04.24.07
Posted in Film at 10.55 pm by Caitlin
I mentioned recently that I am volunteering at the British Museum this year. I am going to be taking weekly or fortnightly tours in the Japan Gallery. The gallery has been completely refurbished and contains treasures from Buddhist statues, samurai swords and medieval clocks to manga and contemporary ceramics. The tours are due to start in mid-May and I have my assessment next week – eek!
I do have a script to follow but I am also trying to learn more about Japanese history and culture. Tonight I went to see Karas: The Prophecy at The Barbican Centre as part of the Japanimation series.
Anime for me seems to fall into two categories. It’s either utterly original and absorbing or it’s utterly original and completely baffling. I loved movies like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. But this fell more in the latter category.
The film was about water demons taking human guise in a city and needing to drink human blood to survive. Water spirits seem like a consistent theme in Japanese cinema; this also featured in Spirited Away. We had a talk from Helen McCarthy, co-author of the recently released Anime Encyclopaedia before the movie and she focused on the role of myth and myth making and how in Japanese mythology you can’t escape destiny. You can be reckless or careful, but the monsters will get you anyway. She also mentioned how monsters in the sewer is a theme shared with Western art as well – notably Doctor Who in recent weeks.
Anyway, the plot seemed to involve a good guy who used to be a bad guy and a bad guy who used to be a good guy but I’m not really sure. There were also some other spirit types – some tall and elegant with flowing white hair and others that were small and round and colourful like little Hello Kitty figures but I’m not sure what they were. I was starting to make sense of it by the end, I think, but then it ended on a cliffhanger. It turned out to be an unfinished television series rather than a film.
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Posted in Life, Media & Internet at 10.34 pm by Caitlin
Some of you may have been wondering why I hadn’t updated Caitlin in London recently. The reason of course is that I was busily preparing this new blog. I thought it time that I move to my own domain name, instead of piggy-backing off Blogspot (aka Blogger).
I am developing a professional website so that when people search for my full name on Google or other search engines, hopefully they’ll find information about me as a journalist rather than about my trip to Paris or Cardiff. And this site will be my new home for personal stuff. So update your bookmarks or RSS feeds now because Caitlin in London will no longer be updated.
Some of you may be interested in the technical details. I am using WordPress, the open-source blogging software found at WordPress.org. WordPress also offers free, hosted blogs (similar to what I had with Blogger at WordPress.com. The difficulty with transferring from Blogspot to WordPress is that I had previously upgraded to New Blogger and WordPress.org only had an import tool for Old Blogger. I couldn’t cancel the upgrade so I tried all sorts of horrid things like resetting FTP settings, which I really know nothing about. I spent hours and it felt like I was beating my head against a brick wall. I actually reserved this domain name a couple of months ago but I basically gave up because it was too aggravating.
Then I figured out something quite simple. WordPress.com now has an import function from New Blogger. And it’s dead easy to export from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. It’s a bit bizarre that I had to do it in two steps since but it was really painless and took about five minutes in total – and it brought all my categories, comments and everything! Woo hoo!
My other blogs, Century of Books and True Wild Catches have also been imported to this site. I will use categories so that anybody who wants to track them individually can do so.
Old Blogger didn’t have categories but New Blogger did so only a small percentage of the site was categorised before I moved. I have made an effort to try to categorise more of the archive but it remains a work in progress. I also need to check photos and links and profiles and so on, but it will take time, since paying work and a personal life have to come first.
Welcome to my new site! Please feel free to leave comments. (Compulsory moderation will apply for the first comment but once you have at least one approved comment, you can comment freely).
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04.21.07
Posted in London, Running at 1.38 pm by Caitlin
I have signed up for the Race for Life on Sunday 3 June in the City of London. It’s a 5km race to raise money for Cancer Research UK.
Please sponsor me and help me reach my target of £100. Anyone can donate but if you are a UK taxpayer you can increase the value of the donation by 28 per cent by agreeing to Gift Aid.
Most of us know someone whose life has been affected by cancer and know the heartache this terrible disease can bring. I am running the race in honour of my Granddad who died from prostate cancer over ten years ago. I hope that by fundraising, I can make a difference to the lives of others and add to the possibility that someday we can find a cure.
I am also running because I am not a natural runner and by training for a 5km race I am making a commitment to my own health and wellbeing. I know that I can run 5km but a year or two ago this would have been unthinkable. It’s my first race so I am guaranteed a personal best! And if it goes well, I might really push myself and train for a 10km run.
I am racing with Dominique and hopefully (if her ankle is better), Jess.
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Posted in Environment, Media & Internet, Society & Politics at 12.53 pm by Caitlin
The Independent has a unique news sense – either self indulgent or refreshingly different, depending on your point of view. Yesterday, the drought in Australia made the front page, with extended coverage inside.
The drought has been going on for many years but the reason The Indy decided to cover it now is because the situation in the Murray-Darling basin is so grim that if it doesn’t rain in the next six to eight weeks, the government will ban irrigation. This would be a disaster for a region that provides 40 per cent of Australia’s food; crops would fail, livestock would die, fruit trees and grape vines would wither. The other reason is that The Indy likes writing about climate change and it’s pretty clear that global warming is at least a factor in the worsening drought conditions in Australia.
The story is important both for Australia and, with the climate change angle, the world. I can see their justification, but it was still an interesting choice for a British newspaper. Most of its competitors spent the week focusing on the horrific campus shootings at Virginia Tech in the United States, or Prince William breaking up with his long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton.
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Posted in London, Skating at 12.44 pm by Caitlin
I have graduated* from the Sunday Stroll to the medium-paced London Skate, which runs every Wednesday night through the summer.
Last week was the first Wednesday skate of the year and I was there! We had a good few hundred people skating and we made our way up to Camden via Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Soho, Holborn and Hampstead Road. It was hard work with a few hills and rough surfaces and a faster pace than the Sunday Stroll but it was fun as well. And the second half (really the final quarter) was long and smooth and down hill, right down past Regent’s Park and Park Lane. It was challenging but do-able and I will definitely be back for more!
* I’m not planning to give up Sundays though.
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04.13.07
Posted in Film at 10.58 pm by Caitlin
We went to see The Curse of the Golden Flower tonight. We went to the cinema up the road, a nice change from the over-priced and over-crowded cinemas in the West End. It meant that afterwards we could have a drink to discuss the movie and then walk home.
There are some spoilers in the following review.
I was expecting a Kung Fu movie along the lines of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of the Flying Daggers but it was a little different to that. Certainly there are a few acrobatic fighting scenes that are the trademark of the genre but not that many. If this is your primary reason to see the movie, I would stay home as you would likely find it slow and boring. Though the battle scene is quite spectacular with synchronised movements of the army of silver versus the army of gold.
It had all the ingredients of interesting and well-orchestrated characters at conflict with one another, combined with mystery and suspense. Unfortunately I didn’t think the movie fully delivered on that early promise and I found the ending a little unsatisfying.
The film is set in the Song Dynasty, around the time of the Dark Ages in Europe. (Although it is also set in the Forbidden Palace, even though that wasn’t built until much later, during the Ming Dynasty). The set-up is that the empress has betrayed the emperor by sleeping with his son (her stepson). In vengenance, he drugs her with a slow-acting poison, so to save herself she plots his overthrow. The main theme was loyalty; to the emperor, to the empress, to your family, to your lover, to your country.
The second eldest son chooses loyalty to his mother over loyalty to the emperor, his father, but he does so and goes to his death without knowing of her love affair. The youngest prince has no loyalty to anyone but himself. The eldest prince ultimately chooses loyalty to the emperor, his father. The emperor loves his eldest son more (perhaps out of loyalty to the son’s mother) but has decided to name his middle son as heir because he is the more talented of the two and the emperor is presumably acting out of loyalty to the country. The theme applies even to the more minor characters; the physician’s daughter knows about the poison and is torn between loyalty to her family and the emperor and loyalty to the empress. Later the same character puts herself in danger out of loyalty to her lover.
We are meant to identify with the mother and son (the empress and the middle prince). It’s easy to do this as both are strong, likeable characters. Yet it’s not black and white. While the king is ruthless and exacting, he is not an ogre and clearly loves his sons very much. And the empress lets her son risk body and soul for her, without ever telling him the truth about the situation. She promises to tell him but not until after the risks have already been taken; he dies first.
I don’t think the film had a moral as such but it certainly explored some interesting ideas.
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04.11.07
Posted in Environment at 8.46 am by niltiac
The Congo is a huge country, one of the largest countries in Africa. Unlike most of the countries in the region, it is still covered with vast tracts of virgin rainforest and is home to some of the world’s only surviving populations of gorillas. (In contrast, Uganda, a much smaller country, was pretty comprehensively deforested by Idi Amin and his henchmen).
Now an area the size of the United Kingdom will be logged by a small group of European and American timber firms, after contracts were signed in highly questionable circumstances and in defiance of a World Bank moratorium. In some cases chiefs of villages signed away 25 years of access rights after one hour of consultation, in return for bags of sugar and salt. They didn’t realise that individual teak trees are worth up to £4000, they didn’t have legal advice, and they didn’t have the support of their tribe – who are now really angry. The loss of the forest will most certainly consign them to a life of misery and poverty.
I tend to think of this sort of thing as an example of the rank colonialist exploitation that went on in the 19th and 20th century. It’s difficult to believe that it’s still happening today – why haven’t we stamped it out yet? All our earnest hopes for a better future for Africa and concerts to end poverty count for nothing when this sort of thing is allowed to go on. It’s not just happening in Africa either, it’s happening all over South America, Asia and the Pacific. We’re still logging old-growth forests in Tasmania, for god’s sake!
The World Wildlife Fund for Nature is working with the local tribes to protect the rainforest in Papua New Guinea. They are currently celebrating the signing of three new Wildlife Management Areas covering 80,000ha of land, which is a legal mechanism established by the local people and recognised by the PNG authorities ensuring the protection of their environment. This is a stunning area, home to rare orchids, giant pigeons and some of the world’s largest butterflies.
Five more communities have asked for help but it will cost $AUS250,000 to establish legal protection in all these areas. You can donate here – international credit cards accepted.
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