I’ve spent the cold dark months of this winter lost inside the dark stream of Netflix. It’s like the web you browse and they browse. You gravitate towards genres, in my case dark detective stories. These have included Cracker, Waking the Dead, Dexter, Wallender (Lassgard), Wallender (Branagh) and Wallender(Henriksson). It’s odd in that I had a free choice, nobody coerced me, so why this genre? It’s very male, not so much the violence of murder, rather the aftermath of death, over and over again. A search for meaning in this dark existentialism. The detective’s investigation is a side story, in terms of the deeper search for meaning in a meaningless world. In the darker corners you witness a sad nihilism which is almost poetic. In Cracker it’s all about psychology. In Waking the Dead the emphasis is upon forensics. In Dexter it’s serial killinq and blood spatter, juxtaposed with sunny Miami, somehow it makes for a heady cocktail. And then Wallender interpreted by three very different lead actors, each actor interpreting the one author’s vision in slightly different ways, but all conveying a sense of isolation. In Wallender (Lassgard) there is a moment when Wallender asks a detective colleague who has been troubled by a gruesome murder if he needs to talk. The colleague says yes and Wallender hands him the card for a helpline…no one is there.
Tag: Television
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WDTV LIVE 2013
After a quiet and reflective period, I embraced technology on New Year’s Eve (2012). It wasn’t rocket science by most people’s standards, but for me it was a bit of a tipping point. I’d been interested in internet TV for some time, but did not want to invest in a new TV given that they are currently changing so rapidly. So after some casual surfing I decided that a small WDTV box was the way forward. The reviews suggested how simple and user friendly it was. I purchased it on-line on Saturday evening with tracking and then watched it moving on-line until it reached my home on Monday morning. Imagine if they were tracking people like that – HoHo.
In the afternoon, I unboxed it, though this held no surprises as I had watched a film of it being unboxed on YouTube before deciding to purchase. I had done my homework and purchased a HDMI cable in advance, although this didn’t work the cable with red, white and yellow connectors they included worked and we were away. So a case of trying to be a bit too clever. It really was easy to set up. I have wireless and I just needed to let this little box know my wireless password. It downloaded a firmware update and then with a reboot installed it. The box was the size of my hand, yet performed in a manner similar to a computer. The interface was clear and user friendly. And then the exploration began. My motivations all related to spending my working days staring into this screen and I wanted to spend some of my evening leisure time in the lounge watching TV whilst reclining on the sofa and so far so good.
The WDTV had about 26 web enabled channels for me to access some of them a bit marginal, but they had what I was after. BBC IPlayer to watch catch up TV, YouTube so that I could watch those esoteric documentaries and Snag Films which appeared to have some indie content. Also, they had various commercial offerings. I decided to test the technology by downloading a blockbuster movie and watching it. Oddly, whilst I work with a computer all day, I have never watched a whole movie on-line. AceTrax had a promotion were you could download some trial content for free. I had nothing to lose, so I went for the apocalypse film 2012 which seemed right for New Year’s Eve. The quality was great, I had been prepared for stuttering, but the movie played better than the normal DVDs that I rent. The film was odd fun, full of almost unrelenting doom, all the usual reference points with redemption thankfully at the end.
My next New Year’s Eve excursion was to watch that old Face to Face documentary on YouTube focusing upon a interview with Carl Jung and ending with his immortal quote man cannot live a meaningless life. I look forward to watching many more of these odd documentaries, which are never likely to be broadcast on mainstream TV again. I was creating my own audio visual New Year’s Eve, which is nothing new, but great fun. Finally, I watched on You Tube Videos a full Portishead concert recorded by Canal + in 2009. The quality was great and the band were on top form entertaining me in my living room, they played a wonderful set and I was happy.
I witnessed last night a wave of technological innovation which isn’t new, but for once it engaged me, 2013 is going to be interesting.
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Baka : A Cry From the Rainforest
Baka: A cry from the rainforest came unexpectedly crashing into my life last Friday evening. About twenty five years ago I watched Baka: People of the rainforest and almost half a life time ago it made a big impression upon me. It featured people living in the rainforest of South Eastern Cameroon living a simple life, free from the technology and industry of modern life. It was a very tough life even then, but there was something different and superior to our modern life. What stood out was the Baka’s connection with nature, for them nature was life or death. Their medicines came from the forest, their food came from the forest. Equally diseases and predators came from the forest. I was more naive and romantic back then, but at times it really appeared to be idyllic. Their songs stood out, music made from instruments that they crafted themselves. The sheer joy in the children’s singing. At the time I purchased Heart of the Forest (The music of the Baka forest people of South East Cameroon). I am listening to it now and on this quiet Sunday it still sounds uplifiting.
In the last twenty five years my life has evolved in good and bad ways like everyone else. I guess on Friday I had hoped it would be business as usual for the Baka. Unfortunately Phil Agland the film director had to tell a far more tragic story. Modern life was increasingly encroaching upon this part of Africa. The Baka were now banned from parts of their own forest which were being developed by the government as nature reserves. Other parts of the forest were now being forested by the logging companies who were after the mahogany. They were now prohibited from hunting the bush meat which had been an important part of their diet. Accordingly they were working on farms of the Bantu people. Often they were paid in strong alcohol made out of fermented bananas. Despite the scale of the other threats it was this alcohol which was doing the most damage. Some of the Baka women were drinking heavily whilst pregnant, leading to foetal deformities which they did not have the infrastructure to deal with. Equally the men who drank the alcohol were being damaged in the process. The title of the film captured the scale and nature of the challenge.
The most dramatic element of the film was the screening of the previous film to the Baka people of today. The film was screened in the forest on a large projection screen. The Baka people were fascinated to see themselves and their ancestors and requested repeated screenings each night. They glimpsed what had been lost in the passage of time and they even attempted to return to old ways of living, but in fairness they were swimming against a tide of progress which cannot be resisted. The optimism was conveyed in a young girl called Ambi who was going to study in a nearby Bantu village. There was light and hope in her eyes that suggested at least for some of the Baka people something more. Beyond this it was difficult to envisage in twenty five years the Baka tribes existed in anything more than a tourist theme park.
Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest -
Rolling News Coverage of the TUC Demonstration
This afternoon I found myself watching the rolling news coverage of the TUC demonstration in London. The early reports from the TUC suggested 100,000 people on the march whereas the police were claiming that 250,000 people were marching. This statistical discrepancy amused me. Before my arthritis, I used to march regularly only to get home and watch the TV news during which the police frequently underplayed the number of marchers. Back in the eighties the police worked very closely with and for the conservative government. That seems to have changed with the Con-Dem coalition government repeatedly questioning the work, pay and pensions of the police. We are living through interesting times.
In watching the demonstration on TV I felt like I had taken a wrong turn, but anyway a bit of me was there. The march was a huge success and as the afternoon progressed figures from both sides were revised upwards towards half a million. As well as the TUC stewarded march, there were separate direct actions today which appeared to interest the media far more. At about 1.50pm today I was watching a speech by the Leader of the opposition party Ed Miliband on the BBC news channel. He was one of the key speakers at Hyde Park along with Brendan Barber. As I watched the speech the BBC split the screen in two and without explanation began screening live coverage of black block anarchists attacking Top Shop and Top Man. The outcome of this clever BBC editing was that in half the screen you could see Ed Miliband speaking whilst in the other half of the screen there were very vivid scenes of civil disorder. The combined sound and vision was very powerful media manipulation. I hoped the BBC might try and correct their own breach of impartiality, but no joy. They then upped the stakes filling the screen with the Top Shop/Top Man footage, whilst maintaining the soundtrack of Ed Miliband speaking about the social harm that the cuts were doing and the danger within the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives attempts to create a divided society. The juxtaposition of a legitimate political leader being mashed up with scenes of civil disorder was deeply troubling.
Back in the eighties when I was studying in Sheffield there was a radical grouping known as the Glasgow University Media Group. They highlighted how trade unionists were invariably misrepresented by the media. As I passively watched the news today I yearned for more honest media which did not represent the narrow interests of a dodgy coalition and their wealthy backers.