(Yes, I know it's been the best part of a year since I posted here. No, this probably isn't the start of a resurgence in posting. Sorry to disappoint.)
As a fully certified geek, it is not at all surprising that I'm entirely familiar with the Star Wars universe. I hear and recite quotations from the films frequently, I own two of the video games, I can give you a potted summary of the "Han shot first" controversy at the drop of a hat — I have certain credentials here, is what I'm saying.
So I was rather surprised to realise recently that not only did I not own any of the films in any format, it had actually been well over ten years since I had seen any of them. (We're talking the original trilogy here, of course — my geek cred extends far enough to know that the recent prequels, aka abominations against the very concept of cinema, don't count.) So, taking advantage of the January sales, I headed into London to pick up the DVD box set, and spent a reflective couple of hours the other night watching Episode IV.
It took me a while after finishing watching it to decide what I thought of it. Given that the established wisdom of...well, pretty much everyone I know, with the exception of my mother, who wanted to take a tin-opener to C-3PO when she first saw him...is that the original films are classics of modern cinema, masterpieces that soar above lesser films like an X-Wing twisting between bursts of turbolaser fire, it's difficult to have any kind of unbiased viewpoint here. Nevertheless, for what it's worth, here are my conclusions. (One note on formatting in this post &mdash I'll use the italicised Star Wars to denote Episode IV, as that's its original theatrical title, and plain Star Wars to denote the franchise.)
1. Good grief, this is EPIC.
From the opening shot, as an Imperial cruiser (I don't think the term "Star Destroyer" is mentioned anywhere in the first film) slides almost endlessly across the top of the screen, to the climactic battle above a space station the size of a moon, Star Wars has a sense of scale unlike almost any other film. This continues almost everywhere &mdash our heroes move between entire star systems, at speeds greater than light, landing on worlds that consist entirely of desert, fighting an Empire that, we're told, spans the galaxy. Lucas went all-out to create this compelling atmosphere, and he pulls it off admirably.
2. Intergalactic Planetary Planetary Intergalactic
An essential element of the sense of scale throughout Star Wars is John Williams' score. It's utterly beautiful, moving from urgency to wonder to triumph to shock with ease. I was surprised that even after having so long over the years to become sick of it, the mournful theme as Luke looks out over the desert he's so desperate to leave behind was still really moving. As with his score for Jurassic Park, Williams came up with something at once unique and yet very obviously his own.
3. It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know
As Ben Kenobi strode onto the screen, I began to wonder "how did they persuade Alec Guinness to appear in as large a gamble as this?" I think the answer has to be that Guinness could tell he was among people who knew what they were doing. All the casting is inspired — Mark Hamill probably wouldn't thank me for saying that he really looks and sounds very ordinary in this film, but that's precisely what was required for the role of an everyman farm boy, caught up into something larger than himself. Carrie Fisher is as Princessy as you could wish for (in looks, if not in character — more on that later). Even the Rebel fighter pilots and the various generals on the bridge of the Death Star are well-portrayed. (And, as Eddie Izzard is fond of pointing out, they're all British.)
As for Harrison Ford, well, it's a shame that he picked up the "action hero" stereotype in this franchise, because he really can act. There's a scene towards the end, when Obi-Wan has just died (or been absorbed by the Force, or whatever — the film's intentionally ambiguous here) and Luke is sitting on board the Millennium Falcon, stunned and unable to take it in ("...can't believe he's gone."). Han Solo comes down the ladder to find Luke, as he's going to need him to fend off Imperial fighters, and he says just one thing: "Come on buddy, we're not out of this yet." It's a simple line, over almost immediately, but Ford's delivery of it is pitch-perfect, conveying kindness without being at all sentimental, and still maintaining the urgency required by the situation. It's worth noting here that the script is also better than one might expect from a sci-fi blockbuster — I'm not certain, but I think this is the first time Solo refers to Luke as "buddy" rather than "kid", and the quiet character development signalled by that tiny change is significant.
4. My Explanations, Let Me Not Show You Them
One of the most surprising aspects of Star Wars, for me, was the extent to which it doesn't fall into the trap of so many bits of sci-fi, that of over-explaining everything. We're treated to practically no backstory for any of the characters, at no point does anyone tell us just how a lightsaber works, the Force is vague and mysterious. The most stunning example of this was when Han Solo talks to Greedo and then Jabba — there are no subtitles, despite both the characters he meets speaking completely alien languages, and we're left to decipher what they must have said from Solo's side of the conversation. (Come to think of it, my DVD-playing setup is a little ropey, so the subtitles may simply have been broken. If that's the case, then feel free to disregard this point!) This general attitude towards the viewers — that they are intelligent enough to figure out what's going on, and that the story is more important than explaining the fine details of the setting — is refreshing, and really helps to move things along.
5. I Am No Man
Speaking of subverting expectations, I was really impressed by the role of Leia. The word "princess", when applied to a film role, is usually code for "fairly drippy character whose involvement in the plot is restricted to a) getting captured and/or rescued, and b) falling in love with the male lead". And yet our first sighting of Leia is when she is confronting the 7-foot tall, half-man-half-machine-all-evil Darth Vader. And it is a confrontation — she chews him out for boarding a diplomatic vessel, threatens him with the wrath of the Galactic Senate, and shows no fear whatsoever. This kind of can-do attitude isn't a one-time thing, either — she's the one who gets them out of the detention levels, she's the only character who cottons on to the fact that their escape from the Death Star was too easy, and she's pretty handy with a blaster too. Even though there is a romantic subtext between her and Han, it's never over-the-top, and she maintains the upper hand throughout — note that in the ceremony at the end, it's Luke and Han who have to walk up to Leia to receive their reward, not the other way around.
6. Aaaaaaaagh I'm Running Out Of Time
And so we come to the only thing I really didn't like about Star Wars. At the end of the film it took me a while to put my finger on why, though I'd enjoyed it a lot, I'd also found it a bit disappointing. I think the answer can be summed up in one word: Pacing.
The impression throughout the film is that, much like me when starting to write one of these epically long posts, Lucas thought he had all the time in the world. We spend seemingly forever in and around Luke's home, meeting Obi-Wan, and following the droids. Oh, man, the droids. Is there any particular reason why we had to go through the whole "R2-D2 and C-3PO go off in opposite directions, complain for a few minutes, get captured by the same set of characters and have a glorious robotic reunion" storyline? It has precisely no bearing on any of the rest of the plot, and could equally well have been done by simply having the Jawas find the escape pod as soon as it landed. As it stands, this and other scripting and editing decisions mean that the first half of the film moves glacially slowly.
Now, there's nothing wrong with a film that runs slowly to give the audience time to take in the atmosphere. Nor is there anything wrong with a film that builds pace throughout. But Star Wars does this to a ridiculous extent, such that it takes at least a good quarter of the film before we've met all the main cast, while the final battle, from the Millennium Falcon landing on Yavin to the destruction of the Death Star, takes place in-universe in less than half an hour.
Even the pacing within some of the scenes is odd. Take the destruction of the Death Star, for instance. Luke drops his bombs into the shaft, he and Han fly off, Vader spins away, we cut to the people on the Death Star looking unconcerned, and then it immediately blows up. The whole sequence has taken a couple of seconds at most. No anticipation, no time to wait for it, just BOOM. For me, at least, that took a lot away from what should have been the climactic shot of the film.
For much the same reason, the final ceremony is unsatisfying, because it feels forced and tacked-on, leaving completely unresolved the question of what the Rebels are going to do next, how the Empire is going to be destroyed (it's only lost one of its weapons, and is far from powerless) or even how the various character relationships are going to work. From a position of knowing that there were two more films, it's not so bad that things haven't been resolved — we know there's more story to come. But if you're going to do that, you surely have to either do an explicit "to be continued" type of ending (as the Lord of the Rings films did) or make the films stand entirely on their own (as the Matrix films would have done, had there been any sequels). Star Wars, however, doesn't know what it wants to do and it ends up falling between two stools, with a rushed and unsatisfying ending that leaves too many questions open.
Obviously, given that I've just spent 1800 words discussing this film, I found a lot to enjoy, and I'm certainly glad I came back to revisit this touchstone of geek culture. If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to argue violently in the comments. And maybe — just maybe — come back soon when I re-watch The Empire Strikes Back...
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Anyone who even thinks of the word "midichlorians" is not welcome here.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Your Vote Matters (Well, To A Certain Extent, I Suppose)
OK, sorry for yet another politics post, particularly after such a long gap, but we're almost at the election! The day after tomorrow, the polls will open and Britain will flock to cast their vote for whoever they want to lead us for the next however many years it is.
Well, some of them will, anyway. One of the major problems with our first-past-the-post electoral system is that it's entirely too easy to find yourself stuck in a constituency where your preferred candidate has not the faintest chance of being elected, even if they're from one of the major parties. And in those circumstances, it's completely understandable that a lot of people will simply not bother, or vote for someone who's kind of close to their preference, but isn't quite what they were after. I think that's a shame.
So, I'm going to use this space to give you three good reasons why you should vote, and moreover why you should vote for the person you actually want to get in rather than the person who might make it. I may as well note before I start that the cornerstone of democracy is that everyone is free to cast their vote for whoever they want, for whatever reason they want, or indeed not to vote at all. If you want to vote for the BNP to "send a message" to the "political elite", for instance, that's your democratic right. (That said, we have a great tradition of free speech in this country, so it's also my right to call you a complete idiot if you do.) Essentially, I'm fully aware that if you don't want to vote for anyone, or if you want to vote tactically, that's absolutely your right, so don't let me guilt you into it. But if you'd care to read on, here's why there might be a better option.
First, parties become competitive by people voting for them when they are not competitive. That's been the Liberal Democrat pattern for ages — they very rarely take a seat out of nowhere, but rather do it over two or more electoral cycles, slowly gaining enough support to be seen as potential challengers to the incumbent, at which point enough people take them seriously to get them the rest of the way. Another example is the Greens, who haven't had a decent shot at a Parliamentary constituency since their formation, but who stand a reasonable chance of taking Brighton Pavilion this time around. So even if the vote you cast for a non-competitive party this time around doesn't get them into office, people will look at the vote total next time. Not just the voters, but also the parties themselves — the more people vote for them in a given constituency, the higher the chances that they'll pour some more cash into campaigning there in the future.
Secondly, people look at the popular vote. Even in our voting system, where the popular vote is technically irrelevant, it gets a lot of attention from the parties when they're campaigning or when they're trying to argue that their opinion should be taken more seriously. And in this election, where there's a reasonable chance of the Liberal Democrats coming second in the popular vote but a distant third in seats (and of Labour coming first in seats despite coming second or even third in the popular vote), the popular vote is likely to be a powerful argument in favour of voting reform. When we're talking about popular votes, every vote is as important as every other.
Thirdly — and perhaps most importantly — this is the least predictable election for a generation. The Lib Dem surge caught everyone unawares (watching the Conservatives scrabble madly to regain the initiative after the first debate was a particular highlight for me, I have to admit), and with this coming on top of the expenses scandal (which has resulted in around a hundred MPs not seeking re-election), a lot of constituencies are suddenly way more open than they have been for years. In short, unless we get some kind of voting reform before the next election, this may well be the public's best chance for decades to upset the normal order of things and bring a bit of variety to politics. Don't blow it now!
Campaigning is in its final stretch, and if you haven't decided who to vote for yet, you're almost out of time. Whatever the outcome, this is the most exciting election the UK's seen for ages and the possibilities are fantastic. I don't know about you, but I for one am looking forward to it.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Politics is always improved by a little injection of Science.
We're into the last few weeks before the General Election. At least, I assume we are, our Glorious Leader having apparently neglected to officially call one, and seeming to want to hang on until the last possible minute. And who can blame him, frankly? The poll numbers have been showing the Conservative lead evaporating recently, going down from a lead of around 18% last July to a mere 7% or so. The Budget seems to have pushed it back in their favour (not unusually, given how people don't tend to like being told they're going to pay more), but whether that's the start of a new trend back towards the blue end of the scale or a mere blip on the way to the great British public being completely undecided is something we just won't know for a little while longer.
Either way, it's an exciting time in politics, and the pollsters are having a lovely time. But how do we interpret the poll results? Well, I've been letting my geeky side (which is, I must admit, pretty enormous compared to my non-geeky side) run riot a little more than usual, with the result that I'm now in a position to put forward a tentative projection.
There's two main ways of predicting Parliamentary results based on poll figures. The first is the Uniform Swing Projection. In a nutshell, this method compares the vote share predicted by a poll with the vote share at the previous election to calculate the swing towards or away from each party, then applies that swing to the vote share in each separate constituency.
It's not the most sophisticated way of doing predictions, and suffers from a few limitations. For example, a strong negative swing can result in a prediction of zero votes for a party, which is fairly unlikely. It also fails to take into account boundary changes and the size of a constituency, and is likely to hit particular problems in an election like this one where a number of MPs have resigned or have had their reputations tarnished by the expenses scandal. It's a good place to start, though, and gives you a reasonable idea of the general trend of the election.
So, what's the prediction? Well, based on the most recent YouGov poll listed on the UK Polling Report, which gives figures of 38% Conservative, 31% Labour, 19% Lib Dem, 12% other, I'm projecting a Hung Parliament with the Conservative Party short of a majority by 51 seats. That's not far off UK Polling Report's current projection of a Conservative shortfall of 19, so I think I'm in the right neck of the woods.
Of course, that's only one poll, and I've heard bad things about YouGov (it's an online outfit, which does make them susceptible to outside influence). So let's see some more recent results, with my projections.
- 29th March (YouGov), Con 39% Lab 32% LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 35
- 29th March (Opinium), Con 38%, Lab 28%, LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 3
- 28th March (ComRes), Con 37%, Lab 30%, LD 20%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 59
- 27th March (BPIX), same results as ComRes above
I've got some more work to do on my projection model, and I've had some ideas for getting it a bit more accurate, so watch this space for more details (I'm also going to open-source my code shortly so you can play around with it for yourself). Until then, I'm going to leave the parties to frantically scrabble for those extra few votes...
Monday, 15 February 2010
Harmonicas make everything sound sad.
What with all the excitement of the Winter Olympics (which have been fantastic so far) and the Six Nations (which...hasn't, at least from an English perspective), I forgot to make an update which I really shouldn't have missed, even in these days of very sparse additions to this blog. That update is the annual anti-Valentine's entry.
OK, so it's a little cynical to always make sarcastic comments about love at this time of year, but on the other hand, there is such a field of mawkish sentimentality to choose from when selecting something to methodically deflate, it seems churlish not to do something.
Fortunately, I've gone the classy route this time, by doing something creative for a change. That would be recording a song, on the theme of love. Have a listen to "So We'll Go No More A-Roving".
The music may be mine, but the words certainly aren't — they're taken from a poem by Lord Byron (original text here). It's a sad song, telling of a love that used to be bright, but has faded; love itself must have rest, as old age takes over.
Byron wasn't exactly in any position to know about old age, being only 29 when he wrote this, but the note of weariness that pervades the poem is very powerful. It's always a bit surprising to see someone who was a notorious hellraiser — he was the first man to be described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" — coming up with something as tender as this. Maybe it indicates that the what he thought was love to start with wasn't actually what he was after.
This poem feels like it's nothing but sadness, leaving the reader with no love and nothing to replace it. But maybe that's the point. If the first rush of love — wild, passionate, roving late into the night — doesn't last, then we have to find something with which to replace it before that happens. Whether Byron ever managed this is unknown, but it's unlikely; he died only seven years after writing these verses. Maybe our challenge, then, is to see whether we can do better.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Earthquakes, Evangelists and Evil
What would be a proper Christian response to the recent events in Haiti?
That's not just idle speculation, it's actually pretty important. After a US General has suggested that the death toll may top 200,000 (that's considerably higher than the population of Newcastle, in case you were wondering), the world is in shock at what seems like a completely senseless tragedy. At emotionally fraught times like this, the church has traditionally been one of those places that tries to bring "meaning" (in so far as that's possible) to those situations which seems meaningless, in the hopes that people will be comforted.
That's not always a good thing, of course — it's entirely possible that what people really want from the church is an assurance that this kind of thing won't happen to them, that there was something different about those "others". Sadly, some people are all too eager to give such false assurances; Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, has blamed the earthquake on a pact with the devil that Haitians allegedly made in order to gain their independence.
I don't mind admitting that when I first read Robertson's words, my immediate reaction to them was decidedly un-Christian, and I'm certainly not going to repeat it here. (Not without a long disclaimer and a video of a kitten, anyway.) How someone so influential, who commands a large audience of Christians, and who is apparently well thought of by his audience, could spit out such poisonous rubbish is beyond me. Needless to say, that is not the right way to approach the topic.
So what can we say? Well, it makes sense to start with what we know and have always known — that God loves the world and the people in it. This is a theme that runs right through the Bible, from the world's creation (when God looks at all he has made, and sees that it is very good), through to its salvation, in which we find that God loves the world so much that he will send his Son to save it. This is a love so great that literally nothing can separate us from it. So whatever happens, we can be sure that God hasn't left us, and that he cares for us.
But if God loves the world, why do things like earthquakes happen? Although I'm going to have a stab at this, it's really far too large a topic to cover in a single blog post, even if I thought that I had a handle on it (and I really don't). People far more intelligent and wise than I am have spent years trying to solve this. Some people have even used the problem of evil as an argument against God's existence, often phrased in the form of The Riddle of Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Personally, the point where I would take issue with this is at the second line, in which it is claimed that not consistently preventing evil is logically equivalent to malice. This doesn't logically follow, to my mind at least. There are situations in which permitting evil to happen is not necessarily an evil act in itself, if it allows a greater good. Take imprisonment, for example. Is it evil to deprive someone of their liberty? In a vacuum, you'd have to say yes. (Particularly if by that you meant imprisoning people inside a huge vacuum. That's definitely evil.) But if, by imprisoning someone, you prevent him from killing someone else, then you've done more good than evil.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
"But wait!" I hear you cry. "That doesn't work, quite apart from the whole 'ends justify the means' thing which you appear to have completely ignored, even if it was for the purposes of avoiding long digressions like this one. If you're carrying out little evil acts to prevent big evil acts, you're presupposing the existence of big evil acts! That doesn't explain evil at all!"
And you'd be right, annoyingly perceptive voice in my head. What it does let me do, though, is lead up to what Wikipedia tells me is Plantinga's Free Will Defence (the whole Wikipedia article on the problem of evil is well worth a read, by the way). Plantinga argues, in a nutshell, that if God wishes us to have free will, we can choose either good or evil. Now, the fact that free will pops up in the Bible so very early (Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree) indicates that it's part of the original plan, the one that God calls "very good". So, if evil can occur, this is only because a much, much greater good — the ability to choose to serve God, or not to — is its result.
Right, so we've reached the stage at which we can say that God who is both all-powerful and completely loving isn't necessarily incompatible with a world where terrible things happen. That doesn't go far enough as an explanation, though. Sure, we can say that murders and violence may happen, but that's because people exercise their free will and do bad things. It doesn't cover earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, or any of the other million and one horrible things that the Earth periodically does. How does this square with the image of a world that God made, and with which he was very pleased?
I think the key to understanding this is that we always like to remember the first half of the verse I linked to above ("God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.") and we forget the second half ("And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.") Each part of the story of Genesis is linked to a particular and very specific time; just because the world was perfect then doesn't necessarily mean that it's still perfect now.
(I'm going to take a moment here to digress, and say that I'm not going to put forward any opinion, one way or another, on the extent to which I consider Genesis to be a literal, historical account of creation. That's a topic just as large as the problem of evil, and far too much ink and vitriol has been spent on it for me to try to wade in here. What I will say is that even if one takes the most metaphorical view possible — and I'm not saying that I necessarily do — there are still many, many important themes and valid bits of theology that we can draw from the book. In other words, Six Day Creationism isn't the only game in town, and it's possible to take just as active a part of the conversation if you're on one end of the spectrum as if you're on the other. Right now, I'd prefer to focus on the stuff on which we stand the slightest chance of reaching some kind of agreement. Sound good?)
What Genesis makes very clear is that although the world was perfect, there was a Fall. After Adam takes the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, God says the following to him:
Cursed is the ground because of you;
From that point on, everything goes wrong. Adam and Eve get clothed in animal skins rather than the leaves they were wearing before, highlighting the fact that death is now a part of their lives. Adam has to work the ground before it will give him any food, which implies that before this it was working with him. Again and again the point is hammered home that just as humanity is no longer living in the type of relationship with God that he originally planned, so their relationship with the Earth itself has gone sour.
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
For the record, I should note that Pat Robertson (and those of his ilk) probably wouldn't disagree with any of this. Where we part company is the assumption that because the Earth's brokenness is because of sin, therefore any manifestation of that brokenness — for example, an earthquake — is in response to a very specific sin, such as the one Robertson attributes to the inhabitants of Haiti. I think this seems like a very odd idea. Should we assume that if we get weather we want, for example, that God is particularly pleased with us? No, of course not. After all, Jesus makes it very plain that the rain falls both on the righteous and the unrighteous. Although the Bible reports that God has used natural disasters as a form of judgement (the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind), it doesn't remotely follow that any natural disaster is therefore part of such a judgement.
What's more, it's daft to assume that any particular sin you see is going to receive a visible punishment. Take the Roman Empire, for example. This was a society that far outstripped our own in terms of capacity for evil (bad though Big Brother may be, we haven't yet reached the stage of having people raped and murdered in public for our entertainment), and yet it never received so much as an errant asteroid.
Of course, all this ignores the number one reason not to blame particularly sinful Haitians for the earthquake: Jesus tells us not to. You can't get much plainer, really — Jesus is told about specific tragedies, and states in no uncertain terms that these were not due to their victims being unusually bad. He does add the very ominous warning "But unless you repent, you too will all perish", but he's not backtracking on his own words. He's not suggesting, for example, that even though people who have towers fall on them aren't necessarily sinful, if we don't repent we will also have a bunch of towers fall on us. No, he's pointing out that sin is a big deal to God. What we might think of as something inconsequential is something that has completely broken our world. It didn't cause a tower to fall, it caused our relationship with God to be completely twisted out of alignment, and that matters a lot more.
I've clearly gone on at some length here (hello, all two of you who made it down this far!) so let's draw things to a close. What is our response to the earthquake?
Well, first, don't blame the victims. I'm looking at you, Robertson. What the victims of this need to hear from us is not that God is not chuckling away at the carnage that he has caused, but that he loves them and cares for them.
Secondly, we need to back up that expression of love by actually helping them. If you possibly can, donate to the aid effort. If you're in the UK, I'd recommend donating to the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation of several charities working together to get help out there. The Red Cross, or Médecins Sans Frontières, would be good choices too. Anything you can do to help is a good thing.
Thirdly, and most importantly, pray. We're living in a broken world, one which periodically does terrible things to its inhabitants, just as they do terrible things to each other. And we can't fix that, but we believe in a God who can. When we've done all we can on our own terms, the only thing left to do is to ask God to do all he can on his.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
You know, I don't think I want to even touch the part where he suggests that Banksy should have been murdered at birth.
I've posted here before (and at some length) about graffiti and its artistic potential. Indeed, I was reminded of it just the other day as I was heading back to London on the train, going past a rather fine mural of a shark beside the track (can't find a photo of it online, sadly). London has a fantastic supply of awesome graffiti — this and this are just beautiful, for example, and I love the South Bank combination skate park and graffiti wall.
Now, I can fully appreciate that even though I really like some graffiti work, it isn't to everyone's taste, and some people would rather it be removed. That's an occupational hazard for street artists, and if the people who live in the areas where it's particularly prevalent really don't want to look at it every day, it's hardly my place to tell them that their opinions shouldn't count.
All of which brings us to a news story that caught my eye today, about Bristol City Council planning to let members of the public vote on whether specific bits of street art should be kept or removed. This seems like a great idea, if they can make sure the voting's fair (apparently they're using an online poll, which isn't exactly immune from interference and will naturally skew the vote towards the younger end of the population). And if the public decide that a particular piece isn't worth keeping, more power to them.
Some people aren't happy with this development, though. To quote from the article (with emphasis added by me):"The two words 'graffiti' and 'art' should never be put together," said the art critic Brian Sewell. He added the council were "bonkers". "The public doesn't know good from bad."
Oh dear. Who let Brian Sewell out of his crypt? I'm sure he knows a lot about art — at least I hope he does, given that that's his job — but he's committing the cardinal sin of a critic, that of thinking that only certain people are permitted to be critics.
"For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don't know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn't matter if they [the public] like it. It will result in a proliferation of entirely random decoration, for want of a better word," he said.
That isn't to say that everyone's viewpoint is equally correct, or even equally worth listening to. If you can't back up an opinion with at least some kind of reasoning, no-one's very likely to listen to it. But that's a very long way from suggesting that only those who offer these opinions professionally should ever be heard, or indeed that people without the "proper" education are necessarily incapable of forming a reasoned judgement. I know practically nothing about art or its history, for example, and yet when I look at any particular bit of artwork I can generally come up with something specific that I like or dislike about it.
Sewell may have a grain of truth in his objections — after all, this is the country that has repeatedly voted on Big Brother enough to keep it on our screens (although not any more), so there isn't any guarantee that the people involved in the vote will choose a course of action that will improve Bristol. However, the main reason he's wrong in this case (quite apart from a breathtaking degree of arrogance &mdash and I know arrogance, given that I apparently think enough of myself that I write a bunch of stuff on a semi-regular basis and assume that a lot of strangers on the Internet might care about it at some point) is that this particular bit of artwork doesn't exist in a vacuum. Because it's street art, it's very much part of the city — and it's a city which enjoys a general lack of Brian Sewell, given that he lives in London.
That means that although Sewell may be perfectly within his rights to criticise street art in the context of art, his opinions as to its place in the city have no weight at all. And, more to the point, the people who do live in Bristol automatically have something of a right to decide what goes on there. Sewell's thesis, that the public shouldn't be allowed to decide what their city looks like because they don't necessarily know what a city "should" look like, is therefore flawed on two fronts. Not only does being part of a city give you at least some rights in shaping it, opinions are not necessarily exclusive to those who can back them up most effectively.
Now, given that I live in London, I wonder if I can vote to paint over Brian Sewell...
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
This does, of course, assume that all alien civilisations are familiar with the ASCII character set.
While browsing the internet today at lunchtime (yes, it was at work, but if they're going to give me an hour to eat lunch and also give me an unrestricted internet connection, the two are going to intersect sometimes), I came across Hello From Earth. This is a project that aims to send a whole lot of messages out to the nearest Earth-like planet we've yet found in the Galaxy, Gliese 581d. (Shame they couldn't come up with a snappier name.)
It's referred to as "Earth-like" because it's in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" of its parent star, Gliese 581. That means that it's neither too hot nor too cold, but the right temperature for liquid water to exist. Perhaps, then, we might find the much-vaunted "life as we know it" there. That is quite a large assumption — after all, we probably wouldn't notice if someone speculatively sent a burst of radio waves at our planet from squillions of miles away. Assuming, therefore, that it'll work at Gliese 581d, if there is indeed water there, and if there is indeed life, and if that life is advanced enough to detect radio, and if it happens to be listening at the time, and if it can decode our messages in any meaningful way, seems to be a bit of a tall order.
Not that it matters, really. Obviously it would be cool if someone did turn out to be listening, but the real value here is in seeing the kinds of things that people want to send out to the cosmos. Some of them go with general friendly greetings; Katrina from California, for example, will send the following:
Hello from Earth ! We come in peace. I look up at the universe every night wondering what magnificent things are out there, this could be one of those things.Very nice, but perhaps not very informative. Other people have gone down the "dire warnings to the aliens" route, like CruelAngel from Budapest:
For your own safety... You should NOT land on our planet. It stinks.A little pessimistic, perhaps.
There's plenty of vague platitudes, messages directed more at the people reading the site than at any hypothetical aliens, and (this being the internet) attempts to slag off everyone else using the site, although the fact that all messages must be verified and approved has kept the spam to a minimum. There are some funnier ones that I do like, though:
If you plan to study our species, please don't start with our television broadcasts. They require a lot of explanation.And lastly we have the people who are determined to demonstrate that the Earth holds advanced civilisations, and that we know stuff. I particularly liked this one from Luiz in São Paulo:
Eric Zak
Phoenix, United States
To the owner of a red Porsche 944, your lights are on.
H C
Wichita Falls, United States
Hello from Earth, please visit. We have cookies.
Chris Hully
Ottawa, Canada
Xenu, save us!
Tom Cruise
LA, United States
3,14159265358979323846 ***, * **** * ***** ********* ** ****** ***** *** ***** ******** ********* ******* ********* *** ** *** ******** **** ******Simple and elegant.
So what, I hear you ask, did I decide to send? Well, I managed to up my geek points considerably by transmitting the following out into the Galaxy.
. . .. ... ..... ........ ............. ..................... .................................. .......................................................Yes, with all the vistas of human knowledge open before me, I opted to send them the Fibonacci sequence expressed in full stops. I hope they're grateful for it when it turns up in December 2029.
