Auden's Sunday Best

Too long for a twitter post (c'mon, "tweet" is lame) and too not-interesting for a status update, this undernourished post has thus been dumped unceremoniously here. Also it's about poetry. Yeah.

I get to read W.H. Auden in a module next semester. I'm actually quite excited. You can thank Christopher Hitchens for that. Anywho, there's one poem of his that I particularly like, so here it is:

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,

Bring out the coffin...let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle, moaning overhead,

Scribbling on the sky the message: He is Dead.

Put crepe bows 'round the necks of public doves,

Let traffic policemen wear black, cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East, my West.

My working week and my Sunday rest.

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,

I thought love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one.

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

Pour out the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good." 

Lovely, in't it? Because my reading skills are surprisingly iffy for someone that studies literature at university, I've always read the line in the third stanza as 'My working week and my Sunday best'. It was with dismay that I found out otherwise, not because I felt illiterate, but because I actually prefer my version. I prefer the contrast of the weekly toil - the drudgery, the mundanity - with getting suited and booted and being at one's best. 'Rest' feels apathetic in comparison, lacking in purpose and decisiveness. 'Sunday best' even maintains the religious imagery - doesn't that tradition stem from looking nice for church?

S'all today, folks.

Zooey Deschanel and Katy Perry: Not twins, alter-egos

Everyone's noticed how indie goddess Zooey Deschanel and pop-slut Katy Perry look alike.

It's like they're twins or something! 

However, Katy Perry is not Deschanel's long-lost sibling. No, instead Perry is her evil alter-ego. I think I'm onto something here. I'll break it down.

Appearance

Our pair of lovely lasses might look almost indistinguishable, but the key's in the details. Deschanel comes across as modest; Perry flaunts her modesty at every opportunity. What is mean by this is: boobs. We never really get to see any of Zooeys, but Katy Perry's approach to her boobs is best illustrated by a quote from Abraham Lincoln: 'you can show all your boobs some of the time, you can show some of your boobs all the time, but you can't show all your boobs all the time'. Perry's a slut; Deschanel's demure: 

"But I want to show all my boobs, all the time!" - Katy Perry

Relationships

They say people are judged by the company one keeps; one of our ladies socialises with esteemed gentlemen like Russell Brand and elegant ladies like Rebecca Black; the other hangs with scruffy oiks like that dodgy Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Can you guess which?

Hands off, you disreputable ruffian, you

The evil side clearly has a stronger pull on Ms. Perry than it does Ms. Deschanel. The latter goes for guys that you'd be happy take home to your mother; the former goes for guys who should be kept away from your mother at all costs, let he bangs her.

Music

A necessary part of being 'the perfect woman', which Zooey has apparently made her goal, is being able to sing and shit. She turned out to be annoyingly good at that too, when she released a fairly decent album of folky tunes, with, yes, a 'kooky' edge a few years ago. Then there's also the above clip which is slap-bang in line with her 'adorkable' persona. Katy Perry, as ever yang to Deschanel's yin, sings songs about pulling girls in fairly extensive detail. It's really classy and stuff. Zooey is the kind of girl that you can believe like The Smiths (because The Smiths are so indie, insouciant, and appeal to those with an outcast complex (all eighty billion of them) dontchaknow)

"Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers" - a real poet, that Morrissey

Conclusion

I think that's enough evidence to assert that Zooey Deschanel and Kety Perry, while facially eerily similar, diverge as far as possible when it comes to absolutely everything else. ZD is deliberately indie, KP literally makes 'pop'ular music; ZD looks like she'd side with the nerd at school; KP would be the bully. I may be clearly in favour of Deschanel here, but I'd bet Katy Perry would poll pretty strongly if they went up against each other in a popularity contest. 

Admission: This post is intended to be one that gets me hits. The previous and only other time I have written about a celebrity also happens to be my second most trafficked-post ever; what can I say, I guess people really like Megan Fox. Also, (500) Days of Summer was on telly tonight so there's that too. 

Some charities are 10 000 times more effective than others. It's worth knowing which.

The British public love to give to charity. From big BBC-led television extravaganzas like Children in Need, Sports Relief and Comic Relief to your everyday person raising money after the death of a relative, we as a nation seem to relish giving. It's an undervalued national character trait, if you ask me.

What we don't do, though, when deciding to donate to third-world-relief charities, is to take time to consider which charities have the best cost to result ratio. It's the big names charities that take in the majority of our dough, the charities with a broad scope. That's not a slight: it's difficult and tedious to do because there are so many charities seeking to make a difference. It's a shame there is less awareness of the differing potential for change across charities because it makes a massive difference. According to the excellent givingwhatwecan.org "it is not even a matter of some charities being 10 or 100 times as effective: even restricted to the field of health programs in developing countries, research shows that some are up to 10,000 times as effective as others." Damn. So what they're saying is that for every live you improve giving to a less effective charity you could be improving ten thousand lives. 


Giving What We Can is an organisation in which all members have taken a pledge to give 10% of their earnings  to the most efficient charities. It sort of feels like a group of super-philanthropists with a dauntingly noble dedication to making a difference. However, if you're put off by the scarily large 10% figure, like I have been, they also speak an enormous amount of sense on giving efficiently and effectively. Even if you just give what you feel comfortable with, knowing which charities do the best work will enhance the value of the sum many times. If I were to go further on the best charities and so on I would just be quoting the website, so for convenience have a big juicy link instead.

That's the century!

Finally, with that last entry I have hit 100 posts. Hopefully it's been at least mildly diverting. Big thank you to my post 'Castles' for being by far my most trafficked post with 1.1k views (out of 7.4k). Also big thank you to February 2011 for roping in a record high 820 views.

And of course, the select group of 30 or so Facebook friends that regularly follow the links that I dump on their newsfeeds every few weeks or so.

Women's Sport Is Not Under-represented in the Media

Women don’t get much coverage in sports, and apparently lots of people, not just women, are miffed by this. Sexism may be a factor, but it is far from the most dominant. There are two big factors that ensure that women’s sport has far smaller viewing figures than male sport: firstly, women are really bad at sports compared to men, and as a consequence there is less skill on show; secondly women are far less interested in sports than men and like to watch women’s sport just as much as men, i.e. not at all.

Women are bad at sports in comparison with men. This sounds damning, and it is, but not because the sentence is constructed in an uncompromising way; no, it’s damning because it’s true. Women are equals in terms of intelligence, ambition, artistic ability and a million other things, but not when it comes to sport. No one feels the need to defend the male Black Widow spider because he’s so inferior in size and strength to the female, and it’s the same situation in humans, albeit in a less exaggerated scale.  Women’s sport  is a poorer product. Wimbledon is an excellent point of comparison. The women are athletic, talented and committed, and their games do have drama. Yet, the men’s tournament is even more dramatic. They play for longer; the extra length means fatigue and fitness plays a bigger role, allowing for bigger swings in momentum. They hit harder and more accurately, and run faster for longer. Hence, bigger viewing figures. This is the case in all sport, but is most clearly outlined in tennis, in which men and women both receive equal billing.  

This is a legitimate case for preferring men’s sport, and there is no reason to feel guilty about it. There is no obligation to like or to pretend to like something that we don’t, or can’t be bothered with. There’s no expectation that we give bad films a fair shout (although, worryingly, bad films often dominate the box office so maybe that isn’t the best example). The under-16 age group is even more unfairly represented in the media than women’s sport. The England U-16 boys football team would beat the senior women’s team, and sometimes do well internationally, yet they get zero airtime. Where’s the fairness in that? No one complains about that, even though all the arguments for the increase in airtime for women’s sports could be copy and pasted into an argument supporting the increase in airtime for U-16 sports.

The amount of coverage designated to news outlets is in line with the popularity of the sport: the Premier League has the highest viewing figures in terms of live and television audiences; Ultimate Frisbee gets no attention because no one watches it. Television figures are the important numbers (because they’re higher) but the popularity of a sport stems from the size of the live audience. At Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, the best men’s team in the country, the weekly 75 000 strong audience dictates that football gets a lot of coverage. At Meadow Park, the 4 502-person capacity stadium that is home of Arsenal Ladies F.C, the best women’s team in the country that can boast Kelly Smith, the world’s best player, ‘attendances for most home matches are in the hundreds’ (Wikipedia). The question is this: ladies, if you want women’s sport on television, and this football example is as good as any, shouldn’t you go and watch it live, first? If the best women’s team in the country, situated just outside the biggest city in Europe, cannot find four and a half thousand women to watch them play, why should T.V controllers and media outlets designate money into areas that interest effectively nobody? They shouldn’t, so they don’t. The women’s sport that does get strong attendances is tennis, and it is no coincidence that women’s tennis does get attention from the media. Athletics and cycling do as well, because loads of people watch the Olympics, and to a lesser extent the World Championships. This is simple supply and demand.

 The subtext in the lamentation that the media don’t pay enough attention to women is sport is really that men don’t pay enough attention to women in sport. Far more men go to watch live sport than women, and there is no obligation for them to watch women’s sport. If women can draw in large crowds of women to watch them perform, then sponsors would get interested and push advertising and push the media to cover the sport more. It is not the responsibility of the sport-watching men to drag women’s sport up from the poor table, it’s the responsibility of the women. 

Revenge!

When Auntie Saskia came to visit, she would always say the exact same thing:

“My, haven’t you grown!” she would exclaim, ruffling my hair, as if patronising me was somehow a viable substitute for actually saying something of worth. Being a polite, well behaved little boy, I just nodded and smiled, but every time it happened I grew slightly more frustrated. When I hit fifteen and 6’3”, I was surely old enough by that point for her to think I had something interesting to say, and tall enough to be out of reach from the dread head-pat - but no. So I hatched a plan.

***

It’s Christmas Day, and now 34, married, and with kids of my own the brood has come to stay; just one person left to arrive. Saskia. Once, she could have been described as svelte – with a name like Saskia you’ve got to be - but age, a sedentary lifestyle and a weakness for chocolate gateau had taken their toll. The stage is set. The doorbell rings.

“Auntie Saskia, my, haven’t you grown!”

Revenge!

A Hundred Years Later, And Cinema Has Gone Full-Circle

The very first films started popping up in the late nineteenth century. They are not really what we would recognise as films nowadays, instead of narratives and characters the earliest films were just a minute or so long, and showed something of interest. This could be a shot of a boat leaving a harbour, a procession of ostriches, some teenage girls having a pillow fight, a wall demolished then reversed; there is not really a unifying theme other than something that an audience used to static backgrounds and relatively thin stage of the theatre found appealing. Hence, it has become known as the 'cinema of attractions'.

There are a few notable examples that I'd like to draw on. One of the earliest was 'Repas de Bebe', which showed a baby eating something. However, it was not the baby that grabbed the attention of the audience, but the moving foliage in the background. This was a realism unlike anything they'd seen produced artificially before, and it was fascinating.

The next video is one of a train pulling into a station. Now this is a myth, and did not actually happen, but the story goes that the first audience that watched this film were scared that the train would come through the screen and into the auditorium. They were not that easily duped, but it neatly summaries my point: audiences found shots that contain great depth and movement towards the camera very striking.

Do the above things remind you of anything? A certain megabudget sci-fi spectacular? Yes - Avatar embodies both of these things, and uses them as its primary selling point. The story is crappy; I'm pretty sure the producers knew that. However: CGI! $250m dollars worth! The dialogue might be hammy and the characters thinly conceived, but goddamnit look at those backgrounds! Who cares what those blue dudes are doing - imma look at that floating rock! With a waterfall!

You get the picture.

It's not just the backgrounds that ape the 'cinema of attractions' style appeal. The feeling of something coming towards you, as with the train before, sounds an awful lot like 3D, the other selling point of Avatar. Those people that did not flinch, but might have, have clear parallels with modern audiences who flap their hands in front of their faces or duck when the 3D effect whizzes something uncomfortably close. There has been 3D before, and there has been complex CGI before, but Avatar is the first time when both are united to fill theatres like never before.

There have not been a huge number that have tried to follow in Avatar's footsteps - Transformers 3 is probably the only one that relies solely on 3D and CGI - but Avatar is the biggest grossing film of all time by a long way and so cannot be ignored. Our watching habits are reverting back to how they were before cinemas were even a thing; and when spectacle took precedence over narrative. Narrative films were barely even possible back then, so in this day and age when anyone can shoot a film better than the Lumiere brothers, why are we reverting back to the superficial?



N.B. Yeah, I know, Avatar came out two years ago, but I've only just learned about the cinema of attractions, so excuse my tardiness.

EDIT: minutes after posting this I discover that some French filmmakers have made a genuine black-and-white silent film. It's not quite the same as what I'm getting at in this piece, but weird coincidence or what.