Review of 'Night of the Iguana'

A 1960s classic with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and a rather fab Deborah Kerr. I'd never seen it before, and it's great - based on a short story and then a play by Tennessee Williams, the script is wonderful, the acting great. It seems to cross genres, starting off as social comedy and ending up as a something more thoughtful. Near the end one of the characters completes a poem on which he has been working for the last years of his life, and then dies - and it seems to me to have been a good poem, worth the wait.

In general it feels surprisingly modern, especially in its depiction of Ava Gardner's post-sexual relationship with her husband, and her rather more sexual relationship with two maracas-playing young Mexican men. The representation of these two Mexicans, and the others at a beachside bar, verges on the stereotypical, but it didn't spoil the fim for me.

Watched via Chromestream and Chromecast, after obtaining through informal distribution.

Review of 'Mute'

A rather good, creepy science fiction film set in a near-future Berlin, which is rather well depicted. Lots of violence - it's set in a demi-monde of nightclubs and gangsters, and two of the main characters are former US military torturers who learned their trade in Kabul. But it didn't feel gratuitous to me, or that kind of comic-book knockabout violence that some films have where nobody really seems to get hurt. On the contrary the violence is mainly terrifying.

Curiously this felt and looked quite similar to the Amazon Prime original 'Altered Carbon', set much further into the future, though I think this was better. I liked it more because it was a one-off, and the near-future scenario felt more plausible.

Definitely worth watching, but not for the faint-hearted; I had to watch some of it through my fingers.

It's a Netflix original, and one of the few good films that I've watched on Netflix for a while.

Review of 'Roxanne, Roxanne'

A film about a young Black woman - 16-ish - in Queensbridge NYC who is a rapper and somewhat unexpectedly becomes a hip hop star. It was engaging, but I wasn't sure whether to like it or not; lots of stereotypes about useless, feckless Black men, drugs and the rap scene, trashy jewellery, etc. It was sympathetic to the Black women characters (only two white characters, and minor ones at that - in the whole film - shocking for British people that life in an apparently non-segregated city can be so segregated), but still depicted them in a way that Steve Bannon might have approved - shoplifting, skipping school, drinking to forget their troubles rather than addressing them, ripping each other off...

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'As High as the Sky'

A film about an OCD woman recently abandoned by her partner, whose wilder older sister and daughter arrive unannounced for an indefinite stay. It's a bit of a comedy, but mainly a serious and quite touching film about loss and relationships. A lot of obvious symbols, but not bad in dealing with some big issues in a relatively light but meaningful way. Not sorry I watched it.

Watched on Amazon Prime on clever TV.

Review of 'Queens of Syria'

Oddly disappointing. I ought to have liked this, because of the subject matter (women refugees in Syria develop personal and social confidence through performing a Greek classical drama about displaced war victims- The Trojan Women) and the treatment...a fly-on-the-wall documentary, which I generally like. But I didn't much. I just wasn't engaged with these women or their stories, and I don't feel good about saying. I found myself checking my watch to see how long it still had to go.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as the last film in the Stroud Film Festival.

Walking on Sand

The sand is scorching, even through my white plastic sandals. I am six years old.

I am sitting on a towel, underneath a red and white beach umbrella. I’m shaded from the direct sun, but it is still very hot. I am resting my narrow back against my Daddy’s shin. I push my hands into the warm sand, scoop some up to let it fall through my fingers. Just below the surface the sand is damp, cooler.

The beach is a low thrum of sound. Dark men in straw hats walk up and down with enormous ice boxes on their back. They are calling in Italian, but I know that their rhythmic cries and songs mean that they are selling ice creams and cold melon.

I have finished my ice cream. My fingers are sticky and I am still very hot. Mummy and Daddy are reading their books, dozing. The sea is fifty yards away, through a few more ranks of towels and loungers and umbrellas. I tell Mummy and Daddy that I want to go in the water; they say I should turn round and wave to them when I reach the sea.

I hop and skip across the burning sand. At the shoreline the sand is cool, soothing between my toes. I look back at the red and white umbrella. I know Mummy and Daddy are underneath it, though I can’t see them in the bright sunlight. I wave, turn and wade into the water. I am wearing a red and white hat with the name of the resort and a picture of a friendly smiling mouse.

The sea is warm, gentle. I submerge my shoulders, enjoying the feeling of buoyancy. I watch some young men playing football with a red and white beach ball. I walk out of the water, back on to the cool wet sand. I know that I just need to walk back in a straight line, the way that I came down to the sea, and there will be Mummy and Daddy.

But I can’t see the red and white umbrella, or Mummy and Daddy. The faces of the people on the beach are blurred. My severe myopia will not be diagnosed until later in the year.

I walk up and down on a short stretch of the waterline. Soon Daddy will come to find me. But he does not come. After what seems like a very long time I start to cry.

Instantly I am surrounded by kind people, moved that a child is crying. They speak to me in Italian, and though I don’t understand them, I know they are kind. One takes my hand, and a big group walks with me along the beach, calling to help me find Mummy and Daddy. And here they are, and I cry some more and then I stop. There is much thanking and patting of shoulders, and the nice people go back to their own beach towels.

***

And now another little brown boy stands on an Italian shore. The early morning sky is cobalt blue. Now the sand is not hot. The boy’s feet sink its icy chill.

His clothes are wet, and his teeth are chattering. He is wearing an orange life jacket. Heaps of wet rags are scattered all along the beach. There are people lying at the edge of the water. Their limbs bob lazily back and forth in the waves. 

The boy cannot find his Mummy and Daddy. He cannot understand Italian, or English. Perhaps he speaks Arabic, or Tigrinya, or Kurdish. He cries. Soon the kind Italian people will come, and help him find his Mummy and Daddy. Won’t they?

Review of 'The Daughter'

A really good Australian family drama, with lots of plot and emotion. Possibly the best Australian film I've seen since Lantana, which itself was brilliant. Much more would be a spoiler, but some great acting from favourite Austrialian actors Sam Neil and Geoffrey Rush. Not sure about the decision to make one of the characters apparently American - was that really necessary, or just to secure an international market? But a minor quibble.

I note in passing that once again alcohol is one of the main villains of the film. Funny that after 6000 years we haven't really come to terms with it, or the possibility of altering our consciousness and emotional state through chemistry.

Watched on Netflix, on our smart telly that has it built in. Interestingly (?) Ruth started watching it on her phone but the app on the TV knew where she'd got to.

Review of 'Viaggio Sola' (A Five Star Life)

I really hated this film, which unaccountably won awards for 'best comedy' (and I didn't even realize it was a comedy until I saw that) and 'best actress'.

It's about an Italian woman who is a 'mystery guest' (as in 'mystery shopper') who visits the most expensive hotels and compiles reports on them for some sort of rating/review agency. We constantly hear and see the items on her check list, which are all about how good the hotel makes the guest fee. Early on we see her checking for inadequate cleaning, etc, but it's really about the amount of emotional labour the staff put in. There is no indication at all that the staff are people with their own dreams, fears, problems - this is seen entirely from the perspective of the over-privileged guests. The hotels she visits get a name check in the final credits, and they'd have nothing whatever to complain about - although the film, and the Italian title 'I Travel Alone' is vaguely meant to suggest that there is some emptiness in her life (she doesn't have a relationship or a family life) there is no suggestion that there is anything soulless or depressing about the hotels themselves, or anything fake about the promise of homeliness from an industrial facility.

Incidentally, until I watched this I never thought about the 'Five Star' in 'Five Star Movement'. Is the vacuous populist party actually aiming for some affinity with luxury brands?

As one who has spent some time in such hotels when traveling on business I really, really hate them - whenever I can I've chosen to stay in cheaper places or in Airbnb.

There is a bit about her flawed relationship with her sister - part-resolved when she buys the sister an expensive dress that she'd earlier told the sister didn't suit her. She makes friends with a British feminist anthropologist who dresses like an ageing porn star, and they plan to go out but the anthropologist dies in the night in her hotel room, which makes our heroine question her life's values, but not too much....

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'Cherry Blossoms'

A very moving film about an old German couple, their  relationship with their children and each other, roads not taken and lives not lived to the full...described as slow and beautiful, it was indeed beautiful and very clever - lots of story told with a few images and expressions rather than laboured through narrative and dialogue. Despite the slowness and the length it didn't drag at all.

Hard to tell much more without spoiling, but there's death and grieving, children who find their ageing parents a burden, connection between people who have suffered and are suffering...but it's not a downer of a film, though I was near to tears several times.

Small note: at the beginning of the film the woman in the couple wants to go on an adventure but says 'my husband doesn't like adventures'. We see him enjoying his very routinized Bavarian life, but also them walking together in the mountains, which areuji stunning. She wants to go to Japan, he says 'Fuji is just another mountain.' I think he has a point, though the film later says he is wrong.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as part of the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of 'The Red Turtle' (Spoiler Alert - don't read if you haven't seen the film and want to)

I was expecting quite a different film from the brief description on IMDB: "A man is shipwrecked on a deserted island and encounters a red turtle, which changes his life." I thought it would be about a man and a turtle, but it mainly isn't - because the turtle (which the man has apparently killed) transforms into a beautiful woman, who becomes his companion for the rest of his life. They have a child, who in the course of the film grows up to be a man and eventually leaves them with some other turtles.

It's a downer of a film, even though it's very beautiful - fabulous Ghibli-style animation. It's sometimes quite scary, and often moving. I'm usually affected by films (and plays) that manage to show the arc of a whole life, and this did.

For what it's worth, my take is that the film is not intended to taken as a 'realistic' fairy-tale, but rather as a visual presentation of a hallucination. In the first part, before he meets the turtle-woman, we see quite a few of the shipwrecked man's hallucinations, including a string quartet playing on the beach which disappears as he approaches. I think he has actually died quite early in the film, so that the rest of the narrative is actually his dying hallucination. That would make it quite similar to the William Golding book Pincher Martin, in which the final pages reveal that the entire course of the novel (also about a shipwrecked sailor) didn't happen, the narrator imagined the events described as he died.

One more thing; within the narrative, the man and the turtle-woman grow old together, and then he lays down and dies, and she turns back into a turtle and swims away. If people and turtles did have relationships, they'd be dominated by the inescapable fact that turtles live much longer than people - so it would be like our relationships with cats - we can love them but know we will witness their deaths.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as part of Stroud Film Festival, in front of a very full audience of adults and childrens.

Review of 'Altered Carbon'

I wanted to like this, and feel like I ought to like it - cyberpunk, some interesting ideas and philosophical discussions about identity and memory entailed by the idea of making back-ups of people (something I have considered myself from time to time) - but somehow I didn't. There's a lot of violence, and some rough sex; I don't mind either but didn't enjoy them much here. There's a confusing plot that I couldn't entirely follow. It's not that I mind complexity - I persevered with The Peripheral and ended up quite liking it. Here, though, I felt like I was reading pulp fiction that was dressed up as philosophical; I'm aware that my feelings about were influenced by the fact that I read it on Kindle, where I suspect some of the markers of 'quality' - the font, the paper, the typesetting - are absent.

I think it's a three star book - potential not fully delivered.

Review of 'Lady Bird'

I can't believe this entirely conventional teen-coming-of-age/mother-daughter movie got such rave reviews. It was OK, in a dull and predictable sort of way, with little critical perspective on anything. Our heroine has a bit of under-age sex with her boyfriend, pretends to be richer than she is to impress the cool attractive girl at her Catholic school (of course, in the UK you can't pretend to be posher than you are without major deception, because everyone can tell), has spats with her mum. It's all just a bit ho hum, and much too long.

Watched at the Vue in Stroud...I paid real money to see this.

Review of 'The Limehouse Golem'

Apparently 'based' on the book by Peter Ackroyd, but it would be more accurate to say something like 'inspired by'. It's different in lots of ways, including the plot and the denoument.

Very bloody and violent, and rather graphic. It makes an attempt at the 'unreliable narrative' theme that underlies the book but I don't think it does it terribly well. It looks great, rather in the way that 'Penny Dreadful' does - um, why are we so keen to watch stuff about the cruelty and brutality of Victorian London?

Not surprised that this was not in cinemas for long - I'd meant to go see it, but it was gone before I got the chance. Bill Nighy plays one of his regular slightly confused characters, but it's not his usual sort of film - it's close to horror.

Watched on TV via Chromestream and Chromecast, following informal distribution.

Review of 'South Pacific'

One of those musicals that you think you've watched, but you haven't - you just know all the songs. Finally got round to watching it yesterday, and found it long, a bit tedious, and shapeless - the plot seems to meander along with a few meaningful incidents but no real dramatic tension. Like a lot of Rogers and Hammerstein, it seems to spend a great deal of time setting up the scenario and then resolve it very quickly.

And yet this is a famously anti-racist musical, with one song about how people become racist (not one that anyone knows, You've Got To Be Carefully Taught) forming the emotional and intellectual centre of the show. It was denounced at the time as 'inspired by Moscow'. The sentiments are much better than the standard liberal guff about racism. Oh, and when the original musical went on tour, Rogers and Hammerstein refused to let it play in segregated theatres.

And there's more, which rather passed me by while watching - some of the 'native' characters are not Polynesian but Vietnamese, deported to the islands to work on the French plantations. There's even a slight gesture in the direction of gender identity - while the female lead is singing a song in which she's a guy singing about her 'honeybun' girl, the guy who runs the laundry drags up for the big show within the show to entertain the troops, although we know he's brave and comfortably male.

Watched in the Common House at Springhill on a proper DVD.

Review of 'Oriented'

A surprising film about young gay Palestinians living in Tel Aviv...surprising in that the narrative that we are expecting, that these men can be free in a tolerant, secular, Jewish city but not in their own communities, is not what we get at all. Instead they're mainly comfortable in their own skins as gay men, but not as Palestinians in Israel. One is very clearly accepted and cherished by his tolerant, secular, modern family - one is loved and cherished but hasn't come out yet, though it's reasonably clear that his sisters can see what's going on and are sympathetic, and the third falling in and out of love with Jewish men, and feeling bad because he's sleeping with the enemy.

There's also a woman friend who hangs out with them all the time, and provides lots of support and friendship, but doesn't even merit a name, much less a back story...a shame, because that misses an opportunity to introduce a whole lot more issues.

Another surprise is the boys' trip to Amman, where they attend a huge gay concert-party. The point of this, well made, is that the picture that Israeli liberals draw of the Arab world as a place where gays are only persecuted, is incomplete. Dancing in the crowd, they say that this is what Palestine could have been. Of course, they would have had less fun in some other parts of the Arab world, and even in some other parts of Palestine - I don't think there's much of a gay scene in Gaza.

But though it's a little bit long, and includes too much footage of the boys' self-indulgent 'art' videos, it's a really interesting thoughtful film, worth watching even for people who are not specially interested in the gay experience but want to see the dynamics between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians from another angle.

The Today Programme today

Having spent the early part of the day shouting at the radio, I can at least share some of the grumpiness with you.

Great to see how the government's decision to cancel the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry was not worth commenting on the following day...when the BBC wants to it keeps a story going by covering 'reactions' and 'comments', and when it doesn't...well, it reported on it once and that's enough. So no news about how the victims of press corruption and intrusion feel about this decision, or reaction by campaigning groups, like this statement by Hacked Off: "This is probably the first time that a Government has overruled the views of the judicial Chair of a statutory Inquiry by cancelling an inquiry against his will."

Oh, and the panel for Any Questions tonight: Barry Gardiner MP, Anna Soubry MP, Fraser Nelson and Brendan O'Neill. Two right wing journalists, a europhile Tory, and Barry Gardiner representing everything to the left of that (look him, especially the China connection).

The Exchange of Beautiful Ideas

The building was not at all as he had imagined it. Standing in the chill wind that blew shreds of litter across the deserted piazza, Robin felt as if he was getting his disappointment in first, before he even went through the double doors. The grey of the concrete matched the grey of the sky behind. A desultory strip of red tiles divided the ground floor from the eight stories above, as if someone had told the architect at the last minute that some form of decoration was required.

Apart from this the building, which occupied one side of the square, was a dull matt slab with mean dark windows and a flat roof. Next to the doors there was a scrappy sign in tarnished metal, screwed into the concrete.  “The Exchange of Beautiful Ideas”, it proclaimed, in three centimetre Times Roman.

Robin walked slowly up to the entrance, the shoebox that held his idea resting heavily against his bent arm.

Inside the air was too warm, and uncomfortably dry. There were notice boards with flapping leaflets and schedules. A woman in a nondescript uniform jacket sat behind a reception counter, her eyes fixed on a screen. She did not look up as Robin approached.

“Excuse me,” he said, and then she did look up, with a show of reluctance. “I’ve got an idea that I’d like to -”

“What sort of idea?” said the woman, turning her attention back to her screen, which now cast a blue-green glow onto her face.

Robin hesitated for a moment. He had not expected to have to explain his idea at the reception desk.

“It’s...it’s about how people can be nicer to each other, by -”

“Social and political, third floor. Second door on the left,” said the woman, in a bored tone. “They’ll explain how the exchange works to you there.”

The lift to the third floor seemed as decrepit as everything else about the place. The door slid closed with agonizing slowness. Inside, there were two signs about what do in the event of an emergency, with contradictory instructions as to which buttons to press and what number to call. There was no sign of a telephone.

At the third floor the corridor was dimly lit. One of the overhead strip lights flickered and buzzed. There were more unkempt-looking noticeboards. The second door on the left had another metal sign that read ‘Social and Political’. One of the corner screws was missing.

The room was too small for its contents. There was another counter, with another uniformed woman sitting behind it. Shelves crammed with bulging lever arch files covered the walls from floor to ceiling.  Behind the counter there was a table, on which Robin could see piles of paper spilling onto the floor.

The woman behind the counter gave Robin a friendly smile, and for the first time that day he felt himself relax a little.

“I have an idea,” he said. “I hope it’s - I think it’s beautiful, and I’d like to -”

“Here’s the form, and the notes,” said the smiling woman. “It’s quite straightforward, but if you need any help just ask.” She handed him a thin sheaf of papers and indicated a desk on the other side of the room.

Robin sat down and looked at the form. There were several pages for personal information, but only a very small space in which he was requested to describe the idea itself. He looked around for a pen, and finding none, took out his own.

The minutes passed, slowly. Robin was aware of the ticking of a large electric clock above the counter. The personal information sections were exhaustive but easy enough to understand. The notes, and the later parts of the form, were very confusing. At last he finished, and went back to the woman at the desk.

She took the form from him and begun to copy out his entries on what looked to be a very old computer. She typed slowly, pecking at the keyboard with two fingers, and looking backwards and forwards between the handwritten form, the keys, and the flickering monochrome monitor.

“Wouldn’t it have been quicker if I’d just typed it straight in myself?” asked Robin.

The woman shrugged. “Administrative Improvements is on the sixth floor,” she said. “We’re just Social and Political here.”

Robin waited for what seemed like a long time.

“You’ve not assigned a nominated beneficiary,” the woman said, at last. “Or signed the primary assertion of ownership. We can’t put it in if you don’t do that.”

“I don’t understand,” said Robin, feeling small and stupid. “I don’t want to own anything. I  just want to exchange my idea. My beautiful idea.”

“Don’t worry,” said the woman, in the patient, slow tone one would use to explain to a not very bright child. “A lot of people find it confusing, the first time they file an idea.”

She thinks I’m an idiot, thought Robin.

“The whole point of the exchange is to enable ideas to be owned,” she said. “So that they can be traded. Bought and sold.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “I thought the exchange was to encourage the spread of ideas. Like a sort of library.”

“Exactly!” said the woman. “You wouldn’t steal books from a library, would you?”

“Of course not,” said Robin. “Only, an idea isn't the same as a book, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” said the woman. “A proper idea is unique. That’s what makes it intellectual property. And we can’t have people stealing each other’s property. That’s why we made the exchange; to establish ownership and property in thought. Because everything should belong to someone.”

“But I want my idea to spread,” said Robin. “I want as many people as possible to hear about it. A book in a library, well, only one person can borrow it at a time...unless there’s two copies, of course, and then…” His voice trailed away.

“We can’t have two copies of an idea,” said the woman, with a hint of irritation creeping in to her voice. Her smile had vanished. “How would we know which was the real one?”

“Aren’t they both the real one?” asked Robin. “A copy of the idea is...well, it is the same as the real one. Exactly the same. It’s not a counterfeit idea, or anything like that.”

“It’s a pirated idea,” said the woman. “The originator owns the idea, unless they’ve sold it to someone else, and then the buyer owns it. If anyone else has the idea, then they’ve stolen it. Like they walked into a shop and taken took something off the shelf without paying for it.”

“No they haven’t,” said Robin, who was also becoming irritated now. “Because if I steal something from a shop it’s not there anymore. But if someone else has my idea, I’ve still got it. It’s not gone anywhere.”

“If we followed your logic, nobody would make ideas,” said the woman. “There’d be no point, if they couldn’t own them. What would be the incentive?”

“I don’t have ideas because of an incentive,” Robin replied. “I have them because I think about something, and it leads to an idea. Or it doesn’t...but whether it does or not is nothing to do with incentives or ownership. It’s what brains do, have ideas.”

And then Robin had another idea.

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t think I want to put my idea into the exchange after all. I’ll find somewhere else to put it.”

“Suit yourself,” said the woman. “Only mind out. Someone else might put your idea - “ she held up her fingers to make air quotes as she said the word - “Into the exchange. And then it wouldn’t be yours anymore, it would be theirs.”

“I’ll take the chance,” said Robin. “And all this talk about owning ideas has given me another idea. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I just know I won’t be putting it into the exchange.”

“Suit yourself,” said the woman, shrugging. “I don’t care either way.” She began to peck at her keyboard again.

Robin left the room and walked back to the lift.

Information wants to be free, he thought. Now there’s an idea.

Review of 'On Body and Soul'

A Hungarian romantic drama, mainly set in a slaughterhouse - sounds like an insane 1970s arthouse project, but was actually one of the most moving films I've seen for a long time.

The film centres on the slaughterhouse's financial director and a new external meat inspector, who is a stickler for the regulations in the way that her predecessor wasn't. There is an alert at the plant because some 'cattle mating drug' has been stolen and used at a party, and the police suggest that all the staff undergo psychological screening. The psychologist asks all the staff really very prurient questions about their sex lives and histories, during which it emerges that the finance director and the inspector are meeting in their identical dreams, in which they are both deer.

That's the only fantastical element; it's not explained, but it makes the rest of the plot and development possible. The inspector is a high functioning and ethereally beautiful woman with severe asperger's syndrome. She continues to visit her child psychologist and resists his suggestions that she see an adult therapist. The finance director gradually falls in love with her, despite (or because of?) her alien-ness - she makes Saga Noren from the Bridge, the beautiful blond aspergers detective from The Bridge, look well-adjusted. Their relationship and how it develops is the centre of the film, but there is plenty of other character development and interaction. The sexy pyschologist (Réka Tenki) is remarkable.

The cinematography is understated but remarkable; the deer are beautiful, and in a beautiful winter forest landscape, but the cows in the industrial setting of the slaughterhouse are also beautiful - there are lots of close-ups of their faces and eyes. And it's possible to infer from some other details (for example, what the characters wear) that it's the height of summer, and therefore hot, but it never looks like it is; it somehow manages to be literally gloomy, both indoors and outdoors.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club in Stroud, with less than a dozen other people in the audience.

Healthy New Towns - a good idea or a tech-washed way for the healthcare industry to grab a slice of the property boom?

Another day, another on-trend article from Architects Data File - this one, entitled 'Care Pathways', about Healthy New Towns.  It doesn't seem to be avaiable online, so you'll have to trust my summary until I can add a link to the original.

Roughly it goes:

• Health a big problem, the NHS usually reactive and attuned to ill-health
• Healthy New Towns, an initiative 'from the NHS) via its Five Year Forward View 2014 strategy aimed at prevention and well-being, not sickness, calls for policy and planning to take health in to account
• Lots of demonstrator sites in progress or planned - to encourage walking and make for mult-generational housing
• Technology jolly important and we need lots more of it - tele this and that, needs 5G networks and the Internet of Things, communities should be built around the internet
• Healthy New Towns need private capital and development opportunities

See what I mean about the tech-washing? I have no trouble believing that technology can help to solve human problems or even transform societies - I'm a big fan of genuinely radical visions for technology, from solarpunk through Paul Mason's PostCapitalism to more mainstream versions like Jeremy Rifkin's Zero Marginal Cost Society.

But there is no link here at all between the call for more technology and more infrastructure on the one hand, and the proposed transformation on the other...just a touching belief that tech is needed.  And not much engagement with big questions either, like why the commercial market is unable to offer 'multi-generational neighborhoods'? Hint: it's to do with a housing market that no longer bears any relation to other parts of the economy, including the labour market and what young people can expect to earn in a lifetime. 

Oh, and I didn't see any mention of cars or transport policy, or even parking...just the information that one of the planned pilots is 'just outside the M25'. 

Against Decluttering

I picked up a cutting from the Architect's Data File, and it was all about decluttering and de-materialization and microhomes/tiny homes. It was linked to some material about building regulations and minimum space standards, and to the ideas of 'futurist and author' James Wallman, responsible for the book and blog 'Stuffocation'.

Normally I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. I've said more than once that we go on holiday to get away from our own stuff, because so much of it nags us to do something - fix it, put it away, do the thing that it represents, remember that we bought it in order to take up a new activity that we haven't got round to...you get the picture. As a Green I know that our lives are full of shit that we don't really need, or even want, or have space for, that cost resources to make and will leave toxic traces behind when we eventually dispose of them. I watched the original 'Story of Stuff' film.

But now I'm thinking about the flip side to all this. If capitalism wants to sell us stuff (whether we need it or not) why is it paying consultancy fees to Wallman? Because it doesn't care whether it sells us stuff, and because it quite likes a future where we give it money but it doesn't have to give us stuff.

I'm not the first one to think about this, obviously; this article argues that in handing back 'ownership' of our things to the companies that sold them to us, we are effectively going to back to the middle ages, when all property belonged to the crown, and the rest of us just had some limited rights to use it.

But I still want to give two cheers for ownership over the 'experience economy'. In the old days, when I bought a physical book, or physical DVD, they were mine to do what I liked with. Sure, there were copyright restrictions, and that blurb in the front of the book about it not being re-lent or re-sold without permission, but unless you were involved in parallel imports it didn't really matter. I can give a book (or a DVD) to a friend, or take it to a charity shop. If I pay for a film on Amazon Prime (or Google Play, or anything else) I pretty much can't. Google offers me the choice of 'renting' the film or 'buying' it, but in neither case do I own it in the same sense that I did the physical item. Even though the marginal cost of producing the 'digital experience' that is a streamed film is close to zero, I pay almost the same for it that I would pay for a physical item, and I can do less with it.

In the Economics textbooks that I studied at school there was a lot about the supply curve. As the price of a thing rises, more firms enter the market to produce it, so that the price eventually falls back to an equilibrium representing the marginal cost of production (I may have rushed that a little). In real life capitalists move heaven and earth to stop this happening, and much of what you get taught in business school is stuff that ought not to be of any use if classical Economic theory was true. Barriers to entry - patents, regulations, licensing rights, state-protected monopolies via 'outsourcing' contracts...if you need a refresher it's all nicely set out in Guy Standing's book The Corruption of Capitalism, which re-introduces the Economic meaning of 'rent' as unearned income.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of economic and technological development over the last few years has made the fiction of the supply curve a bit more true. Globalization, competition from China, the increasing automation of physical production, and the increasing software component of physical goods has all helped to ensure that the marginal cost of producing stuff is also tending towards zero, even if it will never actually get there. Stuff is getting cheaper, and competition from low-cost no-brand producers is a constant concern for big branded manufacturers. Chinese Android mobile phones are pretty much as good as the more expensive branded versions; the after-sales service is not much good (but actually it's not much good from the big brands either, for the most part) but there's pretty good free support from other users via the web.

Hence, I think, the increasing emphasis on things-as-a-service, and on rolling back ownership of things we thought we had bought. Warranties and licence agreements that are breached if we try to repair or enhance the things; software that acts against the interests of the apparent owner; Delightfully, Amazon rubbed our noses in it by deleting, of all books, Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of customers who thought they had bought the book.

It bears saying, too, that while the manufacture of things is subject to this cost curve, I don't think the same applies to the creation of 'experiences'. The latter are much more likely to involve human labour (even though some it will be robotized and automated, I suspect the premium experiences will involve humans, almost by definition) - and on present experience, not very well paid human labour. And it's not necessarily true that the ecological footprint of experiences is less than that of stuff - especially not if that experience is a carbon-heavy trip to Kilimanjaro, or a cheap flight stag weekend in Tallinn.

And let's come back to those microhomes, where this began. Is it really true that millennials and others are embracing smaller homes out of a values-driven rejection of stuff and clutter, or is that rejection actually the consequence of smaller homes? So-called 'luxury flats' have minimal storage space nowadays - one reason for the huge boom in out of town storage. It's not only piles of meaningless plastic crap that you don't have room for; it's also your parents' photo album, and your grandmother's candlesticks. Letting go of some of these items, even when they are not in frequent use, is an emotional process. It's nice to think we are freer because we're not burdened with stuff, but are we also giving up a bit of ourselves? Erving Goffman's famous account of total institutions drew attention to the way that inmates are stripped of their identity-defining personal possessions. Something to think about the next time you hear someone waxing lyrical about decluttering, and dematerialisation, and 'x as a service'. And while we're at it, let's have a look at James Wallman's house.