Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in richardthinks' LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
10:19 am	What I'm tempted to write this morning instead of my dissertation An anti-Bourne wonk-assassin thriller, in which the gunmen are as incompetent and corrupt as everyone else and even the wide-eyed cub reporter has ulterior motives which do not involve engaging with the Big Plot Threat. The murderous action revolves around two mercenary companies - Solutions Consulting and Consulting Solutions, which are both secretly run by Park Avenue Corp and their shadowy frenemies, Islamonazignomes, of Zurich. And it's played out between Kuwait, Dubai and the Indian Ocean, which are shot in warm yellows - even when we're at sea - and anonymous boardrooms in the UK and US which are all steely blues and greys and dim lighting. And also some comedy interjections in Japan and Thailand, which are bright pink and green, respectively. Now all I need is one sympathetic character and we're off. I know it's Tom Hanks, but I don't know if he can do a Borat accent. (Comment on this)
9:35 am	Maritime Monday on arming merchant ships Fred Fry's very last Maritime Monday has an interesting pair of interviews regarding arming merchant ships - one with a mercenary (sorry, "private security") company owner, the other with a rep from shipowning company Clipper Group (mostly paywalled: longer extract available at Fred Fry's). Given their positions of interest and the audiences they're talking to, there are no surprises here, but it's still interesting to see the perspectives in play - how the mercenary blames the UK government (no really) while the Clipper rep says convoys should work fine (bearing i mind he represents the very largest and most politically powerful classes of shipping out there). I'm going to save jordan179 some breath and say up front: (a) yes, I know you're in favour of arming merchant ships, and (b) I'm still not, even though the situation has changed considerably, and predictably, from last year. I might be in favour of convoys, naval blockades or some other professional, focused military action specifically against pirates (not including air strikes on towns in Somalia), but in general I think arming huge numbers of thugs and setting them loose in the far-from-lawless but also extraordinarily grey area of international waters is a Bad Idea: inventing and protecting Wild West frontiers usually doesn't help anyone but criminals. And because it's Maritime Monday there's the obligatory ouch! photos, and a disturbingly spongebobian girly calendar. Connections to Birnam Wood are left as an exercise for the reader. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 30th, 2009
10:55 pm	Rendezvous with Rama all over again Charlie Stross reminds me forcefully of the Cthulhuvian weirdness of Arthur C Clarke's tale of an encounter with a spaceship bent on god knows what from god knows when. I'm not quite sure what Clarke's message was, but his images really were strikingly alien-seeming. Greg Bear revisited the conceit in the mid 80s, with the surprise revelation (I was a teenager, and green in such things) that the aliens were us, and the less surprising coda that he could outweird anyone if he was given enough space (remember, mid 80s, when Gibson was just stirring from his lair and China Mieville hadn't even started thinking about writing anything). After that I imagine more weirdness followed, but I rather lost interest in SF. Stross, though, now explains with telegraphic patience exactly why any real and sensible human interstellar intervention would have to be absolutely the weirdest, least understandable thing you ever heard of. The sort of thing we wouldn't even recognise as space travel if it wandered past us. ...and I look again at SETI's pedestrian assumptions and sigh. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:14 pm	yay fantasy II Mabinogi seems set on becoming the new Evony. Although they seem to have learned from Evony's principal mistake - lack of boobage in the product itself. Sigh. The mangasploitation seems to be remarkably catholic, though: I have no idea how this is supposed to relate to this sort of Pokeporn, or how you'd go about getting (or avoiding) these. (all borderline SFW) (Comment on this)
11:33 am	games and realism I was a bit unfair, perhaps, to this post on international law and video games because of its title. The body merely suggests (perhaps) that the question could be cynically milked by political candidates, bringing, again, the worlds of politics and games closer together. It makes for a nice dialogue with this typically enjoyable bit by Steven Poole on games and movies, and how each can make the other stupider. Poole notes that experience of tactical games can make lazy cinematic dramamongering even more apparent (which is a refreshing recasting of an old problem - that interactive movies were always first and foremost excruciatingly bad movies). I think there's more going on, though: games obviously - and movies slightly less obviously - play by rules, and those rules make arenas or theatres for a particular kind of suspension of disbelief. Ongoing debates about violence in videogames, which always concentrate on the "realism" with which violence is depicted - that is, the degree to which game reality and off-screen reality is highlighted, suggest to me that the arenas of games very often are simply not understood - that a common understanding cannot be relied upon. When somebody objects to content in games but would approve the same content in films - for instance, where an unlawful massacre of civilians by armed forces is depicted - it seems to me their objection is based on uncertainty about the division between the game's rules and "reality's rules" projected onto the putatively hapless player, while the same division is treated as unproblematic in the case of the movie projected onto the putatively critically-aware viewer. The same audience that would consider the depiction of such a massacre in a movie "art" or "commentary" is supposed not to consider it absurd that, in a game, it is imagined to teach players bad social categories/behaviours. I am tempted, then, to conclude that such worries spring from simple ignorance... except that if such ignorance is widespread, perhaps it really does confer greater social power on games than on films? Poole's a very savvy player and yet the conventions of gameworlds come to filter his experience outside those worlds, even though they are fairly explicitly stated within their own arenas. This makes me wonder about Bourdieu. On the one hand, he seemed to think implicit rules were always more powerful than explicit ones - "they go without saying because they come without saying" - which would suggest that movies would be better at conveying ideology than games. On the other, he insisted that it's not how ideology is communicated but how it enters actual practice that matters: how it is internalised by the player (a term he liked) through their own action/implementation. Perhaps it doesn't matter how explicit and objectionable the rules are, as long a they are followed. In short, I'm wondering again if there isn't something to the argument that interaction affects behaviour/cognition more and differently from the pseudo-interaction of passive viewing, and if that might not be the appropriate direction for any "more research to be done and discussion to be had." On the implications for architectural history I see that Poole is again already ahead of me, pointing out that the world off the screen sometimes does just as bad a job of suspending our disbelief, of masking its canalisations. We can identify and "know about" rulesets, but most of the time it pays us to suppress that knowledge and just play along. In other news, I've just noticed how Voltaire rather anticipated Said in his plea for cultural studies that moved beyond the reinscription of colonial categories. I've thrown that "barbarians on th Oxus" line around in the past without really understanding that it was a call for a more considered, intelligent and consequence-laden history. He seems like a man in charge of his categories. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
9:25 pm	D. H. Krahn gin The local pharmacy name is offset by high modern typography on the bottle, so you know you're in for a gin that takes itself Very Seriously Indeed. And it's not bad, which seems like damning with faint praise but is really my fairest assessment. The flavour profile is very clearly London Dry, reminiscent of Beefeater or Boodles, slightly longer on citrus and shorter on juniper than your average classic gin, and the result is a very enjoyable, quaffable martini (very dry, up, with a twist, using just a dash of Dolin Chambery vermouth) that I'd be happy to do again. Although I don't generally go much for lighter-flavoured gins this one suits my current, very bitter-averse mood, and it doesn't simply taste like the gin has been diluted with vodka. Unlike, for instance, Quintessential. ...but it's not very distinctive, and in the final analysis, unless you're actually unhappy with Boodles I'd say save yourself 40% on the price. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
7:47 am	I'd start with the Connie When I first proposed doing an architectural study of ships I got some sceptical responses. I joked at the time that, if you can't think what to say, go smaller, and that next I'd do aeroplanes and truck cabs. Ahem. For all your Airforce One needs. Also, how do you transport a jetliner airframe quickly? No, silly. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 27th, 2009
9:28 am	taint of evil Alas, there is nothing the current British government cannot make evil and creepy. Admittedly, the Ordnance Survey started out creepy, being basically a government-made guide for artillerists bent on bombing the snot out of the British Isles, but since then it's managed to transform itself into a national treasure, used by hikers, archaeologists and real estate agents, among others. So it's wonderful news that the Ordnance Survey's exemplary, comprehensive map data is finally to go online for free. Except. There is so much wrong with the government's rationale for making it available. Apparently they've been "inspired by the success of crime mapping where "data openness" is helping citizens assess the safety of geographical areas" - in other words, their model for success is a ghetto-making project. They think they'll save money in the long run by making the data open because somehow government institutions had to pay for this public data as if it had been produced by a private consultant under a ludicrously restrictive contract. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the OS's own ghetto are understandably sceptical about Brown meddling in their affairs again: the union representing staff at the OS stated that Brown's pledge was in "complete contradiction with the OS's own plans to explore commercial opportunities and find new ways of raising revenue". ...because the OS has already been axed as a government department once, under the rationale that it'd be more "efficient" if it masqueraded as a free market(ish) company. Now High Command is planning to swipe its company assets (which would be great) but has no plans to pay the mapmakers out of its own coffers to keep those maps up to date. I think if you start by appointing an "information tsar" your intentions can't be good. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
4:22 pm	gambits that never work Overheard from my son's play date: "this is the funny part! The funny part! Wait, wait wait! Wait! It's coming, the funny part! No. Yes, there it is, it's comingggg..." Overseen from Duck of Minerva: dammit why don't video games represent the laws of war adequately? Maybe they should be forced to? Urban legends core77 style: exchange of emails that starts "hey, can you do me a quick logo and some pie charts for an investor meeting this week?" Trust me, it's the funny part. Also it reads just like the weird view of advertising that always appears in TV shows. Who knows? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
4:26 pm	Typology, International Style and critical regionalism Does Brian Wilson wish for a diversification of the girls resident in California, so that, for instance, the warmth of Northern girls' kisses and the reassurance offered by Midwest farmers' daughters could be found and appreciated there, rendering California a privileged topos of comprehensive pan-femininity, or does he wish that the model of the California Girl could be applied to all of the other girls of America, so that they might be improved in their cuteness (perhaps, although this is never made clear, suppressing their special heating function)? I think I might term these two approaches the Treasure-house (or possibly the "Johnson"*) Model and the Stalinist-Utopian or Standardizing Model. I note that, in offering his own band as the archetypal model of and for The Beach Boy, Wilson rather tips his crypto-totalitarian hand.** * After Samuel Johnson, of course; "when a man is tired of London" etc. ** The other possibility, that by leaving the unfulfilled desire unspecified Wilson deliberately opens a space for the expatriate's melancholy - in which no one place can satisfy the contradictory hungers for xenophilia and nostalgia, wanderlust and homesickness engendered by long sojourning in foreign lands - seems hardly more credible to me given the cultural moment in which it was produced. Unless, you know, it's a deliberate reference to his trip. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 20th, 2009
1:24 pm	Swakopmund ...demands its own post. princeofcairo made me think of Portmeirion in postmodernist-architectural terms, and now of course I see that that's how a bunch of self-proclaimed pomo architects already saw it. Silly me, with my prior familiarity. I'd also never drawn the connection between The Prisoner and The Truman Show's use of Seaside, FL. - I figured they just thought it looked like a creepily unreal, saccharine-and-plasterboard sort of place, a la Edward Scissorhands - but in retrospect it all slots into place. The new Prisoner's use of Swakopmund in Namibia kicks it all up several notches, though: it just might be the smartest thing about the whole production. The website strikes exactly the right tone, with its lighthouse search-beam and safety tips. And it delivers on all of Portmeirion's implicit, referential creepiness - it's a German colonial seaside resort town with attached prison right in the middle of uranium country. If I were planning a Prisoner remake I'd probably say to my location scout, "try to find me an idealised village resort run by totalitarians - like a cross between Baden-Baden and Naypyidaw but with a government we can work with," and then I'd quietly try to figure out ways to paste it together out of multiple other places, assuming no such thing could be achieved. Swakopmund would exceed my wildest dreams. Maybe, in fact, it was the town that inspired them to try a remake. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
9:38 pm	What madness is this? I'm sorry,I know I haven't been keeping up with Games Workshop's products for the past couple of decades but... Fast Attack Bag? Really? Fast Attack? They do a black backpack on wheels for $73 as well. When did they become a luggage company? OK, you deserve a proper link, so check out the Happy Imperialism photo gallery, which starts with "ethnic Mongol" bears, just for muckefuck. Essays welcome on any and all of the troublesome issues raised here. I'm tired right now, so you can just assume I'm going to rag on "ethnic," several of the categories (yay Taiwan! Yay Tibet! So nice to see you), and the whole nationalist/supranationalist/imperialist thang. Also, these are more artfully arranged than the "ethnic" displays in the National Museum of Turkmenistan, but the smiles are just the same. Also also, best traveled giant black cloth evar. Via Mary HK Choi, as you might guess from my prose style. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
4:27 pm	weddings and orgies The ever-reliable Russia Today reports: Somali pirates have spent the € 2.7 million they got for the liberation of the Alakrana trawler from the Spanish government on weddings and orgies. If a word of it can be believed then it seems to me this warrants some good ethnographic investigation - that particular combination of weddings and orgies. Now that dowries are rare in the US, most of us don't think of marriage (I imagine) as a business arrangement aimed at the perpetuation of male lines; (I'm hoping) women are no longer considered commodities. Somalia is another matter, but that's emphatically not because it's lodged in some unchanging realm that time/modernity forgot. It seems (to my naive, distant eye) that Somalia is a pretty lawless place, where "traditional" (or at least non-state) methods of ordering society are about the only ones left. In similar situations elsewhere, we've grown used to seeing a certain set of social changes - toward nativism, outward displays of social conservatism or millenialism. Here they seem instead to be headed toward what a Hollywood understanding of piracy would lead us all to expect: ”Previously, we could not get married because we lived in poverty, life was difficult, but the situation was unsafe. Women need love and money, and the pirates have the money, and they show us their love,” 17-year-old Khabibo Salad, the wife of a pirate recently captured by German naval forces, said. And if some do not want to be bound to them by a wedding knot, there is another option. “Today girls can marry, but many also agree to be paid for sex,” Khabibo Salad added. The pirates offer the enormous compensation of €2,500 for taking part in their orgies. So we're told prostitution is becoming more widespread because there's a market for it (natch) and more socially acceptable because it allows for women to survive and fill social functions in a situation where it is understood there is little other recourse. With compensation set so high (really?! what does that say?) I'm wondering how many orgies a girl would have to do in order to be effectively self-sufficient for life on local rates, or in order to get out to another situation. And, of course, just how many tertiary and quarternary "industries" have sprung up to ensure that the girls themselves don't get to receive or retain such princely sums. I am particularly interested in this line, though, which suggests that piracy itself may be becoming an acceptable social identity with a manageable risk profile: the wave of weddings began in Harardhere even before the buccaneers got the money, as most of them organized the feast on loan, counting on the ransom being paid. ...what about the wave of orgies, though? And are these always communal activities - parties - or is regular prostitution also on the rise and available on credit? Enquiring minds, etc. Via Eaglespeak, of course. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
11:29 am	A moment of Baudrillardian rage: advertising in The Economist So yesterday I mentioned Dell Upton's neat summation of a major theme of post-70s thinking - on tradition: "a way of life imagined by modernity as its innocent Other." Today what do I find on the back cover of The Economist? You never actually own a Patek-Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation. Nice. Or for the next financial quarter, or economic blip, or fashionable turn in business wisdom. Really, Economist readers buy this sort of ideology? Are they guarding 6 Sigma as an eternal standard for the benefit of all our descendants? (Comment on this)
8:48 am	Sorry, these Prisoner/Pomo thoughts will probably keep trickling in... It suddenly occurs to me that "Hammer into Anvil" is probably the single best text for understanding half of what the Situationists were doing. I wonder if Debord was watching. ...I repeat, though, that I don't see anything very distinctively postmodern about The Prisoner: the binary struggle between the putatively free individual and a constraining society is exactly the sort of "metanarrative" our alleged Postmodernists (let's pick on Lyotard today) were trying to get away from. Unless you adopt the delightfully inclusive definition of postmodernism offered on Wikipedia,* in which case it's difficult to find any distinguishing feature on which to hang a definition of the term. * I did not know that Arnold Toynbee considered the post-WW1 age "postmodern." Perhaps it is a fundamental part of the condition of modernity that one considers oneself to live in a postmodern moment? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
4:12 pm	Dell Upton's bon mots - on culture, tradition and types or bons mots? I'm never sure. ( Dell Upton has 'em, in a review, no less ) (Comment on this)
12:55 pm	Pseudo-poll: what should Hugh Laurie do next instead of House? I'd like to see him go for a complete change of pace - maybe play Father Brown* or Stephen Maturin. If we're stuck with hyperrationalist detectives then I'd ask for Auguste Dupin rather than the more heavily-trodden Holmes-clones... or maybe Moriarty. Thinks: craggy face, piercing eyes, ability with physical comedy. Allan Quatermain? In my own Extraordinary Gentlemen project he'd be F E Younghusband. If we're stuck with doctors** I'm less interested unless it's the aforementioned Maturin, noting in passing that House himself seems closely based on Cadwallader Cuticle. What would you like to see him do? ( Go, oh Screenwriters, and write me this thing. And make it good, dammit, and not for George Clooney ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
9:44 am	one more late thought on The Prisoner: what's changed since 1967 Having seen the rest of episode 1 where the 6/2 relationship seems to settle down into its proper rut (and now being 2 episodes behind the curve, due to the hardcore cultist-only schedule), I have only one further thought to add: this is not a Prisoner for Foucault-haters. Wikipedia claims The (McGoohan) Prisoner has "postmodern themes" - I'm not sure exactly what makes its themes postmodern (there was plenty of individualist vs. collectivist - or if you prefer psychological vs. social angst kicking around since the 19th century or earlier), but I'm intrigued that it aired right before what's since been identified as the Pomo moment. As such it shows the same influences that turned up in Foucault's and others' writing, but the ideas are captured fresh, in their first excitement - and a big part of their charm is that we don't know where they'll lead (possibly, I'm tempted to speculate, into iconic works of cultural criticism). The current series' presentation of the Village shows a bunch of the same ideas at least somewhat digested but not very much explored, and bearing highly recognisable fingerprints. So now 2's base of power is the Clinic and the main conduit of power 6 confronts is medicine rather than the State. I'm waiting for 2 to refer to the insurance risk 6 poses. In short, where the first series asked questions, the second appears to have answers... which it acquired from an authority and repeats at second hand, without much of the playfulness or poise with which the questions were posed. The Village is clearly all about governmentality,* but it shows it in a distressingly crude form, in which people are required to forget themselves in order to become passive socialised subjects. I can't decide yet if that's because the program makers themselves have a crude idea of governmentality or if it's a deliberate ploy on their part, to distress us with the crudeness. ( So we see influence in one direction. But power comes from everywhere... ) (Comment on this)
Monday, November 16th, 2009
3:01 pm	of two Prisoners (and one escaper) The text is woven around large chronological and informational lacunae. Have so far only seen the first half of the pilot to AMC's decidedly glancing "remake," so this is a rather hasty review. It's not grasping me, though (despite presence of McKellan in kingly mode - sharply, emblematically different from Leo McKern's apparatchik), so I might not ever get around to a fuller consideration. Here's the thing: while I'm watching this rather lackadaisical meandering I'm thinking non-stop about the original, and realising a number of things I never understood before. E.g: it occurs to me that the original's tight story summary, tucked inside its title sequence, is both completely necessary to lending meaning to the episodes and (perhaps) self-defeatingly comforting; McGoohan's Number 6 is the opposite of an unreliable narrator - absolutely reliable and steadfast in his refusal to narrate anything. So the story ends up being about Them - the Village and its controllers - because we know we're not going to learn anything about Him. Caviezel on the other hand is only half-functional as a subject, and his perceptions are very clearly narratives: constructed, half memory, and possibly not his own. He's both the deepest mystery and the filter through which we see, so we're thrown into doubt, as he is, about perceptions and reality, and the result is that we get pulled in a metaphysical direction that's paranoid but not illuminating. And while I'm pondering the very unmetaphysical original I notice that, at heart, it's a kind of caper - like Mission Impossible, but MI's protagonists are McGoohan's antagonists - and McGoohan's a Houdini of the ego, always composed, observing, measuring his moves, strategising, keeping his will-to-power up to guard his subjectivity, helping us understand that what he's involved in is, fundamentally, a game - a psychological one, sure, but one where he always trumps angst with action, where his hard-man front is what keeps him impervious, and interesting, to his captors, and what prevents the whole thing from degenerating into what we see in the remake. Now capers are basically upbeat; their payoff lies in seeing the scheme come off despite all contingencies - to see victory snatched in the final reversal - but to get that payoff the audience has to understand the rules and the stakes at play, and that's what the remake doesn't deliver: instead Caviezel ricochets off characters obsessed with their own stories, each locked in their own rule-set, so the game isn't chess but maybe System Shock or Halo or something of that ilk: psychodrama but precious little puzzle-solving. And the tone of the remake, somehow both leaden and hallucinatory, bodes ill for the future: the original stretched a carnival levity over unspoken menace, as a window into its basic structure - of amusing maneuvering between Numbers 6 and 2 masking... what? An understanding of life in the world? Of how to behave as a modern citizen/subject? Certainly not the kinds of rather tired Cartesian epistemological issues Caviezel seems to be thrown back on. As you were following McGoohan, trying to figure out what was really going on, you were at least in pleasant, somewhat novel, surroundings. Caviezel seems to be taking us on a journey through hell and we, to swipe a Churchillism, are asked just to keep going. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
4:56 pm	awesome bunk: architecture school rankings and comments Am greatly enjoying the comments on the ranking of US architecture schools in Architectural Record. Are architects more status-anxious than other professional groups? Are they superior flame-warriors? Or is this typical for any group of academics when rank tables are drawn up? Or is this a rare moment when the beast is drawn from its lair and you get to see its claws, which usually strike out of sight? I remember a report some time ago that stated that engineers seemed to be drawn to terrorism. I have a sense architects are kept away from it largely by micropolitics - a situation that is only natural given the practices and demands of the profession - Keller Easterling is much more ruthless about this than I would be, and she knows the professional habitus better. (Comment on this)