We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”
From Russia With Love.
It is a measure of the achievement of what Ian Fleming produced that, for all the criticisms hurled at his 007 adventures for their supposed snobbery, sexism and violence, that no-one ever accused his output of being boring and that he ended up producing the most famous fictional British character of all time, apart possibly from Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Born on this day in 1908, Fleming died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1964, just when the movies made out of his books were going into overdrive. Goodness knows what he’d make of the hoo-ha marking his centenary.
Sebastian Faulk’s new book, which he has tried to write in the Fleming style, is in the mail. I’ll put up a short review when I get it. With any luck, the book will be fodder for another great film with Daniel Craig.
Update: here is an article in the New York Times about Fleming and the new book. It is pretty harsh about Fleming, calling him a nasty piece work, including the sin of anti-semitism. Really? I cannot remember anything in the books that refers to Jews in a clearly disparaging way. Considering his depiction of the Nazis in Moonraker, I’d say that Fleming was pretty sound, in fact. As far as I know from reading his books or the excellent biography of him by Andrew Lycett, this was not an issue that came up. Was he a racist? Well, his portrayal of blacks in Live and Let Die is a bit condescending. He writes about people of different races, such as Koreans and Turks, in ways that sometimes paint too broad a brush, but I do not get the sense that he damned whole swathes of humanity because they had different skin colour. The NYT reviewer also refers to Fleming as a “failed” journalist. That is flat wrong. He worked for several years at Reuters and covered the Moscow show trials of the early 1930s with considerable aplomb; after the war, he worked as a senior executive at Kemsley Newspapers, responsible for running foreign news and training up staff as well as checking copy; he also had a column at the Sunday Times. Yes, he was not, by his own frank admission, one of the “greats”, but to say he was a failure is grossly unfair. At least – unlike the NYT – he did not make up news stories and kept his fictional skills for his novels.
There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.
– Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Biopics”, or films about the lives of the famous, have their place. According to this report, the US actor Leonardo di Caprio, who played Howard Hughes in “The Aviator” – which I thoroughly enjoyed – is lining up to play Ian Fleming, who would have been 100 on 28 May (the same birthday as your humble blogger). Hmm, not sure whether that is great casting. There was a film made a few years back with Charles Dance that did the job rather well.
For Fleming fans, this biography by Andrew Lycett is strongly recommended. John Pearson’s biography is also good.
Talking of famous writers, though, here are some people I reckon would make for quite good biopics:
Victor Hugo
A. Dumas
Tolstoy
Dickens
Saki (Hector Munro)
Robert Byron
Voltaire
Evelyn Waugh
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E. Hemingway
James Baldwin
Jonathan Swift
Shelley
Patrick Leigh-Fermor
By the way, my list does not imply that I necessarily admire or like all the writers, only that they are interesting as subjects of film.
So give your suggestions if you have others.
Update: several writers are unimpressed by di Caprio. I think he was okay as H. Hughes but as I said, I have my doubts as to whether he will be able to play Fleming well. Fleming was an old Etonian, a bit of an eccentric but despite all his possible foibles and failings, a first-class writer and journalist with a great eye for detail. I fear the Hollywood movie-makers will want to focus on his womanising. I suppose this is inevitable.
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture… yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.
It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.
And the ‘eye thing’… very cool.
But I am not writing this to praise Rhona… well, actually I am…
…no…no… the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.
“Oh yes, that film is a hoot!” he replied, “but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything.”
I just came across this. What’s happened is that they’ve discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:
Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn’t there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.
Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn’t actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.
This is what I call gratitude.
On the subject of rare musical instruments, and as a sign of how desperate some investors are to make money away from the standard stock and bond markets, you can even invest in violins. I can see the jokes coming: “So, what do you invest in?” “Violins”. “Hmm, I’ve been on the fiddle myself”.
Groan.
Just straying off the Samizdata reservation for a moment…a pointer for Nine Inch Nails fans: Trent Reznor is giving away his latest record The Slip, and it is 100% free… to download it, go here. Reznor has released it under Creative Commons, which is a very interesting development.
John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review, the conservative publication, is not a man I always agree with. On the issue of creationism, however, he is wonderfully scornful of some of its advocates. In commenting on the movie, Expelled, put together by Ben Stein, he has this to say:
Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility – from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.
And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world – that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”
Update: Ben Stein has lost it totally.
My wife, during a business trip to Arizona, once sat in an aircraft next to the guy who now owns Southfork ranch, the place that achieved legendary status in the hit TV soap Dallas. Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have this rather whimsical piece on how the show, despite portraying most people in business as either predatory villains (JR Ewing), or often losers (ie, anyone up against JR), was effective in inadvertently demonstrating the sheer, material wealth of US capitalism. I remember, as a teen, wanting to have a red Mercedes like Bobby Ewing.
Well, I don’t know how much you can really read into shows like this. I must say that Dallas was so full of outrageous storylines and crazy characters that it was compulsive viewing. My mum, bless her, was addicted to it. Watching it today is a bit scary – it reminds me of how far ago the early 1980s now seems.
What is true, though, is that the sort of aspirational message embedded in shows about rich people stands a universe apart from the depressing, tragic vision embodied in UK soaps like EastEnders. I once watched about half an episode of the latter show the other day. It is about 20 minutes of my life I shall never get back.
Meanwhile, here is an old post of mine about Italian daytime TV, which is, er, a phenomenon.
People say: Is classical music dying? Go to Covent Garden and you can view the corpse.
–Joe Queenan reacts negatively on Newsnight Review earlier this evening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new opera The Minotaur
This is a must-visit for fans of 007 and his literary creator. There are a few events this year to mark what would be Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday, 28 May, which also happens to be my own birthday, by weird coincidence. Sebastian Faulks is bringing out a new Bond novel on that day. Most of the attempts to carry on the character by other writers have not really worked, although Kingsley Amis had a good shot at it. I quite enjoy Faulks’ writings, so this might be good. Let’s face it, the movie-makers have already used up all the original Fleming story lines so they could use some decent new ones without too many corny one-liners or implausible villains.
The other day I pointed to an article by David Mamet, the US playwright who has become drawn to classical liberalism in his later life. As the Cato Institute blog points out, the great British playright Tom Stoppard has been, in his quiet way, thoroughly sound for years.
This quote is great:
“The whole notion that we’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that’s all going now. And I don’t even know in whose interest it’s supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It’s in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago.”
Definitely an improvement on Harold Pinter.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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