I was sorry to learn that Paul Scofield died yesterday, adding another item to my list of regretting-I-didn't-dos, namely, that I didn't get to see him act in person. Here follows the rest of the list of things I regret I didn't do:
-See Screamin' Jay Hawkins perform in person
-See Otis Redding perform in person
-Screw that blond guy in York
-Be Serge Gainsbourg's (well-paid) psychoanalyst
-Live in Copenhagen for the year between highschool and undergrad
I think that's about it, these days. The shortness of the list may reflect hubris but probably only reflects the fact that I'm young yet.
And seriously, Paul Scofield as Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons has to be one of the best things ever. The almost ridiculous comparison between that fucking tour de force and Charlton Heston's turn in the 1988 film actually does a latter a favour by making it seem like high comedy - Bright Eyes from Planet of the Apes travelling back in time to Tudor England - instead of just shitty. Also, the Paul Scofield version has one of those entertainment cues that make me cry automatically-like. The point where he tells Wendy Hiller that she must understand why he's doing what he's doing is guaranteed to sqeeze a few tears out of my steely macho eyes. So is:
-'Grandma's Hands' by Bill Withers
-The bit in the Iliad where Hector says bye to Andromache
-The sight of Tom Hanks crying
-The sight of Will Smith crying
-'Try a Little Tenderness' by Otis Redding
giovedì, marzo 20, 2008
mercoledì, marzo 19, 2008
God Save the Queen (and Us from Ourselves, While You're In a Saving Mood)
Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. Do you mean that British youth didn't spring spontaneously as fully-formed drunken destructive nihilistic assholes from their mothers' wombs, like one of God's more capricious racial punishments in the Old Testament? That perhaps they had adult role models in terms of becoming drunken destructive nihilistic assholes? That perhaps their main fault is being drunken destructive nihilistic assholes in their own cities instead of travelling abroad and subjecting browner people to their charms, like their parents and grandparents?
Dear me. I was all set to buy a Mosquito for our stoop in case any English youths accidentally stumbled on to the Eurostar and blundered their drunken destructive nihilistic assoholic way to my neighborhood, but now it looks as though I'll have to get a gun.
I know I rib on Americans a lot, and the French, and Belgians when it's not Lent (four more days until Easter and I can start again! Wheeeeee!), but the British, that paler, richer half of my genetic and cultural heritage, never fail to fascinate me, nor most other Europeans. While Italians and French content themselves with typical linguistic uncreativity to calling them 'Roast Beefs', Germans have thought up the much more descriptive name 'Inselaffen', or 'Island Monkeys'. Although it only indirectly touches on notions of the British caste system that oppresses its own natives in a way other European countries only oppress browner people that they considered furriners, I feel it sums up to a tee the British notion that there is something subhuman and deeply unaccountable about themselves, as nicely written up in this rant by Philip Hensher.
I'm enjoying the Independent at the moment, by the way, and regretting I didn't switch from the Guardian long, long ago. And the round of being fascinated with the British that I'm currently in sprang from reading another rant in the Independent about how having CCTV cameras everywhere is actually okay. I feel there's something wrong with people being filmed, their movements being recorded, even if it is in public spaces, without certain guarantees about how that footage will be used and kept - deeply wrong. And yet Johann Hari makes a good point. Could he make a good point if he was writing in other countries? I don't know. And hence, the fascination with the British.
Dear me. I was all set to buy a Mosquito for our stoop in case any English youths accidentally stumbled on to the Eurostar and blundered their drunken destructive nihilistic assoholic way to my neighborhood, but now it looks as though I'll have to get a gun.
I know I rib on Americans a lot, and the French, and Belgians when it's not Lent (four more days until Easter and I can start again! Wheeeeee!), but the British, that paler, richer half of my genetic and cultural heritage, never fail to fascinate me, nor most other Europeans. While Italians and French content themselves with typical linguistic uncreativity to calling them 'Roast Beefs', Germans have thought up the much more descriptive name 'Inselaffen', or 'Island Monkeys'. Although it only indirectly touches on notions of the British caste system that oppresses its own natives in a way other European countries only oppress browner people that they considered furriners, I feel it sums up to a tee the British notion that there is something subhuman and deeply unaccountable about themselves, as nicely written up in this rant by Philip Hensher.
I'm enjoying the Independent at the moment, by the way, and regretting I didn't switch from the Guardian long, long ago. And the round of being fascinated with the British that I'm currently in sprang from reading another rant in the Independent about how having CCTV cameras everywhere is actually okay. I feel there's something wrong with people being filmed, their movements being recorded, even if it is in public spaces, without certain guarantees about how that footage will be used and kept - deeply wrong. And yet Johann Hari makes a good point. Could he make a good point if he was writing in other countries? I don't know. And hence, the fascination with the British.
martedì, marzo 18, 2008
Reading television
Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then I watched most of it, after Hilts let me know it existed in television form. I know that points to an obsession with the book or with Jared Diamond, but nobody has replaced Steven Mithen in my pop-science affections. The thing is that the F-word is on a huge Russia kick at the moment and about to wade into the Gulag Archipelago, and he reads slowly so he'll be in there forever, but he was jealous that I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I figured if the documentary was halfway decent it'd get the points across to him without him having to break his Russia run.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.
It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.
The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.
Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.
Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.
Oh, and by the way:
"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."
Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.
Cry, the Beloved Penguin
So at the moment I'm reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, as I found it for Euro O.50 at the Oxfam bookshop here. God, I love that bookshop. They have no idea how much Anglos in Brussels would be prepared to pay for books. I should tell them, really, because it all goes to a good cause, but I'm having a hard time giving up the possibility of getting a new copy of Heart of Darkness every time I need one for a mere Euro 0.25.
As far as a book goes I'm not crazy about but it's full of facts that I didn't know and that are so neat. For example, did you know a key barrier to the domestication of the zebra was that, unlike horsies, they can follow the trajectory of a lasso as it sails through the air and then dodge it, so they were almost impossible to catch unharmed? Neat. And of course some of his ideas are also interesting. For example, he goes on a bit about the role of literacy as a way to monopolize rather than simply preserve knowledge - in that one small class is literate, and therefore has access to written information that the illiterate classes can't hope to access reliably or first hand.
That got me thinking about lawyers and about how the legal systems of most countries are so inaccessible to the defendants and accusers who use them. It's rather frightening, the degree to which a largely legally illiterate population trusts its fortunes to a small legal class who we believe has access to all this legal literature and jargon and history we can't possibly understand.
So today I'd like to say bravo to this crazy chick who managed to get £10 million more than her estranged husband was offering even though she sacked her lawyers mid-trial and represented her own fantasistic ass. The outcome probably says more about the clarity of UK divorce laws than about her competence, but nonetheless, what a gutsy move. Now she has £10 million more than she might have had, that she can devote to ruining the livelihood of our East Coast natives, because baby seals are cuter than the Canadian aboriginal population.
Just remember, beeyatch, those cute little pups grow up to eat the cutest animals of all:
As far as a book goes I'm not crazy about but it's full of facts that I didn't know and that are so neat. For example, did you know a key barrier to the domestication of the zebra was that, unlike horsies, they can follow the trajectory of a lasso as it sails through the air and then dodge it, so they were almost impossible to catch unharmed? Neat. And of course some of his ideas are also interesting. For example, he goes on a bit about the role of literacy as a way to monopolize rather than simply preserve knowledge - in that one small class is literate, and therefore has access to written information that the illiterate classes can't hope to access reliably or first hand.
That got me thinking about lawyers and about how the legal systems of most countries are so inaccessible to the defendants and accusers who use them. It's rather frightening, the degree to which a largely legally illiterate population trusts its fortunes to a small legal class who we believe has access to all this legal literature and jargon and history we can't possibly understand.
So today I'd like to say bravo to this crazy chick who managed to get £10 million more than her estranged husband was offering even though she sacked her lawyers mid-trial and represented her own fantasistic ass. The outcome probably says more about the clarity of UK divorce laws than about her competence, but nonetheless, what a gutsy move. Now she has £10 million more than she might have had, that she can devote to ruining the livelihood of our East Coast natives, because baby seals are cuter than the Canadian aboriginal population.
Just remember, beeyatch, those cute little pups grow up to eat the cutest animals of all:
lunedì, marzo 17, 2008
For love or money money money money money money money money money money money
I'm sick. I blame stress; the past two weeks have been fucking busy and life in general busy. Last night I realized that I owe everybody a phone call, visit, or email - that I've been neglecting everything. I suppose I could stop blogging and instead devote that half-hour each morning to being better at keeping in touch, but blogging is a luxury that's become a necessity for me - a place to sneeze out all the crap in my head, that's more optional for other people to read than a communiqué addressed directly to them. It organizes me, brain-wise. And yet, since it's public it doesn't become a self-perpetuating self-examination circle about my relationships or the people I don't like or the things I hate about myself. Because frankly, I'm afraid of boring you all.
Of course there's not much to sneeze out today blog-wise, and there is a strong risk of boring you all, as my cold has crowded all the thoughts out of my brain. Consequently the most exciting thing I can write is that I bought a fantastic super snuggly bathrobe in Düsseldorf last week and this weekend I've been breaking it in, and today I will continue breaking it in - a tough job but it must be done. On the topic of shopping, I'm very excited about the catastrophic plunge of the dollar which looks set to continue as the Fed debates another Super Interest Rate Cut. If this keeps up, I'm buying a fucking MacBook Pro in New York in October! Finally! It means I'll have 'made it', as those things are what yuppies who are scared to drive buy instead of an Audi.
There's talk now about a European interest rate cut to make the euro a little cheaper, and I can definitely understand it. I know from work that the shitty dollar is really hurting some businesses here even as it helps others. The thing is, the European Central Bank is shit-scared of inflation for a reason. In the U.S., and Canada too, inflation hurts old people with savings the most, and nobody in the powerful classes cares about them except in the eight months before a general election. But in Europe, it'd hurt the state coffers the most, as they have social safety nets for the old people, the unemployed, university students, et cetera . . . there's a reason besides wanting to look more competent than those pesky Americans that governments here don't want life to get more expensive. So I think I may indeed get to have my MacBook Pro this fall. Except, of course, I work for a U.S.-based company, and our central accounting is in dollars. Eep. All I can say is thank Jeebus they'd have to fire me in a socialististic country where everybody gets a golden parachute.
You see what I meant in the first paragraph? I don't want to write about how crises in international fiscal policy may or may not lead to me getting a MacBook Pro without people feeling like they don't have to read what I write. Thank you for the airtime, Blogspot.
Of course there's not much to sneeze out today blog-wise, and there is a strong risk of boring you all, as my cold has crowded all the thoughts out of my brain. Consequently the most exciting thing I can write is that I bought a fantastic super snuggly bathrobe in Düsseldorf last week and this weekend I've been breaking it in, and today I will continue breaking it in - a tough job but it must be done. On the topic of shopping, I'm very excited about the catastrophic plunge of the dollar which looks set to continue as the Fed debates another Super Interest Rate Cut. If this keeps up, I'm buying a fucking MacBook Pro in New York in October! Finally! It means I'll have 'made it', as those things are what yuppies who are scared to drive buy instead of an Audi.
There's talk now about a European interest rate cut to make the euro a little cheaper, and I can definitely understand it. I know from work that the shitty dollar is really hurting some businesses here even as it helps others. The thing is, the European Central Bank is shit-scared of inflation for a reason. In the U.S., and Canada too, inflation hurts old people with savings the most, and nobody in the powerful classes cares about them except in the eight months before a general election. But in Europe, it'd hurt the state coffers the most, as they have social safety nets for the old people, the unemployed, university students, et cetera . . . there's a reason besides wanting to look more competent than those pesky Americans that governments here don't want life to get more expensive. So I think I may indeed get to have my MacBook Pro this fall. Except, of course, I work for a U.S.-based company, and our central accounting is in dollars. Eep. All I can say is thank Jeebus they'd have to fire me in a socialististic country where everybody gets a golden parachute.
You see what I meant in the first paragraph? I don't want to write about how crises in international fiscal policy may or may not lead to me getting a MacBook Pro without people feeling like they don't have to read what I write. Thank you for the airtime, Blogspot.
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