photo credit: drosera88

Solar by Ian McEwan first published on drb.ie

There are many issues that the turbulent passage of global warming through public discourse has revealed. From the deadlock at Copenhagen in December to the growing confidence of climate change scepticism, it has become clear that we suffer from an incapacity to rationally discuss and address long-term and system-wide problems. It might indeed not be an exaggeration to say that we have seen evidence of the failure of politics and political discourse.

This can register in different ways. In Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, the Nobel-winning physicist Michael Beard passes through the institutions of climate science and enterprise, absorbing many of the conflicts and failings of the world around him. McEwan’s story is one of character, and it is it is only through the character of this arrogant, juvenile and occasionally likeable man that we can assess the causes of the various turmoils in which he finds himself.

Beard’s path is inflected by the crippling barriers imposed by personal hubris and self-aggrandisement. Occasionally caught up in the cycles of public debate, his situation reveals the vicious ignorance of the media and the inadequacies of public discourse. In his recurring efforts at restraint, control and purpose and their failure in the face of unrestrained entropy and the overriding immediacy of desire, Beard seems ? perhaps too simply ? a synonym of ecological crisis and the failure to address it.

We do not take this failure for granted. The Copenhagen Summit was infused with the tail-end of the popular optimism that saw Barack Obama elected to the White House: even his election tagline was cannibalised in the awful and retrospectively tragic pun, Hopenhagen. And even though the summit and the presidency have frustrated it, the mass mobilisation of hope indicates the persistence of belief that the problems of the world are not beyond our control, that participation in the political process can lead to meaningful change.

Solar is a novel in three parts, three stages in the life of Beard, who first enters as a man of little purpose or direction. His Nobel Prize has moved him from intense and productive study to a steady succession of titular and administrative positions with little connection to research and no outlet for his energies but sexual and culinary indulgence. Although head of the National Centre for Renewable Energy, he has little interest in the issue he is paid to address, or indeed in any of his career. His fifth and final marriage is slowly falling apart as his wife, having learnt of his numerous infidelities, responds in kind, prodding her husband into morose obsession.

While much of the first part of the novel is given over to Beard’s post-romantic wallowing, he eventually finds direction after a government-funded environmentalist junket to the Arctic, when a tragic accident conveniently both shears his entanglements with his current life and sets him up for a new one. The death of Tom Aldous lands Beard with the young physicist’s breakthrough research into artificial photosynthesis for solar power, research that he wastes no time in claiming as his own. Armed only with lucrative patents, he ventures forth into new terrain, to save the world and make a killing.

When we next see him, Beard is travelling, as indeed he is throughout much of the remainder of the novel. A meditation inspired by the view from an airplane window questions the capacity of humanity to exercise restraint, or even control, over growth. Seen from this perspective, the city, and civilisation itself, seem opaque, implacable, and ferociously dynamic, an immense multitude of desires, an inchoate surging of creation and expansion that will inevitably overwhelm the earth beneath it.

These days, whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon ? the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face … One day this brash and ancient kingdom might yield to the force of multiple cravings, to the dreamy temptations of a giant metropolis, a Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Los Angeles combined, to effloresce from London to the Medway to Southampton to Oxford, back to London, a modern form of quadrilateral, burying all previous hedges and trees. Who knew, perhaps it would be a triumph of racial harmony and brilliant buildings, a world city, the most admired world city in the world.

But Beard, regardless of his elevated perspective, is no different from what stretches out below. It is hard not to see in him a personification of the discordant, chaotic passage of the world in general. The rotund physicist likens his internal life to a process of political debate, with all the accompanying fractiousness and acrimony: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Any crucial issue is the subject of clamorous debate. Options are weighed and outcomes considered. But even when his raucous internal polyphony is momentarily unified, its capacity for policy-making is inevitably scuttled by the immediacy of desire.

He was thirty-five pounds overweight. About his future lightness he had made many general resolutions and virtuous promises, often after dinner, with a glass in his hand, and all parliamentary heads nodding in assent. What defeated him was always the present, the moment of vivid confrontation with the affirming tidbit, the extra course, the meal he did not really need, when the short-term faction carried the day.

The summit at Copenhagen revealed something similar. For all the high ideals espoused, the process of debate was as unproductive as it was undemocratic. The leaked “Danish Agreement”, it is now agreed, scuppered any chance of consensus, but the text itself shows what kind of deal the developed economies wanted; a retraction of the Kyoto Protocol, sidelining of the UN and overall direction on climate policy to be set from the World Bank. The countries that would not toe the line were bullied, ignored or bypassed. The people who walked the city and demanded something better were beaten from the streets, locked in cages and blinded with pepper spray.

The first section of the novel closes after Beard travels to the Arctic on a junket for scientists and artists to view the consequences of global warming at first hand. Here, in what is partially a rendition of McEwan’s experiences on a similar trip, the problematic relationship between intentions and actions emerges again. In fiction and reality the high-minded ideals that dominate the dining table disappear as they venture beyond. In the dressing room, the guests’ mad scramble for outdoor clothing amounts to collective sabotage as coats, boots and gloves are stolen with chaotic abandon. As McEwan mused on the experience that provided the material for this episode: “ … for all the fine words and good intentions, maybe there was a comic inadequacy in human nature in dealing with this problem”. This reflection is not far from recent comments by environmental scientist James Lovelock, that perhaps humans are too stupid to solve the problems of climate change.

The novel’s crucial turning point comes when Beard frames his wife’s lover for the death of Tom Aldous. Even in this moment of life-changing cruelty, Beard shows no concern for, or even awareness of, those he will harm. Whether to avenge his cuckolding at the hands of the macho builder or simply to avoid the fuss and trauma of a possible trial, he does not think beyond the boundaries of his person. His actions begin as simply an idea, a possibility to be toyed with. “He did not have a plan, he simply enacted one. His body had a plan. And he walked it through, as though experimentally, believing at every stage he could undo it, go back to the beginning, with nothing lost or compromised.” There is no moment of decision, just one of belated realisation that this is the course his actions have taken for him. When events threaten to disrupt his life, Beard is capable of decisive action, yet he does it without the discomfort of decision.

We see this same subliminal process at work later, more trivially, where, leaving an airport, he is pulled, as if magnetically, to the newsagents to satisfy a longing for salt and vinegar crisps.

Now he was at the counter, sorting the pound coins from euros in his hand, with four newspapers under his arm, not one, as if excess in one endeavour might immunise him in another, and as he handed them across for their bar codes to be scanned, he saw at the edge of vision, in the array beneath the till, the gleam of the thing he wanted, the thing he did not want to want, a dozen of them in a line, and without deciding to he was taking one ? so light! ? and adding it to his pile, partly obliterating a picture of the prime minister waving from the doorway of a church.

For all the speakers in his internal parliament, Beard cannot make decisions consciously. McEwan, like Lovelock, seems to implicitly attribute the failure of political process to that of democracy. Lovelock has argued that climate change is a threat, like war, where political process must adapt to the moment, that, in his words, “[i]t may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while”. Though it would be hard to endorse Lovelock’s contention that the problems at Copenhagen were due to a surfeit of democracy, Michael Beard offers only affirmation of the pessimistic reflection that “[t]he inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful”.

Beard, like Brecht’s Galileo, is a sensual man, but his sensual nature is not productive in the same way, a facet of joy in discovery of the world. It is, instead, a steady dissipation, a self-erosion, accompanied by an almost obscene indifference to the needs of others. We do not see him involved in any scientific work at any point in the novel. The Nobel Prize and the work that won it gesture to us as if from another world, while the modification of Tom Aldous’s work that sets up the second and third sections of the book is hidden in the intervals. In this novel about a scientist, the science occurs, like Shakespeare’s plot-defining battles, off-stage. Whether this is due to lack of technical capacity or is executed for reasons of maintaining narrative interest, the effect is to make the novel purely a chronicle of dissipation, where action, purpose and direction fall necessarily in defeat.

In the face of the inevitability of failure, Beard masters the art of deferral. It is only pleasures that instigate immediate action, while the crises of relationships, health and business are suppressed, ignored. “The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.” Gluttony or adultery, his life is an expanding mess of unwelcome repercussions of immediate pleasures. Five failed marriages and a succession of new careers testify to his adeptness at extricating himself from responsibility, but, like the green world that skirts the city, Beard too must yield to the weight of his actions, the postponed “force of multiple cravings”. While these repercussions are slow in coming, come they do, and, at the novels end, all converge with implausible propinquity.

A diversion from the plot, via a stint on a government quango on gender participation in the sciences, brings us to yet another unfortunate incident in the life of Michael Beard. When casual comments on biological gender differentiation in cognitive capacities attract the attention of the media, he is caught up in the merciless spin of the news cycle. This is his second time in the media spotlight, but he finds the story, and his role within it, has shifted dramatically. His “earlier incarnation as the harmless, dreamy cuckold, the innocent fool, the dupe of a flighty wife was conveniently forgotten. Now he was a loathed figure, seducing women even as he drove them out of science.”

Thus cast in a tabloid trope, Beard is put to the question at an event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London where the audience is packed with postmodernists who harry him with righteous denunciations of his “hegemonic arrogance”. Though the opposing speaker, a cognitive psychologist, refutes Beard’s arguments, the audience is unimpressed, for she too shares similar rationalist affiliations. “By the time Applebaum started in on her conclusion, Beard thought he was the only one listening. Statistics were clearly not a postmodern concern.” His philandering exposed and his reputation seemingly devastated, Beard sees the end of his career looming. But the attentions of the tabloids pass as quickly as they had come as fresh scandal draws the storm elsewhere.

This series of incidents is, as other reviewers have noted, a somewhat inexplicable segue away from the main narrative sequence, yet by following Beard through both news cycle and debate, we see the failure of either to provide space for education and rational discussion. The press, pursuing scandal and sales with pre-cooked morality tales, has no interest in ideas, nuance or evidence. The audience at the debate, in its self-righteous attacks on scientific method, its belief “that science was just one more belief system, no more truthful than religion or astrology”, are the book’s closest counterparts to fundamentalist Christians or conspiracy theorists, those who posit creationism as a theory that may be as valid as evolution, or those who portray concern over climate change as (another) plot to install global governance.

The conjunction of these two elements then, the factually agnostic and the aggressively ignorant, is apt when we consider the controversy which continues to attach itself to the science and policy of global warming. Both media and conspiracy theorists had a field day over the “Climategate” scandal, when stolen emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit were presented as proof that climate change was indeed, in the words of US senator Jim Inhofe, “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. Beard’s painful ordeal by media and public forum resonates with our contemporary questions: are there institutions in our society capable of holding a serious debate, of educating, of rationally discussing crucial issues? If the answer is no then McEwan’s novel offers tacit support to Lovelock’s suggestion that the suspension of democracy may be the only response to impending disaster.

But we can take it another way as well. Beard’s reflections on his now past public infamy are followed by a speaking appointment in London at which he addresses an audience of investors, whom he endeavours to convince of the money to be made by investing in green technology, preferably his green technology. This is, of course, technology built on the unashamed theft of a younger colleague’s work. It is clear throughout that Beard does not wear the green mantle for laudable motives.

It is not until the third and final section of the novel, when he is on the cusp of fame and fortune, that Beard is confronted for his appropriation of Aldous’s research. By now he has an array of solar panels in the deserts of New Mexico; the theoretical breakthroughs of his young, deceased researcher have led him to the holy grail of solar energy, one hundred per cent efficiency, artificial photosynthesis that can convert all incident light into electrical energy. The crowning triumph, of course, never comes. His theft discovered and litigation ensuing, Beard is given the chance to admit his crime and seek reconciliation. Instead he turns to declamation, delivering the book’s final masterclass in hubris, pouring scorn on the idea that a lowly post-doc could do such work and unashamedly asserting that “In our democratic times … science remains a hierarchical affair, unamenable to levelling.” Our scientist hero is unheroic. Self-advancement and the pursuit of personal pleasure inflect his work, while his life, like that of his society, is determined not by any great plan or ambition, but by the chaotic and contradictory drives of self-interest. The disdain he espouses for egalitarian notions derives, at least partially, from his own pursuit of status and success.

In Solar we see ideals, purpose and ambition fall inexorably into dissolution. Beard, much like the world around him, is neither capable of identifying or addressing the problems that beset him, nor of relating to other people. Both problems stem from his solipsistic pursuit of immediate pleasure, a drive that damages those around him and ultimately himself. In this way, Beard’s insulated personal world and his repeated surrender to short-term desires are apt reminders of the irrational economic system that causes environmental destruction, while the communications failures that afflict the novel’s interpersonal relationships pithily express the incapacity of the political process to bring it under control.

Fittingly, the novel rarely assumes any telling narrative voice, nor does it seek to explore the thoughts and motivations of anyone but Beard. But this is more claustrophobic than it is effective, and the novel, for all the resemblances to the everyday, retains an element of unreality. As long as we are closeted within the life and mind of a single man, we cannot know the world in which he moves. There are efforts to make him real, as McEwan attempts to situate his hero within a wider social sphere through references to absent friends or stilted comic incidents. But neither Beard’s extra-narrative life nor the unsuccessful efforts at humour succeed in deepening the characterisation. Beard, without connections to the world around him, cannot fully chart its crisis.

photo credit: (Carrie Sloan)

In The Limits of Liberty, historian Diarmuid Ferriter has been given three one hour episodes to lay out the social history of the Irish Republic.  It is, of course, too brief, but the first episode is encouraging for its dissection of the new-state’s failure to deliver on promises of equality.

The first episode is shot through with indignation, as Ferriter centres his ire around the lip-service paid to the social values of the Democratic Programme after its adoption by the first Dail in 1919. By focusing on the deliberate retention of the British system of social governance such as workhouses, he works to explode any notion that the newly-independent Free State had any desire to represent the good of the entire population. Indeed, he emphasises their class allegiances as ‘men of property’ and their contempt for less reputable elements of society.

He also provides us with assessments of emergent powers of Irish society, such as the Licensed Vintners and the Catholic Church, and the strange balancing act between them. The program builds a strengthened awareness of the various interests and allegiances that would dominate the new nation, as well as those who were dominated.  Efforts at advancing an alternative path were stamped down firmly, with the suppression of strikes confirming Kevin O’Higgins’ boast of belonging to “the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution”.

We see that there were many who opposed the status quo’s implementation. We also see that those who did so, republicans and revolutionaries alike, were beaten up, shot down or forced out. The 1919 election slogan that ‘labour must wait’ seemed to have been extended indefinitely, while those who challenged the easy lies about sexual morality, Church-run institutions and continuing poverty were ignored or silenced. Throughout the program it is clear that the new consensus was founded on exclusion as much as agreement.

Ferriter is an excellent writer, investigating the lives and deeds of  powerful and powerless alike, backing up his case with interviews,  documents and video reels. Live action and set piece narration are used to break up the info-dumps and maintain the viewer’s interest. The interweaving of all these elements, however, is often over-wrought, betraying a similar excess of cinematographic ambition as RTE’s other recent heavy-hitter, Aftershock. The thinking at Montrose seems to be that documentary is best delivered with the dizzying shifts of a Lady GaGa video. Presumably such visual violence has permanently damaged viewers’ attention spans, so that we have to be repeatedly and violently jostled to remain conscious.

A more important weakness is that the sheer breadth of the topic confounds the program; it jumps from social history to individual biography to  political history and back, with narrative thread often dropped between the bounds. The combination of the vast range with Ferriter’s impressive capacity for detailed assessment of individual issues is that the program seems to offer a scatter-gun approach to the subject – hitting only parts of its target. Where it does hit, in fairness to Ferriter, it hits hard, but the format precludes a patient and clear analysis, of causes and effects.

Despite these quibbles, this series is very welcome, if far too brief. Ferriter has been given a chance to tie together a range of phenomena in a narrative of life in Ireland after independence. His indignation is well-placed, and his focus on the political, economic and moral resemblances between the new elite and the old are very welcome. Indeed, in the current circumstances, the critical examination of Irish history can help debunk nationalist historiography and provide us all with a clearer sense of our society and the forces that have, and continue to impose limits to liberty and equality both.

The Limits of Liberty

• RTÉ One, Tuesday 1 June 2010, 10.15pm
• RTÉ One, Tuesday 8 June 2010, 10.15pm
• RTÉ One, Tuesday 15 June 2010, 10.15pm

photo credit: murphyz

On 2 March 2010, the Government decided to begin the process for declaring certain substances to be controlled. A large number of these are products sold at head-shops as legal highs, but the most well known are mephedrone and methylone, and other related cathinones products. Cathinones derive from the khata plant and the increase in control was justified on the basis of their similarity in structure and effect to amphetamines.

The British government stepped up its mephedrone control in March, making it a Class B substance, meaning that those found in possession of the substance can receive prison sentences of up to five years, while dealers can receive sentences of up to twelve years. The ban came after the UK Government received advice from the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs Act, which stated that ‘the harms associated with the cathinones most closely equate with other compounds in Class B’.

However, due to the relative novelty of cathinones in widespread use there is, as yet, little evidence of their danger in public consumption. Indeed, even the amphetamine connection is not necessarily solid; the ACMD also stated that ‘There is a need for more basic research to examine the similarities and differences between the cathinones and their amphetamine equivalents.’

The argument on harm to users is similarly unsure. As the ACMD reports, ‘Most data regarding the harms of the cathinones (mephedrone in particular) are self-reported and there are very few clinical data available.’ Given the lack of data, the scientific analysis is relatively light, and there has been assertions from several former members of the ACMD that it is political pressure rather than medical necessity that has pushed through the ban. The data reliant on self-reporting is relatively unserious. A study of 25 people who presented themselves at hospital with toxicity due to mephedrone over a one-year period found that 16% required medication for agitation, while 80% were discharged without treatment. One was sent to the Intensive Care Unit for toxicity due to another drug.

Similarly, despite intense media coverage of legal highs leading to deaths, there have not been any deaths that have been proven to be caused by mephedrone or other cathinone derivatives. Although seven of eighteen deaths in the United Kingdom have found mephedrone at time of death, only one post-mortem implicated mephedrone as the cause of death, and this was a combination of mephedrone and methadone. Similarly in Ireland, where there have been no post-mortem confirmations of mephedrone caused death.

This is not to say that cathinone-derived drugs have no negative side effects. There are several that are similar to amphetamines and particularly to MDMA, especially tachycardia, which is an accelerated heartbeat and vasoconstriction, the narrowing of blood vessels, can increase the body internal temperature. Although there are no signs of the substance being inherently addictive, some 85% users do report strong cravings to re-dose to maintain the high, which exacerbates any health dangers of the use.

Tachycardia is another serious symptom, reported as afflicting one in two users. Agitation and paranoia, common effects of stimulant use, are also experienced, and a quarter of users have reported anxiety and low mood in days following use, which would indicate short-term depletion of serotonin in the brain. This is also experienced in the use of MDMA.

Eric Carlin resigned from the Council after the ban was pushed through, complaining that members had not even had time to read the complete report before the chairman left the meeting to brief the Home Secretary on the issue for a press conference. Similarly, Polly Taylor resigned after complaining that there was undue political interference with the process. The mephedrone scandal was preceded by the sacking of David Nutt, previously chair of the ACMD, for question the efficacy of criminalisation of drugs. He notably warned of the danger of equasy, pointing out that horse-riding deaths in Britain outnumbered those due to ectasy considerably.

He was dismissed by the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who said that he strayed beyond the line by criticising government policy. Subsequent reviews found that he acted within government policy for advisers, and the inability of Johnson to give assurance on the future independence of scientific advisers led to five more resignations, meaning a total turnover of 7 of 21 advisers in recent months over governmental interference.

Mephedrone has in recent months become the fourth most popular recreational drug in the UK & Ireland, excluding alcohol and tobacco. The reasons suggested for this include diminishing supply and quality of illegal amphetamines, which supports the contention of the ACMD that mephedrone is used as a substitute for this type of drug. This is also supported by the surge of arson attacks upon headshops in Ireland, which have been blamed on drug gangs. It is likely, then, that criminalisation of mephedrone will serve to help drug dealers whose margins were sufficiently threatened for them to attempt violent acts.

The scientific basis for the control of mephedrone is, as of yet, inconclusive. The ACMD report draws on a shallow pool of evidence, leaning especially heavily upon self-submitted data from a mixmag.com survey and records from 25 hospital attendees with problems from mephedrone use. This is not sufficient to clearly ascertain the risks associated with the drug, nor is it sufficient to assess if control through prohibition is necessarily the most suitable way of mitigating these risks. Mephedrone and the other cathinones do seem to have health risks which require greater investigation, but neither the UK or Irish governments has shown that public health and safety would be best protected by prohibition. As such, it seems that government policy is being driven by considerations other than the stated aims of drugs policy and may be a response to media coverage.

photo credit: Contando Estrelas

I was in the Ilac library the other day and was lucky enough to find a copy of Ministry of Space sitting on the shelf. The work of Warren Ellis (the twisted mind behind Transmetropolitan), the comic is a lovely short 3-part alternate history, where the WWII capture of Nazi rocket scientists has enabled Britain to win the space race and forestall post-war decrepitude (it was the Yanks who got them in reality). The final frontier becomes the basis of another colonial adventure, Moon and Mars claimed for the Queen, and, a payload of nuclear warheads orbits the earth in space station Churchill to safeguard the Empire.

We’re retrospectively navigated through the new British Empire by the narration of its architect, John Dashwood, an ambitious and arrogant Air Force Officer who plans and leads the Ministry of Space. British dominance unfolds in parallel with retellings of crucial events in global politics, and post-war decolonisation is balanced with the opening up of space to imperial reach. Ellis suggests that renewed international and intergalactic dominance would have as its corollary intensified domestic social control. The mods and rockers are kept off the streets by conscription and racial segregation keeps the West Indian diaspora firmly in their (subordinate) place.

It’s a gorgeous comic, and Chris Weston’s graphics supply plenty of lovely high-tech retro kitsch, a bright and beautiful Golden Age, poised somewhere between Dan Dare and Austin Powers.

A good read, really pretty. Good use of half an hour.

photo credit: Blue Jay Day

The economy was in trouble. GDP was falling, businesses were closing, dole queues expanding. It was time they pull together they said. Time to put aside agendas, work for the common good. So there were pay cuts. Rationalisations. Downsizings. And we put our differences aside. We worked for the common good. We worked hard for the common good, for the hope of a return to better days. And, for a while, it seemed like it would be enough. Closures slowed. The unemployed went back to work, working for their dole in the places of the downsized.

But it was not enough. The economy still languished. The people languished too. So the necessary steps were taken. We had not fully accepted the new realities it seemed. Our expectations were too high. And so they changed the working week, five days from seven to four from five. It was strange, they admitted, but we would adjust. And we did adjust. A week can be five days as easy as it can seven. We had many years of ritual, habit and custom built up around the old week, but these were new realities, one day is all that’s really needed to recover from our end-week drinking.

But there were some who could not adjust. There were some who were too old, too stubborn, to unrealistic to accept that times had changed, that this was a new situation. They fell away, some into the dole queues, or into retirement, or into the hectic standstill of casual labour. But these stories are not recorded.

All in all, the change worked. We put aside our differences and we adjusted. Habit can adapt, people change. Some may have even gone into the new week with a renewed enthusiasm, a stolid determination. And the economy did seem to recover. A little, at least. The figures were clear. And, even if we did not feel the benefits ourselves, we could be assured that they would come. At least we could be satisfied that we had put aside our problems for the common interest. The good times would come again.

photo credit: Oxfam

Sonja, known as Red Sonja, is a medic and warrior who has become a heroine of Chinese power, a noble symbol for the nation’s less-than-noble struggle for survival, which had left, or caused, millions to die in the cause of the greater good. The sole remaining state, China’s ambition is unbounded, and it engages in vast techno-social projects of world-shaping, from the hydrogen bombing of the Himalyas to terraforming Mars in the image of the Gobi desert.

Sterling is an accomplished futurist, and his vision pulses with ideas and inspiration. Moreover, as the 2065 setting indicates, the technology is not madly fantastic. Many of the key elements, from the Acquis exoskeletons and augmented reality to the Dispensation’s gerontological treatments, are included in the US National Intelligence Council’s predictions for key technological developments by 2025. What is unique is Sterling’s ability to weave the diffuse elements together into visions of human worlds, and his exploration of how technology shapes and is shaped by the relations between humans and their relationships with the extra-human environment. In his words, “the future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”  This is in many ways, then, a novel about convergence, but, importantly, about different types of convergence.

Unfortunately, however, Sterling is less able to construct a coherent narrative, which could play out the tensions between these models of society with the depth and intensity that they deserve. Other near-future speculators such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson tie futurist vision to narrative progression with taut, and somewhat limiting thriller plots, and this is hinted at in The Caryatids‘ jacket description, promises that the four sisters would be brought together ‘in an audacious plan to save the world. ‘ This plan never materialises, and the paths of the sisters are entwined only retrospectively, in an epilogue.

Much of The Caryatids suggests that Sterling was attempting to develop a more expansive style to accomodate the breadth of this novel’s vision. He divides the narrative into three different subject-positions, each with their own histories, unique access to different social structures and world-views and each is given ample space for exploration. There is, however, no bringing together of the sisters in a common quest, and thus no reconciliation or final schism of these positions. The book remains a work of interesting, and at times inspiring speculative-anthropology.

photo credit: server pics

A while back an article from AdBusters on Hipsterdom was linked to from this blog. The writer railed against the appropriation of rebel aesthetics by ironic and vacuous posers but, understandably, was unable to offer any real solutions to the cul-de-sac of Western culture signposted by this trend.

A couple of weeks after that, a bunch of Sao Paolo graffiti kids trashed a street art exhibition in protest against the commercialisation of an art form they wanted to remain true to its origins among the most disenfranchised groups in the Brazilian city. These ‘pixadores’, named for the local pixacao (trace or stain in English) graffiti scene (or movement, as they call it), celebrate the criminality of their work and rage against all efforts to make it safe and depoliticised for mainstream consumption, against the ‘marketing, domestication etc.’ of the style.

A few months before all this, some of the top names in street art, including Os Gemeos (whose rise to worldwide fame was aided through exhibitions at the Choque Gallery) had exhibited at the Tate Modern, probably the most high-profile such event in street art history.

In this context, the pixador vandalism , seems like a burst of local outrage at the propulsion of an antagonistic art-form from the poverty-stricken streets of Latin America to the walls of major galleries, and onwards, a la Banksy, into the coffee-table books of Western consumer culture. It seems, in short, like an effort to stop the commodification of a medium of expression that was born as, and often remains, a political protest.

The criminality of the art is important for this scene; they tagged paintings and gallery alike with slogans like ‘Art as Crime, Crime as Art’ and big Circled-As, while their numerous YouTube videos emphasise achieving daring tag locations as much as style and content of the work. The article from Adbusters laments the growth of a hipster subculture entirely devoid of originality or drive, whose taste in fashion and music alike is only the endless recycling of the faded remnants of bygone rebellions.

This may be the fate of jaded Western youth in the twilight of consumer society, but the kids of Sao Paolo don’t want to share it. In balance though, it’s difficult to identify a viable strategy for anyone wanting to retain the authentic political content of their aesthetic forms in the face of a vast system of cultural appropriation and commodification. It’ll require a bit more than trashing an art gallery at any rate.

“Branded, marked and scarred by talk. Boxed by words.” This is the fate of the characters of Enda Walsh’s drama. Three sisters live isolated within their house, the elder two telling and retelling the story of their humiliation at The New Electric Ballroom, many years ago. In this way, it seems much like Endgame, as the lonely monotonous existence of the characters is punctuated and enlivened by their recital of past pleasures and regrets. The youngest of the three, Ada, seems at first to be the jailer of the other two, marshalling their recitals, dressing them in the faded finery of their dancing days and urging them on when they falter at the painful moments, or linger too long in their brief pleasures. But it becomes clear that she too is trapped by the story, even though she has no place within it.

The story they tell is of The New Electric Ballroom, a local nightclub on a night where a touring show-band returns, having left them both, as young adults, with the promise of romance, an escape from the petty dreariness and tawdry sexual opportunities of their small fishing village. The romantic exoticism invested within the show-band exemplifies the painful boredom and petty existence the sisters face as they move into adulthood, and they load the leers of the leading singer with all the weight of their lives’ ambitions. The touring show-band brings the tantalizing prospect of a different life through rock-and-roll music, swinging hips and shiny suits. Billy Fury’s ‘Wondrous Place’ drifts dream-like from a stereo during these stories, and the music seems to express the story’s conclusion aptly; the promise of escape that had drawn the sisters to the dancehall becomes poisoned, forcing them to flee their public ridicule and entomb themselves within their own house and their own stories, never venturing out into the outside world.

Review continues after the digital jump…

That this outside world exists at all is only apparent in the occasional deliveries of Patsy, the fishmonger, who disrupts the rituals with clattering entrances and chatters inanely, looking desperately for some sort of company. The social forces of small-town gossip that are claimed to have pushed the sisters into seclusion are nowhere to be seen; they are referenced, but not visible. Indeed, the seclusion in which the women live is shown as being constructed through their own ritualised recitations of past regrets. This is a constant tendency within the play, the retrospective story of the tragic night at the New Electric Ballroom takes on narrative dominance, shaping not only the lives of the 3 sisters, but the progression of the plot itself.

The youngest of the three, having never faced the possibility of a better life must be presented with such a chance and, due to the logic of such tragedy, it must fail and, in doing so, reveal her inability to make their own life. Here, the possibility of escape does not come about through the fact of individual freedom, but from the internal logic of the story that dominates the narrative. The escape is offered to Ada in the form of Patsy who seems to offer the chance of a better life, of genuine love and companionship. This fails, as it must, but it does not do so because of Ada’s weakness, but that of Patsy; she is never presented with a choice, but with a fleeting glimpse of possibility. Moreover, the potential of Patsy to show such an escape is only created by his unwitting participation in the sad story of The New Electric Ballroom and his inability to follow through on the offer is likewise bound to this narrative logic. The story makes the people in this play, rather than vice versa.

In this way, a comparison with Beckett is interesting, for while storytelling in his work offers purely distraction and amusement in the face of the absurdity of the world, Walsh’s play reveals people and world constructed by stories. It seems a writer’s conceit, for what is fundamentally unsatisfactory about The New Electric Ballroom is this overarching dominance of narrative, even, and especially, over those who narrate. Ada’s failure to escape, and the entombment of the sisters in general, offers little social insight, for it is bound up in the logic of the story already. The characters do not fail in the exercise of freedom, since they’re not really free to begin with.

Reddy’s always complaining about the need to update the DIY aesthetic for new technology, so I thought I’d flag this very good example of a video-maker doing just that. Lorcan Finnegan’s new video for Dublin locals Sickboy has got mad photocopy-based animation, playing around with the self-promotion aesthetic developed in the local music scene. Also has a real grim high-contrast opening shot of tower-blocks. Dead nice.

Went and saw Diary of the Dead couple weeks ago, expecting a fairly standard zombie flick, but stumbled into a pseudo-intellectual critique of horror movies and visual culture in general. An unfortunate thing to happen to anyone really.

The film starts off with a recording of a zombie attack on a news crew, the narrator informing us that the truth never made reaching television, that it was re-edited as part of a massive government cover-up which has hidden the reality about the undead epidemic. This film, uploaded to the internet, is part of a global effort by bloggers and amateur journos to put out the truth via myspace and youtube. We’re almost positioned as internet explorers discovering a story, reminiscent of how the Blair Witch Project used a ‘documentary’ ploy in combination with a viral marketing strategy to help earn a $15,000 film over $248 million. Like the BWP, Diary of the Dead is shot in first-person, repeating and updating the documentary concept, with the premise also giving the film its impetus, as the students rattle around in their Winnebago in an ongoing quest to get the truth out.

These similarities to the film that defined viral marketing show a lost opportunity and some interesting possibilities for future movie-makers. Despite replicating the basic premise of the documentary horror, Diary didn’t develop an internet strategy of any power, nor did it expand on the tantalising possibilities offered by the blogosphere for spreading the idea of a suppressed zombie epidemic, with the truth to be found for those willing to look for it… Still, the avenues explored will likely set some clever marketers thinking, and with Alternative Reality Games becoming an ever more important tool for generating hype, it can’t be long til links are made.

A sequence where the plucky heroes trawl round on the net on a much-needed breather from televisual derring-do and piece together various strands of a global narrative from the web hints at the possibilities of a totally different fictional medium emerging; using the net to create a half-buried mixed media archive, where cyber-browsers become intrepid archaeologists for a time, gradually unearthing more details of a suppressed history. But my marketing executive wank fantasies will have to wait til another day.

As a zombie film, Diary does quite well, featuring the necessary elements of brutal cannibalism, hilarious zombie-killing and shuffling crowds engulfing the unfortunate protagonists. It’s also a bit of a self-parody, at least I hope it is, with pretty much no effort going into such superfluities like characterisation or plot. The character who does stand out is the alcoholic academic supervisor, who sits around alternating pseudo-philosophical sound-bites on the nature of film with reminiscences from his days at Eton and his experiences in “the war” (unspecified). He even uses a bow and arrow for fucksake. But these foibles are funny rather than anything else, well made up for by the gleefully gruesome deaths that are inflicted upon the innumerable staggering hordes.

The main problem is that this pleasant fare is interrupted by the musings of the narrator on visual culture, cause maybe filming things has become an obsession of the modern age, so much so that we stop feeling bad about, maybe even enjoying all the horrible things that we’re recording, y’know, its like watching a car crash, it’s really gruesome, but we just keep looking. Oh Christ, its happening again…Sorry, just had flashbacks to first year philosophy.

The point of these interludes, taken along with the constant references in the film to the dehumanising nature of recording reality, seems to be that the director wants us to laugh while watching simulated violence one second, then step back and question, ‘is it wrong to enjoy watching these images, are we just consuming pain?’ and then watch some more. Some sort of cinematic alienation effect maybe? Or maybe it’s just the logical continuation of an eminently self-conscious genre which has continually mixed social satire and violence for an audience who don’t go in for the suspension of disbelief. Whatever reason motivated these theoretical episodes, their effect is dull.

People don’t go to zombie movies to intellectualise about why they go to zombie movies, they go to zombie movies because for whatever reasons, they want to watch all sorts of nasty killings, laugh a bit, get a little bit scared and maybe catch a hold on the person sitting next to them at an opportune jumpy moment. In fairness, Diary of the Dead has got all of these elements, its just that the half-hearted attempts at a critique of Western visual culture keeps getting in the way. A particularly rewarding scene features a scythe-wielding, dynamite-tossing, mute Amish Mark Williams (of The Fast Show and Harry Potter renown) lands top of the funny pile, among some wonderfully moronic antics by the heroes. There’s a couple of frights too, and the POV style allows for some good ambush effects, but it’s generally more funny than anything else. The graphic killing is also nice, as Romero’s slapstick zombie approach leads to some gleeful acts of carnage, this viewer’s favourite being a zombie’s head slowly melting after being hit with hydrochloric acid.

Anyway, a reasonably good zombie flick, spoiled by trying to put theory into a genre defined by its stupidity…If any major marketing companies are out there reading this, I’m open to providing consultation on cutting edge-strategies for generating product awareness through immersive branded entertainment. Fuck yeah.