About Blade Runner 2049

Some disconnected thoughts about the Blade Runner sequel that may, one day, make their way into a coherent review (but probably not). Oh yeah, SPOILER ALERTS.

• It cannot sensibly be described as short.
• The horse. The dog. The unicorn in the original? Maybe?
• People who think Ryan Gosling’s a great actor, and then take the piss out of, say, Keanu Reeves, really ought to take a long, hard look at themselves.
• Lots of weather.
• Baudrillard. Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard. Baudrillard. Baudrillard Baudrillard. Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard Baudrillard. Baudrillard. Baudrillard. More about that by Steve Rose.
• The enormous naked lady with blue hair is meant to be funny, right?
• Less overtly noir than the original; a bit closer to Star Wars-style space opera (flying out to big domes in the desert, etc).
• In 2049, the United States will still not have got to grips with metric measurements. (See also Fahrenheit 451.)
• How many more times can Harrison Ford return to a role from several decades previously in grumpy dad mode? What’s next? A Witness sequel where he finds out he’s knocked up Kelley McGillis?
• The blonde hooker is very Pris. But is that relevant?
• I mean, *lots* of weather.

About Ishiguro

Will Self on Kazuo Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize:

“He’s a fairly good writer and surely doesn’t deserve the dread ossification and disregard that garnishes such laurels.”

PS: Just seen this: the Harukists gather to mark their man’s perennial Nobel disappointment.

About Trump/Amis

Toby Litt on The Orange One as a fictional construct with a very specific heritage:

The reason I’m writing this now is that President Trump (I’m sure it’s been said elsewhere a hundred times) is – for me – an Amis character rather than an any-other-fiction-writer-in-the-world character. It’s Amis’s novels – yes, Money – that were on the money about this ludicrous, strutting, wad out, greasy kind of masculinity. Others had stopped taking it seriously, or investing it with pathos and power. It had no future, why bond with it? But for Trump (the name is 1980s Amis) to be up there, in government, using the phrase ‘warmest condolences’ in referring to the Las Vegas Shooting – I feel the need to acknowledge Martin Amis here, to bow in his specific direction. Yes, you were right. This is his reality, as surely as Princess Diana’s death was J.G.Ballard’s, pre-scripted. In that phrase, and in every murderously clumsy verbal gesture and grandiloquent self-serving parp, Trump has been pre-scripted by Amis. Amis pre-understood him. This suggests it’s time to re-read.

About Isaac Newton

Preparatory reading for my MA course, which begins properly tomorrow, is happily reinforcing my obsession with the notion of an epistemological canon — essentially, what can/should we be expected to know; or, to put it another way, what prompts a disapproving glance from Richard on Pointless?

For example, re-reading Barthes’s Mythologies, I come across this in the introduction:

...which also has echoes of Bachelard and Hjelmslev...

and assume I’m just *meant* to know who they are. I mean, I know there’s Google (although there wasn’t the first time I read Barthes) but the throwaway feel to the phrase implies, you know, Bachelard and Hjelmslev, those guys... And then, in another book, I find:

...the scientist Isaac Newton...

and this annoys me for the opposite reason. Oh, right, the *scientist* Isaac Newton, as opposed to the plumber, the travelling salesman, the serial killer.

But of course, my annoyance is pretty solipsistic; my gripe is that the authors’ assumptions, in both cases, fail to correlate with what I (don’t) know. Although deep down I rather hope there’s someone who’s a mirror image of me, who’s fully conversant with Bachelard and Hjelmslev and all their works, but doesn’t know who Isaac Newton was.

And in other news, I think I’ll give up on social media, because the best Instagram name has already been taken.

About selfies

I just discovered that the French for selfie is égoportrait, which is entirely perfect and beautiful.

PS: I’ve been advised that égoportrait is specifically Québecois; the French are happy with selfie.

About mother!

And so I went to see the much-hyped, heavily spoiler-alerted, highly-controversial-or-bust, orthographically wacky mother!, the new film by Darren Aronofsky. It begins as a mid-period Woody Allen movie, then pulls in elements of Rosemary’s Baby, Straw Dogs and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but ultimately it’s just another home improvement TV show gone horribly, horribly wrong.

About Foucault

“We know what we do and we know, up to a point, why we do it: what we don't know is what what we do does.”

Anyone would think I was about to start an MA in Cultural Studies.

Maybe there’s a reason for this blog to stumble back into some sort of life.

About Lewis and Diana

Lewis Hamilton, a man who drives cars very fast, has written a poem dedicated to the memory of Princess Diana, a woman who died in a car that was was being driven very fast (but not, it must be said, by Mr Hamilton).

Englands Rose

The day we lost our Nations Rose
Tears we cried like rivers flowed,
The earth stood still
As we laid her to rest,
A day you & I
Will never forget
The people's princess
Who came to see,
The love from a Country
We'd hope she'd lead,
Englands beauty
Captured in one sweet soul,
Carried the torch
God rest her soul,
With the gift she had 
She'd light up the way,
With a smile to show us a brighter day,
Hearts still full 
of the love she gave,
20 years since she laid in her grave
There will never be another like you,
Now a shinning star in the midnight sky
I will always remember you,
Princess Diana
As our sweet nations Rose🌹

It’s not terribly good, is it? I mean, even if he’d taken the trouble to sort out the punctuation and spelling, and find some better rhymes, and learn a bit about scansion, it would still be fairly mundane.  But, hey, what do I know? Many people appear to have liked it. “Beautiful” is a very common response. “Heartfelt” as well. And, in one case, “I can’t wait to call me nan later. Read her this poem. God is great.” Some are even prompted to respond in kind:

A rose, you never used your thorns, the ones you loved abandoned you, your angel face made hearts so warm, you helped the sick... but who helped you?

offers olivercsmith90, perhaps channelling the spirit of Rik the People’s Poet.

A few, though, are less charitable:

wow your just too easy to please, now go read a John Keats poem , and see if Lewis 's poem still ranks with you!!! Yeah it probably would!

suggests simonnoble389. But sofiashinas shoots back:

You can't compare Lewis to Keats, apples and oranges. One is a champion race car driver, another is a brilliant poet. Either way Lewis's homage to Diana goes straight through my heart ❤️ and bring tears to my eyes .. he obviously loves her spirit as most of us did and still do.

Of course, Sofia is setting up a false dichotomy here; one can be “a brilliant poet” and something else as well. TS Eliot worked in a bank; Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Keats himself was a doctor. There’s nothing to say Lewis Hamilton can’t be a champion driver *and* a brilliant poet as well. I mean, his homage goes straight through Sofia’s heart and that’s what matters.

My own response to Mr Hamilton’s efforts was simple and, I hope, sincere.

You are the poet the British people deserve.

Let’s just leave it there.