a bit sorry for Miles Raymond, but he's still a SCUMBAG. Save the throat lumps for people like María, Madre and Vecino...even brutish old Padre. Their problem is more like a curse that runs down the generations. (Ok, maybe there is just a hint of social realism in Sideways - we are offered a chance to guess at the impact of maternal influence on Miles' character and the family life of single-mother Stephanie briefly makes its proletarian ugliness felt.)
Here in Britain we generally import people to lead these kind of shitty lives, but Spanish towns can still suck 'em in off the sierras. The performace of Ana Fernández is astounding. Can you really act such physical desolation? - it seems to be written all over her face.
Solas is a "film which seems pessimistic on the surface but which in fact is not", Benito Zambrano advises in his notes on the DVD. This 'surface' is the first two-thirds of the narrative. which is grim stuff, unsentimental almost to a fault. Even the cinematography seems to suffer from low self-esteem.
Redemption does eventually put in an appearance - well, it lived next door all along in the shape of Vecino, a lonely old man with the face of Socrates who, although too late to save Madre, sorts María out simply by pointing out that at least she hasn't run out of time like he has. (You might also say that Álvarez Novoa’s rendition of this tender-hearted figure saves the film before it too runs out of time.) Offering himself up as an adoptive grandfather for María's forthcoming child, he eventually persuades her to wriggle free of the life of lacerating lonesomeness they have both led in the beautiful city on the Guadalquivir.
The action in Solas is based around a defining few days in the relationship between Madre and daughter María. Yes there's a quaint little old lady, but she's a shuffling symbol of restrained sadness, nothing to get especially cheerful about.
The unenlightened despot of the family, Padre, lies morosely in a hospital bed in Seville. Madre has come to town to stay with her daughter while her repugnant husband recuperates. María is intelligent but combustible like her authoritarian parent and her attempt to escape from both him and the countryside has left her in the deepest of blue-collar ruts. Her course of self-destruction includes cigarettes, alcohol and getting knocked up by her heartless trucker boyfriend. Madre brings just a hint of love and light into her daughter's battered existence, but she too is a wounded soul.
If in Tempus Fugit we had the smiling face of underachievement, and in Sideways mediocrity as distressed by incipient failure; here in Solas it's full-on loserdom without any of the laughs.
Last week I cackled when Peter Bradshaw showed off his emotional scars from his multiple viewings of Sideways: "Audiences at the screenings where I have been present may have heard something like a fusillade of gunshots from the auditorium; it was the sound of my heart breaking into a thousand pieces."
Get a grip man! By all means feel a bit sorry for Miles Raymond, but he's still a SCUMBAG. Save the throat lumps for people like María, Madre and Vecino...even brutish old Padre. Their problem is more like a curse that runs down the generations. (Ok, maybe there is just a hint of social realism in Sideways - we are offered a chance to guess at the impact of maternal influence on Miles' character and the family life of single-mother Stephanie briefly makes its proletarian ugliness felt.)
Here in Britain we generally import people to lead these kind of shitty lives, but Spanish towns can still suck 'em in off the sierras. The performace of Ana Fernández is astounding. Can you really act such physical desolation? - it seems to be written all over her face.
Solas is a "film which seems pessimistic on the surface but which in fact is not", Benito Zambrano advises in his notes on the DVD. This 'surface' is the first two-thirds of the narrative. which is grim stuff, unsentimental almost to a fault. Even the cinematography seems to suffer from low self-esteem.
Redemption does eventually put in an appearance - well, it lived next door all along in the shape of Vecino, a lonely old man with the face of Socrates who, although too late to save Madre, sorts María out simply by pointing out that at least she hasn't run out of time like he has. (You might also say that Álvarez Novoa’s rendition of this tender-hearted figure saves the film before it too runs out of time.) Offering himself up as an adoptive grandfather for María's forthcoming child, he eventually persuades her to wriggle free of the life of lacerating lonesomeness they have both led in the beautiful city on the Guadalquivir.
Sideways
Miseryguts and I have both been a bit reluctant to see Sideways, partly because we suspected that it might contain a few home truths about the lateral drift of our own biographies and those of our closest mates.
Alexander Payne makes movies about the discomfited existences of morally-flawed mediocrities. I enjoyed About Schmidt more than I planned to and Election was one of my favourite movies of the 90s.
Like Payne's other subjects droopy-lidded Miles scuttles crablike along the line of loathsomeness for most of the story - forgiveable if not exactly likeable. Miles is in many ways a continuation of Jim McAllister, but on this occasion Payne disdains to go completely "over to the dark side" and appears to be offering his anti-hero a path to redemption.
Miles and Jack are two not getting any younger sort of guys that are beginning to feel themselves turning to vinegar in their bottles. Each has found a vessel in which to sail the seas of disappointment. For Jack it is his sexual prowess - people of all ages still check him out he pleads, "even dudes". For Miles is is the fruit of the grape. So their grape tour in Northern California is supposed to be a week of intense re-vitalisation based around their respective hobby interests, sexual instinct and oenophilia.
I'd love to meet Alexander Payne one day and discuss the topic of embitterment with him. If one day I take the opportunity to escape mediocrity I suspect that I'll soon wish that I hadn't.
Pleasures of the sort Miles gets from his bottle of Cheval Blanc are really the best that life has to offer outside of true companionship. If you can kick back and avoid the red herrings and the tailspins this might actually be the best place to hang out - ordinariness has its ladders as well as its snakes surely? Tempus Fugit for instance depicted a sunnier, Payne-less (sorry!) vision of underachievement. (Looking around him at London's shabby intelligentsia in the Purcell Room's 'airport lounge' last Friday, Miseryguts asked me if I thought people became socialists because they missed out on all the trophy mates?!)
Sideways is an acerbically funny film and very well written. "Did you drink and dial?", "quaffable but far from transcendent" and "tight as a nun's arsehole but good concentration" are amongst the lines that will stick with me.
Miles is certainly right about one thing - if you like wine systematically there is usually one bottle in your past that made the crucial difference. Mine was a Beaune, '77 I think, also a Pinot. My father once served an '82 Cheval Blanc at Christmas and I kept the bottle as a souvenir, but the memory of the moment my palate was stunned by that wonderful Burgundy is still the most vivid.
Smiley-eyed Virginia Madsen is lovely as Maya in this film. In spite of any affection you might have built up for Miles, it's hard to imagine at the end that she's exactly made herself a great catch. Her interest in wine is somehow deeper and more intelligent that his, which isn't much more than a front for dipsomaniacal decline. And Miles hasn't really done anything good to make up for things like stealing from his mother! But if you are the compassionate sort you might conclude that he's rather like his favourite grape - thin-skinned, out of place in most environments and in need of careful nurturing- yes, "quaffable but far from transcendent". (Well, the nun's arsehole one didn't fit.)
Alexander Payne makes movies about the discomfited existences of morally-flawed mediocrities. I enjoyed About Schmidt more than I planned to and Election was one of my favourite movies of the 90s.
Like Payne's other subjects droopy-lidded Miles scuttles crablike along the line of loathsomeness for most of the story - forgiveable if not exactly likeable. Miles is in many ways a continuation of Jim McAllister, but on this occasion Payne disdains to go completely "over to the dark side" and appears to be offering his anti-hero a path to redemption.
Miles and Jack are two not getting any younger sort of guys that are beginning to feel themselves turning to vinegar in their bottles. Each has found a vessel in which to sail the seas of disappointment. For Jack it is his sexual prowess - people of all ages still check him out he pleads, "even dudes". For Miles is is the fruit of the grape. So their grape tour in Northern California is supposed to be a week of intense re-vitalisation based around their respective hobby interests, sexual instinct and oenophilia.
I'd love to meet Alexander Payne one day and discuss the topic of embitterment with him. If one day I take the opportunity to escape mediocrity I suspect that I'll soon wish that I hadn't.
Pleasures of the sort Miles gets from his bottle of Cheval Blanc are really the best that life has to offer outside of true companionship. If you can kick back and avoid the red herrings and the tailspins this might actually be the best place to hang out - ordinariness has its ladders as well as its snakes surely? Tempus Fugit for instance depicted a sunnier, Payne-less (sorry!) vision of underachievement. (Looking around him at London's shabby intelligentsia in the Purcell Room's 'airport lounge' last Friday, Miseryguts asked me if I thought people became socialists because they missed out on all the trophy mates?!)
Sideways is an acerbically funny film and very well written. "Did you drink and dial?", "quaffable but far from transcendent" and "tight as a nun's arsehole but good concentration" are amongst the lines that will stick with me.
Miles is certainly right about one thing - if you like wine systematically there is usually one bottle in your past that made the crucial difference. Mine was a Beaune, '77 I think, also a Pinot. My father once served an '82 Cheval Blanc at Christmas and I kept the bottle as a souvenir, but the memory of the moment my palate was stunned by that wonderful Burgundy is still the most vivid.
Smiley-eyed Virginia Madsen is lovely as Maya in this film. In spite of any affection you might have built up for Miles, it's hard to imagine at the end that she's exactly made herself a great catch. Her interest in wine is somehow deeper and more intelligent that his, which isn't much more than a front for dipsomaniacal decline. And Miles hasn't really done anything good to make up for things like stealing from his mother! But if you are the compassionate sort you might conclude that he's rather like his favourite grape - thin-skinned, out of place in most environments and in need of careful nurturing- yes, "quaffable but far from transcendent". (Well, the nun's arsehole one didn't fit.)
Monday, February 07, 2005
The Crime of Father Amaro
It's easy to dismiss this film as middlebrow Mexican melodrama. Indeed it features a bunch of ageing stars from the telenovelas, and the whole idea of catholic priests giving into temptation seems to belong to that genre. All a bit old mitre, you might say.
Truth is though that although El Crimen de Padre Amaro definitely becomes a melodrama the first hour or so are best understood as a satire and a very biting one at that. Yet I'm afraid if you can only follow the subtitles much of the irony will tend to slip by unnoticed.
I think what happened here is that the headline news-item about the misadventures of country priest was probably lifted from the Portuguese source novel written back in 1875. The scriptwriters then set about grafting onto this a more hollistic critique of the role of the priesthood in near-contemporary Mexico. This would account for the strong currents of censorious nineteenth century ethics throughout which seem juxtaposed with the moral complexity and ambivalence elsewhere. (Though perhaps we shouldn't expect anything coming out of Mexico to be antiseptically Modern in its outlook.)
It's very easy for us cosy first worlders to forget that the Catholic faith is still very much a public project in Mexico! Indeed, in a country where social justice is remarkably hard to come by, many people look to the men in cassocks for some sort of resolution of the question of ultimate Justice.
One of the priests in the film, Father Natalio, is depicted as a classic Liberation Theologist - more or less a Marxist in a dog collar- a seeker of justice within a historical dialectic if not in the here and now. Meanwhile the character of the bruja who rushes home to feed the host to her black cat with a sinister "ameeeeen" highlights another way that the message of the Church is typically muddled in those parts - by grafting itself onto the traditional beliefs of the indigenous peoples of America, Catholic dogma, such as the meritocratic afterlife with its notion of Resurrection, has become irremediably tangled up with the spirit world. The latter is a murky, animistic place full of rather headstrong ancestors, not quite heaven or hell, and certainly no place to seek Justice.
I drew a clear parallel between the Catholic Church and the CIA in my Local Assets posting last week, and the point is worth re-emphasising here. It's clear to me that one of the key questions being raised by this film is whether the bad apples bear the same relatationship to their organisation as say spam does to legitimate email, or whether the apple tree itself is fundamentally rotten.
On the one hand we the viewers are being asked to consider whether decency can possibly expect to survive in such a bent work environment, and yet we are clearly also presented with the case for realpolitik. For example Father Benito has taken laundered funds from local narco Chato Aguilar in order to build a big hospital. "We are taking bad money and making it good", he contends - i.e. who cares where the money comes from because the outcome is pretty neat, isn't it? Do I have to mention Colonel North?
The problem with this ends-based line of argument is exposed by the sub-plot surrounding the young journalist who is chosen to expose the dodgy priest's relationship with the drug lords. Unknown to him, the incriminating images from a baptism have been passed to his newspaper after the photographer himself was brutally done in by a thug with a old grievance against Chato Aguilar. Conclusion - nobody is left unpoisoned by the venom that runs through the veins of this country.
Idealism has enough to cope with without all the complications this local situation implies and when you throw in sexual repression too, you are bound to end up with an unhealthy outlook. I say this as a man married to someone who very nearly became yet another victim of a seminary abuser. No doubt that particular young man embarked on his vocation hoping to make the world a better place. Yet Michael Jackson is almost synonymous with that same aspiration and look where he has ended up!
I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with pragmatists like Richard Rorty who see religion as essentially just another way to lead a good life (while remaining atheists themselves it has to be said!). The right to have faith should be as inviolable as the right to fall in love, Rorty attests, adding that "Religious tools are needed to make possible certain kinds of human life but not others". It's a charitable outlook, but ignores an awful lot of history.
If you strip down Christianity to its most worthwhile kernel you are left with Christ's message of Love. (This ought to be the "bottom line" of Christianity, not the "burning of the flesh" suggested recently by one of my readers!) Charity appears to lie at the core of Father Amaro's being too - in the opening scenes he us shown engaging in an act of selfless kindness - alerting us to a basic virtue that we later see undermined by the sin of ambition primarily, but of course also by lust! (He indulges in such elaborate preparations for his tryst with Amelia you have to ask why these didn't include the acquisition of a condom - another legacy of Eça de Queirós' novel I suppose.)
I guess it's true that the makers of this film don't seem to have ready solutions to the issues they are exposing, but why should they? One problem they faced is that it's hard to "out" the sublimated sensuality in the Church from within a culture that is so impregnated with the Catholic mentality. One of the side effects of this is a current of misogyny not unlike the one that runs through the religion itself. For example, I'm not convinced that Amelia is portrayed as an unblemished innocent. On the contrary, her getting off to thoughts of Jesus is mocked as the kind of knucklheaded popular (female) piety that underlies the whole sorry mess. The chess-playing secularists on the other hand are all educated men.
And it was no doubt the idea of Gael Garcia Bernal shagging with a 16 year-old schoolgirl dressed as the Virgin Mary that made this Mexico's biggest ever box office hit, rather than general excitement about its socio-political ramifications. Still, this is a worthwhile work of art that takes the story of one man's debasement and puts it in the context of a debased society. Unlike most Europeans many Mexicans will have enough of a sense of their own debasement to be disconcerted by the miasmas of intractability that it conjures up.
Truth is though that although El Crimen de Padre Amaro definitely becomes a melodrama the first hour or so are best understood as a satire and a very biting one at that. Yet I'm afraid if you can only follow the subtitles much of the irony will tend to slip by unnoticed.
I think what happened here is that the headline news-item about the misadventures of country priest was probably lifted from the Portuguese source novel written back in 1875. The scriptwriters then set about grafting onto this a more hollistic critique of the role of the priesthood in near-contemporary Mexico. This would account for the strong currents of censorious nineteenth century ethics throughout which seem juxtaposed with the moral complexity and ambivalence elsewhere. (Though perhaps we shouldn't expect anything coming out of Mexico to be antiseptically Modern in its outlook.)
It's very easy for us cosy first worlders to forget that the Catholic faith is still very much a public project in Mexico! Indeed, in a country where social justice is remarkably hard to come by, many people look to the men in cassocks for some sort of resolution of the question of ultimate Justice.
One of the priests in the film, Father Natalio, is depicted as a classic Liberation Theologist - more or less a Marxist in a dog collar- a seeker of justice within a historical dialectic if not in the here and now. Meanwhile the character of the bruja who rushes home to feed the host to her black cat with a sinister "ameeeeen" highlights another way that the message of the Church is typically muddled in those parts - by grafting itself onto the traditional beliefs of the indigenous peoples of America, Catholic dogma, such as the meritocratic afterlife with its notion of Resurrection, has become irremediably tangled up with the spirit world. The latter is a murky, animistic place full of rather headstrong ancestors, not quite heaven or hell, and certainly no place to seek Justice.
I drew a clear parallel between the Catholic Church and the CIA in my Local Assets posting last week, and the point is worth re-emphasising here. It's clear to me that one of the key questions being raised by this film is whether the bad apples bear the same relatationship to their organisation as say spam does to legitimate email, or whether the apple tree itself is fundamentally rotten.
On the one hand we the viewers are being asked to consider whether decency can possibly expect to survive in such a bent work environment, and yet we are clearly also presented with the case for realpolitik. For example Father Benito has taken laundered funds from local narco Chato Aguilar in order to build a big hospital. "We are taking bad money and making it good", he contends - i.e. who cares where the money comes from because the outcome is pretty neat, isn't it? Do I have to mention Colonel North?
The problem with this ends-based line of argument is exposed by the sub-plot surrounding the young journalist who is chosen to expose the dodgy priest's relationship with the drug lords. Unknown to him, the incriminating images from a baptism have been passed to his newspaper after the photographer himself was brutally done in by a thug with a old grievance against Chato Aguilar. Conclusion - nobody is left unpoisoned by the venom that runs through the veins of this country.
Idealism has enough to cope with without all the complications this local situation implies and when you throw in sexual repression too, you are bound to end up with an unhealthy outlook. I say this as a man married to someone who very nearly became yet another victim of a seminary abuser. No doubt that particular young man embarked on his vocation hoping to make the world a better place. Yet Michael Jackson is almost synonymous with that same aspiration and look where he has ended up!
I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with pragmatists like Richard Rorty who see religion as essentially just another way to lead a good life (while remaining atheists themselves it has to be said!). The right to have faith should be as inviolable as the right to fall in love, Rorty attests, adding that "Religious tools are needed to make possible certain kinds of human life but not others". It's a charitable outlook, but ignores an awful lot of history.
If you strip down Christianity to its most worthwhile kernel you are left with Christ's message of Love. (This ought to be the "bottom line" of Christianity, not the "burning of the flesh" suggested recently by one of my readers!) Charity appears to lie at the core of Father Amaro's being too - in the opening scenes he us shown engaging in an act of selfless kindness - alerting us to a basic virtue that we later see undermined by the sin of ambition primarily, but of course also by lust! (He indulges in such elaborate preparations for his tryst with Amelia you have to ask why these didn't include the acquisition of a condom - another legacy of Eça de Queirós' novel I suppose.)
I guess it's true that the makers of this film don't seem to have ready solutions to the issues they are exposing, but why should they? One problem they faced is that it's hard to "out" the sublimated sensuality in the Church from within a culture that is so impregnated with the Catholic mentality. One of the side effects of this is a current of misogyny not unlike the one that runs through the religion itself. For example, I'm not convinced that Amelia is portrayed as an unblemished innocent. On the contrary, her getting off to thoughts of Jesus is mocked as the kind of knucklheaded popular (female) piety that underlies the whole sorry mess. The chess-playing secularists on the other hand are all educated men.
And it was no doubt the idea of Gael Garcia Bernal shagging with a 16 year-old schoolgirl dressed as the Virgin Mary that made this Mexico's biggest ever box office hit, rather than general excitement about its socio-political ramifications. Still, this is a worthwhile work of art that takes the story of one man's debasement and puts it in the context of a debased society. Unlike most Europeans many Mexicans will have enough of a sense of their own debasement to be disconcerted by the miasmas of intractability that it conjures up.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Tempus Fugit
A delightful and deceptively clever time-travel caper from Catalan film-maker Enric Folch who, before the projector whirred into life, stood up and explained how he set about telling a story about ordinary people saving the world - one that would in fact celebrate the absence of big name stars like Bruce Willis.
Tempus Fugit is the brand name of a drug indicated for time travel. The leaflet inside warns "keep out of the reach of children". A box of this potentially dangerous product has been brought back to contemporary Barcelona by a tall blond man in a bowler hat called Andros. He reveals that he has come back to persuade shy watchmaker Ramon to prevent the imminent end of the world but later admits that he himself was the clumsy intern at the Time Control Centre who accidentally created the problem in the first place. He unleashes even more trouble by dropping his box of Tempus Fugit on the pavement outside Ramon's house.
The tablets are marked -1/2 - 4 +8 etc. In the first third of the story the complexity seems to be growing expontentially as several of the characters (and even a dog) start popping the pills, but Folch isn't about to allow his narrative to disappear up its own paradoxes like so many others of this genre. He reins in the various strands and then sets up the climax - in fact two climaxes. One of these is quite dark, but you hardly notice such is the lighthearted tone of the movie.
Indeed Tempus Fugit wears its SciFi garb very lightly. It's really a warm-hearted paean to the rhythms of ordinary lives lived around a second-tier town square somewhere within the grid of Barcelona. Man from the future Andros makes the imperfect and unassuming present moment sound like the best place to be even though he claims to come from a world where disease and poverty has been eradicated and the "last of the smokers was executed some time ago"!
Made by Catalans in Catalan for local TV, this film is an exercise in gentle self-mockery. A story about dull, ordinary people might just have resulted in a dull ordinary film, but Folch introduces an element of frantic comic excitement in the form of fanatical Barca fan Terrades who lives across the corridor from Ramon. The scene where he is sitting sharing a meal with his double from the future is masterfully scripted. If only all Sci-Fi were this playful.
Terrades doesn't quite steal the show though - Folch turns Ramon's sheer ordinariness into the best gag of the film. Andros has said he can't tell Ramon what it is he must do to save the world until five minutes before he is due to do it because of the danger of introducing "other variables". In the end it turns out that all Ramon has to do is not buy a packet of eucalyptus lozenges at the news stand, something that he otherwise does every day of his uneventful life. In the hilarious scene that follows Ramon despairs that Andros has picked him precisely because he would be the last person to ever change the course of world events, but eventually summons his determination and strides towards the news stand wearing Neo-style black sunglasses. The parody is completed when the camera spins 360 degrees around him when he stretches out his hand for the newspaper.
Raj commented afterwards that Folch had cleverly used the town square as a stage for the locating the characters and the drama. Wherever you look in this low-budget gem there's something to admire. There's a fifth main character, a pretty girl at the news stand called Monica. She is familiar and benevolent with all the weird and wonderful inhabitants of the square - that straightforward openness of the Iberian woman. In one scene we see her away from her place of work she has apparently picked up Andros and led him towards her apartment. He gallantly explains that he might not be around for much longer and she retorts coquetishly "Yo solo busco un buen polvo" ('I'm only after a good shag'). Andros is of course taken aback at her forwardness. That Folch has taken the time to fashion a minor character into a living emblem for an urban culture that is open, kind and vivacious yet at the same time unashamedly hedonistic, is a mark of the care and craft that went into making this great little film.
Well-deserved applause for the director at the end.
Tempus Fugit is the brand name of a drug indicated for time travel. The leaflet inside warns "keep out of the reach of children". A box of this potentially dangerous product has been brought back to contemporary Barcelona by a tall blond man in a bowler hat called Andros. He reveals that he has come back to persuade shy watchmaker Ramon to prevent the imminent end of the world but later admits that he himself was the clumsy intern at the Time Control Centre who accidentally created the problem in the first place. He unleashes even more trouble by dropping his box of Tempus Fugit on the pavement outside Ramon's house.
The tablets are marked -1/2 - 4 +8 etc. In the first third of the story the complexity seems to be growing expontentially as several of the characters (and even a dog) start popping the pills, but Folch isn't about to allow his narrative to disappear up its own paradoxes like so many others of this genre. He reins in the various strands and then sets up the climax - in fact two climaxes. One of these is quite dark, but you hardly notice such is the lighthearted tone of the movie.
Indeed Tempus Fugit wears its SciFi garb very lightly. It's really a warm-hearted paean to the rhythms of ordinary lives lived around a second-tier town square somewhere within the grid of Barcelona. Man from the future Andros makes the imperfect and unassuming present moment sound like the best place to be even though he claims to come from a world where disease and poverty has been eradicated and the "last of the smokers was executed some time ago"!
Made by Catalans in Catalan for local TV, this film is an exercise in gentle self-mockery. A story about dull, ordinary people might just have resulted in a dull ordinary film, but Folch introduces an element of frantic comic excitement in the form of fanatical Barca fan Terrades who lives across the corridor from Ramon. The scene where he is sitting sharing a meal with his double from the future is masterfully scripted. If only all Sci-Fi were this playful.
Terrades doesn't quite steal the show though - Folch turns Ramon's sheer ordinariness into the best gag of the film. Andros has said he can't tell Ramon what it is he must do to save the world until five minutes before he is due to do it because of the danger of introducing "other variables". In the end it turns out that all Ramon has to do is not buy a packet of eucalyptus lozenges at the news stand, something that he otherwise does every day of his uneventful life. In the hilarious scene that follows Ramon despairs that Andros has picked him precisely because he would be the last person to ever change the course of world events, but eventually summons his determination and strides towards the news stand wearing Neo-style black sunglasses. The parody is completed when the camera spins 360 degrees around him when he stretches out his hand for the newspaper.
Raj commented afterwards that Folch had cleverly used the town square as a stage for the locating the characters and the drama. Wherever you look in this low-budget gem there's something to admire. There's a fifth main character, a pretty girl at the news stand called Monica. She is familiar and benevolent with all the weird and wonderful inhabitants of the square - that straightforward openness of the Iberian woman. In one scene we see her away from her place of work she has apparently picked up Andros and led him towards her apartment. He gallantly explains that he might not be around for much longer and she retorts coquetishly "Yo solo busco un buen polvo" ('I'm only after a good shag'). Andros is of course taken aback at her forwardness. That Folch has taken the time to fashion a minor character into a living emblem for an urban culture that is open, kind and vivacious yet at the same time unashamedly hedonistic, is a mark of the care and craft that went into making this great little film.
Well-deserved applause for the director at the end.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Closer to the Original
After seeing Closer in the cinema I decided I had to experience the play, though sadly only as an expensive paperback bought at Foyles.
The film's ending is somehow more satisfying; and that song is so beautiful. Marber hasn't really changed anything - he has simply brought the curtain down earlier. Yet Alice is a character that leaves you in sad, wistful contemplation in the darkness whether or not she actually dies.
In the play Dan relates how Alice chose to love him because he cut his crusts, yet reveals that he did so only on that day because they had partly come off by themselves.
Larry's outburst at Anna, "Now fuck off and die you fucked up slag", one of the harshest in the script, is softened in the play by virtue of being the set up for her to repeat it back to him later on.
There are some great lines which I can't recall from the film: "You're a man, you'd come if the tooth fairy winked at you" and "you're old enough to be her ancestor" - the latter probably because the age differences are not entirely so pronounced in the film thanks to the casting.
Natalie Portman is a great actress and is compelling to watch in Mike Nichols' film, but somehow she isn't quite up to the insincerity and the dirtyness that the role of Jane Jones the secretive stripper requires.
The social isolation of the characters is actually less pronounced in the play - Larry and Anna's family are mentioned and Dan's girlfriend Ruth plays a role as a reported offstage personage. The intricate network of signs and coincidences in the meshed-up lives of these four people are far more obvious too.
The film's ending is somehow more satisfying; and that song is so beautiful. Marber hasn't really changed anything - he has simply brought the curtain down earlier. Yet Alice is a character that leaves you in sad, wistful contemplation in the darkness whether or not she actually dies.
In the play Dan relates how Alice chose to love him because he cut his crusts, yet reveals that he did so only on that day because they had partly come off by themselves.
Larry's outburst at Anna, "Now fuck off and die you fucked up slag", one of the harshest in the script, is softened in the play by virtue of being the set up for her to repeat it back to him later on.
There are some great lines which I can't recall from the film: "You're a man, you'd come if the tooth fairy winked at you" and "you're old enough to be her ancestor" - the latter probably because the age differences are not entirely so pronounced in the film thanks to the casting.
Natalie Portman is a great actress and is compelling to watch in Mike Nichols' film, but somehow she isn't quite up to the insincerity and the dirtyness that the role of Jane Jones the secretive stripper requires.
The social isolation of the characters is actually less pronounced in the play - Larry and Anna's family are mentioned and Dan's girlfriend Ruth plays a role as a reported offstage personage. The intricate network of signs and coincidences in the meshed-up lives of these four people are far more obvious too.
Strangers
The ghost stories that have made the biggest impression on me over the last decade or so (Sixth Sense, The Others, Haunted amongst others) are tales where the writer aims to mislead the audience about who is alive and who is dead. All three of these examples maintained their camouflage well right up to the end. This is a great way of constructing a thriller because it doesn't get you bogged down too much in the metaphysics, so sceptics can end up fairly entertained too.
Vertigo was perhaps the best of all such films, because in the end the supernatural becomes superfluous - Hitchcock milked the form of the ghost story for all the suspense he can get, then delivered an ending that can be almost completely interpreted "rationally". Almost completely, because the turn of events remains quite spooky and fatalistic.
Taichi Yamada's Strangers is an interesting variation - a literally haunting representation of the loneliness of urban apartment dewellers which I can readily identify with right now. The author just about avoids falling into the same trap as several recent spooky stories (such as The Eye) where the suspense built up in the first half is squandered once the true nature and vocation of the supernatural threat is revealed.
At the end of the novel the characters agree that their minds probably weren't quite right, but as readers we are pretty sure there were real ghosts involved. Their principal 'victim', a 47 year old divorcee called Harada, had even conducted a bit of empirical research along the way by asking the apparitions of his parents to teach him a card game he knew he didn't know how to play!
Yamada is quite half-hearted about disguising his dead people. In one particular case Harada doesn't twig until the last few pages, but the reader would have to be fairly dense not to be on to this individual from quite early in the story.
The ghosts in Strangers are not especially spectral. The couple that look exactly like Harada's parents did when they died some 40 years previously appear to have moved with the times and are able to go to restaurants and interact with serving staff. There's only one instance of someone actually seeing through one of these apparitions and I rather thought this was an example of Yamada lacking the imagination to find another way to kick off the final act.
Perhaps the main reason why Asian ghosts are so fashionable these days is their basic ambivalence. In the European tradition (seen at its most kitsch in Ghost) the deceased have a simple bi-polar moral status - either they head towards the white light or those little black fingers start dragging them down! Japan's religiosity is a mix of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism (Can't resist another pair of AA Gill quotes here: "Modern Japanese people get born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist and work Mazda." and "If religions were cars, Shinto would be a wheelbarrow.") and while spirits can be evil or good, Yamada takes the line that even apparently benign ghosts take a ghoulish toll on the living.
I DON'T believe in ghosts. At least I don't interpret them in exactly the way that my popular culture does. There are a number of reasons however why I think that paranormal phenomena should be the subject of an open mind, but not, as Richard Dawkins would say, a mind so open that the brain falls out.
Vertigo was perhaps the best of all such films, because in the end the supernatural becomes superfluous - Hitchcock milked the form of the ghost story for all the suspense he can get, then delivered an ending that can be almost completely interpreted "rationally". Almost completely, because the turn of events remains quite spooky and fatalistic.
Taichi Yamada's Strangers is an interesting variation - a literally haunting representation of the loneliness of urban apartment dewellers which I can readily identify with right now. The author just about avoids falling into the same trap as several recent spooky stories (such as The Eye) where the suspense built up in the first half is squandered once the true nature and vocation of the supernatural threat is revealed.
At the end of the novel the characters agree that their minds probably weren't quite right, but as readers we are pretty sure there were real ghosts involved. Their principal 'victim', a 47 year old divorcee called Harada, had even conducted a bit of empirical research along the way by asking the apparitions of his parents to teach him a card game he knew he didn't know how to play!
Yamada is quite half-hearted about disguising his dead people. In one particular case Harada doesn't twig until the last few pages, but the reader would have to be fairly dense not to be on to this individual from quite early in the story.
The ghosts in Strangers are not especially spectral. The couple that look exactly like Harada's parents did when they died some 40 years previously appear to have moved with the times and are able to go to restaurants and interact with serving staff. There's only one instance of someone actually seeing through one of these apparitions and I rather thought this was an example of Yamada lacking the imagination to find another way to kick off the final act.
Perhaps the main reason why Asian ghosts are so fashionable these days is their basic ambivalence. In the European tradition (seen at its most kitsch in Ghost) the deceased have a simple bi-polar moral status - either they head towards the white light or those little black fingers start dragging them down! Japan's religiosity is a mix of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism (Can't resist another pair of AA Gill quotes here: "Modern Japanese people get born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist and work Mazda." and "If religions were cars, Shinto would be a wheelbarrow.") and while spirits can be evil or good, Yamada takes the line that even apparently benign ghosts take a ghoulish toll on the living.
I DON'T believe in ghosts. At least I don't interpret them in exactly the way that my popular culture does. There are a number of reasons however why I think that paranormal phenomena should be the subject of an open mind, but not, as Richard Dawkins would say, a mind so open that the brain falls out.
- Perhaps this is more of a hunch than a belief, but I have reached the conclusion that events 5 minutes ago, 50 years ago and 5000 years ago are equidistant from the present moment. Whatever Time is, it has no spacial geography.
- I'm with Everett and Deutsch on Quantum Theory. Only a multiplicity of realities makes sense of the evidence.
- At the particle level experimental evidence (the 'split beam/single photon experinment') apparently indicates the likelihood that matter can pass between these different realities.
So for these reasons I walk around with my brain hanging halfway out.
Personal immortality either in pain or bliss seems remarkably unlikely, but the idea that this very spot in spacetime is connected imperceptively to a billion others, and that some of these might just be more connected for, shall we say, aesthetic or contextual reasons, is an interesting notion that I'm not yet ready to surrender.
Eduardo Niebla in Concert
Went to see Eduardo Niebla at the Purcell Room with Miseryguts on Friday night.
My initial sense of jamminess about having got front-row tickets for just £15 was soon dissipated by the realisation that we were sitting to the left side right in front of a massive speaker. The performance was to be live in the visual sense if not in the audio and we struggled to catch the contributions of the guitarist over on the right as he clearly wasn't plugged into our speaker.
Niebla sat in the middle of the trio, a middle-aged Spaniard with the diminuitive stature typical of those born before the death of Franco. The other two kept up the haunched posture of humble acolytes throughout the performance, leaving all the facial contortions to the Master. All three wore darks suits with the slept-in look.
In the thick accent of the Andalus Niebla introduced each piece with a brief explanation of its inspiration and a plug for the CD where the track could be found. "This one is named after a street in the Albacin in Granada, about a time when there was little water and everyone had disease", he would say then lead the others off on a jolly, jazzy little tune that sounded much like the one he called Primrose Hill!
The music itself reminded me very much of Acoustic Alchemy; and would probably be best appreciated in a dark underground bar accompanied by a steady consumption of alcohol. We both felt that we got a bit more into it after a pint during the interval!
The compositions were intricate and pleasurable, but my foot didn't seem to want to tap that much and the mood around us in the auditorium never scaled the heights reached during the Radio Tarifa concert last year. All the same Niebla encouraged his audience (Hispano-Guardian) to clap through a couple of the pieces.
I've said before that nearly all Flamenco-inflected culture "walks the kitsch tightrope" but the gypsy element was quite subdued here - the only really kitschy part being Niebla's little intros. In some respects it looked like he aspires to walk the Modernist tightrope instead - one piece in particular ended with him spending almost half a minute trying to extract some virtually sub-audible whines and scratches from his instrument.
Evie joined us for a drink in the RFH bar afterwards, empty at first then flooded by the exiting audience from the concert there. (Yes, definitely exiting rather than exciting - we tried to guess what sort of concert they had just been to see. Definitely not the WOMAD crowd from the other place! )
Evie had just been to a private view of some installation that involved people walking around with speakers attached to the sides of their heads. She looked worried when I proposed that such events might actually be a form of cultural sado-masochism - the sadistic idiosyncrasy of the artist's inspiration matched with the self-flagellation of the private view rent-a-mob that go around willingly offering themselves up as art-victims.
My initial sense of jamminess about having got front-row tickets for just £15 was soon dissipated by the realisation that we were sitting to the left side right in front of a massive speaker. The performance was to be live in the visual sense if not in the audio and we struggled to catch the contributions of the guitarist over on the right as he clearly wasn't plugged into our speaker.
Niebla sat in the middle of the trio, a middle-aged Spaniard with the diminuitive stature typical of those born before the death of Franco. The other two kept up the haunched posture of humble acolytes throughout the performance, leaving all the facial contortions to the Master. All three wore darks suits with the slept-in look.
In the thick accent of the Andalus Niebla introduced each piece with a brief explanation of its inspiration and a plug for the CD where the track could be found. "This one is named after a street in the Albacin in Granada, about a time when there was little water and everyone had disease", he would say then lead the others off on a jolly, jazzy little tune that sounded much like the one he called Primrose Hill!
The music itself reminded me very much of Acoustic Alchemy; and would probably be best appreciated in a dark underground bar accompanied by a steady consumption of alcohol. We both felt that we got a bit more into it after a pint during the interval!
The compositions were intricate and pleasurable, but my foot didn't seem to want to tap that much and the mood around us in the auditorium never scaled the heights reached during the Radio Tarifa concert last year. All the same Niebla encouraged his audience (Hispano-Guardian) to clap through a couple of the pieces.
I've said before that nearly all Flamenco-inflected culture "walks the kitsch tightrope" but the gypsy element was quite subdued here - the only really kitschy part being Niebla's little intros. In some respects it looked like he aspires to walk the Modernist tightrope instead - one piece in particular ended with him spending almost half a minute trying to extract some virtually sub-audible whines and scratches from his instrument.
Evie joined us for a drink in the RFH bar afterwards, empty at first then flooded by the exiting audience from the concert there. (Yes, definitely exiting rather than exciting - we tried to guess what sort of concert they had just been to see. Definitely not the WOMAD crowd from the other place! )
Evie had just been to a private view of some installation that involved people walking around with speakers attached to the sides of their heads. She looked worried when I proposed that such events might actually be a form of cultural sado-masochism - the sadistic idiosyncrasy of the artist's inspiration matched with the self-flagellation of the private view rent-a-mob that go around willingly offering themselves up as art-victims.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Local Assets
My recent posting on the Bourne Supremacy got me thinking about my own encounters with the espionage community.
Last weekend Miseryguts and I were reminiscing about our visits to the Soviet Union in '84 and '85. We recalled how the KGB agent-provocateurs that sidled up to us with tempting souvenir offers ("meelyatary belts...Russian flegs") were, as they say, straight out of central casting - long brown leather overcoats, high cheekbones and close-cropped hair. This was the first time that I came across the phenomenon that Cold War spies nearly always looked exactly as they were supposed to. Indeed when I first went to Central America in the late 80s I could always spot the CIA men - they were the ones sitting alone at the back of the bar wearing Hawaii shirts and Panama hats. I haven't met any British secret agents but when I do, I expect they will be wearing black tie!
By a curious coincidence when Surfer and I flew into Central America on a TAN SAHSA 737 in 1989 we were unable to sit together and both found ourselves sitting next to CIA agents on opposite sides of the aisle. Mine was quite tame. He described himself as an "Operations Logistics Officer" and spoke quite passionately about his interest in dinosaur fossils. He was on his way to a Honduran military base to install security systems, he told me. Not the license to kill type I concluded. Surfer's was more of a livewire. If anyone remembers Joe Don Baker in the BBC's Edge of Darkness , that's roughly the type. He lectured Surfer on why Daniel Ortega was the "noo Robes-pee-yairr" and confided that his favourite "toon" was the Hallelujah Chorus. Not one to meet the Sandinistas half-way.
On that same flight a family of Cuban stowaways were forced at gunpoint down the aisle and into the rear toilets by US Immigration officers. Once we were airborne one of the Honduran stewardesses started a collection for them in a sick-bag.
The next agency man I encountered on the same trip had actually attached himself to an archaeological dig organised by two Texan Universities. Not quite sure what he was up to there, but interestingly enough my own reason for being in northern Belize at that time was my loose connection to a Cambridge University expedition that was being run by a charismatic Indiana Jones-like figure with el Che's Guerrilla Warfare tucked under his arm - lets call him Ramon. With an everpresent maniacal glint in his eye Ramon was gaily channelling funds donated by his family's extensive network of gullible philanthropist friends towards his own little scheme for stirring up a separatist Maya revolution in Northern Guatemala. (To be centered on that civilisation's final point of resistance to the Spanish, Tayasal on lake Peten Itza) Needless to say I was not the only non-archaeologist attached to this particular archaeological expedition.
Anyway, the CIA agent, whose name I conveniently forget, was seemingly more interested in his own private business activities which involved acquiring land on the cheap in El Salvador - much of the country was then under effective guerilla control and the landowners in these parts were inclined to sell up. Ramon even suggested to me that the guerrillas and the American were in it together.
This is the other truism about Langley's agents in the field - they all seem to be on an exceptionally long leash and are all up to no good in one shape or form. The most disturbing example I know is a man we shall call 'C'. I have to be a bit cautious about what I say about him here, as he is still resident in Antigua as far as I know, and is unquestionably deranged. The strange thing is that your first impression when you meet C, in spite of his uncanny resemblance to Dennis Hopper, is 'harmless old geezer' - one of those occupants of the sixties that never quite broke out and is now holed up south of the border scraping a living making hippy-style costume jewellery.
Now it's a pity I have to be quite so discreet, because the most immediately interesting thing about C in the context of Guatemala is his surname - by extraordinary coincidence his name just happens to be the term that locals use to describe themselves. Yet in fact it is also a name with a great American heritage. A clergyman bearing that name was one of the passengers on the Mayflower and another 19th century ancestor of his famously said "Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth."
Just how much of the truth was being shut out became apparent when C asked V to help him out with his new computer system as a kind of PA-trainer. It seemd that his fortunes had taken a turn for the better when he suddenly and unexpectedly inherited the bulk of the family fortune. Yet after only a couple of weeks in her new job V bolted. She discovered that C had the kind of armoury in his living room that would make even a T800 model Terminator cream in its pants. She also found she had to work with C's "nephew", a much bejewelled young man from Puerto Rico not averse to waving an automatic pistol around. And she found out from la boca del caballo no less, that in his agency days C had been responsible for training Guatemala's deadly secret service unit G-2, to all intents and purposes a death squad. One of their most global media-unfriendly projects was the abduction, rape and torture of Sister Diana Ortiz which occurred at the time I was living in Antigua back in 1989. V also learned quite a lot about C's extra-curricular commercial activities but I think I'll leave those to your imagination.
This December V's brother 'O' told me about another local asset gone bad called Jimmy. Jimmy was a blubbery figure living biblically in a house with six Guatemalan orphans - by biblically I mean rather like a local operative of that other pernicious and seedy global organisation, the Catholic Church. The FBI got wind of this inappropriate conduct and Jimmy was forced to flee back to the States. 'O' recalled that the next they heard of Jimmy was when they saw him on TV in the act of being arrested for first degree murder x 6. His subsequent defence was that the agency promised him that if he whacked those people for them they would forget all about his DIY orphanage.
Perhaps the CIA's most famous alumnus from Guatemala is none other than George Bush (Daddeh Bush). He played his part in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion by re-badging three ships that were to be used in the landings as the Houston, the Zapata and the Barbara! It was Gabriel Garcia Marquez no less, then working as a journalist in Cuba who helped rumble the American preparations in Guatemala. The Yanks added a magical realist touch of their own by failing to account for the one hour time difference between Guatemala and Cuba which meant that the air cover for the poor buggers on the beaches arrived precisely 60 minutes late. It's amazing that someone in any way connected with a clusterfuck of this magnitude could rise to become the dynastic leader of the free world.
Last weekend Miseryguts and I were reminiscing about our visits to the Soviet Union in '84 and '85. We recalled how the KGB agent-provocateurs that sidled up to us with tempting souvenir offers ("meelyatary belts...Russian flegs") were, as they say, straight out of central casting - long brown leather overcoats, high cheekbones and close-cropped hair. This was the first time that I came across the phenomenon that Cold War spies nearly always looked exactly as they were supposed to. Indeed when I first went to Central America in the late 80s I could always spot the CIA men - they were the ones sitting alone at the back of the bar wearing Hawaii shirts and Panama hats. I haven't met any British secret agents but when I do, I expect they will be wearing black tie!
By a curious coincidence when Surfer and I flew into Central America on a TAN SAHSA 737 in 1989 we were unable to sit together and both found ourselves sitting next to CIA agents on opposite sides of the aisle. Mine was quite tame. He described himself as an "Operations Logistics Officer" and spoke quite passionately about his interest in dinosaur fossils. He was on his way to a Honduran military base to install security systems, he told me. Not the license to kill type I concluded. Surfer's was more of a livewire. If anyone remembers Joe Don Baker in the BBC's Edge of Darkness , that's roughly the type. He lectured Surfer on why Daniel Ortega was the "noo Robes-pee-yairr" and confided that his favourite "toon" was the Hallelujah Chorus. Not one to meet the Sandinistas half-way.
On that same flight a family of Cuban stowaways were forced at gunpoint down the aisle and into the rear toilets by US Immigration officers. Once we were airborne one of the Honduran stewardesses started a collection for them in a sick-bag.
The next agency man I encountered on the same trip had actually attached himself to an archaeological dig organised by two Texan Universities. Not quite sure what he was up to there, but interestingly enough my own reason for being in northern Belize at that time was my loose connection to a Cambridge University expedition that was being run by a charismatic Indiana Jones-like figure with el Che's Guerrilla Warfare tucked under his arm - lets call him Ramon. With an everpresent maniacal glint in his eye Ramon was gaily channelling funds donated by his family's extensive network of gullible philanthropist friends towards his own little scheme for stirring up a separatist Maya revolution in Northern Guatemala. (To be centered on that civilisation's final point of resistance to the Spanish, Tayasal on lake Peten Itza) Needless to say I was not the only non-archaeologist attached to this particular archaeological expedition.
Anyway, the CIA agent, whose name I conveniently forget, was seemingly more interested in his own private business activities which involved acquiring land on the cheap in El Salvador - much of the country was then under effective guerilla control and the landowners in these parts were inclined to sell up. Ramon even suggested to me that the guerrillas and the American were in it together.
This is the other truism about Langley's agents in the field - they all seem to be on an exceptionally long leash and are all up to no good in one shape or form. The most disturbing example I know is a man we shall call 'C'. I have to be a bit cautious about what I say about him here, as he is still resident in Antigua as far as I know, and is unquestionably deranged. The strange thing is that your first impression when you meet C, in spite of his uncanny resemblance to Dennis Hopper, is 'harmless old geezer' - one of those occupants of the sixties that never quite broke out and is now holed up south of the border scraping a living making hippy-style costume jewellery.
Now it's a pity I have to be quite so discreet, because the most immediately interesting thing about C in the context of Guatemala is his surname - by extraordinary coincidence his name just happens to be the term that locals use to describe themselves. Yet in fact it is also a name with a great American heritage. A clergyman bearing that name was one of the passengers on the Mayflower and another 19th century ancestor of his famously said "Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth."
Just how much of the truth was being shut out became apparent when C asked V to help him out with his new computer system as a kind of PA-trainer. It seemd that his fortunes had taken a turn for the better when he suddenly and unexpectedly inherited the bulk of the family fortune. Yet after only a couple of weeks in her new job V bolted. She discovered that C had the kind of armoury in his living room that would make even a T800 model Terminator cream in its pants. She also found she had to work with C's "nephew", a much bejewelled young man from Puerto Rico not averse to waving an automatic pistol around. And she found out from la boca del caballo no less, that in his agency days C had been responsible for training Guatemala's deadly secret service unit G-2, to all intents and purposes a death squad. One of their most global media-unfriendly projects was the abduction, rape and torture of Sister Diana Ortiz which occurred at the time I was living in Antigua back in 1989. V also learned quite a lot about C's extra-curricular commercial activities but I think I'll leave those to your imagination.
This December V's brother 'O' told me about another local asset gone bad called Jimmy. Jimmy was a blubbery figure living biblically in a house with six Guatemalan orphans - by biblically I mean rather like a local operative of that other pernicious and seedy global organisation, the Catholic Church. The FBI got wind of this inappropriate conduct and Jimmy was forced to flee back to the States. 'O' recalled that the next they heard of Jimmy was when they saw him on TV in the act of being arrested for first degree murder x 6. His subsequent defence was that the agency promised him that if he whacked those people for them they would forget all about his DIY orphanage.
Perhaps the CIA's most famous alumnus from Guatemala is none other than George Bush (Daddeh Bush). He played his part in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion by re-badging three ships that were to be used in the landings as the Houston, the Zapata and the Barbara! It was Gabriel Garcia Marquez no less, then working as a journalist in Cuba who helped rumble the American preparations in Guatemala. The Yanks added a magical realist touch of their own by failing to account for the one hour time difference between Guatemala and Cuba which meant that the air cover for the poor buggers on the beaches arrived precisely 60 minutes late. It's amazing that someone in any way connected with a clusterfuck of this magnitude could rise to become the dynastic leader of the free world.
Friendship Overrated?
The Long Tail today makes the point that friendship "is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to describing relationships, especially in matters of taste".
Strangers are actually more reliable recommenders which means that social software networks like Friendster are likely to be less effective taste filters than the blogosphere. The latter is more like a trust network, consisting of people that don't hang out anywhere else other than cyberspace.
Indeed it strikes me that part of growing up is gaining the confidence to have friends whose tastes are entirely different from your own.
Strangers are actually more reliable recommenders which means that social software networks like Friendster are likely to be less effective taste filters than the blogosphere. The latter is more like a trust network, consisting of people that don't hang out anywhere else other than cyberspace.
Indeed it strikes me that part of growing up is gaining the confidence to have friends whose tastes are entirely different from your own.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
The Bourne Supremacy
A sequel with the tagline "they should have left him alone" is asking for trouble, isn't it?
When it starts you think, aha, this is going to be one of those complex spy thrillers which require constant focus and attention to the plot, or failing that an index finger resting gently on the rewind button. It doesn't quite work out that way though, as you soon realise that the makers are prioritising frantic motion over plot development and ultimately find disappointingly easy ways out of every complexity that the plot tries to set up. (However the deleted scenes reveal that the script did originally attempt to tie up one or two of the looser ends - such as the body in the basement. )
There are far too many cuts and edits in this film for my taste. As the co-author of Spycatcher with Peter Wright, British director Paul Greengrass was on paper a fine choice for this sort of spookfest, but his efforts to give the many different European locations a gritty, realist feel are undermined by the relentlessly hectic nature of the action.
This is Europe as the West's demi-monde, where the Polizei hunt in packs. For the benefit of his American viewers Greengrass emphasises the otherness of every point of contact that Bourne has with this environment. The phones, the homes, the cars etc. Not a great deal survives intact - Bourne leaves a trail of collateral destruction behind him on Moscow's roads worthy of Team America. (It was actually quite hard not to keep thinking of that hilarious Matt Damon marionette while watching this!)
Julia Stiles is wasted in this movie, Franka Potente quite literally so. Joan Allen plays the archetypal Langley bitch who slowly de-freezes towards the end - in a work environment dominated by uptight salarymen with one eye on their meagre pensions, ice-maidens like this inevitably occupy key strategic positions on the org-chart. Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR) is a convincing Russian hitman, though it is the fact that his character is not a very convincing grungey tourist in Goa that sets up the opening chase sequence. Must have been the silver Mercedes that gave him away!
The Westin Grand in Berlin features quite heavily - the hotel in which I stayed on my only visit to the city back in 1998. It's on the East side of the old divide and still has something of the musty opulence of tyrrany about it. You reach your room by ascending the ornate lift at the side of an astounding 30m high atrium around which the rooms are distributed in an irregular circle.
When it starts you think, aha, this is going to be one of those complex spy thrillers which require constant focus and attention to the plot, or failing that an index finger resting gently on the rewind button. It doesn't quite work out that way though, as you soon realise that the makers are prioritising frantic motion over plot development and ultimately find disappointingly easy ways out of every complexity that the plot tries to set up. (However the deleted scenes reveal that the script did originally attempt to tie up one or two of the looser ends - such as the body in the basement. )
There are far too many cuts and edits in this film for my taste. As the co-author of Spycatcher with Peter Wright, British director Paul Greengrass was on paper a fine choice for this sort of spookfest, but his efforts to give the many different European locations a gritty, realist feel are undermined by the relentlessly hectic nature of the action.
This is Europe as the West's demi-monde, where the Polizei hunt in packs. For the benefit of his American viewers Greengrass emphasises the otherness of every point of contact that Bourne has with this environment. The phones, the homes, the cars etc. Not a great deal survives intact - Bourne leaves a trail of collateral destruction behind him on Moscow's roads worthy of Team America. (It was actually quite hard not to keep thinking of that hilarious Matt Damon marionette while watching this!)
Julia Stiles is wasted in this movie, Franka Potente quite literally so. Joan Allen plays the archetypal Langley bitch who slowly de-freezes towards the end - in a work environment dominated by uptight salarymen with one eye on their meagre pensions, ice-maidens like this inevitably occupy key strategic positions on the org-chart. Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR) is a convincing Russian hitman, though it is the fact that his character is not a very convincing grungey tourist in Goa that sets up the opening chase sequence. Must have been the silver Mercedes that gave him away!
The Westin Grand in Berlin features quite heavily - the hotel in which I stayed on my only visit to the city back in 1998. It's on the East side of the old divide and still has something of the musty opulence of tyrrany about it. You reach your room by ascending the ornate lift at the side of an astounding 30m high atrium around which the rooms are distributed in an irregular circle.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Ichi the Killer
Roger Ebert said of the Spiderman sequel: "Now this is what a superhero movie should be. Spiderman 2 believes in its story in the same way serious comic readers believe, when the adventures on the page express their own dreams and wishes...It's simply and poignantly a realization that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not entirely willing to bear." Now swap Ichi the "nice young man" that wants to rid the world of bullies and Ichi the Killer for Peter Parker and Spiderman and these remarks would still make sense - but you would have to start worrying about the "dreams and wishes" of all those manga readers.
This film has more "oh for fuck's sake!" moments than any I have ever seen. Anyone that walked out of Irréversible will find themselves heading for that exit again. It is surely unmatched anywhere in world cinema for its depraved exuberance. Redeeming features? Quality direction and cinematography guided by a dark sense of humour. Takashi Miike loads scenes of torture with the kind of pulchritude you associate with gentler fare like American Beauty. And in Kakihara a very memorable bad guy, styled like a deeply evil , sadomasochistic Dr Who. My stuffu phase may have to shift into reverse after this. Where can you go from here?
One of the things that fascinates me creatively about manga is the multi-genre nature of the format. Individual characters effectively go around in stylistic bubbles which identify them to particular audience targets. The comic version of Battle Royale mixes pervy panty shots and kick-ass karate with sappy romance. The aesthetics and the ethics seem to stick to the characters rather than the plot - in other words, there's no moral centre. Yet the late Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2002) seemed unable or unwilling to reproduce this technique cinematically.
There was a great piece on The Long Tail blog the other day, titled What is it with the Japanese and Robots? One of the comments on this posting offered the view that "Young Japanese men these days are the products of decades of impotent power-fantasizing...The Giant Robot, like most of Japanese modern pop culture, is rooted in the national experience of being the only country that was attacked with unanswerable nuclear weapons and then promptly demilitarized, after having had a strong warrior culture for centuries."
Cry-baby killer Ichi is himself the bearer of a strange moral duality - he wants to both save and rape his female fixations. I'm sure psychoanalysts and students of Japanese history and culture could have a field day with this. "Don't worry, from now on I'll beat you up", he reassures a girl whose pimp lies in two symmetrical slices at her bedside.
There was one non-gory scene which particularly struck me. One of the most resillient clichés of the action genre is the scenario where the hero finds himself forced to reveal his deadly abilities when, as an accidental bystander, he sees someone being harassed by a group of nasties. The initial intervention is polite but firm, but after provocation bad-guy butt gets kicked quite ferociously. Now Ichi happens into a just such a scene, but one with some disturbing differences. Carrying painful memories of his own experiences of bullying he intervenes when he witnesses a young kid being beaten up on by four of his peers. The gang leader tells Ichi to get lost and kicks over his bicycle. In a flash he's been downed by a vicious karate kick and lies moaning and crying on the ground while the others scram. Miike has reproduced the format faithfully, but his vision of an adult wreaking this sort of violent revenge on schoolkids makes his version anything but hackneyed. A nice twist in a movie that is generally quite twisted!
In conversation last night Miseryguts and I agreed that the Asian horror genre also has a thing about lifts. He remembers vividly the lift scene in the Pang brothers The Eye and I recalled other elevator-phobic incidents in Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes and in Strangers by Taichi Yamada, which I'm in the middle of right now.
This film has more "oh for fuck's sake!" moments than any I have ever seen. Anyone that walked out of Irréversible will find themselves heading for that exit again. It is surely unmatched anywhere in world cinema for its depraved exuberance. Redeeming features? Quality direction and cinematography guided by a dark sense of humour. Takashi Miike loads scenes of torture with the kind of pulchritude you associate with gentler fare like American Beauty. And in Kakihara a very memorable bad guy, styled like a deeply evil , sadomasochistic Dr Who. My stuffu phase may have to shift into reverse after this. Where can you go from here?
One of the things that fascinates me creatively about manga is the multi-genre nature of the format. Individual characters effectively go around in stylistic bubbles which identify them to particular audience targets. The comic version of Battle Royale mixes pervy panty shots and kick-ass karate with sappy romance. The aesthetics and the ethics seem to stick to the characters rather than the plot - in other words, there's no moral centre. Yet the late Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2002) seemed unable or unwilling to reproduce this technique cinematically.
There was a great piece on The Long Tail blog the other day, titled What is it with the Japanese and Robots? One of the comments on this posting offered the view that "Young Japanese men these days are the products of decades of impotent power-fantasizing...The Giant Robot, like most of Japanese modern pop culture, is rooted in the national experience of being the only country that was attacked with unanswerable nuclear weapons and then promptly demilitarized, after having had a strong warrior culture for centuries."
Cry-baby killer Ichi is himself the bearer of a strange moral duality - he wants to both save and rape his female fixations. I'm sure psychoanalysts and students of Japanese history and culture could have a field day with this. "Don't worry, from now on I'll beat you up", he reassures a girl whose pimp lies in two symmetrical slices at her bedside.
There was one non-gory scene which particularly struck me. One of the most resillient clichés of the action genre is the scenario where the hero finds himself forced to reveal his deadly abilities when, as an accidental bystander, he sees someone being harassed by a group of nasties. The initial intervention is polite but firm, but after provocation bad-guy butt gets kicked quite ferociously. Now Ichi happens into a just such a scene, but one with some disturbing differences. Carrying painful memories of his own experiences of bullying he intervenes when he witnesses a young kid being beaten up on by four of his peers. The gang leader tells Ichi to get lost and kicks over his bicycle. In a flash he's been downed by a vicious karate kick and lies moaning and crying on the ground while the others scram. Miike has reproduced the format faithfully, but his vision of an adult wreaking this sort of violent revenge on schoolkids makes his version anything but hackneyed. A nice twist in a movie that is generally quite twisted!
In conversation last night Miseryguts and I agreed that the Asian horror genre also has a thing about lifts. He remembers vividly the lift scene in the Pang brothers The Eye and I recalled other elevator-phobic incidents in Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes and in Strangers by Taichi Yamada, which I'm in the middle of right now.
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