Moving

I’m moving my blog over to a new location: http://www.dether.com/blog/

TTFN.

Free fruit, and class questions

It’s late summer already. Sheesh. Still, got to love this time of year for all the free fruit. Spent Sunday gathering elderberries, blackberries and wild plums and making stuff. Also loads of rowan berries around, but I’ve not experimented with them (you can make wine, and a jelly which is presumably like rosehip jelly).

Elder is such a weed of a tree it’s good to get something useful out of it, in our case elderflower cordial in the spring, and elderberry cordial now. The plums I use in my friend Nadia’s excellent plum sauce recipe. It’s like a slightly spicy, fruity ketchup and well worth a try if you have a plum tree, and if you’re like me and don’t much like fruit in its natural state.

Nadia’s plum sauce (Word file).

As an aside:  is foraging a totally white middle class activity? Its best known exponents are the decidedly middle class (nay posh) celebrity chef likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers. While we were picking blackberries in “waste” land near our home in south London, the local black teens just stared at us like what we were doing was just plain weird, and the only other pickers we saw were a white middle class mum and her young daughter.

Before the industrial revolution moved populations to urban areas, and before the post-WWII industrialisation of farming, surely foraging for free food was an activity most people undertook? Particularly poorer people. And even today, it’s not like foraging needs to be some kind of alternative, posh rural activity, as we proved with our two kilos of blackberries (we could have got loads more) and two kilos of wild plums, all picked from plants and trees in publicly accessible urban areas. It’s a bizarre situation.

Sod’s law strikes again

Friday – hot, dry and even summery. Sunday – warm and dry. Monday – warm and, so far, dry.

Saturday:

(Thanks to Ceri Thomas for the photo – and for holding the brolly while I flipped burgers…)

Still, at least we had plenty of cake:

Blog spellchecker

Oh the irony – the spellchecker on my blog doens’t recognise the word “blog”.

Storming clouds, and other digital media revelations.

The advent of new technologies is a slow process, with older technologies evolving till they reach a tipping point of commercial viability. Those moments make it appear like things are happening fast and suddenly, and that certainly seems to be the case now, with an apprent rush of new cloud media. What last.fm and spotify have been doing for music the past few years, other companies are potentially going to start doing for movies and even gaming in the next few years.

In terms of movies, this is fantastic news. For years, DVD shops have been dying off. In their place, if you wanted to watch a movie of your selection after work, were new distribution media, notably Torrenting. Now, Torrenting movies is by and large illegal, but the movie companies – both the rights owners and the distributors – have been very slow to step up with a viable, legal alternative. Lovefilm, the dominant UK DVD rental company, does offer streamed movies, but that never worked for me (dunno why not, I’m just on a PC running Vista, it’s not like it’s an awkward, uncommon setup). And while DVDs can be bought very cheaply, in an age of digital media, I’m among the many folk who really don’t want to clutter of physical formats any more. (That’s not to say my DVD cabinet doesn’t regularly get new additions – it’s sometimes hard to resist those Play bargains.) Meanwhile, cinemas – particularly those in central London, continue to charge farcical amounts to watch movies. A recent jaunt to the Odeon West End set me back £10.50 – and that was for a screening in one of their tiny auditoria, a cramped place not much larger than the average living room. A tenner might be justifiable for the proper experience of a massive auditorium with a vast screen and bone-rattling sound system, but not for the cruddy chopped-and-changed small auditoria, where the experience is no better than many people’s domestic movie-viewing arrangements. It’s a tricky position for the cinemas to be in.

Nick James wrote an editorial about the tricky position of over-priced cinemas and the temptation of the highly efficient distribution system of Torrents in a recent issue of Sight & Sound. After talking about the economic implications of illegal downloads, he made the point that legal music downloading is commonplace, in part because it’s cheaper. He mused why cinema wasn’t “the kind of cheap mass entertainment that booms in hard times” (Hollywood arguably thrived in the Great Depression), then bemoaned the “continued absence of an effective revenue-gathering model for download that’s foolproof.” That editorial (February 2009) struck a definite chord – cinema is too pricey, and legal, viable home cinema services were desperately needed. Yet, only a few months later, the situation is changing markedly. Like many males of a certain age, I’ve got an Xbox 360 attached to my TV. Microsoft’s Xbox Live has, since 2002, been slowly but surely evolving to offer more and more in the of media and home entertainment options. 2006 saw them launch their Video Store/Video Marketplace. Partnering with such major entertainment bodies as Paramount, Disney and Warner Bros, the service enabled Xbox Live subscribers to download TV and movies, for a fee paid in Microsoft Points (credits bought with real world currency). Recently, this service seems to have been expanded markedly (in the UK, dunno about the US), so last night we bought our first movie – and very efficient it is too. It’s was about £3 to buy a film, which you can start watching while it downloads, and which then expires after 24 hours after you’ve hit play. (Or lasts longer if you don’t hit play.)

That’s just one of a couple of new ways to watch movies I’m becoming better acquainted with. The other is The Auteurs. This new service, currently in beta, appears to have a remit to offer streamed rep cinema – for people who have no access to actual physical, real-world rep cinemas. Which basically means most of us – even London is pretty poor for rep cinema, with just really the BFI Southbank and some touring films offering an alternative to the conveyor belt of mainstream commercial cinema. The invite-your-friends email (thanks Lawrence) says it’s “an online movie theater [sic] where you watch, discover, and discuss films. // Fall in love all over again with the movies, and meet other people who feel just the same way. Great films, original editorial coverage, and a community of the most interested and interesting film fans in the world – all waiting for you. // Think of it as a virtual cinematheque: a place where you leave the dark of the screening room, and find yourself amongst friends.”

So basically, it’s a cloud cinema. Which really is a great idea. Clicking on the list of films, then selecting the “Available to view in your area” option gives a subsidiary list and pricing. The list isn’t bad already, which bodes well considering it’s still in beta: it’s pretty extensive, with lots of classics (Metropolis, Rocco and His Brothers),  so-called arthouse (Festen, Lilya 4-Ever), and even shorts (like Jan Svankmajer’s Food). Features seem to be £3, again – it’s a price that’s potentially more than you pay per film from Lovefilm, but here or on Xbox Live you’re paying for the convenience. One of the drags about LoveFilm is that it can never really satisfy specific “I want to watch X tonight” urges.

Another cloud system that’s also currently in beta is Gaikai. This is worth a whole blog rant in itself, but to try and keep things fairly succinct, it seems to have the potential to offer a means of streaming even the hugest games onto your computer, rather than loading them up in the form of vast software clients. There’s a demo of Gaikai in action here, from one of its dev team, games industry veteran David Perry:

That looks truly remarkable. Someone techie than myself has given a thorough evaluation of the system, with interview comments from Perry, over here. It’s fascinating stuff, we’re at a very exciting point for digital media distribution, movie watching and gaming. Of course movies are bigger than music tracks, and games are even more complicated than that, so there are potentially going to be all sorts of techie issues (latency etc) to iron out over coming months. And there are probably minefields of legal and rights issues to negotiate too, but if the movie industry can find a new models that work, why can’t the movie and games industries? We certainly live in dynamic times – digitally at least – with such new systems and media on the verge of hitting that viability point.

EDIT: chatting with L, one fundamental aspect of The Auteurs is its social networking dimension, but that’s probably a whole different blog entry too.

ANOTHER EDIT: I was lumping together Xbox Live’s Video Marketplace with The Auteurs here for the sake of a topical discussion. Of course, they provide very different services – one very mainstream, by way of a piece of gaming hardware; the other all about access to neglected, foreign, classic or arthouse films on your computer. The sort of films, in fact, you used to see on BBC2 when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, but are extremely uncommon on terrerstrial telly these days, and elusive on satellite/cable channels too – never mind only fleeting presences in even the best “arthouse” cinemas. All these technologies have the promise of functioning like vast, easily accessible libraries (with reasonable fees). Which is one of the things the internet is really all about – or was about in the idealistic days of the mid-90s. A repository.

Neighbours

A, B, C and D share a water supply, part of an intrastucture supplied by X. The water supply has a leak. While B and C are friendly, D won’t talk to C, and A won’t talk to B, C or D.  A and D barely even leave their houses. Indeed, the son of A had a period of shouting death threats through the wall at B. X, meanwhile, takes no responsibility for any of it.

Will the leak ever get fixed or will hundreds of litres of water keep pouring down the pavement?

Institutionalised illiteracy

You do not “arrive into”, you “arrive at”. Yet the entire British rail network seems intent on using this mangling verb construction. “The train is now arriving into Basingstoke.” Excuse me while I wail in despair.

I realise language is fluid, but come on: this is just ugly, dumb and wrong. It’s institutionalised illiteracy.

Videogames do not turn people into murderers

Another tragic high school shooting spree, this time in Germany. And yet again, the media cannot cover it without having to shoehorn in a mention of the fact that the killer played videogames.

This from The Guardian 12 March 2009: “Testimonies of friends and acquaintances today portray the table tennis champion as a lonely and frustrated person who felt rejected by society. A 17-year-old who gave his name as Aki said he had been studying alongside Kretschmer at a private business school in the region and described him as a quiet and reserved boy who enjoyed playing a multiplayer video game called Counter-Strike that involves carrying out assassinations to complete missions. ‘He was good,’ he said.”

The full story in the paper is a reasonably standard piece of reporting but this mention of Conter-Strike seems entirely without context, crudely chucked is as a aside because, for some reason, news reporters seem to feel obliged to mention videogames whenever a young man goes on a tragic killing spree  or particular violent crime. It’s knee-jerk nonsense, not proper journalism. I’d expect it from a tabloid or a right-wing paper, but The Guardian? 

The point is that millions of people worldwide play videogames, indeed as many people probably play games as watch movies, or read books – or newspapers. Videogames are just another culture medium, they’re not training grounds for killers. So if the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre played Doom, or another young American killer played Grand Theft Auto, and now this unfortunate young man is known to have played Conter-Stike. So, that means of all the videogames in the world, some infitessimally tiny number of them are also killers, if you were to look at it in terms of a Venn diagram. Well, of all the killers in the world, some of them probably watch movies, read books and watch TV too, yet whenever a young murderer is reported in the news, it’s very unlikely their television viewing or reading habits will be mentioned. 

We’ve been here before so many times – 19th century penny dreadfuls were accused of corrupting the youth, as were comics in the mid-20th century, as were so-called “video-nasties” in the 1980s. Well, I’ve read a lot of comics, enjoy horror movies, and play first person shooter videogames, but my mind hasn’t been shaped into that of a desperate killer.

I’ve written about this before and here. I do wish the media wouldn’t keep casually throwing in ill-considered, implied connections between violent cultural items and acts of violence. I’m not saying that culture doesn’t nurture, and it’s possible this young man’s sensibilities were in part shaped by what he consumed culturally, as well as how he was brought up, his relationship with his parents and peers, his education, etc.  What I am saying is that nurture and the formation of personality and self are incredibly complicated. Journalism that insists of mentioning “videogames” in the same story as “school killing spree”, without  more in-depth, considered, research and evidence, is just misleading, mob-baiting, irresponsible, and plain lazy.

Economics of the high street

I consider myself a reasonably bright person, but one area I most decidedly struggle with is economics. When the newspaper goes on about “tumbleweeds blowing down your high street” I can’t quite reconcile it with a trip to the West End of London. Around Picadilly circus at 7.30 on the evening of Sunday 26 Jan was entirely comparble with the the same spot a year ago, or two years ago. Thousands of people in a frenzy of consumerism, clutching thousands of branded bags (all destined for the landfill), containing thousands of pounds worth of tat (much of that probably also destined for the landfill), and not a tumbleweed in sight. I’m really starting to feel the pinch of the rescession, but witnessesing these scenes – am I missing something?

Health and safety in the cinema

Treated myself to a trip to the cinema yesterday, to watch the British horror film The Children. It was playing at the Empire Leicester Square, a cinema that boasts my favourite auditorium – the huge Empire 1, which has a fab, subtle lightshow before the programme starts.

The Children, being a lesser release, was in Empire 3, a pokey little auditorium up some stairs. The size wasn’t the problem though. Everyone shuffled in and found seats in the dark, with only the bright green glow of the Exit sign and the light from the adverts playing on the screen to light the way. This darkness was perfect for watching images on the screen, but not ideal for finding seats before the main feature had even started. Then when the feature did start, the lights suddenly went up, so much so that I could see reflections glinting on the bald head of a chap two rows in front. It was rubbish. Especially for a horror film.

A lot of others shuffled and grumbled, but being Brits no one got up to ask about it. One chap might have done, but still nothing was done about the lights, so I went and asked. I met a chap on the stairs who stuck his head and said “No, they’re the safety lights.” Eh? Safety lights now have to be so bright that they reflect on the screen and dull the image? That defeats the object of the cinema experience, where the illumination comes from the image on the screen, and any other light source is a distraction, be it a bright green Exit sign too close to the screen or the light pen of a tiresome numbskull journalist who never mastered the skill of taking notes in the dark.

I toyed with the idea of leaving, but the film was gripping. Indeed, The Children, along with Eden Lake, has raised the torch for quality British horror high for 2008.

Afterwards, the same guy from my row was asking what was wrong with the lights at the ticket counter, so I joined in too. The woman was joined by the guy I’d spoken to before, who may well have been the manager. He said the lighting should have been on similarly during the adverts, because it was required safety lighting. He explained that Westminster Council’s fire officer had recently been round and said all the lighting needed to be increased. So great, Britain’s disproportionate, nannying health and safety culture is now buggering up the cinema experience too. Westerminster is particularly pedantic, one of the worst governing bodies when it comes to health and safety, so this may well mean all cinema experiences in central London are now ruined.

Now, any sensible, logical person knows that putting a sign up by the ditch saying “Beware, ditch” won’t stop people occasionally tripping into that ditch. Accidents happen, full stop. They’re freak, fluke, matters of chance. Legislation cannot prevent accidents happening. In a cinema auditorium, the bright green light of the emergency exit sign is highly visble, even if you have poorer eyesight. And indeed, if you do have poorer eyesight, presumably you’ll be wearing your contacts or glasses if you’ve gone to watch a film. Insisting on bright ambient light during the main feature – the bit you’re paying for – in a cinema is only going to ruin the experience. The manager guy did say they were hoping the redevelop that Empire 3, but if Westminster now insists on X candela that probably won’t help.

These days, many people have big TVs and can control the light levels in their own homes – where thankfully, a health and safety officer can’t knock on your door and tell you to turn on your lights. If people have this option at home, more and more will stay away from cinemas that are themselves now legally required to bugger up the light levels in auditoria and ruin the fundaments of the experience. If, like me, you love going to seee movies in a cinema, where that beam of light is projected over your head onto a screen that by and large is still bigger than most TVs (and certainly our old CRT), creating that unique atmosphere that’s intoxicated punters for more than a century, this is a tragedy.

Addendum:

During the few weeks after I posted this, I went to a couple more central London cinemas, such as the Cineworld in the Trocadero and the Odeon on Shaftesbury Avenue. Neither had lighting as offputting as in that specific Empire auditorium, so either it’s not a Westminster council edict, or if it is, these other cinemas are yet to act on it.