Bad Film Night No.4: Deadly Prey (1987)

In Vietnam He Was The Best...He Still Is.

A Mirror’s Temperature is Always Zero

One of his colleagues has described the haunting and profoundly revealing occasion when Heydrich came home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage he 'whipped his pistol from his holster and fired two shots at this double', the ever and tormentingly present negation of himself, from which he could free himself in liquor and in the splintered glass, but not in reality. He was prisoner of this figure of negation, he lived in a world populated by the self-created chimeras of of a hostile distrust, scented behind everything treachery, intrigue or the snares of hidden emnity, and thought only in terms of dependence - the most impressive embodiment of that vulgarized Darwinist principle in whose light the world was revealed to National Socialist ideology: life seen only as struggle. Himmler said of him that he was 'the embodiment of distrust - the "hypersuspicious", as people called called him - nobody could endure it for long'.

- Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (1963)

Like Luke and R2-D2, Me and That DVD Player Were

On Sunday I took my old DVD player to the recycling place. Mum and Dad got it me for Christmas 2000, I think, and it's been with me ever since. There are plenty of reasons to get rid of it: it's the size of a house, the SCART socket seems to have broken, and it's from the days before HDMI. Plus I have a Bluray player these days. Nontheless, if you lived with me in Nottingham, London, or Liverpool, this was what we used to watch things on.

The Year 2017

March Violets

FIRST MAN: Have you noticed how the March Violets have managed to completely overtake Party veterans like you and me?

SECOND MAN: You’re right. Perhaps if Hitler had also waited a little before climbing on to the Nazi bandwagon he’d have become Führer quicker too.

- Das Schwarze Korps, November 1935

Sol Niger

Futures, Unevenly Distributed

Mumbai in 2014. Photograph by Paul Needham.

Dreaming in Moscow

Found here.

"They've Got Nowhere to Go"

While New Labour's chief ideologues promoted the idea that class divisions were no longer relevant – part of the 'old ways of working and doing things', in Tony Blair's words – working class people of all races were feeling the sharp end of the New Labour project. Inequality of income, which had soared under Margaret Thatcher, continued to rise. In 2004, well before the financial crash, real wages stagnated for the bottom half of earners and fell for the bottom third. Disguised by the availability of cheap credit, social mobility had in fact stalled. The aspirations of many were increasingly out of reach.

Plentiful immigration, which grew further after 2004, when eight former Eastern Bloc countries joined the EU, was only one factor in keeping wages low – a 'flexible' labour market, where employers were much freer to hire and fire than elsewhere in Europe, was the broader picture – but fears about immigration were hyped by right-wing newspapers and pressure groups such as Migration Watch. Perception mattered: by the end of the New Labour era, only 18 percent saw immigration as a problem in their area, but 76 percent saw it as a national problem.

In 2009, Gordon Brown's attempt to deal with growing discontent as the economy turned sour was a disastrous speech in which he promised 'British jobs for British workers' – a slogan that could have come straight out of a far-right propaganda handbook, and one that was thrown back in his face in 2009 by oil refiners workers in Lincolnshire, who staged wildcat strikes in protest at their wages and conditions being undercut by several hundred European contract workers. Even this ham-fisted attempt to address the issue was too late. During New Labour's pomp, Hain told me, few at the top were willing to listen. Blair, along with his closest allies, simply did not see a problem. According to Hain, his warning in 1999 was met with a complacent response. 'Peter Mandelson said to me, "your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They've got nowhere to go."'

- Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (2012)

Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.

- Will Davis, "Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit" (2016)

The Story Continues

Barely Audible Intimations of His Own Murder

In 1929 the writer Evelyn Waugh came to Crete on a cruise "to admire the barbarities of Minoan culture". In the Herakleion Museum "except for one or two examples of animal sculpture", he wrote, "I found nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all". On the merits of Minoan painting he was perspicaciously uncertain, "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last 20 years". In the restorations, he detects "a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue". At Knossos, he continues, "I do not think that it can only be imagination and the recollection of a bloodthirsty mythology which makes something fearful and malignant of the cramped galleries and stunted alleys...these rooms that are mere blind passages at the end of sunless staircases". As for the throne "here an aging despot might crouch and have borne to him, along the walls of a whispering gallery, barely audible intimations of his own murder" (Waugh 1930: 136-7).

- Gerald Cadogan, 'The Minoan Distance': The impact of Knossos upon the twentieth century (2004)

Highlights From A Subtitling Failure

Netflix UK recently encountered an error in which the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth went out with the subtitles from the Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden show. Some of the resultant highlights:

Owls Disappointed By Labour Leadership Candidates #1

The first in an occasional series.

Donald Trump is a Candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America

We Can't Stop Here, This Is Snake Country!

Fieldwalking survey has its own charms, and its own perils.

I'll Let You Know When The Bodies Start Turning Up

Taken last week:

Taken today:

Top Bantz With The Ya̧nomamö

The Ya̧nomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet. One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, “Sh
aki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?” His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.

 - Napoleon Chagnon, Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People (1968)

If things had worked out differently, that guy could've been a Vine superstar.

Hard Boiled Athenians

In the absence of a public prosecutor, it was up to private individuals to take one another to court, and they would rarely do so unless they were motivated by personal hostility. Demosthenes was once charged with desertion by a group of his enemies, but the case never came to court. One of his prosecutors had allegedly been bought off, and was later found dead – brutally murdered and mutilated by a madman who, by some strange coincidence, had once been a friend of Demosthenes'.

Hans van Wees discusses Demosthenes 21.103 and Aeschines 2.148 in Greek Warfare: Myths and realities (2004).

Poststructuralists in Foxholes #1

The first in an occasional series.

"Baudrillard Was Here", painted on an abandoned bunker at Bnaider, Kuwait (Artist: Alia Farid).

Hotspur Press