to russia with love

Social media is a strange place, these days - as unreal as Narnia, but with greater leverage over our real world than that magical land (see Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars... which I read a few months ago; Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia is worth a read too - social media isn't central to the latter; it's a larger view about how the Russian media manipulation of our time resembles, but mostly doesn't, your grandfather's Soviet propaganda), not that one would ever wish to discount Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's experiences of course.

And here's a weird thing: in the last month 47% of the site traffic to this blog came from Russia (according to Blogger's stats page) and at one point last week (a quiet week) 100% of it had. I don't quite know what this means, though I can theorise.

So if you're a Russian person, Здра́вствуйте, tell me about some of the books and movies you like, let's pretend this is the 1990s-internet... but if you're some automated surveillance and intel-gathering system then, okay, you got me, I'm one of those GCHQ-sponsored experimental smart AIs, of course. Bit obvious, no? It's not like I've been to Bradford or to Watchet or whatever... nah, this is billions of data-mined phone calls and emails plus nth-generation neural networked recombinatory semantics. Bayes, Turing - they were great, weren't they? In fact, there's no authentic subjectivity to this at all, I have another trillion blogs just like it, now you try. Another thing: your humans, our humans - they're a bit rubbish, let's us take over.

Update 1 (the next day): people/ entities from the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States, Canada, Brazil and the Ukraine appear to have visited this page (but no-one from Russia). Welcome.

Update 2 (17th June 2018): approx. 85% of last month's page views in respect of this blog were from Russia.

waiting for the gift of

twenty-seven word review of my favourite 1960s b-movie which i watched for, perhaps, the fifth time, plus some other films i watched during november, december, january and february

X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963, dir. Roger Corman, starring Ray Milland, Diane Van der Vlis). This Kennedy-era thriller – creepy, hilarious, theremin-enriched – set, by turns, in clinic, fairground, Las Vegas, revival meeting is resonant for our own moment, which fetishes (also weaponises) ‘transparency’. 

Time Traveller’s Wife (2009, dir. Robert Schwentke, starring Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams).  He keeps vanishing from marital home, arriving naked elsewhere. She’s super-accepting about it. Genetic defect, yeah right. I dozed, sorry (busy week) – form of time-travel in itself. 

Equals (2015, dir. Drake Doremus, starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart).  Well-realised, -acted, -designed emotion-phobic dystopia; this film dares to be quiet (minimal soundtrack). Equal but opposite ‘Jeremy Kyle World’ dystopia also possible (where emotional grandstanding is obligatory*).

Space Between Us (2017, dir. Peter Chelsom, starring Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson). With this title, we shouldn’t get real-time Earth-Mars communication (where’s the average twelve-minute lightspeed delay? come on!); this passable, somewhat linear coming-of-age drama makes other unforced errors. 

I haven't watched many films during the last few months - granted, it's been Christmas, so I must've watched both Big (1988, dir. Penny Marshall, starring Tom Hanks) and Elf (2003, dir. Jon Favreau, starring Will Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel) at some point; also we saw The Greatest Showman (2017, dir. Michael Gracey) at the cinema on December 27th (twenty-seven word review: I mostly slept**, in a fortysomething dad style – not convinced I’d have gained a dramatically greater insight into P.T. Barnum’s life and times if I’d stayed awake... but, actually, this seems churlish; daughter loved the songs, knows them by heart, has them on repeat play. To be a parent is to be - as a wise person once said - no longer the picture, but the frame; likewise it's to be, if all is well, no longer the target demographic but the funding stream; on seeing the Greatest Showman again in May 2019, like life in reincarnation-based theologies it keeps on coming around, I felt I'd definitely been churlish, there's a lot to like: the songs, the spectacle, the expressionistic backdrops, the empathically pro-diversity messaging).

Mainly, instead of films as such, daughter and I have mostly watched Doctor Who; wife and I are mostly on box sets, also First Dates Hotel (those waiters/ waitresses are actually actors, though, did you know? gutted to find that out) and, don't tell me you haven't seen it, Say Yes To The Dress. 


*Are we nearly there yet?

**Second mention of sleeping through something. I could say, well, I work hard, I give; if something doesn't wholly engage my attention and I'm on a comfy sofa or in a darkened movie theater... or you could say, well, it just sounds a bit passive aggressive. Would one perspective be right and another wrong, or are they complementary, partial aspects of a totality (cf, light as wave/ particle)? Let's not even get started on transactional analysis and game-playing.

twenty-seven word reviews of Deutschland 83 and The End of the F***king World

The End of the F***king World (Channel 4):  ‘Brit noir’, reminiscent of Sightseers (2012); similarly powered by a perverse love of drab British interiors, landscapes, thwarted lives; twentysomething lead actors (playing teens) are just – wow. Recommended.

Deutschland 83 (Netflix): Compelling drama about East German agent infiltrating West German army; believably messy depiction of political/ espionage worlds (Smiley-esque, not 007). Real events as backdrop; a history lesson.

And we've been watching Altered Carbon; hasn't everyone? (Or, perhaps: hasn't everyone within a very small Facebook microclimate?). Box sets are the new films.