As the Orange Menace in the US runs out of ways to lose the election (how many times was that by now, counting all the law suits, 50?) but damage his country that much further, his cousin-in-malice-and-bad-hair keeps piling up ways to make satirists weep because they'd never get away with this stuff if they'd invented it. Gunships against French fishermen? Trying divide and conquer with Merkel and Macron and feeling insulted the two respond exactly as they did every time in the last four years a Brit tried this, by pointing out the EU negotiates as a block and not via individual members? And then there's the tale of Johnson during his dinner with Ursula von der Leyen "joking" that hey, English and German people knew how difficult the French could be, heh, heh, heh. She wasn't amused. See, in fiction, villains as successful as Johnson are supposed to have come competency and at least some ability to read the room they're in.

Not unrelatedly, and with my mind still on the late John le Carré, have two scenes from the film version of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold: Richard Burton, Oskar Werner, and Claire Bloom (in the second one):







And here's Philip Seymour Hoffmann in his last role in A Most Wanted Man. You can immediately see he's Richard Burton's grandson, so to speak:

Re: British politics... so, I hear the sequel to Into the Spidervers will be titled Spiderwoman: Judgment Day?

Truly, it was a glorious day yesterday, but today the depressing guess has grown in me that the horror clowns on both sides of the Atlantic will just brazen it out. In the US, the Right have become so fanatic and radicalized that they seem incapable of mustering anything like the sense of responsibility that sent Nixon running in the end, and in Britain, Brexit has become an ideology to trump, no pun intended, all other ideologies to its followers, whose policy, if it can be called that, basically amounts to "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". I mean, yes, they've utterly unmasked themselves. (Sovereignity of parliament? Not if its members do anything we don't like. Sovereignity of British courts and British laws? Nah, judges are "enemies of the people" (Stalin says hello). United Kingdom? To hell with North Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.) But I doubt anyone brainwashed by Brexit fever will care. You know what, I prefer Stephen King novels. Sure, a great many of the cast may die, and if you're really unlucky, the glimpse of the afterlife makes things even worse, but generally people make more sense, and fanatics get foiled before it's all over.

On that note, I've only begun to check out this delightful Stephen King fanfiction exchange: Some Find Solace is a creepy h/c delight of a story in which Trisha (from The Girl who loved Tom Gordon), Carrie (White, of course, from guess which novel), Jesse (from Gerald's Game) and Dolores Clairborne (another titular heroine) all meet.

My own assignment for startrekholidays has arrived. There aren't prompts as such, but there are several relationships I think I can work with. After a rewatch of key episodes. Oh, the hardship! :)

So let me get this straight: during the recent local elections in Great Britain, all parties with a pro Brexit agenda promoted by their leadership - The Tories, Labour and Ukip, and isn't that a combination that should never have happened - suffered heavy losses, while the parties with a clear pro-Remain, anti-Brexit attitude like the Lib Dems and the Greens gained seats - and the message not just Theresa May but also Jeremy Corbyn say they take from this is "get on with Brexit?"

I've got nothing.

Back to more sense-making fiction: the tv version of Elena Ferrante's novel My Brilliant Friend, the first of her four "Neapolitan Quartet" novels is finally available in Germany as well. After watching it, I googled reviews and discovered the English language ones, from when HBO broadcasted the season, were far more positive than the German ones now which aren't negative per se but complain that this is too faithful an adaption and also that it feels staged, and that something of the wild vitality is lost. I know what they mean, though I don't exactly agree with how they mean it. Not having been in a working class industrial suburb of Naples in the 1950s, I have no idea how crowded, or not, the streets were. (I was in Naples, twice, but in the city centre, trotting the tourist routes.) When reading the book, I imagined them more crowded and cramped, whereas in the tv version you get the sense that there are only the characters present the scene calls for, no accidental bystanders.

The other thing which I had, however, expected, was the transition from first person narrated novel to visual medium means some of the elements get toned down or don't come across with the same intensity, like teenage Elena's deep uncomfortableness with her own body, the way she fears it will turn into her mother's, and her dissatisfying relationships with boys being tied to this way she feels about herself (in addition to being tied to the need to compete).

However, any adaption of those novels stands and falls with whether it can provide a believable Lila, can get the central Lila/Lenù relationship across in its messed up intensity and can provide a sense of all the drama among the supporting cast. (Having read some of Ferrante's earlier novels, I would say the supporting cast is the difference. The earlier novels also offer memorable main characters and at least one intense relationship, but not a memorable ensemble. Whereas in the Neapolitan Quartet, we don't just follow Lila and Elena but also the other families from the old neighborhood and with them the changes in Italian society.) And here, the tv adaption succeeds with flying colours. The four young actresses who play Lila and Elena in the first season (two child actresses in the first two episodes, then somewhat older ones for the two girls as teenagers between 14 and 16 for the remaining season) are all fantastic, which given that I understand the kids at least didn't act before is all the more amazing. And they really look eerily alike.

(Speaking of the casting, I thought it was well done down to the tiny details, like the two young actors playing Alfonso having some physical resemblance to the actresses playing Lila; this irrelevant in My Brilliant Friend but will become a plot point in the last two novels. And the actors and actresses in general looked like every day people, not stunningly good even when they're supposed to come across as avarage.)

Compared to the novel, I'd say the tv version makes it clearer who killed Don Achille from the get go, but avoids too obvious foreshadowing. And it keeps the ambiguity of such events like the girls' attempt to walk to the ocean - did child!Lila simply underestimate the distance and got tired, or was this an attempt to sabotage Elena's permission to continue school? Like Elena, we don't know.

So far, I didn't spot any "new" scenes, or composite characters. And because we're talking tv series, not two or three hour movie, it doesn't feel like a "edited highlights of My Brilliant Friend version, either, it's not rushed but takes the time to establish the Rione.

All in all: a good translation into another medium, and I look forward to the remaining three seasons. And hope the good casting of the two leads will continue into adulthood and middle age.

Since today is not-at-all-Brexit day, I want to extend my sympathies (again) to any and all citizens of the United Kingdom. Also to the writers of the latest James Bond movie, a work in progress titled after a Karl May character. (No really, they're calling it Shatterhand.) I just don't see how any Bond villain, no matter whether or the traditional cat-stroking evil organisation heading variety, or of the mad rogue agent variety that came into fashion in the 90s, could possibly do worse to Britain than Britain, or more precicesly, England, or even more precisely, almost the entire British top political hierarchy plus all Leave voters did to itself.

Also, I'm having a hard time to imagine any incarnation of Bond (from Connery to Craig) who wouldn't conclude that the country would be best served by kidnapping anyone currently in the running as PM as well as the PM and dumping them in the next overcrowded refugee camp in Libya, awaiting the treatment there which refugees are given by this "safe" country. Oh, and adding Rupert Murdoch for good measure.

I mean, I imagined a lot from the moment the referendum was decided, but even my wildest imaginations didn't extend to this.

Which was an okay adventure for our gang, and I'm amused about how Sheffield is the new London in terms of DW, but what I'll really remember about this special is the absolutely perfect Brexit gag.

( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder whether Individual 1 and the Brexiteers have some competition about most bizarre farce in politics going. Our lot tried with the endlessly drawn out drama around now finally sacked spy chief Maaßen of "there never were any xenophobic attacks! the greatest danger to Germany right now are left wing radicals in the SPD!" fame, which certainly was farcical enough, but good lord, is it ever left in the dust by Brits and Americans alike.

The Economist, itself surely as far from "left" as you can get, has chosen Boris Johnson for the worst damage causing idiot of the year award, reasoning:

In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years. Step forward, Boris Johnson!

Not that I disagree with any of this, but just look at the competition! Even if you leave aside the Orange Menace and his minions across the Atlantic and treat it as Brits only. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better any time soon, no matter whether or not May remains in office, for, as Jonathan Freedland puts it here:


The justice secretary, David Gauke, was right when he told the BBC this morning that “the parliamentary arithmetic does not change if you change the person living in Downing Street”. As prime minister, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab might dial up the Brexit rhetoric, but the numbers in the Commons will remain obstinately the same. It will still be a government without a majority. It will still be a hung parliament with a majority of MPs who backed remain.

More to the point, the Irish border question persists no matter who is in No 10. Under the Good Friday agreement, Britain is required to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. The EU is adamant on the same point, fixed in its view that there can be no hard border in Ireland, and yet equally certain that what would now be the external frontier of the EU necessarily involves customs checks and the like. No new PM will be granted a magic wand to wave away those facts, no matter how tightly they screw their eyes shut and insist they truly believe in Brexit.

Tory MPs don’t like hearing that they cannot have their cake and eat it, that there is no Brexit that comes without a severe cost, and so they are taking out their frustration on May. But any prime minister – Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mordaunt, Leadsom, Hunt, Javid – will eventually have to break the same news to them. The problem is not May. The problem is Brexit.

And thus we go for more endless reruns of the whole agonizing circus. It's like watching a friend drink themselves to death, it truly is.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Individual 1 had a temper tantrum on live camera in the reality show he's turned US politics into. this just about sums it up. You know, I've recently read Brecht's play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui again. This is one of the plays where a few decades have completely changed my opinion on it. When I was in my early 20s, I thought it was an amusing satire on Hitler & Co., but also dated by this very fact, unable to function outside of the Third Reich context, which often is the problem with political satire. Now it's 2018, and I'm not surprised The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is staged in the US, in Britain, and on German stages. If you don't know the play: Brecht wrote it in a few weeks, near the end of his time in Finland, waiting for US visas for himself and his entourage. It was supposed to be his debut on the American stage, using some key events of Hitler & Co. rising to power and telling them as a Chicago gangster story (in blank verse, with some witty parodies of Shakespeare scenes and scenes from Goethe's Faust to boot). This didn't work out. (In fact, the play was never staged during Brecht's life time and for years was regarded as a minor work. Not anymore, though.) According to his latest biographer, the potential US producers, far from appreciating the American location of the play, resented the implication that Americans could possibly be receptive to a fascist charlatan rising to power backed by a combination of rich industrials and thugs.

...Yeah. Anyway, read today, I think the play would work best if you ditch the explanation signs as to which event in the fictional Chicago matches which in German history altogether and don't let your Arturo do a Hitler imitation. The Cauliflower Trust and old Dogsborough, that supposedly honorable white haired man corrupted by a mixture of money and vanity, thinking they can use small time gangster Arturo Ui and then, when it turns out they are the ones used by him, cravenly falling in line; Ui's mixture of lethargy and temper tantrums; the matching of gangsters and their crooked schemes with grandiose overblown rethoric; no, you don't need to look at the past for this to work at all. There are no heroes in this play, and no larger than life villains; that the lot of them are pathetic and still gain power, wrecking terrible havoc, was part of Brecht's point. No wonder the last lines of the play these days are among the most regularly quoted Brecht lines (here in the translation by George Tabori):

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Had a very busy week on the road, in which I barely consumed anything fannish and was instead consumed by the two simultanously running "History: A Farce" soaps running in the UK and in the US. No, that's unfair, the US one had a serious plot thread (btw, it's really WEIRD how the Democratic Midterms victory was downplayed initially), with only the tantrum-throwing toddler-in-chief providing the completely over the top satire. Back to the drawing board, scriptwriters. This "President" just isn't believable, not even as a caricature.

More seriously, as an explanation of how the insanity across the channel came into being, this article putting Britain on the couch provides as good an explanation as any as to what went on in the murky depths of (a part of) the public subsconsciousness:


What’s striking is that we can begin to see in this hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors. (...) But the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonising power, this romance of martyrdom is mobilized as defiance of the EU. (...) Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted. It does not greatly matter what the European Union is or what it is doing – its function in the plot is to be a more insidious form of nazism.

Meanwhile, this article sums it up shorter, but also to the point: Brexit fantasy going down in tears.

Given I have a lot of British friends whose life will get worse and worse and worse now, I really do wish this were all a tv or radio show, safely fictional. But it's not. Speaking of powerful symbols pertaining to nations, though, I discovered/was reminded again that one of those things I myself am sentimental about is the French-German post WWII relationship. Yes, our two countries have their problems and flaws. (Do they ever.) But dipping into pre and during WWI literature again, it struck me once more how ever present and insidious the assumption of a national feud was, and how self evident today (unless, of course, you're Marine Le Pen or Alexander Gauland) the alliance and friendship. (It's also encouraging to me when the way hatred is whipped up again today not just between nations but within nations makes me wonder how on earth all this tribalism should be overcome. Note to self: it's been done. Fait Accompli.) Macron and Merkel at Compiegne, where the WWI truce was made, was a great illustration for this. (As had been, decades earlier, Kohl and Mitterand at Verdun.) It was also, to me, an illustration of how to deal with a war anniversary without glamourizing the evilness of war in any way (and that war isn't glamorous and heroic but awful is to me the lesson that public consciousness first grasped with the WWI catastrophe, even though it seems we keep having to learn). So, have a few vids from that other reality show, Frankreich et L'Allemagne: c'est possible:

Macron and Merkel at Compiegne (btw, whoever choreographed everything really was extremely thoughtful; note that when they're sitting at the table where the truce was negotiated, they're not sitting opposed to each other, as their historical counterparts did, but at the head of the table, together):



Summary of the entire weekend:



Macron and Merkel at the Peace Forum afterwards:




And to end on a fun note, here's the 101 years old lady excited to meet the President who thought Angela Merkel was Brigitte Macron and, after being told that she was the chancellor of Germany, said "'c'est fantastique':

Can't decide whether I want this to be true or not. I mean, obviously I don't want Farage in my country: we've got our own blustery bigots, you can keep yours, Britain. But there's no danger of him actually getting German citizenship - married to a German or not, he'd have to prove several years of residency -, and the utter shamelessness of applying for it in order to keep the benefits of being an EU member after doing his best to ruin it for the rest of Britain makes for a good narrative. Also, I have fun imagining him trapped in endless bureaucracy, with every civil servant on whose desk his application for citizenship lands taking a special pleasure in flinging yet more red tape at Farage.

Bigoty and xenophobia won, and we all lost. I'm sorry for my British friends, but frankly, I'm horrified on account of what this means to the rest of us in Europe.