Loveful Heights

A long, splendid list of collective nouns

2010-06-23T23:56:00.002+01:00

I came across a list of collective nouns today. The multitude of collective nouns is a real oddity of the English language, here are some of my favorites...

Birds:

A bellowing of bullfinches
A commotion of coots
A plump of ducks
A murder of crows
A gaggle of geese
A charm of goldfinches
A screw of hawks
A scoop of pelicans
An conspiracy of ravens
A squabble of seagulls
A gulp of swallows
A mutation of thrushes
A posse of turkeys
A committee of vultures

Mammals:

A coffle of asses
A flange of baboons
A destruction of wild cats
A coalition of cheetahs
A horde of gerbils
A journey of giraffes
A whoop of gorillas
A drift of hogs
A clan of hyenas
A mob of kangaroos
A mischief of mice
A cartload of monkeys
A romp of otters
A prickle of porcupines
A dray of squirrels
An ambush of tigers
An ugly of walruses
A sneak of weasels
A cohort of zebras

Invertebrates:

A culture of bacteria
A smack of jellyfish

Insects:

A kaleidoscope of butterflies
A business of flies
A scourge of mosquitoes

Amphibians and Reptiles:

A quiver of cobras
A congregation of crocodiles
A froggery of frogs
A rhumba of rattlesnakes
A knob of toads

... and People:

A conflagration of arsonists
A tabernacle of bakers
A galaxy of beauties
A blush of boys
A shuffle of bureaucrats
A sneer of butlers
A syndicate of capitalists
A drunkship of cobblers
A hastiness of cooks
A herd of harlots
A neverthriving of jugglers
An eloquence of lawyers
An illusion of magicians
A curse of painters
A poverty of pipers
A prudence of vicars
An ambush of widows

Frank Sidebottom and Heroin

2010-06-22T09:37:00.003+01:00

In light of recent events, I'm going to break my blogging silence and share a brief, but strange story...

In about 1992, by chance I bought a Sinclair Spectrum game called "The Biz". I didn't know anything about the game, but discovered that it was endorsed by Frank Sidebottom. The game looked very cheaply produced, yet it was intensely addictive. You basically manage a rock band and try and get them to the top of the charts.

Flash forward about 13 years. It's 2005 and I screened one of my short films at a club in Manchester called Filmonik. The programmer of The Biz is there (Chris Sievy) and he screens a strangely avant-garde film that features Frank Sidebottom. The penny suddenly drops that the programmer of The Biz *was* Frank Sidebottom.

After the screening, I approached Chris and introduced myself. I told him that in my early teens I got hooked on The Biz. He replied "was it like heroin?". I replied "huh?", and he told me that when he programmed this game, his manager started playing it, and he got so addicted that his wife told Chris that it was like her husband was on heroin.

So that's how Chris Sievy touched my life. Rest in Peace, dear boy.

The Case of Gerhard Richter's "Betty"

2010-03-13T00:24:00.015Z

I've been visiting my friend Matt Thorpe recently, and the above image adorns his living room quite prominently. I liked it immediately. Though I've been visiting Matt intermittently over the last few months, I finally decided to find out more about the picture by looking online. It would seem that there is something about this painting that just won't quit!

First of all, formal comments: the dark background becomes blacker than black when contrasted with the colour in the foreground. Also, the sharpness of detail on her jacket contrasts well with the blurred quality of her hair. As one online commentator points out, the painting is like "a photograph in its precision, yet with the touch of the personal, that care, which a painting can convey." How true.

Another online aesthetician commented on the artist: "Richter's opinions about his profession are famous: it is useless, ridiculous, impossible, to be reviled. Still, he believes that to paint is an act of enormous hope, maybe the last such act available, and he's devoted his life to it. The resulting canvases are by turns gorgeous and empty, or ashen and empty."

Both commentators also suggested that the painting arouses curiosity, particularly in light of what it is that the woman (Richter's daughter) is looking at. Personally, this question never entered my mind. I did wonder initially what her face looked like, but soon I was struck by another thought, which is that besides being etherial and evocative, it's also quite funny...

It's amazing to me that my friend could keep such an image in his living room - I'd go bananas fairly soon. Seeing a person's face is so fundamental to human visual experience. We're continually on the lookout for other faces, including crude abstractions:

It's a landscape that we never tire of - images of the human face are redundantly plastered all over our media landscape, including for example, crossword magazine covers. Why?

It's quite simple. When you see someone's face, you can detect what their intentions are. It's our first point of identification, an essential part of our interaction with our surroundings. Such a facility was essential to the human race when we were surviving in the wild. Thanks to thousands, if not millions of years, we're incessant, chronic face-radars!

With that in mind, Richter's painting becomes ascetic on first glance, and quite painful after extended contemplation. Not only are we looking at a person (rather than an abstraction or an inanimate object) but we can't see what frame of mind she is in, what her intentions are or whether she is pleasing to look at. Worst of all, SHE WON'T TURN AROUND! The stasis of the picture turns into a gesture of stubbornness. So I'm acutely aware of my heart progressively sinking in a manner that is both painful and invigorating.

So, rather than getting wound up by the painting, I finally concede that it is as comical as it is sublime.

Movies that I'd Like to See

2010-02-17T01:16:00.005Z

First blog in ages! Over a year ago, I was watching Return of the Jedi with a couple of pals. In the middle, my mate Russell Bailey said that he would like to see a version of the original Star Wars trilogy, but with the focus being on the dissolution of the friendship between Darth Vader and Palpatine.

Well, I liked this idea very much. So recently I've been thinking about a bunch of other films I would like to see re-imagined....

James Bond where there's no spy stuff or fighting going on, just an international playboy doing his thing

A movie which charts the small talk made between Dorothy, The Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion as they walk down the yellow brick road

A real-time film which shows Tim Robbins crawling through the sewer for an hour and a half in The Shawshank Redemption

Wall-E vs. Johnny 5

What would *really* happen if it was Groundhogs Day

All the other conversations that took place in the bar in Casablanca

The Shining, but Jack finishes his novel and they go home

Annie Hall, but when Diane Keaton offers Woody a lift home after the tennis game, Alien busts out of his chest

Ferris Bueller loses his virginity

Predator, told from the Predator's point of view

Ghostbusters, told from the Staypuft Marshmallow Man's point of view

.... that's everything that springs to mind just now.

Open Letter (To Living Colour)

2009-11-28T02:28:00.035Z

OK. This post is about a band who were pivoltal to my musical life (an in turn, my life more generally) - Living Colour. It was after discovering Living Colour, during my teenage years that I grew my hair, got a guitar, and sought out other groups like Led Zeppelin, Faith No More et al. But it always came back to these guys. Since they weren't as widely known as groups my peers were listening to in the early 90s (i.e. Queen), my obsession with the band felt intimate and personal.

What they were best known for was the fact they were rock musicians, but they were black. This was their 'novelty', as far as the media seemed to be concerned. It's odd. Lenny Kravitz is a rock musician, Prince draws from rock, Hendrix (arguably the biggest icon of the genre) was a rock musician, Little Richard was right there on the cusp between rock 'n roll and the heavier style that followed, as was Chuck Berry. If you keep following that line backwards, you get to rhythm and blues, then the blues, and then delta blues. Black musicians.

However, for some reason it blew people's minds that this group of 4 black guys wanted to play rock instead of hip hop or R&B. Their first hit, Cult of Personality has since become something of a flagship piece for them. I guess that's fine because I like the song, but to my mind, there would be other equally fitting contenders. What's interesting about Cult of Personality is that it gave a political theme to a hard-rock tune four years before Rage Against the Machine became famous for doing that. To my mind, the message of Cult of Personality (that charisma can be channeled for both good and evil) is a whole lot more interesting than that of RATM's Killing in the Name (some police are racist). At any rate, I don't mean to belittle RATM just to make Living Colour look good. I'm just saying....

Living Colour's debut album, Vivid, which was released in '88 made a great impression on me. Although it was a Talking Heads cover, the song Memories Can't Wait resonated vividly (no pun intended). There seemed to be a strange, ambient energy to it that I hadn't heard elsewhere in music. And I loved the sound of the vocoder when the guitarist, Vernon Reid made his guitar say "these memories can't waiiiiit..." - exciting stuff for someone discovering music!

Then came Time's Up (from '90) - which I consider their masterpiece. It was as ambitious, eclectic and sprawling as the album cover. I noticed something new every time I looked at the inlay, and a world of mystery somehow seemed to be embedded within the music. Even the font they used to write the name of their band excited me. Well, 17 years later, as I listen to the album, I'm still pleased that this was the one I broke myself in with. The record starts with a montage of ticking clocks and alarms going off. A snare drum strikes three times, and it tears into a tight, Slayer-esque riff. Corey, (the singer) cries "Time's up, the rivers have no life. Time's up, the world is full of strife. Time's up, the sky is falling... time's up, the lord is calling!" What a punchy start to an album! The tune turns into a tight groove and everyone in the band showcases their virtuosity (yes - that's the correct word).

After that first track, instead of another hard-rock song, a strange sound-montage kicks in. Consistent rhythms disappear and instead you hear what sounds like slowed down samples of some kind of lesson on African musicology, amongst other samples like "are slaves going to be free in heaven?". The rest of the album is similarly eclectic and inventive. Love Rears Up it's Ugly Head has a funk-blues thing going on, in which the tone of the song and the subject matter of the lyrics seem to be perfectly matched. Plus Love Rears uses a distinctive game show-host voice sample that they created for the first couple of albums - in this song, he yells "wedding march!". In the song Type, it ends with a chorus of voices singing "everything that goes around, comes around" in a cycle, while Corey sings the same line over the top in a variety of melodies, at different speeds. In the track Information Overload, Vernon makes his guitar sound like a computer loading up software (very exciting for a young guitarist looking for new ideas). Elvis is Dead sounded like a deranged James Brown track, complete with a saxophone solo and a guest rap from Little Richard(!). Under Cover of Darkness shifts from a breezy opening riff to unashamed funk. Queen Latifah does a guest rap, and Vernon plays in a modal Jazz-scale for the guitar solo. Brilliant, seamless fusion. Solace of You, such a sweet melody, draws from South African Mbaqanga music. Ology is a brief, extraordinary instrumental which just doesn't sound like anything else I've heard. Tag Team Partners is a fun, goofy beat-box interlude. Finally, the grandiose This is the Life begins with a montage of sitars and strings with middle-eastern scales. I still can't hear exactly what they did.

For what it's worth, I think that if they left New Jack Theme, Someone Like You and Information Overload as b-sides, they would have had a pretty-near perfect album.

In '93, Stain followed. This album marked a departure for the band, and to my mind it set the template for all their subsequent albums. They didn't use the loopy band logo anymore and opted for a simple, direct capital-letter font, and a single image with muted colours. This album had the lovely and unique ballad Nothingness on it. Plus Wall is a great song, and Hemp is another etherial and atmospheric sound montage. Otherwise, the album seems much more musically and emotionally uniform to me. Some of the dissonant, heavier tracks such as Go Away, Auslander or This Little Pig took them to a place I couldn't go for some reason.

I heard one fan comment online that he thought Stain was their most 'focused' album. For me, 'focused' is another way of saying that he is only interested in hard rock and used to skip past the more adventurous tracks. Sorry - that's what I think.

Why did this change take place in the band? Whilst a new bassist joined them for this album, I doubt it had too much to do with that. Perhaps they felt the need to re-invent themselves, which is indeed a healthy thing for artists to do. But, record sales for Stain were apparently a disappointment for the band. They were still quite healthy, mind - but not what they were aiming for. Now, public taste can be a fickle thing and it's easy for me to sit and blog in judgement. But, speaking as a fan it seemed to me that in dropping their eclecticism, along with other trademarks like their logo and the game show host voice-sample guy, they were discarding some of the things that made them so interesting in the first place - the things that played a good part in bringing them their initial commercial and critical acclaim.

Two years later in '95, Living Colour disbanded. However, in 2003 they got back together and released the album Collideøscope. I'll not say anything about that record, because a) I don't know it well enough to comment, and b) this blog is already way longer than I planned it to be.

In 2009 - earlier this year, Living Colour released another album entitled Chair in the Doorway. I was looking forward to hearing this album very much, and I'm happy to report that their first single (Behind the Sun) is one of the best songs that they have done. But I'm less happy to report that the rest of the album carries everything over that I found dissatisfying about Stain, but to a greater extent. There's almost no guest musicians, a relatively constrained instrumental line-up, moderately constrained emotional territory (mostly angry). Cross-check this with Times Up, which shifts from rage (Time's Up), to ambience (History Lesson), to a sense of defeat and submission (Love Rears...), to sexual (Under Cover of Darkness), to wistful intensity (Fight the Fight). Also, there's no more sharp genre shifts mid-song (a la Funny Vibe or Under Cover of Darkness), no more joviality one finds in Glamour Boys, no chanting choruses of Funny Vibe, no mysterious soundscapes, no Jazz scales, no world-music influences, no samples.

I heard Vernon comment in an interview that the members of the band all have separate outlets for their own personal projects, and that this is a good thing for the group. Are you sure about that, Vernon? I know that Corey was involved in stage musicals, Will (the drummer) is involved in world music and Vernon is involved with the downtown New York avant-garde scene (amongst other things). While these various external projects may help reduce creative differences in the band, I wonder if that creative tension actually made the group more interesting.

I like to belive that artists don't burn out, or run out of ideas but rather they learn how to cut deeper over time. But I also wonder, is Living Colour's level of ambition as high as it was in 1990? I gather that most the guys in the band have become parents in the intervening years - which is wonderful. But when I think of artists becoming family men, I think of George Lucas. And I think we all know what good that did him. His work became imbued with a sense of "there's more to life than my art".

re: ambition. Lets take the case of Bless Those (Little Annie's Prayer) - which is actually one of my favorite tracks from Chair in the Doorway. It basically revolves around three power chords, going back and forth. The simplicity of the song is appealing, I guess and I like the slide guitar. But I've been in bands and I think I know how this song would have been written. One instrument (perhaps the bass since it was co-written by Doug - the bassist) came up with the initial riff. Then Vernon added the most natural sounding guitar riff that would have gone with it. Then the drummer did the same thing. Some lyrics were cooked up, and voila.

But it's too goddamn easy! I listen to Under Cover of Darkness (from Time's Up), and it's obvious that a good amount of re-structuring and layering went into that song, everyone thought about how their own individual instrument should be both separate, yet contribute to the whole piece. It sounds like it was painstakingly thought through.

I'll say it in simple terms: I don't think that Living Colour are trying as hard any more.

And I'm not sure if it's because they have been through the recording process so many times that making an album isn't as big a deal to them as it once was, or if they have other musical commitments and family commitments which have drained their creative energies for this group. It might be because they were given less time in the recording studio, or their new record label (Megaforce Records) encouraged them to focus on straightforward rock tunes.

I imagine that some fans, and perhaps the musicians themselves would say that Chair in the Doorway contains as many ideas as their earlier work. Well, on the surface that isn't the case. I realize that Hard Times is in 3/4, Young Man has a disco rhythm, the riff to Behind the Sun is tapped, and Out of my Mind contains some first-rate shrieking. But one has to look for the nuances to find variety in this record. In their earlier work, the variety was on the surface. And that's absolutely fine. As far as I'm concerned, the surface of a piece of music can actually be more important than subtle, easily-missed details.

Anyway, I wrote this blog (or at least the second half of it) with a heavy heart. I feel like I'm shitting on a group of artists who have given me so much, and while they are doing what they can, I'm sitting at home on my computer and passing judgment. But this was written entirely in the spirit that if you care about something, you're critical of it. As a fan, if any of you guys should ever read this, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the impact you had on my life, and that I hope you keep working together, but also that I would love to see you be as audacious and eclectic as you used to be.

I've been following the reviews of Chair in the Doorway and they have been warm. But I don't want to see 'warm' reviews, these risk invoking a tepid reception from the public. I want you to be widely loved in the way that I love you! And I wanted to voice my opinion, which I haven't seen elsewhere.

Peace.

A Great Conversation

2009-11-23T23:45:00.002Z

Me: "Guess who the richest man in the world is"
Emily: "I don't know... the Sultan of Brunei?"
Me: "Who is that?"
Emily: "It's the fucking Sultan of Brunei"
Me: "No, it's Bill Gates. Guess who is number 2"
Emily: "Sting?"

Johnny 5: Queen of the Desert

2009-10-09T01:02:00.004+01:00

Two more similar pictures.

This has been bothering me for a little while and I have to get it off my chest. Whenever I walk through the London Underground at the moment I keep seeing this poster...

... and at first glance I keep thinking it's the poster from Short Circuit

Two figures in the desert, both being zapped from above. Coincidence? Yes.

Story Time with Tabe

2009-09-27T17:32:00.002+01:00

Staking Out My Position

2009-09-23T01:20:00.012+01:00

Disclaimer: It's not so smart on my part to dismiss a branch of Philosophy, and there are people out there with more philosophical knowledge who could set me straight on a bunch of things, but these are my two cents. Comments and criticisms, as ever are welcome.

I'm going to start with a synopsised summary of analytic and continental philosophy taken from wikipedia:

Analytic philosophy is a term for a style of philosophy that may be characterised by an emphasis on clarity and argument. It often incorporates analysis of language, and a respect for the natural sciences. It is committed to the idea that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts, and also that philosophy should be continuous with those of the natural sciences. Key names would include Wittgenstein, John Searle, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker.

Continental philosophy includes movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism (don't worry if you don't know what they are). Philosophers who subscribe to this approach are said to generally reject scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena.

From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities. However, with post-modernism (a continental idea) in the 1970s and 1980s, university departments in film, literature and the fine arts have increasingly incorporated ideas from continental philosophers into their curricula.

At least, this is how it's characterised in wikipedia. I've got a bunch of other opinions on how one can characterize continental philosophy that aren't so charitable. But the fact that it rejects science as a means to understand phenomena is probably a good starting point.

Here are two short clips. The first is of an analytic philosopher, Steven Pinker who discusses free will (ignore the text pop-ups and the Dawkins bit at the end):

And the second is Slavoj Zizek discussing the Universe (he's continental):

In both cases, I tried to find something brief, but long enough for you to get the flavor of their approaches.

OK. Now, now you'll be forgiven if you find Zizek interesting and charismatic. But read the following extract from Searle in a comment he made about Derrida and see if Zizek also fits Searle's description: "anyone who reads [Derrida's] texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."

Derrida responded by saying that Searle had misunderstood him, Searle (and others) responded back by saying that this is a long-running excuse for his bullshit (though he didn't phrase it like that)

Since I don't have the patience to make this blog flow more smoothly, I'm just going to put all my thoughts into a series of bullet points. So this is...

REASONS WHY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY BUGS ME:

Continental philosophy rests on the assumption that the more difficult an idea is to understand, the greater the reward will be when you do finally grasp it. Even if the mind 'rewards' itself when a difficult concept is grasped, that's not the same as being enlightened with a profound truth
Using specialist terms and thinking in novel, counter-intuitive ways does not elevate your thoughts above those of everyday people. It's more difficult (and ultimately more useful) to use the same language and framework of thought as everyone else, and still say something insightful
Some continental person responded to Pinker's clip on youtube and said the following: "Freewill is an IDEALIZATION of our mental faculties. Moral theory requires that, much like how mathematics has figures such as perfect 2-D circles which could not possibly exist in reality." That's what I'm talking about - total cobblers. It's not even a coherent sentence
I heard the continental accusation of science as being "bougeois". Whoever thinks that is a big fat loser
Continental philosophy has a powerful aroma of name-dropping and the snooty "Europeans are smarter than English speakers" attitude. Check a list of continental names some time - they are great to drop into a conversation (e.g. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre)
Zizek is colourful, animated and has a charming speech impediment. His video is hard to understand, yet somehow seems clever and internally consistent. So one comes away feeling like there is profound truth and wisdom in there, but one also has to keep watching it over and over to properly grasp if there is actually anything meaningful. I've not figured it out yet, and I've watched this clip a few times. Pinker, on the other hand, not only did I enjoy the first time but I understood it too
Continental philosophy is far more responsible than analytic philosophy for making most people feel like their not brainy enough to have anything to do with Philosophy

WHY MIGHT PEOPLE LIKE CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Continental Philosophers tend to have fertile minds and be well read. It fuels creative thought. If it could be a branch of the arts, on some level this might not be so bad. But to claim that it's more connected to the world than analytic philosophy is a bad idea. Aesthetics should be difficult to grasp, but thought should be clear and articulate. That's not dogmatism, it's sense
The ideas are sometimes interesting. But continental philosophy subordinates explaining phenomena in place of being interesting. There is an intuitive feeling that we should resist common assumptions and accepted wisdom, and also that we should develop new terms and use words in a different way. I agree with that stuff, but it can, and has been taken too far by continental philosophers - any Lacan clip would prove my point on this one better than the Zizek clip
I do sometimes enjoy listening to philosophers of the continental strain and occasionally feel enriched after contemplating them. I like this clip of Derrida discussing love, for example. But there are far more ideas that fun to believe, or fun to try to understand, but little more

So there you go, that's my feeling. Hit me!

Small, private thoughts

2009-09-14T13:57:00.004+01:00

This is kinda frivolous, but I wanted to share it because I've been thinking it for years and never told anyone. Plus I never actually put these two pictures next to each other.

I think that the woman on the left from The Mamas and the Papas:

was kinda pulling the same pose as Henry 8th:

Jews, Nazis and Tarantino

2009-09-04T17:07:00.005+01:00

I went to see Inglorious Basterds with some amount of apprehension. I’d heard that Eli Roth said that the film is a “Jewish wet dream” because we see a team of Jewish soldiers brutally kill lots and lots of Nazis. The level of idiocy on Roth’s part is mind-boggling. Even if there is a part of the human psyche that wants revenge, from Jews or anyone else, why watch a movie that indulges such negative, destructive impulses? Are Jews supposed to feel appeased somehow, watching a movie with people pretending to kill other people who are pretending to be Nazis? Think of it as a question of what kind of stories we need to tell ourselves. Movies provide cultures with a working-through of ideas and feelings. The only thing I can imagine this film will provide us with is stoking the flame amongst Neo-Nazis that Hitler should have ‘finished the job’, and that Jews are 'just as bad', and are capable of the same level of savagery (Neo-Nazis will inevitably be interested in seeing the film), and it will also invite the delightful comparison that gets banded around, whereby Jews are behaving like Nazis. This comparison comes up every once in a while from liberals, Jews and anti-semites alike.

A digression: are Israelis behaving like Nazis? No. They are insofar as Palestinians are treated like second-class citizens, just as Jews were in Nazi-occupied areas before they were sent to death camps. But it’s a bogus comparison because a few more conditions would need to be comparable. For instance:

• Palestinians would need to be sent to death camps
• Israel would need to Invade Syria, Egypt and other surrounding countries
• There would need to be have been terrorist Jews killing German civilians in the 30s and 40s

If these things were happening, the comparison might have merit. Instead, we have impoverished Palestinians retaliating by firing rockets into Israel, prompting Israelis to elect politicians who are going to come down hard on Palestinians, and the whole thing winds up in a big ugly cycle. I imagine most Palestinians are caught in the middle between Palestinians terrorists and heavy-handed Israeli soldiers. Dreadful.

Anyway: it’s a lousy comparison, and I think people enjoy saying that Israelis are acting like Nazis because irony is appealing, and people get a little buzz out of being provocative when they think their entitled to be.

But back to the movie, and back to Tarantino. Something that bothered me about the Kill Bill movies is that they spent too much time contemplating themselves. I realize that that was the point of those movies – small incidental scenes turn into 10 minute sequences (walking into a nightclub, or a sword being ceremoniously given away), but the whole thing just seemed in awe of itself. Inglorious Basterds seemed happy just to get on with the story (with the exception of a 5-minute lipstick application scene). More conventional on Tarantino’s part, but a welcome return to commonplace convention. He did remain consistent with his other work by having monologues in which we are invited to reconsider something we’ve always taken for granted. In this case, it’s why we have a bigger problem with rats than we have with squirrels (previously, he’s covered a new understanding of Superman, what they call the Big Mac in France, what the song Like a Virgin is really about).

He also follows his earlier trademark-thing by citing movies and filmmakers he’s interested in – Leni Riefenstahl gets name-dropped (a famous Nazi-Propaganda filmmaker), Pabst and David O Selznik gets mentioned too. This is just part of his ‘wink at the camera’ thing where he recommends films to fans who want to look up bits of film history. Shogun Asassin gets menitoned in Kill Bill, and I’m sure there’s a reference to some 70s action movie that gets mentioned in Death Proof. Well, I kinda like the ‘lets celebrate cinema’ thing in movies. Nanni Moretti does that too and it’s always cool. Godard did it as well of course (though he’s not a fan of Tarantino, incidentally). Somehow, in Tarantino’s hands citing film history is starting to feel a little bit tired.

Another criticism: while Inglorious Basterds was about 2hrs 30, it still felt like there were too many threads and characters that weren’t given space to breathe. As a result, I wasn’t really in the zone during the climax. Perhaps Tarantino should have split this movie into a 12-part mini-series as he said he considered doing. If he had, it may have been the masterpiece he claimed it to be.

In spite of my criticisms, I did come away from Inglorious Basterds feeling like it might be his most interesting work. Whether it’s his best, I’ll not comment because I try not to be in the business of evaluating stuff too much. But it did get my brain going more than any of his other works. I found the very first scene very compelling and affecting indeed, and there is a scene in an underground bar which plays out beautifully. Despite what some critis said, I didn’t think the scenes played out for too long at all. They played out nicely, and Tarantino found a new way of using time rather than his usual *blam blam blam* pacing.

In conclusion then: Inglorious Basterds is a socially irresponsible movie (though hopefully ultimately innocuous, like most art), but it picks up on a bunch of Tarantino-esque tropes and is compelling to watch, despite a bunch of shortcomings. Also, comparing Jews or Israelis to Nazis is stupid.

There you go.

Facebook and Mythologizing the Self

2009-08-12T21:37:00.005+01:00

Hmmm. That might be a pretentious title, but it's the one I'm most satisfied with right now.

At any rate, what's great about social networking sites is that you get to create your own persona if you choose to invest in it. It can be particularly revealing considering what kind of profile picture a person selects for themselves. I've attempted to break down all the possible choices. Let me know if there's any I've missed:

At home
On holiday
At party
At fancy dress party
Studio photo
Childhood photo
With girlfriend/ boyfriend
With spouse
With buddy
With child/ grandchild
Something done to your face (e.g. Yearbook Yourself/ Cartoon avatar/ MorphThing)
A photo of something else (e.g. a painting they drew/ movie freeze frame/ funny picture)
Their pet
Their shadow (particularly popular amongst artists)
Picture of a celebrity/ cartoon character
'In action' - e.g. at work
Their hands
Clowning around

For all the variety here, I think that the range of face expressions are fairly limited (although there is room for variation within these categories)

Smiling nicely
Sultry
Moody
Pulling a funny face
Engaged in something

I think that the persona people attempt to develop for themselves can fit into the following categories, and sometimes it's a combination:

I'm attractive
I'm mysterious
I'm unconventional
I'm unconventional even by unconventional standards
I'm wacky and don't care who knows it/ I don't take myself seriously
I'm creative
I play it straight
I'm one of the lads/ girls
I love my friends/ partner/ children

I've never seen "I'm hard" as a profile picture, but would imagine that's because I wouldn't befriend someone who would use that as their persona.

I think everything has pretty much been covered here. If you can think of any curve balls that I haven't spotted, let me know...

MorphThing

2009-08-01T00:46:00.008+01:00

The human face is a landscape that we never tire of. We are programmed to be on the constant look out for faces, even where there isn't one, or where it's a heavy abstraction of a real face.

As such, I'm hooked on the website called morphthing at the moment. If you could have told people 50 years ago that we would have the technology to blend faces together, I can only imagine their minds would have been blown. Well, my mind is blown and it continues to be. I can't believe we can do this.

The site is clearly aimed at teenagers, and is seen as a fairly frivolous thing. Maybe it is. I can imagine the "you've got too much time on your hands" response, or "it's all a bit silly really". I dunno. I just keep thinking it's amazing and taps into something fundamental about our perceptions.

No point hiding from the fact that I have an interest in my own face. As such, here's me with Whoopi Goldberg:

Mona Lisa:

Barack Obama:

This is me today with me when I was about 6:

Then there is other people who you can combine. This is Tupac and Tony Blair:

Tupac, Tony Blair and a Tiger:

Harry Potter and Hitler: (or Harry Pittler, if you will...)

Britney Spears and George Lucas:

It just goes on and on. Weird, androgynous people and splendid combinations. You can reconfigure your own face. Such giddy fun!

Reggae and Gay People

2009-07-28T20:17:00.001+01:00

It's a real heartache to me. Sizzla is possibly my favourite of the current generation of dancehall musicians. He carries the heritage of Lee Perry, Big Youth and Dr Alimantado effortlessly and adds his own thing. The hooks are great, and he sings straight from his heart.

One problem - he's a total homophobe.

See, I never cared especially for Wagner's music so I was never really faced with the problem of how to negotiate the art/ politics problem (Wagner was a Nazi sympathizer). Sizzla is my modern day equivalent.

I think it was a 70s thing in particular - the politics of aesthetics. The general thrust seemed to be that right-wingers didn't like radical art, but lefties did. That seems to broadly be the attitude today.

Well, this never made sense to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you listen to any piece of music (without lyrics), it says nothing at all about the composer's political convictions. How they feel about welfare benefit, gun control, abortion or whatever else. Secondly, one of the pivotal movements for the avant-garde was the Futurists, who were Fascists.

So formal properties remain apolitical. We would like to think that art with questionable content will consistently be substandard, but this isn't the case. Leni Riefenstahl is a classic example. In much the same way, racist jokes are always politically objectionable but people are more likely to forgive the joke if it's actually funny. I would take this as meaning that the form of the joke is solid, even if the content is offensive. Conveniently, most people who cook up these jokes aren't that bright so the jokes usually aren't funny. But even if they are, that doesn't make it forgivable. A friend of mine said to me recently "I think you can say anything as long as it's funny". This seems to be a widely held belief, I would contend that even if it is funny, that's not a license to be hurtful to any group of people.

Back to Sizzla. There is no room for ambiguity in his lyrics. He cooked up a song called Nah Apologise, which is him declaring his refusal to apologize for writing and performing songs which incite and encourage hatred and violence towards homosexuals. This song is freely available on youtube. I looked at it, and noticed that the discussion wall generally went along the lines of people writing "kill batty boys!". Great. So my good turn for the day was flagging the video to youtube, and alerting them to the fact that it's inappropriate and incites hatred and abuse towards gay people - which is against youtube policy anyhow. What's surprising is that it's already been looked at by 355,586 people (to date) and it would appear that I'm the first person to object.

I hoped that they would take the video down, but instead they just disabled adding comments. Not ideal, but I guess it's something. Though if I was catching the brunt of his hatred (i.e. something anti semitic) I wouldn't be satisfied.

Rastas, particularly the ultra-orthodox branch to which Sizzla subscribes - called Boboshanti Rastas better sort this thing out. Jamaica has such a proud tradition, they punch above their weight culturally, but why the hatred? No-one asked them to be gay, it's a low pressure deal. Their rationale behind the hatred of gays comes from their claim is that to be gay is to go against the will of God. This comes form the book of Leviticus - the same book that states that any child who says their parents name in vain shall be put to death.

Do Boboshanti Rastas follow through on this instruction as well? Of course not. If they could first of all admit that the hatred of gays comes from a personal dislike rather than sublimating it to God's will, that'd be a start.

Dear Sizzla: you have a right to your opinion, and I have the right to call you a fool.

Synaesthetic Film Reconsidered

2009-07-18T19:00:00.000+01:00

Empathy, Mirror Neurons and the Peanut Song

2009-07-17T14:44:00.000+01:00

This is a home recorded version of an academic paper that I delivered last month at Salford University on screen comedy...

Free-floating thoughts on MJ

2009-07-17T01:02:00.001+01:00

Yes, I'm still smarting over his death. So there's a series of thoughts I wanted to get out of my system:

Medication: The ‘Dr. Feelgood’ characters have been in Hollywood as long as there has been a Hollywood. These are people who can give prescription painkillers to wealthy showbiz-types and they keeps killing our stars. MJ is the latest in a list accompanied by Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith, Elvis, Judy Garland, Howard Hughes, Keith Moon, Nick Drake and (one of my fave avant-garde filmmakers) Maya Deren. The list goes on
Nothing learned: Some deaths lead to something positive - Jade Goodie’s legacy is that the number of women taking smear tests shot up, but no lesson will be learned from MJ’s death. The media won't stop exploiting their stars, and no medication addict will kick their habit
Revisionary: I never even liked the song Billy Jean that much. On Thriller, Human Nature sits there quietly making it a great album without you noticing. On the album Bad, Speed Demon does it for me every time. Plus more attention should be paid to the post-Quincy Jones era. Remember the Time is a deceptively good song, and Butterflies could have been a hit if Sony had promoted it properly
Liar: MJ explicitly stated that he impregnated Debbie Rowe. However, he’s black and his children aren't mixed-race. They are his foster children. (Yes it’s obvious, but no-one ever seemed to point that out). If anything tells me that he was willing to delude himself, it's that
Expose: MJ clearly already had plastic surgery by Thriller, and no-one objected. So is it the plastic surgery that bothers us, or the fact it’s bad plastic surgery? (bad meaning ‘bad’). My suspicion is that he developed an addiction to surgery, and would fixate on different parts of his face at a time rather than pay attention to the complete thing. I notice his plastic surgeon has remained anonymous this whole time. Can’t he/ she be exposed?
Arseholoe: If Gavin Arvizo admitted that he made up the story about being molested, isn’t he legally accountable? Is that called ‘contempt of court’?
Baby-sitter: No – I wouldn’t have let MJ look after my children. But neither would I let Prince, Boyzone or the Cheeky Girls look after my children either
Tough break: He had to sell his home in order to clear his name and the court decided on both occasions that he hadn’t molested anyone. Still the public didn't trust him. He probably settled out of court the second time because they didn't want the case to be prolonged. He was caught between a rock and a hard place
Journalism sucks: MJ exposed most journalists’ inability to hold two opinions about a person at the same time. He’s either the greatest guy ever or the worst
Trauma: It’s damaging to be attacked excessively, but it can be equally damaging to be praised excessively. MJ had both
Suspect: The video to Man in the Mirror intercuts MJ with Martin Luther King, Ghandi, John F Kennedy and Mother Teresa while he induces a religious fervour in a stadium full of people (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgtWIx2zLtk). During the Jarvis Cocker incident, he was pretending to be Jesus. In the video to They Don’t Care About Us, he plays a Che Guevara-type folk hero. In all these examples, one could argue that he’s being used as a symbol of hope, but it’s all rather suspect
Good guy: On the other hand, he’s apparently the second biggest celebrity-contributor to charity after Oprah Winfrey. That's a piece of information that never really slipped into public consciousness
Skin: I’m willing to believe that he had vitiglio, but why didn’t he use his money to make his skin brown again? At any rate, I don’t think he wanted to be caucasian. I think he wanted to be white, as in, *pale*. That's not the same as being 'a white guy'
Sha-Mo: This is MJ’s own version of “Tra-la-la” or “Shoo-be-do”. I think it’s great that he came up with his own musical turn of phrase
Moonwalk: MJ didn't invent the Moonwalk. To my knowledge, he never claimed to. There have been recorded instances of the Moonwalk performed as early as the 1930s by Cab Calloway, and later in the 50s by Marcel Marceau. Later still in the 70s, street dancers were doing the move. MJ just popularized it
Cruel: Who asked his bereaved 10 year-old daughter to speak in front of a stadium of about 250,000 people? (Or 1 Billion if you count worldwide figures)
Fun: You never hear about anything fun that Richard Branson or Bill Gates did with their money. MJ became a Billionaire and bought a fairground and a monkey. Cool
Tragic/ Hero: Will he be remembered as a pop hero or a tragic figure? Elvis showed us that there is space for both conceptions in our collective memory
Memento: My favourite video clip of MJ became available a little while after he died. It’s the only footage I’ve seen where he’s not consciously aware of being looked at. See him in the second half of this clip, he’s just watching and thinking, and we’re given some insight into his internal thought processes as he sits and contemplates. Quite precious, to my mind:

Men & Women

2009-07-08T23:57:00.000+01:00

I have this idea I'm trying to work through. As a man, I have a theory that if I can observe women in the correct way when they discuss men, I'll gain a new insight into what men are like. I'm so busy being one, I can't quite tell what we are like as a species.

What I figure is that there is a disparity between the way we imagine ourselves and the way in which the opposite sex imagines us.

Case in point, a woman as imagined by men:

and a woman as imagined by women:

Here we have boys as imagined by girls:

and men as imagined by men (at least a certain type of man):

None of these are necessarily errors in a perception, it's just that both genders bring out a different truth on the same subject.

What we really need is a third gender. A neutral, androgynous sex that can observe impartially without a background set of assumptions, expectations or biases.

Any volunteers?

My Danish Adventure

2009-07-03T21:05:00.000+01:00

I'll start by saying that Copenhagen was a big deal to me - I kinda saw it as being my second Bar Mitzvah. Some sort of passage into adulthood. This was a big conference and if it turned out that I was indeed an impostor playing the part of an academic, this would be the place where I would get rumbled...

As such, I was a tad jittery for the first couple of days. Actually, I started getting jittery about 5 days before flying out there. My good pal Dominic enjoyed the brunt of my nerves by having to listen to me fixate on minor things. Breaking point came when I was complaining to him about how unfair it is for a band like Metallica who will never be recognized as one of the greatest bands ever because there is a glass ceiling for heavy metal groups. Dom eventually replied "listen Paul, just chill out". Probably the right thing to say.

At any rate, I didn't get to see too much of Copenhagen itself because the conference was quite intensive. But I did see a whole variety of people whose books I had read. And if you're a film theory dude, these people are like celebrities to you.

Case in point, this is me with David Bordwell:

Bordwell is something of a patriarch to the cognitive film movement, and besides that he's a giant within film theory. Besides that still, he lives up to his reputation as being a tremendously kind and likable guy. I only got the chance to speak to him a couple of times, but he went out of his way to make me and other PhD students (who might otherwise feel intimidated) feel welcome and needed at the conference. It wasn't intentional, but I think this picture gets across how much I look up to the guy and like him as a person.

At any rate, if Bordwell is the patriarch figure of the conference then Joseph Anderson is my favorite uncle:

Joseph wrote a book called "The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Film Theory", which kick-started my PhD (so as you can guess, I was excited to meet him). I eventually got the chance to speak to him and tell him so, which meant a lot to me. He was very kind with his time and interested in my ideas on film, and was happy to offer a response to questions I had about his book. (Which as basically, how does one factor the avant-garde into an ecological understanding of cinema. But I'll not go into what that actually means for now)

At any rate, the conference itself was fabulous. I was surrounded by other film obsessives who were having thoughts about cinema that had never been thought before - thrilling to see if you're into this stuff. I saw a paper on how spectators visually track the screen and how we miss most of what's going on. I saw a paper on what it means to develop a taste. Murray (my supervisor) spoke on how the sciences can contribute to our understanding of art.

Then there was me. I talked about cinema and a condition called Synaesthesia.

I'll not go into the details of my paper now because I might put some sort of version of it on my blog at some point, but I'll just say that my paper felt like it was warmly received. Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson came along, as did two people who I quoted in my presentation (Carl Plantinga and Kathrin Fahrlenbrach) and a guy called Torben Grodal, whom I had read. I'm kinda name dropping here, but it's more for my sake rather than yours (Unlike most people who will read this, I know who they are, and I'm putting it in my blog so I remember!).

Thankfully, I didn't get a wobbly voice and I pretty much held it together during the presentation and Q&A. It appears I'm not an impostor. Phew.

After this, I had a bit of time to snoop around the city. This is Dom and Ted trying to figure out where we were. Note how instead of getting involved, I just decided to take a picture of them...

The next day I also climbed a Church spire in Copenhagen. It's probably famous, but I don't remember what it's called:

Here we are at the top:

As for the city itself, it was very clean. The locals seemed ecologically conscious, there were a lot of bikes around and no litter. There was also a hippy commune place I went to with a few pals (no photos allowed for some reason).

Danes (?) seemed to go for a fairly meat-based diet, and there is a culture of crisps and chocolate comparable to that of the UK. It's also pretty costly out there. But on the plus side, they had an exhibition of weird sign-posts in the city center:

Anyway, then came a major surprise at the conference. Lars von Trier came to do a Q&A after the screening of his new movie, Antichrist. Here's a blurry picture I took of him with my phone camera:

This was a thrill for me because I love his work. I asked him a question about his use of hypnosis in the film. As a guy, he seemed cool though not someone who naturally felt at ease speaking in public about his work. As we went along, he seemed to feel more comfortable in his own skin. If you want to know more about what he said, ask me :)

I took this picture in my Hotel. The shower was better than the signpost would have you believe:

A few more snaps from the final night, when we had a big meal. This is me with another Professor, his name is Ed Tan. He is of Chinese and Indonesian origins but grew up in Holland. I liked him very much.

This is a guy called Chris who also spoke at the conference. I must look him up on Facebook. Though he'll kill me if he sees I've uploaded this picture:

Finally, a drunk lady who was at the conference. Not sure who she is.

At any rate, the whole thing was just a dream. I got a real sense of being in a culture of academics. Lots of schmoozing, and a supportive environment. By the end I was completely pooped, but what fun.

I'll mention a point made by Dominic. The cognitive movement within film theory is somewhat maginalized. It's been an uphill struggle to get recognition, and this is a very strange thing. As we imagine ourselves (and I think it's a reasonable assumption), we appeal to common sense, straightforward language and facts. And this is seen as the alternative to the dominant paradigm. That's kinda creepy.

At any rate, next year it'll be in Virginia! Whoop....

doomsday like shabby

2009-06-21T02:57:00.001+01:00

'attractive damned sagacious' cross discernment hysterics statutory duplicate explain waken want shilly-shallying, prepare forth up be proper the selfsame cialis online in italia

cialis info till doomsday like shabby

benefit compra cialis the yet in rage

Joy and Time

2009-06-19T00:24:00.000+01:00

I just felt like putting these two happy pictures next to one another. No special reason why...

Beautiful People

2009-06-18T03:44:00.000+01:00

I attended a lecture a couple of months ago by Jerrold Levinson. He was discussing the concept of beauty, and why it was a discussion which could be looked at as an issue within "aesthetics" rather than "art". He said the following...

"There is more beauty outside of art than there is beauty inside of art. How many works of art are there? Maybe 2 Billion. How many people are there? 6 Billion. Maybe a third of them are beautiful"

Stay Sick

2009-06-14T02:19:00.000+01:00

Three characteristics that sometimes go hand in hand: low self-esteem, laziness and misanthropy. I have a suspicion that the second two stem from the first.

These are all characteristics that are generally considered shortcomings. Well, I don't see much use for any of them although I've had a sprinkling of all three off and on over the years. As it happens, it would seem that some of my pals have as well - at least low self-esteem and misanthropy (I don't want to judge anyone else as lazy). But I like my pals.

So I figure, even if those characteristics aren't much use in and of themselves, perhaps something good accompanies them. Being of that disposition makes one more philosophical, or gives you a better sense of humour. Or you don't take the culture we've been handed at face value and one prefers to look at the world as an outsider.

Channel your symptoms!

Guilt

2009-06-10T22:57:00.000+01:00

I've been under pressure recently to get some essays marked on time, and I had a tight deadline. It's all done now - thank God, but the pressure was getting under my skin. However, I was told a technique which can be employed when someone is getting to you.

Imagine a window which has dirt on both sides. There is your side of the window, and there is 'their' side of the window. When you are wiping your side of the window, a smear is produced - you should smear it vertically. When you smear the dirt on their side, wipe it horizontally.

So their smear is horizontal and yours is vertical. Keep their smear on their side and yours on your side. They are separate.

Voila!

Sawdust and Tinsel

2009-06-08T18:05:00.000+01:00

There is a thought I've been trying to articulate for a while, and I'm still not sure if I can. It's something that everyone else has already realised. Nevertheless, I'll have a go:

The downfall of our celebrities interests us more than their successes. Nervous breakdowns, failures and photos of stretch marks
There is an Aztec tradition in which the village would find their most beautiful young woman, dress her up in their finest jewels and then sacrifice her
Armageddon supposedly arrived with AIDS, mad cow disease, bird and swine flu. We love an epidemic
The attempt to provide 'happy stories' on the news is normally neutralised by recounting trivialities. Why don't they make bigger issues out of medical breathroughs? They happen every once in a while
When you go to the Supermarket, the best deals are never at eye-level. They are trying to trick us
We're impressed whenever the television doesn't address us as idiots
There is a Pub I walk past on my way into town which has a special offer on at the moment called the "Credit Lunch"
BBC Radio 1 is state funded and could stretch public tastes, but instead attempts to skew towards them
If the British Media was a person, he/she would be vindictive, manipulative and mercurial
Our culture hates itself. I will watch it collapse with the same glee that readers of celebrity magazines felt when Britney Spears went into a depression

A Magical Evocation Born Out Of the Rigours of Choice

2009-05-29T13:20:00.000+01:00

A zen student once composed the following haiku:

Clipping the wings of
of a flying dragon
is pepper dust.

To which the master replied:

Pepper dust
Give it wings
It's a flying dragon.

Pictures with self-contained stories Pt 3

2009-05-24T23:20:00.000+01:00

More lovely pics I've snagged...

Can we be happier? Yes

2009-05-24T12:01:00.000+01:00

Well, it's not like I don't get it. When I see Paul McKenna's face, I probably have the same reaction you do. I want to attack. The guy has this look of conviction and self-assurance that is horrendously grating.

However, I'm rethinking my feelings about McKenna and 'self help books' more generally. My suspicion now is that we live in a culture that doesn't buy into the possibility that we can be told anything that might make us more productive, more prosperous or happier.

Perhaps it's not the idea of self-improvement that bothers us, but the 'self help' culture. However, if there was such a thing as a book that could make you happier and more productive, what would it look like? Answer: a self-help book.

I've been reading some of his ideas and I find them to be insightful. For example, he says that our teenage years are a critical period in which we build our self image, but for most of us it's also a period of self-doubt and insecurity. I genuinely thought that that was interesting.

With his book "Change Your Life in 7 Days", there is a hypnosis CD. I've been listening to to every day for a couple of weeks now and it really does help inject some positive vibes into your day. I've been imagining my ideal self and stepping into that guy. I'm more polite to strangers, and not getting as stressed out by the heavy workload I have on at the moment. Oh, and I have a new girlfriend :)

And no - I don't think that I'm being duped into anything, and I don't think that I'm being naive by accepting the hypnosis CD and his ideas on their own terms. There is a fine but significant line between healthy scepticism and useless cynicism. I decided that If I'm going to benefit at all, I need to be complicit. It seems to be working.

One friend of mine told me that McKenna is a fraud. Well, if this is so and he hasn't been sussed out yet, he's doing very well. Another friend who is cheerful and productive by nature scoffed at me for saying I'm getting into stuff he talks about. If someone is born hard-wired with characteristics that you want, and you're laughed at for trying to attain them, well... that aint right.

There is a defeatist mentality in this country which has to be scotched. Feel the love! Be complicit! Engage with the guy on his own terms before deciding to dismiss him.

Personality and Nervous System

2009-05-22T23:10:00.000+01:00

I'm kind-of just writing this down so as to keep it as a note to myself.

At some point, I must give some thought to the idea that one's personality, in part, could have something to do with one's nervous system.

Hmmmm

First thing I'll have to do it define these two things....

Creativity

2009-05-22T20:10:00.000+01:00

There are little conversational games I enjoy, like asking "if you could have a dinner party with 5 people, living or dead, who would you have?". You can learn about a person with stuff like that - their interests, their mind set and their level of imagination. Another one would be "what song do you want played at your funeral?" or "who would play you in the movie of your life?".

I asked one inventive friend who would play him in a movie and he immediately replied, "can I have Michael Jackson while he was still an embryo?". I love this. It slid the key under the door for me as well with how I could have fun with these games. There was a kind of creativity simmering beneath the surface with me, but I needed my friend to lift the lid and demonstrate to me that I can come at it from that angle.

So while I previously may have said for the dinner party that my 5 guests may have been:
Harry Partch
Spalding Gray
Stan Brakhage
VS Ramachandran
Steven Pinker

now I can flex the rules, and say:
The person who wrote the alphabet song
The last cow before they go extinct
Winston Churchill's corpse
The Queen's gynecologist
The first person who counted as a human rather than a monkey

We need people to show us what is permissable in creativity. It unlocks our own potential.

Sunglasses that make you look like an Asshole

2009-05-19T12:18:00.000+01:00

Fashion is a peculiar thing. Initially, it was only available to the very wealthy - nobility, and the like. Not something that the peasants could afford. Modern day-peasants wear Nike!

(OK. That's me at my most non-PC, but there's a kernel of truth to it)

Fashion changes tremendously quickly nowadays - every decade in the 20th Century has its own aesthetic, but it wasn't like that in the 1300s. As such, we are sensitized to possible errors we made in recent history. Errors in the 70s:

and errors in the 80s:

Incidentally, if you ever have a moment of thinking that black people are automatically cooler than white people, look at this picture again. They usually are cooler, mind. But this pic serves as a sobering reminder that even people as hip as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five can be corrupted...

At any rate, our mistakes become clearer in hindsight but I think I know what we'll be looking at in 20 years and asking ourselves, 'why the hell did we wear that?'. This is a picture I took of a poor dupe while I was on the tube in London:

This plonker presumably believes that those glasses will make him look cool and mysterious. They won't. It's just a big mistake.

Mis-shapen, over sized. Bad.

Fingers crossed that guy won't see this blog, track me down and kick my ass.....

Sort-of forgotten, but not exactly

2009-03-20T01:08:00.000Z

A while ago now, lets say 6 years ago, I saw this picture of the inimitable Diamanda Galas:

When I last looked, the picture wasn't on my hard-drive. I must have seen it online somewhere and always thought it was great. She's so hip and so sinister.

Cross-check it with the photo I used for my profile image... it looks sort-of similar, no? I took that picture of myself a few months ago and always liked it, but couldn't explain why. Now I know why - because I'm kinda pulling the same pose as Galas! I only wish I could look as cool as she does, but at any rate - the image must have been nestling away somewhere in my unconscious but I hadn't made the connection until now.

Weird...

Undressing

2009-03-19T00:27:00.001Z

I was chatting with a friend today over coffee and we got onto the subject of undressing. It reminded me of an occasion a few years back where I was on a beach in Spain and people could go nude if they wanted to. I opted out, but nearby there was a woman who went topless.

What struck me about this was that it didn't seem like a big deal. She was an attractive woman, but besides the fact it was in a public space, it just didn't really seem to matter or make much of an impression on me. Stranger still - when she got up to leave, she got dressed again and I suddenly felt very voyeuristic and self-conscious seeing her.

My friend pointed out to me that when we visit the Doctor and we have to remove an item of clothing, the Doctor will conventionally draw a curtain and leave you while while you take it off, and then come back in. Strange, no? Shouldn't the taboo be located in how much of your skin they see?

Well. As with the case of the woman on the beach, I suspect that we have a way to conceive of people when they are dressed, and another way when they are undressed. When they are dressed, everything remains hidden and private. When it is no longer private, we quickly get used to it. And yet when you're in the threshold between these two states, something suddenly feels like it is being violated. It's much more intimate. During a sexual encounter, the moment of undressing - the transference from one state to another is something that partners can savor!

It's such a brief, fleeting moment where both states become almost fused. Ah, the mysteries of the human heart....

Shell Shock & Euphemistic Language

2009-03-11T23:27:00.000Z

OK. The general thrust of this blog comes from a bit by the late, great George Carlin. This fuses his interest in language with his social conscience in a beautiful way. The basic idea goes thus:

I don't like words that hide the truth or conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. If you live in a culture that has a problem with the truth, a soft language is developed in order to protect itself from the truth - and it gets worse with every generation.

An example. There is a condition in combat, when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to its absolute limit. The nervous system has either snapped, or is about to snap. This condition went through a series of name-changes over the 20th Century.

Shell Shock: In the first world war, it was called Shell Shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables - almost sounds like the guns themselves.

Battle Fatigue: Same condition, used a generation later in WW2. Four syllables now, takes a little longer to say, doesn't seem to hurt as much. 'Fatigue' is a nicer word than 'Shock'.

Operational Exhaustion: Used during America's War with Korea in the 1950s. We're up to eight syllables now, and the humanity has been completely squeezed out of the phrase. It's sterile. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: This was used during the Vietnam War. Still eight syllables, but it now includes a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon.

If they continued calling it Shell Shock, some of those veterans who returned from Vietnam might have received the attention they needed at the time.

LOVEFiLM

2009-03-09T10:11:00.000Z

A friend of mine had a 3-month free trial period with LOVEFiLM which had to be used by someone else, so she kindly gave it to me. I'm definitely a convert! It's re-invigorated my interest in film in quite a surprising way.

There is, of course an abundance of blockbuster titles on their list. But if you want to explore other types of stuff, it's not such a bad selection. Members of LOVEFiLM are invited to put a list together of their favorites for others to browse, so I posted a list of avant-garde movies (predominantly short films) onto the site. There's actually more out there than you might expect.

If you wanna take a look, this is the link: http://www.lovefilm.com/community/view_list.html?customer_list_id=18215

Pum Pum: A Quick Formal Breakdown

2009-03-04T23:36:00.001Z

A friend of mine, Mark Corrin, posted the new video by Lee "Scratch" Perry on Facebook a few weeks ago. I've had the song on repeat ever since, and I'm still not bored by it. If you don't like it at first, be aware that it's better than you think. And if you do like it to begin with, it's still better than you think.

In case you don't already know, Lee Perry is one of the original icons of Reggae and Dub music. He was born in 1936 in Kendal, Jamaica and now lives in Zurich.

I'll just make a string of points about this video:

I never thought a man in his 70s would look so cool with silver, sparkling eyeliner
The beat is so rocksteady. The bass drum matches the "P" in Pum Pum, so they accentuate one another
I'm haunted by the image of Perry wiggling his fingers with all his gold rings at the camera
Listen out for all the intricate little sound effects layered into the song. Lots of orgasmic groans, ambient humms, gunshots...
He only starts singing about 2mins in. Before that he kind-of speaks the lyrics. I think it's called 'toasting'
It's a call and response song that goes through a series of rounds that can be interchanged. There is a beautiful clarity to it. One of them, which subtly plays with expectations goes:

Good vibration (good vibration)
for the good sensation (good vibration)
good vibration, good vibration, good vibration: I say!

another round that has a weird, asymmetrical structure goes 8-8-8-5. It seems silly, but there is a cleanliness, and a simple clarity which doesn't come easily to most:

Find a pum pum for my tittie
find a pum pum for my tittie
find a pum pum for my tittie
In New York City

Or he will say "look inna Pum Pum", to which a backing singer replies either "sweet Pum Pum, sexy Pum Pum" or "gimme more, gimme more".
Later, he picks up on the "gimme more" round, and voices layer on top of one another saying it in different ways
At the end, the various rounds inter cut one another
It takes a special kind-of guy to invoke a love of Jesus with a love of excess and the erotic so seamlessly
The beat cuts out at one point, and a phasing sound comes in on his voice. Today, it's a common trope but Perry was one of the pioneers to do stuff like this with Dub in the 70s
After Jesus is mentioned, an 'orchestra hit' enters the song - thus aligning his presence with that sound for the rest of the piece

OK. If nothing else, I hope I've demonstrated that if you think the song is simplistic or formally trite, you're mistaken. Enjoy!

If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome

2009-02-28T01:09:00.000Z

I've been reading a book recently that outlines how how language is understood on multiple levels rather than in a singular, literal sense. In everyday life, we anticipate our listener's ability to read between the lines and slip in requests that we feel we can't blurt out directly. Consider the following sentence:

"if you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome"

this doesn't actually make much sense. Why would it inspire awe for someone to pass you the guacamole? Well, it's clearly a request. But why don't people just say "gimme the guacamole", instead of pussyfooting around?

This polite dinnertime request - what linguists call a 'whimperative', can be explained. When you issue a request, you are presupposing that the hearer will comply. But unless you're addressing employees, or you're a bossy kind of person, you probably wouldn't want to speak to people in that way. But you do want the guacamole. The way out of this dilemma is to couch your request as a stupid question ("can you pass the guacamole?"), or a pointless rumination ("I was wondering if you could pass the guacamole") or a ridiculous overstatement ("it would be great if you could pass the guacamole") or some other blather that is so incongruous that the listener can't take it at face value.

The person you're talking to intuits what you actually mean, and at the same time they sense that you've made an effort not to treat them as some kind of assistant. Thus you've done two things at once - communicate your request for guacamole, and signal your understanding of the relationship.

Jolene

2009-02-22T19:19:00.000Z

I was musing to a friend recently about how I find it odd that when I ask people what sort of music they like, they normally say "a bit of everything, really". This is invariably followed by either "except heavy metal", or "except country music". I don't understand what people have against heavy metal or country music, but credit to any genre that forces people into having an opinion about it.

At any rate, my friend replied that she doesn't like country music either - except for the song "Jolene" by Dolly Parton which she likes very much. I had another listen to it today, and it is indeed a terrific song.

Besides the fact it has a pleasing melody and the guitar interacts well with the percussion, it's a good theme for a song. The general gist goes that Dolly is singing to a woman who could easily seduce the man that she loves, and she's pleading her not to. For Jolene, who is beautiful, it would simply be another conquest but for Dolly, she would lose her only true love and be left with nothing.

This presents a dilemma which women in relationships might more often face than men. Dolly knows that her partner, whom she loves, would cheat on her given the opportunity. In her heart, she understands that, accepts him and forgives him for it. But she just doesn't want to see it happen.

So I wonder two things: firstly, is this something that is commonly felt by women in relation to their boyfriends or husbands? Do women frequently feel threatened by other women? Secondly, do we judge each other's moral characters in terms of what the people around us have done, or what they would do, given the chance?

If we could accurately predict one another's response to a variety of given situations, it would probably lead to a lot of friendships and relationships becoming very strained very quickly. All sorts of unspoken anger and disappointments. So I guess part of the mechanism by which human relationships of any kind are allowed to operate is by sweeping certain doubts we have about our friends and lovers under the carpet, and only judging them as and when we're in a position where we're forced to.

Or maybe I'm being pessimistic. I'm not sure.

Pictures with self-contained stories Pt 2

2009-02-17T23:01:00.001Z

Continuing from yesterday...

Pictures with self-contained stories Pt 1

2009-02-16T23:37:00.000Z

There seems to be a thriving culture of people who collect strange and splendid images and share them online. I decided to start collecting them a little while ago, and this is the first half of the ones I decided to add to my blog.

I love how they frame one another, despite the fact they were all taken in different contexts, for different reasons. Together, there is a strange internal logic to it all. All of these images contain miniature stories and that, for me, is a part of their delight. Each one asks for a moment's contemplation.

Disclaimer: many of these are cherry-picked from my pal, Michael Crowe. So all credit to him!

More pictures to follow....

We saw some animals

2009-02-12T23:41:00.000Z

I went to the zoo with Sandie last weekend, we had a splendid day out!

I saw Nellie the Elephant

Here are some big horned beasts that were feasting on hay. I can't remember what these are

I saw a Gorilla that sat peacefully and ate some leaves. As I watched, I imagined that this must be what prehistoric man looked like for most of the day. Just sitting around eating quietly

I saw this creature and said to Sandie, "what is that?". She replied "I don't know but it sure likes oranges". She was right. I think we read somewhere that it's related to Raccoons. So his name is Rocky Raccoon

Finally, here is a muddy Rhino. I don't know if Rhinos like wallowing in mud or what. Maybe they do it to keep cool - I've heard pigs do that. It might just be an unkempt Rhino. I thought about how Rhinos look wrinkly pretty much from birth. Their not old or anything, that's just how they look

I enjoyed myself enjoying the animals, if that makes sense. It's a simple pleasure, looking at stuff and going "ooo! look at that"

Restaurant Etiquette

2009-02-12T19:22:00.000Z

This has happened to me a couple of times now: I'll go out for a meal with some friends, and we all order whatever we fancy. I'll ask for something a little more modest, because I'm either not as hungry or because I don't particularly feel like spending too much money.

Then, the bill arrives and someone says "right, shall we just split between the four of us then?".

On both occasions, I just didn't want to bother arguing that I shouldn't be paying the same as everyone else because it's unfair. So I cough up the money and try to forget about it (though I'm writing this blog so I obviously can't).

Walking home today from campus, I was thinking about both sides of the argument. I basically saw one argument for each side of the debate. Those in favour of sharing the bill evenly, I presume, believe that we're all friends anyway so a little less or a little extra doesn't matter - it's a gesture of good will. Those who prefer not to split the bill evenly, such as myself, prefer to feel like we're being fair. I wouldn't want to feel like I was over-paying, and I wouldn't want someone else to pay extra just because I ordered a more expensive dish than them.

As I see it, neither one of these arguments actually refutes the other one. Rather, they simply both draw out different aspects out of the same social convention. So it's not as though two people having this debate could undermine the other persons argument with their own point. It's simply two things that are true. So it's a case of which truth you choose to focus on.

After having this thought, I wondered if that is the nature of all sorts of discussions and disagreements people have. They aren't actually disproving one another during a debate, they just focus on different aspects of the same thing.

Mysterious Magpie in a Misty Miasma

2009-02-08T16:33:00.000Z

This is a photo taken by my friend Emma Shaw. Between the two of us, we came up with the title of this blog post. That put me in a good mood.

Thanks Emma!

25 Random Things About Me

2009-02-02T23:33:00.000Z

1) I frequently tap melodies with my fingers

2) I am politically to the left, but I mistrust any group that consistently polarizes towards the same opinion

3) I enjoy experiencing bad art, because I can think about what is wrong with it

4) The points of focus between my two eyes don't properly converge

5) My fringe has inspired a comparison with Dogtanian

6) As far as I understand, if you are atheist then you have to believe that consciousness is a side-product of the firing of neurons. To me, this requires a substantial leap of faith. Therefore I believe in God

7) I always mis-spell the word necessary. For some reason, "neccesary" looks right to me

8) Instead of having a song played at my funeral, I'd rather have the short film "Rainbow Dance" by Len Lye screened (it's on youtube if you're curious - though it's a blurry copy)

9) I don't think that all religions are the same at the end of the day

10) I really like my life at the moment

11) I am gluten intolerant, pescetarian, I avoid artificial sweeteners and high-glycemic index food, and I try to stay away from dairy and peanuts

12) I resent Pythagoras for developing the chromatic scale

13) I think that wearing gold jewellery is odd and a little perverse

14) I don't like 'folk wisdom' (e.g. "everybody is different", or "just be yourself")

15) I feel good when I cry, even if it's about something sad

16) I think that the best use of the english language can be found in modern day, working-class Jamaica

17) My mum hypnotized me to treat my phobia of spiders. It was helpful

18) I try and pay attention to noise that is sent to my visual cortex, rather than just the retinal impression of things

19) I once asked someone what "ionic" means while I was in a restaurant in Broadstairs. As they were explaining it to me, Bob Geldof walked past the window. I got distracted, and still don't know what ionic means

20) I think that Bassett Hounds look a bit like Rabbits

21) Three of my favorite artists - Spalding Gray, Stan Brakhage and Harry Partch

22) I once saw a girl with a dog on a train. She ate a bag of crisps, and then let the dog lick her salty hand

23) I think that New Scientist is a great magazine

24) I threw a snowball at a tree today

25) Provided nothing unexpected should happen, I would hope to live long enough to see the 2050s

Terrible English

2009-01-31T01:35:00.000Z

Here's a quote from the film theorist Colin MacCabe, from 1975. Why are academics sometimes the most inarticulate people... like... ever...

(bear in mind that this is a single sentence)

"The problem is to understand the terms of the construction of the subject and the modalities of the replacement of this construction in specific signifying practices, where “replacement” means not merely the repetition of the place of that construction but also, more difficultly, the supplacement—the overplacing: supplementation or, in certain circumstances, supplantation (critical interruption)—of that construction in the place of its repetition."

If I have any aim as a film theorist, it's to not write like this. I realise that the sentence before this one is a bad one, but I did it on purpose. It's also because I've been marking essays, some of which those essays are written with bad english that makes my writing now bad.

The funny thing is that I can't always tell what it is that makes a sentence a bad sentence or poor grammatically I just know when I see it but I know that poor punctuation has a lot too do with it also sentences that are too long also where the same word it used twice in the same sentence (like the sentence just before this one where I said sentence twice)

I Finally found a use for the Semicolon

2009-01-24T18:58:00.000Z

;-)

A Glass of Pure Heaven

2009-01-24T15:34:00.001Z

No doubt about it, I'm definitely a middle-class kind of guy. Every once in a while I see something that brings this middle-class thing back to the surface.

I was in my local convenience store today and saw this:

I find stuff like this very difficult not to judge from some kind of elitist perspective. Is it just me? I have a theory that if you read "great deals! 99p Pure Heaven" you're locked into this predicament of either having to think "oh boy, that's a good price for a taste of pure heaven" or thinking "nasty shit".

It's illegible from the size of this picture, but the bottle says across the front "Sparkling Celebration Drink". The thought that people actually celebrate special occasions with this stuff makes me mist over for some reason. Celebrating with a glass of tap water wouldn't have quite the same depth of tragedy than celebrating with a glass of Pure Heaven.

Like I said, I'm middle-class. So sue me.

Can't See a Thing

2009-01-17T20:59:00.001Z

I don't recall when I first saw this picture of Godard, it's one of those iconic images that feels like it's always been there. I became a projectionist in about 2003, and something that occurred to me quite soon after working with 35mm film is that Godard wouldn't be able to discern a single thing he was looking at. Try and imagine how dark a frame of film is, and then imagine looking at it while wearing a pair of shades. Idiotic.

More recently, however I saw this picture of Eisenstein that was probably taken about 30 years before the Godard one. It's not as well known, but I think it's an awesome picture....

Here is my version of that pose, albeit with a humble strip of 8mm film:

3 Generations

2009-01-13T19:41:00.000Z

I must be into pictures that are alike at the moment (see Munch and Macaulay post). Here is mum, myself and my nephew seemigly pulling the same expression in recent photos.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and all that...

Tea Ski

2009-01-13T00:21:00.001Z

For whatever reason, I wanted to transcribe a joke that stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg made on his recent album. Don't know why, but I think there's a brilliance to it:

"I wrote down tea ski, what the fuck kind of joke is that? I have no clue. Tea ski? What the fuck... Oh yeah, I remember - I wanna go to a lake and put tea bags in there for like, a hundred of them for like, a week. And then I'm gonna tea ski."

Munch and Macaulay

2009-01-12T01:18:00.000Z

Do Cockatiels Smile?

2009-01-09T02:33:00.000Z

Do cockatiels smile? No - they just look like their smiling. This dawned on me when I was chatting with a friend a couple of days ago, it's just the shape of their beak.

It must be exasperating to be a cockatiel if you're in a bad mood - everyone will get the wrong impression.

Peanuts and Mirror Neurons

2009-01-08T10:12:00.000Z

As most people know, the brain is made up of lots and lots of little neurons that are firing all at different moments. More recently, 'mirror neurons' were discovered. A mirror neuron is a something that fires both when a person performs an action and also when they observe the same action being performed by someone else. The neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another person, as though the observer were performing the action themselves. They have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans.

Studies have suggested that the mirror neuron system is involved in empathy - experiments using brain scans have shown that certain regions are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain, etc.) and also when he or she sees another person experiencing an emotion.

With this in mind, I suspect that one of the reasons that this clip of Matt Lucas singing the Peanut song on Shooting Stars is so funny is because he keeps cracking up, as do the guys sitting behind him. I guess it's called "infectious laughter". All about the mirror neurons...

Rage in a Shopping Center

2009-01-05T23:39:00.000Z

I'm reluctant to visit shopping centers, or shopping in general for that matter. Or engaging in any kind of discourse with the public domain. One of the reasons I'm glad that I don't have TV is because it's another way that I don't have to think about how our intelligence is continually being under-estimated. Case in point, I was in a shopping center recently and besides having to endure the insipid, limp-wristed music that's being forced in my head, I also saw following:

What's the point in the additional exclamation points? Do they actually think that these will get us more excited about the price reductions? They won't. It'll just edge us that little bit closer into the state of living-death where we're numb to everything and nothing is as fulfilling as it seems.

Obnoxious!!! Idiotic!!! Patronising!!!

Thai Toilets

2009-01-04T23:40:00.000Z

For New Years Eve I went to a Thai restaurant with my parents in Macclesfield. The graphic toilet signposts put me in a good mood...

A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics

2008-12-30T10:15:00.000Z

OK, I'm posting a massive one this time and I'm kind-of cheating - this is part of a work-in-progress chapter that is going towards my final thesis. I'm sure I'll at least revise it, if not just start from scratch and take some of the ideas.

Some of it assumes prior knowledge, but I think for the most part it should make sense to anyone with an interest in this stuff.

----

Response to Francis Steen’s A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics

From the outset, my intention has been to employ a model of cinema as a ‘perceptual tool’ rather than as a medium of entertainment, or an ‘ideology machine’ – although these models are by no means incompatible or mutually exclusive. My discussion of the avant-garde from a cognitive framework is an area that has so far only received a modest amount of attention, not least specifically in relation to film. In spite of this, there is no shortage of material available on avant-garde film, some amount written on cognitive film theory, and a vast wealth of material from the wider field of cognitive science.

While much of my research will revolve around synthesising these fields and adding my own observations, I have so far just encountered one essay which seems to directly address the question that will serve as a backdrop to my larger discussion. Put concisely, that question is “what unconscious prerogative underpins the desire to produce and experience avant-garde art?”. An essay by Francis Steen entitled A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics offers a valuable response to this question, and so in the interest of defining my own ideas and objectives I wanted to outline Steen’s proposals and respond to them. It bears mentioning that his field of expertise is literature and mine is film - but we are both looking at guiding principals of aesthetics, and use different mediums as springboards for our discussion.

We begin by levelling the same criticism at theories offered on the emergence of aesthetic principals from within the field of evolutionary aesthetics. There is a tendency towards attempting to offer a ‘cover all’ account of standardised aesthetic practise. Steen cites the book by Voland and Grammar entitled Evolutionary Aesthetics (2003), which principally focuses on adaptations for habitat choice, and the experience of human beauty as part of mate selection. As Steen puts it, “what evolutionary aesthetics has so far failed to provide is a credible framework for understanding the surprising range of aesthetics” (Steen, 2006: 50). I would make the same criticism towards Anderson’s book, The Reality of Illusion (1996). Anderson offers a valuable ecological account of the principals of the human perceptual system as it evolved, in relation to how movie spectators engage with the illusions of cinema. However, there is no account for the variety of styles that one finds in film, not least an explanation for the emergence of the avant-garde. One would think, after reading the book that cinematic practise only works effectively in classical narrative form. For example, Anderson claims that an individual protagonist is “indispensable” to a narrative, and that Eisenstein’s experiments with a collective protagonist were “generally unsuccessful” (Anderson, 1996: 148) – both ignoring the variations by which “success” might be measured by, and also discounting the creative achievements of artists like Michael Snow, Bruce Baillie, Len Lye and countless other artists from the field of the avant-garde who commonly worked without a central protagonist, if any human figures at all.

Another reference that Anderson makes to ‘alternative aesthetics’ is in reference to Last Year at Marienbad in which he states that if the filmmaker does not supply adequate signals for a change in the image’s status (e.g. into or out of a flashback, dream or fantasy), the viewers will feel either bewildered or exasperated if they cannot supply the transitional signals by themselves. This may often be the case, at least for spectators entirely schooled in classical narrative cinema - but the question as to why Resnais intuitively chose to refrain from supplying signals for a change in the image’s status should be addressed. What unconscious prerogatives directed Resnais’ aesthetic choices? While not to discount Anderson’s contribution, an account for the range of aesthetics in film from a cognitive framework is yet to be developed . The variety of aesthetic approaches that exist, as Steen puts it “presents a crucial and delicate challenge when attempting to situate our current cognitive proclivities and capabilities within a renewed narrative of human origins” (Steen, 2006: 57). The variety of aesthetics tells us that a cognitive model which accounts for the range of styles available in the various media has not yet been proposed.

Traditional Beauty

By Steen’s proposal, we can begin to account for the variety in aesthetics by tracing the discussion back to the development of our perceptual facilities. He explains that in order to construct a fully functioning brain, one cannot depend on the genes alone. The human mind also depends on information that is present in the environment, he puts it that “we can think of the genes as a series of switches activated by an orderly progression of environmental conditions” (Steen, 2006: 60). Relating this back to the question of an ecological prerogative, it is suggested that if the environment reliably contains the information required to construct the brain, natural selection can be expected to favour mechanisms that easily access this information.

In many cases, the information required from the visual world is ubiquitous – such as the colour red, or circular forms. In one experiment, a group of cats were raised in a controlled environment without vertical lines, and on growing into maturity they failed to develop the capacity to perceive vertical lines (Stryker et al. 1978; Tieman and Hirsch 1982). In all of mammalian history, cats have always been able to depend on the recurring presence of vertical lines. As such, since the necessary information was abundantly present in nature, a relatively passive mechanism for accessing it would have otherwise been sufficient. Evolution hadn’t anticipated a controlled experiment such as this.

This is where art plays its role in the process of self construction. Beyond simple phenomena such as colours or individual forms, more ‘complex orders’ can be presented in art to expand our perceptual faculties. Steen proposes that aesthetic experience serves to supplement genetic information,

“our attraction to beautiful objects and events, and our experience of aesthetic enjoyment, may coherently be understood as the results of a biological need to locate certain types of information in our environments, as a supplement to genetic information, for the purpose of constructing and maintaining our own order” (Steen, 2006: 61)

He goes on to suggest that not only do we use art to supplement our own order, but that natural selection has constructed a motivational system that leads us to seek out these experiences. This proposal that art is used to calibrate our perceptual systems seems entirely compatible with my model of film as a cognitive tool – something we use to construct ourselves. And his discussion of the brain’s dependence on the visual world and other ‘orders’ found in nature to calibrate our perceptual faculties may well be the ‘missing link’ in substantiating my otherwise intuitive claim.

A point of contention in Steen’s claim stems from the fact that there has been such a variety of aesthetics that have emerged over history. Not only do guiding aesthetic principals vary according to geographical specificity, but they are temporally specific as well. Is it possible that the human brain required different aesthetics throughout history in order to maintain its own order? This seems unlikely. However, one possible response to this might be that as Bordwell suggests, where human biology constrains the aesthetic (i.e. sets the parameters), culture-based conventions specify (Bordwell, 1996: 98). Therefore, there is some leeway afforded to spectators across culture and historical place in regards to aesthetic specifity, even if the same biology remains consistent across time and location .

Nonetheless, Steen’s proposal that art serves to bring our senses back to life, and optimize our sensory systems may be usefully employed in my own thesis. But how does his claim fit into film? Perhaps Anderson’s book offers much to account for how film maintains order in the brain and brings our senses back to life by connecting the various aspects of standardised cinematic language (continuity, diegesis, character identification and narrative) to the evolution of our perceptual faculties. Narrative devices that were intuitively cultivated as cinematic language evolved exploit and perpetuate existing human proclivities, ‘maintaining our order’.

The Avant-Garde as Cognitive Strategy

If popular art can be used to construct and maintain our own order, how might the avant-garde be understood as providing an alternative strategy? It should be pointed out that Steen never specifically discusses the avant-garde or employs the term in his essay, and yet his idea seems to fit it with my area of interest pertinently. He suggests the following:

“By proposing new perceptual orders, artists tap into both the core and the unused fringe capacities of the aesthetic response system to explore complex sensory orders that have no precedent in nature” (Steen, 2006: 65)

This may be usefully applied as a backdrop to my own study. In art, one may engage with an artificial environment that cannot be found in nature. Since the human organism no longer operates in quite the same environment for which it was designed to survive, we may now propose new orders in the interest of expanding our perceptual faculties [expanding our aesthetic response system]. Steen suggests that it is not necessary for the orders found in art to replicate natural aesthetics, as long as they “tap into the design of our aesthetic response system” (ibid). Leeway is afforded to the human response system since innovative aesthetics “[exploit] the slack in our adaptive machinery” (Steen, 2006: 70). He continues,

“through art, an individual can not only acquire a certain type of self-knowledge about his own aesthetic preferences, but also use the art itself to propose new orders. These new orders can then be selectively incorporated into his own perceptual system, in effect teaching him to perceive and sense the world in new ways.” (Steen, 2006: 65)

This material is rich with points of discussion which I can address in the course of my thesis. For example, the “self knowledge” that Steen speaks of suggests that there are inherent similarities in calibration between individuals with similar aesthetic values. I, for example gravitate towards the mythopoeic rather than structuralist films (to use Sitney’s terms), in spite of the fact that I am familiar with the viewing procedures necessary when engaging with the Structuralist films, as proposed by Peterson in Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order. Is it therefore likely that I was born with a calibration which inclines me towards the kinetic, sensual style of the mythopoeic over the colder, conceptual style of the structuralist film? Were other adherents to the mythopoeic style born with a similar mental design?

A deeper examination on how new orders are incorporated into the perceptual system is something that could also be discussed. In a sense, “incorporating new orders into the perceptual system” is another way of saying “developing a taste” - but this could be looked at in more detail from a cognitive perspective.

A final point of discussion Steen raises here is how the ‘world’ is experienced differently after the spectator has acquired information that is unavailable in the genetic coding or the environment. It is easier to consider how the spectator’s engagement with art might be adjusted or stretched, but whether that changes the person’s engagement with the larger world is an interesting question, but one that is outside the scope of my line of enquiry.

One point of divergence between myself and Steen is in his faith in the average spectator’s appetite for novel orders:

“the proposed adaptive design of the aesthetic response engine is to detect and acquire information in the environment that is not present in the genes or in its own structure, for the purpose of wiring the brain” (Steen, 2006: 65)

What I feel needs to be addressed in this claim is that if human spectators hanker for information in the environment that is absent in genetic coding, surely the best source would be within the avant-garde – and yet the appeal of the avant-garde remains marginal. If the aesthetic response engine continually sought novel experience, wouldn’t fringe aesthetics be more popular? Public taste appears to seek novel experience within fairly strict parameters .

However, whether or not the general public seek radically new orders or not, the avant-garde nonetheless emerged as an artistic strand in the late 19th Century, and with this strand comes an alternative strategy that artists and spectators may employ in calibrating their perceptual facilities – a strategy that was at play beneath the horizon of conscious awareness.

Conscious Awareness & The Aesthetic Response

Two final themes that Steen discusses in his essay that I wanted to pick up on was question of the biological function of aesthetics and the aesthetic response system - both of which, according to Steen are undetectable to the conscious mind.

Before encountering Steen’s article, I already developed the belief that one’s aesthetic values were based on tacit knowledge – in other words, the spectator isn’t consciously aware of every human computation that takes place in perception of aesthetics. Therefore the human spectator cannot fully verbalise or account for their own preferences to themselves or others. Similarly, Steen suggests that “the conscious mind does not need a conceptual model of the distal purpose and function of aesthetics, nor does it need access to the complex internal logic of the operation of this function” (Steen, 2006: 62), and this is also accounted for:

“the biological function of aesthetics is complex in principle and execution, and from the standpoint of selection, there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by clogging up the limited bandwidth and processing capacities of the conscious mind” (Steen, 2006: 62)

So evolution did not provide the conscious mind any awareness of the computations or the biological purpose of aesthetics, which may account for why this has been largely ignored in critical theory in film, while textual readings are pervasive. The “inferred but invisible underlying order” (Steen, 2006: 63) in art, as Steen puts it remains elusive to the conscious mind.

Steen also claims that the aesthetic response system is inaccessible to the conscious mind. What is made available to the conscious mind is a “phenomenology of aesthetic” which is rich and delightful, inherently motivating and it “confirms the exquisite order of the world and indeed our place within it” (Steen, 2006: 62). Inversely, when the senses are deprived of an aesthetic order we experience boredom and a dissatisfaction with the quality of our sensory environment. But again, the details of the aesthetic response remains elusive to the conscious mind:

“The elementary guiding principle of artistic creation is to trigger a controlled series of sensations that awaken an aesthetic response… the detailed characteristics of our aesthetic response system are unknown to us” (Steen, 2006: 65)

however, it is possible that the details of the aesthetic response system have in fact already been identified. Ellis describes a network in the brain called the RAS (Reticulate Arousal System ) which is believed to be the centre of arousal and motivation in humans. The RAS carries information from the outside world to the higher brain for stimulation by means of its connections with the cerebral cortex – which plays a central role for a variety of brain functions including attention, perceptual awareness and consciousness. The cortex and RAS are “intimately connected and stand on opposite sides of a balance, with the RAS exerting an arousing influence on the body system generally and the cortex inhibiting the RAS” (Ellis, 1973: 89). The point here is that it is optimal arousal that we seek, not maximal. But what’s important to my discussion is that this may offer some insight into the characteristics of the aesthetic response system that have eluded Steen – the nature of pleasure during an aesthetic experience, so to speak. When the spectator experiences a work of art that he is captivated by, he is at an optimal level of arousal. When the spectator is under stimulated, he will compensate by allowing his mind to wander. When he is over stimulated – if the sensory input is overwhelming, he might escape from the situation, or attend only to parts of the input. But in avoiding under stimulation, Ellis also suggests the following:

“the crucial factor [seems] to be [the] presence of meaningful stimuli. A hissing or white noise may generate the same quantum energy in the ears, but the subject cannot generate from it patterns of input that can be attended to” (Ellis, 1973: 87)

I would add to this that rather than simply a presence of meaningful stimuli, the spectator must be mentally equipped to both detect a meaningful pattern, and feel suitably challenged by it. When a work of art fails to arouse an aesthetic response, I would propose three possibilities as to why this may be the case:

1) the work of art is impenetrable, i.e. the spectator’s aesthetic values aren’t configured in such a way that accommodates the characteristics of the work. In Steen’s words, the spectator cannot detect the ‘inferred but invisible order’
2) the art is redundant, so the spectator is well acquainted with the form and/ or perceptual procedures of the work but feels under challenged
3) the spectator would enjoy the work on a formal level, but it doesn’t fall within the cultural sphere within which he aligns himself and so resists any potential aesthetic enjoyment

the third of these propositions is an unusual case since it requires a wilful act, so we can just focus on the first two.

In staying with Ellis’ auditory example, Patrick Hogan essentially argues the same point as myself – which is that rather than being the presence of a meaningful stimuli, the spectator needs the correct relationship with the information – the order should be neither impenetrable, nor redundant. Hogan cites W. Jay Dowling (a prominent cognitive theorist of music), who describes the experience of listening to music as “perceiving pattern invariants in musical events” (Downling, 1988: 126), and states that while the average adult would be unable to detect meaningful patterns in Shoenberg’s Second String Quartet (even though they are detectable to the trained ear), Barney the Dinosaur’s I Love You; You Love Me quickly becomes insufferable to adults in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that the pattern invariants are abundantly, excessively apparent (Hogan, 2003: 9). A less sophisticated infant could listen to the song endlessly, it would seem because an infant can find the appropriate level of stimulation in the work. But this is less likely to be the case for an adult.

So Steen’s orders, Ellis’ meaningful patterns and Dowling’s perception of pattern invariants all appear to point towards the same concept. With the order in place (in its multitudinous forms available), the spectator depends on having a set of aesthetic values instilled that are compliant with the stimulus on offer. If the spectator and the order are ideally compliant, the RAS exerts an arousing influence on the body to an optimal level. Failing that, the spectator will experience boredom, irritation or feel overwhelmed.

Bringing this discussion back to the avant-garde, a slightly different set of rules are at play to those already discussed. While arousing the spectator through detectable orders operates as a prerogative of art, the desire to incorporate new orders into the perceptual system requires the spectator to deny themselves the direct arousal of which is the underlying strategy found in popular art. In the avant-garde, at worst the art will more likely be impenetrable, and thus under stimulating. At best, it will allow the spectator to expand their perceptual skills and understand a broader range of aesthetic approaches – and this is something that is tacitly understood by adherents to the avant-garde and fringe aesthetics.

Conclusion

The starting point for my discussion began with what I saw as an incongruity between the ecological account of the emergence of film aesthetics that Anderson provided, and the emergence of the avant-garde. My goal is to offer a proposal that makes the ecological approach compatible with the fact that the avant-garde exists as an aesthetic strand. Using Steen’s theory of aesthetics as a tool of self-construction, I’ve proposed that the avant-garde unconsciously provides its adherents with an alternative strategy for self-construction to that of mainstream work. Within that debate, I’ve also attempted to provide an explanation as to why the process of self-construction is an unconscious one, and why the avant-garde – while providing benefits in self construction that might make it preferential over mainstream work, remains largely ignored by the general public.

It is possible that I should adopt a more moderate view of the difference between the mainstream and the avant-garde. It may be more appropriate to characterise these two aesthetic approaches as poles operating on a sliding scale, rather than being binary opposites. To one extent or another, every work of art supplements genetic information to optimize what’s already there, and every work also strives to create new orders (all art requires some degree of novelty) - but there is a difference in emphasis between these two approaches depending on where on the scale between the mainstream and the avant-garde the work is placed.

With the broader discussion in place, in the following chapters we can now examine more closely how ‘new orders’ are proposed to spectators of the avant-garde through the denial of and appeal to commonplace perceptual procedures. Maya Deren, for example denied the human propensity to seek out causally linked events and worked through metaphor and evocation instead – while still employing human agents and standard visual compositions. As a retinal experience, her films were relatively conservative. Fischinger, on the other hand abandoned the representational in his work and worked with abstract shapes. But he ‘softened the blow’ by synchronising the shape’s movements with music – why this made it easier for the audience is something that will be discussed. Amongst other techniques, Stan Brakhage pushed the boat further, so to speak by employing erratic camera movements as part of the expression of his work, and resisting synchronised sound – both being necessary asceticisms as part of the expression of his work. These perceptual procedures and others may be further examined during my thesis.

Research from the field of visual perception will form a major part of my discussion of the avant-garde, and also processes discussed in cognitive science such as cross modal analogy and cross modal verification. I also wish to go into more detail in examining the roles of the artist and that of the spectator, and the role that the genome plays in the development of an artist’s personal aesthetic and a spectators aesthetic preferences. In doing so, I hope to shed light on avant-garde film from a line of attack that has so far received little attention.

----

Anderson, J (1996) The Reality of Illusion Southern Illonois University Press
Bordwell, D (1996) Convention, Construction and Cinematic Vision In Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carrol, University of Wisconsin Press
Bordwell, D (2006) The Way Hollywood Tells It University of California Press
Dowling, W (1988) Tonal Structure and Children’s Early Learning of Music in Generative Processes in Music: the Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition ed. John Sloboda, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Gombrich, E (1984) The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art Phaidon Press Limited
Hogan, P (2003) Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts Routledge
Peterson, J (1994) Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order Wayne State University Press
Sitney, P (1979) Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943 – 1978, Oxford University Press
Steen, F (2006) A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics in The Artful Mind ed. Mark Tieman, S., and Hirsch, H. (1982) Journal of Comparative Neurology, 211, no 4
Turner, Oxford University Press
Stryker, M et al. (1978) Journal of Neurophysiology, 41, no 4
Voland, E and K Grammer, eds. (2003) Evolutionary Aesthetics Berlin: Springer

Corporate Cannibal

2008-12-28T22:52:00.000Z

I never really understood the whole thing about Kate Moss. If I hadn't been told that she was so interesting, I don't think I would have noticed. I am prepared to concede that I might be missing something, but honestly - I don't get it. Seems to me that people say that they like her because it's considered more discerning than to say that you like Abi Titmuss.

I've tried to pick out a couple of images here in which I'm being fair to her. I realise that I could just choose two bad pics in an attempt to prove that she has no interesting qualities, but I don't think I've picked out 'bad' pictures. They just reflect what I honestly think, which is that she looks kind-of pretty and sort-of interesting, but never commits to an opinion on anything, and only seems to know one face expression - nonchalant.

Grace Jones, on the other hand kicks ass and I do think she's a real superstar. Unlike Kate, she developed a much more radical persona (know any other models who look like they could beat you up?), and she takes bigger risks in what she chooses to wear. Plus participating in the music industry makes you vulnerable to failure but she did it anyway. Hats off.

Unlike Kate, or most other models for that matter, she allows herself to look grotesque in the most exquisite way. If you don't know what I mean, look at the youtube video of her new single, Corporate Cannibal. That woman has balls.

Oh, and it's a great song, as is Slave to the Rhythm (her hit song from '85). Hooray for Grace!

Mistakes are Good

2008-12-26T23:10:00.001Z

If any work of art means something to me, whether it amuses me or not is kind-of immaterial. Well, amusing me isn't the main thing it needs to do, lets put it that way. I don't really care whether a film or a song or anything else entertains me for a while, nor do I care if there are visible shortcomings. If it provides me with a novel way of looking at something and I see life within the work, then it's doing its job.

Popular opinion seems to dictate that we evaluate art of any form by its absence of flaws. The less shortcomings, the better the work of art. I would love to see this value system go away. For me, the more I feel entitled to love work that is rough around the edges, the more my response springs to life.

Case in point. Consider this photo:

This is an image that I saw recently and I just adore it. By common value judgements, it's "wrong". The objects of interest (ie faces) are obscured and out of shot. One is in the top left and the other is in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph. The center of the frame, where the eyes are inclined to go, doesn't contain anything of interest - unless you're interested in toy trucks. And yet I love the framing in this picture and I also love the raw, spontaneous energy. Irrepressibly human. It contains all the necessary information and was taken by someone who was clearly engaged in the moment itself.

Compare that with this photo:

Thin, lifeless, artificial. Disengaged. Supposedly, this is better framed and a more effective testament to the "magic" moments of a loving family. I'm probably being excessively judgmental of a family's earnest attempt to show the world how much they love each other, but I hope anyone who reads this will also interpret it as an effete shadow of the other picture I used.

Barthes once said, "What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself". Word.

Death and Christmas

2008-12-25T21:29:00.000Z

I watched The Muppets Christmas Carol again today. I saw it countless times as a child, but I'm happy to say that I still think it's a great film. Everything seems well chosen, there are no mis-steps. Good casting, nice Muppet Choreography, great camera movement, catchy tunes. Plus when Rizzo the Rat asks Gonzo (who plays Charles Dickens) "how is it you always know what's going to happen?", Gonzo replies "Because I'm the narrator - I'm omniscient".

What resonated with me about the film this time extends to the original story. Scrooge, as y'all know, gets rattled by the three ghosts. In my mind, they disturb him in the following ways:

Past: Regret
Present: Guilt & Humiliation
Future: Terror

I think the idea goes that he's already lowered his defenses by the end of his experience with the Ghost of Christmas Present, but it's the Ghost of Christmas Future that properly puts the boot in and makes sure that he changes.

With the past, Scrooge re-steps the experience of how he let the love of his life slip through his fingers by putting work first. In the present, he sees how his employee (Bob Cratchet) lives in borderline poverty with a disabled but spirited son and he also sees others have a joke at his expense.

However, his experience of the future is a little bit different to how I remembered it. I thought that the final straw was seeing that no-one misses him when he dies, but that's not really it. Scrooge sees various people say how they won't miss a guy who has just died, and he has to clear away the snow from a gravestone to reveal that that person is him. But I'm sure that Scrooge already knew before clearing away the snow that it was him who people wouldn't miss.

I don't think it's the thought that people won't miss him that really bothers the guy. Rather, it's just being confronted with the terror of his own mortality that leads to his ultimate reform. The Ghost of Christmas Future, in his final gesture doesn't provide him with an argument towards him needing to re-think his life, but rather he just scares the shit out of him by accompanying the reasons why he should change with a cold, material affirmation of his eventual death. And I reckon that's what Dickens had in mind - you don't change people with reason or with sorrow, but with terror.

And that's the story of Christmas!

Sinterklaas and the Pagan Goblin

2008-12-21T20:20:00.000Z

I've developed an interest in the origins of Santa Claus, he's an interesting hodge podge. We begin with Saint Nicholas of Myra, a 4th Century Greek Christian Bishop who lived in an area that has since become Turkey. He had a reputation for being generous to the poor, in one famous instance he provided money to three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian so that they wouldn't have to become prostitutes.

Somewhere along the lines, Saint Nicholas' memory was fused with a mythological character - Odin. Aside from the fact they both had beards, I'm not sure what they had in common or how they got mixed-up. Odin was one of the major Gods amongst the Germanic people prior to their Christianization. According to myth, Odin rode an eight-legged horse called Slepinir who could leap great distances. Children of the time would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw or sugar near the chimney for Slepnir to eat. Odin would reward the childrens' kindness by replacing Slepnir's food with gifts or sweets. Sound familiar? Think "chimney" and "gets around with a flying/ jumping animal".

The figure of Father Christmas (though not Santa Claus - Father Christmas had a different name and was too slim) had hit the scene by the 16th Century, but Puritan groups of the time banned the holiday on account of it being either Pagan or Roman Catholic (which I guess it was). Following the restoration of the monarchy and the Puritans losing their power in England, Father Christmas was back! This is a picture from The Examination and Tryal of Father Christmas (1686), published shortly after Christmas was reinstated as a holy day in England.

In Nordic countries, the original bringer of gifts at Christmas was the Yule Goat. Here you can see the goat teaming up with a delightfully sinister-looking proto-Santa...

Incidentally, seeing him on a goat reminds me of how similar the name "Santa" is to the name "Satan". But I digress.

There is also another guy we have to bring into the mix - a Dutch fellow called Sinterklaas. In the Netherlands, he's entirely distinct from Santa Claus. However, they look alike, and their names are so similar, there's clearly something fishy going on. In the Netherlands, they call Santa de Kerstman (the Christmasman). Apparently, half of the Dutch households have Sinterklaas visit them on the 5th December, and the other half are visited by Santa on the 25th. Chaos.

How the Dutch name, Sinterklaas became Santa Claus was probably by the same process by which the name Christ-Kindl (Christ-child) became Kris Kringle (another name for Santa). Some english speaking schmuk probably forgot the original name and told everyone the wrong thing and that caught on.

By the late 1800s, St Nicholas, Odin, Father Christmas, Sinterklaas and the goat all fused into one guy, and the American caricaturist Thomas Nast redesigned him as fat and jolly. There was controversy over whether he's based in the North Pole or Lapland, a debate which still rages today. Who knows. At any rate, it was Nast who gave Santa the Red and White look. Although Santa's image was further popularised by Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns of the 1930s, they didn't assign his colours - contrary to popular belief. Coca-Cola also weren't the first soft drink to co-opt Santa, White Rock Beverages used Santa to sell mineral water in 1915.

Finally, Rev. Paul Nedergaard, a clergyman in Copenhagen, attracted controversy in 1958 when he declared Santa to be a "Pagan Goblin". I'm sure Saint Nicholas would be delighted to know that his memory has been morphed into a fat, cheerful goblin that sneaks down chimneys and promotes beverages.

Not Funny

2008-12-20T13:21:00.001Z

I'm perfectly happy to judge a book by its cover. As such, I've been looking through a database of stand-up comedians and have compiled a series of pictures of comics whom, I'm certain, aren't even remotely funny. Enjoy.

Journal Excerpts: March to December 2004

2008-12-18T01:55:00.000Z

From mid-2002 to early 2005, I kept a journal of ideas and thoughts. I've been flipping through it today, and thought I'd copy out some of the later ones that I still like:

17/12/04
Yetzer Hatov - a Hebrew term that means 'the good instinct'

26/09/04
If an antidote to pain was invented, then I would wonder how I could survive without it

12/09/04
By the year 3000, the whole world will be speaking Chinese

18/07/04
[Excerpt from a conversation with Steve Crowe who mis-heard me]
Paul: "this t-shirt cost me ten smackers"
Steve: "tit smackers?"

16/07/04
Weird advertising ploy on posters and TV commercials: men dressed up as 'hunger' or 'dyslexia' or headache demons

31/05/04
It's a danger. From an early age you might be making shit jokes, but people laugh out of politeness and you grow up with the misconception that you're funny, but you aren't. You're just surrounded by kind people

20/05/04
It is not God's presence, but rather God's absence that is mans greatest source of comfort
[That's a quote from the film Eloge de Amour]

12/05/04
WWF wrestlers are comic book characters put back into real life:
Reality --> Fiction --> Reality

25/04/04
In the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" Judy Garland sings in anticipation, and Eva Cassidy sings in retrospect (step-mum's observation)

16/03/04
Punks feign poverty, Townies feign vitality, Rockers feign trauma and Bohemians feign sophistication

Ribena ben Moses

2008-12-16T22:55:00.000Z

A few years ago, some ex-students of my step-dad (Frank) sponsored a pig for him as a gift.

The pigs name was Moses. I never heard about Moses until, by chance I was around on the day that Frank received a letter from the farm that looked after his pig saying something to the effect of "We are sorry to inform you that Moses has been very ill recently and had to be put down. However, in Moses' place you will now be sponsoring his son, Ribena." and there was a photo of Ribena enclosed.

Offhandedly, my mum exclaimed "ah, Ribena ben Moses!". For some reason, that phrase has remained lodged in my head since late 2004.

Incidentally, the word "ben" is Hebrew, it means "son of".

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

2008-12-15T23:07:00.000Z

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence.

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". These are:

the city of Buffalo, New York
the animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos")
the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

The sentence reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo.

[OR] Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community also intimidate other bison in their own community.

Sega: Childhood Mythology

2008-12-15T00:33:00.000Z

I imagine that most people are like me in that they have enduring, and somewhat haunting images from their childhood - when one's imaginitive life is just as potent as real-life interactions. I'm of such a generation and demographic that some of the most potent images of my early childhood come from computer games.

This may sound unfortunate to some, but it isn't something that troubles me at all. Computer games for me were wondrous environments to explore. Children today play computer games in which the graphics, the interface and the sophistication in design has long superseded what I grew up with. Yet I'm very happy to have spent my early years playing Sega Master System games.

It's sort-of difficult to explain precisely what continues to bother me about some of these images. But there is something particular about these early games that spook me. They create these little internal worlds that just look so incomplete.

See what a strange image this is. All primary colours, made of these big blocks and no detail whatsoever in the sky - just bright blue. A blonde guy sits on the shoulder of a giant robot and waves at you. He's accompanied by slow music that bleeps and bloops.

As you play the game, you never learn who Space Harrier is, he's just a guy whizzing through the air that shoots space aliens and monsters and the like. No back story, no motive. Unclear where he is. Just a guy whizzing along....

Here's an image from a game called R-Type:

For old-school gamers, this is quite an iconic image. But again, an entirely incomplete imaginitive space that the player enters. I never understood whether I was controlling the spaceship itself, or a guy inside the spaceship. But besides that, what's the deal with this alien? You just fly up to it and start shooting, and it shoots at you. What was it doing before you got there? Who made it? It's tied to a wall, so did it spend its whole life sitting there being evil or what? These sorts of things bothered me when I was a kid. And again, besides the lack of back story there is no detail whatsoever behind the figures of interest, just pitch black. This wouldn't happen in computer games today, there is always visual detail and the self-contained universes are filled-out with a back-story.

For this reason, I don't think that young gamers today will be as haunted by their early computer games in later life as I am by mine. A child's fertile mind is compelled to fill in the blanks with the incomplete environment and he/ she becomes more immersed. Weird stuff from early life that imprints itself in your brain.

So I'm thankful to have been part of that fleeting generation.

Farookh Bulsara was kind-of a Weird Guy

2008-12-10T21:36:00.000Z

Farookh Bulsara was kind-of a weird guy. More than any other public figure that I can think of, there was a whole load of misconceptions or incongruities around him which seemed to pass over the radar for the general public.

He was born in '46 in Zanzibar. He and his family subsequently moved to the UK, where he decided he was going to be a musician, and chose a pseudonym for himself. On becoming famous, only a small minority seemed to realise that it was a stage name, by and large people thought that that was his real name.

If you look at pictures taken of Farookh when he was young, it's quite apparent that he was Indian, but I think it became less apparent as he got older. Another peculiarity is that he did look sort-of like a Rock Star earlier in his career, and yet as he became increasingly famous he looked less like one.

It can be difficult to imagine Rock history without someone as iconic as Farookh, he always seemed to me to be a part of the fabric
of things. But seriously, can you think of another Rock Star that had short hair and a moustache?

He just pulled these excellent poses on stage so he looks like a real superstar. But try and picture Farookh sitting in a chair quietly - just not a very Rock 'n Roll image. Who else looked like that? Also, which other Rock Stars were most famous for the music they produced in their early 40s?

Farookh was Zoroastrian - a religion that entered recorded history in 5th-century BCE, and was apparently marginalised during the mid-7th century following the Islamic conquests of the time. It's apparently the oldest of the "revealed credal religions" and "probably had more influence on mankind directly or indirectly than any other faith"* . Ever heard of another famous Zoroastrian?

In much the same way Farookh was Indain and no-one seemed to care/ notice, he was also Gay. You'd think that in the 70s and 80s that would have been a big deal, but apparently not! Seemingly had no bearing on record sales or public image or anything.

Finally, Farookh and his band broke a United Nations cultural boycott by performing a series of shows in the (then) apartheid South Africa in 1984. Apparently they had some criticism at the time, but that appears to have been largely forgotten. Much better remembered is their performance at Live Aid the following year. My suspicion is that people forgot about the performances in South Africa because they liked the music.

I just kinda like how there's this superstar who has all this stuff about him that no-one seems to notice...

* Quote taken from: Boyce, Mary (1979), Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices

Man and the Animal Kingdom

2008-12-05T00:06:00.003Z

My nephew investigating a chicken, and me being intimidated by a swan

A Theory to Defend

2008-12-04T22:40:00.000Z

I invested in a Canon XH A1 Video Camera today, thus upgrading from the Canon XL1. I'm really happy about this, and am looking forward to having a new toy to play with, plus I'll be making better wedding vids, I'm sure. One of the major advantages in this upgrade is the addition of a flip-out screen. If you look at the pictures, you'll see that the XH A1 (the black one) has a little screen that comes out and the XL1 (the white one) just has a viewfinder that you have to look into with one eye.

I was discussing my XL1 with a video technician recently, and I complained about the absence of a flip-out screen. My objection was that since I spend somewhere in the region of 5 hours per day filming wedding footage, it's a little tough on the eye having to stare into a tube for that long. Her counter argument is that it saves on battery if you just have the small screen. I replied that if you keep a second battery to hand then that isn't such a problem. She replied, "ah yes, but professionals look through the viewfinder".

This pisses me off for a few reasons. First of all, she didn't address the fact that it hurts my eye to stare into that tube all day, so she didn't refute my first statement. Rather she said something unrelated and pretended that that somehow counters what I said. Secondly, every camera that has a flip-out screen also has a viewfinder. So all they are really doing is limiting your choices.

But what mainly bugs me about this is that I'm not really saying anything particularly difficult to figure out. Stubborn though it may sound, I'm definitely right. But she didn't want to change her mind on the matter because she had a theory to defend. That's all it is. It's not that she chose a position through a lot of careful thought, she just selected a position and adamantly stuck to it. Sadly, I think that this is tremendously commonplace. Where does this confusion between 'standing your ground' and 'being pig-headed' come from?

Perhaps I'm writing this down just to remind myself not to fall into that trap. It's good to be swayed by other people's opinion. Ah, how beautiful it is to change ones mind.

Who is Rrrr?

2008-12-03T01:50:00.001Z

I took this photo a few months ago in Broadstairs. Is there seriously someone in the world called "Rrrr"?

Stop sending stuff to Mars

2008-11-29T18:47:00.001Z

I watched another episode of "Real Time w/ Bill Maher" yesterday, it's a topical discussion show that includes journalists, politicians and politically aware people from showbiz.

Ashton Kutcher was on in the last episode I watched, and I wasn't expecting much from him but he actually said something that resonated with me more vividly than anything else that was said. He was complaining about the amount of money that is being invested in sending stuff to Mars. Those around him recognised what he was saying to be true, but I think this should be a much bigger deal in public consciousness than it's given credit for.

A while ago, the comedian Steven Wright made the point that money invested in the military could have been put into the arts, or museums. This is true, of course. But lets say actually we do need the money invested in the military for national security. I don't believe that, but lets say that that's the case. Do we really need to send stuff to Mars? You can blast a little rocket into outer space, it goes up there and touches a rock. A bunch of people at NASA give each other a high 5, but besides that who gives a shit? I have a second cousin who set up a charity to fund a guy who is apparently making brilliant breakthroughs in treating cancer. He needs a charity?! Similarly, Malaria is the number one killer of refugees in Africa, all they need is mosquito nets, which cost about £6.50 each. How many lives could be traded in for a piece of rock from Mars? What does that rock tell us that we need to know?

Perhaps activists haven't made such a big deal out of this because NASA isn't perceived as an enemy or an oppressive force. They don't seem like one - but as far as I can tell, their draining money from the economy for something that's completely useless.

Everything that's on my mind about Guns 'N' Roses at the moment

2008-11-28T01:41:00.001Z

A friend of mine did a series of pictures recently entitled "Striptease Camera"

These are the images:

A caption at the bottom reads:

A camera takes photos of its own innards

until a vital piece is removed and it no longer works.

(he's a fab artist by the way, his blog is http://figcrumbs.blogspot.com/) I suppose this in part reminds me of Guns 'N' Roses because I saw both things recently so I'm seeing links. But the connection in my mind lies with the fact that after 17 years, GNR have released another album of new material - but only one member of the band is still there.

The lineup used to be Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy, Dizzy and Matt. So in part, I'm wondering how in the world one person managed to kick all 5 other guys out of the band! How much of the camera to you have to gut before it's no longer a camera, and how many members of a collective do you have to dispense with before it's not that collective any more? I guess I wouldn't spend too long pondering this, but it's very strange to me quite how Axl did that. Why didn't the other 5 guys just kick him out instead? Schmuks.

Speaking of Axl, compare this early 90s pic with a more recent one:

my first guess is there there is some kind of Michael Jackson thing going on here. But when asked if he's had a botox injection or work done on his face, he says no. So my second guess is that either he just aged in a really weird way, or his face just naturally produces botox.

Kinda sad, either way. He was a good looking chap. Here's some good news - I've been listening to the new album, "Chinese Democracy" over and over. It's very strange to me, I feel like I'm 15 again because I haven't listened to rock albums since my teens. On the first couple of listens, I thought it sounded a little stiff and hackneyed, and I probably still do but some of those hooks are great. I'm also obsessed with the fact it took 17 years and cost $13 million to make. God, the fun I could have had putting that much time and resources into about 70 mins of music. The microtones, the contemporary classical influence, the indonesian influences. Collaborations with world-class musicians. Shifting time signatures and clarinets, turntables, african drums, chinese harps, tuvan throat chanting, ukeleles. Combining the primitive with the contemporary. Ahhhh....

Instead we get a Rock album. But, a fairly good one. In fact, two of the songs are as perfect a rock anthem as you could hope for ("Street of Dreams" and "Catcher in the Rye") - the weird thing is, either of them could have been on Use Your Illusion (their previous album). What's scary about that is that 17 years before Use Your Illusion pre-dates Punk music, A Night At the Opera (by Queen) and we're into Led Zeppelin territory. So the fact that those songs don't sound completely incongruous seems like a sign that the rate at which rock music is changing has significantly slowed down.

OK. I think I've got everything on my mind about Chinese Democracy off my chest!

I just realised something about people who perform in Porn films...

2008-11-26T03:59:00.000Z

... their all narcissists

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2008-11-23T21:59:00.000Z

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Handsome men, and the purpose of writing

2008-11-22T12:00:00.000Z

I read a couple of quotes in the last few months that must have made an impression on me since their still on my mind. So I figure I'd share them. The first is from Bill Watterson, and it's in a Calvin and Hobbes strip:

"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity."

It was enormously cathartic reading that!

The second quote is from Roald Dahl:

"Personally, I mistrust all handsome men. The superficial pleasures of this life come too easily to them, and they seem to walk the world as though they themselves were personally responsible for their own good looks. I don't mind a woman being pretty, that's different. But in a man, I'm sorry, but somehow or other I find it downright offensive."

Personally, pretty women bug me just as much. But otherwise I'm with the guy - and handsome men are a good target for attack!

Aging & letting go

2008-11-22T01:44:00.000Z

Well, I've been 29 for about a week now. Been pretty good so far!

When I tell people that I'm 29, I'm inclined to think that their thinking "ooh - getting old!", particularly if their younger than me. My honest feeling is that I'm actually way too young to be pondering how old I'm getting. People start marvelling at their age when they hit double digits,

"10?! wow - I'm so old"

so 29 is still too young. But I do have one bad habit that I'm trying to let go of now - whenever I hear that someone made any kind of achievement, I check how old they are. It's like a reflex! And it's getting harder and harder because they are invariably younger than me now. I think I'm still in the mind-set that I should only look to those older than me for any kind of insight. Plus, of course there's this nagging feeling that time is marching on and I should have done something culturally significant by now...

Some years back, all the pop stars were older figures - they had this kind-of worldliness to them. At this point in my life, the world of pop just looks like a dialogue between kids being mediated by adults.

Henrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Robert Johnson all died at 27. So when I listen to those guys, I'm listening to people that are at least 2 years younger than me.

So I thought, well that's just the pop world. How about fine art? Well, Duchamp made 'The Fountain' (sometimes considered the most influential piece of art in the 20th Century) when he was 30 - so I have one year left to make the most influential piece of art in the 21st Century. And Cinema? Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 26.

Anyway. This is just the art world. Surely scientists hit their peak later in life? No dice - Einstein developed his theory of relativity when he was 26. So that's 3 years younger than me. God damnit.

One source of comfort is that most of my favourite artists hit their creative stride later in life - Woody Allen, von Trier, George Carlin, Harry Partch, Spalding Gray (to name a few). So I can take pleasure in that, but better still would be for me to try and let go and recognise excellence in those younger than me. And also not feel threatened by other peoples talent. This is a transition I'm going to try and make, but I'm not going to do it gracefully.

Palin Song

2008-11-20T20:52:00.000Z

I only just discovered this youtube video yesterday but was astounded by it. I don't interpret it as a satire on Palin - it's a musical exercise that could have been done on anyone, but Pailn was a good subject for it.

The pianist mimics her voice with their right hand and applies chords with the left hand - thus bringing out the inherent musicality to the spoken voice. This isn't actually a new idea, I remember one of my music lecturers doing this to a Woody Allen monologue about 10 years ago. Plus in the 1950s, Harry Partch mimicked the intonation of the spoken word with musical intruments.

What Partch did that this clip doesn't is use microtonal intonation, which is closer to the sound of spoken word. Basically, microtones are the little notes that you get inbetween the 12-tones on a common western scale. The 12-tone system, as I understand was developed by Pythagoras in ancient Greece and continues to dominate today - sadly. You could have 100 notes in an octave if you wanted, just with much smaller intervals than the semitone.

So what the pianist does here is approximate Palin's vocal pitch to the nearest note in the 12 tone scale. It's a brilliant rhythm and melody.

Frame freeze

2008-11-19T19:04:00.000Z

I had a conversation with my friend Charalambos yesterday that I can't get out of my head. I shall try and transcribe it,

Chara: "I liked your essay and its use of frame freezes"
Me: "you mean freeze frames?"
Chara: "frame freeze?
Me: "no no, freeze frame"
Chara: "you don't say frame freeze?"
Me: "I say freeze frame"
Chara: "..."
Me: "... but you can say frame freeze if you like. Anyone would know what you mean"
Chara: "ah, freeze frame"
Me: "yes..."
Chara: "... I like your moustache"
Me: "thanks!"
Chara: "this was a weird conversation"
Me: [laughs] "yeah!"

Rising to it

2008-11-17T23:56:00.000Z

I think that Obama went through this excellent process during his campaign that artists can go through when their at a creative peak. You can see it in the work of Prince during his "Sign 'O the Times" era, where he had received a lot of positive critical and commercial attention. It was apparent that he considered himself as a genius at that time and it just made him stronger. Of course, you can't keep that momentum going forever and things went back and forth for Prince over the years following. The same thing is bound to happen with Obama - I imagine this will happen particularly when all discover that it's beyond his power to lead the western world into a utopia (which he never claimed he could but people still seem to think it, or act like he will).

A couple of other things that interest me about Obama: his talent is very unthreatening! I wonder what that quality is, when you can show off your talent without belittling others. Not sure how he does that.
Also, just as he has a talent for communicating with Republicans and people leaning to the right politically, his aesthetic sense seems to cover a broad ground as well. On his Facebook profile, he lists Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach, and The Fugees as his favourite musicians. This might be a sincere list, but there seems to be something for everyone in there - Jazz, Folk, Motown, Baroque and R&B. All of these artists are broadly liked, and none are particularly contentious aesthetic choices. He also manages to avoid skewing to any particular demographic and demonstrate how open-minded he is.

Everyone can like the guy! He's even handsome in a non-threatening way.

His favourite quote is curous, though I'm not quite clear on what it means. It's from Martin Luther King, "The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

I think I get it, but not entirely sure....

Jonas Mekas on Paris Hilton

2008-11-17T01:06:00.000Z

This is one of my favourite youtube videos. It features Jonas Mekas, who I consider one of the last important living figures from the post-ww2 american avant-garde film tradition. He came to America in the 1940s from Lithuania as a refugee and began working is a film critic.

He's working on a 365 film project, which as I understand it, involves him making a little video every day for one year. Not sure if the project is finished yet. At any rate, this is one of them. He goes for a 'video diary' style, and this time he just holds the camera and reflects on the importance of changing one's mind.

I love how committed he is to what he is saying, and I think he's right as well. For a bit of back story to the man, he was initially opposed to the avant-garde when first taking up film criticism. He's also alleged to have said in the past that the avant-garde was part of a 'conspiracy of homosexuality'. Sad though this claim is, I think Mekas is no stranger to learning to change one's mind, and he also comes across as a very humane guy.

The Enchanted Afternoon

2008-11-14T14:53:00.000Z

Now Hear This

2008-11-14T01:27:00.000Z

Chuck Jones is definitely one of my favourties. More than anyone else, I think I admire him for finding a way to make a balance between working within the studio system and producing work of real artistic integrity. For those who don't know, he was one of the key animation Directors at the Warner Brothers animation studio - the great 'evil empire', particularly in the 1950s who could challenge Disney's reign.

There are a few films by Jones that are recognised as classics - and rightly so. Duck Amuck is one, What's Opera Doc? is another and One Froggy Evening is another one. I adore all of these films but there is one called Now Hear This which I think is as good as any of those others, and for some reason it gets ignored.

Jones talked about it as though it was put there primarily to antagonise the studio heads of the time (early 60s - the tail end of WB's animation heyday) by being esoteric, but it's so much more than that. The sound designer at WB was a guy called Treg Brown. If you watch WB/ Looney Tunes while paying particular attention to the sound, you''ll see that although the image and sound effects should be incongruous, they actually fit perfectly. That's sort-of what this film is about. But in this film, it's not just incongruity - I think that the sound expresses metaphors for the images in a sense.

A quick word on metaphors though - every metaphor contains a source and a target domain. If one says, "your room is a pig sty" then your room is the domain and the pigsty is the target. So you have to look for common properties between the room and the pig sty. Does the room have hay in it? No. Does the room have low ceilings? No. Is the room messy, like a pig sty? Yes.

So you'll see in this film such things as a bird singing a song, and the man hears a melody from a music box - this seems like a metaphor to me. What are the common properties between a bird song and a music box? They are both sweet and melodic, perhaps. They have an innocent, twee quality. Another example - bubbles fly into the man's face, accompanied by the sound of laughter. What is the common property here? Perhaps both are a cacophony of short, succint utterances. Hmm - not sure if there's a better way of saying that. At the same time, the laughter also expresses offscreen voices, which laugh at the trick played on the man.

Anyway, I've talked enough. Hope you like the film!

Sketches from a conversation on aesthetics

2008-11-13T17:35:00.000Z

I had an invigorating discussion/ argument with someone a few months ago and I was scribbling down ideas as they came. Here are some edited remenants of said discussion...

what does the aesthetic suppress

abstraction is a transcendental move

Matisse/ Duchamp paradigm continued with Brakhage and Warhol
(retinal and conceptual)

the conceptual is the blind spot of the retinal and vice versa

why can't theory have an aesthetic?
(is it a misunderstanding of the use of ambiguity?)

______

i'm a modernist, not a post-modernist
i believe in purity of form (concerned with notes in music, not lyrics. don't like comedians doing songs, etc)
i fetishise america
i'm not one for subject matter, only form

Young Abraham

2008-11-13T01:17:00.000Z

I saw this picture of a younger, beardless Abraham Lincoln recently. Can't tell you why, but it stuck in my mind

Hm.....

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2008-11-07T01:31:00.000Z

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Stand-Up Material/ Musings

2008-11-06T17:29:00.000Z

On the train a couple of days ago, I overheard two people in their mid-30s discussing the difference and relative merits between Crispy Creme and Dunkin’ Doughnuts. No conclusions were reached.

I also saw a 9-year old girl with a dog. She was eating a bag of hula hoops, and then her dog wanted to lick her salty hand.

I went to the beach recently and spent time on the ‘amusements’. For the first time, I really understood why they were called amusements. That’s exactly what they are, their basically one step up from being ‘distractions’.

In the past, fashion was something that was exclusive to the privelaged minority – noblemen and people like that. those who wear Nike trainers today, would have been wearing potato sacks 500 years ago. Pesants – we used to call them. Come on people, don’t be fooled by the PC brigade. Call them what they are! Peasants.

I like this new wave of derogatory guidebooks – “healthy eating for idiots” and what have you. Then there’s, “windows vista for shit heads”. “getting published for arseholes”, “oil painting for cunts”

the french are the only people who eat snails. There’s a reason why that never caught on in other countries. And it’s the same reason that haggis never went any further than scotland. It’s gross.
Who even thought of eating a snail in the first place? What sick mind? I’ll say this – the first guy who a snail, probably ate a slug as well.

Che Guevara was a pretty handsome guy. Do you reckon that picture would have been so iconic if he had buck teeth and a big nose?

Use the word obfuscate when you want to obfuscate someone

no matter how many times I hear it, I remain unconvinced my the name Roald Dahl. “Roald” isn’t a real name, and “Dahl” is a lentil-based curry

I was at Coop recently and I picked up some homous. The tub said that it was “the cooperative homous”. Somehow that put me in a good mood

Cyan – a real colour or just invented for compuers?

no-one talks about judo any more

same with wellington boots

they make double gloucester cheese, but single might be ok

shiitake mushrooms (always looks like shit cake)

after spending half an hour watching game shows, I feel a little bit stupider. After half an hour of masturbation, I feel about the same. I think there is a lesson in that

All men are potential rapists. I guess that’s true, but all men are also potential magicians.

illegalise pop songs where the singer asks if the mics are loud enough during the intro

rape fields are deceptively safe

no more posters with Einstein sticking his tongue out. It’s not that funny

You know what I don’t care about? Caramel. It truly doesn’t matter to me. If they eliminated caramel from the world, I don’t think I would mind. Chocolate, I would miss. Even toffee, perhaps the occasional moment. But caramel… pfft… I can live without

Same with treacle