Friday, January 25, 2008
Of Capital NIghtmayors...
Having had a life spent in both the north and the south of England (and with a family in Scotland) and, latterly, living in East Anglia and Surrey but working in the north (Manchester, Sheffield etc) it has been borne home to me that there IS a divide in the country. When, finally, I come to spend most of my time in France, yet continue to do some work in the UK, then what was a feeling, an impressionistic surmise constructed out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak, suddenly becomes palpable.
The South, and London in particular, have an obsessive self-regard, a preoccupation with wealth and status, a presumption of high culture that sucks the energy from the rest of the country, while mocking, arrogantly, it’s parochialism. Its size and mores of disinterested anonymity, its Dysneyesque world of ancient buildings and a thousand ‘things to see and do’ makes it seductive, dream-like, unreal, a place where wraiths live; the natural location for 28 Weeks Later. Since Pepys, Defoe and Dickens documented a century or two of the subcultures of poverty, acquisitiveness and base human drives, among the vile effects of early capitalism, London has established a genealogy of extreme competition redolent of the murderous fight for survival in all arenas of nature.
Marx’s insights about capital and class may equally be applied to the constant war for supremacy at city-level; as if, as writers often portray them, cities are some kind of super-organism. Go north and settlements become less well-endowed, the artefacts of higher culture become sparser and the battles for resources constantly lose out to the capital city. People in the north often display a simmering anger and disgust at the concentration of wealth and obnoxious assumptions of superiority of ‘Londoners’ or ‘Southerners’ - those who live down there, regardless of their often forgotten origins.
And here in le sud sud of France, guess what? People feel the same way about Parisians.
It would take a mammoth act of faith and vision to help people become equal in more than the eyes of the law and the spouted hypocrisy of most politicians who have relocated to the Westminster Village. The hub and spoke economic mechanism of communal living spins too fast, constantly throwing uncompetitive humanity to the very rim of acceptable existence. And even in London, there are further internal hubs and spokes that produce the same centrifugal injustices, in fractals of finer and finer detail.
Best to know what the Mayoral elections are actually about!
Having had a life spent in both the north and the south of England (and with a family in Scotland) and, latterly, living in East Anglia and Surrey but working in the north (Manchester, Sheffield etc) it has been borne home to me that there IS a divide in the country. When, finally, I come to spend most of my time in France, yet continue to do some work in the UK, then what was a feeling, an impressionistic surmise constructed out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak, suddenly becomes palpable.
The South, and London in particular, have an obsessive self-regard, a preoccupation with wealth and status, a presumption of high culture that sucks the energy from the rest of the country, while mocking, arrogantly, it’s parochialism. Its size and mores of disinterested anonymity, its Dysneyesque world of ancient buildings and a thousand ‘things to see and do’ makes it seductive, dream-like, unreal, a place where wraiths live; the natural location for 28 Weeks Later. Since Pepys, Defoe and Dickens documented a century or two of the subcultures of poverty, acquisitiveness and base human drives, among the vile effects of early capitalism, London has established a genealogy of extreme competition redolent of the murderous fight for survival in all arenas of nature.
Marx’s insights about capital and class may equally be applied to the constant war for supremacy at city-level; as if, as writers often portray them, cities are some kind of super-organism. Go north and settlements become less well-endowed, the artefacts of higher culture become sparser and the battles for resources constantly lose out to the capital city. People in the north often display a simmering anger and disgust at the concentration of wealth and obnoxious assumptions of superiority of ‘Londoners’ or ‘Southerners’ - those who live down there, regardless of their often forgotten origins.
And here in le sud sud of France, guess what? People feel the same way about Parisians.
It would take a mammoth act of faith and vision to help people become equal in more than the eyes of the law and the spouted hypocrisy of most politicians who have relocated to the Westminster Village. The hub and spoke economic mechanism of communal living spins too fast, constantly throwing uncompetitive humanity to the very rim of acceptable existence. And even in London, there are further internal hubs and spokes that produce the same centrifugal injustices, in fractals of finer and finer detail.
Best to know what the Mayoral elections are actually about!
Labels: Boris Johnson and others.., Mayor of London: Ken Livingstone
Saturday, January 19, 2008
No Country for Old Men: the film of the book
I read Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, a month or two back, saw the Coen Brothers film yesterday and watched the Newsnight critics half-dismiss it the same evening. There was some praise but, in the main, they felt it was over-hyped. One found the psychopath, Chigurh, robotic, a mechanical killer and the whole enterprise little more than a series of murders, strung together without any deeper meaning. One felt it represented a dark shadow passing over the US in 1980. The third yearned for some humour. They did agree that the dialogue was brilliantly terse.
How curious it all seemed: the literary village people and their tone-for-television views. Feeling somewhat resident of another planet, I was mesmerised by the film. It was essentially faithful to a book which is so spare it feels moulded out of the desert sand, desiccated by its sun and scarified by its wind. It is a relentless battle to oblivion between a fast disappearing morality and a modern world which has little imperative to show any compassion and where the basest human drives inhabit imaginations, leading to mayhem and death. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and the psychopath (Javier Bardem) crisscross the savage landscape, playing a game of chess for the life of a local man (Josh Brolin), whose almost involuntary, mad act is stealing two million dollars from the death tableau of a shootout which has left nearly all the drug runners dead. The sheriff says tiredly that he has been ‘overmatched’ by the killer who employs an icy desire to live up to his promises of retribution towards anyone who blocks his path. Sometimes he spins a coin for their lives, sometimes he doesn’t. He is random and utterly out of a Jungian universal nightmare. He symbolises the crazed world of the gun lobby, Columbine, the deference to and celebration of killing that characterises so much US foreign policy (Vietnam, in the film, acts as a social conditioner, a raison d’etre for characters’ actions). He is a creature too insatiably insane to be called wicked.
All the while, the old ways with horses and neighbourliness is giving way to anonymity and machines, thoughtless, brutal acts and the lure of money and drugs. The resolution is merely a lull in the driving storm of destruction. We do not leave the cinema sated by justice, or think that things might turn out for the better.
It IS exceptionally funny in certain moments. It is full of menace. The dialogue is pure gristle.
Go and see it!
And then see the extraordinary Tommy Lee Jones again in The Valley of Elah. So much in store!
I read Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, a month or two back, saw the Coen Brothers film yesterday and watched the Newsnight critics half-dismiss it the same evening. There was some praise but, in the main, they felt it was over-hyped. One found the psychopath, Chigurh, robotic, a mechanical killer and the whole enterprise little more than a series of murders, strung together without any deeper meaning. One felt it represented a dark shadow passing over the US in 1980. The third yearned for some humour. They did agree that the dialogue was brilliantly terse.
How curious it all seemed: the literary village people and their tone-for-television views. Feeling somewhat resident of another planet, I was mesmerised by the film. It was essentially faithful to a book which is so spare it feels moulded out of the desert sand, desiccated by its sun and scarified by its wind. It is a relentless battle to oblivion between a fast disappearing morality and a modern world which has little imperative to show any compassion and where the basest human drives inhabit imaginations, leading to mayhem and death. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and the psychopath (Javier Bardem) crisscross the savage landscape, playing a game of chess for the life of a local man (Josh Brolin), whose almost involuntary, mad act is stealing two million dollars from the death tableau of a shootout which has left nearly all the drug runners dead. The sheriff says tiredly that he has been ‘overmatched’ by the killer who employs an icy desire to live up to his promises of retribution towards anyone who blocks his path. Sometimes he spins a coin for their lives, sometimes he doesn’t. He is random and utterly out of a Jungian universal nightmare. He symbolises the crazed world of the gun lobby, Columbine, the deference to and celebration of killing that characterises so much US foreign policy (Vietnam, in the film, acts as a social conditioner, a raison d’etre for characters’ actions). He is a creature too insatiably insane to be called wicked.
All the while, the old ways with horses and neighbourliness is giving way to anonymity and machines, thoughtless, brutal acts and the lure of money and drugs. The resolution is merely a lull in the driving storm of destruction. We do not leave the cinema sated by justice, or think that things might turn out for the better.
It IS exceptionally funny in certain moments. It is full of menace. The dialogue is pure gristle.
Go and see it!
And then see the extraordinary Tommy Lee Jones again in The Valley of Elah. So much in store!
Labels: The Coens' killer...
Monday, January 14, 2008
Caution – Lust may not be erotic!
I saw Ang Lee’s latest film at the weekend. I had the same reaction to it as I did to Brokeback Mountain. A long, very stylish but somewhat vacuous film which depended on a single taboo to keep the audiences filing in. In his cowboy predecessor it was, of course, the love that could not speak its name and in Lust, Caution it turned out to be the love that dare not say it was actual sex before the cameras.
Whilst some people might find Lust, Caution erotic (after all, there are people who find all kinds of situations and interactions between humans and objects, birds and beasts, sexually charging) it left me in a state of secondary voyeurism. By this I mean that I find myself disengaged from the visuals of perspiring bodies in unusual positions and watching the camera, watching the action. I wonder whether the director is calling, “down a bit”, “right a bit”, “deeper, deeper”, “what’s your spare hand for, for God’s sake!”, as he orchestrates the action. Or did he lay out a chart of the sex moves and ask them to improvise around them? Whatever, it felt like a fabrication. Not that the filming of real sex has any great interest for me, either. What other people do is what they do and it’s up to them whether they want to beat the daylights out of each other, manacle each other or half-suffocate in plastic bags. It only appeals, in cinematic terms, if it furthers a plot and deepens my understanding of character and the perambulations of humanity. In any case, film relies totally on sound and vision and actual sex is as much dominated by touch, taste and smell which film can never convey, unless it’s a truly remarkable piece of cinematography.
At the end of the day, the attempted graphic realisation of sex in Lust, Caution tries to eradicate doubt as to what is going on and, in doing so, eradicates also the potential for sexual fantasy in this viewer.
I saw Ang Lee’s latest film at the weekend. I had the same reaction to it as I did to Brokeback Mountain. A long, very stylish but somewhat vacuous film which depended on a single taboo to keep the audiences filing in. In his cowboy predecessor it was, of course, the love that could not speak its name and in Lust, Caution it turned out to be the love that dare not say it was actual sex before the cameras.
Whilst some people might find Lust, Caution erotic (after all, there are people who find all kinds of situations and interactions between humans and objects, birds and beasts, sexually charging) it left me in a state of secondary voyeurism. By this I mean that I find myself disengaged from the visuals of perspiring bodies in unusual positions and watching the camera, watching the action. I wonder whether the director is calling, “down a bit”, “right a bit”, “deeper, deeper”, “what’s your spare hand for, for God’s sake!”, as he orchestrates the action. Or did he lay out a chart of the sex moves and ask them to improvise around them? Whatever, it felt like a fabrication. Not that the filming of real sex has any great interest for me, either. What other people do is what they do and it’s up to them whether they want to beat the daylights out of each other, manacle each other or half-suffocate in plastic bags. It only appeals, in cinematic terms, if it furthers a plot and deepens my understanding of character and the perambulations of humanity. In any case, film relies totally on sound and vision and actual sex is as much dominated by touch, taste and smell which film can never convey, unless it’s a truly remarkable piece of cinematography.
At the end of the day, the attempted graphic realisation of sex in Lust, Caution tries to eradicate doubt as to what is going on and, in doing so, eradicates also the potential for sexual fantasy in this viewer.
Labels: Framing sex....
Monday, January 07, 2008
Parents! Get a life and leave your kids alone...
I met a bloke once who got irate with me when I said all private schools should be abolished. He explained that he was (relatively) poor because he was sending all three of his children to private school, just like his parents did with him and his sister. There was no way he would entertain them going to ‘ordinary’ schools because they would be under-educated and fit for nothing. I mused internally that he meant by this, ‘be consigned to the lower orders’.
There have also been a spate of articles recently concerning the degree to which parents are encroaching on their children’s lives in school…and beyond! Not only are they researching for them, helping to write their poems and essays, giving them swotting time and networking good contacts for their field assignments but once they leave school or university, they are preparing them for jobs and even interceding on their behalf regarding pay and rations!
We have reached such a nadir in our consumerist society that our children are becoming our designer dolls. We pour whatever wealth we can scratch together into them and try to sculpt their lives, often towards destinations that we, ourselves, failed to reach. Children are becoming our second chance, our alter egos in life. They are our virtual computer game protagonists, seeking glories in education and work that eluded us, by surmounting obstacles, collecting rewards, climbing the meritocratic ladder.
Where once the very well-off and the aristocracy indulged in this blood-insured road to success, now it has become a widespread obsession. The aforesaid bloke and his ilk are giving up much of their lives to feed the frenzied desire for their progeny’s success. And it will continue in a cycle through oncoming generations.
They don’t stop to wonder about the strange equation that they have created. It is this. If all the energy and resources are poured into the next generation, no-one has a life. Neither the hapless, denuded parent nor the suffocated, manacled child.
I met a bloke once who got irate with me when I said all private schools should be abolished. He explained that he was (relatively) poor because he was sending all three of his children to private school, just like his parents did with him and his sister. There was no way he would entertain them going to ‘ordinary’ schools because they would be under-educated and fit for nothing. I mused internally that he meant by this, ‘be consigned to the lower orders’.
There have also been a spate of articles recently concerning the degree to which parents are encroaching on their children’s lives in school…and beyond! Not only are they researching for them, helping to write their poems and essays, giving them swotting time and networking good contacts for their field assignments but once they leave school or university, they are preparing them for jobs and even interceding on their behalf regarding pay and rations!
We have reached such a nadir in our consumerist society that our children are becoming our designer dolls. We pour whatever wealth we can scratch together into them and try to sculpt their lives, often towards destinations that we, ourselves, failed to reach. Children are becoming our second chance, our alter egos in life. They are our virtual computer game protagonists, seeking glories in education and work that eluded us, by surmounting obstacles, collecting rewards, climbing the meritocratic ladder.
Where once the very well-off and the aristocracy indulged in this blood-insured road to success, now it has become a widespread obsession. The aforesaid bloke and his ilk are giving up much of their lives to feed the frenzied desire for their progeny’s success. And it will continue in a cycle through oncoming generations.
They don’t stop to wonder about the strange equation that they have created. It is this. If all the energy and resources are poured into the next generation, no-one has a life. Neither the hapless, denuded parent nor the suffocated, manacled child.
Labels: Parents, schools and prison...