erhebung

Based on Actual Events

More stuff that got thrown into “drafts” while I was busy:

This is surely one of the most ambi­tious lists cur­rently on Wiki­pedia. Per­son­ally, I’d be more inter­ested in seeing a list of all the films that begin with a montage of “real life” footage before segueing into the fic­tional world of the film. I watched Dark Blue earlier this week, and in that, the director, Ron Shelton, used the footage of Rodney King being assaulted\beaten\subdued by the Los Angeles Police Depart­ment to open his thriller about cor­rup­tion in the LAPD. There must be hundreds more (I’m fairly sure JFK opens with “real” footage, and of course Stone weaves a great deal of archive material into the body of the film).

Another inter­esting list would be a list of novels directly inspired by actual his­tor­ical events. I was thinking about this while listening to an audiobook of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid because I found myself trying to figure out who was fic­tional and who wasn’t. There are thou­sands of his­tor­ical novels, of course, but I’m thinking spe­cific­ally of novels that build them­selves around recog­nis­able “events” or “points” in history (The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid, opens just after news breaks that John F. Kennedy has been assas­sin­ated). I can’t find a list that does what I want, though, and I’m not in the frame of mind to make one. But books and films that use his­tor­ical events (or nar­rat­ives) as texture, or as struc­turing elements, are on my mind.

Over the last few weeks I’ve mean mulling a little excess­ively on the question of ver­is­mil­itude and art, and I need to mull some more, form up some thoughts.

I have mulled some more, but not enough. Will return to this in the future.

The City is a Cypher

I’ve not been taking many pho­to­graphs lately, but I haven’t felt a lack. And as I’ve men­tioned here before, when I do take pho­to­graphs, I’m usually just doc­u­menting some­thing: these days I don’t feel com­pelled, or oblig­ated, to make pho­to­graphs, just take them. The dis­tinc­tion might seem slight, but it is a dis­tinc­tion, in my mind. The six pho­to­graphs below are from the last couple of months and have been placed together along some lines (decoding some­thing?) but are really just fragments.

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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.

A Beehive Around My Head

The Browser (one of the most useful sites on the internet) pointed me towards a fas­cin­ating inter­view with Michael Sil­verblatt, an inter­viewer (some­thing to look for later: inter­views of inter­viewers), over on The Believer. Here’s a chunky excerpt:

BLVR: So how do you read? Do you read as a writer, an academic, or a fan?

MS: No one ever gave me any flash­cards telling me the dif­fer­ence between those things. I read like someone who has been sub­jected at one point or another to vir­tu­ally every stimulus that is appro­priate to lit­er­ature. Let me give you some examples. When I was in junior high, Stephen Sondheim started pub­lishing what were called “Cryptic Cross­words” in New York magazine. They are aston­ishing, extraordinary cross­word puzzles, nothing like American cross­word puzzles in that they have puns and anagrams. Some­times they’re three-​dimensional. Some­times you enter the words as a knight would move across a chess­board. Some­times you take the cross­word and cut it up into pieces as indic­ated and reshape it so it forms a quo­ta­tion or a syl­lo­gism. A typical clue goes like this: “Broken har­mon­icas floating in Man­hattan, for example.” Now that is a very clear clue to someone who does this kind of puzzle. You take har­mon­icas and you break it, rearrange the letters, broken har­mon­icas, and if you have the patience you discover that har­mon­icas rearranges to Maras­chino and you would find a maras­chino floating in a Man­hattan, for example. This led me to read funny.

BLVR: Wow — and this trained you as a reader?

MS: It’s just the way I re-​punctuate things. I’m altern­at­ively shaping sen­tences as I’m reading coher­ently for sense. Words jump off the page, and I rearrange them in my head. I remember a poem by Edward Albee in the New Yorker. Albee didn’t write many poems, but there was one and it had the line “rain turns to snow and calls for a cigar­ette.” And I thought, Hey, snow! You have a cigar­ette? The rain is lit­er­ally speaking.

BLVR: Do you do this with everything you read?

MS: I have an exper­i­ence of the book, and it’s as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It’s very strange.

BLVR: Who else taught you to do this?

MS: I’ve been taught by some of the most extraordinary writers and teachers who’ve ever walked the planet, so I have nothing but rev­er­ence for a good teacher, for a great teacher. Among my teachers and the people from whom I’ve taken example: Hugh Kenner, a sublime literary critic who had the best ear that I’ve ever encountered for poetry, prose, and nuances, for hidden tickles inside a sentence; John Barth; Donald Barthelme; the journ­alist and essayist Dwight Mac­donald. As a friend I’ve had Pauline Kael. I was priv­ileged to be able to sit in on classes taught by Michel Foucault the first time he taught in America. I’m leaving out many who might be offended by my neglect, but I had such remark­able teachers and there’s nothing like having a teacher that you adore and going home and reading their book and hearing how their casual speech mutates into their prose.

Random Random

After a night watching old editions of Question Time on YouTube, I come home to a download of the original Night of the Living Dead; and while watching that, I find this random, random download:

For more than 30 years the Short­wave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intel­li­gence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are trans­mitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Short­wave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way com­mu­nic­a­tion. Spies located anywhere in the world can be com­mu­nic­ated to by their masters via small, locally avail­able, and unmod­i­fied Short­wave receivers. The encryp­tion system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreak­able. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recip­i­ents once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid sched­ules, and transmit in many dif­ferent lan­guages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and inton­a­tion; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that trans­mits a female child’s voice!

One might think that these espi­onage activ­ities should have wound down con­sid­er­ably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by infer­ence, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Tan­tal­ising oddness. Wiki­pedia has more inform­a­tion, here. One “mys­ter­ious, powerful short­wave numbers station” was nick­named “The Lin­colnshire Poacher”, appar­ently. And more inform­a­tion on the influ­ence of The Conet Project, here; and an article from The Wash­ington Post; and another article on the subject from Salon.

More Tangshan

I’ve not been taking many pho­to­graphs lately as the feeling hasn’t been there. But I do still carry a camera with me (a small, 500 RMB digital compact by Fuji), and some­times I see some­thing I want to record: some­thing in the light, usually, or an arrange­ment of objects, or some­thing my eye simply finds pretty. At other times I can hear some­thing in a song that leads to a pho­to­graph; occa­sion­ally some­thing I see in a film will cause me to take a pho­to­graph; and some­times just the sound of trains on the wind at night can cause me to dig out the camera. The stimuli are various.

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Amazing Turn

I have no idea how it happened, but the Liberal Demo­crats are cur­rently leading the polls (well, some of them) in the UK (there is a General Election coming up, in case you weren’t aware). According to The Daily Tele­graph, this is the first time the Liberal Demo­crats have ever led the polls during a General Election campaign. It is also the first time (I’m trusting The Sun, here: apo­lo­gies; but I saw it on Daily Kos, too, I think) that the party of gov­ern­ment (in the UK) has been third in the polls during an election campaign. If you’re in the UK and can vote, take a look at their mani­festo. It looks solid, but most of the issues no longer directly affect me, so it is hard to really say how appealing the party is to the public. But I do hope these poll results are not a blip, as a strong result for the Liberal Demo­crats could be exactly what is required to really stir up the murky waters of the stagnant pond that is gov­ern­ment in Britain today.

Days and Nights

Lately the days have been busy, mainly with teaching, but also, when it has been possible to free myself from the clutches of the office, with books and films and games. Pho­to­graphy hasn’t taken up a large slice of my time, but I have occa­sion­ally brought out the camera to take a pho­to­graph, or two. Below are two of the pho­to­graphs I’ve taken since arriving in Tangshan. They’re quite ordinary, bland perhaps, but they do capture some­thing of my days and nights in this place (which is not to say my days and nights are either ordinary or bland — far from it). More might follow, if I see the light, so to speak.

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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.

Canned Peaches Are Sometimes Enough

I wrote this a few days ago, but forgot to post it:

There is a time for single malt, and a time for rough Swedish vodka; a time for exquis­itely mar­in­ated steak (cooked on a flaming barbecue in a USAF base in South Korea, prefer­ably — but that’s another story), and a time for canned peaches. Films are similar: some are like single malts, others like canned peaches. Tonight I felt like a can of peaches, my brain too weary, too fatigued with nonsense, to appre­ciate anything else, and so I watched The Crazies, a film about a sherrif strug­gling to survive as the town he serves goes insane around him. It was good, in its way, and ended on an pleas­ingly open-​ended note (there might be sequels?). Also, it starred Timothy Olyphant, an actor best known (I would imagine) for playing Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood. There was someone else from Deadwood in it, too, but I’ve for­gotten their name (one of the dope “fiends”).

I feel the same about pho­to­graphy, in a way, right now. Part of it may just be my own personal lack of inspir­a­tion; but a bigger part, I sense, is an unwill­ing­ness to immerse myself in pho­to­graphy of a really high quality. There is an issue with con­sump­tion, not just creation. Music, yes; lit­er­ature, yes; but pho­to­graphy, no. Some­times a fine single malt is great; but some­times you just want to get drunk; and at other times, alcohol just doesn’t appeal at all. With pho­to­graphy, for me, I either want to be com­pletely inebri­ated by what I see, or just not see anything; I’m not in the mood to savour a huge amount of subtlely con­structed, del­ic­ately composed, deeply mean­ingful work. This troubles me, at moments, but not enough to want to do anything to remedy the situ­ation, most probably because I feel very con­tented. So, other obses­sions are to be found. Painting, maybe. Or car­pentry. Or BMX biking. We will see.

Stack Buffer Overflow

That is how things feel today: Stack Buffer Overflow. Too much inform­a­tion flowing between dif­ferent parts of my brain, too much input and no time to properly sort it. It feels like time for a hard reboot.

Which is what is now hap­pening. It is April, after all (I’ve never really felt it was the cruelest month).

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: