Progress – why?
E.M. Ward, The South Sea Bubble (1846), a Hogarthian subject in the Tate Gallery (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The recent purchase of Instagram by Facebook amused me, not least the idea that a company valued at 100 times’ earnings feels it can spend $1 billion on another company that makes no money at all. Basic economics obviously don’t trouble people’s consciousness any more now than they did in the South Sea bubble.
The other reason why it seems strange is that the company’s product is a method of making new photos look old and elegantly faded, so that they are reminiscent of the funny colours on all those polaroids of kids playing in paddling pools, blowing out candles, smiling on a bike. We spend all our childhood wanting to grow up, and all the rest of our lives wanting to recapture the aimlessness of childhood. Failing that, we’re quite pleased with photos that can instantly take us back to the technology of the 1970s and 1980s we remember.
The draw of the past seems to get stronger the more our lives progress away from simple pleasures. We acquire lots of possessions and responsibilities, and live in an annoying bubble of self-imposed pressure to keep pushing boundaries, to keep “winning”, getting promoted, buying a house, getting married, having oodles of kids and still being really groomed, cooking wonderful nutritious meals and raising the offspring to be productive and successful themselves.
Nostalgia and fake photos are little reminders of the world we imagined as children, when we still looked forward to adventures which didn’t, mysteriously, involve paying bills, ironing or working in offices.
Cabin in the woods of your mind
Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I dislike horror movies. The world is full enough of evil people to find the idea of watching sadistic cruelty on screen very unappealing. Perhaps people like the comparative relief that their own everyday hassles aren’t quite on the same scale. A nasty boss making you work late is after all not quite as bad as being eviscerated alive.
Last night, at a friend’s insistent suggestion, I watched Cabin in the Woods. It’s billed as a “knowing” horror movie, so I was expecting something similar to Scream. The basics of the plot are equally derivative: five good-looking students go to a deserted cabin for the weekend, and are pursued by zombies – cue lots of shots reminiscent of Romero’s Night of the living dead. It then turns, surreally, into a quite breathtakingly ambitious metaphor for global capitalism. It’s impossible to discuss in more detail without revealing the plot, but I’m giving away nothing more than the trailer by saying that the whole scenario is a kind of virtual reality set-up controlled by “administrators”; this is relatively obvious from the first frame of the film.
The characters are sacrificial lambs being offered up as a ritual, with different countries around the world setting up different horror tropes in the hope of catching and killing the correct number and type of victims. Screens flash up regularly, showing the progress of the world’s capital cities. “Only the US and Japan are still in the running”, one of the administrators comments. They run an office sweepstake on how the victims will die. They talk about probabilities and statistics a lot, and the necessity of maintaining the order of things within the horror genre – the virgin cannot die before the stoner. The order of things is clearly not just the genre, but our passive desire to be entertained, without reflecting on the hidden Pandora’s box of trapped individuals in other parts of the world that enable our lives to function smoothly. So there was quite a lot more to it than the mindless combination of blood and sex I was expecting – worth seeing in a totally wacky way.
Related articles
- Grizzly Review: The Cabin in the Woods (grizzlybomb.com)
- Talking Spoilers for Cabin in the Woods (tor.com)
- Cabin In The Woods – Blazing Minds Film Review #ApolloRhylFilmReviewer (blazingminds.co.uk)
What the world worries about
In a bored moment, I wondered whether climbing really is all that dangerous – so of course I googled it.
As most people know – or certainly most people who’ve worked with Google AFS – the predictive text that shows up when you type in a search phrase is ranked in order of search frequency, excluding the rude searches (which unfortunate search editors have to filter out). This is what I came up with:
It’s quite amazing that people with sufficient education to spell “statistical likelihood” feel the need to question evolution.
I never did quite figure out the climbing stats, although it seems to be about 20 times as dangerous as skiiing – surprisingly, since I don’t know anyone who decides to hop on the end of a rope after a few hours of Glühwein and Rösti.
Don’t watch Sunshine
![Cover of "Sunshine [Blu-ray]"](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51r0GZfxl5L._SL300_.jpg "Cover of \"Sunshine [Blu-ray]\"")
Cover of Sunshine [Blu-ray
In fact, I think I’ll try to weave the question of whether people like The Beach into all first dates from now on. It’s almost excusable to like it if you are 23 and have substance abuse issues of your own – so presumably you watch it with a kind of nervous Schadenfreude. In any other circumstance, it’s just a plot full of holes and some annoying camera work.
Anyway, Sunshine is about some astronauts who go on a suicide mission to “fix” the sun by lobbing a bomb into it. It had Solaris written all over it from the first frame, it completely misses the sense of mystery that makes Solaris a great film. Garland seems think that if his script says “something strange happens” every 20 minutes, this will do the trick.
When the chief scientist destroys half the spaceship by forgetting to change the angle of the shields, it struck me as completely ludicrous to have a procedure prone to potentially fatal mistakes being executed by one single person. If the name of the ship (Icarus II) hadn’t already told us this was a doomed mission, we could now be quite certain that none of the characters would be doing a victory lap around Houston.
In fact, things became more predictable than I could possibly imagine, in a really bad way. A bit like Event Horizon, only minus any of the psychological tensions, and with a bit of theosophy thrown in.
Giant waste of £1 and two hours, apart from the fact that Cillian Murphy is beautiful.
How will anyone know?
Like many people my age, I was very sad to hear of Whitney Houston’s death. It seems ridiculous being really upset all week about the premature death of someone you never even knew, but the voice is so familiar, and such a long background soundtrack to people’s lives, that you can’t help feeling like something which touched your life is gone forever.
Image via Wikipedia
When I was nine, my best friend Vanessa used to do these little dance routines in her living room. She’d always pick Kylie Minogue’s version of Locomotion. I never particularly liked it, and eventually I got to pick my own track, so I picked How Will I Know. The voice was so special, and the simple lyrics appealed to me, even though at the time I had no idea why people said “he loves me, he loves me not”, when they picked petals off daisies. So we did this dance routine, which consisted mainly of alternating legs on the spot, followed by flicking arms out sideways and trying to imitate the head flick at the same time. I’m pretty sure it looked like a malfunctioning robot. Vanessa even had a tight pink lycra skirt like the one Whitney was wearing in the video. It looked a tad better on Whitney’s long, pin-thin legs.
In many ways the arrangements she was given were at odds with her voice, being neither the Britney Spears style of snappy, bass-heavy backing tracks that beef up the pop princess’s little voices, nor having the simplicity to allow the voice to develop depth. I hated Greatest Love of All, and all those other syrupy tracks with keyboard backing, although recently I’ve rediscovered So Emotional. I was never a massive fan until I heard My Love is Your Love, which is still my go-to song for a slightly melancholy drive. It is no coincidence that the songs with almost no backing track were by far the best.
I was 14 when The Bodyguard came out, and I loved every minute of it; it ticked all the boxes of what teenage girls aspire to, even if the bit with the samurai sword was a little weird – the clunky symbolism of self-sacrifice somewhat passed me by at that age. The thing in the film that really struck me even at the time was how thin she was. She looked so rakish that I got a little paranoid about my own normal sized thighs. The scene where she is going running in leggings shows legs which are like matchsticks all the way up. I sometimes wonder whether the drug addiction just spiralled out of taking ephedrine or whatever other slimming pills she probably used. Even “normal” parties are full of people telling you that cocaine is the answer to all your weight problems. I have never taken any notice of this advice, but then I’m not scrutinised in the glare of the world’s media every day. And I don’t have nasty old French alcoholics telling me “I want to f*** you” on TV shows: I watched the clip of Serge Gainsbourg telling an 18-year old Whitney Houston that, and the poor girl looked so humiliated. All she’d done was go on the show, sing Greatest Love of All, and then gets this repulsive old man saying disgusting things to her, while the chat show host tries to smooth things over, but quite obviously finds it absolutely hilarious.
No one knows why some people succumb to drugs, and some don’t. Drug addicts are assumed to be weak people, and this always seems to be given as the primary reason to judge them. We always say they’re “throwing it all away”, “wasting their talent”, implying that they have control over their addiction and have made an active choice to take drugs, while simultaneously criticising them for losing any perspective on the usual priorities of friends, family and professional commitments. I’ve really no idea what serious addiction is like, or why it happens, so how can I sit and judge an addict?
I’ve had some crazy obsessions in my life, like the time I was working in a factory, and it was so soul-destroying that I became completely addicted to watching Baywatch when I got home. I was asked to do an extra shift once, and hid in the toilets in tears because it would mean missing an episode. I’ve also variously been obsessed with running, rowing, climbing, boys at school, ten letter words (I made huge lists of them when I was 11), Ben Affleck, crochet, my violin, chocolate, wine, Lord of the Rings, and sudoku. It’s just that none of those is particularly self-destructive, apart from at one point perhaps the wine and the running.
People take ghoulish pleasure in the nadir of drug addiction, wanting to read about the fall from grace, to see the pictures of some beautiful and talented celebrity all ashen-faced and emaciated. The press reports dress this up as “concern”, while really driving home the message that this person is a basket case. I guess to a certain extent it’s natural to want a superhumanly talented person to be human on some level, to have some flaw or weakness that makes them likeable, but it’s still not for us to judge.
The drug addicts I know are high achievers who feel the weight of expectation most keenly, precisely because they will go the furthest. It’s almost as if success scares them, because if you’ve reached a great pinnacle through both skill and effort, you are expected to keep making the effort to stay there. And then maybe you start doubting whether you deserve your success, and start to wonder whether it’s all worth it.
It’s all very sad, but I don’t think she threw anything away. She didn’t want it any more, so I’m just happy that she lived at all.
Related articles
- Whitney Houston (sterlingsop.wordpress.com)
- I Miss Whitney Houston Already (yourinfolinc.wordpress.com)
- A Look Back At Whitney Houston’s Fashion Evolution (thegloss.com)
- The X Factor to Honor Whitney Houston, Hire Female Judges (thehollywoodgossip.com)
- Rest in Peace, Whitney Houston (thehaints.wordpress.com)
- The Greatest Love of All (takeheartlauriesessa.wordpress.com)
Even food has a hierarchy
I somehow feel the need to share a little slice of my sister’s working life. She works as a City secretary, which she doesn’t enjoy a whole lot, given the fact she has a postgraduate degree on top of an Oxford degree. It’s hard work, but unrewarding, and people are quick to judge secretaries as stupid.
She came home the other day, and told me she had been asked to attend an evening client event. It was a private viewing at an art gallery (of course), and her task was to greet clients as they arrived, and cross them off the list – the clipboard girl, basically.
So far, so normal for random secretarial duties. The less normal part was that she and her colleagues were told in no uncertain terms that they were not permitted to eat any of the canapés, much less drink any alcohol. Apparently, it would be in “inappropriate” for the secretaries to mingle with the clients or to eat any of the food even when no clients were around.
“Arrangements will be made for assistants to eat before arriving”.
During the evening, this little huddle of lesser people started chatting to the caterers, and told them they weren’t allowed to eat. The caterers were so scandalised by this that they went off and made extra canapés, which they smuggled to the secretaries without their bosses noticing. Those sort of moments always end up being rather like smoking behind the bike sheds (or what I imagine that was like, since I was too chicken), and consequently enjoyable. Still, it’s a bit pathetic treating grown women who earn a salary as if they were 12-year-olds.
To top the evening off, my sister recognised one of the clients’ names on the list. It was one of her Oxford classmates, whom she greeted, and directed up the stairs to the party, while she remained downstairs, chained to the clipboard.
Valentine’s regrets
Image via Wikipedia
The ballerina Marianela Nunez was in Trevor Sorbie this morning, having her nails done. First, I saw a bright pink trainer walk past me; it barely seemed to touch the ground, moving along on springs, rather like people do in Nike ads. The way she walked, and her absolutely emaciated frame, made it very obvious she was a dancer, and I recognised her face straight away, before the nail lady walked up, consulting her clipboard, and announced “Marianela?” in the general direction of both me and her.
No one recognised her at all; she is one of the most successful principal dancers of the Royal Ballet, and has been for five years. It would be a rather schizophrenic life, being world-famous in front of packed houses of ballet lovers at night, and completely anonymous during the day. If combined with the apparently very poor salaries – which I never quite understand, given I pay £75 for a seat – I can see why someone as completely gifted and young as Sergei Polunin would go off in a fit of pique. It must seem a lot more pointless than many badly paid jobs, since it’s these people’s entire lives, and bodies they have honed for years.
Still, the Royal Opera House is one of the best things about London, even if it is packed with philistines who are only there to be seen. I of course appreciate the art, which I also know very little about. There have been so many lovely evenings there over the years. Taking my father to see Wagner’s Ring was a highlight, even if I wasn’t particularly enamoured of the five hours of Siegfried. La Sylphide was quite beautiful, and La Fille mal Gardee was an unexpectedly touching romance. I think I cried, for no particularly good reason.
I keep all the programmes, and sometimes keep the tickets, depending on how much the evening meant. A ticket to La Boheme on 24th May 2010 is always in my purse. I thought about that evening today again. Perhaps it was all those cheesy poems printed in the Times for a Valentine’s day special. Naturally, they brought home to me just how much loving someone matters, or not even just loving someone, but being with someone, facing the world head-on, not flapping in the lonely wind of solitude, an abandoned tent of mistakes and fear I can’t face alone. A lifetime of shared memories is all that people live for. I was reminded of my grandmother, whose 97 year old face looks around sometimes, waiting for her late husband to walk through the door.
The poem was When You are Old, by W.B. Yeats:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Related articles
- Royal Ballet’s youngest ever Principal quits a week ahead of show (dailymail.co.uk)
- Asphodel Meadows, Enigma Variations, Gloria (dancereviewer.wordpress.com)
The Germans – almost always the baddies
Image via Wikipedia
Another night in the giant multiplex at Westfield, watching Sherlock Holmes. In the first few frames of the movie, I see that familiar gothic typeface, known in Germany as Frakturschrift, and my heart sinks.
The scene is Strasbourg in 1891, and the German inscription says something like “1. Jubiläum Elsaß-Lothringen” – which means “first anniversary of German Alsace”.
That historical storyline is a great backdrop to paint these martial warlords in all the glory of their staccato orders, and great black coats with too many buttons. It was a clever move, simultaneously looking at the great Franco-Prussian conflicts of the 19th century, but also looking forward to to what modern warfare really meant; how physically damaging and powerful infantry warfare was.
It is the laziest narrative context for a power-crazed despot whenever the script requires it, but that image of Germany will never, ever die. I went to the bagel shop up the road last Saturday, and the headline on the Jewish Chronicle outside said that one-fifth of Germans are anti-Semitic. I find that hard to believe on the one hand, but on the other, it still seems to be acceptable even in this country to come out with quite amazingly judgmental comments like, “he walks like a Jew” – someone actually said that at work the other day. What the hell does it mean? I guess it’s the same universal human desire to slot their fellow humans into frameworks that require no nuance, and allow no room for ambiguity, but it so very intellectually low; a pathetic attempt to differentiate oneself from everyone else, putting oneself in the “majority” view.
In a big meeting some time ago, I was talking about the difficulties we were having with a project plan, and said something vaguely along the lines of, “the problem is, I don’t have a final solution to this either without additional budget”. Someone laughed, and said “Yeah, you’re German, so I guess you would say that”. It took me quite a long time to make the connection, and even longer to fully grasp that he did indeed mean to make a flippant remark not only about the death of 6 million people, but about the very tangible fact that my grandfather could for all he knew have been involved. All he saw was a witty opportunity to make someone feel very uncomfortable, and to effectively silence me for the rest of the meeting. I was so angry I could not have remained at all professional, or for that matter avoided crying, if I’d made any sort of reply. There were another 12 people around the table, and not one of them said anything.
When Germans find out that my mother is English, they will say that they could always tell I wasn’t “100%” German, which is pretty funny, since up to that point they generally talk about how I look quite Eastern European. In fact, one particularly ancient old lady once helpfully informed me that I was the kind of girl Hitler would have liked. I informed her that this was not a compliment.
When English people find out I’m German, they will variously claim that I sound a bit German – very unlikely, since it isn’t my first language – or that with blonde hair and pale blue eyes, they had assumed I must be of some sort of Nordic origin. It’s frustrating. I’m just me, the same way everyone else is, and I love the erudition and artistry of my country that seems forever at arms’ length now. Goethe, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Nietzsche, Rilke, Möricke, Hölderlin, Schiller, Dürer, Kleist, Mendelssohn, Bach, Beethoven, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Luther, Handel, Einstein, Lucas Cranach, Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, Engels, Marx, Kant, Schopenhauer, Lessing.
When I ran out of instantly recall halfway through writing that list, I flipped through a list of famous Germans in Wikipedia; the number of entries in the “prominent Nazis” category is longer than the list of artists or scientists, and I don’t think any of the ones born in the last century stayed in Germany after the war. I probably talk about this topic a lot, but the creative poverty of such a rich nation makes me so sad, and so worried about people’s failure to learn the lessons of history. Next thing we know, some EU bureaucrat will be coming back from Budapest, having injected a huge wodge of cash in a frighteningly corrupt regime, and perhaps waving a bit of paper stating “peace in our time”….
Related articles
- Fighting the Fourth Reich (musingsofablogger.wordpress.com)
- Court Keeps Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ From German Newsstands (nytimes.com)
- German Secret Police Keep Spying On The Wrong People (businessinsider.com)
Bush and political criticism
Cover of Enemy of the State
I don’t suppose I’m that close to American politics – not living there and all. An American boyfriend of mine got really irritated with me for expressing my views on the absolute greatness of Clinton, even in 2001. “You don’t know anything about it”, he said, but was pretty vague about what exactly I didn’t know. I watched his reelection in 1996 with baited breath, just somehow loving the verve, the dynamism, the obvious intelligence.
I guess I just thought of him as a force for good for the world, regardless of his personal shortcomings – or perhaps because of them. He seemed capable of assimilating other points of view, and other ways of living, which made his foreign policy decisions somewhat more nuanced than Bush’s. I guess in the end his impact was limited, as a result of that Congress vote in 1994, so it’s all the more impressive that he made any headway – mainly by not really changing too much.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence of the global economic boom that the 1990s were also an amazing time for films. I guess it all came down to money, and if you can get the funding, you can make anything, no matter how controversial.
One of those movies is Enemy of the State, which I’m just watching on TV. I saw it when it came out, and remember thinking it was all a bit conspiracy-theorist nonsense. Governments don’t spy on their citizens, I thought. It would not get made today, and the main reason is that none of it turns out to be that far-fetched in the truly digital age.The Patriot Act made it all a reality.
Related articles
- Internet Blackout Highlights Failure of American Politics (alhittin.com)
- George W. Bush: The GOP’s forgotten man – Reuters Blogs (blog) (blogs.reuters.com)
The pursuit of nothing
Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral (Photo credit: teelanovela)
Friday night came around again, and once again I was busy trying to clear out my inbox, in an effort to attain the elusive “strategic” Monday morning. This is the as yet unfulfilled vision of having time to think about process structures, and figure out a cohesive plan, rather than the headless rush I’m in at the moment with collateral management agreements. It was going well, but before I knew it, it was 9 pm, so I cleared out of the empty office, got the same sandwich from M&S at the station as yesterday, and slunk off home for an evening of solitary web browsing and TV, which seemed like a big reward.
After watching Margin Call earlier in the week (a guy at work laughed at me for watching a movie about my job in my spare time), I was struck by the resemblance to a short story by Heinrich Böll. A line in the absolutely excellent film about the very ordinary greed of Wall Street bankers was an exact parallel to “Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral” (anecdote about how to reduce work ethic).
In the film, the main character, played by Kevin Spacey, grudgingly agrees to stay on in a job that involves taking apart the investment bank he has worked for on a multi-million-dollar salary for 36 years, with the following justification:
I’ll do it John, but not because of your little speech, but because I need the money. I’m not sure how it could possibly be after all these years, but I need the money.
It’s so common, that corrosive idea of “need” in the City, and I suffer from it too – although hopefully not to that extent.
In the short story, a Greek fisherman sits by the harbour in a deckchair, dozing in the bright sunshine, with the morning’s catch visible under the awning of his little boat. A tourist shows up and gets all enthusiastic about fishing in general when he sees the catch, and starts going on about how much money the guy could make if he was out on his boat all day. He could then buy another boat, and employ people, so that he could massively increase his sales and make loads more money. So the fisherman goes, “and what use would that be?”, and the tourist replies, “then you could sit in a deckchair and do nothing all day”.
We all do a bit of that, aspiring to something that we’ve long since forgotten the purpose of. I’m working these crazy hours because I feel guilty about how much I am paid, and want to justify it in some way. I’ve taken such a well-paid job because I want to take 6 months off and go climbing, and I want to spend all that time climbing because I want to improve, so that one day those cool routes are within my reach. Then when I’ve maybe done them, I’ll go and settle down to the domestic life I already had many years ago, before I started all this vain self-improvement.
Related articles
- Margin Call – Review (moviegeekblog.wordpress.com)
- Film aims to make bankers human (bbc.co.uk)
- Watch This Wordy Margin Call Scene Reduced to Lots of Uncomfortable Silences (entertainment.time.com)
- Film Review: Margin Call (2011) (filmblerg.com)
