Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground. 
What have you found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

Goodbye Kristina. You’ll be missed. 

The Village is a film by the director of a Sixth Sense M Night Shyamalan. He’s a director who gets worse and and worse critical response the further toward art his films progress. Hitchcock’s classics used to be slated by the reviewers when they came out at the cinema, only for them to regarded as classics 20 years later. It’s the same with Shyamalan.

The Village is set in a period village, some time in the past - it could be 1880, it could be as late as 1950, featuring characters whose dialogue makes 21st century English sound like txt speak. You know the drill. Fancy costumes, dancing with gentlemen, close knit families House on the Prairie style. But this isn’t the standard Saturday afternoon costume drama - tension builds - it has a supernatural angle - something is haunting the village, they’re under attack from a beast in the woods. (Spoilers ahead…)

Ivy is a blind girl who must eventually venture out into the woods to find help and fetch medicine from a far away town to help her lover, who gets stabbed by the village mentalist and lays on a bed dying.

But she comes out of the other end of the forrest onto a modern highway patrolled by the forestry commission who’s jeep blares out it’s sireon and pulls over at the side of the road to ask her what she’s doing. The year is 2005 and it’s revealled the village is actually in the modern world, set up back in the 1970’s by a cult to preserve the innocence of their children from what they saw as a threatening and dangerous world.

It’s a brilliant idea but predictably such a brilliantly shaped piece of art didn’t fit in the small space of most people’s skulls. It was like trying to constantly ram brilliance down the plug hole, stuffing ounce after ounce of it into a hole which was too small to take it.

People spat it out with disgust and some fat Americans even managed to choke on their popcorn. The world became 140,000 kilos lighter but the words hung heavy on Shyamalan’s career. “Predictable. Shyamalan is a one trick pony. The Shyamalan ‘twist’ gets more rediculous all the time…etc, etc.”

But those with minds larger than a wallnut lapped it up. They mulled it over for weeks, finding new meaning in the parable every day. They remember the characters like glittering jewels in a world full of shit. 

I’ll add this film to my list of things that I care deeply about whilst most people seem content to settle for holidays and lots of sex. If only our communities were like The Village. If only we had an ounce of childish wonder left in us.

Anyone yearning to rip up the asphalt and tower blocks replacing it all with shrubbery and grass might be overjoyed to hear that their horticultural dream has just shimmied one step closer.

A scientific model has been created to predict the future of civilisation. It collapses.

Badly.

Not only that but the results seem to tally with known science - facts no less - about how complex systems behave.

In a nutshell it goes like this - a simple society of old would have many separate structures in place, i.e villages, each self sufficient. Very quickly in the last 100 years or so we’ve made a lot of progress since the industrial revolution and are just about to cross the boundary point of where a ‘hybrid’ society changes into a ‘networked’ one. This makes the system so complex and fragile, if any point on the network fails, the whole thing could come crashing down. Our global civilisation now resembles an animal. Randomly chopping off any part of the sheep effects the whole sheep. Depending on how important the part is that you cut off, you might even kill it altogether.

Looking at civilisation like a wounded sheep maybe fun but the following theory isn’t fun at all.

Complexity theory.

Out to give us another kick in the teeth, it deals with energy and the transfer of information around a complex system - like as in our civilisation. The industrial era gave rise to industrialised farming. It’s aim was and still is to increase food production. In turn because it creates a lot of food it supports a much larger growth in population than usual, which in turn requires ever more advanced ways of increasing food production to support the growth. A unsustainable vicious circle but that’s not all…

The larger the population the more you need to improve infrastructure and services as well - which uses yet more food energy. For example if crops fail because rain is patchy build irrigation canals. When they fail through time organise for them to be repaired. When there are too many channels for ad hoc repairs install a management bureaucracy and tax people to pay for it. When they complain invent tax inspectors…and so on. Tax inspectors have to eat their bacon butties at lunch time. The hungry highway men who burn calories maintaining our roads have to replenish their energy by eating too. It’s not rocket science yet the grubby bastards still won’t stop breeding*

If this sounds a lot like modern civilisation you’d be right. For every layer of complexity there is a huge price in energy to pay for it. Sooner or later, as I long suspected would happen, all our energy will be spent simply trying to maintain civilisation’s existing level of complexity - civilisation and the machines end up feeding off us rather than us off them. It’s not science fiction - it’s simply the law of diminishing returns. For all the effort which goes into maintaining food supplies and infrastructure (like roads, oil supplies, factories etc.) there is less energy left over for people to actually live their lives by because you have to feed the system more than it can supply us in return!

Recently there have been a number of signs that we are well on our way to some kind of ‘heat death’ of civilisation. Oil is running out, petrol prices are sky high, global warming is scaring everybody witless and people are becoming less and less satisfied with the way they live their lives in these materialistic and bureaucratic modern times.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to go back to living in mud huts after all. However if you think you’re going to survive the collapse, think again. For while the computer model predicted 90% of the Earth’s population would perish under the rubble of civilisation for some people the living conditions might actually improve.

No longer bothered by tax inspectors or Tesco, farmers might actually get a good nights sleep for once. Maybe the meek really will inherit the Earth.

All it takes to set the collapse in motion is a change in ‘the normal range of conditions’ say the scientists. Sadly they reveal, we have plenty of candidates for that. Terrorism and the war on terror (very energy consuming). The financial / debt crisis. Global warming (and measures attempted to prevent it). Dwindling oil supplies and our reliance on it. The list goes on…but sadly not our shiny modern civilisation.

Goodbye!

* Humour 

This week has been quite satisfying. Work is good, the online ticket selling software is turning out nicely. But the week took a turn for the worse when I went shopping.

Entering most shops these days is like intruding on a private student disco. The grumpy teenagers have to actually stop socialising with each other and shouting across the store against a backdrop of loud music, to serve the customer! Can you believe it?

One guy, who works at CEX in the Arndale centre is particularly obnoxious and sulky toward customers yet as soon as he turns his back he acts like he’s the heart and soul of some kind of staff party you’re not invited to. This guy is really special - not only does he not do his job, he prances about with his mates behind the counter like he’s trying to flaunt his social life.

He’s actually trying to make people look at him and think ‘wow, this guy is a lot of fun. I wish I could give up my web design job and go and work in a shop’. The amount of innate drivel that comes out of their mouths when they should be working is incredible. Its cock-sure, arrogant and… private. If I hear about another ‘date’ or the details another conquest I will ram a USB stick so far up his arse the shock will make his tattoos drop off.

CEX sell 2nd hand electronic stuff, DVDs, cameras and the like. Sometimes I can sniff out a bargain and its a fun place to browse but I dread going to the counter. It’s like being forced to put your hands through the cage at the zoo. Then I had an idea. Why not shop him? Why not drop a little email through the wire into the shop, stating that here is a seriously pissed off customer - why are you employing monkeys?

We interrupt this blog to bring you a pig slaying. Some trendy 20 somethings are on a ‘rented’ island in Fuji to build an ‘eco community’ which has been organised via ’social networking on the Internet’. If some middle class bloke in the pub kept banging on about the time where he had to slay a pig on a island and how amazingly primal it was I’d hit him in the face after 5 minutes but because this is about ‘eco shit’ and ‘community bollocks’ we get it thrust onto our televisions like it was the most important and relevant programme of modern times. Funny though, that in between mouthing off to the camera against a backdrop of black people cutting down trees, they all have time to gel their hair and apply makeup. Meanwhile I can hear sqealing and blood curdling screams but it’s not a pig having it’s throat cut - its a posh girl from West Sussex watching a pig having it’s throat cut. She also doesn’t like standing on mud in the wood. It’s not even entertaining. It’s shit.

If we really have to kill animals (and yes, as humans we do actually have to kill animals - to survive as a race. It’s part of what makes us so grotesquely human in the first place) I wish we could do it for a good reason - not simply to feed a bunch of Prada wearing cretins.

I liked the quote from Woody Allen recently. He says he’s not neurotic or bookish, he prefers watching sport and listening to music than musing about his many worries. He does, however, ‘not agree with’ death, and that he thinks about death nearly every second of the day. I think that sums up all our lives. When you have a lust for life you really don’t want it ever to die or grow old. But in return for life, I really don’t want to have to spend it in the Arndale, or accidentally catching sight of horrific cretins on TV.

Those things, believe me, I will try never to do again.

Pigs can fly. 

There is a man, an oil man in the early 20th century, the first to exploit the great riches under California. The industrial revolution needs feeding.

There is a second man, a holyman, who lives in a wooden house on a hill. He suspects there is oil under his land. Its literally seeping out of the ground. He wants money to build a new church for his community so he tells the oil man about his find.

Once in through the oil drilling door he rings the neck of the holy man, kicks him to the ground, humiliating him and trampling on his spirit until there’s nothing left.

At the height of his pomp the oil man is like Iggy Pop screaming into the microphone bare chest pouting outward toward his admirers whilst the priest, face flat in the mud, contemplates the cruel reality of life and faces up to the fact that - there is no God.

This is what capitalism has done to the world, but my god it makes for thrilling drama.

Then the oil man, played by Daniel Day Lewis runs into ruins, into madness, into soiltary confinement, within the walls of his great mansion - his kingdom of dirt, as Jonnny Cash would sing. And in the throws of madness he once again meets the holyman who has come to beg - apparently he’s found oil again and wants to start a business with the help of the once great oil man.

Eyes buring, raging like an oilwell on fire in Iraq, Day-Lewis does a piercing stare so powerful the holyman remembers once again that there isn’t a God, and then he explains that the oil has all gone. There’s nothing left under the whole state. He’s drilled it all. And then he says:

“I drink your milkshake. I drink it all up!”

And then he smashes the holyman over the head with a bowling ball, again and again until his skull caves in.

It has to be the greatest film ever created.

I will look forward to the real life drama when oil begins to run out and civilisation collapses. At the moment its a bit boring but you wait 2 years, you’re in for a treat…

There’s a song that goes:

#Everything was going perfectly until
It backfired at the disco#

Well for some it backfired at birth. Gordon Brown reminds me of one such person.

I wouldn’t trust Gordon Brown to operate a door handle, never mind run the country. Having said that, I wouldn’t trust the Tories to protect us from the terrorists any more than I’d trust Basil Brush.

Yet in the midst of all this Punch and Judy political theatre both sides actually have a point. Have you been watching the news recently? If so then read on…

Labour want to protect us from the terrorists by wrapping us up in so much red tape stripping us of so much privacy that we’re no longer targettable - just hollow floating spectres.

The Conservatives quite rightly argue (at least they ’say’ they mean it) about maintaining our basic privacy and freedom but you wonder sometimes if they haven’t yet woken up from the 1960s into the modern world and maybe it’s better to be wrapped in red tape 1984 style rather than in shrapnel, Bloody Sunday style.

Meanwhile the government leaves secret papers and personal data here there and everywhere. Most of them can’t even be trusted to pick up their belongings after getting off the tube, let alone post a USB stick securely. To think they’re going to introduce ID cards and databases makes me shudder. In a futuristic post-human world 200 years from now they’ll be carrying us about on USB sticks and keep dropping people down drains or still leaving our entire ‘being’ on a tube seat. That’s if I’m not getting all confused and in 100 years it’s actually the governors who are going to be USB sticks not the populace. Most of them already have IQs similar to floppy disks…

Whilst that makes me scared, another thing makes me angry. Why should the government snoop on us anyway and who every alowed them to turn England into a big brother house?

I wish they’d all just come clean. Labour are so apt at making me angry and so bad at explaining the facts, while the Conservative party are so good at arguing their cause yet so bad at the science.

Do we need the 42 day detention law, yes or no? Will it help terrorists or just piss everyone off? If we’re going to have a big brother society with a CCTV camera in every bedroom it better be for a reason, or is it better just to be blown up on occasion? In fact, is it better (and cheaper) simply to ignore the terrorists for a few years, stop annoying them with wars and George Bush, and hope they go away?

There is a dire difficulty here - one of civil liberties versus safety and security but at the moment I feel distinctly as if the government is acting like a spying parent present at the playground when they should really be leaving the kids to get on with enjoying themselves, while doing something more important like having dinner ready on the table for when they return.

If Labour is mummy and the Tories are daddy then daddy has gone mental.

He’s talking to himself in the shed at the back of the garden, like Gollum in Lord of The Rings fighting two opinions - one of protecting the public from evil and one of stopping his nasty wife and her spies from entering the shed.

He’s building a big war machine in there that once ready to break out will not only trample over wifey but destroy the entire house and kill the kids.

I find it a repulsive idea that as adults we’ll have all our private communications and data stored on mummy’s laptop.

But I certainly don’t trust daddy to fix it.

The last time I had some lego my brain was but a small childish prototype.

I built things like transportation systems with my lego Airport Shuttle Monorail - a Christmas present in the days when Christmas actually meant something (constant bribery with gifts for good behaviour). The year was 1991 and I was 11.

Other things I built: trucks to carry huge loads (water bottles) down rough hills filled with hazzards (100 metres down the pavement a road of oncoming traffic), houses with nothing inside, whole cities with matchbox cars littering the streets. Then came the computer revolution and I got side-tracked for 20 years.

Finally, this weekend I am going to go through my old stuff at the old house and see what lego I have left, and endevour to save it from the bin. Since it has been nearly 20 years since I last played with the lego I can’t wait to see what my fully formed adult brain is capable of doing with the stuff. Why, only 10 minutes ago I had the idea of encasing a cat in a huge cube built out of red and blue lego blocks with a small window at the top and one brick missing for ventalation purposes, then seeing what the cat does. The possibilities are endless!

No, I think the ultimate ambition has to be to give my adult brain full reign on the stuff. I am to build a lego robot, created with 3 simple laws. To serve, obey and protect.

To serve: me tea in the morning. To protect me from harm: the robot will accompany me on nights out, making sure that it drank my excess alcohol preventing me from getting too pissed. To obey: when I need the shopping doing at Tesco the robot won’t be spitting bricks and demanding ‘human rights’.

It will be fitted with wheels.

The power source will be self charging, as I’ll program in a ‘walking action’ (yes that’s ‘walking’, with an L) whereby should the battery be low the robot will go and sit on the table next to my Macbook with a USB lead attached to it’s left ear.

Every robot needs nourishing. This one will eat USB sticks.

Should the robot misbehave in any way, I will sent it to the corner of the lounge where a lego gilloteen is situated. The robot will then be beheaded and put back together again, then beheaded, then put back together again, then beheaded and put back together again.

I think what computer games have done to today’s generation of potato eating kids is pretty scary really. They’ve lost the ability to play - they’re all to busy stressfully shooting each other in the head or sneaking round dark corners in cloaks, with a dagger in hand. And that’s just a night out on the town.

What the kids really need is ambition and the ability to build stuff - actually physical stuff that they can touch with their hands. Maybe then we can be a nation of great engineers, inventors and machine builders once more.

(Above: Snoozy)

While waiting for my film to encode tonight I was gifted the opportunity to watch fainting goats and narcoleptic dogs on YouTube.

Humans have a lot of affection for animals but I don’t think it’s always balanced.

For example: we eat half of them. And what we don’t eat we humiliate. The narcoleptic dog was named ‘Snoozy’.

A clever play on words with Snoopy this may be, but you can’t help feeling this American owner’s large brain (sentence utterance first) is getting one over on poor Snoozy, the narcoleptic dog.

Equally the fate of the fainting goats were equally bleak. They were being used in a genius ploy - as decoys to be eaten by predators thus saving the more valuable (and non-fainting) members of the farmyard heard.

Call me soft hearted but I think animals deserve more respect. This very weekend, while attempting to print out my movie script my friend’s printer was playing up. I opened the lid and a piece of plastic roller had come apart and was mashing up the mechanism. I put my hand in to remove the offending item all the while watched by a curious cat. The cat then began to help, putting its out-stretched paw into the printer alongside my hand and pawing at the loose plastic along with myself, in attempt to free it.

The watchful helper then sat by the printer, jerking it’s head up and down as the machine whirred into action, surveying each movement, especially that of the paper feeding mechanism: which the cat took particular delight in occasionally pawing.

Meanwhile we tie up monkey’s arms in labs, jam probes into their brain tissue and train them to use a robotic arm by thought alone in order to feed themselves.

Higher up the food tree we may be (but not necessarily more evolved, we’re just lucky the speech of parots, the imagination of monkeys, the social skills of dogs and the curiosity of cats came together in the same body) but that doesn’t give us the excuse to announce that on the one hand we care about animals while on the other hand wiggling metal rods about in their brains.

I love technology though, and this is a necessary step to more wonderment.

I just wish we’d admit it: logically Humans aren’t really that caring, not compared to the wide-eyed undoubting naivety of a dog anyway. With a few exceptions we’re hypocritical robots designed to skilfully torture and bully our way to the top of the food tree.

View footage of Snoozy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0h2nleWTwI
View footage of Slitty*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyzeCiW-nn0&feature=related
View footage of the fainting goats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9_CdNPuJg

*Narcolepsy not necessarily real 

I have made a film about the last woman alive. Hilary Clinton is beginning to resemble that character. Rambling to imaginary friends, she drags out the US presidential nominee contest with the more talented Barack Obama to breaking point. It’s a split in the Democrat party, a civil war. Which leads me to Max Mosley who has won his vote of confidence today.

Here is a decision based on common sense, a victory for humanity, a snub to the politically correct corporate machines which put profit before people. Yet the irony is the decision is wrong for the sport, wrong for safety and wrong for all kinds of political & business reasons despite being a victory for common sense over politics.

I refer of course to the world motorsport senate’s vote following their leader’s sex scandal involving 5 prostitutes, the wife of an MI5 agent, a bra-cam and lots of sexy Nazi role playing.

Any one of those ingredients would be enough to base a feature length film on it, but when you have all 4 together it’s no surprise that the sport takes a back-seat in the public imagination, especially considering that the sporting side of F1 2008 mostly revolves around whether or not a ‘flexible-bridge-wing’ counts as a ‘movable-aerodynamic-device’. That’s enough to make a narcoleptic go full circle and stay permanently awake, while everybody else looks on with the wide eyed demeanor of sheer bemusement etched across their faces.

Formula One motor racing used to be about the bravery of the drivers, overtaking on the track, magnificent skill in battle and a host of super fast heroic personalities smoking and drinking their way into the beds of even faster women. Now it’s about who optimises their race-day strategy and car setup best out of 3 drivers. The rest don’t even have a chance because their cars are slower. The end.

So back to the politics - it’s far more interesting. What will happen now that the world motorsport has a Nazi role playing pervert as their figure-head?

First of all, it will spin itself into civil war for no good reasons and lose sponsors. Fained disgust will gush out from the taps of political correctness. The money will drain out of the sport and the car manufacturers will follow. Bernie Ecclestone will have a coronary and the sport will return to a brutal he-who-dares-wins scenario out on primitive tracks. Off it, without the corporate sponsors to schmooze, the drivers will do and say what they like. It will be sheer bliss.

All credit to Max Mosley and his orgy.

In all seriousness, it is admirable that this man had the strength to fight his detractors for justice, common sense - and most of all - safety (not to be confused with political safety - that of saying nothing interesting while smoozing sponsors). Those who seek to undermine him have all ulterior motives for doing so. The American Automobile Association and especially the German motoring body, whom I forget the name of out of sheer disgust (ACDC or something), simply want more power. They see the scandal as a way to legitimately stab Caesar in the back. Their fumbling attempts with the knife having failed, they will now sulk off (the German body has already left the building), put people’s lives in danger (the FIA is responsible for car manufacturers, including those in Germany like BMW, participating in the NCAP road car safety tests) and then attempt to form a break-away group.

In F1’s recent chequered political past, which is more chequered than a chequered flag, it was first the car manufacturers from Japan, America, France and Germany who formed a break away group, threatening to withdraw their teams from F1 leaving just Ferrari competing against a team run by a mouse with technology borrowed from Matchbox cars. The FIA (made up of motoring groups) were on the other-side, persuading the teams to stay and work for the future of F1, because there can only be one F1.

Now that storm has blown over, it’s ironic that the car manufacturers have so many stooges installed within the FIA that they’ve split it in half. Maybe they have got their wish after all and will see their plans come together. Their plans which involve:

a) Turning the world into a giant metal robot where people are cogs in a giant corporate machine
b) Destroying the greatest sport in the world in the vain belief that they can do things better themselves while earning double the money from it (that is to say - ALL the money).

Money and power - will the world ever go back to being ruled by common sense and humanity?

I’m off to play cricket.