Gestalt Mash have just put up my second column providing alternative solutions to the mysteries in the BBC’s Holmes-inspired TV series Sherlock.
The column considers the possibility that dear old Sherlock may have fallen into the trap of Sinomania: Assuming that Chinese people possess super-human levels of competence. The concept of Sinomania draws upon this excellent article from the London Review of Books.
New website Gestalt Mash have just put up the first in a series of pieces I shall be writing for them entitled Sherlock’s Little Mistakes.
The piece is a commentary on the BBC’s recent Sherlock TV series and the idea behind it is to speculate ways in which Holmes might have been mistaken. In looking at the first episode in the series ‘A Study in Pink’ I considered the possibility that sometimes a suicide is just a suicide.
Futurismic have just put up my latest (and somewhat delayed) Blasphemous Geometries column.
The column looks at Crackdown 2 and wonders why its main narrative is so utterly incapable of maintaining our interest. Is the problem bad writing? Have our brains been re-wired by the internet as suggested by Susan Greenfield and Nicholas Carr? And if it has, should we care?
In a recent issue of his popular history podcast Hardcore History, Dan Carlin expressed a note of regret regarding the direction that historical scholarship has taken over the last generation or so. Time was, argues Carlin, that historians were in the Big Picture business: They would study whole periods of human history, cogitate upon them and then produce epic works of scholarship that drew upon their entire reserves of specialist knowledge and general scholarship in order to produce some universal moral or theory about human nature and society. The exemplars of this type of historian, argues Carlin, are Will and Ariel Durant — whose 11-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning The Story of Civilization is, shockingly, currently out of print — but I would also list Kenneth Waltz whose Man, The State , And War (1959) remains one of the foundation texts of International Relations.
Contemporary scholars, suggests Carlin, are not just specialists but niche-dwellers. Their interests lie precisely not in the Big Picture but in high definition images of microscopically small areas. Most contemporary academic scholarship focuses upon areas so precisely defined and delimited that not only have the products of academic research become increasingly irrelevant to the intellectual culture at large, they are frequently inaccessible and incomprehensible even to other academics working in similar fields. Modern academia is about depth, not breadth. Specificity, not generality.
Of course, this is the result of changes in the culture of higher education. Even after the Second World War, university education in general and post-graduate education in particular were still comparatively uncommon allowing researchers enough intellectual lebensraum in which to discuss big ideas without replicating each other’s work and treading on each others’ toes. However, as the number of post-graduate students increased, so too did the need for more and more people to carve out professional niches for themselves. As population numbers increased, so did competition for intellectual territory and in order to survive, young graduate students were forced to carve out small specialised intellectual niches that could sustain an entire career’s worth of research purely through the depth and power of their obscurity and inaccessibility.
This process of specialisatilon has resulted in academic criticism becoming divorced from the public sphere. While humanities academics still do contribute to accessible cultural journals such as the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Sight & Sound and The London Review of Books, their public writings are frequently of a profoundly different character and form than their professional writings. Indeed, the likes of A.C.Grayling and Richard Dawkins are famous public intellectuals but the works that make them well known are not necessarily the works that got them their professorships.
This shift in the humanities from an emphasis on breadth of knowledge to depth of specialisation is what lies behind Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. The book is an extended essay that uses wit and provocation to poke fun at the cult of the specialist and argue for a return to an intellectual climate that championed the generalist over the specialist and the creative thinker over the niche-dweller. Bayard’s book is not only funny and beautifully written, it is a wake-up call to an academic culture that foolishly surrendered the hustle and bustle of the intellectual marketplace for the easily-defended comfort of the ivory tower.
I just hope that the academics can find the stairs by themselves.
Videovista have my review of Scott Murden’s The Dinner Party, an Australian psychological thriller.
Though rather unyielding in tone (it contains no changes in tempo or plot twists that might vary the mood or allow the degree of tension to vary), the film contains a really insightful commentary on the potential of friendship, love and politeness to enable the worst kinds of transgressive behaviour. In essence, the film is an assault on the glaze of consent and agreement that we apply to all of our social interactions.
Nice to see an Australian film filtering through to UK release too.
Videovista have my review of Ozgur Yildirim’s Chiko, a neat little German crime drama set amongst the Turkish immigrant population.
The film starts well by delving into the same un-glamorous vein of social realism as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy but despite providing some interesting insights into the lives of second-generation Turkish immigrants in modern Germany, the film is let down by a histrionic and entirely unconvincing third act that lapses into poorly written melodrama.
Videovista have my review of Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In The Pit (a.k.a. En El Hoyo).
The film is a documentary about the building of a massive motorway overpass through Mexico City, a massive public works project that has been going on for years, employs thousands of workers in terrible conditions and which quite possibly will not make any difference to the city’s gridlock problems as the more roads you build the more people are encouraged to drive their cars.
This should have provided a fantastic backdrop for a documentary filled with Sisyphean themes but unfortunately, Rulfo decided to place the focus of his documentary on the experience of the workers and the workers turn out not to be particularly insightful either about themselves or the project they are working on. In fact, all they really seem to have to say is that they’d rather be getting laid and high than working and that their co-workers all take it in the arse. Hilarious. Disappointing but a beautifully realised DVD release.
Videovista have my review of the beautifully produced but appallingly written and conceived Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler directed by Toya Sato.
The film is based on a manga and an anime TV series and it constitutes an entry into one of my most favoured of sub-genres: the gambling movie. Unfortunately, while the film’s first game works beautifully, the other games it comes up with are nowhere near as interesting and rely instead upon torrents of psychobabble and hysterical over-acting for their tension and drama. Add to this toxic melange a socially regressive metaphor about the heroism of always playing by society’s rules regardless of how unfair they are and you have a film that is not only dumb but also quasi-fascistic. Ugh.
There are so many different ways in which to see the world. Sometimes, the differences between perspectives are so vast that it seems impossible that such a range of divergent emotional responses could have been provoked by the same thing or place. A simple country lane can be a beautiful holiday spot for walkers, a barely tolerable distance from home for commuters and a symbol of economic under-development for an ambitious local councillor. There is only one world but it is perpetually made and destroyed by the act of looking upon it. Wisdom lies not in the beauty or definition of one’s vision of the world but rather in one’s capacity for understanding that our vision of the world is not the only one that exists. That other perspectives are out there and that they all have a value, even the ones that are profoundly ugly and especially the ones that hurt us when we entertain them.
The first book of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy is a book that is weighted down by the multitude of ways of looking at the French city of Marseilles. Unlike other works of crime or historical fiction with an iconic location, it is not a book that attempts to capture the spirit of a particular place and time. Instead, the book argues for both the absolute necessity and utter impossibility of ever completely grasping all of the different ways in which to see a particular place or person. The book’s French title Total Kheops — lamentably released in English under the title Total Chaos — takes its name from a track on the first solo album by Kheops, the DJ of the Marseilles-based Rap outfit IAM. ‘Total Kheops’ refers to a situation of impossible complexity. Un bordel total. A complete cluster fuck.
Futurisimc have my thirtieth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Roleplaying Games and The Cluttered Self”.
The column is both a defence of Consumerism and an examination of the ways in which we express, formulate and find ourselves through the process of playing games. It is also the longest piece of writing I have ever published, clocking in at over 6,500 words. It is also the first piece of writing for which I took photos (the photos in question are of my old room at my mum’s house, which I have been clearing out over the past few months).
Aside from these minor formal experiments, the piece also marks something of a departure from my traditional critical stomping grounds and towards something a good deal more personal in that I try to use my thinking about games to shed some light on some thinking I have recently been doing about myself. I’m not entirely sure how effective the experiment has been, but it was certainly an interesting experience trying something so different.
Ruthless Culture 