Review of "Use of Weapons" by Ian M Banks

 

This is the third novel in The Culture series, and quite different from the others. The plot is more complex, it shifts backwards and forwards in time, and there is some confusion about who the characters are. I have a slight suspicion that it was assembled out of a series of disparate stories, because the atmosphere and the descriptions of places and characters are great - it's just a hard-to-follow narrative thread. 

Still enjoyable, mind you.

Review of "Noughts and Crosses" by Malorie Blackman

I suppose this is not really aimed at me - it's Young Adult fiction - and maybe that's why I didn't like it. It's easy to read, with short chapters and un-challenging language, and a plot with plenty of emotion and action to carry the reader along. Still, I was a bit bored. And I can't see the point about writing about a fantasised, alternative-reality racism, when the real thing is everywhere and needs writing about.

Do young adult readers respond to an account of racism in which the positions of blacks and whites are reversed, and Black Africans have colonised white Europe? Maybe they do, though I can't see why. And there's so much about the scenario that's not really fleshed out. Why are the Blacks called Crosses and the Whites Noughts? Are the Crosses and Noughts roughly equal in number, or are the Crosses a tiny colonial elite? There's some suggestion that the Noughts were once enslaved, but we don't know how long ago this was...within living memory, like in the US? Or way back in history? Is this our Earth with a point of departure in history, or a parallel one? And so on...

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

I finished this a few weeks ago, but it has taken me ages to get around to writing a review...perhaps because I hoped that I would have something profound to say, but I haven't. It was a great and mainly enjoyable novel, even though the subject matter was anything but enjoyable. It's a retelling of Dickens's "David Copperfield", but relocated to the Appalachian mountains. It focuses on an orphaned poor White boy, and his progress through the "care" system. It has Dickens's eye for the details and the nuts and bolts of institutions, and how they grind people down. And it's set against the background of the opioid plague that has devastated regions like that, as well as much of the rest of the US.

It's a great book, another triumph from Barbara Kingsolver. 

Review of Hugo

Nice enough steampunk-ish (well, period drama really, but with so much steampunk detail that it felt faux-period) kids' film about a boy living in the walls of a Paris railway station, trying to solve a mystery that was left to him by his now-dead father. Quite a lot of cinema history in that rose-tinted way that Hollywood sometimes likes. Lots of famous people in cameo roles - Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances de la Tour, Peter Ustinov, Ben Kingsley, and the lead for Asa Butterfield, before he became famous as Otis from Sex Education.

Whisper it not, but I was a bit bored by the end, despite the chases and the drama. For the most part the peril never felt very perilous. Still, it was lovely to look at.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Operation Mindfuck QANON AND THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP" by Robert Guffey

Much more detail about the nature of the Qanon conspiracy theories than I was prepared for...I knew this stuff was pretty batshit crazy, but I was still unprepared for how stupid it all is. And at some level I can't help thinking that the people pushing it out know that it's stupid, and are laughing at their followers; for example, the references to Deep Underground Military Bases, for which the followers unreflectingly use the acronym D.U.M.B. 

Some of this was compellingly awful, and other parts were mind-numbingly boringly awful...not the author's fault, it's just that there's only so much of this you can take. 

Sometimes his political instincts are spot on - he manages to despise the right-wing nutjobs who perpetrate this stuff without embracing their opponents, the mainstream Democrats who really don't give a shit about the damage that they've done with their policies and their wars. 

At other times he - no doubt exasperated by the depth of the bullshit he's had to wade through - descends into sarcasm that isn't interesting or edifying to read. That's a shame, a better editor would have cut a lot of that out.

He's quite well informed on the historical background to conspiracy theories, but I found that there are things that I wish he'd known about - for example, he cites Will Eisner's "The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" for an explanation of the historical background to this foundational conspiracy theory, rather than Norman Cohn's "Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion". 

Probably not the definitive source on Qanon, but a good one to read. I was reading this as the news came through about Trump's indictment, and it made me glad that there was a prospect, however small, that the bastards responsible for all this might go to jail.

Review of Barbie

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It seemed quite clever and funny to me, and I liked the acting - playing the live-action equivalent of plastic doll is obviously role that Ryan Gosling has been waiting for.  The Guardian review is itself clever and funny, and hard to improve on...but a few things in passing occur to me that don't seem to have been noted elsewhere. 

Firstly, this film is overtly self-referential - it doesn't quite have characters addressing the fourth wall, but the narrator does refer to it being a film, with casting choices - not something I remember from anything else. It does't need to make sense of the fact that Barbieland is a fantasy, and instead it chooses to make fun of this...Barbie doesn't expect drinking vessels to have fluids in them when she's in the real world, and the wave on the beach is of course solid, as is the surface of the pool at Barbie's dream house.

Is this lost on what I assume is the film's target audience...young girls who either still play with Barbies or did until recently? Or is that not the target audience at all? The film opens with a parody of the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, complete with Thus Spake Zarathustra, and showing very young girls smashing their baby dolls as they embrace the possibilities of the new Barbie toy. I thought it was funny...but who else did? Is today's pre-teen audience so media-literate that they get this joke too? Or what?

Watched at an actual cinema, the Vue in Stroud - the first time in ages!

Review of Pixie

Quite enjoyable Irish dark comedy, set in the wild west where we've just been on holiday, and populated with feuding drug-dealing families, some of whom are priests. Held my attention, had a few laughs, a strong woman character and some interesting takes on male buddydom and sexuality. 

I note in passing that the font for the titles suggested the 1974 film "Foxy Brown", which was also about a woman taking revenge on drug gangs. Pixie, Foxy, that's not an accident, is it?

Review of Belfast

Nice, beautiful-to-look-at coming of age movie by Kenneth Branagh that is apparently autobiographical. Young Buddy is growing up at the start of the troubles - the first scene takes place in August 1969, in an idyllic mixed working class Belfast neighbourhood, where Catholics and Protestants live happily together. Perhaps it's too romanticised...I'm sure everyone who was there has their own version of what this experience was like. Certainly we don't see any sign of the symbols of sectarianism, no union flags or tricolours, no Orange lodges...even the murals on the gable ends of terraces are harmless.

But then we see things quickly slide into pogroms and burning-out of Catholics from the Protestant streets, and vigilantes and barricades - though only in a Protestant street. In fact, Catholics are largely absent from the story, except in the imaginations and conversations of the Protestant characters, especially the ones from the central family. 

One thing struck me - the family, especially the mum and the dad, and some of the other characters including the local Protestant thug-gangster - are all really gorgeous to look at. Funny how striking that is, because almost everyone in documentary footage from this period looks so ugly.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via usb stick and informal distribution...one consequence of this was odd melting transitions between some scenes, because the video player couldn't quite cope. It made it even more arty.

Review of Aftersun

Moody slightly menacing film about a dad on holiday in a Turkish resort with his pre-teen daughter. At first it has all the dullness of a resort holiday (and I admit to having a little doze) but the mood and the menace take over, and I ended up being really quite moved by it. It's a depiction of a father-daughter relationship that's kind and loving, even though the dad is really troubled. 

It's occasionally a bit confusing - most of the narrative is set during the holiday but some of it is in the future when the girl is grown up and reflecting back on the past...and perhaps some of it is in the further past, depicting the dad's break-up with the girl's mother - it's not 100% clear. 

Not what you'd call enjoyable but I am pleased I watched it...via informal distribution and USB stick to the projector in the Springhill Middle Floor.

Review of The Last Letter From Your Lover

Sort of OK, watchable romantic drama with a split-chronology narrative. In the 1960s a wealthy socialite has an affair that ends abruptly, and in the present a young woman journalist finds love letters in her magazine's archive and becomes intrigued by the story. It's engaging enough, but not really great...the 1960s scenes are sumptuously filmed and the socialite wears some great clothes. Some nice backing track music.

Watched on Netflix - the film was produced independently but Netflix bought it up.

Review of Escape From Room 18

Unsettling but also unsatisfactory documentary about a Jewish young man who was a member of a Nazi skinhead gang in the US...at first the Nazis don't know he's Jewish, but then they find out and try to murder him, and he miraculously survives and escapes to Israel, where he and his family make a new life. Later - at the time the documentary is made - he meets up with one of his old Nazi skinhead friends, now no longer a Nazi or a skinhead, and they go on a trip to the Theresienstadt concentration camp together.

There's so much about this film that's weird - of course - but also so much that is unsatisfactory. There's not much consideration about the roots of Nazism and White Supremacy in the US, and no examination at all of what it means to escape from racists by going to live in Israel. The main character has moved to Israel with his mum, who speaks with a strong Southern accent, obviously misses the food and culture of the American South, and has a twin sister (who has also moved to Israel), and the two of them dress identically. Which would have been enough for a weird documentary in itself.

Review of Wild Men

 

Billed as a comedy but dark and violent and a bit nasty - a little like Riders of Justice. What is it with Danish comedies? Is the audience in a Danish cinema roaring with laughter at this, or do they just mean a different thing by 'comedy'?

This one features an unhappy man who has left his family to live in the wilds of Norway so that he can reconnect with his proper, natural, manly self...but he's actually not very good at it. Failing to kill anything to eat bigger than a frog, he ends up robbing a petrol station instead, and is then half-hardheartedly pursued by the local police, who are mainly oblivious of a trio of drug smugglers in their neighbourhood. The drug smugglers hit a moose/elk, and one of them runs off with the cash leaving the others for dead, but they aren't, and then they run in to the aspirant wild man.

Lots of violence, and blood, and unhappiness, and almost no laughs at all. Even so I found it quite thoughtful and interesting, though Ruth didn't.

Watched on BBC iPlayer. 

Review of Transition by Ian Banks

A novel set in the multiverse, with characters who are aware of and can travel between parallel universes. It's nicely done (or perhaps nicely overdone, since quite a lot of the descriptions are sort of camp in the way that steampunk sometimes is - especially the lavish settings and costumes of Madame d'Ortolan, who functions as a principal villain). 

Lots of drugs, some sex, not much rock and roll.

It took me a little while to get into it, but I ended up enjoying it and was almost sorry when it ended.

Review of Mixed By Erry

Italian film about three brothers who stumbled into music piracy and became, for a while, a very big part of the Italian music business. A bit dull - I had to watch it in two tranches because I kept dozing off, despite the violence and the depiction of heavily militarised organised crime. The brothers are pretty much the heroes of the film, and the captain of the Financial Police who is trying to catch them is pretty much the villain. 

There's almost no reflection at all on the ethics or the politics of copyright infringement - I'm rather relaxed about such matters, but I would have at least liked some reflections on who are the winners and losers from this. 

Watched on Netflix, and a good example of why one perhaps ought to cancel one's subscription.

Review of The Fabelmans

The sort of film that I think is meant to be heart-warming...a semi-autobiographical coming of age thing by and about Steven Spielberg...apparently he waited until his parents were dead before it was finally made, though his sister wrote the screenplay. 

I was a bit bored at the beginning...it looks up briefly in the middle, but it's a bit self-indulgent and not all that engaging. Sometimes films about movies are great, but this isn't one of those.

I don't know how autobiographical it is, but the not making it until the parents were dead suggests that it must have been seen as potentially hurtful to them.

Watched via informal distribution and an HDMI cable.

Review of "Bonjour Tristesse"

A quite annoying book about sex and relationships among affluent, comfortable middle-class French people, set in the holiday villas and nightclubs of the French riviera. The first person narrator is a precocious adolescent girl, who enjoys her widowed father's dalliances with women younger than himself but takes fright when he plans to marry an elegant older woman.

There are some good moments in it, and it gradually grew on me, but it wasn't especially memorable.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article, and I learn (a) that the author was only 19 when she wrote it, which is remarkable, and (b) that the Spectator said "Bonjour, Tristesse, which has achieved remarkable celebrity by virtue of its subject-matter and its authoress's age, is a vulgar, sad little book." So now I like it a little more.

Review of "The Little Drummer Girl" by John Le Carre

I really enjoyed this but it wasn't quite my favourite Le Carre. As with the Cold War ones, he's good at exploring the moral ambivalence of the sides...but perhaps because of the subject matter, Israel and Palestine, I find it more difficult. He tries to have it both ways, with sympathy for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, but I am not sure he really succeeds.

The plot is quite simple (if implausible - Israeli intelligence recruits a young English actress to infiltrate pro-Palestinian networks in Europe) but as with other Le Carre, he's good at providing the detail, of atmosphere and interiors and characters. 

It was a good lesson for me in the secondary importance of plot...I sometimes got a bit confused, and I don't really think that this would have happened (though I was rather reminded of the scene in Spielberg's Munich where the two competing groups of Palestinians and Israelis are staying in the same safe house in Athens), but it didn't detract from my enjoyment.

I'm also aware that this is a novel about a double agent/infiltrator, and that here as in real life the cultivation of a successful infiltrator personality results in a lot of inner emotional turmoil. Being convincing as an infiltrator means that you have to develop friendships and connections with the members of the group that you are targeting, while partitioning off the "real" you that is reporting back to your own side. I think I'd like to look at other books that deal with this, both fiction and non-fiction...I'm aware of the story about a Shin Bet infiltrator of left groups in Israel in the 1970s, who went native, and also of Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly". But there must be lots of others, surely?

Review of How To Blow Up A Pipeline

It would be facetious, and also factually wrong, to complain that this film does not tell you how to blow up a pipeline. It's got a lot of specific detail in it, including the requirement to make sure that the explosive is quite close to the pipe itself, which is very strong. The film's protagonists find making detonators the most difficult part, and this involves both chemistry and electronics work. The explosive itself seems to be old-fashioned sugar and weedkiller, and though they bash it about quite a lot as they move the oil drums in which they've packed it, it doesn't go off. 

I haven't read any terrorist (or urban guerrilla, if you prefer) memoirs, but I suspect that there isn't a great deal in them about the nuts and bolts of bomb-making. Perhaps if there was then the crew in the film wouldn't have made such heavy weather of it. Can't help thinking that the IRA had an easier time...perhaps because they had access to supplies from supportive governments?

Most of the film is like a heist movie...about the individuals' back-stories, and about the preparations and mechanics of the operation itself, with tension supplied by unexpected appearances and so on...there's another thing but I won't talk about that because I don't want to commit a spoiler.

Nice that one of the gang is a conventional Texas farmer who looks like he would have been at home in the Tea Party or storming the Capitol, and who has been radicalised by the compulsory purchase of his family farm for the pipeline.

The author of the eponymous book, Andreas Malm, is said to have a walk-on part somewhere in the film, but I didn't see him.

In its own terms it's quite gripping, though I haven't thought much about it afterwards. There's not much political discussion or reflection about the tactic of sabotage and how it might relate to a wider movement, and what there is not very thoughtful.

Worth watching though - how many films about climate activists are there?

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.

Shlomo Epstein

My mum's grandfather, who I knew when I was a little child (until I was about eight, when he died) was usually called Solomon Epstein, though he seems to have sometimes been called Itzko. He was a tailor in the East End, and worked for other master tailors. He was never a master himself, and seems to have been unemployed outside the season. Family tradition says he had attended a yeshiva but became a Bundist, back in the town of Pruzhana (now in Belarus but then Eastern Poland). Later he was very pro-Communist, if not a party member, and thought very highly of Stalin.

He hadn’t meant to emigrate to England. He’d taken a boat to America but was refused entry, perhaps at Ellis Island, because he was suffering from the eye disease trachoma. As a result he ended up in London. 

He must have already been married to Sarah Trappski, who was the mother of his three daughters and a son; I know this because Sylvia’s father, Louis Epstein, was born in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). I have a picture of him with his wife and four children, in which Sarah looks quite plump. A later picture of her, when she was probably already ill (I think with TB but it might have been cancer), shows a very emaciated woman.

He was married two more times after Sarah Trappski died (she’s buried in Frankfurt, where I think she went for treatment which was unsuccessful). The first time he married the widowed mother of Louis’s wife (Sylvia’s mother, known variously as Fay, Fayge, and Ruchel), the second time another widow called Lena, who had a daughter in Israel - I remember a picture of her in her army uniform. Lena kept chickens in the backyard, and fermented and pickled, and my mum remembers her infusing cherries in alcohol. 

When conscription was introduced in WW1 he wasn’t liable to be conscripted, because he wasn’t naturalised British. The British government went to some effort to sign military conventions with the governments of allied nations, allowing it to either conscript non-naturalised immigrants or deport them to serve in their ‘home’ armies, but it didn’t do this with Russians because there was some recognition that they were refugees from Czarist oppression. This changed in March 1917 when the first revolution overthrew the Czar, and the Kerensky government continued to fight alongside the allies. In August 1917 the Anglo Russian military convention was signed, making Russian subjects liable to conscription or deportation. 

One of the documents in my possession is of some sort of certificate, issued in 1918, by the Russian Embassy in London, then based in Gordon Square. It shows that the embassy staff have manually corrected the headed notepaper to remove the word ‘Imperial’. On the back, in pencil, is some text in the first person about Shlomo/Itzko - I don’t think he wrote it himself. It describes how he came to England and concludes with words that emphasise his claim to be a Russian.

As described in Harold Shukman’s book ‘War Or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917’, the mainly anti-war immigrants were advised by their socialist leaders to opt for deportation - it was assumed that the government was too busy to organise deportation and transport to Russia. This turned out to be wrong (though perhaps not bad advice, given the level of slaughter on the western front by then) and the immigrants - Jews, but also Lithuanian miners in Scotland - were rounded up and put on a ship for Archangel. 

Shukman describes what happened to them thereafter. By the time they arrived there was no Russian army left for them to serve in, and they wandered around Russia during the early stages of the civil war. At some point in 1918 they reached Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Ukraine. I have a composite picture, with lots of insets, showing portraits of what was probably the deportees; some text on one of the insets says ‘Members of the Convention, taken in Ekaterinoslav XI 1918.’ There is also a picture of a ship and some railway lines. 

Shlomo spent several years in Russia, during what must have been the civil war. At some point he is said to have found his way to family members who stayed behind in Russia, and there recovered from typhus. Eventually he found his way back to London (some time in the early 1920s), though family tradition says that when the ship docked he wasn’t allowed to disembark, and had to return the following day on another ferry. 

Review of "White Skin, Black Fuel: On The Danger of Fossil Fascism" by The Zetkin Collective and Andreas Malm

Lots to like about this book. It's clear and to the point (though sometimes slips into unfortunate academic language and uses complex, unfamiliar words where a familiar one would have worked just as well).  It makes some good distinctions between different kinds of climate change denial...though it doesn't always use those distinctions in a consistent way. Still, I appreciate the difference between "fossil fascism" and "capitalist climate governance".

It made me think whether the climate movement, broadly, has focused too much on the latter, and not enough on fascist-tinged denialism. Until recently I've rather thought that actual deniers were a tiny band of nutters - after reading the book I'm more aware of how widespread and powerful their ideas are, and how they serve as a radical flank for the foot-dragging mainstream..."of course this is a very serious problem but we can only do what's possible, and that is limited by all those people who don't even believe this is happening." In its earliest days XR majored on taking the facts about climate change to a much broader audience, with its introductory talk that activists could learn. Perhaps it gave up on that too quickly in favour of stunts that grabbed headlines and felt like action.

It also made me thing about the role of consumption - especially of some particular goods, and especially cars and meat - as the symbols of a limited kind of prosperity, and thus as a substitute for class consciousness. In a demented sort of way having a big car and eating lots of meat is a sign of what "we" have achieved, and what must be defended in the face of "elite" plans to take it away from us. We may not have a decent welfare state or healthcare or education, and our kids might never be able to afford to buy or even rent houses, but we still have our big cars and steaks. 

It's also worth thinking about how anti-car rhetoric is also a class marker. The richest people often don't have cars or drive much; they live in the cool, walkable inner-city areas from which everyone else has been priced out - see Paris, or London, or New York. The poor and the working classes are living out in the outer suburbs, and in the absence of proper public transport a car is a necessity for a decent way of life, including getting to work, shopping cheaply at big supermarkets, and taking the kids to visit grandparents and friends and to activities.

Two more things - first, that the relative absence of green nationalism is surprising. I know the authors have an explanation, but I am still mystified. It's a largely vacant political position, and the attractiveness of it is not hard to see. The far right's hostility to renewable energy is hard to understand. Perhaps it only makes sense in the context of actual cash flowing from fossil fuel companies and owners to the far right parties.

Second, I am still mystified by the pathetic uselessness of capitalist climate governance. Why don't the mainstream right parties do more? After all, it's the role of the capitalist state to protect the overall system against the particularist interests of particular fractions of capital. So why aren't they doing their job here? Is it that they are worried about being unpopular? That seems unlikely, they are prepared to do lots of other unpopular things when it's necessary for even the short term interests of the system. Are they really just short-termists, who don't care about climate change because it won't happen on their watch? Do they really not believe in the science? In which case those of us who have tried to thrust it under their noses have failed. Do they think that they personally, and the ones they care about, will be able to escape to somewhere where this won't happen? Genuine question, if we knew the answers to this we might know better what to do next.