Oscars for sale

Premiya-Oskar

It's well-known that the British cinema industry is concentrated around a few airing-cupboard offices in London's Soho. In fact, with the digital revolution a tiny room at the top of a west-end stair can be enough to run the show. The Soho connection is important - and the important word is "connection". Same as in the music and broadcasting business. If you want to make your mark you probably are still best doing it in Soho (despite the universal complaints that it's not what it used to be) - and the other two requirements are tenacity and loads of money. If you have all these sorted you can join the struggle for an Oscar, which nevertheless has to look like an unexpected surprise when it comes. Today (Thursday January 15th), the nominations are announced, and over in the USA backstage the struggle continues. This week's guest blog has the story: http://stephenfollows.com/how-much-does-a-hollywood-oscar-campaign-cost/

a propos Charlie Hebdo

Old Hanley's Almanac

I hesitate to blog opinions here rather than facts, but as we watch the current rapid shifts in world power I'm prompted to go into print with what I've been saying in the pub for a few years. As the USA, for so long the all-powerful entity hanging over us like God, with a never-ending supply of money, rewards and retribution, dwindles to third-world status, with Detroit, Motor City itself becoming the world's biggest city farm, at the same time as India and China are rising. China has been topping-up America's economy for long enough. Waging war has no doubt kept the US economic system working but without exports and with increasing reliance on imports this has just been window-dressing. If China decides to stop giving the USA credit, as it could, that will most likely lead to the end of the Israel regime in Palestine; it could be the first cut if America really has to shape up - a lot of money the USA really doesn't have goes that way annually, and the Israelis are getting ever more stroppy with their sponsors, just as the Revolutionaries did with the British. The most important thing about China's status now is not a readiness to wage war like the US/UK axis but the fact that it is backing up its rise as an economic power with its new role as the planet's centre of industry.

Fallujah - a Lost Generation?

In one of the many alternative mini-cinemas that have sprung up in Bristol City, we enjoyed a one-off showing of this vital documentary set in Fallujah, by Feurat Alani. Fallujah was chosen over Baghdad as it was the city, it's explained, that put up the strongest resistance to the invasion.


The results of the US/ UK invasion are, of course, well-known: the enforced dismantling of the army and the civil service which left the whole country open to the most negative of anarchies, for instance - and more of that side is revealed in the film. But the immediate effects of the attack have been treated as less newsworthy and also have been subjected to stringent censorship wherever possible. Inevitably rumours and facts have leaked out, but this film looks like the most substantive indictment to date. The use of white phosphorous, a close relation to napalm, has led to accusations of war crime, but the depleted uranium, used in shells, bullets and armour plating for its extreme hardness (and probably because it spontaneously combusts under heat), goes beyond that in many ways. Years after it was used, it continues to cause cancers  locally and doubtless has contributed to the World's general atmospheric pollution, while leading to the regular birth of children with seriously disabling defects. This is all revealed in the film, whose makers, we can't forget, were braving considerable danger in making it. They, at least, were able to work without the threat of American sniping, unlike the concerned doctors and scientists who tried to determine the source of the increasing cancers and birth defects in the early days.
Inevitably, the director's  concern for his subject didn't stop with the camera's rolling. He's not the only one: our hostess for the evening revealed that she had found that children, made homeless by the bombing, were playing in an abandoned army vehicle heavy with the above DU (- let's call it by what it is, really: nuclear waste-)  and tried to get the truck removed, but she couldn't get America, Iraq or Britain to accept responsibility. Eventually, she told us, it was moved from the centre of the square to the side - creating two contaminated areas out of one.
Well, that's it. A documentary that works like a home movie for the Humans. I hope.

Acker Bilk

JazzServices.org.uk

The clarinettist and band leader who came close as anyone could to making Trad Jazz look cool, Acker Bilk has died at the age of 85. He will always be associated with 'Stranger on the Shore', the major hit in both the UK and US, ahead of the British pop-rock invasion. After he gave up touring, and a good while after the height of the Trad boom, he returned to one of his other careers and enjoyed some success as a painter, concentrating on small landscapes. More:

So long, Jack

goingthruvinyl.com

Jack Bruce, from Bishopbriggs Glasgow, has died at 71. He studied composition at the  Royal Scottish Academy of Music and left the academy and Scotland at the age of 16, making his way to London where he became a member of the seminal Alexis Korner's Blues Inc, where Charlie Watts was on drums. Watts left to join the Rolling Stones and Ginger Baker took over, beginning the long love/hate relationship - or hate/hate relationship, that found its expression in Cream's roaring, racing backdrop to Eric Clapton's extended solos. Immediately after the breakup of Cream he got back into jazz, with the release of the album 'Things we like', and went on to work with such luminaries as John McLaughlin and Frank Zappa, playing a central role in arguably jazz's first supergroup, Lifetime. He left a legacy of songs and compositions as well as just enough recordings to establish his great width of abilities.

Susan Greenfield

Mind Change

Random House

In her new book, neurologist Susan Greenfield asks this question: We know that the human brain adapts to its environment so, in the new unprecedented cyber environment of the 21st Century could our brains be changing in unprecedented ways? And if so, what implications might such changes have for the generation of ‘digital natives’ whose brains will be influenced at a crucial time in their development?

Drawing on over 500 ‘peer-reviewed studies’ Greenfield explores (for the first time, it says here), what those changes could be. She examines three different aspects of the digital landscape: social networking, and its impact upon interpersonal skills and identity; computer gaming and its impact upon attention, as well as links with addiction, aggression and risk-taking; and the use of search engines and their effects upon thinking, learning and memory.

Greenfield’s interest is in finding how we can create a world where our technology does not frustrate, but actively fosters, some of the key features that make us human: deep understanding, creativity, sense of identity, and real fulfilment. These last three she listed in her introduction as part of Bristol Festival of Ideas as her ‘must-have’ items. Although she touched on the possibility of there being a whole generation of kids with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortexes as connecting with others via the Net instead of talking face-to face with the attendant body language and mutual consideration results in pretty raw, ill-considered talking, (True- see the comments column on any site, especially if it’s linked to the news media), Baroness Greenfield was able to remain optimistic about the cognitive near future. In her short talk in Bristol  she was able to touch on other related things, like the difference between facts and knowledge, and the chicken-egg relationship between low seratonin and clinical depression. Maybe that problem could be compared to an endless game of tennis, cause and effect constantly changing sides.

As for fulfilment, she allowed that we could get that out of a witty verbal exchange as easily as from creating something bigger, a symphony for instance.

And there we’re talking psychology as much as neurology.The important thing is to keep the game going.

Another thing that occurred to me was: we each can alter our mind’s environment to an extent. Noel Coward’s recipe for a Good Life was to ‘enjoy yourself as much as possible. It passes the time pleasantly, and gives you some memories to enjoy in your old age.’

And for Mr Coward, enjoyment was work. Perhaps I’d sum up the whole thing by admitting that nothing succeeds like success, especially in the cerebral cortex.