Review of The Ballad of Wallis Island

Beautiful slow poignant movie, which nevertheless manages to be quite funny. It's about a folk duo who were lovers but broke up and stopped playing together, and a lottery-winner superfan who wants to get them together for a private concert, just for him, on a lonely island off the Welsh coast.

Watched via informal distribution and USB stick.

Review of O Brother Where Art Thou

Watched again in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from a DVD, and realised that though I had warm and fuzzy feelings about this film, I'd forgotten almost all of it.

Anyway, it was great, even after 25 years - fabulous music, sharp dialogue, a good and funny plot, and good politics. The set-piece with the KKK rally, the discovery that the "reform" anti-corruption candidate for governor is the Grand Wizard, all feels very topical.

Feeding the hand that bites us

Last weekend I attended some of the Festival of Commoning, held in Stroud. There were lots of interesting talks and discussions, but there was one particularly significant moment for me. Jem Bendell, famous as a guru of XR and Deep Adaption, was down to speak on “Great Reclamation”. In retrospect the title of his talk ought perhaps to have rung a few alarm bells, but it didn’t - one assumes that an event like this ought to be a relatively safe place. 

He didn’t talk about climate or deep adaptation at all - the focus of his talk was a call for restrictions on foreigners buying or owning land in Britain. I don’t have a very strong view on this. I’m aware that lots of other countries have such restrictions, and there’s room for a balanced, evidence-based discussion on what the impact might be on the affordability of homes in Britain.

The trouble was that the language that he used was very strongly reminiscent of that used by the far right. He talked about “globalists” and “international bankers”. He spoke about how these people were “sucking the life blood out of our country”, and he said that this was directly linked to “our” children deciding not to have babies. It was all rather “Great Replacement”, and the title may have been a deliberate referece - if it wasn’t, then it’s shocking that no-one noticed. (You can see a version of what he said on his blog here, and judge for yourself whether my reaction was justified).

So when it was time for questions and contributions, I stuck my hand up and pointed this out, saying that on a day when Tommy Robinson had brought 100.000 foot soldiers on to the streets of London, it was a bad day to be fooling around with economic nationalism. I said that “globalists” was often a dogwhistle for Jews, and that focusing on “foreign” ownership of property made it seem as if it was OK for the Duke of Westminster to own huge amounts of property in Britain because he was “one of us” - in Bendell’s word, a citizen.

It would have been easy for him to have agreed that the language was - on reflection - a bit unfortunate, and that it wasn’t his intention to align himself with the far right, but he didn’t. He doubled down, said that “globalists” were the source of the problem, and that the suggestion that he might be unconsciously echoing racist and antisemitic rhetoric was just the sort of thing he’d be expecting from “guilt-ridden Guardianistas”. 

Somebody else from the floor joined in, saying that his language was wrong and bad, and that it was of a piece with the sort of thing one heard from the US far right; rather wonderfully, that person turned out to be Carne Ross, the “accidental anarchist” and former diplomat who was one of the later celebrity speakers at the event. Someone else called out that next he would start talking about the Rothschilds. Still Bendell was having none of it; he was in sympathy with Black and Brown people who couldn’t afford housing, and that was down to the globalists.

The final contribution came from a local activist with whom I’ve had my disagreements who made a generous and kind closing remark about me personally, and about the importance of being careful about language.

Afterwards a few people spoke to me - some of the organisers of the festival, who said that I’d been right to bring it up, and that Jem Bendell didn’t really mean it, and we probably agreed. A couple of others said that they’d never heard that “globalist” and “cosmopolitan” were used code-words for Jew, and I perhaps unkindly replied that they ought to get out more.

I was pretty shaken by the experience, though the solidarity I received helped make it better. Reflecting later, I thought it would of course be easy for Jem Bendell to show that he wasn’t a racist. There’s no sign that he’s an antisemite either, in the sense of someone who hates Jews. Apart from a recent engagement with the cause of Palestine and Gaza, he’s not said or written anything touching on the subject.

I think that’s the point. Antisemitism isn’t a feeling (hate), it’s an ideology - one which puts Jews at the centre of explaining how the world works and what’s wrong with it. It’s possible, and even common, to spread this ideology without personally hating Jews, and even to do it in places where there aren’t many Jews. 

And what’s wrong with it isn’t only that it’s hurtful to actual Jewish people, but that it makes everyone else stupider, and less able to understand the world as it really is. That’s the point about the expression “the socialism of fools”. Antisemitism isn’t just something that is promoted by stupid people, but something that helps to make people stupider.

AFTERWORD: Jem Bendell wrote a response to this post, which is published here. Once again, I wish to make it clear that I am not accusing Jem Bendell of being an antisemite. You can judge for yourself whether the language he uses is helpful to other people who are.

Review of Martha

A sympathetic biopic of Martha Stewart, that makes her seem almost nice. The bad parts aren't ignored, but they are spun and glossed. So we sort of know that she's horrible to minions, but it's OK because she's just a perfectionist, and everyone who was getting at her (like the SEC and the FBI and the DA) did it because she was a successful woman, not because she'd done anything really wrong.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Heartbreak Agency

Not-very-good German romcom - a woman starts an agency to help people suffering from heartbreak after break-ups, a journalist writes a mean article about it. He gets sacked by his new young boss because he won't retract, and finds himself grovelling for his job back which means he has to write another, nicer article, which includes receiving the heartbreak therapy...and he and the agency woman end up falling for each other, obvs...

The best bit is the location, which includes some stunning Baltic coastline, and now I want to go there. Someone seems to have described this as the "worst film ever", and it's not quite that bad.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Dreamland" by Kevin Baker

Wow, what a book. 

I bought this for my mum, in hardback, as a birthday present years ago - I looked at the subject matter, Jewish immigrants in New York City in the early C20th and thought she'd like it. I don't know if she ever read it, which is sad.

At some point I borrowed it from her, and put it in my bookshelf, and I didn't read it either, until now. And it's pretty amazing. A multi-threaded narrative with many characters, usually told in close third person but occasionally in first person. Many but not all of the characters are indeed Jewish immigrants, though not the pious, Americanising upwardly mobile ones that we are usually presented with in this sort of narrative. They're gangsters, prostitutes, union organisers, circus freaks...

It's very vivid in its descriptions of the city and its environs, especially Coney Island, the site of the eponymous theme park "Dreamland". 

I want to read the rest of the trilogy now, even though I had previously never heard of Kevin Baker. Disappointingly he's the same age as me, but he's written so much!

Review of "Silverview" by John le Carre

Not one of his best...perhaps because it's not entirely his. He died before he finished it, and his son completed it from extensive notes. It was a bit boring, with a not entirely believable ageing Polish  antifascist disappointed by Communism as the central character - the sort of ambivalent, ambiguous disappointed old guy that Le Carre usually does well, but not so interesting here.

Review of We Live in Time

A poignant romantic drama, made much more interesting by the unusual narrative structure - non-linear, so events are jumbled up in an out-of-sequence timeline. This allows for multiple dramatic crises, whereas if it had been linear we'd have expected it to build towards one. It's got a lot of domestic drama, hard to discuss without spoiling. But it's well acted and beautifully put together, well worth watching.

Unusual good film on Netflix.

Review of Kensuke's Kingdom

Nice, mainly gentle animated film, in which a young boy is storm-washed from the deck of his parents' sailing boat and (somewhat implausibly) finds himself on a tropical island paradise presided over by the eponymous Kensuke, a former Japanese sailor whose family were all killed in the Nagasaki nuclear bombing. 

Perhaps I missed it, but I had thought that when the storm hits the family sailing boat is still in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for South Africa, which makes the presence of a Japanese sailor hard to explain. The Wikipedia article about the book makes it clear that they are in the Pacific, which makes much more sense.

Despite the subject matter I didn't get too emotionally involved - not as much as I did in the The Wild Robot, another animated film which strangely I don't seem to have reviewed. 

Review of "Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History" by C.L.R. James Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

As I write here quite often, I'm not a big fan of graphic novels. I find them hard to read, distracting and non-linear- maybe I have an old-fashioned attention span. This one felt different, perhaps because it's adapted from a play, and it reads like the script of a good play. I am a big fan of CLR James, and his intelligence and his willingness to deal with difficult and contradictory elements (like the slave-owning planters' enthusiasm for the French Revolution) shines through.

It's still bloody confusing though, and hard to keep track of all the currents - the revolting slaves loyal to the kings of France and Spain, the interventions of the British and the Americans, the shifting loyalties of the mulattoes and the free blacks. I'm glad there was a list of dramatis personae at the beginning, and I referred back to it more than once.

Still hard to read of Toussaint's betrayal and death without a lump in the throat, and the graphic novel removes many of the details that are in James's book The Black Jacobins.

A great introduction to the Haitian revolution though, with a good bibliography. 

Review of "Spies" by Michael Frayn

A beautiful, clever book, mostly told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy in wartime England, though with a frame first person narrative told by the same person in his old age. It touches on everything about England - class, race, town and country (and new suburb), manners, sexuality.  Two boys who are uncertain friends play lots of fantasy-based games around their newly built suburb, which still shades into rough rural at its edges, and they create a scenario around the idea that one of their mothers is a German spy. It's hard to say more without spoiling.