Ephemeral Isle
Archives
Archives
Wednesday
1 June 2005
Theatre of Blood
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
If you want to see an entire entertainment industry get stabbed straight through the heart, then come to Seattle and watch theatre die before your very eyes. This is a pity, because one of the main reasons why I moved to here was because I was then a professional actor and the city had a vibrant theatre community.
For those of you who have not been involved in theatre (i.e. the sane and level headed amongst you), professional acting is a mug's game which involves honing one's art for tiny stipends at tiny theatres while struggling to land more lucrative gigs such as commercials or voiceover work. It's hard work and frustrating, but at least it allows one to learn how to dodge tomatoes and keep one's professional dignity while waiting for the Big Break. True, one could always join Equity, the stage actor's union and play in Equity houses which paid something nearer a living wage, but most actors, myself included, tend to look on an Equity card as a licence for permanent unemployment, as there are very, very few Equity jobs and being a member of Equity effectively bars one from working in non-equity houses. Hence the tradition of working for beer money-- provided the cheque doesn't bounce at the end of the run, which it does more often than not.
But all that was yesterday. Today the choice is pretty much join the union or resign yourself to declaring yourself as nothing but an amateur thanks to the state of Washington and its draconian employment laws.
At the behest of certain people with very large axes to grind, the state government has started to audit smaller theatres in Seattle and are levelling heavy fines on those who have not been paying their actors full wages as employees and have failed to fork over to the state employee benefit taxes.
In the theatre, this is known as the Kiss of Death. And I don't mean a slow, lingering death either. I mean full on Wylie Coyote having a safe full of lit dynamite dropped on his head sort of death. To put it simply, there is no theatre outside of the Equity house that is Seattle Rep that could possibly hope to pay their actors as full-fledged employees. The average production budget in Seattle fringe theatre is something of the neighbourhood of $6000 per show. That's for set, costumes, lights, the whole enchilada. But throw in even minimum wages for one actor and those wages would eat up the entire budget before the show even opened.
The effect of this on the theatre community in Seattle has been... well... Do you remember the scene in Chicken Run when the hens discovered they were all going to be turned into pies? It was something along those lines.
Of course, actors, especially in fringe theatre, have a somewhat tenuous relationship with reality and it wasn't long before the local theatre message boards were illustrating that de Nile is not just in Egypt. On the one hand you had those who figured they could fly under the radar, which is pretty much the standard practice of the theatre world. Okay, but in this case you'd have to fly so low to avoid notice that you wouldn't have any audience. On the other hand, you have those who want to try to call stipends "gifts" and resorting to equally distorted arguments that miss the point that it isn't the stipend, it's that theatres are faced with the choice between going under and being relegated to a strictly amateur status that no professional actor would associate himself with.
The frustrating bit is that this is whole thing is generating about as much public interest as a stamp-collecting convention for a more than particularly boring collection of chartered accountants. Seattle has been rocked by several major theatre scandals in the past couple of years and I'd say that the public's reaction has been "eh," except that implies that the public noticed it in the first place.
What I find particularly galling about the whole thing is that, contrary to general opinion, this did not come out of nowhere; this is not due to some bureaucrat suddenly deciding to audit a couple of theatres. My sources who were in on the audits inform me that this is not, as the Seattle PI (intelligent as a post) relates, "The state says it is not cracking down on theaters." The state auditors made no bones to the theatres that they went after first that they were "cracking down on your industry."
As to why? My opinion is that it can be boiled down to one word: Equity. It is my belief based on what I have heard about the background to these audits that it is a case of Equity forming an alliance with the state government to force the non-Equity houses to either go out of business or throw up their hands and declare themselves amateur houses. True, this will effectively kill off theatre in Seattle with professional theatre being restricted to two-man shows at the Rep-- and they can't even be bothered to employ local actors above the level of understudy anyway, but this isn't the first time that a union has killed an industry rather than give up the closed shop. My wife thinks that this is suicidal on the part of Equity, but I firmly believe that the union would prefer see theatre in Seattle die rather than tolerate non-Equity houses.
So what?
Good question. I'll tell you so what. This is just the tip of the ice berg. Just wait until it reaches the local zoo. Think about it. The animals are given room, board, and full medical care. But are they paid even minimum wage? I don't think so. Once the unions and the state are finished with the theatres they'll be going after Woodland Park in no time. And let's face it, I know for a fact that only the lions there have an Equity contract.
Thursday
2 June 2005
Dutch Courage
Today the Netherlands gave us a
Dutch treat as a massive voter turnout rejected the EU treaty with 63%
saying Nee. My wife was one person who wasn't surprised
by the huge number of Dutchmen who went to the polls. She said that
the threat by the Dutch government to ignore the poll results if there was
less than a 30% turnout would spur everyone and his grandmother to get out
and vote.
The question now is what happens next. Already there is a lot of eurofingers being stuck in euroears as the elite hum loudly and shout that they can't hear what anyone is saying.
The fact is, however, that the EU constitution has been rejected in referenda by the people of two countries that were founders of the EEC and have always been regarded as the very model of "good" European states. If the EU mandarins are wise they will stop trying to shrug off the French and Dutch votes as mere domestic politics misdirected and take the results at face value. The fact of the matter is that the people of Europe do not wish to be ruled by an unaccountable elite nor do they want to see their countries jammed into a one size fits all ersatz European identity that may go down well with the BBC and the academy, but which the common folk loathe.
If he has any brains Mr. Blair will use his crack at the EU presidency to take the hint and persuade his colleagues to scrap all the nonsense about a European army, courts, foreign policy and other Eutopian tripe and concentrate on restoring national sovereignty, dumping the Euro, and bringing the EU in for a soft landing as the trading bloc it was meant to be. Either that or he can stuff the cotton wool in his ears with the rest of them and hope he doesn't get hit by the shrapnel when the EU comes apart with a sharp bang inside the next ten years.
Friday
3 June 2005
Nazi A-Bomb
According
to an article in the latest edition of Physics World by Rainer
Karlsch and Mark Walker, Nazi Germany was closer to developing an
atomic weapon
than anyone had previously imagined. In fact, the authors present an
undated schematic drawing of the Nazi bomb and even claim that there is
evidence that the Germans detonated a crude hybrid fission-fusion device in
March 1945.
I've seen two other drawings of so-called Nazi atomic bombs. One is of an extremely crude bomb with layers of uranium and explosives laid on top of one another while the other is so similar to the Allied design that I suspect that it is pure post-war speculation based on Manhattan project work. On the other hand, the latest description of the Nazi bomb given by Karlsch and Walker seems much more credible in that it is both more advanced, yet, if true, shows that the Germans were clearly going down a blind alley.
From the string sticking out of the tail of the thing I'd say that this may be the long-rumoured "Helmut bomb," to which I've dedicated as many as fifteen minutes trying to track down. It is so named because it was designed by German scientists to be detonated by having the string pulled by one Herr Helmut Finkelmeyer, a minor party member and former second-hand meat seller from Düsseldorf who was not very popular around the lab.
Sauce for the Goose
George
Will has an interesting take on Sunday's Non vote by the French
people.
In his view it wasn't so much a rejection of the proposed European Union
constitution as of the idea of the French to being subject to it.
French "no" voters were surly about their surly president, Jacques Chirac, who favors admitting Turkey to the EU. Worried about their sluggish economy, the French fret that after last year's eastward expansion of the EU by the admission of 10 low-wage countries, French jobs will move east and low-wage workers -- the dreaded "Polish plumber" -- will move to France. The cognitive dissonance of the French is striking: They wish to lead a Europe from which they are effectively insulated.
(Emphasis added)
In other words, the constitution was supposed to be a charter for the subject peoples of a new French Empire, but not for France itself. If this attitude is even partially true, then the French need a little talking to and EU itself is due not for "a period of reflection," but a cold, hard and deeply suspicious look.
Monday
6 June 2005
The Day The Earth Slowed Down a Bit
Last Friday at the Szondy household started out with a bang-- literally.
My plans had been fairly simple; put the kettle on, fire up the laptop and prepare to settle in for a long day's work. At least, that was before there was a sudden flash and a loud bang outside the window. As we learned later, a crow had landed on an electrical transformer and had unluckily put one foot on a live wire and the other on a grounded bit of metal which completed the circuit and PHUT! the semi-exploded and half-cooked corpse ended up at the foot of the pole while we were on the wrong side of a blown transformer without the benefit of electricity.
My wife, who had once been in a stage adaptation of the classic Twilight Zone story "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," went out on the balcony and was reassured when she saw that the buses were still running and that there was little sign of civilisation collapsing in an insane orgy of rioting and destruction inside the next twenty minutes. We therefore put away our Lord of the Flies gear and waited for the power company to come and fix the transformer.
About here I should fall back on the cliché response to such a situation and say that we were instantly transported back to the 19th century. If only! Then we'd have been saved a lot of aggravation. True, the television had gone dead, which is a situation that completely flummoxed Emma, as this was a complete novelty to her, but if we'd been in one of the houses of my youth where the Age of Electricity was merely a highly suspect newcomer we'd have been better off. We'd have had gas lighting, a cooker that would have not only have been able to boil the kettle, but provide hot water for washing as well, and the fireplaces would have presented us with no obstacle with taking the chill off the rooms if needs be. And if we'd been in one of the posher homes of the late Victorian Age the phone would still have worked.
Unfortunately, we now live in one of those wonderfully efficient flats of the 21st century that runs entirely on electricity so we not only lost the lights, but the cooker, the fridge, the heating system, and the only hot water was what sat in the rapidly cooling boiler hidden in the kitchen. Even the door bell was up the spout. What was worse is that the architect had designed our flat based on the assumption that electric lights were always available, so the windowless interior corridor and bathroom were plunged into pitch blackness.
But the worst of it was that the centrepiece of the Millennial household had been knocked out of commission; Zen's main components were now offline, which meant that we had no internet connection and no telephone. Spiffing. That meant I could not access my client's network to get the files I needed, couldn't use e-mail, and couldn't even phone to explain why I was dead in the water. Heck, I couldn't even call the power company.*
So, this was less like being hurled into the past than just having an entire system shut down on me.
Though what I found truly peculiar wasn't what wasn't working, but what was. When I was a boy having the power go out meant that the only things electrical you still had on hand were the odd torches and tranny radio. But today, thanks to an obsession with portability and a neat little market in affordable emergency gear, I have quite a little reserve to fall back on. For example, while Zen's primary components were out, we still had the laptops, so we could still manage to work offline as long as the batteries held out and since they had wireless connections we could always have decamped for a wifi coffee shop to check our e-mail. Also we didn't need to worry about resetting the clocks later, because they were all battery powered, except for one radio alarm clock that had battery backup anyway. And as for light, true the loss of the mains threw us into the gloom, but in a fit of paranoia about terrorist attacks and natural disasters I'd blown twenty dollars and equipped the flat with battery-powered emergency lights, so I did't have to shave in the dark. We even had an odd number of media devices to entertain us, including a portable DVD player that would run just long enough to let us watch The Omega Man so we could take notes on what to do next if the power company never came.
We seemed to be pretty well covered-- at least, so we thought. But what about caffeine? The cooker was out, which meant no kettle, which meant no tea! I had no intention of dragging the propane camp stove out of the earthquake/terrorist attack/volcanic-eruption/carrottop-elected-president emergency kit just for a cuppa, so what to do?
Turned out that I got lucky. The local supermarket had started selling a new brand of self-heating coffees designed for the mass market and I'd picked up a four pack with a view of including them in one of the Future Past pages. So, I dragged one out, flipped it over, pulled off the bottom plate, pushed hard on the plastic bladder to mix the chemicals, waited ten seconds, turned it over, shook it for ten seconds, waited eight minutes for the liquid-crystal embedded spot on the label to turn from red to white, twisted the plastic lid, popped open the seal, and enjoyed in a jonesing for a fix sort of way.
Did it ever occur to the makers that that is a lot for one blurry person to do first thing in the morning? And no, don't ask me if it tasted any good. I was looking for a caffeine delivery vehicle just then, not an enjoyable morning experience and I was to the point where plan B involved sucking on tea bags.
The upshot of all this was that the Szondy family had a fairly quiet morning with Daddy sipping chemically-heated latte reading magazines, Mama napping, and Emma making choo-choos out of her crayons. Several hours later, as we expected to happen once the End of Civilisation scenario had been ruled out, the power winked back on. This was the only hairy point, as I didn't know what would happen when all the parts of Zen's network started bellowing at each other for attention simultaneously, but aside from a brief hiccough as the phone modem tried to contact the outside world while the cable modem was trying to sort itself out, my little cyberkids seemed to get on just fine.
And I am now resolved to get battery back ups for Zen's main bits so I can at least stay online long enough to let people know why they won't be able to contact me. That should keep me going until someone perfects an affordable home backup fuel-cell generator.
*I know, I know what you're going to say. Why not use the cell phone? Because I don't have one at the moment, but that's a story for another day.
Tuesday
7 June 2005
Great Moments in Music
Were it not for the symphonic world's lack of vision, Nathan's invention would have revolutionised the bassoon.
Wednesday
8 June 2005
Pulp Adverts No. 19
Glostora hair tonic; the one that does it all. Not only will it tame unruly hair, but it will set your coiffure so firmly that it will protect your pate against anything up to and including a direct hit by a Nasmyth steam hammer.
Glostora! The crash helmet in a bottle.
Thursday
9 June 2005
Pulp Adverts No. 20
I just hope to God it isn't a correspondence course.
Friday
10 June 2005
Pulp Adverts No. 21
Yes, take up the saxophone and you'll have the local girls flocking inside a week-- assuming that they are either irredeemably tone deaf or are willing to let you make love to them in the desperate hope that you'll stop playing the blasted thing.
Monday
13 June 2005
The Gas Grill
I have a gas grill. Nothing fancy, mind; just one of those bright red things with folding plastic legs that to some minds is less like a small barbeque and more like a largish camp stove, but to me it is a thing of beauty. It is the right size for our tiny balcony deck, yet large enough for our culinary needs. Also, it comes apart so that it can not only be taken to the beach, but it can be tucked away in storage, so that the balcony need never become The Place Where the Grill Lives.
It also has a number of interesting features such as a thermometer that goes from Cold to Hot to Too Hot. And I was impressed to find that it not only had a built-in griddle and was coated with the wonders of Teflon, but it also had a neat little detachable plastic bottle that acted as a grease trap. All very civilised.
It was supposed to be my surprise Father's Day present, but when UPS rolls up to the door with a huge box marked "Gas Grill" it is rather difficult to keep the thing a secret, especially since I'd signed for it, and so it was immediately unpacked and assembled with the usual quota of cursing. Except by my daughter, that is, who was delighted with the large, irregular bits of packing foam, which promptly became a fort.
As I unpacked, screwed on, placed here, and inserted there visions of grilled vegetables, barbeque spare ribs, succulent steaks, juicy beef burgers, tender chicken drumsticks, and delicate jumbo prawns danced in my head. I was, needless to say, over the Moon.
Since we'd been married my wife and I have gone through several barbeques from a tiny cast iron hibachi to a clumsy enamelled sphere that dribbled ash everywhere to a sort of tin table-top portable propane model that was so simple in construction that it didn't so much convey elegance as it did the promise of an impending gas explosion. Now, thanks to the generosity of my wife using our three-year old as proxy, I have a grill that I can stand at with pride as I cook rather than kneel before clumsily like the supplicant of some cruel and barbaric pagan god waiting to have his eyebrows singed off.
But why did I want a gas grill in the first place? Was this supposed to fulfil some primordial urge? Was it supposed to answer some atavistic desire on my part for a taste of the simple life. Hardly. When I was an archaeologist I spent enough months at a stretch cooking over an open fire to sate my taste for ash-flecked dishes and when I lived on a small boat I was utterly dependent on a single gas ring for my cooking for several years so that things like blenders and microwaves I still regard as a change of pace. I won't even go into my days of living in a cold water flat in Oxford where my only cooking device was one of those immersion heater thingees that you plug into the mains and then dunk into a mug of water. Let us simply say that there was a time when for me luxury was defined as a weekly supper of takeaway chicken & chips washed down with a bottle of Old Thumper.
In other words, for most people, a gas grill is a summer luxury-- a change of pace with which one can incinerate the odd burger. The grill qua grill for me does not have the connotations of the great outdoors about it. My lust for the thing stems from one gaping hole in the Szondy culinary lifestyle; our flat's kitchen is so tiny and the cooker so basic that trying to cook a substantial piece of meat is next to impossible unless you are an invariable fan of roasting. Indeed, any sort of grilling is next to impossible beyond the odd pancake or scrambled egg using the twenty-five dollar top-of-two burner griddle thing that we got for our first Christmas together from my wife's parents and which we thought was a DVD player after they gave us a copy of the deluxe edition of Goldfinger even though we didn't have a player yet. Imagine our chagrin.
But that is a tale for another day.
I'm more of a charcoal man myself, but although I like the taste of food prepared over the glowing briquettes, I have never been able to reconcile with the absurdity of taking the better part of an hour to light the charcoals, spending twenty minutes doing the actual cooking, and then being stuck with a load of hot coals blazing away for no good purpose for the rest of the evening. And no, I do not like toasted marshmallows and have not done so since the Burned Tongue incident of 1967. Besides, the prevailing winds in our neck of the woods blow from the west and burning charcoal out on our balcony would rapidly turn our flat into a two-bedroom smoker.
Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that whenever I cook with charcoal the meat is quickly engulfed in jets of grease-generated flame so intense that the end result resembles a bit of blast furnace clinker on the outside and is utterly raw on the inside. It's like a nightmare meeting of the two worlds of well done and rare that cannot abide the other.
But why bother with having a grill if it doesn't use charcoal? Where's the chance of that wonderful smoky tang? If you are using gas, why not just cook inside? A fair question, to which I reply that if I had a decent sized kitchen to allow for a modern cooker with a built-in gas grill I wouldn't have an outdoor grill. I may miss out on the smoky tang alluded to above, but at least I wouldn't have to remain on constant vigil against the crow that lives in the pine tree outside our window that eyes the food on the prep table with greed and what is on the grill as a potential dive-bombing target. That's why I like my BBQ utensils to be as long as possible so as to give me the advantage in case an Alfred Hitchcock moment should arise and I must defend home and honour.
Also, the average small charcoal grill is such a pain to clean on a tiny balcony that it rarely gets a look in past once a fortnight, but my new grill is such a domestic little beast that I've been using it practically every night. Even when it rains, which, being in the lee of of the flat above, makes our balcony relatively dry and thus one up on the great outdoors. I've even used it to cook breakfast. Well, we did have bacon and egg hamburgers the night before and the grease on the griddle area was bacon fat, so waste not want not.
This evening my wife is out with some friends, leaving me to assemble dinner on my own. This is a perilous job at the best of times-- not because I'm one of those cooks who punctuates his recipes by hurling knives about, but because our kitchen is built along the lines of a rather miserly galley on a twenty-four foot sloop. This isn't much of a problem when one is on one's own, but with a more than usually curious little girl in residence one needs someone else to act as a goalie if burnt fingers and trodden on little toes aren't to be added to the menu.
The grill, I learned is an excellent solo cooking defence strategy because the balcony has a sliding glass door that Emma is still to small to open, so it's possible for me to go outside, slide the door shut, and flip the burgers in the sure knowledge that no little one is going to follow me. Unfortunately I did not realise that while Emma is too small to open the door, she is of more than adequate size to flip the latch, and I found myself stranded outside with two burgers, a pair of toasted buns, and, as I did not have a rope ladder ready to hand, the desperate need to make my daughter understand that it was time to leave the Play-Doh to one side and unlock the door.
I think we'll have egg-salad sandwiches tomorrow. After all, one can have too much of a good thing.
Tuesday
14 June 2005
The Battleaxe
My nearly three-year old daughter is running about the house with a battleaxe.
Fortunately it's a plastic one. The battleaxe in question is a memento of a fancy dress party I went to several years ago dressed as a mediaeval executioner complete with the requisite black hood and a long black cloak which has served me in good stead through a number of dramatic productions where the costume mistress' proffered capes did not come up to standard and I felt compelled to supply my own.
I was actually quite proud of my disguise and expected to make an impressive entrance with everyone guessing the true identity of this silent, menacing figure of the night wielding a double-bladed cleaver heavy enough to decapitate a smallish dragon. Then two of my friends addressed me by name while I was still a good twenty yards from the house and the whole scheme was up the spout.
They said that they recognised me by my walk. "Nobody lopes along like that," they said; planting the seeds of paranoia that linger with me to this day.
Like most fancy dress props, the battleaxe had done its duty as soon as I'd walked in the door and made the first rounds, then it ended up propped next to the coat tree with the executioner's hood, being swapped for a more practical domino, stuck on it like the finishing touch on some sort of post-modern scarecrow. Retired from active service, it has since rested somewhere behind the plastic storage bins in one of the bedroom cupboards.
I have no idea how Emma got her hands on it. She somehow found the battleaxe's hiding place this morning and while I was checking my e-mail she trotted it out, happy as a homicidal clam. Even though it's just a prop weighing a few ounces, it's alarmingly realistic looking and it was positively surreal to see a delicate little girl brandishing a weapon a good eighteen inches taller than herself and looking as if it weighed thirty pounds. This was not improved by the fact that at the time she was wearing a pink fairy costume complete with little chiffon wings. For some reason that escapes me this reminded me of that old movie Death Takes a Holiday; only in this case it was more like Death Takes the Day Off and Has the Tooth Fairy Cover for Him.
Still, I shouldn't have been too surprised. It isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. She's often got into the costume box where we keep the relics of past acting gigs and Halloweens of yore. In fact, she's commandeered some of its contents as her own and it's a regular event in the Szondy household for Emma to walk up to you wearing a tricorn hat emblazoned with the skull and crossbones and carrying a pair of plastic cutlasses, one of which she hands to you before declaring, "I pirate!" and laying into you like Anne Bonnie-- though I doubt if even the late Miss Bonnie ever managed a cutlass duel while wearing pink party shoes three sizes too large.
I never thought that fatherhood would make me grateful that I took a first in fencing at university and thereby able in my middle years to fend off toddler boarding parties. Emma is actually quite accomplished a duellist for an almost three-year old and could easily put a lesser man to his heels. She even knows how to press her face into yours and snarl "ARRRR!" in the clenches. I think she'd have even given Errol Flynn pause.
I'd find my daughter's propensity for bloody violence less disturbing if she were at least consistent about it. If in her non-pirate moods she leaned in a piratical direction I would then have some explanation for what is going on, but Emma is, aside from the battleaxes and cutlasses, a thorough going "girlie girl," as my wife puts it. She loves frilly frocks, impractical shoes, and baby dolls; regards Easter Sunday as her favourite holiday because of the dressing up; will strike fashion poses at the slightest prompting; and loves to show off the ballet moves she learned at nursery school. Not exactly what you would expect of a little girl determined to walk in the footsteps of Ed Teach and Calico Jack.
It's puzzling, but now as I think on it, I suspect that Emma is playing a deeper, more subtle game; one for larger stakes than the Spanish Main has to offer. Perhaps she is planning something else. Perhaps she is aspiring to something that the world has never seen before.
Perhaps I may just have to come to terms with being the father of the world's first pirate ballerina.
Wednesday
15 June 2005
Home Cooking
There were subtle things that told us when our mother was boiling cabbage.
Thursday
16 June 2005
One Day in the Orchard
It was only at times like this that Albert could indulge his secret ballet fantasies.
17 June 2005
One Day in the Parlour
Vera couldn't help but feel that Roger was going a bit overboard about his cold sore.
Monday
20 June 2005
Father's Day
The Joy of Meat
It was Father's Day yesterday, which I meant that Daddy was shamelessly indulged as to the Szondy family menu. Therefore, I opted for a veritable orgy of meat suitable for grilling including:
- Breakfast heavy on the proteins.
- Lunch at the beach groaning with buffalo burgers and hotdogs with all the trimmings.
- Dinner back at the flat consisting of a massive t-bone and grilled lobster tail of Herculean proportions for myself, and a chicken kabob for the missus, (who has little taste for beef or seafood)* -- backed up with grilled potatoes and veggies and all washed down with copious amounts of inexpensive champagne.
Because of this, I am in desperate need to make like Numa the lion having gorged on my kill and turn my attention to a long snooze to aid digestion.
My wife also says that tomorrow she will be using the loo at the coffee shop on the corner until the crisis has passed.
*We also went through the motions of offering same to Emma, but as usual she stuck to the chips and ketchup.
Iranian Elections Department
"I am shocked, shocked that there is election rigging going on here!"
Tuesday
21 June 2005
We Know What's Best For You
(So Do What You're Told)
In
a blow for public health and against the basic freedoms of the individual,
the British government has announced that it will rely
on informants to enforce its new smoking ban.
George Orwell is reported to be spinning in his grave.
Cedar Revolution Update
News
out of the Lebanon is that the anti-Syrian opposition movement has won a
solid majority in the recent and protracted Lebanese elections. With
72 out of 128 seats in the national assembly, the opposition claims a solid
mandate for dismantling the police state that Syria imposed with its
occupation thirty years ago.
According to the BBC,
Damascus ended its nearly 30-year deployment in Lebanon in response to street protests and international pressure triggered by (Prime Minister Rafik) Hariri's assassination.
Of course, the fact that there were 180,000 Coalition troops across the Syrian border giving Damascus the hairy eyeball had nothing to do with it.
Wednesday
22 June 2005
Batman Begins
I like my superheroes the way I like my coffee: dark, straight up, and served in a cheap souvenir mug from Brighton that says "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." In other words, I finally got to see Batman Begins on Saturday and I am pleased to report that neither sucks nor blows.
As I have said before, I look upon modern Hollywood with deep suspicion and loathing and can only watch most of its products if I go in with expectations so low that I'm grateful when the film isn't in French. With Batman Begins, I can confirm that in at least one area Hollywood is getting things right. It finally understands how to make a superhero film.
This is no mean task. Superheroes have been around ever since Superman pulled on tights in 1938, yet for forty years superheroes were relegated to serials and television with only a Max Fleischer Superman cartoon series and two feature films (Superman and the Mole Men (1951) and Batman (1966)) to look back on. Even when they finally managed to break into the big time with Superman the Movie* (1978) the rare superhero flick was poisoned with the virulent bacillus of "camp" that the lemmings the industry breeds as studio executives thought was the key to the success of the 1960's Batman series-- never mind that it also killed it off inside of a couple of seasons. Even the Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel suffered from it from the get go and developed a fatal case after the first two outings. It also didn't help that Tim Burton landed firmly on the genre's neck like some demented incubus and Michael Keaton and his successors' Batmen not only had to fight an overrated Jack Nicholson Joker, an embarrassing Mr. Freeze, a tag team of Two Face and the Riddler who regarded insanity as a fashion statement, a Catwoman whose mask didn't fit, overwrought deco sets, tje painful addition of substandard a Robin and Batgirl in an outing that emphasised rubber-clad buttocks, but also costumes (including a batsuit with those infamous nipples!) that I firmly believe are grounds for never letting the designers near any school or playground.
That's all changed now. Ever since the success of X-Men (2000) filmmakers have discovered what was blindingly obvious to any six-year old; the way to deal with superhero movies is to take them seriously. Yes, in the cold light of day they are preposterous bordering on the ridiculous, but despite this they do have their own internal logic and if you approach them on their own terms it reaps dividends that the weak as water plots of mainstream drama can no longer deliver. Because the superhero lives in a simplified, artificial world, he can act in a straightforward way that has been missing ever since screenwriters forgot who Sophocles and Homer were. In other words, the superhero film can be what last year's Troy so miserably failed at: a powerful story about large themes.
Batman Begins is a perfect example of this. The director, Christopher Nolan, recognises that Batman is more than just a character, he is an heroic archetype and as such he can be used to say things that aren't possible in the self-conscious, water-down world that marks 99% of modern cinema. Nolan takes us on a trip about how Bruce Wayne as a child saw his wealthy parents gunned down before his eyes, vowed to turn his unsatisfied lust for vengeance into a crusade against evil, how he immersed himself in the world of crime in order to learn to combat it, how he became involved in a society of vigilantes who turned him into an expert fighter, how he rejected them because they cannot tell the difference between salvation and destruction, and how he turned a childhood fear of bats into a persona that he could use to terrify wrongdoers. It is not only a thrilling adventure, but also a powerful study of personal insight and discovery that you wouldn't think had its origins in a five cent comic book.
Through the story of Batman's origins, Nolan is able to explore questions of maturity; manhood; paternal love; the primal nature of fear; the limits of justice; the dangers of nihilism; the fine line of fighting villains on their own terms without becoming one; and how to preserve goodness in a world that has turned its back on God, yet where evil is a very real and predatory thing. And as one reviewer pointed out, you can even make some very conservative points that would normally give Hollywood a case of collective hives, such as the difference between dealing with evil from a safe distance through philanthropy, as Bruce Wayne's father did, and combating it face to face as Batman does. In other words, Batman Begins is rather like a film about a liberal who's been mugged.
And if all this high-brow stuff doesn't impress you, I might point out that the action sequences are incredible, the cast is top notch, the batsuit is the best ever (we learn why the cape), the villains are believable, the pacing is excellent, and the Batmobile makes a Hummer look like a clapped-out Ford Fiesta.
Not enough? Okay, let's boil it down one more time: Batman kicks butt and takes names.
You can't say fairer than that.
*Good movie, dreadful title.
Thursday
23 June 2005
Cosmos 1 Satellite Gone Missing
Blofeld Issues Statement
Cosmos
1 was apparently lost yesterday; two minutes after launching from
a Russian submarine. The privately financed
space probe was
designed to use eight 49 foot solar sails to capture the light of the Sun to
propel it without engines or onboard fuel supply.
The Russian Space Agency said the Volna rocket's first stage misfired within 83 seconds of lift-off, but that there are some indications that the Cosmos 1 spacecraft apparently freed itself from its booster went into Earth orbit.
However, in an unexpected development, Ephemeral Isle has received the following statement from Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Chairman and CEO of SPECTRE:
Greetings,
I suppose you are all wondering what has happened to your little toy Cosmos 1. Let me assure you that it has come to no harm and it is in safe hands-- mine. While I am a great fan of science and deeply regret having interrupted this noble experiment, I am afraid that I had a more pressing need for the probe's solar panels to complete a little project of my own.
If it is any consolation, the Cosmos 1 mission was already compromised, since I had taken the liberty of ordering my men to replace the instrument packages with my solar-powered laser cannon, which is now focused on the assets of certain major military powers whose leaders will in due course be presented with a list of my demands. Rest assured that I am not a greedy man and that my terms will be both reasonable and much less costly than the alternative, so I am certain that wisdom will prevail and a good deal of unpleasantness can be avoided.
Ernst Stavro Blofeld
Friday
24 June 2005
Dalek Update
According
to Reuters, a Japanese company is preparing to market a
robot security guard to patrol shops and offices. Sogho Security,
which developed the robot sentry, dubbed "Guardrobo," says that such a
machine is necessary because,
In the near future, it is certain that securing young and capable manpower will become even more difficult ... and the security industry will feel the full brunt of the impact.
In
fact, this is a total lie.
Ephemeral Isle has learned that the "robot" security guard is nothing but an elaborate smokescreen concocted by the BBC which is reeling from the unforeseen consequences of a recent Doctor Who episode that involved a vast army of Daleks.
Despite the fact that the episode was a critical and audience success, the BBC is now faced with the dilemma of what to do with over 200,000 unemployed Daleks. Because roles written specifically for Dalek actors are notoriously thin on the ground and having learned the harsh lessons from last year's Murder of the Orient Express in which the Dalek portraying Hercule Poirot resolved the case by exterminating all the suspects, the BBC is attempting to retrain the redundant pepper pots for low-profile positions with various companies involved in security, canine obedience training, driver's education, complaints departments, public relations, and the implementation of EU directives.
In fact, the latter has proven particularly successful, as Daleks turn out to be natural Eurocrats.
Monday
27 June 2005
A Lovecraftian Weekend
It's been a weekend of horror for me. No, I am not talking about having to watch Mary Poppins AND Toy Story for the 346,985th and 466,361st times respectively; though Heaven knows that that should qualify. My problem is that I am in the middle of roughing out a script for a radio play which is supposed to convey mounting dread and loaded with all sorts of references to eldritch nightmares and various H. P. Lovecraft themes of doom and futility culminating in a climax of terror-- which is all all rather difficult to do on a Saturday when you're sitting on a blanket under an umbrella on a sunny beach with the family, munching on ham sandwiches and swigging beer whilst reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel and keeping one eye on a toddler chasing after a pink plastic beach ball. Somehow it just doesn't set one in the proper frame of mind.
It also doesn't help that Mama was having a lie-in this morning owing to having caught a touch of the Sun on the day before; leaving Daddy to look after the afore mention toddler who has decided to get up at 7:30. I can honestly state that trying to work one's self into a state for wrestling with the dramatic necessities of faceless evils from beyond the stars is somewhat hampered by having Dora the Explorer playing on the telly and having a sunny-faced little girl serving one with pretend tea and plastic tarts in between demands to be either tossed in the air, buried under pillows, or tickled depending on the current rotation.
You have no idea of what the word "baffling" means until you have tried to sit down with a copy of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in an attempt to recapture the flavour of Lovecraft's prose and crib a few juicy quotes from the Necronomicon only to have a bundle of joy leap into your lap with a big smile and beg you to read the story book about the frog with the wobbly eyes while she eats animal crackers and raisins. How am I supposed to keep slobbering monsters bent on destruction in focus with that going on?
I'm beginning to have some insight into Lovecraft's mind, though. It's becoming obvious to me that one of the reasons that he was able to become one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century is not only his strange upbringing, solitary habits, and nocturnal perambulations, but also because he didn't have any children. Without those constant reminders of innocent happiness running up and presenting him with crudely sculpted Play-Doh crabs it was much easier to wrap himself in a warm, grey, tormented shroud of Poe and Dunsany. In fact, I doubt if one word of The Haunter of the Dark would have been written if while draughting the outline a pair of pudgy arms had hugged his neck while a little voice said, " I laoo!"
And it isn't just the good moments either. If you're going to write really effective, gut-wrenching horror you either have to be a man who sees himself as the universe's whipping boy and has the experiences to back up the claim, in which case you'll probably not write a word anyway, or you have to have the sort of inflated ego that imagines that you have the power to plumb the depths of Creation and declare there is naught to look forward to save the Abyss. Trouble is, nothing destroys a man's pretensions and brings him down to earth with a jolt like being driven to distraction by a little girl who angrily refuses to put her beach shoes on and then insists on being carried across the tidal pool to the sand bar because the seaweed feels "icky". This is made even worse when your anger is transformed into laughter five minutes later when she chases a sea gull into the surf in an attempt to save the star fish that the bird has snapped up in its beak. That sort of thing gives one such a jolt to the ego and such a strong sense of perspective that you begin to suspect that all horror stories are just adventure tales with a pessimistic tinge and the third act missing.
So, here it is Sunday evening, my script is still unfinished, and I am in a state of exhaustion, frustration, annoyance, optimism, underlying contentment, and a strong desire for my supper and a nice glass of wine. I suspect that at moment the closest thing I could get to the proper mood is petulant rather than terror-struck and I don't think that Victor Meldrew is quite the voice I'm looking for. I'm going to have to find someway of getting myself back into the proper state of fear, bewilderment, and insecurity.
Perhaps I'll go and look over this month's bills. That usually does the trick.
Tuesday
28 June 2005
One Day at the Office
Generally, the Friday meetings went better than this.
Wednesday
29 June 2005
One Day at School
At Midvale School, discipline was enforced by making the boys hold superhetrodyne shortwave receivers for long periods of time.
Thursday
30 June 2005
Flag Burning: Pro, Con, and Idiots
Proposed Anti-Flag Burning Amendment
The congress and the states shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.
The anti-flag burning amendment currently running its course through the US
congress is one of those issues that normally doesn't show up on my radar.
Frankly, this is one of those issues where I don't have a dog in the fight.
In Britain, the Union Jack isn't flown from government buildings on a daily
basis and some local councils have even forbidden displaying the flag on the
grounds that it's "racist." Fine. I still fly it because I'm a contrarian imperialist who enjoys annoying left-wing councilmen, but in a
nation with at least four national flags I won't argue why the main one
doesn't get the exposure it should.
But Americans have a reverence for the flag which goes right down to the marrow and if there was a town in the bluest of the blue states where at least a few houses didn't sport Old Glory 365 days years it would be raided as a suspected bridgehead for the pod-people invasion.
The Stars and Stripes also drapes neatly over one of the great fault lines of American politics with one side believing that the major symbol of the Republic should be treated with the respect usually reserved for the Eucharist and the other seeing flag desecration as the ultimate in political expression behind having sex with a polar bear in public. This causes a great deal of heat without fire, so it isn't surprising that something like the anti-flag burning amendment should crop up ever other year.
Personally, my attitude toward the amendment is pretty much that of Mark Steyn:
For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.
This is particularly true in a time of war when political discourse has become downright surreal. It's one thing to say you oppose the war, but support the troops. That's one of those glib, yet vague little catchphrases that, like a vicar's trousers, covers a multitude of sins and it takes a lot of burrowing to find out what is actually meant by "supporting the troops." Does it mean you support their mission? No? Even though the troops themselves support it? No? Okay then... How about more powerful weapons and more of them so that the troops can take out the terrorists before they know what hit them? Encouraging recruit at schools and universities so that the troops can be assured of having the men to finish the job and come home? More aggressive strategies that protect the troops? Leaning on Syria and Iran so that they'll stop acting as staging areas for terrorists? A more responsible press that doesn't destroy public morale or encourage the enemy? One that doesn't throw baseless accusations of prisoner abuse around? Demanding that senators stop comparing the troops to Nazis, Soviet goons, and Khmer Rouge monsters? Saying "There, there. It's okay, little man" and patting the troops on the head as they march home slump-shouldered and shame-faced after an unconditional surrender to the terrorists? If it turns out to be the last, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be followed by "and don't you dare question my patriotism."
But it's another thing to burn the flag and then say, "How dare you question my patriotism!" The obvious rejoinder is, "You're burning the flag. What else do you expect me to do?" Symbols have a way of cutting through the haze rather sharply.
I can understand the frustrations of a large segment of the America who feel that even the government has turned its back on protecting the symbols of the country. I can also appreciate how some people see any restriction on flag carbonisation as the dawn of a fascist state complete with mandatory goose-stepping lessons for the under fives. I just don't want to get in the middle of the fray.
So, why am I bringing all of this up? I do so because I believe that I have discovered the one thing I think everyone can agree on. That is that flag burning has it's limits, as this story from Sarasota, Florida demonstrates. Whatever your opinions on the current amendment or flag burning in general, I think we can all agree yes, maybe you can legally burn the American flag, but that doesn't mean you can burn American flags that belong to other people!