The Filtnib's Progress

Trailer of the week - Burn After Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:48:00 +0000

It's about time we, the public, got another Coen Brothers film. And here it is. Dream line-up: Frances McDormand, Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich.

Burn After Reading is headlining the Venice Film Festival in August and will open in the UK on September 5th.

Spy Games

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:23:00 +0000

Following up from my rant last week about flying, there's a fascinating article in today's Guardian, about a spy seemingly planted by nobody-knows-quite-who in an effort to undermine the anti-aviation group Plane Stupid.
Oxford alumnus Toby Kendall - pictured here in a fetching combination of pseudo-activist scarf and baseball cap - hardly looks like a force to be reckoned with, and he obviously didn't cover his tracks very well. What's more worrying is the company he works for: C2i International whose Orwellian logo is "Command+Control+Intelligence=Security".

Trailer of the Week

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:15:00 +0000

Ok here we go with a new feature: once a week I'll post a trailer that I think is worth watching, either because it heralds a great film to come, or because the trailer is worth a watch for its own sake.

This week's treat is Tropic Thunder, a somewhat provocative-looking comedy with a dream cast of Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jnr, Jack Black and... wait is that Steve Coogan?

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:52:00 +0000

So last week Heathrow's Terminal 5 opened, but not to the adulatory fanfare airport execs had hoped for. Instead, the launch descended into farce.

At least one group of people wanted that outcome. On Thursday morning, hundreds of citizens with no intention of travelling anywhere had converged at the airport. Come 11am, they donned red T-shirts printed with 'Stop Airport Expansion', wandered around, chatted, smiled at the press and drank tea. Some lay on the floor spelling out the words of their rallying cry.

It was a deliberately understated demo. An organizer explained their method: "Almost everything is against the Heathrow byelaws, but wearing a t-shirt is not a crime. So as long as you’re not demonstrating, you’re not breaking the law!"

The T-shirt brigade was hoping to hijack headlines and compromise the glossy launch of the new terminal. Ironically their outcry was eclipsed by BA and/or BAA's own blundering mismanagement, with the result that most news outlets only spared the demonstrators a sentence or two. In the protestors' facebook group, one member joked at intrigue: "I bet BAA organised their complete failure to overshadow the protest... seemed to work on the news!"

Conspiracy theories aside, aviation is entering an era of increasing public scrutiny. Not because baggage handling is such a big deal (the FT's news editor Robert Shrimsley has a very funny piece of faux-reportage here: scroll past the Zimbabwe bit for the legendary intro: “The BBC is banned from Heathrow but our correspondent Orla Guerin got past security disguised as a Samsonite Aeris upright”) but because airports are such an obvious locale for climate anxieties to converge. Planes just about write their carbon emissions in the sky. Green science can get complicated, but almost everyone gets the more-flying-more-climate-change argument. Don't we?

Actually no. Most of us still fly short-haul without a second thought. At Monday's Evening Standard/YouGovStone mayoral debate, one city slicker got up to ask Boris, Ken and Brian why they weren't doing more to protect Heathrow's right to expand. He clearly didn't read the Economist last week. And just because he works in finance, doesn't mean he gets that climate carelessness wreaks unsustainable externalities. As Nicholas Stern pointed out, in his monumental report 18 months ago, climate change is the worst market failure the world has ever seen.

I've heard people say the climate change frontline is in the Arctic, where the polar bears paw at melting ice, or in the drought-stricken, cracked-earth farmland of Northern Kenya. Unfortunately those places stand for battles we've already lost. The true frontlines are the intellectual and geographical spaces where carbon emissions can be counted and cut. And maybe airports are where the stand-off begins: between short-term, profit-chasing expansion and the far-sighted view that is informed by the warnings of the world's leading scientists.

The unpalatable truth is that if we're serious about meeting the government's target for cutting emissions 60% by 2050, we need to rethink our travel habits. That won't happen while flying is so cheap. I picked a random date, 1st of May, and thought about visiting my friend Jeni in Glasgow. I can fly from London to Prestwick for just £28.27 with Ryanair, while the cheapest train ticket - a saver return - is £102.90. And that's booking almost a month in advance. It's all wrong. Easyjet was fun but the cheap fare revolution it kickstarted continues on borrowed time. Time borrowed from future generations.

Thanks to Greenpeace, Amin Allen Tabrizi and Chris Seufert on Flickr for photos.

Who's afraid of the big bad cyber-wolf?

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:46:00 +0000

The Washington Post reported yesterday that China-based hackers may have broken into web accounts belonging to the Save Darfur Coalition. Save Darfur are an American lobby group advocating Western intervention to end the genocide in the Sudan, with members including Amnesty, the American Islamic Congress, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. According to the Post, "The allegation fits a near decade-old pattern of cyber-espionage and cyber-intimidation by the Chinese government against critics of its human rights practices".

The idea that the Chinese government would go so far as to hack into a human rights group's web server suggests a level of conscious evil that is almost ridiculous. It's like something you'd see Kim Jong-il plotting while humming happily to himself in Team America.

The world first became truly aware of the massacres in Darfur in 2004: a full four years ago. It was the same year Britney Spears reached no.1 with Toxic, the third Lord of the Rings film won just about all the Oscars, abuse in Abu Ghraib was exposed and Athens hosted the Olympics. Just think how much has changed since then. Now let's think about what we've managed to achieve in Darfur.

Look back to this 2004 BBC report, which quoted the International Crisis Group: "Urgent international action is required on several fronts if 'Darfur 2004' is not to join 'Rwanda 1994' as shorthand for international shame". In the intervening years, urgent international action has continued to be talked about, but no major power has sent in forces as we did in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. In December last year, the UN finally deployed some troops, but the promised force of 26,000 peacekeepers is yet to arrive; currently there are only 9,000 on the ground.

Our failure to do anything more than witness is not for want of trying. As the picture here testifies - it's Mia Farrow and an 8-year-old Darfurian refugee, walking into a sandstorm near the Sudan-Chad border to mark the start of a Dream for Darfur torch relay - the cause is a big deal, with celebrities, marketing campaigns, numerous charitable trusts, books, films and rallies all attempting to get someone, somewhere to make it stop.

Why to such little avail? Did we learn nothing from Rwanda? In an interview with The Observer late last year, Britain's minister for Africa, Mark Malloch Brown, made a comment that seems to pass the buck rather: "Bush and Blair both had a great deal of personal passion about Darfur. But there's a limit to what leaders can do if there isn't a heavy level of concern from the public".

Really? Isn't it more pertinent to note the regrettable limit that any level of public concern can achieve when political resolve is missing? We only have to consider the failure of the anti-Iraq war demonstrations to know that however many petitions we sign, the workings of international politicians bear precious little comparison to true democratic process.

In 2007, a UN report found that the Sudanese government had "manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur... and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes". But U.S. and UK sanctions of Sudanese products can have little impact while China continues to buy 70% of the country's exports, and supply it with weapons. Nicholas D. Krystof in The New York Times makes a good case for renaming this year's sports celebrations in China "The Genocide Olympics".
Which brings us back to the China-based hackers who've cyber-attacked the Save Darfur Coalition. Such dirty tricks do nothing to help China's laughable attempts at positive PR, and certainly undermine the stated motto of this year's Olympics in Beijing:

"One World, One Dream" is simple in expressions, but profound in meaning. It is of China, and also of the world. It conveys the lofty ideal of the people in Beijing as well as in China to share the global community and civilization and to create a bright future hand in hand with the people from the rest of the world. It expresses the firm belief of a great nation, with a long history of 5,000 years and on its way towards modernization, that is committed to peaceful development, harmonious society and people's happiness. It voices the aspirations of 1.3 billion Chinese people to contribute to the establishment of a peaceful and bright world."

If only this were true. The crackdown on pro-Tibet protestors last week and China's general policy of cyber-bullying seems to point more seriously than ever to a boycott of the Olympics outright.

Laura Marling & friends at the Union Chapel

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:59:00 +0000

"There's a point in the gig every night where Laura has to change guitars," says the drummer apologetically, "And I have to talk."

The audience laughs. We don't mind waiting for Laura Marling, the 18-year-old whose voice is jaw-droppingly elastic, like treacle, to change from one acoustic guitar to another. Neither do we mind sharing the good-natured camaraderie that her band Mumford and Sons, gently surround her with, like protective big brothers.

The Union Chapel on Upper Street is full yet quiet on Thursday night; quiet with expectation and appropriately enough, a kind of reverence. Almost everyone is here because they bought Marling's Songbox, with the unusual consequence that almost everyone has come alone. The Songbox was the only way to get a ticket - no sales on the door - and as some fans complained, that meant unless you bought twice, chances were you wouldn't be able to take along your friend/lover/gig-buddy.

But at least the enforced solitary attendance has the effect of making everyone far chattier than they might normally be in a London venue; standing in the queue I discuss Marling's album with no less than four people whom I've never met before; as we file into the Union Chapel's wooden pews, hesitant introductions are made: "Hi, would you mind if I sit here?... Have you come far?... What do you do?" For a moment it feels more like speed-dating than a concert.

The venue itself is warm and welcoming like churches should be, dark except for a couple of panels of coloured spotlights that prettify the stage, and the streetlights outside that illuminate the rose window. At the back of the church they're selling cups of tea for £1 and my new friend Orlando buys a hot chicken pie from the bar between acts.

The cosy feel is nurtured by Marling's support acts, including the charming band that later accompany her, Mumford and Sons, and Vertigo-signed Johnny Flynn (watch the yummy faux-antique video for his single Leftovers). Both acts are what people call 'alt-folk', though how this differs from traditional folk I'm not exactly sure, except that maybe it sounds a bit more cool and it looks a lot younger.

Mumford and Sons, four floppy-haired boys in tweed waistcoats and open-necked white shirts that make them look like minstrels or agricultural-workers, are very talented and ridiculously endearing. At one point their lead singer prefaces a song bashfully (and entirely needlessly): "This is a new song, and it's a bit rough so please bear with us". His singing voice is rasping yet somehow still melodic; the other band-members offer harmony lustily.

Johnny Flynn and The Sussex Wit wear their folk-ancestry more fully, and so they should, with Vaughan Williams noted as one of their influences. Flynn himself, tousle-haired and dressed-down in his signature lumberjack shirt, has an unshowy but compelling stage presence, apparently at least partly thanks to Stanislavski. I can't stop humming his "Brown Trout Blues", which you should be able to listen to here, seeqpod permitting (listen out for a reworking of a classic tammy wynette lyric):

It's rare that the support acts are so good that you almost forget they're meant to be filler before the main event. When Laura comes on in a white shapeless smock, skin so pale it's almost see-through, her head is bowed and her voice is a bit shaky. "It's very nice to see you all here..." she murmurs, visibly nervous, "Thanks very much for buying the songbox."

A few lines into her first verse and she starts to relax, and meanwhile everyone else is almost holding their breath because her voice is so incredibly liquid and artless and both fragile and strong at once. Even Orlando, who said he was disappointed with the album when it first arrived, is won over.

She looks like a pale, cropped-haired elf, or a small child. Yet her lyrics are far from childish. In "My Manic & I" she treats mental illness with a personal insight that belies her youth: "He greets me with kisses when good days deceive him and sometimes with scorn, and sometimes I believe him". She's also got a dark sense of humour: "Cross your fingers, hold your toes, we're all going to die when the building blows," she croons merrily. The melancholic "Night Terrors", sits well in the shadowy church, with Marling using her voice like a finely tuned instrument, varying emphasis and volume seemingly effortlessly to intone subtle shifts of register.

All too soon it is the end. No-one wants her to stop, and there are two encores after extended applause. We step out into the chill March air and I feel buoyed up by the power of live music when it's this good. Folk is back and it's very young. Long live folk.

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:07:00 +0000

British TV drama is languishing in mediocrity, dominated by cheaply-shot, cliche-ridden fare that looks, sounds and feels like a barely-elevated soap opera (The Bill, first broadcast in 1984, still shows twice a week and yet seems stuck somewhere in the mid-90s in terms of script and style).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, TV just gets better and better. I'm thinking specifically of Damages, which is surely the darkest, cleverest serial since Twin Peaks interrogated American suburbia in the 90s. My only problem with Damages being shown on UK terrestrial (BBC1 on Monday nights) is that it spoils every other half-baked programme around.

In the States, it's just one of a super-league of serialized dramas, so good they're like 10 hour feature films that have been chopped into chewable, consistently compelling segments. HBO have led the field since they created the gold standard in television drama, The Sopranos in 1999; since then they've continued to trailblaze with Six Feet Under and most recently, The Wire (named best TV show ever by Time, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly etc; so good that Slate magazine are publishing a weekly analysis of the final series).

HBO's success proved audiences would lap up drama that is original and provocative, and forged a path for some serious competition. Damages comes courtesy of FX Networks, a channel owned by News Corp's Fox Entertainment, while TV's newest darling, Mad Men, is the first TV drama produced by cable channel AMC; a good start for them, as it's already won 2 Golden Globes.

Even those American series that fit neatly into genre boxes - hospital-based series like ER, Grey's Anatomy, House; police procedurals like the CSI franchise and Without A Trace; political wranglings in Spin City and The West Wing - are still top quality stuff, with real attention (i.e. money) paid to cinematography, lighting and characterisation, the like of which is all too rare in the UK.

The only thing we can do reliably well is period-drama, as the recent Sense & Sensibility and Cranford testified. But surely there must be some TV-friendly British writers more contemporary than Austen and Gaskell? The best we've had recently is Spooks; Life on Mars was good, but not as good as its hype. I tried watching Holby City the other week until the appalling script (somewhere between a Hallmark card and a first aid manual) forced me to switch in exasperation to the far more entertaining BBC Parliament.

In 1879, Matthew Arnold lamented: "In England, we have no modern drama at all." He was talking about theatre but sadly I'd say the same about our TV programming today. In the 19th century we led the way in serialized drama but then the medium was novelistic: Dickens' Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood were devoured by readers in chapters every month. I'd argue that the best TV dramas coming out of the States right now can be compared to those Victorian novels in terms of inventiveness and sheer emotional power. Writers, to your pens. Programming directors, to your cheque books. We need a serious injection of original, imaginative, risk-taking writing here.

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:58:00 +0000

I'm getting very fond of Dalston, despite the unexpected opening of a shop called 'Hot Nuts' just a few moments from our front door (I can't really blame them for calling it that as it sells nothing but hot nuts, but it does sound a bit odd).
The most recent local charm to win my affections is a small underground music venue. Underground as in a cellar, aswell as vaguely hidden. Yes, last week, after reading this Songkick.com blog post, I finally got round to visiting Bardens Boudoir. About time too, as it's only a stone's throw from our flat, nestling between grubby late-night grocery stores and a pub on Stoke Newington Road. When I told my friend Ben where I was going, he raised his eyebrows, and it may be worth noting that if the use of the word boudoir had correlated to any burlesque-style activity - as it sometimes does at the venue - then I would be staying away (I'm with Ariel Levy when it comes to raunch culture).
But on Tuesday we were there to see the gentle folky singer/songwriter Andy Jackson a.k.a House of Brothers and apart from the fact that his songs were "slightly samey" (in the words of M-A) his was an enjoyable performance and all-in-all, one that added to my general feeling of happy-to-be-alive-ness, especially alive in Dalston, and so near such a cosy venue with such inspired decor. Bardens' highlight in my eyes is its little booths, all of which are wallpapered differently. Music Week recently reviewed the place and Time Out say they list it "begrudgingly" since they don't want everyone to know about it. I'm glad we've found it anyway and await future nights (and the happy knowledge that I can walk home easy as pie) with bated breath.

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:23:00 +0000

I'd like to recommend an album: 'Alas I Cannot Swim', by Laura Marling, a 19-year old songwriter from Reading. This is her debut and it's a record to cherish. Beautiful, original tunes with folksy harmonies and rhythms.

I first got into her stuff after watching the video above, 'Ghosts', on youtube. When the CD arrived it came in the handsome A4 sized cardboard box you can see here, complete with a game/postcard/random cardboard trinket for each song.

Cute huh? PLUS, a free ticket to an exclusive gig in March at Islington's Union Chapel for songbox owners.

Ms Marling's explanation for the songbox concept is, in an interview with the Guardian, "I wanted to show, in a physical way, how much work goes into an album."

I never really doubted that album-making takes a lot of work, and to be brutally honest the cardboard things are slightly useless and I can't really think what to do with them. But that said, they look very pretty, and it was incredibly exciting when the parcel originally arrived, leading me to wonder, could this be the beginning of a record industry fight-back against the inevitably intangible itunes? Also I do quite like the artsy crossover effect of the songbox; the way some of the songs have been represented by woodcuts, which are then printed on postcards you can send. There's no doubt Virgin have got some clever marketing people on this case. But if it helps Marling on her way, I for one don't mind.

And the complimentary gig ticket is GREAT.

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:36:00 +0000

The Diving Bell & The Butterfly opens with a series of blurred images in white and grey. On the soundtrack, Charles Trenet is singing the irresistibly jaunty 'La Mer' with gusto. It's a dark jest, for we are not used to seeing the shapes on the screen accompanied by music of any kind. They are X-rays of bones - vertebrae, femur, patella, spine. The American director Julian Schnabel has made a piece of cinema that looks death in the eye while singing above it, and the opening credits set the tone for the entire film – profound tragedy spiked with a defiant, life-affirming humour.

Schnabel is up for an Oscar for Best Director, but the film's real star is it's source material: the autobiography of Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose glamorous life as editor of French Elle magazine was interrupted by a stroke, leaving him with a rare condition called 'locked-in syndrome'. Aged just 43, Bauby was fully conscious but completely paralyzed. We know this only because in the ensuing months, Bauby began to dictate his entire autobiography by moving his left eyelid, using a painstaking system in which an assistant read out the alphabet and he blinked at the right letter. Each word took around two minutes.

The story of how Bauby achieved this could have been slow, repetitive and saccharine, but the film's triumph is to make his ordeal not only watchable but deeply absorbing. Played with great sensitivity by the French actor Mathieu Amalric, our hero is always sympathetic despite his flaws; through flashbacks we gain a window into a previous life that was sensuous and hectic, with a wife, children, mistress and sports car vying for his time. Such memories offer a welcome counterpoint to the vacuum of life in a hospital bed, and force Bauby – and us – to consider the legacy of our relationships once we no longer have the power to make amends.

But perhaps the film's greatest achievement derives from Schnabel's seeming determination that the audience experience something of the diving-bell-like isolation Bauby described in his book. As he first awakens from his coma, we see a doctor leaning in close and asking him to speak. "What? Can't you hear me?" says Bauby, baffled. Only we, the audience, share that anguish. Indeed, for the first twenty minutes of the film, we see almost exclusively from his fixed perspective; the small hospital room, the nurses who loom in and out of focus, the vase of roses of which he asks, unheard, "Who brought those?"

He never gets an answer, and the donor-less flowers might as well stand for the many incomprehensible things in life, for it is with these that the film is most deeply concerned: loss, betrayal, the obstinacy of love in the face of catastrophe. I cried three separate times in this film, nudged by the shamelessly emotive piano score (try listening to the 'Theme for the Diving Bell & the Butterfly' by Paul Cantelon below). I don't think Schnabel quite deserves the Oscar (that's surely PT Andersons) but the Diving Bell team have framed the huge themes of this film with real wit and vision. In the end though, Jean-Dominique Bauby is the true 'auteur' in this film, and his courage its most compelling device.

Investigating Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:19:00 +0000

When a reporter went to prison in 2005 for refusing to give up the name of her source, it could have been a triumph for journalistic integrity. It's a given that reporters – especially investigative ones – often need to protect vulnerable sources from potential recrimination by keeping their anonymity safe. But Judith Miller's source was a senior U.S. government official, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, while the information he was accused of leaking to her (and a number of other journalists) happened to have done significant damage to a government detractor, the former American ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson. Just who was vulnerable here, and who needed protection?

Certainly not Libby, nor the Bush administration in general, although it had shown itself to be remarkably thin-skinned. In 2003, Joseph Wilson had written a series of open editorials in The New York Times, challenging the Bush administration's justification for war (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?ex=1372824000&en=6c6aeb1ce960dec0&ei=5007). In what looked a lot like retribution, the White House subsequently leaked Wilson's wife Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent to a selection of political commentators, including Miller. The first outing came in a July 2003 column by Robert Novak in the Washington Post, which included the seemingly throwaway phrase: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html). Plame had been undercover; her career was now over. Thus Bush's lackeys harnessed the supposedly independent media to punish one of their critics and his family.
Valerie Plame and her husband Joseph Wilson

The journalist Judith Miller had met with Libby on the 23rd of June, to discuss Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger. She met with Libby again on July 8, two days after Wilson's op-ed in the NY Times. Her notebook from that day included the mispelled scribble 'Valerie Flame'. But she afterwards claimed that name came from "another source, whom I could not recall." Miller didn't write an article naming Ms. Plame, but a week later, Novak's column came out. In the ensuing controversy, when the CIA asked for a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity, Miller received a subpoena to testify about the nature of her conversations with Libby. She refused on the basis of protecting her sources, and was sent to prison. Her bosses at the NYT outwardly supported her decision to go to prison, although Executive Editor Bill Keller later said: "I wish it had been a clear-cut whistle-blower case." [1] The problem was, Miller was already under fire for swallowing and regurgitating Bush's justification for the Iraq war in a series of articles, a fact she would retrospectively admit: "W.M.D. – I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them – we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong." [2] The last sentence underlines the frankly terrifying question raised by the Plame affair: how vulnerable had Miller and the other reporters allowed themselves to be, and for that matter, how vulnerable are any political reporters to the machinations of government officials with an axe to grind?

On one level, the answer is simple: journalists are intensely vulnerable. Quality reporting requires backing-up a source's every claim, but when you're investigating government, and the only information available is owned and disseminated by the government, how can you double-source? While Valerie Plame's outing showed the readiness with which wily officials would quash criticism through timely 'leaks', the general reporting of the run-up to war with Iraq painted a damning portrait of the entire media's gullibility. In May 2004, a New York Times Editor's Note reviewed the paper's reporting: "We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been." The editorial did share out some of the blame: "Complicating matters for journalists, accounts… were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq." [3] In other words, spin; an increasingly professional operation amongst government departments. Journalists are no less vulnerable in the UK. At a conference in November, Guardian journalist Nick Davies remarked: "Journalists used to make news judgements, but now these decisions are made by the world of PR, government, NGOs and so on. Military and intelligence organisations manipulate journalists into running stories that are fiction." It would seem that politicians, now they have a handle on the media, have wrested back all the power that a free press is there to protect. For modern government, effective media relations seem to aim to "take the risk out of democracy" (to poach social scientist Alex Carey's definition of corporate PR) [4].

What is additionally worrying is that spin is continually becoming more covert. Only in its early days would it fail to disguise itself adequately, as exemplified by the Labour aide who rashly sent the infamous memo on September 11, 2001: "It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors expenses?" Such brazen Machiavellian plotting is unlikely to be caught on email again, and the length of Libby's eventual trial reflected the way the White House and Downing Street spin machines cover their tracks more effectively these days. Of course the phenomenon of spin is completely at odds with the principal of an accountable democracy, thus seeming to justify the most cynical media attacks on government. Yet it results from a dilemma that has yet to be definitively solved: how should a government best communicate with its electorate?

This is where journalists could retain some power. The 18^th century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued: "As Force is always on the side of the governed, the governers have nothing to support them but opinion. 'Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded" [5]. Public opinion is still the preoccupation of politicians worldwide. The power of journalism lies in its function as conduit and meaning-maker. Labour MP Graham Allen says: "It is now the media not the party who are crucial to securing electoral victory, they must therefore be kept onside and serviced at all times." [6] Today's British politician cannot simply stand and shout his policies from a rooftop; he requires Sky News, BBC 24, Guardian Unlimited and the rest of the media to grant him air-time, print-space, web pages. Tony Blair courted this early in his career, but by 2007 felt it had gone too far, complaining: "a vast aspect of our jobs today… as big as anything else – is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points, it literally overwhelms."[7]
Blair's speech, mauled by many media commentators as utterly hypocritical, nevertheless made an important point, and one that John Lloyd had developed in his 2002 polemic, "What The Media Are Doing To Our Politics". Lloyd argues that the ability of the media to make or break a politician and his party desperately requires a renewed sense of responsibility in journalists. He claims that the vitriolic destructiveness of Britain's press not only makes a politician's life hell, but turns public interest in politics to zero. In investigative journalism, it is perhaps especially true that the reporter's aim is almost always to undermine and criticize. Kovach and Rosenstiel point out: "an expose is in effect a prosecutor's brief and the case it sets forth must be unambiguous… that is why investigative journalism has been called advocacy reporting." [8] Indeed, very few journalists would bother following up an investigation that showed the government was actually doing their job; it just wouldn't be enough of a story. Media critics say this is why spin came into being. As Blair memorably put it: " Not to have a proper press operation nowadays is like asking a batsman to face bodyline bowling without pads or headgear".

The balance of power between the politician and the journalist has inevitably shifted since Prime Minister Gladstone stepped on a train in 1880 to conduct Britain's first ever national pre-election tour, stopping at Grantham, Newcastle and Edinburgh to talk politics to bemused but appreciative crowds. Until then, as historian Martin Pugh says, "Leaders had usually avoided speaking in other men's constituencies… lest they be seen to interfere in a community's private affairs." [9] Gladstone realized that mass emancipation meant the party needed to start communicating with the general public, not just Parliament. He changed the job description of the politician forever. As Lord Salisbury complained to Queen Victoria in 1887, "This duty of making political speeches is an aggravation of the labours of your Majesty's servants which we owe entirely to Mr. Gladstone."
A hundred and twenty years on, we have mass media, satellite communication, press officers and 24-hour news; with Downing Street on youtube (www.youtube.com/downingst), the symbiotic relationship between the media and government has never seemed more firmly rooted. And never has the need for objective, considered and above all, double or even triple-checked reporting been more necessary. On the 19 ^th of July 2007, Joseph and Valerie Wilson's civil suit against Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and other White House officials was dismissed. Judge John D. Bates said: "The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavoury. But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism… by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials. Thus the alleged tortuous conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's status… was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform." [10] That judgement is deeply disquieting, as it effectively sanctions stealth manipulation of the press as a government weapon, not only against military enemies, (in the form of wartime propaganda) but also against its own citizens when they simply exercise their right to freedom of speech. Perhaps it is only with Judge Bates' words ringing in their ears that investigative reporters should listen to government sources.

[1] Bill Keller, quoted in "The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal", by Don van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford J. Levy, The New York Times, October 16, 2005.

[2] Judith Miller, ibid.

[3] Editor's Note, The New York Times, May 26, 2004.

[4] Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom, University of Illinois Press, 1995 .

[5] David Hume, from Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1741-2; 1748), Essay 2: Of the Liberty of the Press, http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL.html

[6] Graham Allen, "The Last Prime Minister: Being Honest about the UK Presidency", 2002, http://www.grahamallen.labour.co.uk/ViewPage.cfm?Page=21129

[7] Tony Blair, Our Nation's Future: Public Life, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page11923.asp, June 12 2007.

[8] Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, Atlantic Books 2003 (2001).

[9] 'The Making of Modern British Politics 1867 – 1945', Martin Pugh, Blackwell, 2002.

[10] John D. Bates, "Memorandum Order", United States District Court for the District of Columbia, July 19, 2007.

What is the What

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:15:00 +0000

Dave Eggers. If you haven't heard of him, go out and buy his first book, "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius" right now. The title may seem somewhat immodest, but it's also fairly accurate. It's one of the best books I have ever read and completely changed the way I think about fiction, aswell as kickstarting an ongoing obsession with a certain type of contemporary American literature.

I was given it by a boyfriend from Philadelphia who wrote beautiful things in the cover; I then rashly lent it to so many people that it came back with half its pages unbound and its corners frayed, though this seemed a worthy price for the unabashed joy I was sure the book was spreading throughout my dearly beloved. That said, I don't think everyone loved it as much as I did; like anything really powerful, it's a marmite-kind of book.

Anyhow I waited impatiently for Mr. Eggers' next work, and when his second novel, 'You Shall Know Our Velocity' finally came out (it is a given that D.E.'s work be always thus; quixotically, beautifully, ridiculously titled) I devoured it in great expectation. As with most things that one pre-emptively enjoys, it was just a tiny bit disappointing. That's not to say it wasn't enjoyable in parts, because I would argue it is impossible not to find moments of brilliance in anything over 2,000 words that Mr Eggers takes it upon himself to write; but it wasn't the masterpiece I was hoping for.

Accordingly, I wasn't so desperate to buy 'What is the What', his third book published here in May, and convinced myself I could wait for it to come out in paperback. But I couldn't wait that long. It's still only available in the UK in hardback, but imagine my glee on finding a U.S. paperback edition in the American bookshop in the Hague while home for Christmas. I have now, today, just this morning, finished it.

'What is the What' is a strange thing to define or grasp, like a kind of shapeshifting animal, and in this respect is echoes the cross-genre style that Eggers made his own in 'A Heartbreaking Work' (you can read an excerpt here:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstchapters/story/0,6761,384966,00.html)

The thing about AHWOSG was that Eggers played very deliberately and with great humour on our perceptions of what it means to read: firstly, to read a novel - a fictional account that we can step back from, walk away from and dip into as escapism, and then conversely, to read non-fiction, specifically autobiography, where we imagine we are gaining a true insight into the real things that happened to someone.

'A Heartbreaking Work' is heartbreaking because it is concerned with telling the true story of the death of both Eggers' parents from cancer within 5 weeks of each other; their children are left to bring each other up, and Dave becomes the primary carer for his 8-year old brother Toph. What's staggering is the gut-wrenching honesty of the narration, but also the comic pathos, the ironic self-awareness that Eggers brings to the recounting of such bewildering personal tragedy. And all packaged in a post-post-modern double-bluffing box of tricks full of hand-drawn illustrations, blank pages, doodles, postscripts and endnotes.

'What is the What' initially seemed to follow a similar line in post-modern playfulness. It's full title is "What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel By Dave Eggers". The preface reads:

"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation. Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel...
- Valentino Achak Deng, Atlanta, 2006"

At first I assumed Valentino was a construct; his voice and indeed the preface itself, a clever conceit from Eggers to immerse us more fully into the novel's world. It's a tradition going back to Tristram Shandy. But then I noticed that on the back cover, a small note stated:

"All of the author's proceeds from this book will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America; to rebuilding southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai; to organizations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng.
http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/"

If Valentino Achak Deng was a construct, this was taking it a bit far, surely?

The answer, of course, is that this time, the preface is absolutely truthful. There is no post-modern trickery going on after all. There is simply an American writer and a former child refugee from Sudan trying to tell an urgent story in the most accessible and compelling way
possible.

Here's a picture of Dave Eggers with Valentino. The book itself is really worth reading and I would strongly recommend it. Dammit I'll even lend it to you, as long as you promise to return it without too many pages missing. Not so much because it is an incredible piece of 'literature' in the all-consuming, unputdownable way that the best novels are - it isn't. Sometimes it fails to flow; it's narrative techniques feel occasionally clunky; at times the plot moves slowly. But that's because it's based on truth, and unpalatable truths at that. The plot sometimes moves slowly but then for the refugees like Valentino who made it out of Southern Sudan alive, daily life was all too-often a slow-moving, repetitive list of tasks as they queued in overcrowded camps for clean water, watched each other die of avoidable diseases like dysentery and waited for schooling that took years to come. There is also a small amount of - actually for me very helpful - background on the problems in the Sudan, leading up to the genocide in Darfur and the infuriating inaction of our own governments. For some people the insertion of odd paragraphs explaining such things might seem patronizing, though they definitely helped me understand the context.

With 'What Is The What' I would say Eggers has done himself proud, and performed a great service to truth and to all of us who would otherwise stay disgracefully ignorant of some of the problems in Sudan. The New York Times called the book "an extraordinary work of witness", and in a way, I think it's our duty to read it. Terrible suffering deserves a terrible number of witnesses. And I think it's the author's hope that the book will also help us to become more present and active witnesses to Darfur's tragedy.

P.S. If you're interested, Eggers wrote an in-depth piece about the origins of the book for the Guardian here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2088375,00.html

Blade Running

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:22:00 +0000

On Monday I treated myself to a ticket to see the new release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Rio. I was reminded of how fun it is to go to the cinema alone, something I used to do a lot whilst at Cambridge, but got out of the habit once in London sheerly because of the expense of cinema tickets. However as the Rio does £5 student tickets on Mondays, maybe I'll get back into the habit. The great thing about solitary cinema is you don't have to worry about what the other person thinks; whether they're enjoying it as much (or as little) as you are; whether you made an error in choosing the film. You can just sit selfishly back and experience the film for what it is, distractionless.

At Monday's screening, just being in the cinema felt special. Once the trailers had finished, as the curtains trailed open to a black screen and the title credits appeared, a collective thrill ran through the audience like quicksilver. I think it's because we were all there as fans of the original film. We knew something good was coming. The theatre was almost full, mainly with young people in their twenties and thirties; gangs of sci-fi geeks, cult film buffs, the slightly intimidating dalstonite fashiontellectuals, and the odd person who might have even seen the original in a cinema rather than on their parent’s VCR.

The film’s Vangelis-scored soundtrack is incredible. Sitting in the blackness and feeling the waves of plangent chords wash over you is shiver-inspiring; like getting into a miner’s lift, watching the mesh shutters close and feeling yourself descend into the dark middle of the earth - you feel even before Blade Runner begins that this film is going to take you places, show you things that are new and dark and important.

It is stylish like too few movies dare to be today. Of course it takes a gutsy director with a capacious imagination to make something this coherent in vision. You also need a razor-sharp narrative focus, something that Ridley Scott managed to carve from the ingenious but multi-threaded novel that the film is based on: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, written in 1968. In that, we engage with a number of characters, each with their own claims on our affection; in Blade Runner there is really only room for one protagonist and that is Harrison Ford’s morose yet likeable Rick Deckard.

And in a way, that’s cleaner, clearer. Like one of my journalism tutors says: “Once you’re on the M1, stay on the M1” - so, to keep your audience's attention, don’t go off on any slip-roads, just cleave to one story. Scott manages that perfectly: there’s no crossing of wires here, no distracting slip-roads into the religion or drugs themes that add breadth but also complicate the novel. Occasionally themes are gestured at that would have been better left out - when Ford's Deckard notes that the owl in the Tyrell Corporation offices is a fake, it's an observation loaded with meaning in the novel, yet somehow empty in the film, where the idea that all animals are now virtually extinct is never stated or explored.

Where the film exceeds the book is - perhaps predictably - in its visual evoking of a dystopian future. The story is set in ‘L.A., 2019’, but it’s a gloriously Chinesified L.A. with street stalls selling noodles, signs in Mandarin and kimonos everywhere; clearly the filmmakers foresaw China's global dominance even in 1982.

The other overriding influence is film noir: Rick Deckard is the future's Philip Marlowe, a hard-drinking, raincoat-wearing gumshoe except he carries a gun that can blast robots through glass, rather than the 9mm luger pistol preferred by Marlowe, and he travels around in jet-propelled flying cars. Aside from that, Deckard fits perfectly into the film noir tradition, traversing rain-slicked streets with collar up, falling for femme fatales and sustaining bruises to body and ego in the course of his work. His job is to 'retire' the Nexus 6 replicants - androids - that have escaped their slavery 'off-world' and are hiding somewhere in this always-night, neon-lit L.A.

These replicants are at once terrifying and pitiful; living in constant fear for their lives, capable of developing emotional connections with each other and more than conscious of the rare preciousness of life, yet also merciless and hideously violent. Rutger Hauer's performance is so compelling as to almost outshine Ford, though in fact they complement each other perfectly - Hauer intense, aggressive, everything externalized, speaking in near-poetry; Ford all wordless longing and internal conflict.

The only jarring moment in the film is the scene where Deckard seduces Rachel, a replicant who has been implanted with false memories to make her believe she is human. Why does their romance begin with what looks very much like rape? There must be some carefully thought out logic to it but despite searching online discussion boards I haven't yet found a legible answer.

Despite that, the film is still a masterpiece and has informed many movies since; its influence can be traced in Minority Report, the Terminator films, 12 Monkeys and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins to name but a few. Catch it in the cinema while you can.

St Pancras and Brussels Midi

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:46:00 +0000

Last weekend I escaped to the Netherlands for a flying visit to see my parents. The utter scene-shift, from a rainswept London full of tiredness and adulthood to the sparkling cold sunlight that greeted me on Saturday morning in the Hague, with the breakfast table already laid and my parents reading the paper and making toast when I came downstairs in my dressing-gown, felt wholesome and good and cherishing, like having a tea-cosy pressed around me. To my admittedly geektastic excitement, I travelled via Eurostar, from the renovated St. Pancras station. The clean, shiny-newness of everything, from the lanterns, redbrick arches and glass roof to the laptop portals (with UK and European plug sockets) makes you feel like train travel is something exciting, even (whisper it) luxurious.

The station before the renovation, which took 10 years.

After.

For comparison's sake, I also took some snaps of Brussels Midi. Tintin; brilliant idea for decor. Also the mischievous, massive advertisement for the new fast Eurostar service to London, which shows Blair, Thatcher and Major all holding EU balloons which they are about to pop.

songkicked

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:57:00 +0000

I'd like to recommend a blog to you:

http://songkick.blogspot.com

It's a bit like having your coolest music expert friend on call, any time of the day or night for recommendations. Very nicely written and wow, you get to listen to the recommended tracks for FREE, easy peasy, no annoying downloads or watching ads or getting the track cut in half just as you were getting into it.
So go! Read, listen, be merry.

A Coroner's Court

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:32:00 +0000

In the last six weeks, as part of our journalism course, we've visited a coroner's court twice. For a while beforehand, I'd been worrying that the experience would inevitably induce morbid thoughts. In fact, I was surprised by what a strange and unexpectedly graceful beast the coroner's court is. The particular court that we visited, St Pancras', is tucked a few streets behind the shiny new Eurostar station, and was built in 1886. With its red brick gables, buttresses and arched windows, sitting placidly in a wide, tree-canopied park that doubles as a Victorian cemetery, the court resembles an odd kind of gingerbread house; or a setting for a chapter of Dickens' great unfinished gothic novel, Edwin Drood.

I guess in a way witnessing an inquest is sure to cast shadows, and the cases that we observed spoke of the drip-drip despair of individuals whose lives were a constant struggle against unjust odds and the plundering internal war of mental illness. Both deaths were basically suicides, although the coroner recorded an open verdict for the first because of complicating factors that I won't go into here. It would have been strange not to feel an empathetic sense of loss when listening to the accounts of these people's lives, read respectfully by the officer of the court to a mostly empty room. It made me think of King Lear when he glimpses the bedraggled Edgar in the storm and says: "Is man no more than this?... Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art".

There is something so painful about the smallness of the process that greeted the deaths; the quietness of these people's exits from the world. Yet at the same time, I felt a kind of warmth sitting in the court and hearing the coroner's careful, unrushed questions as he tried to clarify the deceased's last days, hours, minutes; tried to sift through the emotional accounts of witnesses and carers; tried to restore some dignity and truth to a scene long concluded. A coroner is either a trained lawyer, a trained doctor, or, as in the case at St. Pancras, both. He or she is surrounded by a team of people for whom dealing with the narratives of death is a career. Yet there is something very sensitive and gentle about the process of the coroner's court; all the staff seemed intent upon keeping the atmosphere calm, ordered and above all, respectful. Because, although the coroner is an instrument of the law; a whirring cog in the machinery of justice and record-keeping, he is never there to find a guilty party. His or her role is strictly limited to establishing the facts behind any death that is a) violent or unnatural or b) sudden. In this way the word 'court' itself is misleading, with its associations of a prosecution, the apportioning of blame or the allotting of punishment.

I've often thought the truly brave way to live would be to do so with the waking knowledge of one's own mortality - although not to the extent that you live in constant existential terror, because that would mean you got nothing whatsoever done and simply existed in constant paralysis, like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights - but there's certainly nothing like coming up close to death for putting the daily grind into perspective. I do wonder how the coroner lives his life and whether he experiences it differently because of his daily encounter with death. Also, I quite like the idea of an inquest as a very British way of trying to cope with the random earth-shattering chaos-inducing anarchy of death. In some cultures people weep and wail in the streets, beat their chests, paint ash on their foreheads; here we get some people together to try to ascribe some order to the event, to encircle it with legal language, methodical procedure. And thus, one feels, we go some way towards imposing propriety, structure, tidiness. We wrestle back a little bit of control over our own fates.

Though don't let me give the wrong impression: I don't think that kind of spiritual succour was ever the official function of the coroner's court. The word coroner comes from the Latin for 'crown'; in 1194, it was decreed that three knights and a clerk "attend" every death - presumably this was optimistic rather than an actual policy, unless medieval knights had a hotline to the grim reaper himself - but anyway, their name was "custos placitorum coronae" - "Keepers of the Pleas of the Crown", and their job was to make sure that the correct portion of the deceased's assets were kept for the Crown. So basically, they were a kind of tax collector. I prefer their role today.

Wahaca. Which now means yum.

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:22:00 +0000

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of a unique culinary experience. So good was it, that I would wager it won't stay unique for long, as good ideas in restaurant-land spread fast. But for one day, walking into Wahaca in Chandos Place, I felt a bit like Lucy in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - the first lucky child to stumble across Narnia.
Comparing myself to Lucy does a gross injustice to my guide and general inspiration in all things eatable, Dizzy Ostrom, without whom I would have remained entirely ignorant of Wahaca, not to mention its location, Chandos Place, which quietly occupies a nondescript middle-ground somewhere between Covent Garden and Charing Cross. Dizzy had heard the buzz about Wahaca and mobilized us into a small expeditionary force to test its virtues. Just as well she did. For one thing, Mexican food has never tickled my tastebuds particularly, so in normal circumstances I wouldn't have gone out of my way to try this place. And secondly, as Wahaca is down a long flight of stairs, there was no chance I would have wandered past and glimpsed its supercool decor or been tempted by the lush foodstuffs being rushed out of its kitchens.
Instead, I walked in blind, zero expectations and only a rumbling tummy to challenge my impartiality.
Wahaca's website - www.wahaca.co.uk - talks a lot about 'street food'. Don't let the idea of half-cooked bacteria-fermenting dishes simmering in a bin lid on some dirty street put you off. This food is street as in really, really cool. I had the 'Sonora Salad', which involved sliced avocado, grilled chicken, cos lettuce and green rice in a bowl made of a giant tortilla.

(Dizzy in Wahaca)

My fellow expeditionaries Dizzy, Clare and Greg chose a selection of dishes from the street food menu, including chorizo quesillada, flaked mackerel tostada, pork pibil taco and sweetcorn on the cob with chilli, lime and creme fraiche. Yum-my. We also had the mandatory tortilla with homemade guacamole to start, and were each gifted with a complimentary tequila and virgin mary by our waiter, due to the fact that Friday had been the Day of the Dead and therefore (initially confusingly) a celebratory time. In keeping with the good spirits of the place, if it hadn't been lunchtime, I would have certainly been tempted to sample the restaurant's delicious-looking mojito. But by holding back on Saturday, at least we have a pressing excuse to return a.s.a.p. for an evening outing.

Me, looking quite besotted with my salad in a giant-tortilla; greg enjoying the virgin mary.

We March Because They Can't

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:36:00 +0000

In the last fortnight, thousands of Buddhist monks in Burma have led peaceful demonstrations against the presiding military junta. The Myanmar authorities admit that thirteen people were killed during the subsequent crackdown, but Amnesty estimates the true number to be far higher, and ABC News suggested it would be in the hundreds.

Here are some photos from today's march through central London, organized by Amnesty to demonstrate solidarity with the Burmese people. We tied pieces of red cloth around our heads and lots of people had made placards and banners. We marched from outside the Tate Britain in Pimlico to Trafalgar Square.

At the same time as we were marching in London, demonstrations were also due to happen in Mongolia, Malaysia, Thailand, Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. That's the back of Marie-Aimee's bescarfed blonde head at the middle of the photo... And, less prettily, the houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

If you'd like to take some action, visit: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=331

Or join the facebook group, which at time of writing, already has an astounding 355,415 members:
http://cambridge.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24957770200

Flight of the Conchords - Bret You Got It Goin On

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:51:00 +0000

Midlake and FOTC

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:27:00 +0000

A lighter post. Two things that have made me happy in the last few weeks. First: the band Midlake and their incredible album 'The Trials of Van Occupanther'. I only heard about the group when an American friend, Staton, added a video of their song Roscoe to his facebook profile. Such melodic songwriting and beautifully wrought harmonies. And when I started listening to their other songs, it was amazing because whereas usually you only really like one or two songs on an album, every single track I heard was immediately lovable. Thus I took the unprecedented step of paying to download the whole album from iTunes after Play.com told me I'd have to wait 5 weeks for them to get one in stock. It's been totally worth it so here's the video of one particularly lovely song.

The second happy-making thing is a New Zealand-sourced phenomenon called Flight of the Conchords. I saw the comedy duo a few years ago doing their live act at a university ball and they were hilarious; last year HBO talent-spotted them and commissioned a whole series, which has attracted a cult following in the States and is now being broadcast on BBC4. FOTC have a brilliant website: http://www.conchords.co.nz/
although if you want to get a taster, you're better off searching youtube and watching one of their many clips from the HBO series. Especially recommended are "Business Time", "Bret you've got it going on" and "Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenocerous".

Praia da Luz

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:29:00 +0000

The tiny seaside resort of Praia da Luz in southern Portugal seems utterly unsuited to the magnitude of the story that has unfolded here.
New-build villas with terracotta roofs and palm trees; cheap and cheerful
newsagents flogging postcards, beachballs and inflatable sharks; a sandy,
beautiful golden beach across which a few families attempt valiantly
to gain some enjoyment from their holiday - yesterday a scattering of
toddlers played in the sand, but kept always within close proximity.

Narrow streets with cobbled pavements that lead to the sea. The village in Southern Portugal is a tiny resort that is almost wholly purpose-built for its livelihood: tourism.

The beach. Fireworks on Saturday marked the official end of summer and holidaymakers are thinner on the ground. Journalists take their place, talking urgently into mobile phones and pacing the streets in unseasonal suits in case they're caught by the Sky cameramen that stalk the town.

In many ways the church dominates Luz, standing within a space of its own and somehow exuding implacability with its blunt outline and plain white and yellow exterior. It has proved reassuring in this time of uncertainty, and on Saturday night, the church was full, with people forced to sit on the floor.

Cameramen wait outside the church. There are always a few there at the moment; Portuguese newspapers report daily that the police will at any moment begin excavations around the building. No digging yet though.

For me, the best two pieces of reporting on this story have both come from the Guardian newspaper's "Comment Is Free" page online. As far as I know, neither journalist is in Portugal and perhaps that gives them the distance that is required to see this thing clearly.
Jonathan Freedland's piece reminded me what great comment pieces are all about: someone doing the heavy thinking that most of us don't make time for, and therefore telling us things we don't yet realize - or are too frightened to admit - about ourselves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2167113,00.html

The other piece, by Martin Bell, is an indictment of our culture that makes for uncomfortable but necessary reading, even if it does call into question this very blog post.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/martin_bell/2007/09/media_madness.html

My own piece is on Newsweek online:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/40421
though it is largely just a summary of what has gone on so far.

The Bourne Ultimatum

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:12:00 +0000

I'm happy to say that seeing the final Bourne film some weeks after its release in no way dulled its brilliance, despite higher stakes of anticipation. The film resets the standard for action movies just as its predecessors did, most probably because its director, Paul Greengrass, (of United 93 fame) again brings his signature intelligence and political sensitivity to a genre that usually lacks both.

The movie's adrenaline-rush pacing, furiously choreographed fight scenes and extended car/motorcycle/pedestrian chases through various cities across the globe are fun in themselves; like most action heroes, the world is Bourne's playground but refreshingly it seems that Eurostar and a surprisingly old-fashioned looking ferry are his favoured, eco-friendly modes of transport. The episodic structure that's typical of action movies is here given urgency and humour through the ingenious subterfuge and double-bluffing manouevres that characterize the trilogy and make Jason Bourne our epoch's best hero. In one scene, as Bourne prepares for the arrival of two assassins by doing something incomprehensible with a desk fan and a light, I was reminded of the delicious trickery of Macauley Culkin in Home Alone; something of the same mischief plays in the Bourne films, and makes the otherwise fairly tragic arc of Bourne's journey much sweeter to swallow.

The role has made Matt Damon Hollywood's most bankable actor, apparently worth $27 for every one dollar he earns. It makes sense. Somehow Damon's curiously immobile visage, punctuated by that constant little furrow on his forehead, inspires a range of emotions; pity (the poor boy is still suffering from those headache-inspiring flashbacks that make him a possible twin of Harry Potter), raw desire (Julia Stiles' character Nicky Parsons has a tough time holding back from throwing her arms round his oft-wounded torso and one can relate) and a kind of parental concern (how many assassination attempts can he survive in his quest to find the truth about his past? and more to the point, what is he going to do once he has found the truth? won't he have a big black hole in his life? will he get therapy for this? has he even started dealing with the death of that nice German girl from Run Lola Run who he lost at the start of the second film??)

These are all relatively unimportant points compared with

1) the satisfying portrayal of female characters in the film
and
2) the political undertones which become relatively overt in the movie's final showdown.

Both factors bring the Bourne films decades past the Bond movies in tone, and reflect the scriptural choices that resulted from the trilogy's early deviation from its source material, the Bourne books by Robert Ludlum. As Damon said in an interview before the Bourne Ultimatum began pre-production, ""We've gone so far from the book. Ludlum wrote it as a trilogy and we've really kind-of ignored that plot because it's very Cold War. And so, in the updating process, we kind-of threw out most of what he had so we're kind of on our own to find a third one."

In fact this throwing out of the baby with the bath-water was almost certainly a good thing, allowing Jason Bourne to evolve from a Cold War-bound family man into a uniquely contemporary hero. His relationships with the two female protagonists in the Bourne Ultimatum offer a welcome respite from the swimsuit models that populate so many other action films. Nicky Parsons and Pamela Landy are both three dimensional characters with minds and plotlines or their own. Also gratifying is the fact that Bourne's heroism asks for nothing in return. So putting his own life at unnecessary risk in order to save Nicky from a hitman doesn't mean he then gets to take her to bed, in fact, quite the opposite, as we see him virtually pushing her onto a spectacularly unglamorous bus to start an anonymous life elsewhere without so much as a kiss goodbye. Meanwhile, the beautiful 51-year old actress Joan Allen as troubled CIA-exec Landy effortlessly equals Damon’s on-screen intellectual charisma, making the film much more of an ensemble piece than its title would suggest.

The politics of the film are to my mind its most intriguing aspect; but as I am still musing on them (and this post is already rather long) I will leave them for another day. I will just say that Greengrass is said to be currently working on a screenplay adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's critical book about the American occupation of Baghdad, 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'. And Matt Damon is signed on to star so it’s good news all round.

Cheat Neutral

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:42:00 +0000

Carbon offsetting promised an effortless way to feel guiltless about your carbon footprint. You pay some company every time you go on a flight and they'll invest your money in one of various projects that promises to 'offset' the amount of carbon you've just used - a wind farm in a developing country; a solar-panel in an African school. But does that actually help stop climate change at all? Shouldn't you be looking for a way not just to offset your carbon footprint but to actually downsize it? The guys at cheatneutral.com have come up with a very cool explanation of why offsetting doesn't work. Well worth a watch.

slugs in the living-room and architectural racism

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:08:00 +0000

In the office we work with our backs to televisions; typing, flicking through webpages, picking up phones. Typing. Behind our backs, pictures flash and headlines shout, unbeknownst, until someone turns around to reach for a book or a cardigan. Then, one day, you hear an audible intake of breath, or, if it's bad enough to warrant sharing, an utterance, an 'Oh my god', a low, awe-laden 'wow'.

Surely never a mystical instinct or an overwhelming sudden awareness of distant human suffering forces us to turn to 24-hour news and catch a breaking feed, the ticker tape of doom so unequal to its task, so mocking of our attempts to track tragedy, all over the world, now, as it happens now, and now.

Nevertheless, someone will glimpse capital letters on a red banner at the bottom of the screen, and sooner or later we will feel the need to stand around one television, for it is better to digest traginews en masse, to swear under our breaths but just loud enough to make ourselves heard, to feel the visceral thrill of knowing some kind of history is being made, and to believe, inanely, that by watching a screen, we are somehow present.

When the news broke that a number of university students had been shot by a gunman in Virginia, U.S.A, we were working on other stories. That week's international magazine cover was to have been some timely comment on European politicians; I had been asked to research a gently worshipful piece about the Queen. All were pushed to one side by the enormity of the Virginia story; a story that seemed to call to editors by name, demanding grand, funereal gestures; a new, black cover, numerous interactive build-out features online, a sombre, horrified, aghast tone.

There had been a tragedy. Terrible loss on a large scale and in horrific circumstances. Panic and terror and pain, all too easily imaginable. And yet.

As the self-reflexive media would eventually point out in the days to follow, 33 dead would have been a moderate to good day in Iraq. iraqbodycount.org reports 34 civilian dead on the 7th of April, 56 dead on the 6th of April. On the 18th April, 140 "shoppers, vendors in market and construction workers, commuters" were killed in Sadriya market, Baghdad. 4 times as many as had died that day in Virginia Tech.

And every single day, for weeks, months, years, Iraqi innocents are dying. As Polly Toynbee shouted through the vacuum, "THEY BELONG TO US!" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2061826,00.html), for "This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war."

So why is it that a random killing spree in a university town in the States exercises our imagination more than the surplus of death served up daily elsewhere?

I was at a loss to understand why Virginia Tech upset me more viscerally than Iraq. I felt nauseous for the rest of the day after watching the BBC breaking news footage of the American university massacre; the wide-eyed, numbed survivors with arms interlinked, the photos of the killer. Why was that more upsetting to me than seeing the bombed shards of buildings in Baghdad, innumerable photos of blood-spattered children or the same dazed look of terror in Iraqi victims as had shone from the eyes of the American students?... Was it simply, shamefully, because the Virginia Tech students were "white"? I believe that a degree of unconscious racism possibly, inexcusably, played some part in my empathy weightings, just as it explains in some terrible way the horrifically protracted global inaction over genocide in Darfur. But that wasn't just it. It's a kind of racism, maybe a step-brother or a cousin. Both come from the same ancestors: prejudice, fear and a lack of imagination. But I'd argue this had more to do with landscape than it had to do with skin colour.

It was only when I thought about the slugs that I got it.

So. The slugs.

The house we rent is a characterful four floor Victorian terrace house, 5 bedrooms and a sweet overgrown garden. It's charming in a rickety, under-maintained but homely way and I love it. But recently the contented safety I felt within its four walls was disturbed. We discovered a criss cross of shiny slug trails one morning, decorating the carpet of our living room. The glittery remnants of a slug disco. Later, a dinner guest picked up her discarded handbag from the floor to find one of the small creatures had taken up residence. Yuck.

Slugs in themselves are not particularly pleasant of course but the disquiet and unease I felt was entirely disproportionate to their presence. I think the reason was: by crossing from their proper place - the dark, unlooked-for damp of a plant pot somewhere down the garden path - and somehow entering the manmade enclosure of OUR HOUSE, the slugs had monumentally broken the sequence and structure of things; the separation of outside and inside; garden and house; grimy, slippery animality trespassing on all our attempts at cleanliness and control. Thus they signalled chaos, loss of control, the futility of human efforts.

A familiar trope in good horror movies is the way the worst terrors of all are initially prefigured by small disruptions in the natural order. At the beginning of Hitchcock's "The Birds", the heroine is pecked on the head by a gull. It's only a peck but as she takes her hand away from her head, there is blood. So in the same way, the bizarre and unlooked-for entrance of slugs into our carpeted living-room signalled nothing less than the possibility of apocalypse.

What's this got to do with Virginia Tech and Iraq?

Here's the thing: I wonder if Virginia's tragedy was somehow more emotive for me, because it was the perfect example of the random and the uncontrollable entering the order we have worked so carefully to create, the order that defines western civilization, for whose sake we go to war, go shopping, go to therapy, go to Ikea. For whose reason we send our young people to the safe bastions of controllable chaos that we call universities.

Imagine your house. It's best to imagine the cheapest, smallest house you've ever visited actually. Imagine what that would look like to an alien who just landed on earth. It would look weird: millions of people, all building little arbitrary structures to hide inside, all putting up walls and making glass windows as a compromise with the sun. Spreading carpet where there used to be grass. Installing front doors with locks and doorbells and letterboxes.

All of this, this fortressing of ourselves, is designed to keep out A LOT. Not just slugs but also snails, foxes, magpies, burglars, axe-murderers etc etc.

Physical boundaries, walls and roofs serve to delineate the order we wish to impose on the world in general. Thus our architecture takes on an identity that is deeply linked to our sense of order and security. And perhaps one of the reasons we find it much harder to relate to Iraq or Darfur than to, say, Virginia Tech, is a kind of architectural racism. Because in our naive, ignorant understanding, we fail to recognize the order in unfamiliar architecture. Thus the images of disorder, of structures being broken in foreign lands, are less shocking and less meaningful than those in the places we recognize. At some level we think, breakdown in a desert is almost no breakdown at all. It's like the three pigs and the wolf blowing down the house made of straw. No-one's surprised.

Really I suppose I'm talking about relating to a way of life. If we can't relate, if we can't imagine inhabiting a place, "walking around in someone's shoes" as Harper Lee would say, then we don't care so much. Because our own interests are not under threat. It's hard for the average Londoner to imagine living in a village in Darfur or Iraq, even before the war, and that makes it a lot easier to distance ourselves from the victims who need our help most.

We should care. So what's the answer? In terms of Darfur, I wonder whether the best thing would be to make a film that emphasized those elements of human life that are familiar to as many people as possible. For that you'd need a documentary team to go and follow a family for a number of months, spending time recording all the common human experiences of family, relationships, the voicing of basic human needs, the great silence meeting those needs. That we can all relate to. We need to see the things we recognize at an unconscious level being threatened and then perhaps we will make the threat our own. And maybe, just maybe, we will be galvanized into action.

Europe's Greenest City

noreply@blogger.com (Esther Bintliff) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:11:00 +0000

Four out of five EU citizens inhabit metropolitan areas. So where's Europe’s greenest city? Likely suspects include Reykjavic in Iceland, Malmo in Sweden and Barcelona in Spain, all of whom were quick off the mark in instigating radical green reform. As the green city concept develops political cache, other metropolii are catching up, and nowadays many cities don’t just want to get green, they want to be the greenest of all. Events like the 2003 European Sustainable City Award (the winners were Ferrar, Heidelberg and Oslo) highlight the air of competitiveness that is beginning to seep into local environmental politics, while London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone chose this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos to publicize his commitment to making London “the undisputed world leader” in tackling climate change. But in Filtnib's humble opinion, the green crown must go to Freiburg: situated in Germany’s Black Forest, the city’s long-term embrace of all things green has single-handedly raised the eco-city game.

Freiburg is crucially a green party stronghold: in 2002 Mayor Dieter Salomon sailed into power with 65% of the vote, making it the first large green-governed city in Germany. But the burg’s eco-credentials go further back, and this is what makes it unique: in 1969, revolutionary transport regulations prioritized cyclists, public transport and pedestrians; the following year cyclepaths were introduced (they now run to 500km); and while most of Europe phased out its trams, Freiburg’s network was bravely being expanded. To put this in context, it's instructive to remember that right around this time, in 1971, French President Georges Pompidou was declaring, “the city must adapt to the car”. Good old Freiburg clearly wasn't listening: two years later the town centre was completely pedestrianized. Roll on 1991 and there's even a treat for the exercise-shy: a low-cost “environment public transport ticket” -just 44 euros a month will get you unlimited access to buses, trains and trams throughout the town and its 60km radius. Incredible. Mayor Salomon told me the highly successful scheme has since been copied across Europe, aswell as attracting research delegations from China and Japan.

Transport is just one element in the town’s sweeping eco-strategy. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 the council energetically pursued alternatives to nuclear power. Freiburg is now known as the solar capitol of Europe, hosting the headquarters of many solar research companies aswell as a Solar Training Centre. An innovative “solar village” has just been built within the new Vauban district of ecologically designed homes, where 50 solar houses all produce more energy than they consume. In 1996 the town had 274 square metres of solar cells; a decade on, solar panels span a colossal 11,223m. The 19 floor façade of Freiburg’s central station consists of 240 solar panels and the council even boasts a dedicated “solar information desk”.

Freiburg’s landscape is literally green, too: 42% of the surrounding area is under conservational protection and, as of 1992, any new construction on Freiburg’s municipal land must comply with a stringent low-energy standard, which caps the permissable energy requirement of a building at two thirds the national limit. Mayor Salomon argues that individual action is vital: "The real difference comes when people change their lifestyle, and this is also the real challenge. Thirty years ago in Germany there was only a small minority of people that lived in this way, and the majority laughed at them. Today, lots more people are thinking about it seriously." He adds that Freiburg isn't only concerned with limiting further damage; they’re now planning for a warmer world: "Freiburg will get a lot warmer, but we'll also have a more extreme climate. We expect flooding and storms".

One of Freiburg's favoured methods of mitigating the effects of climate change sounds somewhat like a new dance move: “greenroofing”. Fast becoming Germany's favourite home improvement, the process basically entails transforming roofs into vegetation layers that allow stormwater run-off, reduce energy costs and mitigate the urban heat-island effect. Freiburg's other big coup is a scrupulous recycling scheme: each household has 4 separate bins, and even kitchen and garden waste is composted. Consequently, waste disposal has more than halved since 1988, allowing Freiburg to win “best recycler” in the EU’s 2001 “Urban Audit” (80% of Freiburg's waste was recycled, compared to the European average of just 19%).

Despite the incredible achievements of this smallish town in the Black Forest, Freiburg's Head of Energy Klaus Hoppe isn't complacent, saying “There’s still a lot to do.” New targets are being set each year; right now Hoppe’s concerned with raising the 1.6% of power sourced from bioenergy to 2.7% by 2010. “Freiburg” literally means free city. The town’s eco-logic demands a lot of rules, but in the long-term it’s securing a more important freedom: that of future generations to inhabit a sustainable city. How long will it take for the rest of us to catch up?