Sunday, April 4, 2010
Racial tensions on the rise in South Africa
Keep an eye on South Africa for the near future, because racial tensions are on the rise. Today saw the murder of Eugéne Terre'blance, the leader of the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging - Afrikaner Resistance Movement), the largest political and paramilitary organisation of the far-right, white-supramecist fringe of SA politics (recently re-activated). I won't be shedding any tears for him – even under apartheid SA, he became a figure of ridicule in the mainstream, his movement clashed even with apartheid-era police and in the late 90s was jailed for assault and attempted murder on two blacks – but this bears watching. He was apparently beaten to death in his sleep by two blacks, on his farm. This touches a few sensitive issues for Afrikaners: firstly, for years there has been an endemic phenomenon of white farmers, still a heartland consituency of Afrikanerdom, being murdered on their farms, sometimes including torture and the murder of very young children; secondly, the leader of the ANC's youth wing, Julius Malema, has recently though well of it to resurrect violent chants like 'kill the Boer [white farmer]' and accordingly as been found guilty of hate-speech, causing huge public controversy. Malema is a major public figure, and considered by many to be a possible future leader of South Africa, and his vitriol towards non-blacks (predominantly, but by no means exclusively, whites) is a major sticking point in current SA politics. Terre'blanche's support is more vocal than widespread, though it must be mentioned that it has mobilised violently before, once to spectular effect, and once in bloody farce. But the major danger of this episode is as a bellwether, or as something which causes the lines of racial conflict to again be drawn across my homeland.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Thomas Hobbes on climate change
Which is the cause, that the doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the Pen and the Sword: whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That The Three Angles Of A Triangle Should Be Equall To Two Angles Of A Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as farre as he whom it concerned was able.
Leviathan, Chapter XI
This incidentally, is also Thomas Hobbes's view on the debate surrounding evolution.
I'm no climate scientist, and I have no special reason to believe that the orthodox view in that field, that our planet is experiencing anthropogenic climate change, is correct. But I do note that the interests of the skeptics in climate science are pretty narrowly focussed, and incidentally, focussed on exactly those parts of it which interferes with the interests of people outside of the science.
What is suspicious about this is that the results in favour of anthropogenic climate change is part of a normal science: they have been spit out as part of the business as usual of a research programme, and fits in place with the other aspects and results of that normal science. For instance, pronouncements on anthropogenic climate change depends on tracking the greenhouse effect, of measuring the role of carbon in said effect, of tracking climate change over time, etc. None of these things have been questioned by the climate change skeptics, except to the degree necessary to deny anthropogenic climate change. And that's strange, from a scientific point of view. It isn't quite that all these things stand and fall together, but they definitely are interlinked. But public interest in the field extends exactly as far as its results impact business as usual outside of climate science. And that arch-cynic Thomas Hobbes gives an indication of what to expect in such situations.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Metal interlude - The Headbang Riff Force Scale
Bolt Thrower has given the world many great things: a succesful marriage of Napalm Death-esque grind and heaviness and head-bopping riffage; unabashed, even triumphant, links with hobby wargaming and other ostensive displays of geekery; albums like Mercenary (listening to which gave birth to this post) showing that they are much more than a novelty band as it thrashes all and sundry without making use of a ludicrous (and ridiculously awesome) fantasy backdrop; and the greatest live photo of all time (which I respectfully reproduce above). Because there are so many dimensions to their staggering (literally) achievement, I have drawn up the following measure (based on the Beaufort Scale for wind speed), based on the impact of the sound waves on the listener. In the future I can perhaps point to this scale as a way of indicating how much some album rocked my boat, but now it should suffice to say that Mercenary encouraged me to draw it up. Even while sitting down and typing this out the music hit force 10 quite often. These are conditions not to be trifled with, and I humbly submit this dispatch from the front lines. This story must be told.
The Headbang Riff Force Scale
Force 0 (Silence): No sound.
Force 1 (Light sound): Ambient sounds in background.
Force 2 (Light melody): Discernable musical structure to sounds in background.
Force 3 (Gentle melody): Music with clear structure in background.
Force 4 (Moderate melody): Music listened to with attention.
Force 5 (Fresh theme): Music is met with approving nods.
Force 6 (Strong theme): Music is met with repeated bobbing of head to the beat.
Force 7 (Heavy theme, moderate riffing, near metal): Listener actively and energetically bobs head to the beat, tapping bodily extremities in time.
Force 8 (Metal): Listener ceases all tasks except for energetically bobbing head to the beat, or percussively marking out time in some other bodily fashion, giving full attention to the impact of the music, may casually throw the sign of horns.
Force 9 (Heavy metal): Listener is engaged in headbanging behaviour, may energetically throw the sign of horns, starts grimacing, pursing lips or holding some other abnormal facial expression, entirely given over to the riff.
Force 10 (Storm, fucking metal): Headbanging is so energetic the listener might bump into stationary objects and struggle to keep balance, or is accompanied by simultaneous throwing of horns or tense arching of fingers towards the chest while grimacing in an exaggerated manner.
Force 11 (Violent storm): Listeners behaviour is so energetic as to seem to disregard personal safety, as in apparently intensionally bumping into objects with some force, slinging head in a distressing manner, or fixedly staring ahead with battered consequence as the body gets rolled around by the riff force.
Force 12 (Hurricane force): No further thought is given of continued existence past that off the riff, displayed either by the greatest extremes of headbanging behaviour, like throwing oneself off of heights, into crowds or into solid structures, or by standing transfixed by the force of the riff, showing traces of panic or relief but solid in the belief that this is the inevitable and appropriate sign of the end times to come.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Swanton - A Virtue Theoretic Account of Right Action
There's too little philosophy on here at the moment, despite the fact that what keeps me from updating this blog is all the philosophy I'm doing out there in meat space. Here's a small something I did in the course of the programme I'm in: a summary of one of my favourite ethical articles, Christine Swanton's 'A Virtue Theoretical Account of Right Action' (Ethics 112 (October 2001): 32–52, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/322742 ).
During my time as a philosophy undergraduate at Auckland I came to understand that the normal textbook portrayals of virtue ethics are terribly insufficient. On most accounts, virtue ethics is supposed to be not about what you do but what kind of person you are. That's complete nonsense, of course. To paraphrase Mary Midgley: to do something based not on what the situation demands but merely in order to not sully your own character is far from admirable, but frivolous and narcissistic. If virtue ethics really were about being and not doing, it would make its adherents all be guilty of crass inconsiderateness. And the theory is certainly better than that. The mistake the common 'being not doing' characterisation of virtue ethics makes is that it makes the virtues to be about a person, whereas they obviously should concern people's relationship to their situations: honest people respond to questions with earnestness, to deceipt with distaste, and so on.
What I like about Swanton's paper is how clearly and powerfully it addresses that relationship between the person and the situation, and what the virtue- and vice-terms say about that situations. Swanton isn't the only virtue ethicists to get this right, of course, but I like the way she addresses it.
She tries to give us criteria for acting rightly as follows: “(1) an action is virtuous in respect V (e.g., benevolent, generous) if and only if it hits the target of (realizes the end of) virtue V (e.g., benevolence, generosity); (2) an action is right if and only if it is overall virtuous.” She presents this 'target-centred' approach as an alternative and in contrast to Rosalind Hursthouse's 'qualified agent' approach (which is what Timmons discusses), wherein we can identify right actions by considering whether a virtuous person acting in character would do them, and Michael Slote's 'motive centred' approach, where an act is right if it comes from virtuous motives. How her approach differs from the other two is that she teases apart 'acting from virtue', where you act with the same motivations, emotions and perspective as somebody with the virtue would, and 'virtuous acts', which are when you do what the virtue demands of you (hit the target of the virtue). For her the right acts are the ones that manage to do the just, honest, benevolent, etc, thing, whereas the good ones are those you do out of justice, honesty, benevolence, etc.
Even if we don't end up agreeing with Swanton, the article is interesting and worthwhile in a few ways. Most importantly, the distinction between acting from virtue and virtuous acts helps us to understand exactly what virtues are and how they're supposed to help us make the right decisions. Virtues are dispositions of character – the way somebody might characteristically respond to their circumstances – which includes what they see in a situation, how they feel about what they see, what they are motivated to do and what they aim for in those situations. Acting from virtue is to act based on all of these internal states, that is, to have that virtue during acting. However, you can do something with the same effect as someone who has a virtue without really having it: for instance, I can do something kind even if I am not by following the prompts a kind person gives me. This example of kindness would be a virtuous action, but it wouldn't be acting from virtue. A virtuous act, like the example, would be one which hits the target of the virtue: nurturing the well-being of the person I'm tending to, or however you want to put it. It is worth noting that the distinction between acting from virtue and acting virtuously isn't one of getting everything internal to yourself right versus getting everything external right, since the target of a virtue might sometimes be internal to yourself, like courage where you need to control your own fear and confidence.
The example of somebody doing the right thing by imitating somebody virtuous is an example where you act virtuously without acting from virtue. You could also act from virtue without hitting the target of the virtue. For instance, I can have all the relevant internal states but not the necessary knowledge about the circumstances to do what is appropriate, and thus my actions in such a situation won't be virtuous. This is a problem to both the qualified agent and motive centred approaches, since they concern themselves only, in some way, with acting from virtue. So, if we think that an action having the appropriate effect is important to it being a right action, we need to consider the targets of the virtues if we are to make use of them in action guidance.
Swanton's paper gives an admirably clear and comprehensive discussion of what a target-centred approach to virtue ethics is and why we should pursue it. We don't need to decide now whether the other virtue ethical approaches can take up Swanton's challenge: that would be a very involved discussion which goes somewhat further into the detail of virtue ethics than we need. For our purposes, though, it is very worthwhile to see how the virtue ethical approach is different from the others we've studied. As Swanton shows, using Pettit's distinction between promoting and honouring goods, we can see that virtue ethics isn't consequentialist, not even a target-centred version. This is because an act must hit the target of every virtue in play in a situation, thus you can't rightly do something vicious but must keep your hands clean. Swanton mentions that deontology typically doesn't distinguish between right and good acts like she does, where it is possible to do every good thing you can and still not do what is right. For a deontologist to say this would be to say that you can follow every rule and law and still miss the right action, which isn't something they could admit. There are other differences as well, but this will do us for now.
During my time as a philosophy undergraduate at Auckland I came to understand that the normal textbook portrayals of virtue ethics are terribly insufficient. On most accounts, virtue ethics is supposed to be not about what you do but what kind of person you are. That's complete nonsense, of course. To paraphrase Mary Midgley: to do something based not on what the situation demands but merely in order to not sully your own character is far from admirable, but frivolous and narcissistic. If virtue ethics really were about being and not doing, it would make its adherents all be guilty of crass inconsiderateness. And the theory is certainly better than that. The mistake the common 'being not doing' characterisation of virtue ethics makes is that it makes the virtues to be about a person, whereas they obviously should concern people's relationship to their situations: honest people respond to questions with earnestness, to deceipt with distaste, and so on.
What I like about Swanton's paper is how clearly and powerfully it addresses that relationship between the person and the situation, and what the virtue- and vice-terms say about that situations. Swanton isn't the only virtue ethicists to get this right, of course, but I like the way she addresses it.
She tries to give us criteria for acting rightly as follows: “(1) an action is virtuous in respect V (e.g., benevolent, generous) if and only if it hits the target of (realizes the end of) virtue V (e.g., benevolence, generosity); (2) an action is right if and only if it is overall virtuous.” She presents this 'target-centred' approach as an alternative and in contrast to Rosalind Hursthouse's 'qualified agent' approach (which is what Timmons discusses), wherein we can identify right actions by considering whether a virtuous person acting in character would do them, and Michael Slote's 'motive centred' approach, where an act is right if it comes from virtuous motives. How her approach differs from the other two is that she teases apart 'acting from virtue', where you act with the same motivations, emotions and perspective as somebody with the virtue would, and 'virtuous acts', which are when you do what the virtue demands of you (hit the target of the virtue). For her the right acts are the ones that manage to do the just, honest, benevolent, etc, thing, whereas the good ones are those you do out of justice, honesty, benevolence, etc.
Even if we don't end up agreeing with Swanton, the article is interesting and worthwhile in a few ways. Most importantly, the distinction between acting from virtue and virtuous acts helps us to understand exactly what virtues are and how they're supposed to help us make the right decisions. Virtues are dispositions of character – the way somebody might characteristically respond to their circumstances – which includes what they see in a situation, how they feel about what they see, what they are motivated to do and what they aim for in those situations. Acting from virtue is to act based on all of these internal states, that is, to have that virtue during acting. However, you can do something with the same effect as someone who has a virtue without really having it: for instance, I can do something kind even if I am not by following the prompts a kind person gives me. This example of kindness would be a virtuous action, but it wouldn't be acting from virtue. A virtuous act, like the example, would be one which hits the target of the virtue: nurturing the well-being of the person I'm tending to, or however you want to put it. It is worth noting that the distinction between acting from virtue and acting virtuously isn't one of getting everything internal to yourself right versus getting everything external right, since the target of a virtue might sometimes be internal to yourself, like courage where you need to control your own fear and confidence.
The example of somebody doing the right thing by imitating somebody virtuous is an example where you act virtuously without acting from virtue. You could also act from virtue without hitting the target of the virtue. For instance, I can have all the relevant internal states but not the necessary knowledge about the circumstances to do what is appropriate, and thus my actions in such a situation won't be virtuous. This is a problem to both the qualified agent and motive centred approaches, since they concern themselves only, in some way, with acting from virtue. So, if we think that an action having the appropriate effect is important to it being a right action, we need to consider the targets of the virtues if we are to make use of them in action guidance.
Swanton's paper gives an admirably clear and comprehensive discussion of what a target-centred approach to virtue ethics is and why we should pursue it. We don't need to decide now whether the other virtue ethical approaches can take up Swanton's challenge: that would be a very involved discussion which goes somewhat further into the detail of virtue ethics than we need. For our purposes, though, it is very worthwhile to see how the virtue ethical approach is different from the others we've studied. As Swanton shows, using Pettit's distinction between promoting and honouring goods, we can see that virtue ethics isn't consequentialist, not even a target-centred version. This is because an act must hit the target of every virtue in play in a situation, thus you can't rightly do something vicious but must keep your hands clean. Swanton mentions that deontology typically doesn't distinguish between right and good acts like she does, where it is possible to do every good thing you can and still not do what is right. For a deontologist to say this would be to say that you can follow every rule and law and still miss the right action, which isn't something they could admit. There are other differences as well, but this will do us for now.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Petty Resentment Theatre - Liveblogging 'Invictus'
A film-buff friend of mine encouraged me to watch the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus, largely to see my reaction to it. Well, here it is. I made a log of the various states of outrage I reached as I watched the movie, which I now post here .
--
Dear god, this is hammy.
For heaven's sake, they take almost ten minutes in the first scene where the black and white bodyguards rub each other up the wrong way.
--
Now they're talking about changing the sport emblem, and Madiba's refusal to do so, the way other movies talk about launching the h-bomb. For fuck's sakes.
--
Wait, and now Mandela is supposed to be wearing a South African flag pin? Dear god in heaven, why? I can understand Morgan Freeman not getting the accent right (and he doesn't -- it's quite distracting) but there's no fucking reason to give Nelson fucking Mandela ostentatious symbols of dedication to his nation. Anyway, they're really anachronistic, and have never been common in South Africa. I've certainly never seen Mandela wear one. It's a really asinine little zit on this hairy asscrack of a movie.
--
The Mandela character talking about Afrikaners: "They treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away from them, we will lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be."
Actually, Afrikaners (and the white English -- anybody remember the English? Put in place racial segregation, disenfranchised and dispossessed blacks, still to this day own most of the economic capital in SA's vital industries?) feared that the blacks would rise up and kill the whites in their beds, but never mind that. I'm sure a game of football is constitutive of a healthy nation, and this movie as stirring a portrayal of nation-building, as you make it out to be.
--
Chester... Chester... Chester... yet throughout all the many (many, many) references to the Sprinboks' one player of colour, nobody dignifies Chester Williams enough to mention his surname.
--
"It means 'God Bless Africa', which you got to admit, we can use."
And with that touching evocation of pure truth, Francois Pienaar calls knowing glances to the eyes of the racists who, just five second earlier, were throwing away the song sheet to the national anthem. (It had been the anthem for over a year by then, so it would've been hard to find anybody in South Africa who didn't know what 'Nkosi Sikilel' iAfrika' meant).
--
"Are those the judicial appointments for the Free States?"
Free State. State, not States. I know you come from the Unified States of America, Clint Eastwool, but realise that these things really stand out to anybody who knows anything about the thing you're making a movie about.
--
Also, Jonah Lomu the New Zealander gets named more and gets more screen time than any Springbok other than Francois Pienaar and Chester Token.
--
Another strange thing the movie does: it has given more mention to the NZ team's pre-game traditions than it has on the South African coach, Kitch Christie, who took over a team in shambles and transformed them into a world champion team. He had an unbeaten record in his tenure, starting in 1994, through the World Cup and for some time later, until cancer forced his retirement and killed him. I'd have thought that was worth him at least getting named.
Another strange fact: Mandela's PA in the movie is black, whereas in real life it was a white woman. I wonder why they changed that, given that this train stops at every other Transformation Station on the Track to Reconciliation.
--
Oh Jesus, this is just stupid. In the build-up to the World Cup Final, a 747 did a flyby of the stadium. Everybody knew about it, it was scheduled, part of the airline's intensive PR campaign tied to the tournament, etc, etc. But the movie makes it out to be some maverick pilot who decided to buzz the game on his own prerogative, shocking everybody and putting security into a panic. (What would he be doing in the air in a 747? Is he making a pass over the stadium with a fully loaded commercial liner? Whereupon he personally prepared a supportive message on the undercarriage?). It's another example with Hollywood's abusive relationship to real-life stories: it wants to tap into the drama of actual events, but it never resists the temptation to embellish reality in the most pointlessly showy, grandstanding ways.
--
Dear god, this is hammy.
For heaven's sake, they take almost ten minutes in the first scene where the black and white bodyguards rub each other up the wrong way.
--
Now they're talking about changing the sport emblem, and Madiba's refusal to do so, the way other movies talk about launching the h-bomb. For fuck's sakes.
--
Wait, and now Mandela is supposed to be wearing a South African flag pin? Dear god in heaven, why? I can understand Morgan Freeman not getting the accent right (and he doesn't -- it's quite distracting) but there's no fucking reason to give Nelson fucking Mandela ostentatious symbols of dedication to his nation. Anyway, they're really anachronistic, and have never been common in South Africa. I've certainly never seen Mandela wear one. It's a really asinine little zit on this hairy asscrack of a movie.
--
The Mandela character talking about Afrikaners: "They treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away from them, we will lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be."
Actually, Afrikaners (and the white English -- anybody remember the English? Put in place racial segregation, disenfranchised and dispossessed blacks, still to this day own most of the economic capital in SA's vital industries?) feared that the blacks would rise up and kill the whites in their beds, but never mind that. I'm sure a game of football is constitutive of a healthy nation, and this movie as stirring a portrayal of nation-building, as you make it out to be.
--
Chester... Chester... Chester... yet throughout all the many (many, many) references to the Sprinboks' one player of colour, nobody dignifies Chester Williams enough to mention his surname.
--
"It means 'God Bless Africa', which you got to admit, we can use."
And with that touching evocation of pure truth, Francois Pienaar calls knowing glances to the eyes of the racists who, just five second earlier, were throwing away the song sheet to the national anthem. (It had been the anthem for over a year by then, so it would've been hard to find anybody in South Africa who didn't know what 'Nkosi Sikilel' iAfrika' meant).
--
"Are those the judicial appointments for the Free States?"
Free State. State, not States. I know you come from the Unified States of America, Clint Eastwool, but realise that these things really stand out to anybody who knows anything about the thing you're making a movie about.
--
Also, Jonah Lomu the New Zealander gets named more and gets more screen time than any Springbok other than Francois Pienaar and Chester Token.
--
Another strange thing the movie does: it has given more mention to the NZ team's pre-game traditions than it has on the South African coach, Kitch Christie, who took over a team in shambles and transformed them into a world champion team. He had an unbeaten record in his tenure, starting in 1994, through the World Cup and for some time later, until cancer forced his retirement and killed him. I'd have thought that was worth him at least getting named.
Another strange fact: Mandela's PA in the movie is black, whereas in real life it was a white woman. I wonder why they changed that, given that this train stops at every other Transformation Station on the Track to Reconciliation.
--
Oh Jesus, this is just stupid. In the build-up to the World Cup Final, a 747 did a flyby of the stadium. Everybody knew about it, it was scheduled, part of the airline's intensive PR campaign tied to the tournament, etc, etc. But the movie makes it out to be some maverick pilot who decided to buzz the game on his own prerogative, shocking everybody and putting security into a panic. (What would he be doing in the air in a 747? Is he making a pass over the stadium with a fully loaded commercial liner? Whereupon he personally prepared a supportive message on the undercarriage?). It's another example with Hollywood's abusive relationship to real-life stories: it wants to tap into the drama of actual events, but it never resists the temptation to embellish reality in the most pointlessly showy, grandstanding ways.
Petty Resentment Theatre - Final verdict on 'Invictus'
Yeah, so Invictus is a piece of shit. It likes to have lots of side-stories showing the different South African races growing into camaraderie, each more predictable and contentless than the last. Each of these act as support for the main theme of racial reconciliation, which is itself suitably shallow, signfying nothing. There's nothing here to engage with the story that's supposed to be told, we're just shown a series of images which are apparently meant to invoke all the storytelling inside of us. 'What just happened?' 'The domestic servant also got given a ticket to the big game.' 'And what now?' 'The brave knight killed the dragon with his sword.' Because the movie is in a rarefied air floating over the actual story, we are never touched by the difficulties shown and unmoved by their easy resolutions. There is a succession of inconsequential and largely made-up dramas thrown on the way, but the movie is so single-minded in its portrayal of Reconciliation that I find it incredible that anybody would be impressed by little insets that are so obviously beside the point.
Freeman is also very unconvincing as Mandela. I find his very frequent mistakes in the accent really distracting, but I can forgive that. But perhaps the direction is at fault: Mandela never gave great speeches, whereas the movie makes him out to be someone who solves his problems through rousing oration. Don't bother looking for examples of that in the real world: there aren't any. The film does try to highlight Mandela's more noted characteristics of character and humility, but again its lack of connection with any believable and filled-out story hamstrings this effort. Because we are just given images but not story, there's nothing to add flesh to Mandela's characterisation, and we're given nothing but assurances that he's a great man. Not good enough, I'm afraid: at some stage you need to stop making promises and start delivering on them.
Matt Damon does a much better job with the accent. Too bad he's directed to play a quiet, halting, apparently insecure pretty boy. There's nothing in the character for the actor or the audience to grab hold of.
Oh yes, and as someone who has watched and played rugby all my life, I found the rugby match sequences incomprehensible and pointless. Most of the time I was busy noticing how most of the players looked like underdeveloped schoolboys rather than world-class athletes, or wondering whether the bits of play they were showing conform to the rules of the game. That is how little that sequence captured my imagination.
I liked the movie best when it quietly showed scenes from the actual South Africa: the shots of the townships, and so on. They are believable, and tell quite enough of a story on their own. I very much did not like it when these scenes were artificially augmented with cinematic themes written in letters ten feet tall. Given that it's supposed to be the telling of an actual story, and the poignancy of said story is supposed to be what drives the message home, the film's continued deviation from retelling into embellishment is not only asinine, but self-defeating.
Freeman is also very unconvincing as Mandela. I find his very frequent mistakes in the accent really distracting, but I can forgive that. But perhaps the direction is at fault: Mandela never gave great speeches, whereas the movie makes him out to be someone who solves his problems through rousing oration. Don't bother looking for examples of that in the real world: there aren't any. The film does try to highlight Mandela's more noted characteristics of character and humility, but again its lack of connection with any believable and filled-out story hamstrings this effort. Because we are just given images but not story, there's nothing to add flesh to Mandela's characterisation, and we're given nothing but assurances that he's a great man. Not good enough, I'm afraid: at some stage you need to stop making promises and start delivering on them.
Matt Damon does a much better job with the accent. Too bad he's directed to play a quiet, halting, apparently insecure pretty boy. There's nothing in the character for the actor or the audience to grab hold of.
Oh yes, and as someone who has watched and played rugby all my life, I found the rugby match sequences incomprehensible and pointless. Most of the time I was busy noticing how most of the players looked like underdeveloped schoolboys rather than world-class athletes, or wondering whether the bits of play they were showing conform to the rules of the game. That is how little that sequence captured my imagination.
I liked the movie best when it quietly showed scenes from the actual South Africa: the shots of the townships, and so on. They are believable, and tell quite enough of a story on their own. I very much did not like it when these scenes were artificially augmented with cinematic themes written in letters ten feet tall. Given that it's supposed to be the telling of an actual story, and the poignancy of said story is supposed to be what drives the message home, the film's continued deviation from retelling into embellishment is not only asinine, but self-defeating.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Metal interlude - Pig Destroyer
Even the most casual reader of this blog will have noticed that new posts have ground to a halt. It's due to the pretty demanding schedule of readings and assignments that my current course presses on me, added to the soul-sucking uncertainty and tedium of applying to graduate programmes. Since most of my philosophical attention is currently being given to my academic commitments and chewing on Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, I'll make this my first non-philosophy related post on here. I always intended to have a few of them. They might even become a majority.
My first musical post on here is on something abrasive and disturbing: grindcore, that acrid mix of metal and punk which seems, as far as anybody can make out, to be invocations to have all life eradicated from existence. I've listened to a lot of it the past few hours. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up: today I have subsisted only on vending machine coffee, a chocolate bar and grindcore. Man was not meant to live this way. There is no way which is the way man was meant to live, but if there was a purpose, this certainly wouldn't be working toward it. There is a certain perverted pleasure to be taken out of living this much in conflict with basic human interests, throwing the pointlessness of it all irreverently into the face of an uncaring world.
Pig Destroyer - Terrifyer
There are some very significant ways of counting up the scores in which it turns out that Pig Destroyer are the best band working in metal right now. They have chops, they have passion, commitment and energy, they have thrown themselves onto an artistic endeavour which, from the outside at least, is damned thankless, where their families don't likely understand what they do and wish that they'd stop. They also have a unified vision, which some few metal bands do, but, what's more, they have the focus and the insight to pull it off. Focus is something which tends to seperate the really worthwhile musicians from the also-rans. Actual, honest-to-God insight is a quality so rare that it's hard to recognise, simply from lack of examples. Pig Destroyer, for instance, are a metal band with real lyrical strength. It's not that their lyrics are effective at what they do or check all the usual boxes for the genre. It's that they write songs which contain strong, evocative, well-written texts on their core, with lyrical themes that inform the music and are born to fruition in the format. Even though nobody can make out what J.R. Hughes is screaming. Especially because nobody can make them out. When you realise what the lyrics are the surprise of what is lying beneath is a real kick to the guts -- nobody expects lyrically sophisticated metal, especially not in the harsher extremities which Pig Destroyer live and work in. But there you are: the songs are small, tight meditations on a world fucked up in ways that one can barely stand thinking about: the more you look, the more fucked up things you see. Nobody has an easy time of knowing how to react to writing like this -- people have been wringing their hands about the literature of Céline for decades now, as a case in point. But this discomfort is largely Pig Destroyer's point, and one that they forcefully drive home. It's a remarkable achievement.
My first musical post on here is on something abrasive and disturbing: grindcore, that acrid mix of metal and punk which seems, as far as anybody can make out, to be invocations to have all life eradicated from existence. I've listened to a lot of it the past few hours. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up: today I have subsisted only on vending machine coffee, a chocolate bar and grindcore. Man was not meant to live this way. There is no way which is the way man was meant to live, but if there was a purpose, this certainly wouldn't be working toward it. There is a certain perverted pleasure to be taken out of living this much in conflict with basic human interests, throwing the pointlessness of it all irreverently into the face of an uncaring world.
Pig Destroyer - Terrifyer
There are some very significant ways of counting up the scores in which it turns out that Pig Destroyer are the best band working in metal right now. They have chops, they have passion, commitment and energy, they have thrown themselves onto an artistic endeavour which, from the outside at least, is damned thankless, where their families don't likely understand what they do and wish that they'd stop. They also have a unified vision, which some few metal bands do, but, what's more, they have the focus and the insight to pull it off. Focus is something which tends to seperate the really worthwhile musicians from the also-rans. Actual, honest-to-God insight is a quality so rare that it's hard to recognise, simply from lack of examples. Pig Destroyer, for instance, are a metal band with real lyrical strength. It's not that their lyrics are effective at what they do or check all the usual boxes for the genre. It's that they write songs which contain strong, evocative, well-written texts on their core, with lyrical themes that inform the music and are born to fruition in the format. Even though nobody can make out what J.R. Hughes is screaming. Especially because nobody can make them out. When you realise what the lyrics are the surprise of what is lying beneath is a real kick to the guts -- nobody expects lyrically sophisticated metal, especially not in the harsher extremities which Pig Destroyer live and work in. But there you are: the songs are small, tight meditations on a world fucked up in ways that one can barely stand thinking about: the more you look, the more fucked up things you see. Nobody has an easy time of knowing how to react to writing like this -- people have been wringing their hands about the literature of Céline for decades now, as a case in point. But this discomfort is largely Pig Destroyer's point, and one that they forcefully drive home. It's a remarkable achievement.
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