Black Widow, 2021 - ★★★★
I was last in a cinema in February 2020, to see Parasite. Today I went to the same cinema to see Black Widow. It was great and strange and moving to be back in a cinema at all, and when the Marvel ident started playing at the start... well, it was pretty special.
And the film itself is great. I'm not going to say too much about it, obviously, but it's a fitting debut for Black Widow in a solo film, and farewell for Scarlett Johansson playing the character.
At the screening I went to, at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon, there were my daughter and me in row H; one guy sitting two or three rows in front and far off to one side; and somebody sitting right up the back and also far off. So it wasn't like we were crowded in with people like in the old days. That was quite comforting, but I can't imagine the film is grossing the way Marvel ones have tended to. Still, everyone knows why that is.
Have sunk into a tennis stupor. It’s likely to stay until tomorrow.
Summerwater by Sarah Moss (Books 2021, 11)
My other dissertation supervisor, Julia Bell, suggested that I read this. It’s a multiple-viewpoint work, which is something I’m doing. This one takes it to extremes, though. Each chapter is from the point of view of a different character, and we never go back to any of them.
They’re all members of families who are staying at holiday park of log cabins deep in the Highlands of Scotland, one week when the rain never stops.
It does an excellent job of showing us the inner lives of the different people, as well as the minutiae of what goes on at the park in such difficult circumstances (no internet, miles from anywhere, and constant rain).
And the ending is – well, it’s something else, I’ll say that.
There was a remarkable sporting event yesterday.
We learned that Roger Federer is human, and ageing.
Hinton by Mark Blacklock (Books 2021, 10)
The author is one of my MA supervisors, so take that under advisement, I guess.
This is a historical novel, based on the real life of Charles Howard Hinton, a Victorian mathematician who studied the idea of a fourth spatial dimension. In fact, at least from this I’d go further: he believed in the existence of such a dimension. He, I learned, was the originator of the term tesseract, which – as I’m sure you know – is the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube.
So much for that. What of the story? It’s interesting, a little odd, and slightly experimental, in terms of its telling. It makes use of letters, diagrams, and other documents from Hinton’s life. But a lot of the really interesting bits of Hinton’s life – his bigamous marriage and being convicted for the same, and subsequent departure for, and time in, Japan, for example – are told largely offscreen. Or second-hand and partially, via some of those letters.
Which is all fair enough, but I feel that we didn’t really get to know Hinton as a person. I could have done with more of that. In fact we get to know some other members of his family slightly better, as the story’s focus changes in the second half.
The book is split into sections called ‘Point,’ ‘Line,’ ‘Square,’ ‘Cube,’ ‘Tesseract,’ ‘Cube,’ ‘Square,’ ‘Line,’ ‘Point.’ Numbered chapters or subsections, 1 to 14, are included across the first ‘Line’ and ‘Square.’ But chapter 9 is missing, or skipped. I kept trying to find some mathematical reason for this – 9 is a square number, of course, but it’s not the only square number in the list, and there’s nothing special about 9 in the text, that I noticed. Nor is it one of the numbers we associate with a cube. Six faces, eight vertices, but not nine of anything. So I suspect it’s actually a mistake. I might email Mark and ask him.
I first came to know of Hinton through Rudy Rucker’s books. The fourth dimension is one of Rucker’s great interests, along with infinities, so Hinton was bound to come up. Apparently I’ve never mentioned Rucker on my site before. That’s a little surprising, but I suppose it’s a good few years since I read anything by him. I’m slightly surprised to find he’s still alive: I thought I remembered hearing of his death (and was surprised I hadn’t noted that here). Oh well, the Mandela effect, I suppose.
Lastly, I noticed it was on the list of eligible titles for this year’s Clarke Award (and my apologies for linking to Medium). Which is odd, as it’s not really a novel of the fantastic in any way (except maybe, the slightest hint of something towards the end). But it wouldn’t be the first novel the the Clarke Award has noticed for which that is true. And Hinton wrote some SF himself, and inspired various SF writers as well as Rucker, so it kind of sits near the genre.
Not So Quiet
Just over a year ago I was posting, in passing, about ‘the quiet of early lockdown.’ Actually that particular phrase was a quote, but I was definitely aware of how quiet things were outside.
Including – particularly, in fact – in our back gardern. We live in a terrace, which means there are other people’s back gardens in all directions around us, and quite close. A year ago it was quiet, not just from the lack of cars in the distance, of planes overhead, but also because no one much was in their gardens.
Today, it’s a cacophony: music playing, dishes clattering, children shouting… I guess it’s part of our return to ‘normal’ – or toward ‘normal,’ at least. But it’s strange. It suggests that, last year in spring and early summer, people were scared to go out, not just into the streets, into shops, but into their own gardens.
No one caught Covid over a garden fence. Or so I imagine. At the same time, it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
Not Killing It
We got to the end of The Killing tonight.
Don’t read on if you care about spoilers.
OK?
What a disaster of an ending that was! There are ways to bring a series to a close without having the lead character act completely out of character!
Jesus. What an utter letdown for what was mainly a really good series, if frustrating in places (call for backup! And turn the lights on!) and repetitive in others (too many politicians who might be corrupt or maybe it’s their advisors doing things without being asked).
Anyway. The Bridge and Borgen are both better. If that’s not too alliterative.
Two Weeks
They say the vaccines give maximum resistance ‘two to three weeks’ after the second dose. I hit the two-week mark yesterday, and now consider myself ‘maxinated,’ more or less.
So I’m going swimming later today. It has been approximately fifteen and a half months since I last swam. Back in February 2020 and the preceding months, I was going two or three times a week, most weeks. So I’ve missed it.
I had hoped to go to London Fields Lido: start outdoors, to keep things maximally safe. But it’s all booked up till Monday, so I’m going to the much closer, but less busy, King’s Hall, my local pool.
Both, predictably, require bookings, so there’s little chance of them being crowded.
In other covidian matters, remember back in March last year, when I shared a video of someone showing how to clean your shopping? And then I quickly walked it back, on better advice? Well, at that point we were already wiping down all items arriving in the house, much as the guy in the video was doing. And we continued to do it. I’ve used more antiseptic wipes this last year than I’ve owned in any previous year.
Yes, we soon learned that Covid was almost entirely transferred by air, and hardly by surfaces at all (though we also learned the word ‘fomite'). But the idea that anything crossing the threshold was a potential infection vector burned deep, and remained.
Now, post vaccination, post maxination, will we keep on doing that? Probably not. It’d be nice to get the time back when bringing the shopping home or receiving a delivery. But I don’t know, it could take a while to stop feeling suspicious of things that have come in from out there.
Covid has made germophobes of us all.
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (Books 2021, 9)
The second of Aaronovitch’s series about the division of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical goings-on. It’s a fun romp – I laughed more often than you might expect.
I don’t know how long ago I read the first one, Rivers of London, but I didn’t write about it here, and it must be a while, because I don’t remember much of it. Still, the backstory is handled nicely here, so I could get by fine.
A lot of it is about jazz and jazz musicians. It’s likely to make you check out the odd track.
Single Points
I noticed that GitHub was down this morning – or not down, exactly, but its web pages were profoundly broken. I tried different browsers, then jumped on Twitter to see if it was widely reported.
It was. People were saying the problem was Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN). Also that it was affecting other sites. I don’t know when CDNs started being a thing. I think they might have been recommended by some when I was still using WordPress. The idea being that a CDN can host your site’s static assets – images, mainly – while WordPress carries on with the dynamic bits, generating HTML pages on the fly, as it does. The CDN’s scale will mean it can serve those files faster than your little server.
I didn’t bother with them, not having that much traffic. But in the back of my mind there was always the thought, ‘What if the CDN goes down?’ The idea, of course, was that the CDN would be big, multiply-redundant, reliable: it’s not going to go down!
Here’s a CNN report about the outage. It affected a lot more than GitHub, it seems.
So, are CDNs single points of failure? Obviously there’s more than one CDN, but if the failure of any one can disable large chunks of the web, do they put us in a better position?
Jonathan Richman and the Handwritten Interview
Great story about interviewing Jonathan Richman, by writing a letter to him and receiving one back.
‘Jonathan doesn’t use the internet, email etc. and has never owned a computer or cell phone.’
– Oscar Zambuto, An interview with American music legend Jonathan Richman – all in handwriting
Though he does have an assistant who can say that.
Friends: The Reunion, 2021 - ★★★
It was fine. Good to see what they're all like now. Some funny bits.
Slightly surprised to find that this is on Letterboxd, because it's not what you'd normally think of as a movie, but hey.
That Summer Feeling
I’m sitting in the garden, writing on my iPad, and am wearing shorts for the first time this year (not counting cycling and exercising). Summer is here.
Also listening to Psychocandy. The Jesus and Mary Chain are a surprisingly summery band. Well, not that surprising, considering their surf-pop influences.
‘Feedback-strewn pop narcosis,’ as an uncredited Apple Music contributor describes ‘Just Like Honey.’
It's Never Good When a Useful Site Gets Bought
News comes out that Stack Overflow is being bought by something called Prosus. I’ve never heard of them, but they’re ‘a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world,’ to quote their own site.
This doesn’t bode well. Stack Overflow is without doubt the most useful site in the world, at least as far as programming and other technical matters goes. And its sub-sites cover a vast range of interests beyond the technical: use of English for both beginners and experienced people, for example; or science fiction; parenting, martial arts, the great outdoors, and a hundred more.
When a big company buys up a small one, it rarely ends well for the users of the small company’s products or services, or so it seems to me. Yahoo bought Flickr and let it largely wither on the vine.1 Similarly with Del.icio.us. Google has bought numerous properties and either rolled them into its own products, or abandoned them.
In this case the purchaser is not a technology company itself, but just a holding company. Those ones tend to result in the bought company coming under pressure to make more money. The buyer wants to recover its investment. That tends to end up with the the bought company either selling intrusive advertising space, or selling its customers' data.
It doesn’t have to go that way. Maybe this Prosus will be different. But I can’t help thinking it’s a sad day for mutual help on the web.
-
It’s much better again now that it’s owned by SmugMug. ↩︎
Vax 2
Got my second dose of the vaccine today, just about an hour and a half ago. Down to a local pharmacy, fifteen minutes early for my appointment, and home before my actual appointment time. It was empty! Worryingly so. Why aren’t people queuing up to get their jags?
Turns out The Killing is a pretty good TV show. Who knew? We’re five episodes in, and I’m wondering how they can make this first season last for 20.
It’s all on BBC iPlayer at the moment, which is nice.
Can't Get You Out of My Head, 2021
Convention dictates that I should give a star rating to this. I’m not going to, though, because I’m not sure what it was trying to achieve. What I try to do with star ratings is judge how well, in my opinion, the film achieves what it was trying to do. I don’t claim I always manage that, but when it’s not clear what the film’s purpose was, it becomes next to impossible.
Or: you can’t reduce something as long and complex, audacious and challenging as this, to a mere zero-to-ten scale. 1
Across six films, totalling around seven hours, Adam Curtis gives us ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World,’ as the subtitle calls it. As I mentioned in my last post, Kerry Thornley of Discordian fame is interviewed early in it. That is, an interview with him is used. He’s dead, so it’s not like he was interviewed for these films. Indeed, as far as I can tell, nothing was shot for these films: the visuals are entirely comprised of library footage.
Curtis narrates over them — sometimes with quite a disconnected effect, where the images have no obvious connection to the story he’s telling. Similarly, the use of music can be quite jarring. Sometimes it’s completely relevant to the matter at hand, but often there’s no obvious connection. And the titular Kylie song is not used at all.
It’s not even that obvious why the series is called that, come to think of it. And some of the individual episode titles are even more opaque, notably the last one: ‘Are We Pigeon or are We Dancer?’ I feel sure it’s a quote, and I think it’s probably from a song, but I was alert to it turning up, and as far as I could tell, it didn’t.
OK, a quick DuckDuck gives mainly hits about the episode, but also some about a track by The Killers called ‘Human,’ which includes the line ‘are we human or are we dancer?’ So it’s probably alluding to that. Oddly that line is inspired by a Hunter S Thompson quote that I’m not familiar with, ‘We’re raising a generation of dancers.’ Which sounds pretty good to me, even if Hunter meant it critically.
Anyway, what’s this absurdly long film about?
It’s a bleak, depressing, but nonetheless compelling vision of human history, covering conspiracies and conspiracy theories, wars, revolution, surveillance capitalism, and capitalism more broadly, the tension between the collective and the individual, and a whole hell of a lot more.
But Curtis never gives a thesis statement. He never tells us, in the news journalist’s way, what he’s going to tell us. Or more to the point, what conclusions he’s going to draw from what he’s going to tell us. And his style is very disjointed: he dots about in time and space, with little more to connect the dots than a ‘but’: ‘But in China…’
In that particular tic, it’s not at all unlike the postmodern games of Illuminatus!.
He does come to kind of a conclusion at the end of the two-hour-long sixth episode, but it’s not a very satisfying or convincing one. Which is fair enough, I suppose. One of the recurring thoughts is the idea that society today is too complex for anyone to understand it fully. The problem with that, that he draws our attention to, is that that understanding has caused many politicians to give up trying to change things for the better, which tends to result in burgeoning corruption.
He does end with a note of possible hope, but I think I might have to watch parts of it again to get all of the nuances.
Letterboxd supports half stars, so five stars is ten points.↩︎
Mark E Smith (Co-)Wrote a Screenplay
A screenplay by Mark E Smith, cowritten with Graham Duff? Sounds like it could have been great:
… Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”
– John Doran, Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay
Never made, sadly, but it’s coming out as a book: The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was.
BSAG On Creativity
The mysterious long-time blogger known only as ‘But She’s A Girl’ has some wise thoughts on how her creative process is affected by deadlines:
What I need to remember is that it is always like this. Deadlines are a fact of life and I just have to deal with them when they come up, but the pressure they impose is temporarily disastrous for my creativity. This means that I need to have solved any problems relating to the task which require creative thought long before the suffocating fog of the deadline descends. It’s also why I sometimes go quiet on this blog for weeks at a time. It’s not that I don’t have time to write here, but more that I don’t have the mental space to play around with ideas.
– But She’s A Girl, Creativity
Hit Me Up in the Comments
It’s been a long time coming. When I moved my website to Nikola last year, I said:
Getting them back, and setting up another system for comments, has taken me till now. I’ve had other things on my mind.
That post was in April 2020. In May I wrote about various commenting systems I had experimented with:
Remarkbox was active for a while. It worked, but it was just too weird in the way it handled users. I also tried Intense Debate, which is made by Automattic, the WordPress people, and is hosted on their servers. It worked, but I could only post comments using Chrome, for some reason. I’m a Safari user, and even if I weren’t, that’s a no-no.
So for a while I didn’t have comments at all. I wonder if anyone noticed.
But recently I tried Isso again, and something clicked this time. It worked more or less without me having to do anything – at least, that is, when I ran it from the command line on my server. When I ran it as a service – that is, automatically, in the background, the way something like that needs to run – it just didn’t work. A bit of Ducking led me to this post, which, despite being partly about Apache, when I use Nginx, gave me the pointers I needed to get it all working.
Isso keeps the comments on my server, rather than being an external service, so it’s much more in keeping with the principle of owning my own content. And I’ve imported the old comments from the WordPress site. I got some error messages when I ran the import, so I don’t know if they all made it over, but at least some of them are here.
I need to work on the styling a bit, I think, but other than that it’s all good to go.