Just a film

Almost the first thing I wrote on this blog, almost a year ago, was a small piece about the beginning of filming of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide.

Almost a year later, spare a thought for the film itself, because it's become the locus of so much baggage and anger that it's no longer just a film. Haven't seen it yet, so a review will have to wait until next week, but whether it's any good or not is really quite irrelevant.

It is, in a perverse kind of way, entirely Adams's fault. If he'd not relentlessly pursued the Guide through every medium he could conceive of, culminating in the cooking-steak-by-breathing-on-it extended development hell of the film, then his life, legacy and memory would have been diffused across a larger, more varied body of work. That his body of work is actually larger and more varied than most people realise isn't the point. What they know is the Guide.

As usual, we keep on making the mistake (and maybe Adams did this too) of seeing film as somehow a medium for the ages, for posterity, in a way that radio, television or (god help us if this is true even in some cases) books aren't. Coupled with the knowledge that Adams had been chasing the film for so long, and the slightly nauseating notion that the chase contributed to the depression and stress which killed him, this spectacularly unhelpfully gives the film an iconic status, a representational symbolism of Adams's life, work, and death.

If the film is bad, and to the extent that it's perceived to be bad, it's capable of evoking anger that Adams's work hasn't been faithfully reproduced. Never mind that the Guide is quite uncinematic as a piece of writing - Adams was a writer of very precise linguistic dalliance, not sweeping imagery, which is why it works so well on radio and in print. Never mind that the film's screenplay is (I believe) almost entirely Adams, with some jiggery-pokery from Karey Kirkpatrick to get the pieces in place. Never mind those things, because if it's perceived not to work, then the film becomes the location of anger that he's not around any more, that so much of his life and death went to feeding this thing that's perceived, finally, to not be worthy.

If the film is good, and to the extent that it's perceived to be good, it's also capable of evoking anger that Adams is gone: anger that he didn't get to see it made; anger that he died so young. And perhaps also some anger that, good as it might be, it wasn't worth the cost of creating yet another remix of essentially the same stuff.

Something else, too. Michael Bywater's piece for the Independent (damn its subscription service already) is filled with a controlled but seething rage that Adams is gone, and that the man he knew has essentially been supplanted in the public consciousness by the writer of the Guide:

I was never a close personal friend of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, techno-guru, would-be über-geek, visionary, educator of the masses still sunk in the Dark Age of Faith and Superstition... none of those. I was never a close personal friend of that man.

It was another one, of the same name: a big lumbering chap, who had too many guitars, none of which he could play, and a vast array of synthesisers and keyboards on which he produced, after a year's effort, three minutes of the sort of music you'd expect to hear in an affable lift.

A man who liked fast cars, though he wasn't a very good driver, and enjoyed food, though it once took him two days to cook a ratatouille, following three recipes simultaneously. A man - and this is rare, and probably why we got along - not of ambition (alarmingly free of it, actually), but of enthusiasm.

That's the Douglas Adams I knew, and knowing him was important to me, but I'm damned if it was important about me, and if I thought that, on my gravestone, it was going to say: "Here lies Michael Bywater; he knew Douglas Adams, you know" I would top myself now, on a blazing pyre of the publicity material that still issues from the poor dead bastard's literary estate, and those who are still making a more or less (more in some cases, very much less in others) honest bob out of his efforts.

The supplanting happened many years ago, of course, but Adams's absence now makes it complete and irreversible, and it seems that that's the source of Bywater's understandable rage, particularly now that the film - whether good, bad, or a pile of foetid dingo's kidneys - has finally 'lensed', as particularly fuckwitty Hollywood types might say.

The film seems to be something of a genuine end to, well, to something, though that something might be different for different people. I'm not sure if Bywater actually means what he says here, but the message is completely sincere:

But this I do know: this is the last I, for one, will write, either about Douglas Adams or about his work. Film, schmilm. He was my friend. He's dead. I'm not. I miss him. The end.

What brought Adams biographer MJ Simpson to a similar point might have been quite different, but the film once again serves as the focus of turmoil, and his words echo Bywater's from across the canyon between friend and fan:

I may occasionally lurk on Hitchhiker's Guide-related sites or forums if I'm bored, but as of now I will never write another word, in print or on-line, about Douglas Adams or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Such emotion about a film that's constructed from material which is characteristically light on emotion? (Bywater nails it: 'Which, of course, there wasn't in the original radio series, the television series, or the books. What there was, was intellectual depth.') It's not about the film, of course. It's about Adams, and how much he's still missed. The film has been unfinished business, perhaps, before the completion of which there couldn't for some be an end (or a beginning) to processing the shock of his early death.

So, when I see the film next week, I'm going to try to remember that it's just a film, and it doesn't need to carry the weight of a whole life, whether because it's a crystalline celebration of that life, or a reminder of its messy, unfulfilled end. Just a film.

Doctoring the TARDIS

Zarquod knows, I'm not (quite) old enough yet for Blimpish Letters to the Editor, but I did send something cranky to the relevant cubby-hole at the BBC about its use in this piece of 'Edinburgh Fringe Festival' to refer to the 'Edinburgh Festival Fringe'. It's been mostly changed now - curtseys to whichever minion fixed it - but still, grrr. Names are important; they tell you where something came from, how it came to be what it is now. It's the 'Festival Fringe' because it began as a minor sideshow to the main event. Calling it the 'Fringe Festival' is a bit of neo-confusion that's getting more common. See what the Fringe calls itself.

Aside from that, is it just me or is the Beeb kicking some righteous butt at the moment? It's been ages since I've seen an example of public service broadcasting as outlandish, experimental, as simultaneously high-brow and populist - which is to say, exactly how public service broadcasting ought to be - as Flashmob Opera. It makes me ache with a kind of odd pride in the Corp., and makes me miss it all the more. BBC America is fine for some things, but it does try to feed the American expectation of television as a purveyor of the familiar and the comforting, preferably stretched as wide and thin as possible. Even BBC America has little space for the grand single gesture, the odd and the quirky. BBC America aside, public service broadcasting is squished into practical insignificance in the US, and that saddens me a great deal. Television has such potential to be a medium of social cohesion, support, and - shit, I'm going to use the word that came into my head - enlightenment. Treat it as if it can only be a popcorn machine, however, and that's all you'll get from it.

Someone at the Beeb has their eye on science fiction, too, for the first time in many years. It's ironic just how daring and forward-looking the idea of recreating the live Quatermass Experiment from fifty years ago seems in a modern context.

And then Doctor Who, of course. We watched the first couple of episodes last night, and, with some small qualifications, it's quite fantastic. The long fallow period it needed has paid off. There are great lines - 'Lots of planets have a north' - some very creaky acting in supporting roles (which seems oddly in the very spirit of Who), but most of all Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper completely own their parts already. Eccleston has a mercurial energy and danger that's not been seen since Tom Baker. (Some nods to the costume department for getting rid of those farcically meta question marks on the Doctor's clothing that lasted from Baker's transformation right up to the end of Sylvester McCoy.) The two of them have a lovely easy chemistry. Watch the final scene of the second episode for some really skillful naturalistic acting from both, as their bonding moves from the huge universal to the small universal. It's funny and touching.

Also note what looks to me like a change in film stock for that last scene. The Doctor Who of my childhood was the typical BBC of the period: videoed studio interior shooting, intercut with filmed exterior shooting. The new series seems to use the modern technique of post-processed video for both interiors and exteriors, to create a consistent sense of film, but at a small fraction of the cost and complexity. It's not a look I'm fond of - it smells too much of compromise - but it serves. The final scene in episode two, though, looks to me like it's genuinely filmed. That can only be a deliberate choice. For whatever reason, it works to set the scene apart for a couple of minutes. The Doctor and Rose are taken away from the frantic relevance of their adventures and set among a crowded shopping street, where they take stock. They're just two apparently ordinary figures in the mass, talking first about the darkness in his back-story, but then suddenly overcome by a need for chips (the big fat deep-fried British kind, of course). The light of the film-stock is colder, bluer. Focus is pulled just to them, so that they're separate, but still the same. It's just the sort of moment that gives confidence everyone - writer, director, actors - knows exactly what they're doing. It's going to be fun.

PostSecret

It's striking how many of these are about a desire to escape from life, either chemically or by actually physically running away. But, fucking hell, this one isn't just a secret; it's a story. Once it doesn't seem tasteless to do so, I imagine these will be the stories that are told about that day. How the jagged edge of fate tore people from one life and into another. And I bet this person isn't the only one.

The Cult of the Excluded Middle

John Gruber, who is the person to read for informed, incisive Mac advocacy, takes a piece by Paul Graham and spins from it a discussion of the appeal of Macs to either end of the techie spectrum, but not the middle. Here's the money quote from Graham:

And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple's overall market share is still small.

Late in the development of Mac OS X, I could see something like this coming. Underpinning a ground-up redevelopment of what was already a fine user interface with a UNIX core seemed like a devastating pincer movement. The seventy year-old mother gets a clean, intuitive way to handle the simple; the geeky PhD gets his oily hands into command-line complexity; the whole thing is built to last. I'm not sure I'd have predicted that the pincer would only grab the extreme ends, however, and I think that has to do with a fundamental misconception of mine, which Gruber's piece helped me to rethink.

Upon a time, Macs really were 'Computers for the rest of us'. That was a boast, not an exclusion. They were 'for the rest of us' because they didn't need a great deal of technie nous. They just worked. They weren't for everyone, because the shiny surface was tricky to get behind, but that was fine. OS X's single most important achievement, to marry the GUI polish with UNIX power and heritage without compromising either, blasted that old slogan of Apple's out of the water, however. There was no longer any reason for anyone who was willing to assess their choices objectively to conclude that an Apple wasn't for them. They'd become computers for all of us.

Or so I thought, quite incorrectly. The mistake was to look at OS X functionality, and to apply that to users' needs. Doing that, it seemed to satisfy the seventy year-old mother, and the geeky PhD, and everyone in between.

But people don't assess their choices objectively, of course. They're driven at least as much by prejudice and laziness and ignorance and inertia and fear. Better the DevilOS they know than the Mac OS X they don't. Approaching the matter in terms of user psychology, rather than operating system functionality and usability, I think the missing middle is much easier to explain. The seventy year-old mother has no preconceptions to be adjusted, no learning to unlearn. She settles into OS X because it's just very well designed, and because the complexity underneath which holds everything together doesn't rise from the depths every so often like a tentacled monster to scare the crap out of her. The geeky PhD, on the other hand, might have some prejudices, and might have plenty to unlearn, but he's quite prepared - eager, even - to try new stuff, and he knows enough to apply a critical eye.

The Man in the Middle, however, is in a far less comfortable position. He knows just about enough to get by, and has enough experience to have invested himself emotionally in whatever he might have been using, but however aware he is of its shortcomings - and he's aware of them pretty much every day, viruses, spyware, frequent crashes - the idea of moving to something else is just too hard to contemplate. I imagine this man literally in the middle: he's a middle manager, who tolerates computers, finds them useful, but leans heavily on his company's tech support, because when things go wrong he's lost, and he's deeply insecure about that. He calls them 'gurus', when perhaps all they've done is read the manual. He is the Excluded Middle.

All this assumes, of course, that Macs are objectively better, and that the only question is why some users get that and others don't. I believe they are, but then there's no zealot like a recent convert.

Though, hang on. Rewind past zealot, because I want to say something about that too. It's an article of culturally-received wisdom that Mac users are akin to a cult. They show extreme devotion, loyalty. Their machines are given names, personalities, places of honour.

I used to lazily buy that portrayal myself, but I think it's mistaken. It confuses two fundamentally very different things: that which is believed (and, connected with that, the justification for believing that which is believed); and how that which is believed is expressed to the world. Look at the devotion of Mac users and you will indeed see something that's superficially cult-like. But it's only superficially cult-like. What we see in the devotion is merely the expression of belief, and not the belief itself. Look behind the expression, to the core of that which is believed, and things look much less culty: that Macs are great machines to use; that they repay loyalty with good user experience and reliability; that they're fun. All of those things are, I would contend, objectively true. And what's less culty than a community based on that which is objectively true?

In fact, if cultishness has anything to do with a community sharing support for that which is not only not demonstrably true, but often demonstrably false, then isn't the Cult of the Excluded Middle of those trapped by ignorance, inertia, fear, into claiming that their Windows PCs are the best choice for them, more apt? Just because it's a huge community, doesn't mean it's not cultish.

Perhaps if the Cult of the Excluded Middle were more celebratory, in the manner of the so-called Mac cult, its cultishness would be far more apparent. The lack of any such celebration, devotion, loyalty has little to do with lack of cult, though. Expression of belief in the Cult of the Excluded Middle has more to do with defensiveness, stubbornness, stoicism in the face of adversity. It is truly a faith, whose priests are the gurus of tech support, whose sacraments are Service Packs. Always the promise of better things.

Let them pray.

Shopping in Westchester #2

A word in praise of ligatures, which have been pretty much squished from American English, and more's the pity. If we keep paedo- to use as a prefix for that which refers to children, and use ped- for that which refers to feet, not only will their Greek and Latin roots be honoured - a good thing, no? - but also I won't find myself standing in T.J. Maxx looking at a 'pedometer' and imagining it as some sort of Geiger counter for pederasts. Plus maybe 'pedophilia' might logically be reclaimed for the foot fetishists among us.

See? Linguistic ambiguity might be a fertile source of funnies, but it comes at a big cost in expressiveness and etymology. Let's stick up for those brave little ligatures, I say. They might be mediaeval, but they have an aesthetic that we can appreciate from the foetus on up.

Shopping in Westchester #1

To the friendly, helpful, and rather handsome young man who served me at Trader Joe's in Westchester today, who happened to be called Odysseus, I can only apologise. It's a wonder that when, after wishing me a wonderful day, I exhorted you not to fall for any Sirens, okay?, you didn't punch me in the mouth. Always the smartarse, me.

More Begging

Via Daily Kos, Digby refers, in passing, to the 'Constitution Restoration Act of 2005', currently supported by a nut-cluster of the right.

Here's Digby's quotation of the first clause, with his emphasis intact:

The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

There are any number of reasons to find such a proposal nauseating - it's essentially an end run (yes, I can do American football metaphors now, thangyou, thangyou) around the constitutional separation of church and state. But, caring somewhat more for violations of plain simple logic than I do for wrangling over the meaning of any one country's user manual, I find that Digby didn't emphasise the word that strikes me as the most important one in the clause. It's this: acknowledgement.

Separation of church and state is a matter of process, and a country is quite entitled to decide one way or the other. I'd rather see them as separate, and I'd certainly prefer to see them kept separate when separation is constitutional, thanks very much, but what we have here is something quite different. We're back to begging the question, of course. Acknowledging 'God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government' does more than simply squish church and state together. It begs the question of the existence of a god. One cannot acknowledge something unless its existence as fact is pretty well uncontroversial. Says Chambers:

acknowledge verb (acknowledged, acknowledging) 1 to admit or accept the truth of (a fact or situation).

There are two parts to acknowlegement. There's some thing which is true; and there's an attitude of acceptance being taken towards that thing which is true. Things would be very different if the clause read something like:

The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's belief in God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Belief entails nothing about the truth of that which is believed. Acknowledgement, on the other hand, entails, or at least implies with all the force that natural language can muster short of actually being a formal logic, the truth of that which is acknowledged. The 'Constitution Restoration Act of 2005' as written, would therefore do far more than prohibit enforcement of the separation of church and state in the US at the Federal level - though that would be plenty. It would finesse into Federal law an axiomatic assumption of the existence of a god, who is 'the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government'. It's the god axiom again.

Millions of cheers

We've been listening to some BBC Radio 4 before bed lately: The News Quiz, the fantastic Mitchell & Webb, some odd bits of older archived comedy. It's wonderful to get a bite of the concentrated Englishness of Radio 4 from so far away. I get a tiny bit cranky when the archived copies of recent programmes include several minutes of the previous programme (what's the point of that?), but I also get a break from the extreme rigours of acting hammily while reading something out loud before bed, we can turn the lights out and snuggle, and it's altogether very civilised and satisfying. Go check it out. You might only see the tip of the iceberg, but what a tip.

I played the Shipping Forecast for A. one night, but it was really for myself. I completely adore it. It's found poetry. It's wilfully cryptic, a coded message crucial to the survival of the storm-tossed Merchant Marine transmitted in the BBC's polished RP from some cosy nook deep in the bowels of Broadcasting House, stentorian yet conspiratorial. Sometimes at night I play a game with myself, which goes like this: imagine the least comfortable, least cosy place you might be. Helps if it's some time and place you remember vividly. For A. and I, there was a bitterly cold night we spent standing on The Mound in Edinburgh, having flown in from LA that day and travelled by train from Kings Cross. We'd not slept the previous night either, for reasons that were connected to a car crash we weren't involved in. We were exhausted, stressed, needed some warmth, most of all needed to be able to get in touch with the woman whose flat we were renting, but who had (we discovered the following day) managed to find the only square foot in the city where she'd not be able to find a signal for her cellphone. Our only pathetic warmth was a bag of chips I'd gone to fetch. They didn't help much. See? You make it as hideously unlike being snugly in bed as possible - stuck by the side of the road in the Mojave desert on the way to Vegas, walking miles home in the pouring rain - and then you remind yourself that, oh right, you're actually in bed, and it's warm and snug and you don't need to go anywhere or do anything except be in bed. Those are the best times for the Shipping Forecast. Helps if you're listening to it live, of course, but I'm not picky. There are always brave little trawlers out cod-hunting in the dark Atlantic vastness, cabin lights aglow, to receive the Forecast with understanding and gratitude.

Millions begins with an ostensibly out-of-context reference to the Shipping Forecast. The sea-regions which anchor the Forecast are co-opted to refer to plots in a new housing development. It's a delightfully shorthand way to hook into some British quirk; the crypticism is doubled, as the coded Forecast is itself used in a coded fashion. That such a parochial reference - even a passing one - was allowed to remain in a film which clearly has some global ambition is one of very many things to love about it. I'm not going to write much of a review; just tell you to go see it. It spins a captivating magic realism in a suburban British setting of green green grass and blue blue sky and white white clouds. Danny Boyle's love of filming movement was never better employed.

And there's not a single sign of compromise in voice and tone for the sake of a larger market. The whole thing has an authenticity that makes me want to cheer, particularly when I see that Ian Rankin's latest has unaccountably been renamed Fleshmarket Alley for the American market. The British name is Fleshmarket Close, and there's a very good reason why: it's a real place, a precipitous street of steps which leads from Edinburgh's Royal Mile down to Waverley station. Was 'Fleshmarket' on its own not lurid enough? Isn't the point of Rankin's stuff about setting fictional narrative within a real location? Bah, I say. Bah. I'm only just recovering from reading an Americanised edition of Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World, in which 'petrol' becomes 'gasoline', 'nappies' become 'diapers', 'paraffin' becomes 'kerosine', and so on. Never mind that it's a story of an English boy, set in England, and told in first person, so those are words he'd never use. Never mind that there are concepts in the book that would be new to any kid who isn't spookily worldly. Authentic voice gets smoothed, homogenised, to some end that I can't honestly see, but which is clearly imperative to copy editors.

So lots of cheers for the Shipping Forecast. Millions, in fact.

Bill and Ted go to Greggs

The whole meat-in-pastry thing continues to baffle and bemuse the New World. My eye having been caught by reference to 'The Pasty Shack', a modest emporium of said comestible in Sacramento, in this month's Sunset magazine, I went a-Googling for a website. I found it, only to be somewhat disappointed by its rudimentary nature, but was delighted on the way to find an enthusiastic review in sactosaurus:

This place is grub! You gotta check them out! They make these little things called "pasties" - it's like meat rolled in bread or flour and then cooked in the oven.

Whoa, dude! And those sausage roll deals are like, totally tubular.

According to the Sacramento News & Review, the proprietor of The Pasty Shack is himself none-too-clear on the whole pasty heritage:

Where did the pasty come from?

The origin of it is from Cornwall, England. It's what the miners would take to work along with their coffee and they'd go down these mineshafts. The pasty was whatever was left over in their refrigerator put into pie dough.

I do like the idea of those early-nineteenth century tin miners standing in front of the fridge, bathed in the cool glow, pondering which of the leftovers from the previous night's dinner party they'd whip into that day's lunch, to be washed down with a frothy vanilla latte perhaps.

They go way back, of course. And I do miss them.