01.28.07
Posted in Books at 4.18 pm by niltiac
I first read Animal Farm for English class in high school, back when I was fifteen years old. We were told of course that it was based on the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinist Russia, but I was yet to formally study Russian history. Re-reading it now, it is striking how closely the plot of Animal Farm follows Soviet history. Orwell invents almost nothing and all his characters are either modelled on real historical figures (eg. Napoleon is Stalin and Snowball is Trotsky) or broader social groups (eg. Boxer is the working classes, while Mollie is the bourgeoisie). At the time of Animal Farm‘s publication, Stalin was a crucial ally in the war against Nazi Germany and fascism and it was considered very impolitic to criticise him. The novel was almost not published because of the prevailing political mores and the self-censorship of British publishers at the time.
Clearly, it was not many years later that criticising Stalin and Soviet Russia became decidedly less controversial in the West. However, the novel did not lose its ability to disturb the Powers That Be, especially in the United States, when publishers learned that Orwell intended the novel to apply to the inherent dangers of all revolutions and not just the particular case of Russia.
Despite the close parallels to Soviet history, the novel clearly has broader relevance. The central lesson of Animal Farm is that power corrupts and the citizens of a country need to be eternally vigilant about loss of freedom or civil rights. Governments should be trusted only as far as is absolutely necessary and be held to regular account. This does not apply only to revolutions, for the situation was not much better under Mr Jones in the novel or the Romanovs in real life.
We all have a duty to vote and to engage with the political process at all levels. The alternative is the erosion of freedom and the encroachment of tyranny. Britain is now a full-on surveillance state, with one CCTV camera for every 14 people. Just as the pigs of Animal Farm would cry “you don’t want Jones back, do you?” to justify any decision, from appropriating the apples to abolishing weekly meetings, our governments frequently use the threat of terrorism or criminality to justify restricting our freedom.
Of course, I’m not trying to say that Blair is Stalin or anything of the sort; what I am saying, is that we shouldn’t just accept something like ID cards with the blithe argument that “if you’re not a terrorist or a criminal, you don’t have anything to worry about”. I know of too many cases where police have planted evidence (eg. in the 1970s the police would raid hippie houses and if they didn’t find any drugs, they would plant them, reasoning that they must have hidden them) to be that trusting. And I know too much about technology to believe that the government has the know-how to keep a central database of every citizen’s private information secure from hackers, some of whom may be the very criminals and terrorists we’re supposed to be protected from.
Since I’ve already read this, I’m still at 37 down, 63 to go…
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01.22.07
Posted in Career, London at 10.45 pm by niltiac
After months of unseasonally warm weather, it’s finally getting cold. Apparently it could even snow this week, although the official forecast is only for sleet.
I hope it snows – sleet is nasty and cold and wet whereas snow is beautiful and romantic and cold and wet. So I’m doing my best snow dance right now. The daffodils on my window sill are a bit confused and have already started budding so I have brought them in in anticipation.
I really felt the cold today as my stockings were quite sheer and I left my gloves and hat at home. I didn’t expect to be outside for long but then there was a bomb scare in the building I work in! I am acting news editor at Media Week until the end of February. It’s only three days a week, which is quite nice and still gives me time to do other things.
I got to work at 9.30am (the official starting time) and the building was already in the process of being evacuated. We had to go stand in the park for half an hour, which was mighty cold! Then a few of us escaped to a colleague’s place for much needed hot tea and Christmas cake.
We were finally allowed back in two hours later and it was a mad sprint to put the magazine out since today was press day. We lost two hours from our working day on the busiest day of the week, we didn’t drop any pages and our print slot only moved half an hour! And the deputy editor was ill. Hey ho! We made it and I don’t think the results were too shabby.
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Posted in Family & Friends, Life at 10.29 pm by niltiac
My uncle Chris celebrated his 50th birthday on Saturday and my boyfriend and I headed up for the bash at his house in Cardiff. Happy birthday, Chris!
My aunt Michele (left, in the purple dress) had prepared a fabulous spread of food – some of it with ingredients from her garden – including salad and quiche and dolmades (vine leaves) and spanakopitas (spinach triangles) and dips and bread and cheese.
My cousins also played their part. Aaron, the younger boy, made the birthday cake from scratch – and very good it was too!
Dominic, who is sixteen and going to music college, performed with his band, Johnny and the Bandits. Dom is the drummer. I thought the gig was really good – they play all their own stuff and it’s kinda inspired by things like the Chilli Peppers. There is a Johnny and the Bandits page on MySpace, but I don’t think there’s much up there yet.
I wore a beautiful aqua, silk dress from Ted Baker that I snared in the sales. Unfortunately the only photos of me I’m either eating or have terrible red eyes and since it’s my blog, I get to be vain, and not publish them.
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01.15.07
Posted in Career, Media & Internet at 9.58 pm by niltiac
I think I signed up to LinkedIn.com (a professional networking site for the those not in the know) a couple of years ago and forgot about it. A couple of invitations for connections here and there prompted me to periodically update my profile but I never really thought much about it or found it terribly useful.
My thinking is changing though as it seems in the past week or so I have read a spate of articles of blog posts about how to use it more effectively and first-hand reports on how useful people have found it to be.
Guy Kawasaki has some good advice on his blog, How to Change the World. For example, if you’re a job hunter it’s a good way to research someone who is going to interview you for a job, or get reverse references for a potential employer. You can also request your profile to be indexed on search engines such as Google so that employers can more easily find you.
Penelope Trunk of the blog Brazen Careerist has also written about LinkedIn in several posts, including a Q&A session with one of the co-founders. She has also linked to a recent article on CNN saying that LinkedIn has now reached a tipping point and becoming a must-have for people in business.
So I am going to make an effort to get more out of LinkedIn, especially now that I work for myself. So if you know me (in a professional context) and we are not already “connected”, please feel free to send me an invitation. If I know your work I would also be happy to write an endorsement.
It occurs to me that it could also be a very useful tool for journalists – I am frequently in the position of trying to track down people after they’ve left companies and to be able to see all their previous workplaces and then make contact with various people they’ve worked with in the past could be an enormous help.
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01.14.07
Posted in Film, Society & Politics at 10.04 pm by niltiac
I know I’m a bit behind the times but I finally made it to see the new Bond film last night.
Casino Royale is every bit as entertaining and stylish as its predecessors. It is also a lot smarter than the average Bond movie (or at least the recent ones), with a great deal more emotional depth and complexity of character and motive. This doesn’t exactly make it a work of genius but it’s solid.
The casting was great. Daniel Craig was perfect for the role and turned in a performance that should (and I believe has) silenced any gripes about him being blond. Eva Green was pretty cool as the Bond girl with a brain, Vesper Lloyd. Judi Dench is brilliant as M, as ever.
But – and this is a big but – the movie was almost ruined by the intrusive product placement. There is always product placement in Bond films but this seemed to take it to a whole new level. The Sony Vaio laptops and the Sony Ericsson mobile phones are used far more than the plot demands it and it’s fairly obvious the script was rewritten to satisfy the commercial contracts. Aston Martins are classic Bond material so I didn’t mind that so much – although I didn’t really think he needed to reference it by name in the scene in the hotel in Bermuda.
But the one I found most aggravating was Gordon’s gin – in the casino in Montenegro he asks for a martini and lists exactly how he wants it made, down to specifying Gordon’s brand. The movie then dwells on this for a few moments as all the other players also decide they will have the same drink. Clunk clunk. Groan. (Incidentally, although Gordon’s is ubiquitous in London I don’t think they make particularly good gin – Bombay Sapphire is much better, and I’m not paid to say that!).
I wrote a feature about product placement for Media Week in November. There is a very good chance that the EU, then the British Government, then the statutory regulator Ofcom (in that order) will lift the ban on paid product placement on television that has existed since the birth of commercial television in Britain in 1954. Everyone I spoke to in the ad industry was at pains to point out that this wouldn’t lead to full-on American-style product placement because the British industry and the British public is different and brands would take a more subtle approach in order not to insult the viewing public. Well, Casino Royale is a British movie and the British ad industry played a role in the product placement deals that were struck. All I can say is, we’ve got a different idea of the meaning of the word “subtle”.
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01.13.07
Posted in Environment, London at 2.31 pm by niltiac
This is my third winter in London and its certainly the mildest so far. Normally at this time of year, I would be bundled up to my eyebrows with hats, scarves, gloves etc. This year I am wearing a coat but I don’t really need to do it up and I don’t need the accessories either. The other evening I took the recycling out in my t-shirt and ended up outside for about five minutes without getting cold. Yet two years ago, in February, we had snow.
It’s not just me. The papers this week said that we were on track to have the warmest January ever since records began in 1659. It’s primarily a result of the warm nights, which are reaching highs of just over 12C, hotter than the average in July. (I don’t know what the average this month has been to do a like-for-like comparison). The Met says mild nights are not unusual in January but the fact that we’ve had so many of them already definitely is. It’s affecting wildlife with reports of an early spring with newborn lambs gambolling and daffodils blooming through the English countryside.
It’s not just the UK either – the entire Northern Hemisphere is having an exceptionally mild winter. Ski resorts in Europe couldn’t open until well after Christmas. Across the pond, New Yorkers were experiencing 22C heat a few weeks ago (t-shirt weather) and have only just experienced their first snowfall – a mild flurry. (El Nino is also meant to be a factor in North America but the fact that the story is the same in Europe and Asia indicates a global trend).
It’s deeply worrying. Scientists predict global temperatures will rise between 1C and 5C by the end of the century. 1C would be disruptive but manageable – 5C would probably be the end of our civilisation and maybe even life on earth as we know it. If temperatures increase at the rate they have in 2006 and 2007, we’re on track for the second scenario – scary stuff indeed!
We need to radically think our energy needs and sources and we need to do it now. Time is not on our side.
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01.10.07
Posted in BookCrossing, Books at 4.17 pm by niltiac
Last night’s meetup for BookCrossing was a literary quiz as a fundraiser for RNIB for talking books.
Last night we raised £187 – to be added to the £453 already raised – but the target is £2000 – the cost to produce one talking book. A whopping 96% of books are never made available to people with sight problems and RNIB is campaigning to change this. People with sight problems want to read the same book, at the same time, at the same price, as sighted people. Please donate here if you would like to help.
It was at the recently refurbished Barley Mow near Westminster and it was great fun! Not just because I was on the winning team either!
The questions were mostly not too difficult but there were a few curly ones. It opened with a section on famous first lines – we were given the line and had to name the book and author. Some were easy, such as the famous “It’s a truth universally acknowledged…” line from Pride and Prejudice. Others were more difficult and I was particularly proud of myself for recognising the first line of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which very few other people got.
We also had a London round (eg. Q: From what London borough did the pilgrims set of from in The Canterbury Tales? A: Southwark), a picture round (identifying fragments of covers), a talking book round (identifying the narrator – I was terrible at this!), a general round (eg. Q: What was the name of the farm in Animal Farm before the revolution? A: Manor Farm – a very lucky guess on our part), and a dates round that was made easier by general as well as literary clues.
We had a good team with different strengths. All of us knew the answers to many of the questions but my team members were able to deal with questions on Samuel Pepys and Chacuer, while I knew that Lady Lazarus was written by Sylvia Plath (I studied Plath in high school) and that the Japanese TV show based on Journey to the West was Monkey (I’m a child of the ’80s after all!).
It came down to an exciting conclusion after we tied with another team, both got the tiebreaker question (Q: Shakespeare was born and died on the same date, what was the day and month? A: 23 April – the same as St George’s Day) correct, and then had to guess the quizmaster’s age to clinch the prize money.
We had our pick of the prizes and I took home a Crabtree & Evelyn gift pack of jojoba goodies.
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01.09.07
Posted in Theatre at 11.04 am by niltiac
The theatre – plays, musicals and ballets – I saw in 2006.
January: The Soldier’s Tale, Old Vic (my review)
February: Resurrection Blues, Old Vic (my review)
March: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Apollo Theatre (my review)
August: Market Boy, National Theatre (my review)
October: The Producers, Theatre Royal my review)
Daddy Cool, Shaftesbury Theatre my review)
November: A Moon for the Misbegotten, Old Vic (see review below)
Faust, 21 Wapping Lane (see review below)
December: Avenue Q, Noël Coward Theatre (my review)
The Nutcracker, English Ballet, The Coliseum (my review)
A Moon for the Misbegotten: After a few disasters at the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey finally scored a triumph with this Eugene O’Neill play (see Guardian review. I saw this with Tash, just before her return to Australia, and another couple of friends.
There were just three main characters in this play about rural Connecticut in 1923 – the father, the daughter and the landlord/love interest. So it required – and got – exceptional performances from the actors who not only had to be on stage for the entire time but had to play a full emotional range as well as sobriety, drunkenness and everything in between. The script had the occasional jarring moment but the production and performances were spot on. I love watching Spacey on stage but Eve Best as Josie and Colm Meaney as the father were also superb.
Faust: This production of Faust was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Produced by a theatrical outfit called Punchdrunk, in association with the National Theatre, the performance is staged in a five-level warehouse in Wapping, in London’s Docklands district. On arrival, we were given a mask (some had white masks, others black) and then taken in a lift with different people dropped off at different floors. We were then free to explore the building at our own pace, following our individual instincts and interests. There were fragments of performances happening simultaneously all over the building – from a ghostly pine forest to a Wild West bar and beauty parlour – and you could either follow the performers throughout the building or explore level by level. I was with my boyfriend for part of the time and alone at other times but somehow we met back up at the end for a drink in the bar in the basement.
It was all loosely based on the story of Faust who sells his soul to the devil but it didn’t have anything so straightforward as a plot – it was more about thematic resonance. The performances were not silent but generally did not involve words – usually miming and perhaps screams or other sounds, with music also a big feature. My favourite part was Faust’s lair with the pentagrams on the floor and ingredients for his potions lining the walls. It could have all been quite Undergraduate but it was saved from this by the scale and professionalism of the production.
The audience’s reaction varied. I heard some American girls exclaiming, “I can’t believe we paid good money for this. £25, that’s like $50.” I saw someone breaking down in terror in a candlelit room and being ushered out by friends (she was masked so it was definitely a theatregoer rather than a performer). And I saw another girl scampering about from place to place, crying out, “this is so much fun!!”.
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Posted in Travel at 10.44 am by niltiac
My travel itinerary in 2006.
December-January: Australia (Sydney and Queensland)
January: Shanghai, China
March: Belgium (Bruges/Brugge and Brussels)
April: Uganda
May: Italy (Rome, Umbria, Florence and Pisa) – I don’t seem to have written about this!
June: Paris, France
Cardiff, UK
July: Birmingham, UK
Tanzania
Scotland
July-August: Norway and Spitsbergen in the High Arctic
Denmark
Christiania (community within Copenhagen that claims independence from Denmark)
August: Cornwall, UK
September: Whitstable, Kent, UK
November-December: Australia
December-January: Tunisia – I haven’t written about this yet!
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Posted in Books, Film, Travel at 10.36 am by niltiac
I took myself to the movies on Friday night and saw Miss Potter, the new film about the life of Beatrix Potter. I really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who loved Beatrix Potter’s books (the tales of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, Jeremy Fisher et al) as a child. It’s not thrills and spills a minute so it won’t be to everyone’s taste; it’s a gentle story about love and life told with grace and humour. The CGI animation to bring the drawings to life is a nice touch and Renee Zellweger is quite convincing as the Victorian spinster. I don’t know much about Beatrix Potter’s life and I would be interested to know how close to the truth this film is.
The film inspired me to re-read the books – and perhaps buy them for my little sister, if she doesn’t have them already. It also re-awakened by desire to see the Lakes District as I haven’t been yet. Perhaps I’ll plan a hiking and kayaking holiday this spring – it would be good to have a nice low-carbon holiday close to home as I’ve been feeling guilty about all my air travel.
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