I haven’t much time for the Nobel Peace prize, its previous nominees include some of the more barbaric and notorious of the world’s criminals.
However, in honor of Al Gore’s deserving win, which sends an amusing ‘fuck you’ to the knuckle scraping goons lolling around the White House, here is an excellent Channel 4 profile and interview of Gore. It is presented by the UK’s most savvy US correspondent, Johnathan Freedland.
I’m not normally a fan of slapstick era humor, but Laurel and Hardy are an exception. Even better is the fact that this documentary features all sorts of other funny people. It is narrated by the legendary Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. The video quality is not great, at the beginning. Link
Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” – Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light – rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.
The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.
This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.
This is an odd but fascinating movie. Derek Jarman was often self indulgent as a film maker, but he innovated, and some of what he did was great. He directed the seminal punk movie, Jubilee, many of the Smiths’ pop promos and a beautifully filmed portrait of the painter Caravaggio. The self indulgent stuff included the simultaneously hyper camp and mind numbingly dull Sebastiane, which was entirely in Latin.
Wittgenstein is an interesting subject, being one of the few philosophers that wasn’t entirely self indulgent.
October 1st, 2007Comments Off on Karachi uncovered | # link to | posted by david
There is something fascinating about Pakistan which seems to defy stereotyping or simplicity. A country originally with two branches divided by an entire subcontinent, whose name is an acronym, and whose boundary makes little sense historically. Its a place which seems to be home to both Islamic fundamentalism of the most uncompromising kind, and the type of Islam that is very much at home with rational ideas of science.
Tony Livesey is a former UK tabloid editor. Here he takes a look at sexy women in retro British popular culture, suggesting the slang term for cute, ‘crumpet’ embraces something fun and Vaudeville that we no longer have (I’d beg to differ – we still have it in spades).
In case you think this is too specific or too sexist, he also did a show called beefcake, about guys. And if you want to tap into the particular tabloid style that many successful weblogs are adopting, this UK tabloid, tits and arse meets fox news style is a better precedent than anything in the US. I have never had a problem with the booby and ass bit, its fun, but the tabloid political stance is repulsive. This show is about the former and is smashing telly.
September 25th, 2007Comments Off on Claude Shannon | # link to | posted by david
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Even if information theory doesn’t become the cornerstone of Physics, an outcome that now seems plausible, Shannon’s contribution to science is immeasurable. The encoding in this video itself is a result of Shannon’s ideas.
People are just starting to put up statues of Shannon, in future he will surely be remembered as the most important home grown scientist of the 20th Century.
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I don’t agree with the simplistic conclusions of this nevertheless well researched documentary which looks at Winston Churchill, and Winston Smith’s creator, George Orwell.
The conclusion is that for all their differences, Orwell and Churchill knew that sometimes you had to fight. But I would argue that Churchill enjoyed it. Orwell was complex, Churchill, simple, patriotic, jingoistic, the type of person that sent in troops to shoot poor people – in his own country.