15Oct08 — 0

Bwanngg!

The Economist plays air plastic guitar:

AS THE music industry searches for a new model in the age of digital distribution and internet piracy, it is getting a helping hand from an unexpected quarter: video games such as “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band”, which let people play along to songs on simplified imitation instruments. “These games are revitalising the industry,” says Aram Sinnreich, an industry expert at New York University. “They’re helping as both a revenue and an advertising platform.”

Boggle at this:

…Aerosmith have made more money from “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith”, a version of the video-game that features the band, than from any of their albums.

14Oct08 — 0

Credit Crunch Leads To Balance-Of-Satire Surplus

Here are two I enjoyed: Hopi Sen’s “What would Bertie Wooster do?” and The Daily Mash’s “Government takes 60% stake in Al-Qaeda”:

The prime minister said : “We must ensure that, as an institution, it continues to provide a useful, ongoing threat without actually blowing things up.”

The Daily Mash is a free online site. The Guardian is a national daily newspaper that sells for 80p a copy and uses some of this money to employ an “award-winning” cartoonist to draw George Bush as a monkey.

UPDATE: This is interesting too.

29Sep08 — 3

How I Became A Blogger

My getting into this game had nothing to do with some kind of 9/11 epiphany. No, it was the insanity of the property bubble that started me writing spoofs and screeds on the Web, originally at the excellent, skeptical, principled, and free Motley Fool UK site. I retired from posting on its “Property: Markets and Trends” (PMT) forum back in 2004 when I gave up predicting doom, because it was clear that the banks were going to keep inflating the bubble long beyond insane, with a post entitled “I Was Wrong” containing the words:

[I have] left the PMT building, shaking [my] head in disbelief.

If you want to read any more of my ramblings (rarely about property these days, I must admit) then google for “PooterGeek”.

So long, fellow Fools…

I sold all my shares a few weeks ago, but not having any stock market investments or a mortgage aren’t going to protect me from the recession that’s coming. We’re all going to Hell in a sub-prime, self-cert handcart.

I wrote the following in 2002. It doesn’t seem quite so silly six years later:

Panorama: The Stupidity Scandal

OPENING: MAN IN POLO SHIRT SCRABBLING UNDERNEATH FRUIT MACHINE IN SUBURBAN LONDON PUB.

MICHAEL BUERK: [VOICE RESONATING WITH EARNESTNESS] In 2002 John was a buy-to-let landlord with 4 properties on his books, but by 2005 his business had collapsed and John’s own home was repossessed. Later that same year his wife left him, citing “irreconcilable differences (in IQ)”. Now he is reduced to hunting for loose change on the sticky floors of the saloon bars where once he prophesied a perpetual rise in house prices. He is not alone in his misery. You probably know someone like him yourself.

John is but one of millions of victims of what many are already calling the biggest financial services scandal of the 21st century. During the early noughties thousands of financial products were knowingly marketed to greedy and fearful customers who shared a single fatal handicap. This vulnerability was ruthlessly exploited by representatives of the high street banks, building societies, insurers and fund managers. And now the victims suffer in silence; their only crime?: gross stupidity.

INTERIOR OF HOSTEL. HUNCHED FIGURE PERCHES ON EDGE OF SINGLE BED CLUTCHING BUNDLES OF CARRIER BAGS FULL OF SCRAPS.

VICTIM: Yeah, I took out a mortgage for seven times my actual salary, that’s right. But I was misled. Look, I’ve still got the documents.

[RUMMAGES AROUND IN BAG AND PASSES CRUMPLED PAPERS TO INTERVIEWER]

BUERK: Here on page three in 30-point Helvetica bold it says:

[READS] “Your home is at risk if you do not keep up payments on a mortgage or any loan secured on it. Sign below and you might as well shoot yourself in the groin with a sawn-off. Would anyone in their right minds pay what they’re asking for that place? Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”.

BUERK: It seems pretty unequivocal. How could you not see that there was an element of risk involved in your investment?”

VICTIM: Look, this technical stuff may seem obvious to the likes of you with your Oxbridge education, but some of us aren’t so lucky. It’s people like us these clever money types take advantage of. They exploit our, our…

BUERK: “Stupidity”?

VICTIM: Yeah, that’s right. See what I mean? It’s only people like you who know big words like that. And you run the show. What hope have the rest of us got?

BUERK: We confronted Stephen Wassock, head of BarNatLloydBC’s consumer banking division.

SMARMY MAN IN SUIT SHUFFLES UNCOMFORTABLY IN SEAT, CITY-OF-LONDON SKYSCRAPERS FORM BACKDROP.

SUIT: We believe that we learned lessons from the earlier pension and endowment mortgage misselling scandals. Many regulators claimed then that the risks were not made clear to potential clients. This time, not only did we make the risks clear, we actually made a feature of them.

Even the names of the products were designed to prevent any confusion at all on the part of the buyers; our “Mug-Punters Pension Plan (Extended Terms)”—or MuPPET for short—was promoted in a campaign that made clear that the first three years’ payments would go entirely towards buying a BMW for a git in Armani. Look, he’s on the cover of the brochure. Giving the reader the finger.”

BUERK: Not only that but, “Extended Terms” meant that pensioners will actually go on paying into their funds after their retirement…

SUIT: Yes. But we told them that too. On the first page, next to the picture of Thora Hird eating dog food.

BUERK: But the figures show, that despite your supposed warnings, this was one of your most popular products?

SUIT: [SHRUGGING] What can I say? People are st- still free to choose any rival home for their life savings.

BUERK: Are you aware that focus group work commissioned by your own company revealed that, in 2002, the year of their purchase, many MuPPET buyers had voted as “Greatest Britons Ever” Robbie Williams, Princess Diana and Bob Geldof—even after being informed that Geldof was, in fact, Irish?

SUIT: [TOUCHING NOSE AND GLANCING TO ONE SIDE AT LAWYER OUT OF FRAME] I don’t recall that data coming to my attention. We, er, have huge quantities of research on our desks in any given year. Besides, those are the sorts of mistakes anyone can make. Geldof lived in Chelsea for ages, didn’t he?

BUERK: Panorama has evidence that, despite the horrible consequences we have outlined in this programme, totally unrestricted selling to the stupid continues. Even now, the financial services companies are using sophisticated postcode profiling techniques to target direct mail campaigns specifically at the homes of the chronically dumb. We spoke to one insider who was afraid to be identified for fear of reprisals from idiots.

SILHOUETTED FIGURE SITS IN CHAIR IN OTHERWISE EMPTY ROOM

SILHOUETTE [VOICE DISTORTED]: I can say that, yes, we do look for those who have a proven record of long-term stupidity—maxing out credit cards, subscribing to “Hello!“, participating in Big Brother polls—and promote our most obviously crazy mortgage products at them.

BUERK: You use the phrase “obviously crazy”, but you are a seasoned professional. How can ordinary halfwits, many of them incapable of pointing to Iraq on a map of the World, hope to see the potential pitfalls in your loans?

SILHOUETTE: How can they not?! [WAVES SHEET OF PAPER] This one, for example, offers you ten times your salary secured on the future productivity of your offspring.

BUERK: “Future productivity of your offspring”?

SILHOUETTE: If you default then, once they reach sixteen years of age, your kids are taken from you to work as bank clerks until they die.

BUERK: That’s horrific.

SILHOUETTE: Have you ever tried bringing up teenage children?…

BUERK: Well, er,

SILHOUETTE: It was enormously popular in Japan…

[EMBARRASSED SILENCE]

SILHOUETTE: Anyway, who are you to get on your high horse? How much did they pay you for presenting Nine Nine N-

[INTERVIEW IS CUT OFF ABRUPTLY]

BACK IN THE SALOON BAR. JOHN IS HOLDING FORTH AS HE ATTEMPTS TO PRISE TWO ONE-POUND COINS APART.

JOHN: Of course people just didn’t understand the economics of supply and demand. The value of shares can go down as well as up, but you can’t live in a share certificate can you?

[PAUSES AND SMILES TO ALLOW BRILLIANCE OF HIS ANALYSIS SINK IN.]

JOHN: Houses are different.

BUERK: So “different” that their prices fell steeply in real terms immediately after your own property purchases?

JOHN: Yeah, but that’s the banks, you see, talking the market down, so they could repossess the hard-won assets of entrepreneurs like me. Britain’s a small country with a growing population. There’s actually a lot of divorced people, graduates and immigrants out there, freezing in ditches, desperate for somewhere to live, but they’re afraid to buy because the so-called experts keep telling them that values are going to carry on falling. I blame the government.

BUERK: Reasoning like this finally led to John being clinically certified as “intellectually disadvantaged”. He has been given a place in a refuge and a the charity Compassion for the Stupid is fighting for compensation on his behalf.

If you would like to help John, and others even less fortunate, please make a careful note of the number we will show at the end of the programme.

If you are afraid that you yourself might be stupid, and don’t wish to suffer similar misfortune, please make a careful note of the names of the people listed in the credits, add your name to the list and send it, together with five pounds, to each of them. They, in turn will send you five pounds. Within weeks you will be a millionaire.

25Sep08 — 2

Palin Derangement Syndrome—PalinDrome?

You could argue that Mick Hartley won this game when he collected

Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal.

from The Huffington Post, but I think quoting Naomi Wolf is cheating. Here’s a good one from yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Roger Cohen writes:

From an inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty, American exceptionalism has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by “one-worlders” (read Barack Obama) and who believe it’s more important to know how to dress moose than find Mumbai.

That’s Palinism, a philosophy delivered without a passport and with a view (on a clear day) of Russia.

There are some real reasons to pause before voting for Sarah Palin. Why do supposedly serious commentators need to drift off into a Fiskian fantasy world to find others?

25Sep08 — 1

How iRoll

Some time back, I raved about the freedom my fat, ugly iRiver gives me compared to an iPod. Now you can make your iRiver free-er or liberate your Apple MP3 player with the marvellous new version 3.0 of Rockbox, the open source firmware replacement. It works with lots of other models of portable music jukeboxes and it’s easy to install.

23Sep08 — 0

Bloke-tastic!

And now a post combining football and science:

Imagine a robotic David Beckham six times smaller than an amoeba playing with a ‘soccer ball’ no wider than a human hair … with all of the action happening on a field the size of single grain of rice.

Yes, it’s “Nanosoccer“:

[S]occer nanobots, operated by human players via remote-controlled magnetic fields and electrical signals, slide tiny discs around on a 30mm x 30mm playing field. The human players view the competition through an optical microscope

[via Slashdot]

Depressingly, if you look at the results from the wider RoboCup 2008 World soccer championship (held in China this year), the bloody Germans seem to dominate the winning positions, though the UK seems to have crept into the first place group in the “Secondary Dance” category. Presumably this is the robot equivalent of the FIFA Fair Play Trophy.

On a related matter, I heard on the radio this morning that a Welshman has been convicted of “racially aggravated” abuse of an English family visiting from Bolton. Some Preston North End fans might be surprised (and relieved) at this, given that the relevant legislation was already in place at the time of the final of the 2001 Championship play-offs in Cardiff.

23Sep08 — 0

“That they may see your good works”

I like that one of the authors of this US paper describing gene therapy to restore sight in sufferers from a rare form of blindness, itself a refinement of a treatment first given in the UK, is called “Elizabeth Windsor”:

“One of the patients said that the dim red light from his alarm clock had gotten so bright that it bothered him,” said Artur Cideciyan, a University of Pennsylvania opthamologist and co-author of the study. “He had to turn away from it while he was sleeping.”

22Sep08 — 4

If Only They Could Both Lose

I have been known to have fun at the expense of Chelsea and Manchester United on this site, but following their meeting yesterday, it’s time for me to invite my reader to extend some sympathy to the latter at least. Watchers of Premiership football who value the contribution to the league of Manchester United’s modest and under-appreciated players1 and coach, especially their gracious responses to the judgments of match officials, should be relieved that Man U managed to claim a point this weekend at Stamford Bridge, a point that will be valuable in that impoverished club’s struggle to avoid relegation this season.

Man U climb out of the relegation zoneMan U climb out of the drop zone

(In a pleasing illustration of Man U’s currently misplaced arrogance, the club doesn’t appear on the league table on the front page of its own Website because the lowest position displayed is tenth.)

  1. I particularly enjoyed the commentator on Radio Five Live describing Ronaldo having to have his chains removed before he could join the game as a substitute. [↩]
12Sep08 — 2

Timing

This afternoon, I walked through my door and picked up this week’s local free newspaper, The Brighton and Hove Leader. Amongst the insert spam included today was a glossy advert for Forbes TV rentals, inviting me to hire a flatscreen TV in time for the Beijing Olympics 2008 and a brochure inviting me to come along to the “Marketing Suite” this Saturday (tomorrow) for free champagne and canapés at the launch of some Barratt new-build “penthouse” two- and three-bedroom apartments in Hove.

10Sep08 — 1

Special End-Of-The-World Science Edition

Years ago, PooterGeek featured the “Exxxtreme Mini-Bears”, tiny, hardy, beautiful living creatures called tardigrades. Turns out they are even hardier than thought. Some of them can survive being sent into space. The “TARDigrades in Space project is, of course, going by the acronym “TARDIS”. How long before the BBC sues?

This is also a lovely phenomenon: teenagers playing online games applying the scientific method—or rather a scientific method—successfully without realizing it:

A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a “siege princess,” running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. “They’d be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive,” Steinkuehler recalls.

That’s when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.

They were using the scientific method. They’d think of a hypothesis — This boss is really susceptible to fire spells — and then collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn’t, they’d improve it until it accounted for the observed data.

…

This makes sense if you think about it for a second. After all, what is science? It’s a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master.

Baggage Reclaim covers one of the other projects aimed at detecting Dark Matter. Using only a black pudding mounted inside a microscopically clean kettle and protected only by kevlar flat caps and heavy metal T-shirts, the north of England’s finest boldy go.

05Sep08 — 2

Temper Temper / Pro Tempore

I keep meaning to write something about the response of the liberal Left media to the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States—there are parallels with the way parts of the Right responded to Bill Clinton’s sexual incontinence—but, as I bring my fingers to the keys, I keep seeing the same shade of red that sometimes washes in front of my eyes when I am in the company of over-educated1 and/or posh people who are nodding at each other admiringly and talking shit. Don’t get me wrong: I love posh people; it’s just that gajillions of air miles, multiple degrees, rooms full of books, and broadband Internet access render certain prejudices inexcusable.

(When the redness descends, I sometimes have to slip away for a moment and sit on the edge of someone’s bath, where I swear like a cabinet maker who’s just put a chisel through the palm of his hand until the World’s colour balance is restored. I’m no longer as much of a fan of Doonesbury as I used to be, but yesterday evening I was actually in my own bathroom when I heard parts of a radio documentary on 4 that seemed to be full of such people: Quentin Blake, for example, sneering at Garry Trudeau’s draftsmanship—hah!—Matthew Parris comparing the apparent irony and sophistication of Doonesbury strips with the usual “big-headed” impression he gets of Americans. BBC Radio 4 should start offering its regular listeners courses of antihypertensives. God knows, with my family history of cardiovascular disease, I can barely afford to listen to the station these days.)

Perhaps I’ll have a go at the Palin thing when I’ve calmed down a little. In the meantime, here are a couple of posts, one from Shuggy and one from Norm that overlap somewhat with what I might try to say.

  1. people schooled beyond their capacity for reason [↩]
03Sep08 — 10

Question Time

I’ve just had an email from Yvette Cooper. My first thought was: “Bloody hell, after all these years!” Then I remembered that, since leaving college, I have become a washed-up nobody and she has become a member of the Cabinet with two houses—both of which I am paying for. Not that I’m bitter.

Coincidentally, property was the subject of her Labour Party bacn, entitled: “Because fairness isn’t just a word”. She and her colleagues in the government want to do something to revive the housing market, including helping frustrated first-time buyers in their efforts to buy a depreciating asset with money they don’t have—or “trying to get on the housing ladder” as Yvette puts it. This is going to involve their spending more of my money. You can read the details of the upcoming tinkering here.

After getting a First in PPE from Oxford, Yvette went on to go get a Master’s in Economics from Harvard the LSE. You’d have thought someone might have mentioned to her—or indeed that someone might have mentioned to someone in the government1—that speculative bubbles and Ponzi schemes are fairly easy to identify (especially in markets with a well-characterized history of them) and that a lot of trouble can be saved by intervening in them early on, in this case, for example, by enforcing the laws against fraud properly to prevent reckless lending.

Anyway, is any currently-renting member of the current Cabinet likely to take advantage of this generosity with other people’s money to add a central London one-bedder to his or her property portfolio now? Or have they finally spotted a pattern?

UK house market price trendsCan you guess what it is yet?

  1. Oh yes, people have, repeatedly, for years. Didn’t listen though, did they? I wonder why. [↩]
01Sep08 — 6

He Came From Planet Bathos

Some might question my claim to geekhood on the grounds that I have never read Tolkein or Herbert. Frank Herbert’s Dune is frequently described as the best science fiction novel ever. Over the past few weeks I have been reading a little bit more of it every evening before going to sleep. Whatever else it is, Dune is an extraordinary feat of the imagination. Anyone, like me, coming to the book fresh, but familiar with last century’s speculative fiction, will be struck immediately by how influential it was. Half the genre creations produced in the forty years since it was written seem to have stolen ideas from it.

I’m not giving anything away by saying that a population of sand dwellers called the “Fremen” plays a significant part in the plot. I am about half way through and, so far, Herbert has introduced us individually to several proud, hardy warriors who say things like “They have my countenance!”, use insults like “spawn of a lizard!”, and wield both knives fashioned from the teeth of giant sand worms and exotic, mighty names like “Stilgar”, “Jamis”, “Farok”, and “Liet”. Yesterday evening, I was reduced to giggles by the revelation that one of the female Fremen, “Harah”, was previously married to another proud, hardy Fremen warrior who, until he was slain in a duel, went by the name of “Geoff”. I am waiting to find out if his full title was “Geoff, Controller of Credit for the Empire of Toys’R’Us”.

31Aug08 — 7

John The Savage and Bela Emerson

This week, I saw John The Savage and Bela Emerson at Komedia.

John The Savage is an experimental post-something-or-other band featuring my friend Richard Brincklow on piano. Don’t be put off by my arty-sounding and vague description. They have tunes and they can play. They groove and they rawk. But they’re also very unusual indeed. Go see them (and their support) when they next hold a Club Savage event at Komedia: 25Sep08.

Bela Emerson is a cellist and one of those solo artists who uses lots of digital loops and pedals to create her own accompaniment, but she does so in a genuinely inventive and musical way. You can watch her in action here, though the piece chosen and the somewhat murky sound don’t do justice to the dynamic and frequency range of the sounds she somehow elicits from the strings, frame, and hardware of her cello. I liked the show so much that I bought both of her CDs.

This reminds me of a blog post I read recently by a musician complaining that no one bought his band’s recordings, at gigs or anywhere else. He claimed that they weren’t crap because they had supported [name band] on tour—which shows a certain naivety about the way support slots to big bands are booked—but foolishly included a link to one of his own band’s recordings.

There’s a reason why they call his kind of talentless, tuneless, hackneyed noisemaking “landfill indie”. It’s the same reason why no one buys his band’s stuff or, indeed, why no one buys empty plastic cartons containing sour milk dregs: people value rarity and quality. Originality, and compositional and performing skill are rare; MP3s and CDs of feeble songs sung badly by middle-class white boys over harshly-processed guitars in bands with “ironic” names are not.

It’s the difference between a warm, witty handwritten letter and another piece of email spam promising to “enlarge your male tool to please all women”. Some musicians are so good at what they do and have so much worth saying that, when they start quietly in a crowded room, people shut up and listen; some musicians are so bad that they have to turn every volume and tone knob to 11 before anyone will pay them a moment’s notice.

27Aug08 — 0

Good Sports

In the summer of 2006, a particular grim one for British sport, this blog made public the list of new events planned for the 2012 London Olympics. Following the nation’s successes in Beijing, that has been further revised to include the following, again in alphabetical order:

  • 4×4 Hundred-School Run
  • Aussie Baiting
  • Chopper-, Grifter-, Strika-, and Tomahawk-Class Cycling
  • Eton Fives
  • Guyball
  • Jolly Hockey
  • Lewd Behaviour
  • Not Cricket
  • Pistol Shooting At Dawn
  • Post-modern Pentathalon:
    • Roistering,
    • Rogering,
    • Raffishness,
    • Rabble-rousing, and
    • Roguery
  • Private Yachting
  • Quidditch
  • Seated Pole Vault
  • White-Water Cravating

While I’m on the subject, Tim Almond makes a good point here.

26Aug08 — 6

Bruce W. Wayne

[WARNING 1: The Dark Knight has been out for long enough now that most of you interested in seeing it should have seen it. To those of you who haven’t, know now: spoilery follows.]

[WARNING 2: As usual, I was late to this particular party, so I just wanted to publish this blasted blog post before everything I wanted to say had been said elsewhere—you will appreciate the irony of that admission when you read my punchline—so I’ve been even less coherent and concise than usual. It takes longer to be brief. If the following thoughts make any sense together then thank V and J who accompanied me to the film and discussed it with me by email.]

Apparently lazy and drunken playboy and son of a wealthy and powerful father uses illegal surveillance techniques, hi-tech weaponry, forced extradition, and torture to fight self-confessed terrorist bomber and his associates. It’s not much of a stretch to take The Dark Knight as a wall-high War On Terror allegory. What’s shocking is that, if you do, you have to accept that a film directed by a young, arty, privately-educated Englishman1 is broadly sympathetic to Bush/Batman. That Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times disagrees strongly with this interpretation reinforces my belief, given our previous experience with Landesman. There’s even a scene where hundreds of citizens of Gotham held hostage on a ferry have a vote, the view of their majority is overruled, and it turns out to be for their own good. Director/writer Christopher Nolan himself2 describes what Batman does as a “crusade” and admits that the Bat’s goal at the start of the film is to pass on the job to a legitimate successor, (an “heroic”, “all-American” lawyer). Nolan also describes The Joker as “an enemy who cannot be understood”, the most “frightening form of evil”.

Before looking at this in more detail, I’ll get some surface things out of the way first:

As another (comic-book enthusiast) friend of mine said, “Believe the hype”: Heath Ledger is superb. Even his lip-licking has a sound justification, rather than merely being drama school showing-off. You forget that he is Heath Ledger; Jack Nicholson never let you forget that his Joker was Jack.

Like a lot of recent Hollywood movies, it’s too long and, at times, the dialogue lays out the plot like like a primary school teacher addressing a room full of ADHD sufferers. This might be because reviewers of genre movies in the serious press insist on complaining that a plot is “impenetrable” whenever confronted by anything with more dimensions than a Jon Pilger documentary or geekier than an iPod. Amongst the chatterati, boasting of ignorance of comic books, science fiction, or digital technology serves a similar social signalling function to boasting of ignorance of science.

The special effects set-pieces are stunningly good. I gasped at the audacity of the middle-of-the-day, matter-of-fact destruction of an entire hospital complex, in the same way that I gasped at the scenes of empty, overgrown, sunlit New York in I Am Legend. It had the same kind of “You know this is mostly an illusion, but I’m going to leave the lights on and challenge you to spot the joins, you bastards” defiance about it.

In contrast, even though its makers take care to hide more than they show, the worst of the film’s violence is nasty. Perhaps this is justified by the story and the characters—and the seriousness of the themes tackled. Either way, the censors’ choice of certification was exactly right.

Being the audio geek that I am, having boggled at the soundtrack, I emailed a friend the next day to rave about the extraordinary technical achievements of the sound engineers—if they don’t win an Oscar™ then there’s no justice—and my friend in return sent me a link to this article by someone who knows more about this sort of thing than I do who felt the same way about the same thing. Read his blog post to get a measure of how ambitious the director and the soundtrack’s creators were.

Now to what I hope are less obvious observations:

When presented with a text-book ticking bomb scenario, the “good guys” resort to torture. If the film takes positions on this, they seem to be: “people in power are tempted to torture, especially when they are desperate and frightened”, and “torture doesn’t work because it elicits unreliable information, especially when the torturee is a crazed ideologue”. The practical argument against torture is one of the weakest. It’s like trying to discourage the use of illegal chemicals by claiming that “the drugs don’t work”. The main reason we have to prohibit torture isn’t because people enjoy administering it (though some do); it’s because sometimes it does indeed yield useful information. We should resist its use because, like the use of also-unreliable biological weapons, it’s wrong.

At least twice in the film, The Joker delivers “Gee, Officer Krupke” speeches about his miserable life history right before he does something particularly nasty to the victim-to-be. When he is arrested, however, we discover that he has no past. I’m not sure if that was intentional, but a pointing-and-shouting neocon wouldn’t look any more ridiculous if he claimed that the message here was that the usual apologetics for terrorism are empty.

The Joker repeatedly denies responsibility for the awful consequences of his actions, claiming merely to be “an agent of chaos”. But, from his first appearance, he lies to everybody, especially about not having an agenda or plan. All of his greatest crimes depend upon his own lies and the moral weaknesses of the people of Gotham for their success. He fakes his own death in order to kill his would-be assassins; he dresses hostages as kidnappers in the hope that SWAT team members will execute the captives; in an echo of one of the most infamous scenes from the bloody rule of Saddam Hussein, he invites one group of the condemned to save themselves by killing another. He wants his victims to show themselves to be as bad as he claims they are so that he can say: “It wasn’t me; it was your worst natures to blame. I’m just a crazy boy from a broken home. I didn’t slit the hostage’s throat; you unleashed the darkness when you let the Batman hunt me down.”

Where have we heard that sort of thing before?

I know I am not being original when I say that science fiction movies long ago took over from westerns the job of examining contemporary moral and political questions in a spectacular popular format. 1981’s Outland, by way of famous example, is 1952’s High Noon3 set in space4. I’ve written here before about two other recent science fiction movies that could be interpreted as commentaries on the war in Iraq and the War on Terror: Serenity (itself explicitly modelled on the classic westerns) and The Chronicles of Riddick. To summarize crudely: Serenity attacks the whole idea of well-intentioned intervention in other societies; Riddick says that the only way to defeat a theocratic death cult is through harnessing another kind of evil (and asks, but does not answer, the question: “And what happens when the former followers of that cult find themselves under new leadership?”) As if to complete a set, despite its clearly expressed qualms, the impression The Dark Knight leaves isn’t anti- or ambi-; it seems to be pro-Bush.

In the Wall Street Journal article I linked to above, Andrew Klavan, rants about “Left-wing” films about the War on Terror and points out how unpopular they and their supposed messages of “moral equivalence and … surrender” have been with US movie-goers. I’m going to comment at an angle to Klavan. To state the oft-stated again, all films about the future date the present they were created in, but I suspect that most recent films made directly about Iraq and the War on Terror will date worse and rather more quickly than Serenity, Riddick, and The Dark Knight. None of the latter was subtle at all; each one seemed to take a different position on central moral and political questions; but all of them will turn out to have been more insightful about our current geopolitical dilemmas than their contemporaries that banged on about the ishoos of the day. Why? Because, unlike too many supposedly sophisticated public commentators, these flashy, noisy, and long films were big enough not to look at the second hand to tell us the time.

  1. It’s interesting that Christopher Nolan’s mother is from the US. [↩]
  2. Is it just me or does Nolan bear an unfortunate and undeserved resemblance to Tim-Nice-But-Dim? [↩]
  3. High Noon has been screened more times by US presidents in the White House cinema than any other movie. [↩]
  4. This kind of sentence is one reason why I disagree with The New York Times about the use of the apostrophe after the digits of decades. Imagine if I had typed “1980’s Outland“. [↩]
25Aug08 — 4

Men Are From Mars…

Both of these photos are from the same wedding, at the most excellent Barn at Bury Court. I took the first on one side of the venue (with my camera in a transparent shower cap to protect it from the rain) and the second, later, on the other side, when the rain had stopped.

boys with beers hide under golf umbrellas to play giant garden gamesBoys with beers hide under umbrellas to play giant garden games

Girls reach up to catch the bouquet as the bride looks onGirls reach up to catch the bouquet as the bride looks on

Obligatory film photographer sneer: Apparently sports snappers have to change their technique every time a new generation of digital cameras comes out because the shutter lag—the time between your pressing the button and the camera capturing the moment—gets smaller with every improvement in technology. Apparently.

24Aug08 — 0

Russia Begins Withdrawal

Following the Russian overhaul of the British Olympic medal tally, Russian President Vladimir Putin Dmitry Medvedev has agreed to pull occupying troops back from South Kensingtonia. The president had argued that the democratically elected, ethnically Lithuanian leader of Londonia, Boris Johnson, had forced his hand through “[Johnson’]s encouragement of Britain’s recent atypical sporting aggression”.

The South Kensingtonians, consisting of a mixture of French aristocrats in exile, Arab royalty, and Russian Oligarchs have always had an uneasy relationship with surrounding Londonia. With the recent declaration of independence by Imperial College from Londonia University, and the concomitant acquisition of Imperial’s nuclear technology, tensions were already at a high—especially as the only students who can afford to study at IC are the offspring of overseas finance ministers.

Earlier in the week, a phalanx of urban assault vehicles had rolled into the surrounding regions of Chelski, Fulhistan, and Westminsk in response to the “outrageous provocation” of TeamGB’s performance in Beijing—though they held back from crossing the Thames to enter the undisputed no-man’s land south of the river. It had been some time before the advancing line of 4x4s was recognised as an invasion force because the Russians timed their operations to coincide with the usual hours of the school run.

18Aug08 — 2

Jewish Comedy Timing

INTERIOR. KITCHEN. JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L IS PREPARING DINNER FOR POOTERGEEK.

POOTERGEEK: Like I said to [JEWISH WRITER FRIEND C] and [JEWISH WRITER FRIEND J] about [UNFUNNY JEWISH WRITER], being a Jewish writer who isn’t funny is like being black and having no sense of rhythm.

JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L: Were they offended?

POOTERGEEK: Why should they be?

[PAUSE]

JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L: Actually, you’re right: I’ve never met a black person without a sense of rhythm.

13Aug08 — 2

Chuck Off

Writing on his blog today, Damian Counsell, who, if he hadn’t been baptised a Catholic, would be 37 234 933rd in line to the thrones of the Commonwealth realms, warned of the dangers to the planet of Genetically Unmodified heads of state. He pointed out that inbred dynasties are susceptible to hereditary disorders like haemophilia and verbal diarrhoea, and that they had “driven millions of small farmers off their land and claimed it as their own,” adding that he believed that congenital mental disorders suffered by and vast resources consumed by unelected rulers had significantly contributed to many of the wars and famines in human history. In sum, he claimed, royal families were among “biggest disasters environmentally of all time”. He said that constitutional monarchies were a “gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which had gone seriously wrong”. Pointing at a photograph of the unconvincing combover of a Mr Charles Windsor of Gloucestershire, Counsell concluded: “If that is the future, count me out.“

12Aug08 — 0

Disturbing Search Of The Moment

I’m kind of afraid to ask why people have been arriving at PooterGeek over the past couple of days as a result of googling for “John Kettley” and “hedgehog”. I realise my publishing this post will now make things worse. Perhaps I should add the phrase “Richard Gere” as well.

12Aug08 — 4

Do It For Money

While I’m on subject of recommendations I thought my parents had made to me but they hadn’t, this year I watched The Conversation for the first time. I thought mum and dad had been telling me for years that I should check it out, but, when I was round theirs a few weeks back and thanked them for the tip they said they hadn’t. It’s an excellent, arty, independently made 70s thriller (in which Harrison Ford is shrewdly and atypically cast in a small, but important role).

By coincidence, The Conversation was in a batch of my DVD rentals-by-post around the same time as the 80s comedy Ghostbusters, which I’d seen before at the cinema, but in a matinee screening that turned out to be full of noisy kids. It was even better at a second, closer viewing.

The Conversation is famous for its excellent jazz soundtrack; the pop one of Ghostbusters (apart from its theme song) is one of the few things that lets it down and dates it. Very sensibly, the makers of Ghostbusters resolved to light and to dress the cast in a “classic” way (rather than to print supersaturated colour images of them wearing shoulder pads and rolled-up jacket sleeves); I suspect that the question of who got on the soundtrack was answered at meetings between studio and record company execs.

There are rumours that The Conversation is going to be remade to be released in 2009 and that the “second Ghostbusters sequel” is going to be a video game.

Both original screenplays were written years before funds were available to make them. This had at least two positive results: their creators were able to review them with a fresh eye, and they could make radical revisions with the benefit of experience and the discipline of a budget. Francis Ford Coppola won the Palme D’Or at Cannes for The Conversation, and an Oscar for The Godfather. Astonishingly, he worked on both films in the same year. The Godfather has since become the more celebrated (and seems less dated now), but Coppola hadn’t been interested either in shooting other people’s scripts or in adapting works from other media. As he explains on his commentary for The Conversation, and as has been the case for many great artists creating great works of art, because his American Zoetrope company was in financial difficulty and he had a family to feed, Coppola was forced to do The Godfather for the money.

Similarly, Bill Murray desperately wanted to play a “spiritual seeker” in a film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, but could only persuade the studio to let him do so if he also starred in Ghostbusters. The movie of The Razor’s Edge was a critical and box office squib; Ghostbusters was a hit with the press and public.

11Aug08 — 6

Say What You Like About Joseph Stalin, At Least He Made The Underground Trains Run On Time

It was quiet here last week because I had a lot of things on—to the extent that I had to stop off at the 24-hour Tesco superstore in the small hours of Saturday on the way back from singing at a gig to do my week’s shopping. I’ve read some extreme tales about the goings on in all-night supermarkets, so my pushing a trolley around in dress shirt, silver tie, and stripey loon pants didn’t raise any eyebrows, though a giggling shop assistant did wave a packet of “cock flavoured soup” at me and read out the bit on the back warning that the contents “may contain fish essences” with the words: “That’s made my night, that has.”

Anyway, over the quieter remains of my weekend, I finally got to see the second episode of House of Saddam via the BBC’s iPlayer. If you’ve ever watched the Armstrong and Miller comedy sketch show, you’ve probably caught at least one example of a particular riff they do in which an authority figure addresses a gathering of subordinates or clients in a cheery, encouraging, friendly way—then, after they have left the room, walks across to an intercom and spits a single order in a Bond villain accent: “KILL THEM!”. For example, a record executive jokily congratulates a teen band on their new deal, warns them of the hard work ahead of them in recording their album, shakes them all by the hand, and sends them from his office for champagne at their hotel—before condemning them all to death; in another, a department store Santa Claus orders the execution of a smiling mother-and-daughter in the same way. That’s pretty much what the TV dramatization of the Saddam Hussein story is like all the way through—except it’s not funny. (I’ve not noticed any kite-flying children yet either.)

On the subject of murderous dictators, while I was waiting at a London Underground station earlier in the week, I noticed this poster:

Stalinist London Transport Museum poster

The text reads:

“In the 1930s London Underground advised on the design of Stalin’s Moscow Metro, which is why the magnificent barrel-vaulted halls of Gants Hill station echo its Russian counterparts. Discover more comrades at the new Museum.”

Julian, Ben! Great work on the posters for the transport museum. Looking forward to seeing you both at the reception for the opening of the new exhibition. Thanks again for all your help with the image revamp. Do I remember some of that look from those posters you used to have on your walls in your rooms at Wadham, you scamps? That jolly old Uncle Joe with his comedy ‘tache: liked a bit of that magnificent barrel-vaulted architecture didn’t he, eh? Talent imitates, genius steals, eh? Great job. See you Thursday evening!

[escorts Julian and Ben out, closes glass door of office, and walks over to intercom]

KILL THEM!

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