Month: July 2012

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Opening Ceremony thoughts

I’ve worried openly about the chances of London putting on a good Opening Ceremony, so I guess I should post a reaction: it’s a thumbs up (phew!).

I thought the whole opening movement from bucolic hobbitshire through the Industrial Revolution to the forging of the Olympic Rings was superb: genuine spectacle and theatre. I loved the pouring of the iron sequence: you can imagine so many opening ceremonies where the commentator intones ‘and this represents the pouring of the iron from the furnace’ while dancers in orange jumpsuits run along in a line, but Danny Boyle managed to come up with a theatrical effect that genuinely looked like molten metal, without any need for interpretation.

The other stand out moment was the lighting of the flame, which was a really striking image.

In between there were inevitably a few lulls, but probably less than most of these events. There were some bits that were maybe a bit too parochial, but I guess if they play well at home and help whip up enthusiasm for the Games, that’s no bad thing.

I liked the fact that it felt quite personal and quirky: the content clearly hadn’t been handed down from on high by a government with a point to prove. And I liked that it was sometimes quite dark, as these things go: so the opening section was on one level a celebration of the Industrial Revolution, but it was harsh, grimy, smoky, and the image of the British countryside being torn apart was intentionally brutal. And when it came to celebrate children’s literature, it wasn’t Winnie the Pooh and Mrs Tiggywinkle, it was Voldemort and the Child Catcher. There can’t be many times that night terrors have featured in an opening ceremony.

Some moments of real theatre, some humour, some touching moments, very few boring or cringeworthy bits: wahey, let the Games begin.

» The photo (of the rehearsal, as it happens, not the actual ceremony), is © Hannah Webb and used under a CC by-nd licence.

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The Olympics is a delightful oasis of non-corporate sport

I’m not being sarcastic; well, not entirely.

We’ve had months of angry coverage about the heavy-handed brand management put in place to appease the corporate sponsors of the Olympics: how ATMs at Olympic venues will only accept Visa, and McDonalds have an exclusive right to sell chips in the Olympic Park, and the torch relay is accompanied by a rolling advertisement for Coca-Cola, and you may be turned away from the events if you arrive wearing a T-shirt with a rival corporate logo.

So it’s worth pointing out that one reason they are so heavy-handed about asserting their branding rights is that there is no advertising in the venues themselves. When the sport finally starts, the athletes will not be competing in front of a backdrop of hundreds of corporate logos: just a lot of pink and blue London 2012 branding.

Which is a stark contrast to, say, Premier League football, where the players wear shirts with the team sponsor’s logo printed much bigger than the club badge, and the entire pitch is ringed by an enormous continuous pulsating distracting animated advertising billboard. Or Test cricket, which has advertisements spray-painted on the outfield, and all along the boundary rope, and the boundary boards, and the stumps, and the players’ bats, and the back of the umpires’ shirts, and the scoreboards, and where a 150-year-old cricket ground pisses on its own history by calling itself the Kia Oval.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that, if they were allowed to plaster the Olympic stadium with their own logos, so they knew they would be seen by the hundreds of millions of people watching on TV, the sponsors would relax their iron grip over every other aspect of Olympic branding. I’m sure they would like to have their cake and eat it. And it doesn’t justify the heavy-handed, joyless way their branding rights have been enforced.

But at least we should take a little pleasure in the fact that the winner’s podium is not going to have a Coke logo on it. The medal ribbons are not going to be Samsung-branded. There is not going to be a gigantic Procter & Gamble logo spray painted on the grass where the javelins land. Because if the Olympics was a normal modern sporting event, all that stuff would be true.

» ‘Olympic Torch Relay Day 64 Green Lanes 010‘ is © David Holt and used under a CC by-sa licence. The post-match interview is from an Indian Premier League cricket match. ‘Post match interview with AB De Villiers‘ is © Royal Challengers Bangalore and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

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Songs Of Love by Konai Helu Thaman

Full title: Songs Of Love: New And Selected Poems (1974-1999). This was going to be my book for Kiribati for the Read The World challenge, but it turns out I misread the listing: the illustrator is from Kiribati, the poet is from Tonga. But I didn’t have a book for Tonga, so that’s fine.

I’ve read some underwhelming books from the Pacific for this exercise — which is no surprise, really. Tonga has a population of just 104,000, so picking a book from Tonga is like picking a book from Colchester — if Colchester* was a fairly poor country in the middle of nowhere with little literary tradition and English as a second language [ESSEX JOKE].

I would love to be able to say that this was one of those unexpected treats that make the whole exercise worthwhile… but it’s not. Sorry. It’s OK, I’ve read far worse poetry, but I couldn’t get very excited about it. Here’s a short poem that I quite liked:

EARLY MORNING SUN

the early morning sun steals
through the tightly closed windows
touching last night’s leftovers
leaning low against the light

there is the kettle boiling
and still you will not come

It’s all lower-case, btw, even place names and ‘i’. Which is a stylistic choice I personally find a bit irritating, but hey-ho.

* or pick your local equivalent: Langley, British Columbia; Launceston, Tasmania; Burbank, California; Nancy in France; Siegen in Germany, Bolzano in Italy, etc.

» The photo of Tongan rugby fans is © Nick Thompson and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence. There is no rugby in this book of poetry.

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A passing thought about the London 2012 logo

It could be worse. I give you… (drumroll please)… the logo for NBC’s official coverage in the States:

Now that is an astonishingly ugly piece of design to come from a major media company.

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Drugs Without The Hot Air by David Nutt

David Nutt became somewhat famous in the UK when he was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs [ACMD], the statutory body which is responsible for advising the government on drug policy, and specifically on the appropriate legal classification of different drugs.

He was criticised and eventually fired for being rather too vocal about the fact that the government consistently ignored the advice of the ACMD and allowed political considerations to trump politics, and for pointing out some inconvenient truths about relative harms; that alcohol and tobacco are both more dangerous than many illegal drugs, and that horse-riding is considerably more dangerous than taking ecstasy.

This became a bit of a cause celèbre in the geekosphere. Because we all know that  politicians will ignore the evidence if it’s politically inconvenient, but it’s rarely quite so blatant as firing someone for saying what the evidence is.

This book covers various aspects of drug use: how drugs work, how harmful they are, what addiction is, what treatments are available and so on. It covers alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs as well as the illegal ones.

It’s interesting to read because it simultaneously seems radical and rather obvious. Radical because if all the evidence in the book was taken seriously it would involve a top-to-bottom rewriting of UK drug laws; and obvious because actually not much of this stuff should come as a surprise.

For example, however much politicians may splutter about the comparison, can anyone who lives in this country seriously doubt that alcohol causes far more social harm than ecstasy or cannabis? Or that, purely pragmatically, treating addiction as a medical problem is likely to be more successful than treating it as a moral failing? And even if you think cannabis should be illegal, surely it makes intuitive sense that it is counterproductive to imprison users: both because being in prison is in itself more damaging to the individual’s future prospects than the actual drug use, and because it is very expensive to lock people up.

It’s interesting though, and very readable. It helps that, although the book takes a ‘liberal’ stance compared to the current law, it’s not derived from a naive libertarianism. Nutt is not arguing for loosening the drug laws on the basis of increased personal liberty; he wants the law to be better at managing harms and risks. So he supports the ban on smoking in public places and would tighten some of the rules on alcohol sales. And although treating addiction to heroin and cocaine as a primarily medical problem could be seen as ‘soft on drugs’, he’s arguing for it on the basis that it is the best way to minimise harm.

A few random interesting points from the book: he points out that coca leaves, cocaine and crack are all pharmacologically the same substance, and that the method of delivery makes a huge difference not just to the experience but also the addictiveness. I was startled to learn that about 500 people a year die of heroin overdoses after coming out of prison because, having stopped or reduced their use while inside, they have lost the tolerance they used to have.

And I was struck by his suggestion that the duty on alcoholic drinks should be proportional to actual alcohol content, rather than by category with one rate for beer and one for wine and so on. That would be a direct incentive for drinkers to switch to weaker drinks and for manufacturers to reverse the trend of beers and wines getting stronger. Which seems sensible. There a general argument for making alcohol more expensive anyway, but it seems like a good start to make Special Brew considerably more expensive than lagers with less than half the alcohol.

» The Pink Elephants on Parade LSD blotter is from the Blotter Art website. The bottle of Papine is from Wellcome Images and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence.

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Culture

Translations From The Night by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Rabearivelo was a poet writing in Madagascar in the 20s and 30s — he killed himself in 1937 at the age of 36. He wrote in French; some of his later poems claimed to be translated from Malagasy, but according to this anthology’s introduction, the evidence suggests it was the other way round: that he wrote them in French, produced Malagasy versions, and then lied about it.

Initially at least he wrote squarely in the mainstream of French poetry at the time — again this is according to the introduction, I don’t know enough about early C20th French poetry to judge — but later he took more influence from local traditions, as evidenced by the way he pretended his poems had been translated from Malagasy.

This anthology includes a few examples of his early work but is mainly selected from three later books: shortish free verse lyrics from Presque-Songes (‘Near-Dreams’) and Traduit de la Nuit (‘Translated from the Night’); and short prose pieces from Vieilles Chansons des Pays d’Imerina [‘Old Imerinan Songs’].

The Madagascan influence is not especially obvious, to me at least, in the lyrics; there are a few references to lianas, cassava, coral, and so on, but most of the imagery seems to be very universal: twilight, stars, birds, flowers, bulls, the sun, the moon. I’m sure I’m missing things, since the book is blissfully free of footnotes; which is nice, because footnotes can feel a bit naggy and joyless, but on the other hand, when it says something like

What invisible rat
out of the walls of the night
is gnawing at the milk-cake of the moon?

it could for all I know be a reference to some Malagasy folk-story, or it might just be a ‘normal’ poetic image. And ‘gateau lacté‘ might be some kind of local dish, or it might just mean that the moon is round and white (if it is a real dish, a quick googling provides no evidence for it).

The local influence seems more obvious in the prose, which not only has more local colour but has something of the flavour of traditional story-telling to it. Here’s an example (this is the entire piece):

 – Who is there? Is the Woman-whose-footsteps-echo-the-livelong-days? Is it the Woman-who-is-hard-to-question?
– It is not the Woman-whose-footsteps-echo-the-livelong-days nor the Woman-who-is-hard-to-question! But I am the wife of another, and the livelong days I must know my place. Besides I am the wife of another, and when someone tells me our secrets I am not at all pleased. So plant one root of a fig-tree: perhaps its shadow would make me come. Plant a few roots of castor-oil tree: perhaps then you might be able to hold me. I would rather walk a long way to get my pitcher filled than take away a half empty pitcher with no waiting!
– Offer me green fruits and I will offer you bitter ones.

Questions of ethnology and influence aside, I quite enjoyed it as poetry, although I always struggle with poetry in translation: I assume I’m missing something and try to give everything the benefit of the doubt, but it does feel like watching TV through smoked glass sometimes.

At least in this case I had the French parallel text, but my long-withered schoolboy French was never good enough to assess poetry. It is good enough to find a few spots where the translation seemed a bit odd: repetition in the French which wasn’t reproduced in the English, long sentences in French which were broken up in translation, slangy dialogue in English which seemed less slangy in the original. Small things, really, but they just undermine your confidence a bit.

Still, it was interesting and enjoyable enough to be worth reading.

Translations From The Night: Selected Poems Of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo is my book from Madagascar for the Read The World challenge.

» Because it’s a book from Madagascar, I decided to use a picture of a lemur. There are no lemurs featured in Rabearivelo’s poetry. More’s the pity.

Funny Lemur is © Tambako The Jaguar and used under a CC by-nd licence.