Now looking forward to reading the next one.
I'd have liked more dissection of the stereotype - after all, Essex Girls are essentially a working-class version of other kinds of irresponsible woman (like say 'Flappers'), and I think the class dimension is under-discussed here and elsewhere.
But it's an enjoyable read and a celebration of some forgotten but important women.
Lots of other product placement, but also some good jokes and big song numbers. Oddly it seems to be set in an America where there are no other social problems at all, in particular no race issues - the nice young lesbian woman's putative same-sex partner is African-American, and this is not even worth mentioning. The young men, and the young women, in the film, all hang out with each other across the racial divide.
But was enjoyable to watch.
Watched on Netflix
The film is not remotely erotic, though the young women are nice-looking. It's mainly interesting, though I did have a few little dozes...normal for man in his 60s watching a film from the sofa in the late afternoon, I'd say.
For the most part sex seems to be more a source of misery than happiness for these women. They have very few orgasms compared to the number of times they have sex, or the number of sexual partners they have. They're concerned about what they ought to be doing, how they ought to be doing it, and what others will think. And these are women in Denmark, probably the best country in the world to be a woman. Of course they might be a selected group, even though they have selected themselves by answering an open call to attend filming - if they weren't miserable maybe they wouldn't have attended.
And towards the end the film-makers, who are lesbians even though the subjects mainy aren't, ask the women to undress and show their naked bodies to the camera...most of them do this, even though a few don't or keep mainly out of shot. Why? I can see what it added to the film, but I still think it would have stood better without this.
As I watched I wondered what a film of young men talking about their sexuality would be like, and I suspect it would also be full of insecurity and awkwardness. Maybe sex, except between stable regular partners, is just miserable, or more miserable than happy?
Watched on Amazon Prime.
Watched on BBC iPlayer.
Watched on All 4.
And I will read all the others, and probably enjoy them too, though perhaps with lowered expectations.
A good decision, though it's not an easy read. It's cleverly structured so that the narrative shifts between the author finding out what happened to the Jewish girl that his family took in and hid during the war, and the story as seen through the girl's eyes, as remembered by her grown up self and reconstructed by the author. Hanging over the story is the knowledge that the girl survives but then, as an adult in the 1980s, falls out with the family so that the author grows up without having known about her; we don't find out until fairly late in the book what this was about.
Although I thought I didn't have much to learn about the Holocaust, and everyone knows about Anne Frank, and lots of people know about the 1941 February strike against the deportations of Jews from Amsterdam, there was lots that shocked me. I didn't know that more Jews died in the Netherlands than in any other Western European country, or that this was in part because the Dutch contracted out the round-ups of Jews to competing private agencies - few of the Jews were rounded up by occupying German forces.
And I was really stunned, and upset, to read about what happened to those survivors who returned from the camps to their country, to find that they weren't welcome, that their houses were occupied and they couldn't get them back, that they were liable for taxes for the years that they spent in the camps...and that the Calvinist "resistance" organisation tried hard to prevent those Jewish children who had been hidden from being returned to their families, or where there were no survivors of the families to other Jews who wanted to adopt them. They argued that by putting their children into hiding the Jewish families and communities had given up any rights to them.
Not an easy read - lots of the personal stuff that happens to the girl of the story is hard too - but worth it.
Made worse by the fact that it's dubbed into American English - I liked it better when she was singing, because that's still in Polish. When it's English it seems like every other implausible teen movie. Warsaw looks awful, though I think the film thinks it looks glitzy, all plate glass and neon. There is no sign of the beautifully reconstructed old town, though I caught sight of one Stalinist-era building that I remembered in the centre of town, now swathed in neon. By contrast the village that the characters keep describing as a shithole from which they want to escape is beautiful, with a stunning river next to it. I want to go there, and I wish I knew where it is.
Like I said, there's actually some good elements in there - the breakdown of families, the tawdriness and impermanence of fame, the impact of celebrity and social media on real life - and I'd like to see what another, more subtle director would make of it.
Watched on Netflix.
At one point in the film he almost develops an actual relationship with a co-worker, but she's interested in something that might have a future...and at that point he suddenly can't get it up.
And there's a catastrophic relationship going on with his equally damaged sister, who has moved into his apartment because she has nowhere else to go.
Like I said, hard to watch, but worth it.
Watched on All4 via phone and Chromecast.
From early on Zionism had two different aspects, and this is still important now. In Palestine it acted as a movement and an ideology of colonists, seeking to take over a territory and dominate the local inhabitants. But in Europe, where Jews were an oppressed minority, Zionism was a movement of nationalism (albeit an odd one) for an oppressed people, offering solidarity, cultural renewal, and self-help organisations. Now in Israel (and Palestine) Zionism acts as an ideology and set of institutions for Jewish supremacy - many Israelis say that Israel must be the state of the Jewish people of the world, not a state for all its citizens. But for Jews around the world, Zionism still means Jewish cultural identity, the national pride of a minority that’s not always oppressed but is often fearful.
For non-Jews, including anti-racists, it’s not always apparent how much Jewish identity has been subsumed into Zionism. Radical anti-Zionist Jews who have broken with the mainstream Jewish community, and its identification with Zionism and Israel, have found their own version of Jewish identity. But for most Jews in Britain identification with Israel is a very important aspect of their Jewish identity - even if they are privately unhappy or very unhappy about the government and some aspects of Israeli society. The idea of Israel as a refuge for future Jewish refugees still has a very strong hold. It’s bound up with the memory of all the Jews who didn’t manage to escape the Holocaust, and the memory of how migration to Palestine provided an exit route for those few who did escape or managed to survive the extermination.
I grew up Zionist. I went to a state-funded Jewish primary school that was run by a Zionist organisation. The Hebrew that I learned there was the Israeli kind - I didn’t even understand why older people pronounced Hebrew in a completely different way. The songs we sang were Israeli songs, in Hebrew. We celebrated Jewish holidays the way they did in Israel. There were maps of Israel and Israeli flags all over the school...I don’t think there was one British flag or map of Britain. Later on as a teenager I went to a Zionist youth movement, where we went camping, and got off with each other, and sung more Israeli songs and practiced living like a utopian community.
Eventually my politics took me away from most of this. I mainly look at Zionism through the eyes of its victims, although I can still connect with some of the emotional memories I have about Israel as a rescuer. I also know that some fascists and conspiracy-theorists use Zionist as a code-word for Jew, and sadly that some of my friends and comrades on the left can unconsciously slide into using antisemitic themes and imagery when they’re - rightly - calling attention to Israel’s crimes.
I’d like to persuade more British Jews to oppose the Israeli government and the Occupation, and to support equal rights for all citizens in Israel. I hope more people in Britain will stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, and will support their struggle against Israel. But I hope that it’s possible to do this in a way that doesn’t involve a frontal assault on the personal and cultural identity of Jewish people, and that means treating the issue of ‘Zionism’ with some nuance and sensitivity.
(Afternote: I wrote this as a comment on someone else's Facebook post, and then re-posted as stand-alone Facebook post of my own, and now I've put it here to give it a more permanent home. It was intended originally as a short response, and there are some aspects that deserve more substantiation or exploration. But it's here as it emerged, and I think I still stand by what's in it.)
This book is really interesting - he reveals a lot of his personal history, with the Travellers Convoy and after. He's obviously a very focused person, with a really strong connection to practical things, but a good business sense too, and a powerful code of ethics. It's fascinating to read about the details of the company's relationships with other big businesses, and how absolutely awful they were.
I'd recommend this to anyone who wanted to know about the practicalities of the renewable energy industry.
One small winge...they work as writers, they seem to have enough money for a quite-nice appartment in a NY district that's not yet gentrified (where is this?) but they don't actually seem to do any work, even though all the treatments that they try are really expensive. Sometimes they borrow money from their relatives, but they don't seem as poor as their working lives would seem to indicate.
Watched on Netflix.
But it doesn't really answer the question that it raises - how does Pornhub and its associated companies, which are massive and must have huge servers and pipes - make any money? The content is mainly free (and stolen), and the ads are mainly for other sites owned by the company. The subscriptions and the external ads don't seem able to cover the costs.
One possibility that's raised but not really spelled out is that it's actually a massive money laundering operation. I tried to see if anyone else is alleging this, and can't really find anything substantial.
Watched on Amazon Prime.
