November 8, 2011

Weekend

I’ve written before how I dislike it when stage plays, TV shows and films still manage to be all about the gay even in the twenty-first century. Well, Weekend is one of those, about every aspect of teh gay — except, thankfully, the overblown HIV trope — and yet does not feel like it. From ten thousand feet it’s full of the usual stereotypes that replaced the old campy, mincing Graysons and Humphrieses: the meat market, drug-taking, one-night stands, casual homophobia, checked shirts and beards. Yet these are window dressing. Strip them away and you’re left with a raw core of universal truths. A desire for relevance, for belonging. A fear of commitment, of loneliness. What could be, what might have been.

Russell is semi-closeted, nominally happy but groping for meaning and not truly comfortable in his skin. Glen is out, brash, confident and charismatic with a heavy sprinkling of militant. One you’d be happy to show off to your parents; the other would undoubtedly upset the teacups with a well-meaning but entirely mistimed rant about heteronormativity. It is fair to say you find both types in the real world in abundance.

The film follows Russell over the course of a weekend, from just before his first meeting with Glen until — well, no spoilers. It’s an eventful few days, for both of them, and an inflection point in both their lives. Decisions, revelations, uncomfortable truths. Fundamental changes in their relationships with their closest friends. Universal themes, here seen from an authentic and unashamedly gay perspective.

One problem is that, as a rainbow warrior myself, it is all familiar stuff. It might be a sparkling revelation to the hetties that gays aren’t all of one mind, programmed by Cyber Controller Russell T. Davies with the same set of beliefs and the same agenda. The truth is, and please find a comfortable armchair for this dramatic announcement, we have different opinions. Most of us have at some stage been on one, other or both sides of the arguments portrayed in the film. You should hear what’s said about John Barrowman.

Weekend is shot in a naturalistic style, almost entirely with a handheld camera. The dialogue feels real, and indeed was partially ad libbed. You rarely feel a sense of staging; more than once it appears as though the actors were simply miked up and told to get on with it in a real crowd.

The film’s focus on just Russell and Glen, and primarily Russell, is relentless and almost total. In some scenes the camera stays close on Russell even as he interacts with other characters, who barely enter the frame. Many scenes are shot as long, single takes, often with a long lens, between the jackets of strangers on a tram or through drinkers in a bar. These techniques draw you in from dispassionate third-party, to voyeur, to intimate participant.

Both leads deliver excellent performances. Chris New (Glen) is an actualgay whereas Tom Cullen (Russell) is just gay-for-play, but it doesn’t particularly show.

The film is very definitely an 18: there is drug-taking, there is nudity, there is sex. None of it is gratuitous. Apparently the Daily Mail didn’t like it, which you can interpret as you see fit.

Some films you walk out of and instantly forget. Some you rant about, or laugh about, or immediately look up on IMDb to discover the goofs you missed. Some you shake your head at and say, “I wish George Lucas had stopped making films in 1990.”

Weekend made me want to write something like Weekend.

Avaragado’s rating: assorted munchies

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October 15, 2011

Blessed election

Not since the year of someone else’s lord 1847 has there been a contested election for Chancellor of Cambridge University. That year Prince Albert, winner of Britain’s Got Moustache and celebrity Saxon, beat off god-bothering fusspot the Earl of Powis by about 120 votes. The last time a vote of any kind took place for the position was in 1950, when Indian fashion icon Jawaharlal Nehru withdrew from the contest at the last moment to leave pipe-smoking chocks-awayer Lord Tedder as the unopposed winner. Just 200 people bothered to vote, despite Neighbours not being on telly then.

From 1976 to 2011 the university’s Chancellor was the Duke of Edinburgh. This year he decided that, aged 90, he’d take early retirement, and subsequently the university’s Nomination Board – a cross between Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat and a Ouija Board – settled on Lord Sainsbury as its preferred candidate to replace him. The Board was not, apparently, expecting a contest; but a contest there has been.

The candidates: Lord Sainsbury of Bagging Area (the Chequebook party); Abdul Arain, Mill Road shopkeeper (the Stop Sainsbury party); Michael Mansfield QC (the Establishment Law-Snore party); and Brian Blessed (the Energetic, Loud, Peri-Marrying, Bonkers party).

The election took place yesterday and today and the turnout was tremendous, well into the thousands. As the holder of a Cambridge MA I was entitled to a vote and today I gladly scaled the ivory tower for an hour or so. The voting was scandalously well-organised: marquees, chairs for the doddery, free alumni pins with the university crest, porters in top hats hustling you everywhere, and huge piles of gowns to borrow since you can’t scratch your bum in the university without spending at least half an hour in Ede and Ravenscroft.

I haven’t worn a gown in anger for several years. I still haven’t even returned to college for the termly free nosh, and the undergraduate gown I bought for a tenner on my first day in nineteen-umpty-ump now serves only as an emergency fancy dress cape, dusted off for Darth Vader impersonations and little else.

Today I slipped on the borrowed robes and briefly rejoined the tribe. I thanked the porters, because I know my place; they, meanwhile, gossiped like old queens about toffs in top hats. I queued dutifully at the side door of the Senate House waiting for the appropriate desk to clear; immediately behind me was former Labour MP and cabinet minister Chris Smith, now Baron Smith of Finsbury Park.

What do you call two gay Smiths in the Senate House? Punchlines to the usual address.

At the desk they looked up my details using an app on university-issued iPads and— no, don’t be silly. They looked up my name in the Cambridge University Big Book of Names, no doubt printed specially for the occasion. I was then given a ballot paper and directed to a polling booth. This election uses the Single Transferable Vote system; oddly, rather than print the candidates’ names on the ballot paper and ask you to number them in order, they printed the numbers one to four and asked you to write in the names.

I voted, thanked the closest porter, shrugged off my gown into grateful hands for recycling into the queue, and escaped the Senate House bubble back into the real world.

Then I went to The Anchor, where Brian Blessed held court for a couple of hours and was kind enough to pose for photographs. Nice man. Totally bonkers, obviously.

Yes, of course I voted for him.

Update: Lord Sainsbury won in the first round of voting, meaning he had more than 50% of the first preferences of those who voted.

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September 30, 2011

Facebook timelines: mind the gap

Facebook’s new Timeline feature is seemingly intended as an autobiography in the automatic sense: your life distilled to a series of status updates interspersed with red-eye, all filtered and summarised by the invisible hand of logic, the unblinking, unknowing eye of the Zuck-3000.

I’m intrigued by what my own timeline will show. I don’t write the updates Facebook expects. There’s rarely a sense of where I am or what I’m doing. I never say “Sitting in Bill’s, writing a blog post about Facebook timelines.” They’re my tweets, echoed; my rants, hashtag games, rubbish jokes, and other nonsense. My own timeline is likely to consist of other people’s photos of me, some events, and a bunch of non sequiturs. Here’s me at Chris’s 40th; here’s a link to a blog about Facebook; here’s a photo of a typo. Nothing of deep historical or biographical interest, I imagine.

For eager, unjaded pubescents pouring every numbing detail of their lives into Zuckerberg’s database, the timeline will be great – until it isn’t. Until a friendship disintegrates – as it will. Until a relationship ends acrimoniously – as it will. Then the timeline becomes a sniggering, taunting reminder, Gripper Stebson poking Ro-land in his chubby face, forever.

Thus, inevitably, it will become another part of our life online that needs pruning, tending, curating, culling. It will beg for attention, Tamagotchi: The Next Generation. Users will constantly edit their lives. I am going out with Terry from form 3C, I have always been going out with Terry from form 3C.

Facebook wants your timeline to be your autobiography, but it won’t be. For most people it’ll be like a Hello! magazine puff-piece: all of the glamour and the shiny taps, and none of the hoovering.

You won’t see, perhaps, underage drinking at a dodgy party featuring a jazz cigarette, or cruelly excised former friends or partners. I think there’ll be more of the latter omissions than the former: people’s youthful indiscretions appear to be becoming less important. Clinton had to claim he “did not inhale” but Obama didn’t; Cameron successfully sidestepped questions about his own drug use and not even the Daily Mail proclaimed the End Times. I think this is a natural societal evolution, not caused by the Internet but certainly made more visible and – crucially – searchable by it.

However society adapts to decreasing privacy, it’s the gaps that are most interesting. Facebook doesn’t know what happens in the gaps, in the mini dark ages that pepper my history and everyone’s history. It aims to know all but does not, will not, cannot, even with the vast data-buckets that it and the internet in general can supply on-demand for each of us. Like the missing years in a CV or the crackle as an old film skips a few frames, what is absent is often far more interesting and revealing than what is present.

I therefore submit this humble prediction. Facebook’s timeline will ultimately be no tell-all semi-autobiography. It’ll be a sanitised, part-fictionalised history. Stalin’s airbrushing writ large; Big Brother’s ultimate rewrite.

And employers won’t look at your timeline to decide whether to interview you or hire you: they’ll look at your friends’ timelines.

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September 22, 2011

Facebook and the two minutes’ hate

In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother enforces a regular two minutes’ hate to ensure the citizen-slaves are fully au fait with the enemy of the day. It’s a term that originated in WWI’s artillery bombardments and is now mostly evident fully fourteen letters later, on that other battleground, the WWW.

Today’s enemy – as on so many other days – is Facebook. If it’s Wednesday, it must be another home page revamp. This latest change does away with those pesky ‘Top Stories’ and ‘Recent News’ options, which always used to default to ‘Top Stories’ even though I never, ever wanted anything other than Recent News. Now they’ve inflicted some cockamamy algorithmic hodgepodge that combines those two options, and the entire internet has exploded in a fireball of wtf and zomg.

This is not Big Brother’s doing: nobody at Microsoft or Google or Apple pressed a blue button marked with a cuddly sans serif f and sat back cackling with a smartphone full of white, fluffy lolcats. This is entirely a bottom-up reaction. Were I a lazy reporter desperately scrambling for a headline, I might even make some cackhanded pun on Arab Spring. But I can’t think of one right now.

People despise change because we are creatures almost entirely of habit. We might like to think we have will and self-determination and can stay up all night if we want to, you can’t stop me, mum. But we don’t. We laugh at dogs and their pavlovian reactions, and then it’s 4 o’clock and time for tea, oh and I mustn’t miss today’s Pointless I do like that nice Alexander Armstrong, don’t you? and the punched paper tape loops through our brains one more time.

Slow, gradual changes are easily accepted, embraced, like a frog being slow-boiled. I bought a cheapo wifi-capable printer last week, now perched on an ex-server in my spare room together with the military-grade safe in which I keep its priceless ink. The first few times I walked past the room my inner lizard shouted There’s something in there – it was a new, unexpected pattern on the retina and I turned my head involuntarily. Now, meh, I’ve been retrained. The new pattern is absorbed, the newness has gone, the routine is back.

More radical change takes longer to process. In a new house you’re constantly jumping and starting at its various ticks, cracks and wheezes, getting lost in cupboards and locking yourself in fridges. And all the time you’re swearing like a navvy on jankers. Your brain is clunking and clanking away rewriting the paper tape, and your eyes spin like the MacOS X hypnowheel (other operating systems are available) until the updated universe can be paged back in.

Thus it is with Facebook’s latest update. Millions of people are using the site’s various existing features, which they railed against last time they were changed, to protest these latest modifications. In a couple of days the chances are the Facebook juggernaut will thunder on to its next redesign unperturbed by self-immolating gifs and its users will wonder why they were all worked up about it in the first place.

That’s not to say I like the changes. I think they’re daft. And here’s why.

Let’s look at the UI. There are arguably four focal points: the icons at top-left next to the word ‘facebook’, which gain red numbers when something interesting happens; the list of stuff that seems to change in a way I don’t quite understand down the left (favourites, lists, apps) which gain blue-grey numbers when something interesting happens; the main body, which updates in a way utterly unfathomable to mortals, gaining and losing ‘recent stories’, ‘top news’ and other sections when something interesting happens; and the ticker on the right, which updates in a hazily understood way when something interesting happens.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a lot of something interesting and a lot of I don’t know what makes something appear here. Oh, and some of it may appear in multiple places.

I’m not interested if you have figured out how each of these sections works and when it updates. Well done, have a banana. You are special. The point is, most people don’t. To most people, the way all this works is mysterious and magical and they just hope to jebus that they can find the thing they want to when they need to. This is not because they are dumb, it is not because they are lazy. It is because they just don’t care enough to work it all out: their goal is not to understand all this. To a first approximation their goal, to use the sainted jwz’s expression, is to get laid (link is geeky, SFW!).

Facebook’s current incarnation does not make this any easier than its last. It makes it harder, because the vital goal-fulfilling information is scattered amongst the something interesting and I don’t know what makes something appear here sections.

In Joel Spolsky’s words, the fundamental rule of user interfaces is: “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would”.

Facebook does not behave how users think it does, because most people have no idea how it behaves. There are too many places where slightly different, possibly overlapping pieces of information are presented in slightly different ways, and those pieces of information are chosen using slightly different, possibly overlapping, closely guarded, unfathomable algorithms.

Which brings us to the end of today’s two minutes’ hate. I think I overran. Ah well, time for a cup of tea and Pointless.

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September 12, 2011

Cloverfjord

It’s got shaky, hand-held camerawork. It’s got a documentary, found-footage vibe, with portentous opening captions solemnly promising raw, unaltered material. And it has trolls. Proper, Norwegian trolls, galumphing through Norwegian forests and snowy Norwegian tundra. It also has a troll hunter: which is helpful, as the film’s called The Troll Hunter.

The documentary ostensibly being filmed is a student project, an attempt to investigate an apparent bear poacher. The three filmmakers – camera, sound and talent – follow this alleged poacher with his battered caravan as he travels from damp location to damp location, like a discarded segment from Top Gear. Happily for us it doesn’t take too long for the students to discover the truth. We see the first troll moments after the troll hunter, using the world-renowned “running away” method of hunting trolls, encounters the students deep in a forest and roars “TROLL”, eyeballs out, in their innocent Norwegian lugholes. Thereafter they work together, the students recording the troll hunter’s unexpectedly interesting nightlife.

Like Let the Right One In, the film benefits from its sometimes bleak Scandinavian setting and – for the British audience – unfamiliar cast (apparently the troll hunter is a well-known Norwegian comedian). The subtitles help, too.

It’s confidently made and unafraid to incorporate a little dark humour. Only once did I feel a plot development was overly signposted, and its aftermath was curiously under-explored. (Look at me, sucking on a pencil pretending I know what I’m talking about.)

The found-footage approach is occasionally mildly tiresome: we probably don’t need to see quite so many drizzled-upon lakes and steamed-up car windows. I suspect Cloverfield is the root of the current fashion for this technique; although I enjoyed Cloverfield, it rather succumbed to a virulent strain of the delusional illness known as Lucas. Latin name verdus maximus: we can do green screen, we shall do green screen, let’s wreak devastation on a scale hitherto only realised via the medium of plot. The Troll Hunter is thankfully much cheaper more restrained than Cloverfield: it’s CGI in service of story rather than trebles all round at WETA and chums.

In a sense, and I know I’m in danger of contradicting what I’ve just said, what excites me most about the film is the knowledge that believable, sophisticated motion-tracked effects are now available to relatively low-budget films – in this case, reportedly £3.5m. Such is the onward, mighty march of the nerds. It means that films like this one – hardly likely to interest a big Hollywood studio – can still be made, and made well, without papier mache trolls and comedy modelwork. Perhaps this normalisation will filter up to those with bigger budgets, leading to fewer cases of Lucas. I suspect not: my money’s still on an all-green remake of Episode IV by 2017. “Nooooooooo!” to coin a phrase.

Recommended, with one caveat: as with Cloverfield, if wobbly camerawork wonks up your balance, steer clear. It’s not a friendly film for those with balance conditions.

Avaragado’s rating: boiled furballs

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August 22, 2011

Disco Kenny, the bin-busker and me

A few days ago a random walk took me along King Street. I noted the latest reinvention of The Bun Shop – now more upmarket, The Lazy Scholar, it seems – and gave it the traditional three months. Then towards The Radegund, where stood – on the other side of the road – Disco Kenny.

Kenny’s a Cambridge institution. He’s our version of the white-haired old man with union flags you used to see at every England football match. He’s the Queen’s corgis, the Shipping Forecast. Everyone knows Kenny. He works his way around the city pubs, a half here, a half there, always talking. You know when he arrives: “Alright! Alright! You’ve gotta laugh, ain’cha mate. Gotta laugh.” You know when he leaves: you can hear yourself think.

Ahead of me on King Street, a family – tourists? – passed The Radegund. Kenny called out: “When does it open? What does it say on the door?”. They looked, and answered.

As I passed the pub, he called out again – the same question. I replied, “You just asked them that.” He looked a little crestfallen, perched on the opposite kerb, his familiar wide-brimmed hat drooping.

I concocted a plausible story: he’d arrived to find the pub closed, banged repeatedly on the door and was told to clear off. He was waiting patiently, far enough away, unable to stop himself jabbering to every passer-by.

Kenny is one of those characters every city has. Cambridge has many. The jester; the man with the thing on his head; wasp-bike man; the elderly man who shuffles round town wishing people Happy New Year whatever the calendar says.

Below that, the constructed characters: the busker in the bin; the Sainsbury’s Big Issue seller with the sarcastic patter. Not eccentric, but familiar.

Below that, the faces you recognise. Cambridge is small enough for this to be a long list. You don’t know their names, but you have named them – consciously or not.

I’m one of those. I’m the scribbler on table 24, always Earl Grey with milk. I’m the guy with the backpack snarfing the wifi. I’m the local watching the tourists punt. Sometimes with friends, usually alone.

I suspect that as the years pass you ascend the levels. First each person has their own name for you but nobody realises; then the dots begin to join – “Oh, I know who you mean”; and finally you have a Wikipedia page or a Facebook group.

Still, you’ve gotta laugh, ain’cha. Gotta laugh.

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August 22, 2011

Don’t think of an elephant

In the classic 1960s film version of HG Wells’ The Time Machine – accept no substitutes, even those starring Mike from Neighbours – there’s a famous scene showing the evolving fashions in a shop window as the traveller zips forward in time. Hems rise and fall, fiddly accoutrements come and go, hats balloon, explode with feathers and wither, and the traveller watches transfixed. Then the woodpecker clatter of planks boarding up the shop, and sand bags, sirens and war.

We are all time travellers, rushing into the mysterious future at a second per second. We see the fashions change, the shops appear and disappear, the fads come and go. And in our heads we can make the same journey as Wells’ traveller, skipping between memories with the tickle of a neuron.

The effect is more pronounced if you, like me, live in the same city for a long time. I’ve been in Cambridge for over 20 years, on and off (mostly on), both gown and town, and I can’t walk down a street without unconsciously recalling some event that took place there. Just as saying “Don’t think of an elephant” immediately conjures up an image of our big-eared nosey friends, so passing The Mitre brings to mind the time I walked in somehow without noticing it was a building site in the middle of refurbishment and was given an odd, impromptu tour of the work in progress. When browsing in TK-Maxx I’m plagued by flashbacks to its previous incarnation as Borders, a ghostly second image projected on the now. Was: computer books. Is: pants.

Music and smells are of course great triggers. Some songs at the pub immediately make me think of my friend John, now living in Canada (though still more up-to-date with Cambridge gossip than I am). The scent of aircraft fuel smacks my reptilian brain right in the synapses and whips me back to the first time I flew, and in its wake comes a rush of related memories. It was a Boeing 707, in-flight movie The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (the original). It was my sixth birthday. I visited the cockpit, but as I recall was not asked my opinion on the subject of gladiators. I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley. Shirley Temple, On the Good Ship Lollipop. Lollipop ladies. Walking to school. Walking home from school alone, aged six or seven, to find we had a dog. The day the dog died (twenty-six years ago, and it still upsets me to remember it). And on and on in the great game of memory association football – that one a Ronnie Barker gag I think, “I know my place”, John Cleese was there too, now on to Fawlty Towers, don’t mention the war, don’t tell him Pike…

The chances are that your own brain’s now whirring and right now you’re glassy eyed in your own history, barely conscious of these words. Hello! Pay attention!

Our heads full of experiences, we can’t help rifling through them when an association triggers. (Hmm: “rifle”, “triggers”.) We can surf our own lives in a time sink worse than any Wikipedia session. But we can become locked in our memories very easily: our bodies ticking away the seconds into the future, our minds in Wells’ infernal machine wheeling through the past. The danger is that we spend so much time retelling old stories we stop writing new ones.

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