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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
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"I would hope that people know at this point that I'm smart enough to know what I'm doing.” – Nicki Minaj
There is no difference between high and low culture, and anyone that says otherwise is a mug. It’s with this philosophy in mind that I approached Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday: Reloaded show at the O2. I’ve been, if not a fan, then at least an admirer of her since I saw the transcendental video for “Stupid Hoe” earlier in the year. It’s a towering musical and visual achievement, and I realised she was someone to keep a close eye on. So when I was asked if I wanted to go and see her perform at the o2 I jumped at the chance. It’s important to remember when watching a pop concert like this that every little thing on stage has been carefully calculated. A lot of effort and money goes into these things, and every musical and visual clue must to some degree be someone’s decision. It’s a mistake to consider them as unconnected and unsymbolic, especially as in shows like this, there is a clear narrative and philosophical process being enacted in front of us.
Unpicking exactly what and who Nicki Minaj is and what she is trying to do is more complicated than it looks. For example just for starters, Wikipedia lists two birthdays for her. She was born (at some point) in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago as Onika Tanya Maraj and her family moved to New York when she was five. She had a tumultuous family life; her father drank heavily, took drugs and once tried to kill her mother by setting the house on fire.
So by what process of transfiguration do we get from this inauspicious beginning to the ultra-professional, plasticised pop star that I saw last night? I think this show partially explains how, and outlines the consequences. Becoming a pop star takes a lot out of you, in some cases literally and fatally. Like a freshly caught fish, a person stepping onto the conveyor belt of pop can expect to feel a knife filleting them, spilling their guts out and tossing them away. They can rebuild bodies, making people harder, better, faster, stronger. They're provided with new personalities, new identities, new opinions. Then the unsuspecting popstar is thrown into a chaotic universe where they’re a resource to be strip-mined, exploited by powerful people with an eye to vast profits. Only the strong can survive. The rest burn out spectacularly, going insane and/or dying.
Unlike most people, Maraj had what it takes to pull off this metamorphosis. Her personality type is impregnable and perfectly prepared to the pop star life. Describing her childhood, Minaj says:-
“To get away from (my parents) fighting I would imagine being a new person. ‘Cookie’ was my identity – that stayed with me for a while. I went on to 'Harajuku Barbie,' then 'Nicki Minaj'. Fantasy was my reality."
Prior to her fame she describes a miserable life eking out a wage waitressing in Red Lobster, or working office admin roles. At one point she held a position as an office manager on Wall Street where she describes the intense frustration and resultant aggression she felt, resulting in crippling stress pains. Clearly, Minaj is not cut out to be anybody's wage slave. But she HAS got the motivation, talent and the psychological tools to shed the skin of base humanity and become a fantastic pop star. The show last night explores the consequences of what it means for human being to ascend to the top of the cultural heap.
On stage Minaj is a whirl of contradictions. She stalks around, a gaggle of dancers at her heels alternately spitting out machine gun fast lyrics and fluffy, almost dainty melodies. Her songs, as my friend astutely pointed out, seems to be three or four separate songs mashed into one. You’ll get the fast shouty bit, the light singing and maybe a big drop and a few bars of ultra happy, processed dance. It’s almost like a ‘cut up’ style of music composing. All of this is infused with a take no prisoners attitude, with typical Minaj lyrics frequently asserting her identity and her status as the alpha woman in the room. But every time she asserts that she’s on top, she begs the question, ‘which of you is on top?’ Because there’s not just one Nicki Minaj on stage.
There’s ‘Nicki Minaj’, who seems to be the basic default pop star personality. She sooths the crowd with platitudes “I’m so proud of you!” or “There’s three things I want to tell you: I Love You I Love You I Love You!”. It’s important to remember that although ‘Nicki Minaj’ is the foundation stone of this identity complex that it’s as unreal and calculated as any other the other personae. Within ‘Nicki Minaj’, there are a number of sub-characters too, we see Nicki the Boss, Nicki the Ninja, and Nicki Lewinski, all of which represent different aspects of her past or her personality. The other roles she adopts are Roman Zolanski “a gay lunatic”, Martha Zolanski, Roman’s mother who speaks with a British accent and Harajuku Barbie, but the list goes on, possibly into infinity. She plays with these parapersonalities like she’s shuffling a deck of cards, deciding on ‘who’ she is going to be seemingly at random.
The fact that she can cycle between these identities so fast makes her fantastically suited to life at the cutting edge of popular culture. We’ve all got our own rolodex of personalities, fictionsuits we can don to explore aspects of ourselves or interact more freely with others. To some extent this isn’t a new thing, but internet culture has thrown this jagged, overlapping free-for-all multiple psychology theory into the mainstram. People have a multitude of online identities, posting IDs on forums or fantasy characters in an online roleplaying game – even the ‘Facebook Version’ of the individual has recently gained some currency as a viable separate personality.
It’s this recognition that you need a wardrobe full of masks to cut it in the digital world that Minaj exploits. We can be anything we want or need to be at the drop of a mouseclick. Externalisation and overt theatricality enables Minaj to navigate the high-octane world she inhabits and allows her to become a person-as-corporation, the one-woman brand.
The over-riding visual theme to the show is this conversion of the idea ‘Nicki Minaj’ into a brand or product. The video backdrop allows the scenery to become almost anything, whether it be a projected set, or a psychedelic whirl of colours. Most of the time it shows us a world where ‘Nicki Minaj’ is everything. We see ornate Nicki Minaj branded hotels and department stores full of Minaj branded merchandise. This is as much stage dressing as it is manifesto; a demonstration of the power of her shifting identities. ‘Nicki Minaj’ is adaptable, ‘Nicki Minaj’ is for sale, and ‘Nicki Minaj’ can and does encompass anything.
While us fans have to battle to define our personalities in personal and social terms, Minaj fights for idea space with brands like Coca Cola and Hilton Hotels, taking the fight to the real big boys. Her background projections underline over and over again themes of sublimation of the human being to the brand, the casting aside of the human form/mindset and what it means to personally adopt a shifting and amorphous corporate psychology. If it’s a principle in US law that “corporations are people”, then Minaj asks, why can’t people be corporations?
Later in the show we see a more explicit connection, something that posits her chosen identity within an artistic tradition. In an Andy Warhol-themed backdrop we see shelves and shelves of spinning ‘Nicki Minaj’ branded products. Minaj’ed Warhol paintings flash behind her. The concept of the lifestyle as a part performance, something you live rather than take time off from is exactly relatable to the rootless, globetrotting pop star. By visually aligning herself with a Warholian philosophy the show becomes reflexive; consumerism fuels the Minajplex (herself, her retinue and so on). The identical Minaj branded products rotating away on the shelves behind her reminded me of this famous Andy Warhol quote:
“What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” - Andy Warhol
But this is a show that takes pains to satirise the culture of consumerism and takes particular pains to subvert the symbolism and imagery that it uses to suck us into its perpetually out of reach dream world. This is explored further soon after in the set, when Minaj takes to the stage riding a giant rubbery inflatable pink car. I think the important question to ask here is why make the car so malleable? It would surely have been easier to just hire a real pink convertible for this segment? As far as I can see, the thinking behind it is to get us to consider her and the car as a reflection of each other. She literally sinks into it at times, giggling and laughing as she plays in and around it. Here the car, the traditional symbol of masculine consumerist desire is rendered soft, feminine and ultimately penetrable. If we’re being led to equate this prop with Minaj herself, what does this tell us about her? My interpretation is that we’re forced to see the car as a subverted image of desire and to view Minaj in the same way.
Nicki Minaj’s public image is consciously doll-like. In her videos, photo shoots and live shows she frequently distorts her body, showing an image of herself with huge, staring eyes, brightly coloured hair, long spindly legs or pumped up collagen lips. This overt sexuality is combined with heavy use of pink, with the disturbing effect being that she is at once sexy and childlike. This conflation is a common advertising tool, but Minaj caricatures it, taking it to the logical conclusion, exposing the ridiculousness at the heart of it.
The final important part of the presentation is also the most thuddingly obvious. The backdrop is replaced by a vast money-minting machine, spewing through dollar notes. Throughout the show, above the stage is an ‘NM’ logo, but here it’s evolved into something more abstract, a corporate brand logo like the Nike swoosh. If all the thematic elements in the show have been relatively subtle so far, this is like a bash on the head for the audience members not playing attention. "Look, this IS Nicki Minaj" is the message. It's the final transformation and the most literal. We've seen the evolution from human to money making machine.
The thing is I can't quite work out if this is genuine corporate idolisation or a way of subverting and satirising the corporate system. Even if it IS a satirisation, the Minajplex is a very real thing, and I've always held that actually doing something that you're satirising defeats the point entirely. I guess the most positive way of looking at this is that we have a girl who's risen from some pretty miserable sounding circumstances to become a person who's the master of their own fate. While it may be an example of making the machine work for you, you're still working a pretty exploitative machine.
The thing is I can't quite work out if this is genuine corporate idolisation or a way of subverting and satirising the corporate system. Even if it IS a satirisation, the Minajplex is a very real thing, and I've always held that actually doing something that you're satirising defeats the point entirely. I guess the most positive way of looking at this is that we have a girl who's risen from some pretty miserable sounding circumstances to become a person who's the master of their own fate. While it may be an example of making the machine work for you, you're still working a pretty exploitative machine.
Nicki Minaj puts on a damn good show, and the only minor criticisms I can make are that maybe the costume changes are a bit long and that I didn't know who the guest stars were. But Nicki Minaj is clearly one of the most dangerously efficient and effective people working in pop music today. Who knows what she's going to do next? Whatever it is, I'll be there.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
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What is there to write about a night like this? I stood in a dark room full of flashing lights and listened to essentially the same song for about six hours. Mission accomplished! Putting on a night like this can seem disarmingly simple, you just need a good sound system, a nice space, some toilets and bar and some DJs and you're set, right? Obviously it’s not as simple as it sounds, I've been to enough crappy, badly organised and oversold nights to know that. Fortunately Drumcode go to great lengths to create a nice atmosphere to dance in, and even though the night takes place in some pretty grimy industrial surroundings, there’s an unmistakable attention to detail that you just don’t get at a lot of other nights. From the moment you enter until the moment you leave you’re gently but firmly in a solid pair of hands.
The weather had taken a turn for the chilly and wet over the last few days, and I was dreading having to queue outside in the miserable night waiting to get in. It’s a particular annoyance of mine to have to spend ages waiting to get in when I already have a ticket. Last time I saw Adam Beyer was at the Hearn Street Car Park in April, and I remember miserably queueing up outside in the cold and the rain. People huddle together, desperately clutching print outs with barcodes on them waiting desperately to get in, trying to fight off boredom and the cold. But there was a good omen! Earlier in the week, Drumcode sent me an actual honest-to-god ticket through the post, with a hologram and everything! In this age of online booking, getting a physical ticket in the post is a rarity, and there was a nice sticker in the envelope too.
When I entered the place at about half 11, it was relatively sparsely populated. I picked up a drink and had a look around, realising that at some point over the last few years I've been here before. The night takes place in the arches under a railway bridge, and they soar pretty high over your head. There are six of these, two of them are taken up with DJs. The other ones are bars, toilets, chillout spaces and a cloakroom. Even though the place becomes pretty damn busy later on, there’s still always room to move around and if you need a place to sit down and rest for a minute there’s always somewhere to go. They've got a load of portaloos set up in two of the arches, and I'm pleased to say the queues weren't too long, and they stayed pretty bearable throughout the night. It seems a like a pretty prosaic thing to mention, but (literally) crappy toilet facilities can kill a night like this stone dead, especially if everyone starts pissing against the walls because they don't want to queue up.
One of the main reasons I enjoy these sorts of nights is the general niceness of everyone there. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak and one person acting violently would ruin it for everyone. You can go to clubs in Soho or Camden where there's always at least one knuckle-headed bruiser just waiting for the wrong person to catch his eye. But here there’s a certain expectancy that you’re going to be a good Samaritan if you see anybody having trouble. This ranges from someone who’s dropped something on a crowded dancefloor, at which point people will generally clear a small space to help someone find it, or to making sure that the boggle-eyed, sweaty and confused guy staggering around in the frantic glare of a strobe light like a shot elephant is alright.
So it was a nice crowd and a pretty well-dressed one too. This was after all a Halloween party, and costumes ranging from the lame and to the elaborate were on the dancefloor. Gore and blood seemed to be on the cards, and occasionally you'd see something lurching out of a cloud of dry ice like a refugee from Silent Hill. Some of the fake injuries were disarmingly realistic; it’s weird to be dancing next to someone who looks like they’ve had their face sliced up with a cut throat razor, or had the skin peeled off their bodies. There was also a face-painting station by the front door, so throughout the night the amount of people wandering around bleary eyed with smeared Jokerlike skulls painted on their faces only increased.
This enthusiasm for the macabre was matched by the organisers and Drumcode had made a nice effort to create a Halloween mood. Behind both DJ booths were two excellent backdrops. In one room were two large skulls, and throughout the night they had different things projected onto them. They were faintly hypnotic at times, with huge staring eyes looking around at the crowd. After a few hours I realised that you can get a surprisingly large amount of design variety on a skull template, I saw blood trickling down them, Day of the Dead influenced designs or electroshock bolts running down past the staring, googly eyes. In the other room there was a display made up of coffins, skulls and pumpkins, with blue and green graveyard spotlights illuminating the scene.
Aside from this, there was also a freaky Halloween live show happening in one corner of the room. People in professional and disgusting looking zombie makeup were being held in a cage in the corner, lurching around and grabbing at anyone foolish enough to get close to the bars. When they were out of the cage I saw them being leashed on a chain, and led around by a kinky gas-mask wearing long-coated person who treated them with the disdain a zombie deserves.
All of this stuff, enjoyable as it is, is stage dressing though. What we're here for is the music. But it's difficult for me to write about techno sets like these. What is there to say? Frankly for me, one song melts into the next without any noticeable gaps, and the DJs while obviously talented slightly interchangeable. What's important is the constant hammer smack of the beat, which very quickly has a hypnotic effect. The acoustics here are great, the percussion beating hard off the brick walls, and thumping deep inside your lungs. Occasionally within the throbbing drum beat you get a little synthetic melody or vocal sample that only underlines the heavy nature of the rest of what you're hearing. It's a sensory overload, something that gets deep inside you, working its tentacles into your brain, your arms and your legs.
It's strange how time seems to get a bit elastic when you're in a place like this, something that was amplified by the clocks going back mid-way through the evening. You wander into a place at midnight, and 6am can feel like a very very long way away, but then the music takes over and suddenly you're sweaty, used up, scuffed up and it's very early in the morning.
So I can't really pick out a DJ that I particularly liked more than the others. Maybe there are techno connoisseurs out there who are shocked that I can't tell the difference between the sets of say, Maetrik or Joseph Capriati. Don't get me wrong I think they were both great, but I just don't have the critical faculties to be able to pick out any distinguishing details between them. But not being able to describe why I like it, I do know THAT I like it, and anything that can keep me on two legs dancing for 5 hours or so has got to be worth a damn.
All images used with permission of wo0 photography : wo0.co.uk
Monday, October 29, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
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Transplanting the outlaw and the transgressive into the bosom of the establishment is a tricky piece of surgery. But tricky though it may be, this is what was attempted at ‘LIPA!’ (Lock In Performance Art). LIPA! is an offshoot of ‘LUPA’ (Lock Up Performance Art), a monthly gathering I enjoy attending that takes place behind a block of flats in Bethnal Green (previous reviews here, here and here). One of the main reasons I enjoy it so much is the hint of the secret and unexpected, the transformation of a dull and featureless bit of concrete into a space where societal norms are temporarily suspended. At LUPA there are no rules (or at least the illusion of no rules), and there's no way to predict what you’re going to see next. It could be a pyrotechnic musical instrument, a superhero walking across a roof in skis or simply two oiled up guys in their pants brutally beating the hell out of each other. It's a special secret and is beautifully and subtly seedy.
So does this survive the journey into the beating heart of imperial, monumental London? Can LUPA retain its personality and punkishness when enveloped in the aluminium brushed and spotlight lit Institute of Contemporary Arts? Unfortunately the answer appears to be no.
I arrived just before 8, weaving and dashing my way through the Trafalgar Square pedestrian traffic, hoping I wouldn’t arrive too late and be locked out. When I first heard about the concept of the ‘lock in’ I became irrationally excited. It’s always been an ambition of mine to be involved in a lock in at a pub. I figured if you were going to try and transplant the LUPA atmosphere to the ICA you’d need to create a hermetically sealed bubble, somewhere that is both the ICA and also LUPA simultaneously.
Unfortunately, what I quickly realised is that this space wasn’t hermetic at all. It was barely even a bubble. I’d presumed that the idea was that LIPA! would take control of the bar area, and be allowed to use it for their own ends for an hour. What actually happened is that although Kate Mahony was dramatically holding one of the doors closed, people were free to enter and exit through the door next to her. My excitement deflated a bit upon realising that people could come and go as they pleased, which nullified the interesting idea of being part of a captive audience.
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| The bar in quieter times. |
I took a table with some friends near the bar upstairs, got some drinks and waited for the fun to start. I know that the artists involved here are capable of grand, bold and dramatic statements, so I figured all I had to do was sit back, sip my (quite expensive) pint and take in the performances. Straightaway I felt the atmosphere was tempered a little bit by the fact that a lot of people were having their dinner around me. It looked like tapas was on the menu and waitresses bearing platters of food zipped around and people politely chatted over their dinner. To put it mildly, it didn’t seem like a crowd ready to enthusiastically engage with performance art.
First up was, I think, Daniella Valz-Gen. The performance began with a game of Chinese whispers, a nice way of uniting a pretty disparate crowd. I was a bit annoyed that after I’d passed on my whisper it didn’t seem to go anywhere. The person I’d whispered it to tried to tell someone who was busy tucking into some kind of hummus based dish. She looked non-plussed and returned to her dinner rather than pass the message along. What a spoilsport! After this, Valz-Gen stood at the other end of the bar and performed a short monologue. At the beginning she explained that she can’t speak very loudly, so we all have to be as quiet as possible. The room quietened down a bit, and the only sound was dinner eating with the attendant clinks, scrapes and chewy squishes. But there was still too much background noise to be able to hear what she was saying. Was this the point of the performance? Whether it was or not the main emotion this aroused in me was frustration. I was frustrated with the crowd for not quite being quiet enough, and (perhaps unfairly) frustrated with the artist for being so quiet! One of the bigger problems I encountered in the upstairs area was that with so many people watching, seated at tables, it was hard to move around the upstairs area without either blocking anyone’s view or sitting down at someone’s table who was having dinner. So I sat, ears straining at the back of the room trying desperately to hear what was being said. All too quickly it was over, but I did later notice the artist walking through the crowds at the bar, rubbing her chest and belly and as far as I could see being mostly ignored by those queuing up to buy drinks.
Many of the artists decided not try and overpower the atmosphere of the bar, but to insinuate themselves subtly into the crowd and gently subvert things. So moving around the two bar areas were JB&TheBubbles dressed in skimpy tight fitting black outfits. They carried around trays of cheap corn-based snacks, which as far as I could tell consisted of Space Raiders, Onion Rings and some kind of sugary puffed corn. I thought this was the best thing there, but then I’ve always had a soft spot for performances where you can eat part of the art. Also I hadn’t had any dinner, so by the time these people were handing out crisps I was a bit peckish. I may have indulged a little too much though, at one point they just left the tray on the table in front of me and wandered off for a bit.
It sounds a bit facile but of everything there this was the one thing that properly captured the something of the spirit of LUPA. These cheap, corn based snacks are unpretentious, tasty and inescapably proletariat. I doubt very much that a Space Raider, Quarterback or Transform-A-Snack has ever travelled down the gullet of David Cameron or George Osborne, so seeing them on a silver platter being served in central central London, where the Important things happen was rather refreshing. It also functioned as reflection of the bar itself, during the piece, kitchen staff at the ICA were busy delivering the highest in bar-based Saturday night cuisine to tables. Of all the things here, it went furthest to cocking a proper snook at the ICA and all too briefly LUPA felt like a subversive oppositional element.
Unfortunately similar projects on the same sort of wavelength didn’t work quite as well. There were a few people standing around in t-shirts that read ‘Pose1’ on them. As the performance went on, and as far as I could see from my quite limited view of the space, they seemed to be moving around the bar striking poses. If this all sounds quite vague, that’s because it was by this point pretty hard to be able to tell what was going on. I’d realised by now that I wasn’t going to be able to see much from my table, so I moved to the top of the stairs. This resulted in me being quite brusquely told to move on by ICA security but when I went downstairs it was a bit too crowded to be able to see.
Frequently throughout the latter half of the night I felt like I was glimpsing bits of performances, a few seconds here or there before they performer was drowned out by the crowd in terms of vision or sound. At one point our table was approached by John William Fletcher asking us to write out names on a piece of paper. The noise in the bar was a bit too loud to understand what he wanted them for, but I figured there’d be some kind of worthwhile payoff. Later I saw Fletcher pull a piece of paper from the hat, and speak for a moment. Once again the bar was too loud to be able to tell what was being said, or to really see properly what then happened. A similar experience happened when Selina O, dressed as a clown came to our table and handed us a card that said “Girl Clown says: you are my best friend”. She then left. I get the feeling that maybe there was a lot I was missing out on, but whenever I went to the downstairs part of the bar it felt like there were things going on upstairs, and whenever I was upstairs performances were going on downstairs. No matter where I was in the place I was missing out on something! Very frustrating.
Eventually with a fizzle rather than a bang it ended and people began to trickle out into the night. A bar on a Saturday night is always going to be a tough place to hold an art intervention, and the geography and division of the ICA bar makes it even tougher. The promotional material explained that the artists would be “taking over the bar”, unfortunately the opposite happened and the bar took over LUPA. It was an interesting experiment, and being given carte blanche to perform in a crowded gallery bar is a great opportunity for exposure. But the problem was that even here at the ICA with a crowd that must be at least open to the idea of performance art, a lot of people there just didn't seem to care that much and this lack of engagement was poisonous to the performances I saw. On top of this, the layout of the place made it practically impossible to get a decent idea of what was happening at any one time. By the time it was over I deeply missed the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the garage in Bethnal Green.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
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In space no-one can hear you scream. Or anything else for that matter. So how do you give a lecture examining sound in space? I found out last night at the latest ‘Sensual Universe’ lecture at Imperial College London, a public lecture series which takes the five senses of the human body as its starting point. Every single one of these lectures so far as been fascinating, and also somewhat intimidating. Astronomy and astrophysics are a bit outside of my area of expertise, but nonetheless each and every speaker so far as presented their subject clearly, entertainingly and compellingly. Previously in the series I’ve see Dr Saralyn Mark on the subject of ‘Sex in Space’, and Dr Subhanjoy Mohanty on ‘Beer in Space’, covering touch and taste respectively.
Tonight’s speaker was Prof Jean-Phillipe Uzan, a French cosmologist and director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. He works in theoretical physics, studying the makeup of cosmology at the very beginning of the universe, in particular cosmic background microwave radiation, the topology of the universe, scalar tensor theories and alternatives to general relativity as well as writing six books and hundreds of scientific papers. As far as cosmologists go he comes across as someone dedicated to making science understandable to the general public. To this end he’s written two children’s books, and made it a mission to explain cosmos to the public through music and art.
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| Prof. Jean-Phillipe Uzan |
Uzan begins by explaining that to perceive the universe, humanity needs to “find new eyes”. Sight is perhaps our primary tool for understanding the universe, but when it comes to viewing space, it can only show us a small part of the picture. Much of astronomy involves observing the universe through different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays, though x-rays all the way through ultraviolet, microwaves and radio waves. Stars in particular emit vast amounts of electromagnetic waves through the entire spectrum. Uzan shows us a picture of the Sun viewed at different frequencies to illustrate how we might perceive our sun if our eyes were attuned to, say, the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum.
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| The sun as seen from across the electromagnetic spectrum. |
Uzan begins by giving us a quick outline of the relationship between musical theory, mathematics and astronomy. He tells us the story how Pythagoras came to understand the principles of musical theory and developed the idea of integers in musical notation. Now, a lot of this went over my head, especially as I am rubbish at both musical theory and mathematics. But this was an important foundation for understanding where this lecture was going, Uzan used Pythagoras as a launch pad to explain the history of harmonics, and how scientists have historically attempted to translate the movements of the solar system to musical notation.
We touched upon Johannes Kepler and his quest to discover organising principles of harmony in the movement of planets within the solar system. Throughout his career, Kepler fruitlessly tried to correlate the movements of the planets with the concept of nested solids. Eventually he produced a series of notated “planetary songs”, of which Uzan played some portions of for us. This is perhaps the first historical example of a scientist accurately translating real cosmological observations of the universe into music, and completed the Keplerian Laws of Planetary Motion, which formed a solid foundation for future scientists, notably Isaac Newton, to work upon.
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| Kepler's Planetary Songs |
This process of transmuting something into sound is further explored in the next section of the talk, when Uzan looks closely at artists that have attempted to answer questions like “Can we see sounds?” and “Can we listen to colours?” Uzan shows us the work of Charles Blanc-Gatti, whose paintings of music supposedly influenced Walt Disney in the production of ‘Fantasia’ and Paul Klee, who aims to translate the musical theory into a single image. We see musical instruments constructed that create paintings as they’re played. All of this proves Dr Uzan’s simple point, the process of translation between mediums, from sound to light, or light to sound allows us to view the world around us from a fresh perspective, with all the attendant benefits.
This process is fun and interesting, but does it have any practical benefit in increasing our knowledge of the universe? We’re played a recording of the Vela Pulsar, which rotates about 11 times a seconds. We can appreciate the frequency to some degree just by viewing a waveform of the signal emitted by the star, but it’s only when we actually hear it that we can get a real handle on how it behaves. It sounds frantic, but is also disarmingly regular. The recording played reminded me of morse code – an SOS message from the debris of a massive star that exploded 10,000 years ago. We’re also given a brief overview of the science of asteroseismology, which Uzan describes as hearing stars “beating like drums”. These sounds allow us to study the internal structure of the stars. We heard the distant thrum of Xi Hydrae and HR3831.
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| L'Orchestra - Charles Blanc-Gatti |
These recordings from across the universe are the basis for a number of interesting compositions by various musicians. The example played for us was 'Stellar Music No. 1' by Jeno Keiler and Zoltan Kollath (as heard in the video below).
Signals from across the cosmos like these have provided inspiration for various musicians throughout the 20th century. Some of these pieces, like Philip Glass' 'Orion' are maybe a touch subjective using astronomical data as more of an inspiration, an artistic component of a wider statement rather than something intrinsic to the structure. On the other hand, there are composers who attempt to directly translate data into music, like John Cage's 'Atlas Eclipticalis'. This uses as a score an atlas of the stars, with musical notes superimposed over the stellar bodies. The brightness of the stars is directly translated into the size of the notes in the composition. As such, it's theoretically possible to imagine this piece as containing the same information as the visual star chart itself.
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| Lady Gaga is probably working on it right now. |
Those aliens are gonna think we're so cool.
I'm really enjoying this lecture series, and I can't wait for the next one on 'Light', which will take place in January. My only complaint is that they're not coming fast enough! It's been 5 months since 'Taste' and after this I'm itching for more!
(If I've ballsed up any of the science here let me know in the comments or email me and I'll correct it.)
(If I've ballsed up any of the science here let me know in the comments or email me and I'll correct it.)
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
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| Brian Paddick and Peter Hitchens |
‘Drug Laws in Britain – a waste of time, or an essential barrier to grave danger?”
The Tom Olsen lecture this year wasn’t a lecture at all but rather a debate between two very different men on a very contentious point. In one corner, 54 years old, born in Balham, twice the candidate for Liberal Democrat Mayor of London, former Police Commander of Lambeth and controversial instigator of a lenient policy on cannabis possession Brian Paddick! In the other, 60 years old, Mail on Sunday columnist, author and self described “brutal, sexist, racist, homophobic monster"* Peter Hitchens.
*just to be clear, he was joking
St Bride’s church was lit spectacularly for the occasional. It’s a beautiful place anyway, the dramatic purple lighting gives a certain import to the occasion that you just don't get if you're in some lecture theatre. The presence of the religious iconography (most prominent of which is a rather hunky psychedelic Jesus Christ emerging from what looks like a bit like a rainbow vulva) gives proceedings authority. Many of the arguments we hear tonight are filtered through a manichean lens; Hitchens at least has a strong sense of what is good or evil, something he applies not only to the drugs themselves, but to the moral standards of the people who take them.
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| hmm |
After brief introductions by the Vicar we're off. In his opening statement Paddick explained how his experience as a Police Commander led him to conclude that drug laws lack credibility among the public. In particular he highlighted the public's confusion of the consequences of being caught with a small amount of drugs for personal use. Much is left to the discretion of the arresting officer or custody sergeant, so it's hard to say whether you'll have the drugs confiscated and be waved on your way, or whether you'll end up with a criminal record. Underlining many of his views is the assertion that the vast majority of drug users in the UK cause minimal harm to themselves and others.
Paddick is obviously a confident man when it comes to speaking about this subject, and his years on the beat dealing with the users and dealers show. Throughout the night he sticks rigidly to examining the consequences of drugs law "in the real world". This pragmatism is perhaps best illustrated when he explains the implications and consequences of busting street dealers: inevitably they'll be replaced almost immediately, this replacement may well be someone from a rival gang thus creating a potential future violent confrontation as drug dealers vie for territory. His solution to the problem is to target the suppliers. He explains that in the late 90s there was a period after the IRA had become dormant and before the World Trade Centre Attack. During this period security services focussed on the international drugs trade, apparently successfully. It’s this top down attack on the suppliers that seems to inform his philosophy when it comes to enforcing drug laws. As Paddick sees it, targeting users only leads to distrust of the police, racial discrimination and social misery.
All of this is anathema to Peter Hitchens. He opens with a joke about him being “arrested for crimes against political correctness”. The crowd is literally silent as they try to work out whether this was a joke. Someone coughs nervously. A tumbleweed rolls past the stage. Oh dear.
Hitchens sketches for us a nightmare world. A society gone mad, where powerful forces conspire to render the public at best insensate and at worst irreversibly mentally ill. Their tool for this is cannabis, which he regards as a drug as dangerous than heroin, cocaine or any other class As. Even though this is a debate about wider drug laws, Hitchens narrows it right down to cannabis time and time again. He explains how a series of bills promoted by powerful lobbyists over the latter half of the 20th century have sought to downplay the physical and social harm of this demon weed. The very fabric of society as we know it is at stake and as he puts it "this is the last chance to change things".
The contrast to the Paddick’s pragmatism couldn’t be more pronounced. Hitchens occupies a world of unbending morality and sees certain courses of action as paths of good or evil with not much of a grey area in between. These days it's rare to hear someone espousing a philosophy like this, and to be fair to Hitchens he genuinely seems to believe that views like his will save the country and his countrymen from social ruin. This unbending certainty that he's right ends up tripping him up, particularly when he cherrypicks scientific studies based on whether they support or harm his conclusion. He repeatedly brings up medical research which proves that smoking cannabis at a young age can adversely affect brain development in children, yet simultaneously dismisses any evidence that there’s a physical component to, say, heroin addiction. He never explains the logic behind why he believes one scientific study is more worthwhile than another, and this inevitably means that when it comes to discussing data rather than morality he becomes woolly.
Hitchens sounds most convincing and passionate when he brings up Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ with its population addicted to the fictional drug Soma. Hitchens is probably right when he says that those in power would like nothing more than a dozy, malleable and doped populace. His argument is that drug use robs its users of those human qualities he holds most dear; inquisitiveness, creativity, motivation and the will to stand up for what you believe in. Whether he's right or not at least in a roundabout way he's got a good handle on what he likes about humanity.
After the two men have their say we move onto a quite extensive question and answer session. There seem to be a fair number of people in the audience who work with drug users and addicts in church groups and in prisons. By and large these people seem to side with Hitchens, and take a very negative view of recreational drug use. It seems to me pretty damn obvious why they hold such opinions: if you work in prisons or addiction groups then you’re inevitably only going to encounter those whose lives have been affected the most adversely by drugs, with the result that you end up suffering from confirmation bias. Some of these questions drift into the realm of the barmy, with one woman’s credibility plunging off a cliff when she outlines her opinions of how drug use negatively affects the crucial balance between our sober yin and our raging yang.
What I found to shed more light on the men's views were questions that address specific aspects and effects of drug policy on society. I asked a question about what would they both consider to be a suitable sentence (if any) for possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use. Hitchens explained that he’d give them one caution and then on a second offence they’d be sent to prison for six months. He made it unnecessarily clear that he wasn’t talking about 3 months in prison, and 3 months out on licence, and then launched into a pretty tired old diatribe about how prison should be entirely about punishment rather than rehabilitation, about removing flat-screen TVs from cells and so on – the usual Daily Mailesque boring prison bumph. It’s typical of his arguments that while he seemed pleased with his blood and thunder approach, he also ignores that it’s entirely unworkable and undesirable to lock up vast amounts of people for non-violent behaviour that largely impacts only upon themselves. It's a shortsighted opinion that doesn't consider the longterm impact. When people are released from prison they're economically crippled for life: who wants to employ an ex-jailbird? This inevitably creates a huge section of society reliant on welfare, trapped in a downward spiral of poverty which invariably leads to high levels of drug use. Hitchens' policy results in an recursive loop of misery, a snake gorging on it’s own tail and loving the taste.
Paddick, in my view correctly, identifies that harsh punishments for possession of amounts of drugs intended for personal use disproportionately impact upon black youths. It's a sad indictment of the Metropolitan Police that if you're young and black in London you're far, far more likely to be stopped by police and searched than if you're white. So if you're white and carrying drugs, you stand a much better chance of 'getting away with it' than if you're black. The consequences of this inevitably result in a breakdown of relations between the police and the community, and the consequences of that should be obvious to anyone on the streets of London in August 2011.
It's pretty easy to pick a winner of these two men tonight: Hitchens' arguments have holes so big you could drive a truck through them. In addition to this, he comes across as weirdly insecure. Someone asking a question of him says they think one of this statements was "stupid". Immediately he goes on the defensive, angrily asking if the person asking the question is calling him stupid. It's an oddly reflexive response, and we see similar behaviour from him later in the evening when someone asks what importance we should attach to the views of a newspaper columnist and an ex-politician, and asks as to whether a scientist might have made a better debater. Hitchens turns on the man, asking him what gives him the right to question him. Looking a little confused, the questioner replies that he's a solicitor. They're brief moments, but it feels like Hitchens' erudite, confident mask has slipped and it's disconcerting to see him lash out so readily.
It's clear who made the better case last night. Hitchens' argument suffers from the fact that as far as I can see, he's begun with the conclusion that drugs (particularly cannabis) are very bad things and worked backwards from there. He's very selective about the science he uses to back up his case, and this eventually begins to feel intellectually dishonest. Paddick on the other hand has arrived at his point of view through a career in the police service dealing hands on with the consequences of drug use and the effects of drug law. I doubt very much that a policeman of all people would come to a conclusion that drugs law as it stands is ineffective and illogical without some very careful consideration.
It was a fun evening, and even though I disagree with pretty much everything Peter Hitchens stands for at least he's not boring. Stewart Lee once accurately described Jeremy Clarkson as "someone who pretends to have opinions for money". Ill thought out and wonky as they are, I have no doubt that Hitchens sincerely believes in what he preaches and at least on some vague level I can admire him for that. In contrast Brian Paddick comes across as a practical man, someone who's confident in his conclusions because they reflect his professional experience. He may not be as rhetorically flashy as Hitchens, but he's an infinitely more substantial speaker.
‘Argo’ is a film that tells you a story so preposterous that it must be true. It’s a very funny film that gets seat-grippingly tense. One that tries its level best to do justice to some pretty complex geopolitics but also fumbles the ball a bit in a few aspects.
The film is set in Iran at the time of the Iranian Embassy hostage crisis. The Shah had just been deposed and was been granted sanctuary in the US. The Iranian people wanted to put the Shah on trial, but the US refused to turn him over. The boiling point came when a mob stormed the Iranian embassy in Tehran, and took 52 embassy staff hostage. So far, so well known. What’s less well known is that six embassy staff managed to escape onto the streets in the confusion, and took refuge in the house of the Canadian Ambassador. Eventually the Iranians realised that they’re short six staff members, and came hunting for them. The USA had got to get them out of there, and their best bet was Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) an ‘exfiltration’ expert. His plan was to smuggle them out of the country under the guise of a Hollywood location scouting crew for a fake science fiction film called ‘Argo’.
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| Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez |
It’s a hell of a good story, and Affleck has done a great job bringing it to life on screen. There are some bravura directing moments in this film, particularly the opening sequence showing the embassy being stormed. The film begins with a quick run-down of the C20th history of Iran, before moving straight into the midset of an furious mob demanding justice. Almost immediately we get a sense of the geography of the situation through aerial shots of the building and the crowd. As the situation becomes worse, and the protesters begin climbing the walls a well drilled panic sets in that gives way to chaos very quickly. We see the Embassy staff frantically destroying as much classified information as they can, and the military desperately trying to work out how to contain this situation without pouring petrol onto an already out of control fire.
Affleck quickly cross-cuts between the embassy staff, and the crowd outside who are swarm ing the building from top to bottom. The sense of things rapidly spiralling out of control is captured perfectly. Suddenly there are people on the roof, in the cellar and before you know it, through the front door. The mixture of aerial shots (which may be really great CG), and handheld grainy film gives everything a feeling of intense authenticity. The scene is given added power by the recent embassy attack in Benghazi. The similarities seem clear; staff initially taking the mob for granted ‘after all, there’s protests every day’ to the sudden cold sweat of panic when they realise all barriers have been overcome, and there’s nothing between you and an angry chaotic mob.
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| They may not look it in this picture, but trust me, those Iranians are FURIOUS |
One of the main reasons why this scene works so well is that the Iranians are represented as more of an unstoppable force of nature than as individuals. We see them seemingly acting as one, their faces twisted in anger, practically foaming at the mouth. Affleck seems to use a lot of the same directorial tricks as you'd see in a zombie film, particularly Zack Snyder's remake of 'Dawn of the Dead' (2004). Meanwhile, the embassy staff get quickly sketched character moments over the course of their escape. These sketches evolve throughout the film, we quickly engage with the personalities of these six and sympathise easily with their plight. Meanwhile, the Iranian people are generally represented by large mobs, and if we do get to see individuals, they are generally shouting aggressively in Farsi and terrifying our leads.
This obviously is a bit problematic, but to be fair the film seems conscious of the somewhat murky tools its using to create suspense. As mentioned, it takes care to contextualise the story in the history of the country in a comic book style that seems to take direct inspiration from Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ (2007). So, theoretically the film justifies the anger of the mob, it's at least partly successful in explaining why these people are so angry and upset at Americans. It’s less successful when it comes to the sole entirely sympathetic Iranian in the film, a loyal servant who sacrifices herself to aid her Western masters. In going to so much trouble to outline her as ‘the one good Iranian’, they perversely make everyone else look much worse.
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| The embassy staff trapped in the Canadian Ambassador's house |
Ben Affleck seems like a conscientious film-maker (he even added a postscript praising Canadian involvement in the operation this film depicts after people got upset), but at the heart of the production process here is a catch 22. To make it as tense and effective as possible, it’s dramatically necessary to portray the Iranian people as a single-minded, violent horde. For narrative purposes they sort of have to be extremely otherised, the more sympathetic they become, the less we're scared of them. I don’t believe Affleck sincerely wants to paint an entire people with an understandable political grievance as monsters, but he's in the difficult position of doing just that.
For me, this was a hard stumbling block to get over, as were the general politics of the film. I’m not exactly inclined to buy into any narrative that posits the CIA as fine, upstanding, noble people when all evidence points to the fact that they’re one of the most sinister and immoral organisations of the 20th century. What I have to concede is that in this instance they seem to be acting justifiably, and anyway, I'm not going to side with the Ayatollah.
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| US exceptionalism clocking in for the day |
It’s fortunate then, that the central plot of this film is so compelling and unique (well, maybe ‘Three Kings’ is a little similar). ‘Argo’ uses the central plot device of a ‘fake’ movie shoot as a way to shine a light on the way intelligence services spar with one another. In a fantastic sequence we see a fake press event for ‘Argo’, complete with bombshell actresses dressed in unlikely, cheesy looking Flash Gordon gear cross cut with footage from the hostage crisis. The message seems clear, this is all theatre. The difference is that if the hostage's performances aren't convincing enough then they're going to be killed.
This comparison raises the film up from being just another espionage thriller, and the audience knowledge that all this really happened only adds to the feeling of import. The film only really falters when it decides to artificially make things more exciting. In the final sequences there are perhaps one too many hurdles placed in front of our intrepid heroes, one too many unlikely coincidences or times when they look doomed, and then are saved in the nick of time. This adds up, and the fact that the film becomes a bit more self-consciously unrealistic saps some of the tension from the end of the film. What should be a sudden, intense relaxation of tension ‘merely’ becomes a happy ending. It’s a little frustrating, they had me! I was on the hook for much of the film, fully involved with each little idiosyncratic twist the plot took, but you get the feeling they felt that their amazing real-life tale wasn't quite amazing enough, and had to embellish it a bit.
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| Ben Affleck and an angry, unnamed Iranian (one of many in this film) |
So this is a film with issues, but ones that it’s possible to overlook. It’s a fantastic achievement in direction for Ben Affleck too. His performance in this is perfectly serviceable, playing as he does a man whose skill is in blending in, but it’s behind the camera where he shows some real élan. This directorial confidence, coupled with a top notch supporting cast means ‘Argo’ is a fascinating snapshot of a rarely explored part of recent history.
'Argo' is on general release from the 7th of November 2012
'Argo' is on general release from the 7th of November 2012
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