erhebung

We’re Not Plebs

I highly recom­mend reading this post about World Cup football com­ment­ators in the UK. It’s from Enemies of Reason, a great blog that somehow (really not sure how) ended up in my Google Reader. Here’s a para­graph from the piece:

Here are people who should know more than we do, but they don’t. In a lot of ways, you’re already ahead of them if you’ve bought a few packets of Panini stickers for the kids’ album because you know who the players are. It shouldn’t be that way. These people are being paid to be experts, yet they’re sitting back and approaching every game like a pleb. They talk only about the players they’ve heard of — Argen­tina is Messi and Tevez, for example; South Korea is Ji-​Sung Park — from the Premi­er­ship or the Cham­pions League, and that’s that. No both­ering to look any further. There is no world of football outside of England, or the top teams in Europe — everyone else is just ballast. Just spin out some old flannel about shocking defending and put some whizzy circles around players in the replays at half-​time, and that’s job done. It’s crass, inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous of the vast majority of foot­ballers and teams at the World Cup.

I was struck most by “inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous [of the audience]” and it got me thinking about a doc­u­mentary the BBC had put out about Atlantis (yes, really). When I watched a bit of the doc­u­mentary, it intrigued me, and I was quite enter­tained by it (good pro­duc­tion values, engaging host, etc.), but I dis­covered, after a series of short Google searches, that dozens of little details that were stated as “fact” (or not qual­i­fied in any way) were either largely dis­cred­ited theories or incred­ibly tenuous extra­pol­a­tions. And yes, of course: it’s tele­vi­sion, it’s not a history book; but why shouldn’t it at least try to be a bit more rigorous? Telling us some­thing is a theory (albeit a largely dis­cred­ited one) doesn’t diminish its value as an inter­esting anecdote (I’m thinking of the small segment about “evidence” of human sac­ri­fice at a Minoan site); but it does, perhaps, make everything less black and white, and the “plebs” who watch tele­vi­sion need things to be simple. Or so the argument goes. But it’s not really an argument, just an excuse for lazy programmme-​making.

It didn’t used to be like this: Kenneth’s Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are two examples of engaging, enter­taining programme-​making that doesn’t skimp on its research or dumb-​down its subject-​matter. And there are still good programme’s being made, so mainly I’m just ranting.

Tele­vi­sion has always been getting dumber, though, so none of this is espe­cially rev­el­atory. The frus­trating thing when it comes to inform­a­tion and research, whether about foot­ballers or Atlantis, is that here and now in 2010 inform­a­tion is incred­ibly easy to access, anywhere, and at any time. People, well-​paid BBC pundits and doc­u­mentary pro­du­cers in par­tic­ular, have iPads and netbooks, 3G and wireless, Google and Twitter. With the power of all that at our disposal, it shouldn’t be dif­fi­cult to find out some anec­dotes about the Serbian football squad, or to see what current thinking is on human sac­ri­fice in Minoan civil­isa­tion. And if we really can’t utilise all this tech­no­logy at our disposal, for simple tasks or for complex problems like fixing a broken oil well, then we’re probably doomed.

Soh-​Kah

Whether or not you believe that inform­a­tion wants to be free (and why, really, would it want to be com­mod­i­fied?), it seems that this year World Cup coverage, at least, really does want be free: ESPN has a flashy (lit­er­ally) site with Gamecasts (not sure if I’ll be able to handle US-​accented “soccer”, but we’ll see) and the BBC website lets you listen live (on Radio 5 Live) to all the world cup matches and watch live the fixtures that aren’t over on ITV (ITV is a com­pet­itor channel which has his­tor­ic­ally always shared World Cup broad­casting rights with the BBC to ensure there is no monopoly; but I think the final is shown on both). I like the sim­plicty of the schedule on the BBC site: very easy to see what is what. I missed the first two games (too tired: crashed), but will try to keep up. More inform­a­tion on where to watch over on Life­hacker (and I read some­where else that UnivisionFutbol.com is streaming, too, and their site is very pretty; what I really want, though, is to somehow be able to watch while listening to com­mentary in Italian — few things beat the excite­ment of Italian football com­mentary, and even if you don’t under­stand, you understand).

A screen grab of the BBC’s pleas­ingly straight­for­ward World Cup schedule.

An Intensification of Existence

I’ve fallen into an odd love with Kenneth Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion, a series of doc­u­ment­aries Clarke, a his­torian, produced for the BBC in the late sixties. (Inter­est­ingly, it was one of the first major series to be filmed in colour, and it benefits hugely from the innov­a­tion.) After a day of teaching, I find it incred­ibly relaxing to be given an enthu­si­astic and broad-​ranging tour of some or other aspect of Western culture and history (there was a desire to also cover Eastern and pre-​Christian civil­isa­tions, but time con­straints made this impossible). And whether you agree or disagree with Clarke’s opinions (there is much that feels “wrong”, to me, and some of the state­ments that are made seem a little dusty, a little musty; but the show was made 40 years ago, so it’s not really all that sur­prising), it is hard to find fault with his language, his words always well chosen, his sen­tences always elegant, his delivery always crisp and clear and engaging. I’m quite taken by this passage from the second episode of the series:

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio­active. Well, I don’t put this forward as a sci­entific pro­pos­i­tion, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthink­able under ordinary evol­u­tionary con­di­tions. One such time was about the year 3,000 BC, when quite suddenly civil­isa­tion appeared, not only in Egypt and Meso­pot­amia, but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece — philo­sophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years — but also in India: a spir­itual enlight­en­ment that has perhaps never been equalled. And aother was around about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world — India, China, Byz­an­tium; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life — action, philo­sophy, organ­isa­tion, tech­no­logy — there was an extraordinary out­pouring of energy, an intens­i­fic­a­tion of existence.

The whole series can be found on YouTube, which is excel­lent. And here is the video that cor­res­ponds with the passage I quited above.:

Achingly Bad

A couple of weeks ago a friend, Hugo (he takes pretty pho­to­graphs — you should look), strongly recom­mended Breaking Bad, a tele­vi­sion series about a chem­istry teacher who starts pro­du­cing crystal meth to make some extra money (he has reasons for needing extra funds, but I don’t want to say too much). It took me a while to track down all the episodes (there are two complete seasons, and the third has just started airing), but a few days ago I was able to start watching. I was really intrigued by the first episode, became almost-​hooked by the second and third, and from the fourth or fifth was com­pletely engrossed. There is point at which everything changes, a point after which everything — drama, char­ac­ter­isa­tion, nar­rative drive — is dialled up a notch (anyone who has seen it will probably know the point to which I refer). Right now I’m some­where in season two, and I’m aching to find out where the show is heading. If you’ve not seen it yet, find it.

Writing Teams, Ensemble Casts

Lately I’ve been taking large doses of two tele­vi­sion series: Deadwood and Homicide: Life on the Streets. Deadwood is the incred­ible creation of David Milch, a writer and producer who earlier in his career was involved in the creation of NYPD Blue (I’ve never seen this, but it is on one of my lists). I will be sad when I get to the last episode of Deadwood, but am certain I will be taking it in a second time sometime soon. The other show, Homicide: Life on the Streets, was put on tele­vi­sion by Paul Attanasio (now exec­utive producer of House, the original source material coming from writer and former journ­alist David Simon (David Simon is best known, now, for The Wire).

Creative, poetic writing teams and strong, cohesive ensemble casts: this is what makes them work, for me. And so, I was very pleased to see familiar faces from both Deadwood and Homicide: Life on the Streets in a newly-​released trailer for Treme, a forth­coming HBO show that has David Simon (see above) and Eric Overmyer (he, like Simon, was involved with The Wire, and also some­thing intriguing called St. Else­where, about a hospital) at the helm. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Here is the trailer:

An Institution

I knew The Simpsons had been around for a while, but I was still taken by surprise when I noticed a message (some­thing along the lines of: “thanks for watching; here’s to the next twenty”) at the end of a recent episode. This means, shock­ingly, that all of my students are younger than the show; and that, most dis­tress­ingly, I am now twenty years older (or there­abouts) than I was when I first saw the show in the UK.

When I was in sec­ondary school I felt it was the greatest thing ever produced for American tele­vi­sion; and later, when I was in Olympia, home of Matt Groenig’s alma mater, Ever­green College, I still felt that way; and watching it now, in 2010, a day off my 29th (damn) birthday, the feeling persists, potently. And I do hope The Simpsons con­tinues to be funny and wise long into the future, as I have come to rely on it.

(Amus­ingly, as I was writing this, ‘Way Down in the Hole’ started playing, a track that connects to another truly great tele­vi­sion series produced in the last twenty years; all of which reminds me I need to download some episodes of Homicide. On an uncon­nected note, the new season of 24 is very bad, in many ways, but some of the cast seem to be trying very hard, so I am perservering: foolish, I know.)

The Screen Goes to White

I watched Lost when it first came out, and enjoyed it, but found it frus­trat­ingly paced. I think I stopped watching it reg­u­larly some­where around the middle of the second season (or maybe it was the third). This video has con­vinced me I should probably give it another go:

“Six Minutes to go yet, Control.”

It’s time again for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I don’t think I will ever tire of this superb series, and I say that having seen it dozens of times. I’m hoping that watching it now will ease the soreness of my sore tooth. I should probably read the novel, too. Although maybe I’d be better to wait a week or so: lately I’ve been prom­ising myself I’ll read this or that novel (Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom each come to mind), while not actually getting around to devoting time to any of them. We will see.

(I just read on Wiki­pedia that Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One In, is planning on making a film adapt­a­tion of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: very inter­esting indeed. I need to watch Let the Right One In again, but this time with the English sub­titles turned on — last time Liu Bing was con­cen­trating on it the most, so we were using the Chinese subs, and so I didn’t have much of a clue as to what was happening.)

Not Always a Foreign Country

So, I’ve changed the blog a little, as I men­tioned earlier. And while I was importing the posts from the old blog to the new blog I noticed that it was possible to import posts from Live­journal accounts. Nat­ur­ally I pressed the big button and imported them, as I was curious, and now I have nearly 2000 extra posts here on erhebung. I thought it would let me import them as drafts, allowing me to tweak them or delete them before they went “live” here; but it didn’t, and now they’re all here. I’m going to delete them, gradu­ally, pulling out anything that seems interesting.

One things that seems inter­esting is this post from the 16th of February, 2009:

I’ve recently become semi-​addicted to a computer strategy\shoot-em-up game called ‘Hostile Waters’, and I must say, it’s great fun, if slightly long-​winded some­times (the missions seem to go on, and on, and on…

My cold feels slightly less bad, but I’m still sniffing and coughing a bit.

Irrit­at­ingly, I missed the first bit of West Wing on C4 tonight, after missing all of the first episode of season 3 last week… I couldn’t quite get into it, which is annoying, because I really love it at times…

Addic­tions to computer games, colds, and The West Wing. The past is not always a foreign country. Oddly enough, a day or two ago I found myself looking at the Wiki­pedia article for Hostile Waters after taking a wrong turn while searching for inform­a­tion about the film of the same name. And watching The West Wing again might not be such a bad idea.

Sleeping with Spiders

I was going to post this now, but I think instead I’ll schedule it to post while I’m sleeping:

I’m going to fall asleep listening to the audiobook of Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is a nov­el­isa­tion of a Doctor Who tele­vi­sion story. The original show features Tibetan monks and a race of alien spiders. You can read more about it over on Wiki­pedia, here, or by doing a little light Googling (there is a vast amount of inform­a­tion about Doctor Who avail­able online). I don’t remember it being a scary story, but alien spiders (or were they giant alien spiders?) sound a bit scary. Hope­fully I won’t get nightmares.