20 April 2008

Kaos (2): response and review

Superb. A masterpiece. A masterclass in arthouse movie making.

(There is so much to write that it will take me weeks to construct this weblog posting.)

Kaos is the name the Taviani brothers gave to this movie homage to the writings of Luigi Pirandello, partly because a corruption of the word is the name of the place where Pirandello was born, partly because chaos is what Pirandello feared: the void, the abyss, nothingness, desolation. The movie exudes nothingness in which the characters and actions exist. The nothingness is as tangible as the stones in the barren fields, and the rock on which the houses precariously perch. The roaring silence and blank canvas give a perspective that is almost intolerable in the twenty-first century. People are leaving for the United States every week because of the grinding poverty and the emptyness.

The movie is made up of several short stories, linked by landscape and culture. Reading some of Pirandello's short stories, it is easy to recognise that the Taviani brothers have translated them well from page to screen. The movie starts with a prologue that makes little cognitive sense, but introduces themes important to the movie, such as landscape, human purpose, narrative, the brutality of life, transcendence. The crow of this prologue, a bell round its neck, flies over the landscape between stories, providing a visual and auditory connection between episodes. The movie ends with a Pirandello short story about being called home to talk to his long-dead mother.

Little happens in any of the stories: Kaos is not an action movie. Neither is it a drama, or any other obvious and popular genre. However, tension does find resolution. Kaos reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Kurosawa's Rashamon. The style of acting does not belong to Hollywood, it is much more theatrical (like Fiddler on the Roof), which seems fitting as Pirandello is best known as a playwright.

19 April 2008

Kaos (1): in anticipation

Kaos, produced and directed by the Taviani brothers, was released onto the theatrical art-house movie circuit in 1984. It was screened at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, in 1985, the single occasion when I watched the movie. It left such a deep and lasting impression that I have been searching for a copy of the movie since I bought my television and VCR in 1992. Over the years I have come across several copies of the VHS video for sale, but they have been in US television format (why does the US have to set every standard differently from the rest of the world? - for another posting) and extremely expensive. Being dogged, I have persisted in checking every few months (since about 1995) to discover whether any movie distribution companies had released Kaos for the British / European market, initially on VHS and more recently on DVD. Cliche warning: imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when a soon-to-be-released DVD suddenly appeared on the lists of several DVD suppliers. I was so taken aback that I wondered whether it was a scam. My copy was sent from White Rock, Arkansas, US. Excited to receive it as a child with a new toy, I shall watch it this evening.

In telling my story to people I know, few seem as surprised as I am not that the movie should be released on DVD, but that in the face of steadfast evidence to the contrary, I should continue to stand sentinel for the release of this movie on DVD. Thirteen years is a long time to wait. Only a few people know that I waited a long time for Godfrey Regio's Koyaanisqatsi trilogy to be released on DVD. Even fewer know that I am still waiting for Steppenwolf (based on the novel by Hermann Hesse) and Le Grandes Meulnes (based on the novel by Alain Fournier) to be released on DVD. In telling my story, I am saying something important about who I am.

Instead, what almost everyone I have told has focused on is how I shall react watching a movie for only the second time in 23 years, and in particular a movie I have built up in my mind as being so special that it was worth checking the listings of newly-released videos every few months. In part, I have felt mildly irritated that the focus of my story, about dogged, optimistic persistence, has been dismissed and replaced with a focus on whether the movie will live up to my expectations. In part, I have felt disappointed that the people who I have told (all British) assume that I may feel disappointed with the movie. I have also felt a little sad that no-one much has expressed any interest in watching the movie - I know only one or two people who come anywhere near matching my movie taste.

What will it be like? There are scenes and aspects from the movie that I recall vividly: bandits playing boules with the severed heads of their victims; a man howling at moon as he believes he is transformed into a werewolf; an urn-mender who realises that he is trapped in the urn he has just mended; the absence of someone who has recently died. The movie works at a visceral level that I would term expressionist. The issues addressed are profound and concern existence, and I would term this existentialist. The movies that I know which address such issues belong to such directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Peter Greenaway.

What will it be like? I shall watch the movie with a more experienced eye, mind and heart than before. Half my life has passed since I first watched the movie. I have changed in many ways, and expect that the movie, as though a mirror, will reflect an image of my young adult self. Will the middle-aged adult I have become respond to and appreciate the movie as fully as the young adult I was? Who knows? I shall have to find out, and accept what I experience.

What will it be like? I have written elsewhere about having an interest only in those movies that are worth watching at least several times. I trust that Kaos is a movie so rich in difficult ideas that I shall watch it many times. I already know that its initial heady flavours of wormwood and jasmine, citrus and woodsmoke, give way to a complex aftertaste that lingers for decades. I am looking forward to seeing masters of cinema at work.

10 April 2008

That's another fine weblog you've got me into

A new weblog, Kind Vices, has been set up for me and my colleagues at work. Its address is:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/kindvices/

Who knows what opportunities it will offer. I hope that my colleagues will be willing to use it, not least because I do not have experience of a team weblog (Sound Signs is for my family)

My first posting there, as usual, is about weblogs. This seems to have become a standard way for me to begin. ("I shall begin at the beginning" said Alice.) I am aware of how much I have come to understand since I first began weblogging: one of my initial purposes. I also enjoy the way in which I weblog.

07 April 2008

Antibiotic resistance: culprit identified

A news story supplied by Reuters at:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47795/story.htm

highlights the danger to human health perpetrated by the dairy industry.

In a nutshell, the antibiotics that are fed to cows remain active in bovine manure. Germs and microbes in the soil become resistant to the antibiotics. As a result, the current array of antibiotics becomes progressively less effective. In the United States, during 2005, 19,000 people died of MRSA. In the UK, MRSA has been instrumental in testing to breaking point the effectiveness of the National Health Service and the credibility of the government.

Were the dairy industry to be wound down, the rate at which antibiotic-resistant germs evolve will slow down.

03 April 2008

Geology versus new creationism

I recently received the following e-mail. The e-mail was unsolicited, from someone who does not know me and about whom I know nothing. No explanation was offered as to the reason why the e-mail was being sent to me, nor what prompted its dispatch.

***

Hello,

I wish to inform you that the so-called "biblical calculations" of the age of the Earth at 6009 years old is grossly inaccurate and compiled by dubious scholars. The bible's literal time frame allows perfectly for a very old world.
Very few people realize that the creation of the cosmos and the reordering of the world in seven days are two different events. Genesis 1:2 should actually be translated "the earth became formless and void," not "the earth was formless and void." The author of Genesis did not have all the different states of being in the past tense that we do today. English has evolved such that we have "was," "had been," "were being," "became," "had become," "were becoming." Moses (assuming his was the author) used the same word, sometimes rendered "was", sometimes rendered "became."

The creation of the world is Genesis 1:1. It was written very tersely and briefly; Moses, insprired by God, felt no need to get into detail about it. There was a fall in this created world, and it descended into chaos in 1:2 (we don't know exactly what caused the fall, but it may indeed have been Lucifer's (Satan's) rebellion against God). The seven days, which many people inproperly refer to as "the Creation," was God's restoration of the world into what we know it as, with plants and animals, periods of the Sun and Moon, humankind etc.

Thus there is an indefinite time specified between the Creation and the restoration of six days. The harmonists that try to argue that God may have created the world to appear old in every way against science to test our faith should stop wasting their time. The need look no further than Genesis 1:1-2 to see that God created the world an unspecified time before the six days of restoration. If today's science says the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, which they have to in order for Darwinian evolution to have had enough time, then that massive amount of time in human terms would be mostly before the 6 days of restoration.

Lastly, this doesn't mean that from restoration onward there have been 6009 years. (By the way, the 6009 years was counted many years ago, so it should be several decades higher now.) This time frame was mostly derived from adding the years of Adam to Abraham, Abraham to Jacob, Jacob to Jesus to attain the years of the ancient world. As recorded by Matthew, often unimportant generations are skipped. He wrote in three sets of 14 generations. However, comparing it to Luke's astonishingly historically accurate gospel, we realize that Matthew indeed skipped generations unimportant to achieve his literary form of 3 times 14 (Luke skipped one or two from Matthew's as well). This is fine, because "son of" actually is considered to be "descendant of," as in Jesus the Son of Adam or Jesus the Son of David. In sum, don't use archeaology's established views of 10000 years of human civilization to disprove the 6000 years in the bible that some oddball scholars decided to enumerate.

Thanks.

***

I can only imagine that the person, whose e-mail address suggested that the author is based in western Canada (a gorgeous part of the world that I look forward to returning to some day), has read some of my weblog postings in which I include minor geological references.

I studied geology for three years at university, and recently read the history of the drawing of the first geological map of Great Britain. I live on the site of a Victorian coal mine. I take an interest in geology wherever I go, including examining the stone facias of buildings, and (much to the resigned boredom of my wife and daughter) watch every geology programme that is broadcast on UK television (including the repeats). I am fascinated with the European, Russian, Japanese and American space programmes, closely following each mission on the internet (and for recreation, using Google Earth, I sometimes locate the International Space Station), because I have an interest in lunar and planetary geology.

The Big Bang occurred 13,700 million years ago, creating the universe and all matter within it. Red shift in the spectra of the most distant objects, and residual microwave cosmic radiation shows us the age of the universe (since the Big Bang). Many galaxies and stars are much younger than the age of the universe. Our solar system, the Sun, its planets and dwarf planets, their moons, the asteroids and comets, were all formed out of stellar dust only 4,600 million years ago. Radioactive decay paths and rates show us (for example the half-life of uranium-238 decaying to thorium-234 is 4,500 million years) that many of the rocks in orbit around the Sun date from the time of formation of the solar system: some of them have landed on Earth and on the Moon as meteorites and can be seen on display in museums.

Planet Earth initially coalesced from the solar cloud of stellar dust and debris 4,540 million years ago. Early in its life, when only 10 million years old, proto-Earth, the planet that became Earth, was struck by another small planet (often called Theia). The result was the Earth we know today, made of the two previous planets, and the separation of Earth and the Moon. The Moon, being significantly smaller, cooled rapidly and lost its geological processes, so the Moon we know today has remained utterly unchanged in most respects for billions of years. Earth, on the other hand, being so larger, cooled more slowly, and thermal processes in the core and mantle keep the surface of the Earth geologically active - witness the Boxing Day tsunami. When I studied geology at university in the 1970s, plate tectonics was still new, and still being discovered and proved. I could have applied to work a stint on one of the ships that was still mapping the mid-Atlantic Ridge (the constructive boundary between the European and North American sides of the Atlantic Ocean).

Also back in the 1970s, it was generally held that life really got going on Earth about 500 million years ago, everything before that being termed Pre-Cambrian. I recall being taken to see the Durness Limestone, a rock formation in northern Scotland where there is evidence of Pre-Cambrian unicelluar organisms. At the time this was interesting, and slightly worrying. However, it is now recognised that unicellular life actually got going about 3,500 million years ago, that is, only a billion years or so after the formation of the solar system, and possibly only half a billion years after the planetary collision that formed the Earth and Moon. It was in fact multi-cellular life that got going 500 million years ago, including, for example, the fascinating trilobites. The animals that are everyone's favourite, the dinosaurs, appeared about 135 million years ago, flourished for 60 million years, and then progressively disappeared until finally vanishing altogether (other than those that evolved into birds) with the Yucatan asteroid 65 million years ago. Whilst mammals existed before the dinosaurs, they did not flourish until the dinosaurs had left the stage.

The primate pre-cursor to humankind diverged from ancestral gorillas about 8 million years ago, and from ancestral chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago. Several different human species evolved, including Neanderthal humans who existed from 350,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago. Over the past 100 thousand years modern humans (like ourselves) and Neanderthal humans coexisted for a while, of which there is recently-discovered evidence in southern Spain / Gibraltar. However, the most recent ice age finished off the Neanderthal humans, leaving us to piece together the story, and sadly to vandalise the Earth.

The astronomical and geological story of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our home planet, and life, is one of surprising twists and turns, full of wonder and seeming miracle. I find it fascinating and deeply inspiring. What is more, I am not required to suspend my disbelief, nor to believe any person or text, neither am I required to hold articles of faith. The evidence is in the rock, and I can search it out for myself. The proof of the geological history of Earth, and of the development of life, is not in words, in a book, but beneath my feet.

I recognise the poetry of Genesis 1, and resonate with the reverence for Earth and life that it evokes. I wish that many more people shared that reverence. However, there is little value to be gained in attempting to wring scientific precision from the passage, for that would be to mistake Genesis 1 for scientific reality. It would be like wondering whether the toilets on the starship Enterprise are water flush or vacuum and disinfectant: Star Trek is a fine drama but it is not a documentary.

I do not know why the author of the unsolicited e-mail chooses to fret about misunderstandings, mistranslations and misreadings of Genesis 1; and to be insistent that creation happened in more than a single period of six days; and was concerned to let me know. I imagine that they wish to promote a marginally more credible Creation story. As far as I am concerned, the astronomical, geological, palaeontological and archaeological stories that I have come to know are far more awe-inspiring that any text. In this context, what the books of the Pentateuch teaches us is how Iron Age people in the Middle East conceptualised the natural world in which they lived. The value of scriptural texts is not in the realms of science, but as a dialogue about human values and spirituality. Asteroids and granite are unable to speak to me about meaning, mercy or compassion, whereas with the Bible, Koran and the Tao Teh Ching, I am able to have a conversation about how I might live my life, the choices I make, and how I might interact with other people. Ecclesiastes 3 says little of geological value (the reference to gathering and scattering stones relates to home-making and moving on), but says much about accepting the just-is-ness of existence. Job 28 does address geology, and whilst the purpose of the passage is to emphasise the unfathomableness of the wisdom of God, the value of the passage lies in the awe that it inspires for our planet, not because the passage is of scientific value. Genesis 1 belongs in this latter category.

02 April 2008

Thoughts about a comment

I received the following e-mail from Blogger:

earnest has left a new comment on your post "The Death Clock is ticking":

your fuckin retarted, death clock .com is not real,

Posted by earnest to Digitation at 26 March, 2008 22:25



I found the comment in response to my posting about the Death Clock (which I have since reread, and found straightforward) unhelpful and unenlightening. Apart from intending to be offensive and insulting, I was and remain puzzled about the purpose of the comment. Why go to the trouble of posting a comment that is neither supportive, nor constructive, nor positional?

I am also unclear how the commenter came to be reading the weblog posting. The time stamp says 22:25, which suggests recreational browsing. (I also note from the time stamp that program writers in the US find it nearly impossible to set out the time and date in a rational fashion. What is wrong with logical, rational, well-punctuated, elegant and unambiguous European time and date format: 22:25 Wednesday 26 March 2008?)

I checked the identity of the person who made the comment, 'earnest', but they have made their profile invisible, a practice discouraged but not forbidden by Blogger. Interesting choice of name: not Ernest, but earnest, and with the e.e.cummings lower case initial 'e'. For someone with that choice of screen name, the comment itself seemed incongruent: my posting about the Death Clock is quite earnest.

The facts that the comment starts with a lower case 'y'; the first three words are misspelled, the name Death Clock or deathclock.com is handled uncomfortably, and the comment ends with a comma, all point to someone whose first language is not English, or else whose English is limited to a vernacular restricted code.

I am perplexed by the idea that the Death Clock "is not real". In context, it is quite complex to identify what is meant by the term "real". Of course, the most obvious answer is that the Death Clock does not possess some kind of supernatural prescience, but as I acknowledge and explore the issue in my posting, that answer makes little sense.

The emotional power packed into the comment suggests extreme contempt. I had two thoughts about this. First, that 'earnest' had seen the Death Clock and been seriously spooked by it. By rejecting my posting about the Death Clock, he was attempting to regain a sense of control. Second, as 'earnest' is obviously a Blogger member, he has read my Profile and disliked what he saw. I am aware from having read material placed by the British National Party (a largely English extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist political movement) on their own website, that as an educated, liberal, middle-class pluralist, I could be seen as a traitor to white-skinned people, and undoubtedly represent the values they most detest. I am not trying to suggest that 'earnest' is sympathetic to the aims of any particular political movement. Instead, I am suggesting that some people do take offence to who I am, and maybe 'earnest' is one such.

A final, and perhaps the most important, point. I find it hard to understand why so many people use as terms of abuse language relating to learning disability. At the end of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil calls her henchmen, Jasper and Horace, morons and imbeciles. What makes is acceptable to use these terms, along with the terms 'retard' and 'retarded', as insults. Surely the people to whom they should correctly refer deserve our respect and compassion. For many people with a learning disability life is already hard enough without people stigmatising their disability.

I have no way of knowing whether my musings about 'earnest's' comment approached any truths. However, I have done what I can with the comment. I might write another Death Clock posting, as it is a while since I wrote the first one.