Dead Poets Society

Conversation over dinner reminded me of this old classic I loved madly when I was a kid. If I was cooler, I'd probably come up with some sophisticated critique à la Le Duc/Tot about why this film is fundamentally flawed, not encompassing the multiple layers of contraddictions of post-modern/constructivist intergenerational conflict, blah blah blah, and we'd all rather spend our precious time watching again a) The Rains of Ranchipur, b) Olsenbanden og Dynamitt-Harry mot nye høyder, or c) A bout de Souffle.

But back then, life was simpler and films made me cry when they had plots that spoke to the heart of an angsty teenage boy and when they had Ethan looking like this in them:

I love London

Where else?

Safe vs Unsafe Music

According to Donnie 'God Hates Fags' Davies (who was stupid enough to accept GayMafia as one of his friends on his MySpace profile), the list of bands that will turn you gay includes the following: Bjork (maybe, he concedes), Cole Porter (bless...), the Polyphonic Spree, The Grateful Dead (drugs too, he adds - sic!), The Doors (what a fucking tosser), The Strokes (?!!?), Metallica (!??!?!!?!?!?!?), The Rolling Stones, Fischerspooner (does he even know who Fischerspooner is!?!? How can a DJ and electronic musician turn you gay!?!!?!), Nirvana, the Killers and Lou Reed, plus of course the usual suspects of Madonna, Rufus, Freddie and the Village People.

Basically, the entire Olympus of rock and pop, regardless of whether they are straight, gay or Morrisey, plus Fischerspooner (really, what was he thinking?!?!?).

Interestingly, the safe list includes some absolutely unknown MySpace freaks who sing 'liberals we can't stand', as well as Cyndi Lauper (girls-just-a-wanna-have-fun!??!?!) and... er... P.O.D. (Who knew we had inspired a Christian-metal band?)

No, really, this is for real...

[thanks to Miiiichael for the hint]

the unbearable dullness of academia

Okso.

Here comes a little rant, partially because I am so tired that I can't be bothered to be funny, interesting or cool. Partially because I am pissed off. Yes, sometimes it happens, even to nice people like me. I work my arse off every day of the friggin' week to learn new stuff, reading tons of articles and books, attending countless lectures and conferences, organising dinners so interesting people can fire interesting ideas at each other, all with the firm belief that this is the *right* thing to do, all for the best, it will pay off in the end, all this cash I am pouring into the LSE's bottomless coffins.

I don't really have a social life any longer. I haven't seen some of my friends for decades. I know they are alive simply because their blogs get updated. That's how miserable my life has become. Bed --> Library --> Bed.

So, on the day I am handing in yet another essay, which is not assessed, but which I have spent most of last weekend and early days of this week writing, 2 things occur simultaneously, which send me rocketing with wrath.

1. Last week the Fees Office sent me - and many other fellow students - a message saying I hadn't paid for my MSc fees. I promptly replied with all the details of the transfer, when I got another message saying their IT system had fucked up, and to ignore the previous message. Fine, I just wasted 15 minutes looking for the trasfer details, but fine. There's worse in life. Then today I get ANOTHER message urging me to present 'copy of bank transfer' so their brilliant accountant (who has clearly lost my money) can trace the payment. Surely, I reply, all the information the brilliant accountant needs is in the email I just sent to you, containing ALL the information that a copy of a bank transfer would give you (fuckers). Is it too much to ask for you to actually READ an email before you send out more onerous requests, given how I am struggling to find time to sleep and bearing in mind the hefty fees you are charging me for this painful experience? Would it be too much to ask you to start using Excel to record the money people have transferred to you 8 months ago?

2. I went to my EU seminar, where I had to sit through another hour and a half of idiocy squirted out of the mouth of this fat Israeli woman, who for the first time in my life made me want to torture someone (her). She's one of those people who HAS TO talk all the time, regardless of whether she actually has anything even remotely interesting to say. Week in and week out, all 16 of us have to endure her constant interruptions, trivial banalities and pointless remarks, while the tutor's inability to reign her in constantly reminds me of the UN in Rwanda during the genocide. Highlights of her interventions today included "You know that THING in the Ukraine... You know... The REVOLUTION, yeah? Like, THAT was awesome" and "You know what the problem of the EU and Russia is? Eh? Is that they are COWARDS, the EU, you know?" No, REALLY? Thank you. Thank you SO MUCH for this amazing insight into the complex world of international relations.

It's on days like this that I feel I threw the cost of a decent car down the drain. And that I should be learning something useful. Like knitting.

What the hell is this noise?!?!

I got home determined I would listen to something new and fabulous, given my life of dancing and mad clubbing nights is temporarily suspended for reasons beyond my control. So I thought: what would John Peel do? Well, John Peel had a sense of humour, so he'd probably go onto Myspace and check out a few profiles. Complete waste of time, except for a brief correspondance with Lady Megan.

But a deeper internet search on John himself revealed that one of his last discoveries was the Mae Shi, this wacko experimental punk band from Los Angeles. I loved Run to your grave, their one (and only) pop achievement. And I loved them for the drum virtuoso at the end of the piece and for being so brilliantly old-fashioned in their experimentality.

Still, my search for new exciting things was beginning to prove dull, and I was becoming depressed with the state of today's music.

Then I decided I was thinking like an old man, so I decided to discover something REALLY good, and came across Who Taught You To Live Like That, by the Nova Scotia pop revivalists Sloan (without the final e, thankfully - they are the guys in the picture). The kind of piece which makes you swing on your chair. Which would make you stand up and dance if you weren't a little drunk after 2 bottles of wine consumed in the heights of Tufnell Park...

That's good. Now I am a happy man... Now I can go to bed...

CK? You? Here?!?!?

Now, isn't that bizarre. Just when I thought I had seen all the funniest movies in the world, or at least the ones worth seeing, I come across this gem that makes me laugh so hard, it almost hurts. And what a surprise to see good-old (stressing old, because she's ain't getting any younger) CK, tot's all-time favourite obsession, making a gentle fool of herself with a 40 year old virgin. Now, that's style, I have to admit.

Here's my favourite scene, which had me rolling on the floor with tears in my eyes...

Old travels, new travels

Which one is more beautiful, Bruges or Palermo? Hard to tell, really, but guess which one was colder?

Blood Diamond

I've reviewed all the serious stuff about the movie here. The only thing to add... well... Leonardo appears to have become a rather big boy since we last saw him... Rrrrrrrr...

We heart tax returns

This will probably be the most dull entry of my blog. Ever. But I just wanted to share with you all the relief I feel at having completed my tax return form - inches away from the deadline - and guess what? The UK Government owes me £281!!! That's £281 that won't be spent on bombing the hell out of Iraq!!!

Now, how many times does paying your taxes make you feel so happy?

A new friend

It's rare, especially in a city like London, to start chatting to a random beautiful woman next to you in a restaurant, end up having drinks with her and her friends, spend hours chatting (and ignoring the person you originally went out for dinner with, who anyway wasn't being very interesting) about really cool topics - such as her tattoo hidden beneath her hair, or her wild nights at Torture Garden, and end the night exchanging 'good-night' messages.

The only problem? She's called Santina. Italians will understand. It's somewhat tragic, but I guess it's a perfect fit for the community. She adamantly demands to be taken to the Ghetto. I said I'd have to speak to someone who claims won't be clubbing ever again in her life (yeah, right...)

It's done.

This will soon be the most popular blog in the world.

I am terrified at how many people it will offend.

Penetrate it now before it's too late...

Competition...

... is now open for the best name for Filippo's blog! PDF and I have decided all his pearls of wisdom need to be recorded and shared with the wider masses.

C'mon people, I know you were just waiting for this moment...!

Nosemonkey on blogging

Because the only thing that genuinely does seem to unite bloggers - of the political variety, at least - is that we’re all opinionated bastards and don’t like being told what to do. There’s something in the personality of people who set up websites from which to broadcast their thoughts to the world that makes them singularly unsuited to be dictated to - we’re all rather more arrogant and self-important than your average Joe. As a general rule, you tell us not to do something, we’ll go out and do it just to spite you.

Totty? Anyone? Totty?

The Last King of Scotland

Beautiful and haunting, The Last King of Scotland tells the story of the rise to power of Idi Amin (an extraordinary Forest Whitaker), as seen through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan (an equally convincing James McAvoy) who unwittingly becomes his personal physician. The movie, which is based on Giles Foden's homonymous novel, skillfully moves between the everyday normality and underlying brutality of Amin's regime, which killed an estimated 300,000 Ugandans.

I was left with a strange sense of emptiness, not really understanding what generated these dark forces of Amin's dictatorship, which are progressively unleashed during the course of the film. Nicholas himself, despite living at the heart of the regime (or perhaps because he lived at the heart of the regime), appears blisfully naive (almost delusional) in his denial of what surrounds him. This is perhaps the only criticism I can move at the film: the shallow political analysis, which contains a lingering echo of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', leaves the audience with a sense that the Africa itself, somehow, is responsible for these aberrations, rather than specific individuals, processes, dynamics. On the other hand, the only ones that appear at least in some form of control are the British diplomats at the High Commission, and the film suggests that Amin's rise was simply a white-controlled scheme horribly gone wrong. Again, the Africans/Ugandans themselves seem only pawns in a game that no one seems to know the rules of. Indeed, in the final, excruciating scene, Amin rebukes Nicholas for playing a game without realizing what was at stake, and certainly the naivety of his character is unbelievable even for a provincial Scottish lad in the 1970s.

Nevertheless, the film is - if not a masterpiece - clearly superior. Beutifully shot, wonderfully acted (apart from Whitaker and McAvoy, I loved the performance of Kerry Washington as Amin's third wife), it's the kind of movie that will collect tens of nominations, if not prizes.

(Oh! And I can't wait to see James in the forthcoming Becoming Jane!)

First Music Night of 2007

Mali and Greece, what a treat!

So much fun, thank you Paul for never giving up, even when I was becoming really, really annoying... These are some highlights of what we listened to, in no particular order...

Toumani Diabaté and the late Ali Farka Touré


Salif Keita


and lots of Greek music of which I only remember Stelios Kazantzidis


Now I am bracing for throat-singing night...

莊周夢蝶

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly. As a butterfly he was carefree, happily doing as he pleased. He did not know he was Zhou. Suddenly he was awake and then Zhou was in his solid form; he did not know if he was Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhou. However, Zhou and the butterfly surely have a distinction. This is called the transformation of things.

From Discourse on the Sameness of all Things

New Year, New Look

I was really happy with my old look, but then Blogger had to go all smart on me and do all this beta upgrading and what not... result, my nice template started conflicting with their increasingly Orwellian control systems, and it ended up with no one being able to post comments on here.

So, here's the new look. Tried to stay as close as possible to the old look (none of that white-washing that others seems to have gone for), but clearly it's not the same. Lost my nice banner. Lost all my counters. And also lost a good couple of hours which were meant for studying. Oh well... it's only the start of the term, no reason to get stressed!

Er...

lessons from the wired

Kevin Kelly on Artificial Intelligence. I love this guy...

In general, I like Hans Moravec’s formulation that these are our children. How does one raise children? You train them for the inevitable letting go. If our children never left our control, we’d not only be disappointed, but we’d be cruel. To be innovative, imaginative, creative, and free, the child needs to be out of control of its maker. So it will be with our mind’s children, the robots.

Is there a parent with a teenager who is not concerned, who does not have a bit of worry? It took us a long time to realize that the power of a technology is proportional to its inherent out-of-controlness, its inherent ability to surprise and be generative. In fact, unless we can worry about a technology, it is not revolutionary enough. Powerful technology demands responsibility. With the generative power of robots, we need heavy duty responsibility. We should be aiming to train our robotic children to be good citizens. That means instilling in them values so they can make responsible decisions when we let them go. [...]

What is the most spiritual event we could imagine? A verifiable contact with an ET would rock the foundations of established religions. It would rekindle the question of God no matter what ET’s answers. I think the movie *Contact* is the only movie where a theologian is a star. But we don’t have to wait for SETI to contact ET. We will do it by making ET; that is by making a robot. In this way ET goes by another name: AI.

People worried about AI being an artificial human are way off. AIs will be closer to artificial aliens. Your calculator is already smarter in arithmetic than any person in this room. Why aren’t we threaten by it? Because it is “other.” A different kind of intelligence. One superior to us, but one we aren’t particularly envious of. Most of the minds we make including the smartest AI, will be “other.” Even in the possibility space of types of conscious minds, there are 2 million other possible species of intelligence than the one type we know (humans) -- each one of them unique and different as a calculator and a dolphin. There is no reason to make a clone of human intelligence because making traditional version is so easy. Our endeavor in the coming centuries is to use all minds so far (artificial and natural) to make all possible new minds. Meeting these minds I think will be the most spiritual thing we can imagine right now.

Pics and bobs...

So this is what I've been up to during those long winter weeks...

A little trip to Venice, to see my friend Filippo (not the monster, the sexy skipper):


Preceded by looking Jon drink coffee in the kitchen of Tot's old flat:


Followed by some art in my hometown, after a lot of wine had flown (mainly on the table, hence the mountain of salt, hence the salt/snowman)...


Oh, then lots of staring at this picture in my room, since that's where I was studying for my essays. That's my dad, with my sister in his arms. Circa 1979.


And finally, a random pic of pink-haired PDF:

Essays completed!

Gosh what a marathon. Two essays due today completed and handed in, the first one on East Asia's economic growth, and in particular on Taiwan's development strategies since 1949, the second one on enviromental conservation and the promotion of sustainable livelihoods, with a special analysis of the conflict between snow-leopards and mountain communities in the Annapurna Conservation Area of Nepal. Light stuff, man.

And minutes after I return to the library for more studying (clearly I like the pain), the fire alarm goes off and the building is evacuated. Hundreds of students who were finishing their essays before the 4 pm deadline panicked as their computers shut down and the Nazi porters dragged them out of the building.

For me, it was the signal I needed to drop what I was doing, come home, chill out, forget about gym resolutions (they can start tomorrow) and grab this week's copy of Hello!

Shallow! Totties! Shallow!

Straight to Jesus

Very interesting, Mr Muder...

Back in Italy

Have been here for almost 10 days, and I my body is beginning to develop strange tremors in my left arm, accompanied by enduring throat-piercing pain which basically prevents me from speaking.

Temperature outside the house: -2 C.
Temperature inside the house: -12 C.

Essays written: 0.
Books read: 1.
Studies researched: 142 on line. None read beyond the introduction.

Historic Italian cities visited: 6 (Rome, Siena, Bologna, Parma, Milan, Venice).

Cars crashed: 1. My mother's. Into a wall. Somewhat the nervous system felt better after that. The noise of lashed metal soothed my growing sense of internal panic. Cronenberg sprung to mind. I feel like doing it again.

I am beginning to look like Rasputin. Unshaven. Feverish. A Dostoevskyesque murderous character. I am convinced I am being spied. Or followed. Or both.

Tonight's news: gay rights activists place statuettes of a gay and a lesbian couple in the Parliament's cresh in Rome. An old man is arrested for pretending to be blind in order to claim benefits from the state. Prime broadcasting time devoted to both news: 15 minutes. Time devoted to international news: 0.03 minutes.

I feel like I am living in a sinister pantomime.

I miss my world. I miss the world.

To Jeff

There's the moon asking to stay
Long enough for the clouds to fly me away
Well it's my time coming, i'm not afraid to die
My fading voice sings of love,
But she cries to the clicking of time
Of time

Wait in the fire...

And she weeps on my arm
Walking to the bright lights in sorrow
Oh drink a bit of wine we both might go tomorrow
Oh my love
And the rain is falling and i believe
My time has come
It reminds me of the pain
I might leave
Leave behind

Wait in the fire...

And I feel them drown my name
So easy to know and forget with this kiss
I'm not afraid to go but it goes so slow

mana mana

Shortbus

Fabulous. It's just like the sixties, only with less hope.



Sofia: I think I have some sort of, you know, clog in my neural pathway somewhere between my brain and my clitoris.

Justin: That's disgusting. Don't think of it as a clog. Think of it as some sort of magical circuit board. A motherboard filled with desire that travels all over the world. That touches you. That touches me. That connects everybody. You just have to find the right connection. The right circuitry. Look at all these people out there. They're trying to find the right connection. And I personally expect a few blown fuses before the night is over and maybe one of them will be yours.

Oh God...

Global Orgasm

From the very same (fabulous) people who gave us Baring Witness, comes this new initiative which might just do the trick for us...

The Event

WHO? All Men and Women, you and everyone you know.

WHERE? Everywhere in the world, but especially in countries with weapons of mass destruction.

WHEN?
Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd, at the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose.

WHY? To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm. There are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti-submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, so the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

And here's the science (although I don't seem to be able to load it...)

Kinetic Sculptures

The amazing world of Theo Jansen's Kinetic Sculptures...

Banksy in LA

A genius...

Strange Maps

This is coooooooooooooooool...!!!!

At the Roundhouse

the amazing Giles Peterson


the breathtaking Seu George

Trespassers do Buffy

Season 6, for your eyes only...

Ted Faggart

This has cheered me up for a month.

Romanzo Criminale

One of the best films to come out of Italy in the last... well, actually I cannot remember what the last good Italian movie was, so it musy be a while.

Dark, visceral and virile, Romanzo Criminale has all a film of this genre should have: tough guys, beautiful babes and streams of blood oozing out of gun-wounds, together with a twisted plot that only Italians will get in its entirety. Absolutely flawless.

strange days

waking up before the alarm clock goes off;
grabbing clothes and bike, straight out of the house;
bracing in the cold and clear morning air,
the one that smells like January and winter;
climbing the familiar spyral staircase;
reaching the familiar spot, on the 3rd floor,
the one opposite the smart blond girl
studying corporate law;
turning page after page after page after page;
sucking in all the information, while
scribbling notes on the side,
mulling over a sentence, in amazement, in disbelief;
rushing to a lecture
squeezing past the lingering crowds;
sitting quietly with a pen in the right hand;
returning to the palace of books,
searching for a computer;
typing quickly, lazily, absent-mindedly;
walking back to the same spot,
the one opposite the smart blond girl
studying corporate law;
seeing the darkness descend onto the city;
putting the books back in the small locker;
drinking a beer with a friend or two,
talking about how to put the world to rights;
cycling quickly back to the house in the evening traffic;
eating something grabbed casually on the way;
feeling strangely serene at the end of the day;
lying on the bed, the lights of the city still glimmering;
closing my eyes.