danohu

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Just back from my first ever encounter with Loesje. Loesje is an international network which tries to spread creativity and political commentary by means of slogans on small posters. That is, groups in each city/country meet, collectively compose texts, which are then spread.

In a strange way, it feels a lot like Amnesty. International network. Events structured around a specific purpose. Mythology just a tiny bit too grand for the organization (including, in Loesje's case, the saccharine story of a Momo-like little girl who has a way with words and a lot of friends). Both very clear in their own identities, slightly askew from the rest of the world but directly engaged with it. Both Good Things.

The German green movement is currently managing a tour de force of succeeding by failing. I guess that's true of most protest movements -- winning is nice, but heroic failures are almost as good for building a movemnt.

( Nuclear energy? Really not all that popular )

The coalition have apparently figured out the root cause of unemployment. It's not that there are more workers than jobs, or that a small army of victims of the cuts are now joining them on the dole. No, they're just lazy; a few weeks of forced labour will sharpen them up, render them employable and thus employed:

where advisers believe a jobseeker would benefit from experiencing the "habits and routines" of working life, an unemployed person will be told to take up "mandatory work activity" of at least 30 hours a week for a four-week period. If they refuse or fail to complete the programme their jobseeker's allowance payments, currently £50.95 a week for those under 25 and £64.30 for those over 25, could be stopped for at least three months.
...
"This is all about getting them back into a working routine which, in turn, makes them a much more appealing prospect for an employer looking to fill a vacancy, and more confident when they enter the workplace. The goal is to break into the habit of worklessness."

I can't do much better than refer them to The Onion:

With unemployment at its highest level in decades, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report Tuesday suggesting the crisis is primarily the result of millions of Americans just completely blowing their job interviews.

According to the findings, seven out of 10 Americans could have landed their dream job last month if they had known where they see themselves in five years, and the number of unemployed could be reduced from 14.6 million to 5 million if everyone simply greeted potential employers with firmer handshakes, maintained eye contact, and stopped fiddling with their hair and face so much.

"This economy will not recover until job candidates learn how to put their best foot forward," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, warning that even a small increase in stuttering among applicants who are asked to describe their weaknesses could cause the entire labor market to collapse.

I saw Eisenstein's film Strike last night. Some friends were saying farewell to a piano, and marked the occasion by showing silent films with (exceptionally good) improvised accompaniment.

I've never watched Eisenstein before, and hadn't known what to expect. Certainly not this. Strike is clever, dense, fast-paced and incredibly passionate. Filmed in 1924, it fictionalises a workers' protest from Tsarist Russia of 12 years earlier. The communists organize in a factory, stir up trouble with their extreme demands (an 8-hour work day! 6 hours for children!), and bring production to a standstill until they are eventually slaughtered by government forces.

What really affected me were the individual stories, told economically along the way. Not only is it emotionally powerful, but I'm boggled by the skill required to recount a biography in a silent minute. Take this section (up until about 1:15). A worker has been wrongly blamed for the loss of equipment, falsely branded a thief:

You can tell this worker is a craftsman. What he values is what he sees all around him: skillful absorption in technical work. He's excluded from his work, his community, his self-respect: the three are identical if you base your identity on what you create. So, craftsman to the last, he creates a neat noose and kills himself. Character, tragedy and plot development, all in 60 seconds. And that's just one of many, scattered throughout the film between the grander (and less interesting) mob scenes.

I've read some complaints that it's too black-and-white, heroic workers under attack from the evil capitalists. Partly true -- and I thoroughly approve of making points through caricature. But only the upper echelon are demonised. The immediate boss comes over as a scapegoat (with the help of an actual goat -- Eisenstein is very fond of animals). A quartet of police spies are sleek, strong, capable -- they're caged animals (see?), who would almost be heroic if they weren't working for the enemy. There's the makings of a caper film here: the stealthy pursuit (first ever spy hiding behind a newspaper?); the camera concealed in a watch; the talented team of skilled infiltrators.

Conversely the proletariat lose their shine when they down tools. The strike may be needed, but it robs the workers of their identities; muscular labourers quickly become slack and foul-tempered. The protestant work ethic is hiding right behind the revolutionary fervour.

And the cinematography! It's not that there are a few clever shots. Almost every moment, the camera is doing something surprising. Eisenstein was shooting this film at the age of 25, doing things few had even attempted before, inventing the techniques as he went along. And he never indulges himself by lingering on some novel device: shots that must have taken massive preparation are over in a couple of seconds, and we move on to the next marvel.

To quote one of surprisingly few reviews which appreciate Strike as more than a sterile piece of film history:

In only the film's first minute, Eisenstein had already put together four incredible shots. First, there's a dissolve from a closeup of an evil capitalist to the scurrying workers providing his wealth and back again. Then a gorgeous crane shot of the enormous factory where much of the film is set (did they have cranes in 1925?). Then we watch some factory workers go about their business from behind a lighted screen, rendering them faceless silhouettes, part and parcel of the machinery of the factory. Finally, our first introduction to the strikers is shot as an upside down reflection from a puddle, so that we start by seeing the reflection of the factories smokestacks, then see the conspirators' feet appear upside down in the shot as they walk through the puddle, only to reappear rightside up in the reflection. And these are all in the first minute of the film, in Eisenstein's first feature film.

Have you ever heard the Orson Wells War of the Worlds radio broadcast? The one which supposedly caused mass panic, and certainly made Welles' name?

It's available on archive.org -- and it's very, very good. The genius is how intentionally clumsy the whole thing is: the musical interludes, the interviewees who don't know what to say, the broadcaster gradually sliding from workaday reporting into astonished horror:

the programme is clearly framed as a broadcast within a broadcast. Then comes the neatly devised sequence of weather report, musical interlude (from the non-existent Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York), news flash about peculiar explosions, more music, more announcements, rambling interview with Professor Pierson, head of the Observatory at Princeton (a gruff and bumbling and highly recognisable Welles), followed by the brilliant on-the-spot reporting sequences. [source]

Here is the script, incidentally. And no, I don't know why it's on "sacred-texts.com" either.

Erik Davis earlier this year wrote a great article about Cthulhu. More specifically, about the appeal of cute Cthulhu toys.

Part of the appeal is in taming the terror, creating a playable-with version without entirely losing the power of the original. Cute Cthulhu has a something in common with Mornington Crescent; they're respectively vaccinations against the fears evoked by Lovecraft and Kafka. And they get extra fun and power by combining the opposites of terror and cuteness

Then again, maybe cuteness is all part of Cthulhu's plan. Suppose you're an ancient intellect, vast and unsympathetic, aiming to drive humans crazy and bend them to your will. What better method than a cuckoo strategy? Impersonate a baby or kitten, and quickly gain a devoted entourage of kawaii-cultists:

here is the great secret, my fellow mortals: cute is the true horror, the ultimate obscenity. Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions.

* Davis is a writer in the style I love, and I suspect everybody else hates: dense, flowery, packed with extended analogies between very different areas. I adored his book Techgnosis, loosely based around comparisons between how we related to gods and to computers. I'd recommend it vigorously, but it doubtless infuriates as many people as it enraptures.

Last week most of the world agreed a ban on geoengineering -- that is, on trying to counter climate change by large-scale modifications of the atmosphere or landscape.

At the risk of revealing the Enlightenment demon inside my treehugging persona: this ban strikes me as a Bad Thing. Or somewhat backwards, at least: there's no outright ban on activities that cause global warming, just on those aiming to control it.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to distrust geoengineering proposals. Large-scale engineering projects have a tendency to centralise money and power, cost more than planned, cause large and unexpected side-effects, and wind up corrupt and unaccountable to the people they affect.

But a blanket ban? Surely there exists some engineering intervention which could have a good effect on the climate. As one generally critical article puts it:

everything that matters most about each of these proposals in terms of deliberation about their plausible effects, their costs, their risks, their benefits, their stakeholders differ from one another in absolutely indispensable ways. And it is hard to see why, given these differences, anything much about the relative success of one of these efforts would necessarily justify confidence that any of the others would have comparable success.

If the projects are so varied, doesn't it make much more sense to evaluate them indivudually? Try out the safest-seeming ones, prepare for the worst, and hope the benefits outweigh the side-effects?

It probably won't matter much, in the end. I can't imagine global-scale projects being stopped by a vaguely-worded agreement in a mostly-overlooked international conference. Besides, it doesn't apply to the USA -- and we all know that is the best source of megalomaniac mad scientists, green or otherwise.

Something I find shocking, but nobody else seems to have much noticed: there are 18 elected MEPs who have not been allowed to sit in the European Parliament.

The Treaty of Lisbon is to blame -- or rather, the EU Council and Commission's reluctance to implement awkwardly democratic parts of it. So the new unelected positions created by the treaty were filled immediately after ratification. The elected positions created -- 18 new MEPs, to take office immediately -- remain unfilled almost a year later.

There are a bunch of -- frankly ridiculous -- procedural excuses for keeping the MEPs out of parliament. The real reason seems to be that, in some countries, the MEPs elected were from opponents of the national government. Thus those national governments have taken advantage of the (extensive) procedural uncertainty to keep their opponents out of Brussels.

France is the main villain here. By the 2009 election results they should have 2 new MEPs: one UMP (conservative) and one Green. Sarkozy doesn't like this; he'd rather replace the Green with a socialist, taking them from the French parliament rather than the previous EU election candidates. The French Prime Minister beautifully explains that appointing MEPS would avoid the "useless controversies" involved in following the previous election results, or holding a new election.

Because the Parliament wants all the new members to arrive simultaneously, none of them can take office until France sorts itself out. So MEPs elected in Sweden or Spain (which sensibly sorted out their rules before the 2009 election) can't vote because Sarkozy doesn't like the French greens. And all the other EU centres of power are willing to let France slow things down; it's not worth rocking the boat just to demand implementation of an election result.

In fact, nobody seems all that bothered. Admittedly the Mail and the Telegraph objected -- not to the failure of democracy, but because they (wrongly) believed that the disenfranchised MEPs would still be able to claim pay and expenses.

I also probably wouldn't have noticed, if I hadn't come into contact with one of the affected MEPs, Amelia Andersdotter from the Swedish Pirate Party. She's also one of the most coherent, inspiring and intelligent politicians I've ever encountered.

The pirate movement are a bit like the Greens -- some members are just interested in homoeopathy or downloading True Blood, but the geeky core have a very persuasive economic and social programme. Amelia's definitely part of that core; she has not only an impressive knowledge of trade treaties and EU procedures, but more importantly the ability to fit the details into a broad picture of how they are changing society. I'm a fan.

Of course it's equally outrageous that obnoxious-but-elected politicians are kept out of parliament (the extra UK MEP would probably be a Tory). Still, I can't help being particularly infuriated that a politician with so much to say is being excluded.

[disclaimer: this post is based on a lot of confusing and contradictory information, and I've almost certainly misunderstood some of the details]

Following

khalinche's example, I'm going to try writing a daily lj/blog post through November, as a kind of ersatz NaNoWriMo. This strikes me as an excellent idea, pilfering the best bits of nanowrimo (friendly pressure and a vague sense of community), and making it an excuse to write things I already want to write.

On day one, though, I'm already half-cheating with a couple of links. First is something head-slappingly obvious in retrospect: if you want social/political critique in China, science fiction is the place to look:

Who says that science fiction/fantasy is only good for escapism? Over the course of two hours we got: the Communist ideal as science fiction; designs for anti-urban-demolition weaponry, to be distributed to the populace; both internet firewall technology and anti-firewall-technology as China's two greatest inventions since the compass; correlations drawn between The Matrix and Lu Xun; multiple references to Liu Xiaobo's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I have never heard any Chinese writers speak as incisively or as passionately about the Chinese condition as did these few sci-fi writers tonight.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, none of the authors he mentions are available in translation. Shame; publishing Chinese SF in English must make more financial sense than publishing Serious Literature.

Second is a delightfully vicious profile of Peter Thiel -- billionnaire co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook. What's depressing is not so much the unpleasantness of his politics (he's hardly the only person with scary views), but that, through wealth, he has more power than any thousand of the rest of us.

Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.

Even here there's a silver lining; Thiel has just spent $100,000 to support marijuana legalisation in California.

Charles Stross rages against Steampunk

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right?)

...which is almost appealing enough to make me try NaNoWriMo. Almost

This month I began working in a little place called Atelier Überall, which pretty close to my concept of the ideal place to live and work. I'm writing this as people gradually arrive for a video/dance/performance-art party that's promising to multiply nervous influxes to over-saturate and over-load me. i.e. just about the right level of creative shamelessness* for me.

The rest of the week there's also almost always _something_ else happening: gatherings of VJs, flamenco classes, video filming, artists using it as a studio, musicians practising in basement, in addition to the Berlin-standard assemblage of designers, writers, illustrators and the occasional geek. It's possibly the busiest place I've ever worked -- but somehow in a non-distracting way. It's pretty wonderful being able to spent a couple of hours focussed on work, and know that when you look up _somehing_ interesting will be happening. Doesn't hurt that, by and large, they're good at what they do, or at least seriously dedicated to it, which all works together to make it a place I totally trust.

* I'm tempted to write 'pretentiousness', because that's the only word I can think of in the vicinity. But I hate the implications of dishonesty or social climbing. What I really mean is people being sufficiently self-confident and true-to-themselves to create things regardless of the likelihood that some people will snigger. There doesn't seem to be a word for that.

Radio 4 has a lot of radio plays -- some good, some not. I'd love to sometimes listen to them -- but only the good ones. Where can I find reviews, to help me manage this?

More generally: where can I find (presumably online) reviews of (spoken word) radio programmes?

Brief moment of despair at the ~~British~~ media*

Mr Miliband's intellectual ability is widely admired but his presentational skills were questioned when he allowed himself to be photographed - at the height of the speculation over a potential coup - grinning and holding a banana.

* OK, I guess the media elsewhere can be just as bad (often in different ways); I've just had more exposure to the British bits :(

I stumbled onto Sheila O'Malley's blog this afternoon, and instantly knew I need to read everything she's ever written. Especially the book reviews -- e.g. on Harriet the Spy, Brideshead Revisited, Notes from Underground, and above all this essay on love and AS Byatt.

Talking of Byatt, The Guardian have a wonderful video interview with her; I assume they'll eventually turn in into an article, but they're taking their time about it. What's particularly delightful is how it works as a conversation rather than a potted Q&A. She covers several topics -- social realist novels, facebook, religion, big brother -- but keeps returning to a central theme of the limitations of culture concerned entirely with reality and people, where interest in life as it is has supplanted religion. Also, as one of the comments points out, it's somewhat intriguing that she has a roll of tape balanced on her knee throughout.

More superficially:

The Spectator on Michael Moorcock: "He is generally sound on religion and politics". Yes, really.

A plea for intergenerational peace from Rhian

Remember the park benches in Transmetropolitan? A park in China tries doing it with spikes [NB: Quirky news from China, hence probably exaggerated or downright false]

EU Observer, via Crooked Timber:

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo's colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a "visionary hero."

"Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero," he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. "And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?"

er...Yes. Yes, we really, really should.

FWIW, Louis Michel is also a former Belgian foreign minister, and has been deeply involved with the Congo at a national and European level.

That TV series pilot we released last week? With the $6000 budget and the cast of unknowns? More popular than True Blood and Doctor Who combined.

yeah, ok, some obvious caveats apply

Modern Arab/Arabic fiction -- any recommendations? Ideally not something too downbeat or unrelentingly political, and available in translation.

For the record: there are few corners of the internet that I loathe as completely as I loathe twitter. If I love you very much, it's possible I may still read your tweets. But it'll be through gritted teeth, with constant frustration at the impossibility of having a decent conversation there, and I'd much, much rather follow you to almost any other online forum.

Quiet saturday, slowly working in a mostly-empty office, catching up after a week of Doing Stuff every evening. No great loss in missing a weekend; we still have no summer, only weather than entices you to the park and then dumps rain on you.

Now settled in yet another new room, the 6th this year. Room-hopping has been fun (if intermittently terrifying), but this time I might manage to stay put for a few months. I'm no longer quite so full of optimism and indecisiveness, and I seem again to be acquiring more possessions (i.e. books). Besides this latest home is a good one. It's full of stereotypically-chatty Latin Americans, giving me a much-needed shove towards properly learning Spanish. Plus the big sitting room, with a constant stream of visitors, makes it feel like I'm living out some Ibsen drama.

The office has meanwhile sprouted a workshop. This month they've mostly been getting excited by making plastic out of cornflour. It's great fun, in a nostalgia-for-primary-school way -- even for me, with my instinctive discomfort at anything playfully creative.

Also exciting atm: Henry Miller. Nabokov. MIA. Edmund White. Cinnamon in coffee.

Nick Clegg is now promising "the most significant programme of empowerment... since the great enfranchisement of the 19th century. The biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy."

er...you don't think there might have been a few important bits of empowerment since then, Nick? Like, votes for women? Or, for that matter, votes for non-rich men? Or education and healthcare; IMO the opportunity to be literate and not dead is reasonably empowering. I'm all for libel reform and regulation of CCTV, but they're hardly comparable to universal suffrage.

Profile

danohu

My Website

January 2019

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Page Summary

Syndicate

Style Credit

Style: Starflower for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Rounded Star 005

Page generated May. 31st, 2025 01:44 am

|

Recent Entries

Expand Cut Tags

Loesje

(no subject)

The unemployed can also levitate by simultaneously trampling one another

Eisenstein: Strike

War of the Worlds

Cute Cthulhu and the Kawaii-cultists

Geoengineering banned

How to ignore an election, EU-style

I can't believe it's not nanowrimo

(no subject)

Atelier Überall

radio reviews: where to find

(no subject)

Books to fall in love with

Accomplishments of Leopold II

Pioneer One

(no subject)

Twitter

(no subject)

Over-excited Clegg

Profile

January 2019

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Syndicate

Style Credit