A New Grand Alliance

Have a look at what the Pope just said. This is probably the most eloquent and forthright exhortation of the social democratic ideal I've seen in mainstream recent society. If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, let me excerpt you:

The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies

Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality

The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.


There's more like this. I won't claim that the previous Pope didn't inveigh against markets too, on occasion, but he did so almost reluctantly. This one has a dislike for the pure free market forged of fire and salt. He calls for a poor church, a church that is "bruised hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets". There's more like this - just skim it and you will see the theme thrown out again and again. The secular amongst us must now accept the seemingly impossible  - that heading the oldest religious body in the world, most famous for intractable opposition to the modern world and the dignity of the modern human, is a man bent against the powerful in the world on behalf of the weak. He is the one man with any large platform or authority calling for the end of the neoliberal age.

To be clear: I still can't really say I like Francis. When he removes the church's policy on condom use in Africa, when he embraces equal rights for the gay and transgendered in the world, when he orders full public inquisitions into the child abuse scandal, when he embraces the free moral choice of the mother in the case of abortion -  maybe I will start to warm to him. The fact that he is radically different to his predecessors does not change these facts. Nevertheless, he presents an extraordinary moment for the Left, and one we should not waste because he is an imperfect ally.

That's the thing about allies. If they were perfect, they'd be either working for you or in charge of you already.

The problem with the modern left, as I wanted to say in my terrible dissertation on William Blake, is that it has lost its sense of prophecy. By which I mean, that iron certainty that all the powers of the universe are working on a slow but inexorable path to righting the wrongs of the world. While the Right calls on the authority of religion and tradition, what does the left call on? It used to have prophecy in the form of the messianic Marx, which I feel is a shame, not only because his most fervent adherents ended up destroying the Left in our time, but because he has very little poetry to him.

There are very few great poets of the Left. Blake, of course, is my favourite, because he fulfilled what Orwell called the love of something ever-changing and yet mystically the same. The Jerusalem of Blake's vision is both England of the now and the not yet here. Universal  is the future, but it must be worked toward, sword unsleeping in hand. How many other poets have summoned that unquestionable, Old Testament devotion to progress? How many politicians on the Left can now talk with such certainty and poetic power?

The Pope can. The Pope can talk without any embarrassment about the "poor". He can talk about their dignity. He can talk about the supreme moral good in not just the welfare programmes supporting them but in projects to restructure entire economies to support them. He has no need to kowtow to focus groups and think tanks that seek to put an "aspirational" gloss on his words. He need not fear the New Labour trap of hollowing out one's concern for the disadvantaged by thinking he can have it both ways.

So complete is the triumph of Thatcher and Reagan that we cannot even talk about the poor anymore. They rarely enter our national conversation other than as freak shows. Where does their value derive from in a secular consumerist world? This Pope, if his language is echoed by the Left, can return concern for the poor into a noble thing. We can talk in unabashed terms about human dignity again.

Myself and my fellow secularists will have to swallow our pride now. We'll have to work with a Catholic church that we have long opposed. But an alliance of the international left and the Church has an opportunity to wrongfoot the neoliberal consensus that has long relied on the support of religion. We are running out of time to change the conversation before our long string of defeats are made permanent. By the grace of the God we do not believe in, we have been given a wonderful chance to turn things around.

Life As A Bonus Round

I remember that if you finished a particularly well-made game like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, there would be an extra secret level or two to unlock.

Once all the hard work's done, you get to test out your skills on a blank canvas, seeing how many orcs you can kill in as many different ways or as quickly as possible. It's great fun, and feels a proper reward for your achievements. Of, you know, killing lots of orcs. God talking about games sounds lame sometimes.

Anyway, bouncing off John Scalzi's famous quip that being a straight white male was playing life on easy mode, I thought I'd refine that - being a white straight male (or to list all my privileges *deep breath* a straight cis white able-bodied slim home counties privately-educated Oxbridge male from a loving stable two-parent wealthy book-filled household in a wealthy part of a wealthy country surrounded by lush green space) is like playing the bonus round.

Having by virtue of being born almost all the stuff that everybody else is working their way through the game to get, for their children if not even for themselves, playing to win seems to miss the point a bit. Anything short of Prime Minister is basically a disappointment. And even Cameron can't really look at himself in the mirror and be too impressed with an Etonian petty aristocrat having made it to No. 10.

I hereby pledge to treat my life as the bonus round of a videogame. That means doing something impressive, but impressive in the same way that achieving a triple Scourge of Mordor combo or jumping a motorbike off Liberty City's highest building is impressive. It doesn't mean attempting to make money or climb the career ladder. That shows quite a staggering lack of imagination to me. Any white straight privately educated male who sees all the extraordinary world laid out in front and thinks that money or prestige are the best things to gain in it has not been paying much attention. Those are the things to lust after when you're struggling, not when you're cruising.

So go and do some backflips in life. Go crazy. Go help people. The risk for you is so comparatively light it's almost insulting to everyone else not to. And there are plenty of people to whom I wish I could go back in time, to that Home Counties private school, the people who wanted to win all the rugby matches and come first in all the tests and see life as an endless competition and just put a hand on their shoulder and say "It's fine. It's OK. You've already won."

Because if more straight white males realised they'd already won, they'd be a lot happier, have a lot more fun, and probably sort out a lot more problems.

Or they could fill up the courtyard of a castle with watermelons. Whatever floats their boat.

Why I Am Pro-Choice

Since this blog is still new, I'm going to put down thoughts on the basic issues as a statement of values. It's good to revisit the basics - it hopefully prevents dogmatic thinking creeping in. It's also a useful record in case my opinions change.

It won't surprise anyone to find out I'm pro-choice, but it is surprising to me how long it took me to figure out why. I was a liberal, and liberals are pro-choice, therefore I'm pro-choice. We don't have to discuss it too much in England, so there it sat. I have a suspicion a lot of male liberals don't like to go near abortion for a number of reasons - they think it's not their domain, they think only women can speak about it with any authority, and simply they at some level find it distasteful or shameful, however much they support it as a right. More male conversation about abortion would definitely be a good thing. That however, is not quite my point.

My point is really directed to pro-choice people male and female. What has irked me for a long time about the debate is that the sides never engage with each other's argument. Much of the pro-life movement is based around the idea that an embryo or foetus is a human life and therefore to abort it is murder. This is a simple proposition from which, understandably if that is your position, incalculable amounts of righteous energy is derived. Now whenever I debate the issue with a pro-life person, my instinct is to directly debate on that point, since that seems to me the heart of it. Most pro-choice rhetoric, however, is based around women's control of their bodies. This is a good argument. But it is utterly useless in debate because you are being accused of murder, which supercedes pretty much anything you can say. Surely the important bit is: "I don't think abortion is murder". Everything else misses their point.

I would suggest out-christianing the Christians and loving your enemies. Take them seriously as people, not as men (and women) trying to wrest control of reproductive organs from free people. Rather, meet them on that first point. Is abortion murder?

The pro-choice movement, it seems to me, spends far too little time on the "when does life begin" question. This may be because it's an uncomfortable subject, because it divides adherents, or simply because they refuse to play on the pro-lifer's turf. But I think it is the single best place to fight the battle. Because I don't know when life begins. It's something I struggle with. Not something you want to admit in such an ideological and impassioned debate with people accusing you of sanctioning the slaughter of the innocent. I can't claim the abortion rate in China, for instance, doesn't give me the willies. I can't claim I'm comfortable with my current position that the development of the spinal cord constitutes the beginning of what I understand as human life. It seems so arbitrary. But so much of life requires arbitrary distinctions about gradual changes. A child does not gain the sudden ability to help govern a democracy on their 18th birthday. We don't know where the line is, so we make a guess and draw one.

I may not know where life begins. But nor does anyone. Oh, the religious might say they know life begins at conception because God plans each soul, but they have no evidence of this or that their God exists, and so can't expect to have any say on the law because of it. The decision about whether the termination of a ball of cells is different in kind to the continual destruction of billions of sperm and thousands of eggs is sufficiently complex that the law cannot intervene. That leaves the decision with the mother by default. I have many other opinions on the issue, but this is the rock bottom of my belief, and though I welcome challenge, I cannot see how it is ever to be overcome by opposing arguments.

I fear that when the pro-life movement runs away from the accusation of their opponents, it looks like weakness. They should charge at it head on, and we should all be discussing where we think life begins. It's an uneasy topic for anyone, but it is where the strongest argument and eventual victory lies.

On YouTube Poop

The internet is stuffed with almost unlimited really, really stupid stuff to take our mind off having to go on living. Sometimes it as if the whole of human history up to this point was merely a tedious prelude to the time when people could add dramatic music to a chipmunk turning around or reimagine The Lord of the Rings with Saruman being played by a singer from a Soviet-era light entertainment programme. It is tempting to think this nonsense is palatable only to the stupid and directionless, but after meeting many of the brightest Oxbridge students who also have a love of stupid videos, I've reluctantly accepted that the international conferences on Deontological Ethics of 2045 will be attended by people who have watched hours of cats popping water balloons.

With this in mind, I feel we may as well devote space to the appreciation of the utterly stupid, since it is now so irrevocably woven into our very culture. I'd like to cast a vote for the "YouTube Poop", a style of video in which old movies and cartoons are re-edited and mashed up within an inch of their recognisable life to find the unintentional comedy just waiting to burst out. In particular, I'd like to give analysis to this clip from Les Miserables, since we have recently touched on the baffling absurdity of Russell Crowe. You might say that there's not much point pricking his pomposity since his recent career seems devoted to doing that itself, but first, watch this.

You're quite welcome not to laugh at any of it. That's the point about stupid guilty pleasures; they're quite possibly mystifying and probably embarrassing to anyone else. But in the confessional spirit of the thinkpiece blogosphere, I will here list absolutely everything that I find wonderful about this video.

 

1. The stupid pointless increases in volume, the annoying dubstep, the pitch changes. They exist entirely to annoy the viewer, and I have a quiet affection for anything with that much contempt for its user.

2. Valjean's very long prisoner number 24602060451, of course, but most especially the furious emphasis Javert places on the five.

3.  "You're no-one. lol."

4.  The exchange of Valjean sniffling and Javert going "nnnn"

5. The beautiful non-sequitur "I stole a loaf of bread." "And I'm Javert."

6. Javert shouting "FIVE" in isolation.

7. "My sister's child was the child of Death". The possibility of a fascinating demonic parallel plot to Les Miserables is tantalisingly glimpsed.

8. "Unless you learn the meaning of narushnashnzzzh" "I know the meaning of ezhnazhnalOOOOOOR." Whip-smart dialogue.

9. "What? You're a dangerous nun."

10. "And I'm Jojvert."

Thus a single very self-serious scene is reimagined with nothing more than standard video editing tools to include a liaison between Valjean's sister and the Grim Reaper, an absurd Brazil-like bureaucratic dystopia with needlessly long prisoner numbers, Pinter-like cross-talk, the questioning of the meaning of language itself, and the ironic juxtaposition of frivolous internet slang and the forced removal of identity within a massive punitive institution. If I take this video exactly as seriously as I'm definitely not meant to.


There's a half serious point here, which is something to do with the cannibalisation of existing straight-faced culture being an interesting source of future comic innovation that can find new stories to tell and new angles on characters with great ease and accessibility for anyone with an editing suite. I would go further, but I've been distracted by this Postman Pat mashup.

Pat can break through your door. You really should lock your door.

How About Noah

Russell Crowe seems determined to turn himself into the most ridiculous self-parody on earth. How exactly do you follow playing a Robin Hood from everywhere, an Inspector Javert who could moonlight warning Paris of impending air raids and the god-like father of Superman himself? You play Noah, obviously. The actual Noah who has to build the actual Ark to survive the actual Flood.

Right. Once you've watched that, and finished the long pause that I hope will come between the word "Um" and the word "what?", I hope you'll join me in preordering the vast buckets of popcorn that this doubtless catastrophically awesome turkey will demand. This is it, folks, this is the Hollywood singularity: Darren Aronofsky directing Russell Crowe playing Noah with Ray Winstone epitomising all humanity's cockney evil and Emma Watson practically wearing a sign on her head instructing critics to refer to her as "more wooden than the ark she's standing on". This is going to be fun. A disaster of biblical scale. We like watching colossal  disasters, which is why they make so many disaster movies. It's also why there are so many disasters in the Bible.

The ancient myths we have inherited served many purposes, but let's not forget they had to entertain. The destruction of Troy, the flood of Gilgamesh, the freezing of the world at Ragnarok: these narratives at some level satisfy our ghoulish love of watching other human beings get slaughtered for no reason they can control. Quite why this is is a question for anthropologists and literary critics: I suspect it might be because it magnifies a thousandfold a suspicion we don't dare to face head-on, that life is random and cruel and pointless. Such a vast scale of unfair slaughter paradoxically makes it easier to bear, even delightful, like getting into fits of laughter at a funeral. I can absolutely see why these stories exist.

The problem is that not everyone thinks of them like I do as just stories. In fact, rather a lot of people have a deep abiding faith in the religion that has its roots in these Bronze Age texts, and given this fact it seems a rather odd choice of movie to make. Because the Noah story to me is one of the moral cruxes of the entire Bible, even though it is usually remembered as a way of teaching kids the names of animals and the alphabet at the same time if you're lucky. 

One of my favourite bits of TV ever, God on Trial, features an extraordinary closing monologue from Antony Sher as a rabbi in Auschwitz denouncing God for his crimes. When he gets to the Flood, he asks the blindingly obvious question: What could the people of the earth have done that was so bad as to warrant annihilation? It's a shocking question because it links deeds to punishment. Genesis tells us that the hearts of men were evil, and so God slew them. But that is not how we conceive of justice. Even if we believe in the death penalty, we do so only in the case of murder, and since every human by definition could not be a murderer, the deaths of them all and their innocent children would seem monstrous to us.

And then there's the method of extermination. God could simply stop the hearts of every living creature, but chooses to drown them. Drowning is a terrible way to die. As waters rose, the terrified evil mothers would have run with their new-born babies to higher ground, expending every effort until it became clear the waters would not stop rising and in their exhaustion they and their children would succumb to the slow suffocation of the water. This is not the justice of a merciful God, but one who wishes beings to suffer before they die.

Now, picking holes in the Old Testament is boring and done by boring atheists all over the internet. But this particular story fascinates me because it is the most mythological of the Bible - it is so bleak, absurd and nihilist that it clearly comes from some anguished folk impulse. Indeed the flood narrative is famously common to many cultures. That makes it the hardest to reconcile with the providential Christianity in the latter Testament, basically because they're coming from two different places but need retrospectively to claim to be part of an overarching scheme. This is quite doable as long as you don't focus on the pain and death of the wicked and do focus on the progressive redemption of the sinful, which in a sense begins with the rainbow covenant.

And that is why this film is such an oddity. If you have a hundred million dollars to make a Biblical film, why force attention onto the most ethically uncomfortable moment? Even if the entire human race was made up of gang boss Ray Winstones, all threatening unspeakable things to debtors, we would feel a bit uneasy about watching their complete obliteration. It is possible that there's a fascinating counter-argument to all this in the film itself. It will be interesting to see.

But am I the only one who feels that if you wanted to point out the true horror in the Old Testament to as many people as possible, the best way would be to make a massive Hollywood blockbuster that appeared to take itself very seriously? Fascinatingly, it is written by John Logan, who has impressive pedigree. Just how mischievous can a massive film get?

 Come for the implosion of Russell Crowe's credibility,

stay for the stone-cold exploration of genocide

The Scottsboro Boys: A Horrible Musical

The Scottsboro Boys is the final musical collaboration of Kander and Ebb, the composer/lyricist team famous for Cabaret and Chicago, about the trial and sentencing of 9 innocent black men in 1930s Alabama. It's currently playing at the Young Vic in transfer from New York, and it is stunning. If you can get a ticket, you should go. I'd just like to put a couple of thoughts straight in my head about it, while it's fresh, because I found it a distinctly unpleasant experience, and I'm not sure everyone else in the theatre did. Certainly the standing ovations suggested people felt that the finale, while moving, was also in some way rousing. I just sat back feeling pummelled and bruised. Not guilty, or angry, or uplifted, or purged. It felt like recovering from an illness. And that's not going to go on the poster, but it's the best recommendation I've given to a play in a while.

I think this must have something to do with the minstrel show aspect. To illustrate:

This is one of the opening numbers, "Everyone's a Minstrel Tonight". The whole show is a reverse minstrel act - the black actors impersonate white stereotypes, including Southern Sheriffs, floozies, Jewish lawyers, and do it with a viciousness and lack of subtlety quite shocking to modern eyes. Many of the musical numbers have them dance in the traditional minstrel cakewalk fashion, wide eyes, splayed hands and fixed grins, even as they sing about the wonder of dying by electric chair. It becomes clear by the end that the nine men have become a minstrel show for all America, a righteous personification of the evils of Jim Crow for liberal America to feel better about itself and a defiant symbol of Southern independence for the Alabamans trying to get them executed. They are just figures in blackface. In one extraordinary number, Kyle Scatliffe sings a song in his own words before translating into pidgin mintrelsy for the benefit of the court.

At this point I'd like to jump back to Cabaret, which this show for me surpasses. But the standout moment in that show was the point at which Herr Ludwig hijacks the Jewish Schultz's birthday party with a rendition of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me":

This, by the way, is an entirely invented Bavarian folk song. But it sounds genuinely Teutonic in idiom. It's also impressively catchy, and coming as it does at the end of the first act, the audience goes into the interval singing to themselves: "Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see..."

The feeling I get when humming that to myself is what Kander and Ebb revive, brutally and repeatedly, in The Scottsboro Boys. And here's the crucial difference: both the Nazi folk song and the minstrel musical number feel like relics of a bygone age of brutality. But where the Bavarian oompah band survives in some form untainted by Hitler's shadow, the minstrel show has been utterly destroyed. It exists only in the vaguest of folk memories now, a tawdry and wretched shard of a dark-mirror world now consigned to our nightmares. There is no society for the preservation of traditional minstrel techniques, no revival shows, no performances at village fêtes to keep it alive. The only way we will ever see anything like it is in a show like this, in which black men take on the role of white men. Even then, to be honest, I found it horribly offensive, but this is the point.

By showing us so directly an art-form that took as its very axiom the natural hilarity of a race, their reduction to a single punch-line, an amusing dialect and a silly walk, we are shown a truth of dehumanisation from a different angle. Any social justice-minded work must try to wrongfoot its complacent audience to show them how man abuses man in a way they hadn't thought about before. Black men being unjustly consigned to the chair, I can handle on stage - I read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was young, so I think I know what's coming. But to watch a dance routine that is simultaneously breathtaking and breathtakingly offensive to my very understanding of common humanity: that is a feeling I hadn't felt before.

When I say this will almost certainly be your only chance to see the resurrection of the minstrel show, that sounds like the worst condemnation. But you should see it. To understand what racism is, you cannot simply look at what it fears and hates and sneers. You also have to look at what it laughs at. And it will make you feel so ill, you may feel unable to stand and applaud.

Where I Am On Iran

Something that needs reiterating about the Iranian negotiations: these are not negotiations over territory, resources, an ongoing conflict, or economic relations. Assuming that the Iranian regime wants a nuclear weapon at all - a point I'm still dubious of - then they are negotiations to stop a determined nation from acquiring 1940s technology.

These are not ideal chips to be bargaining over. If a country with the resources of Iran seriously wants the bomb, it will eventually develop it, one way or the other. To stop them you would need an air strike of unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness, devastating their entire programme in one blow, in precisely the attack that the Iranian authorities have presumably been preparing for for a decade or more. This seems to me, even in my capacity as armchair general, obviously absurd. Even assuming you could do that damage, such a strike would either lead to all-out war or simply the reversal of the programme by a few years, at which point it would become even more of a source of national pride and would be even more fetishised by the regime, publicly and privately. The only sure way to stop them getting a bomb is full-on invasion and regime change, which is so blackly hilariously stupid as an idea that I will not give any space here to pointing out just how moronic an idea it is.

So, assuming they really want the bomb, everything between now and a nuclear Iran is just the small talk as cucumber sandwiches are handed round the diplomatic soiree. The alternative is that they quite want the bomb, but would give it up for something better. Given that the best they can hope to achieve from these talks if they intended on using the nuclear threat as bargaining counter all along is a relaxation of sanctions that started, um, because they looked like they were trying to get the bomb, this doesn't seem likely.

The other alternative is that they don't want the bomb at all, and the regime is telling the truth when it says it dislikes nuclear weapons, and Khamenei is not working out how to deal with the incredibly awkward situation when he has to tacitly admit to having nuclear weapons having issued a fatwa against them. The conflicting intelligence reports on the matter, their refusal to allow complete IAEA inspections, the sudden suspicious appearance of new unreported facilities - this suggests to me that the truth is somewhere in between, and a lot of very dangerous bets are being hedged in Tehran. In that case it is possible that Iran doesn't know what it wants from these negotiations, and is stalling for time until Israel makes the kind of characteristically belligerent, bone-headed mistake that gives them more room to make a definitive decision one way or the other. In any of these cases, I get the feeling that tantalising though the negotiations might be to cover in the press, they are to a great degree a means of passing time. Still, jaw-jaw better than war-war and all that.

All fairly standard stuff, I know, but it's good to keep an eye on the basics with a story like this.

A Concise Review Of Thor: The Dark World

This is a film in which Idris Elba stabs a spaceship to death.

A Matter Of Some Gravity

I saw Gravity a few weeks ago. It's a very, very well made film, and I understand why the critics are raving. But it is exactly the kind of film that shouldn't have any film stars in it. The reason no one can ever remember the name of any character George Clooney has ever played is because you always think of him as George Clooney. He's just such a massive name, the apotheosis of Hollywoody Hollywood, and that goes for his legendary charm, too. There's a line in Gravity where Clooney actually draws attention to his own good looks in a manner that's meant to be dry and self-deprecating in contrast to the extreme danger of the moment. Instead you're jolted out of suspended disbelief to think "Oh, it's George Clooney pointing out the most famous thing about the actor George Clooney".

The shame is, it would have been a wonderful line if an unknown actor had said it. The whole film would have benefited a lot from unknown actors, in fact - the film's power comes from the terrifying realism of the peril, and the more we can identify with the protagonists the more we can intuitively feel that this is what getting lost in space must actually feel like. Watching Sandra Bullock on a spaceship mainly makes you realise you're watching a blockbuster where Sandra Bullock is on a spaceship.

Yeah, I know the money-men would never have greenlit a $100 million film without bankable stars. But here's a solution: halfway through the film I suddenly thought that Sandra Bullock's character looked a lot like Green Wing actor Tamsin Greig. So I spent the rest of the film pretending it was nice, normal Tamsin Greig and not Sandra Bullock out there in orbit. I think anyone would agree that would make a much better film.

Just, you know, popping off into space for a tick.

The Drowned Man, Bioshock And The Future Of Art

When I saw Punchdrunk's latest so-hot-right-now show The Drowned Man a few months back, my immediate review via Facebook status was "basically like playing a game of Bioshock with fewer weapons and more nudity". It only occurred to me a few minutes later that the cross-section of my friends who had played Bioshock and seen The Drowned Man might be quite small, and I could probably chalk this up as another joke that sounded clever at the time, but ended up just making me look weird. Is there a large overlap between gamers and theatre-geeks? I don't know, but I think there's much to be learned in both directions.

Sorry if no one has a clue what I'm going on about. This post is going to be quite esoteric, focussing in as it does on a specific game and a specific theatrical piece. But it's worth seeing if there's any cross-pollination that can be done. To recap: The Drowned Man is the latest "immersive" theatre piece from the famed company Punchdrunk. Immersive means you just wander around a massive environment alone and have to piece together the story being told for yourself, either by watching the performances of the actors who occasionally turn up in the various rooms to perform scenes, or by going looking for "secrets" yourself, such as hidden rooms, the letters of characters in drawers, one-on-one segments with actors that only you can access, if you know how.

Lots has been written in various blogs about the show, and I won't attempt much of a review of the show here. But for now I'd like to compare it at more length to the game Bioshock. Now, unfortunately such illustrative videos as I can find on YouTube are played by gamers more interested in slaughtering everything as quickly as possible than the theatrical qualities of the work, but I'll post the opening anyway so you can get a sense of what it all looks like.

No gaming moment I have come across has equalled that feeling you get after having surfaced at 1:20 and suddenly realising you're in control without so much as a by-your-leave. I ended up bobbing up and down for a good minute before realising I was going to have to get myself out of the water. Hitting you with a sudden disconcerting experience and then forcing you immediately to take control: it's the stuff of intelligent immersion, and a slightly less fiery version can be found at the start of The Drowned Man when you're unceremoniously separated from your group (I won't spoil anything) and left in an alien environment with nothing but your wits and a very basic sense of backstory.

In Bioshock you start with absolutely nothing, and are forced to piece together the disaster that has befallen the city of Rapture through a series of audio diaries left by its citizens. Watching the opening murder of a crazed Splicer through a pane of glass without knowing its context or being able to do anything about was replicated in my experience of DM when I witnessed a murder very early on, a creepy half-obscured strangulation that made no sense to me until a little later. It doesn't help that everyone around you is alien in both pieces: everyone in Rapture is genetically spliced to the point of insanity and the audience of DM are forced to wear large birdlike white masks to prevent interaction between us. In these two environments you are alone, and because you are the one doing the exploring, you bear all the responsibility for the scares you get. In either case, you could just go and wimper in a corner for three hours, something you can't do in The Woman in Black (theatrical or cinematic).

Though a friend of mine felt that Punchdrunk had got stuck in this horror/creepout mindset, I can't deny that the horror element was incredibly successful. A certain scene involving a suddenly walking scarecrow in DM was one of the best theatrical sleights of hand I have ever seen, while stumbling across a hidden study in which a "murdered " scarecrow sat slumped at the desk surrounded by pages of the Bible condemning homosexuality and adultery nailed into the wood by nail scissors was a fantastically odd and disturbing experience. But it also is an experience I could only get because I understood the video game milieu. I immediately ran around looking for hidden rooms and secret passages, desperately trying to interact with the actors and get secret cutscenes (one of which was remarkably sexy) as a reward. Non game-players simply didn't have this immediate response to the show, which I think lost them a lot of experience points.

Go and join in the unexplained shagging! Or don't, as you wish.

There is a larger point to be made here. Both of these pieces deal with weighty themes. Bioshock is, outside the generic horror/shooter confines, an impassioned response to Ayn Rand and Nietzschan ubermensch ideology, portraying a world so devoted to heroic individualism it collapsed into gentically modified anarchy. The Drowned Man is an adaptation of Buchner's unfinished masterpiece Woyzeck, dealing with madness, jealously and poverty. Now, the question of how much of either of these thematic undertones actually came through is vital to the future of a great deal of art, it seems to me.

On the one hand you have Bioshock, in which the story was there if you wanted it, but you were mainly concerned with the more pressing issue of what combination of lightning plasmid and shotgun would best take out a Big Daddy. On the other we have DM, where the story was there assuming you were extremely good at very efficiently hoovering up details, moving fast, discovering secrets, choosing which dance pieces to follow etc. But this sequence of tasks distracts you from the ability to engage with the material as surely as if Shakespeare prefaced each scene with "There are exactly 19 interesting things to notice in this scene, and you have to get all of them to move on". In other words, in both pieces the action of "playing" the piece was fundamentally detrimental to thinking about it or gaining any commentary on the themes it dealt with. This is a problem that will have to be dealt with at some point, by both games and theatre. Simply being immersed into an environment does not mean you'll gain anything from it, and may well distract from anything artistically coherent you could find in it.

I think there's a lot of mileage in treating literature as games. I think the ability to affect what is going on in front of you has enormous potential for reimagining the body of work we have inherited. Spec Ops: The Line, for instance, puts Heart of Darkness in a new light by suggesting that Kurtz's journey is inevitable for anyone, including you the player, who has enough orders and immediate goals in front of them that they forget their humanity. But starting with Punchdrunk, immersive theatre has to find a clear way of making the "player" reinterpret the work for themself, through their actions, so the literary basis is neither substantially changed nor lost under procedural baggage. That and giving the audience members a grenade launcher or two, perhaps.

One More Point On Revolutions

Also, by nature revolutions rid certain elements of their power, they'll fight back, be suppressed by the new regime, become martyrs to the new resistance movement, which will then require further suppression including the limiting of free speech and increased powers to security services, which rids the new regime of its legitimacy, cuts it off from decent sources of dissent to correct its course and creates a new elite in tyrannical control. I cannot see the alternative to this.

Revolution is a lazy excuse for radicals to avoid thinking. Or doing anything.

I don't like revolutions.

On Revolutions

I can't really be bothered to wade into the latest Russell Brand controversy. But I will say this: revolutions occur when there is a state of desperation in a nation. For any kind of successful revolution that isn't just a military coup, you need a very large mass of genuinely hungry and underemployed young men on the streets threatening violence or at the very least intolerable civil disobedience. And that isn't the case in Britain and isn't about to be. We're very well fed as a nation in relative terms, and yes, I am aware of the rise of food banks in the last couple of years, and yes, it's a disgrace, but no, food shortage is not of a scale to fuel armed rebellion and would be swiftly addressed by elites if it even approached that level.

Until such time as the revolution becomes remotely feasible and the government is ready to be seized on behalf of the masses, we live in the democracy we have. And that includes the duty to engage and to vote. This is not your decision to make, I'm afraid. You run the country, however difficult and corrupt and frustrating it is, and that was decided when the Reform Act was passed. The alternative is to abandon the country to people who are content with the corruption and sit around fantasising about their demise in an impossible revolution. It's not going to happen in a OECD country that can feed and heat the vast majority of its populace and provide them with huge amounts of distracting, comforting entertainment. So grow up and get back to doing something useful.

Fanboying

I'm looking forward to the new Thor movie. The first one was nonsense, yes, but it was proper nonsense, the sort of nonsense where Kenneth Branagh is directing and will quite happily give Anthony Hopkins the direction to go "HRAGH" for apparently no reason.

It also featured Idris Elba pausing a lot, a genially likeable turn by the lead Chris Hemsworth, the sort of actor whom it is impossible to gauge if they're any good at acting because they're too charismatic, and, for a summer blockbuster about a muscle-bound space Viking hitting giant robots with a hammer, plenty of feminism, if you're looking for it.

And then it had Tom Hiddleston, of course, who has become a surprise sex symbol amongst those denizens of the internet for whom nothing is sexier than five frames of someone's head jerking upwards on an infinite loop. Which, as it happens, seems to be an awful lot of people. Look at the number of Tom Hiddleston-based tumblrs and you'll see what I mean. Now, I probably have cause to thank Mr. Hiddleston for his lady-success - he went to my university, trod the same boards as me and is similarly poshly educated, and if he keeps the skinny posh Englishman look fashionable I can't complain. But I do find him and his tumblr heartthrob companions like Messers Cumberbatch, Hardy, Smith, Gosling et al irritating for a very specific reason. As a straight guy, I'm really jealous of being able to fancy them.

You see, the recent boom in "thinking woman's pin-up" so exemplified by the Double-First in Classics, threepiece-wearing, rug-cutting, Shakespearean Hiddleston has made me wonder why there has been  no equivalent for straight guys. Why the hell aren't there gushing, testosterone-drenched tumblrs devoted to, I don't know, Ruth Wilson? Naomie Harris? Felicity Jones? Natalia Tena? Can you even get posters of these people? Why can't guys get their act together and learn how to drool properly over talented, attractive women in the way that women have come to drool over talented, attractive men (Who mainly keep their clothes on)? 

The answer, as usual, is patriarchy. But that's a boring answer, so let's look at it a little further. The accepted position, cemented by every cliché of a teenage boy's bedroom, is that we are interested in pictures of bikini-or-less clad women of a very specific physical type. And that has never really been challenged, even after we grow out of adolescence. Because the teenage guy's bedroom wall of nude calendars and cars is the way we learn about ogling girls, we have come to associate all lust with immaturity once we're fully grown. You will never have conversations, as a straight male with your straight male friends, about how much you fancy a popstar or moviestar, because we haven't been taught how. We've been left with what amounts to "Phwoar! Eh? Eh?" or "look at the x on that", which is a. boring and b. past the age of seventeen, obviously puerile.

Men, it seems, don't really have much of an outlet for fancying women. Oh, they have porn, of course, but it's not really the same thing. And don't dare come up with the "Ah, but Fred, men and women just fancy each other in different ways. Women fantasise about the type of man they will meet, and getting saved by him" bullshit. For one thing, it reduces all men into slavering animals. We aren't, and we do find things like talent and wit and charm and mystery attractive. We just haven't found a way to talk about it yet, and I really wish we did. Because you know what? I quite like the idea of ogling women. Legitimately ogling, in the way that women and gay men could legitimately ogle Thor or James Bond in their gratuitous topless scenes. It definitely has its place - I think it's a nice steam-valve for sexual desire and it's fun to share that moment with friends. But in those films, because the rippling abs were attached to interesting or dangerous characters who drove the plot, not to mention give name to the franchise, it's difficult to claim too much objectification.

Whereas you can't man-squee over Megan Fox, reduced to the level of a plaything, bending over in Transformers. Because it's embarrassing to any thinking person. And that's the problem. Patriarchy is embarrassing. It's even embarrassing, deep down, to non-feminists. It's embarrassing to be reduced to a gurning eleven-year-old by the producers every time an object of desire comes onscreen, and everyone knows it. 

What we need are, firstly, more female characters with bite and edge and wit and agency to them. (Also, can half of them be played by Natalia Tena, please?) Secondly, we need to find a way to talk amongst ourselves, men, about why we fancy these characters. Something along the lines of "PHWOAR. I'd like to have an engaged conversation with her about US policy towards Iran before the implicit sexual tension became too much and we eventually fell on each other in a fit of passion. EH? EH?"

This sounds stupid. It shouldn't.

Let's face it, if there were such thing as

 fanboy tumblrs, she'd have about 3,000

Andrew Scott Is The Best Actor In The World

Well, that's it then. We have definitive proof of who the best actor in the world is. On Saturday the National Theatre had its 50th anniversary broadcast, featuring pretty much the entirety of British acting royalty in a kind of compilation album of great performances. My favourites all had their moments: Paul Scolfield, Ian McKellen, Anna Maxwell Martin, Paterson Joseph  - but all I could think about afterwards was Andrew Scott doing about two minutes from Angels in America. During which time he tore through 50 years of acting establishment with ease and made them all look like amdrammers. So there. By winning the evening, he has won the Acting Crown for all time, and let no more be said about it.

Buddy Comedy

Trying to think of more observations about America from my recent trip, but currently I can only think of this: the word "buddy" only ever seems to used in America in an unfriendly context. This seems strange.

Nirbhaya

I'm not going to get too pushy about this, but please follow this link to pledge in support of Nirbhaya, which is a play premiered earlier this year at the Edinburgh Festival. It's a response to the gang rape and murder of a medical student in New Delhi last year and it is now trying to raise funds to tour India itself.

I speak not with my reviewer's hat on at this point. As a piece of theatre, it has problems which if it were any other play I'd probably want to talk about. But that would be so spectacularly missing the point. It does the thing that theatre can do more brilliantly than any other medium when it comes to something like violence against women. It bears witness. As a member of that Edinburgh audience, I can only tell you what it felt like to be in that room - it felt like a contract was being signed between audience and performers. It read "I have seen now, and these other witnesses can testify that I have seen. And now I will go and talk about it."

That is how a lot of religion works (lets not forget how religious most cultures' theatre is in origin) and in support of a bad idea can be pernicious. But in this case I came out and, having suppressed my primary urge to punch the wall repeatedly for 15 minutes screaming Oh God No, resolved to talk a lot, to an almost boring degree, about sex and sexuality and consent and respect and that silent scream of anguish, muffled across the world, of millions of women in abusive and rape-based relationships. And it will do far more good in its home country than here.

There are plenty of good causes to pledge for, of course, but this is something I can really vouch for. For it not to go to India would be a disgrace. Just make it happen.

Sweden Sour

Posts on economics on this blog are going to be necessarily speculative, for the simple reason that I have no training in the subject, and in any case going hunting for all those stats and graphs and evidence to make a sustained and substantive point sounds boring and time-consuming. Instead I thought I'd lay out the kind of questions that the majority of untrained but interested minds are likely to ask, and then, if this blog ever has any readers, and if any of them happen to be economically literate, maybe they could take a stab at answering in the comments. That's quite far down the line of possibility, I realise.

Anyway, this post from Matt Yglesias has been doing the rounds. I have liked Mr. Yglesias for a while now, though I read him more when he was still at ThinkProgress and not the "5 ways the iPad is making Obama lose the black vote" Slate. In my lazy moments when I can't be bothered to find my own economic ideology (once again, too much effort with all those charts and fiscal multipliers and weird freshwater vs saltwater aquatic fistfights), I offload the hard work to pundits like him, Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman. Such bloggers are, after all, clearly well-versed in their subject, and are compatible with my own moderate social democratic viewpoint, favouring all the good stuff like regulated markets, decreased wealth disparity, and good old-fashioned high taxes.

Or so I thought. Because I'm also a lazy leftwing fan of the Scandinavian model, forever bringing up Finland whenever anyone challenges my dislike of private education at parties, they hardly have a private system at all and they lead the world dontchaknow. So what exactly do I do when Matt Yglesias writes an article pointing out that Sweden, well, doesn't actually have very high taxes? 

Ok, it does. But not in the areas I thought. Go read the article yourself, but here's a blinder for me: Sweden has no taxes on inheritance or residential property. What? But those are my favourite taxes! They're the good ones, the ones that punish unearned wealth, punish people for being the children of investment bankers and arms dealers and land-owners, surely? I always say we should have more of those. Surely good old Sweden can't be so thoughtless as to do something other than fulfil exactly what I imagine a perfect social democratic country looks like. The bastards, what the hell am I supposed to bullshit with if I can't start "well, in Sweden..."?

And then there's the light business regulation, deregulated labour market, low business taxes and hang on, when the hell did Sweden become a smoking neoliberal wasteland of greed and hedge fund managers stamping on the outstretched fingers of orphans? Even the high taxes seem to be a result of consumption taxes, which even I know punish the poor disproportionately because they spend more of their income on basic stuff rather than invest it or save it. And yet, it all seems to work pretty well, given that the key measure of any wealthy society, equality, is higher than just about any other European nation, and the capitalist engine of innovation seems to be ticking along nicely.

Just off to strip the assets from an impoverished mining town in order to fill our corporate coffers.

That leaves me in the uncomfortable position of probably having to change my mind a bit. Although if I were Obama I would pretend I hadn't changed my mind at all, so as to be able to use it as a bargaining counter in negotiation, I would probably concede the corporate tax rate could stand to come down. I might even have to concede that there is plenty of deregulation that can be done to improve innovation and the business environment (on the condition that it harms neither the environment nor financial stability). 

All this, of course, in my perfect world, would be in exchange for a more generous safety net, shorter work weeks, more maternity and paternity leave, and the rest of it. The deal for the average worker thus runs "your union no longer has the same power to protect your job, but hey, you get a ton of extra benefits from the state!" A nice fluid labour market with a highly educated workforce and lots of redistribution that also is open to the rampages of capitalism and a few very wealthy and powerful individuals and businesses. Hmmm. Actually, I still want to put the property and estate taxes back in there, because I still like them, so there. 

Is this what I actually want when I claim I still want capitalism, but a "good" capitalism? I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud. But I do know that there's a lot of work for me to do before my economic views are half mature, and it will probably involve a lot more grumbling at Sweden when it puts its money where its mouth is and does the capitalism side of things properly.