latin!Latin!

[alexsarll]

Yesterday there were huge queues across the road from my office, as people waited for tickets to watch Live 8 on the big screens. Yes, that's right - to have the same experience as going round to their mate's who has a big TV, but with worse toilet facilities. Anyway, once the tickets were all gone and they'd departed, the street was filthy. And I'm talking here about a stretch of pavement often used as a derelicts' meeting place. There had been bins provided, they could just have kept their rubbish in their bags, but no, that would be too much effort, wouldn't it? They're happy to trot along with the herd when it comes to a popularly sanctioned Good Cause such as keeping Africa's kleptocrats in soldiers and palaces, but when it comes to making the least effort to avoid the environmental degradation of their own city, they couldn't care less. I do hope this weather continues for the concerts.

Narcissistic personality disorder seems to be this week's fashionable mentalism. "It results in the sufferer being obsessed with the fantasy of unlimited success, power, brilliance and ideal love and beauty", says that link. On Newsnight someone* talked of "believing your own propaganda...you become a caricature". OK, so that's yet another condition with which I could easily be diagnosed (I'm beginning to lose count of them) but there's something I'm missing here. Surely all that could also be said of most people who genuinely were great? And how in Hades do you get from 'fantasy of unlimited success' to 'minor credit card fraud'? Poverty of imagination, I suppose - if my dreams of glory were that small-scale, then I might be a danger too.

Like The King in Yellow or The Algebraist, The Red Shoes is a work of art which causes a certain confusion by taking its name from a fictional work of art central to its plot. It is also as wonderful as one expects from Powell and Pressburger - and in particular it has that glorious unpredictability which makes one long for a time before genres and demographics became so ossified. Now, most of the films where one has no idea how they will end tend to be low-budget and self-consciously arty, and as such one does not tend to care, either.
There's not a bad performance in The Red Shoes, but the real star is the colour. In The Whole Equation, David Thomson gets technical about Technicolor, its charms and costs, the reasons that it fell into disuse. I think it may be simpler than that - I think maybe only a generation reared on black&white could make quite this much of colour.

In yesterday's ID cards vote, David Taylor (Leicestershire North West) voted in both the Aye and No. How does that work?

Oh, and a big gay Hurrah for Spain and Canada - though judging by those articles, the former's homosexuals are much more attractive.

*Not Oliver James, though he was on later, proving once more that nothing he says means anything.

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Good point, well made.

kleptocrat

[rentaghost31.livejournal.com]

what a great word! It obviously belongs in the Norn Iron compendium alongside securocrat. I must find a use for this in context at work.

Re: kleptocrat

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's rather hard to use it of anyone actually present without causing a fight, though.

Re: kleptocrat

[rentaghost31.livejournal.com]

yesbut remember the bank robbery. securocrats is used by one side - i could introduce kleptocrat as a term to the other side. what joy. this place is like a huge game of chinese whispers as it is. I'm going to have some fun with this.

Re: kleptocrat

[thermaland.livejournal.com]

How about "hey you bunch of f#cking kleptocrats, why don't you all f#ck off?". Bring an electric guitar to cover up the penultimate word for maximum effect.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Dad laughs at Glastonbury with its massive Greenpeace signs over its enormous megawatted stages and still can't fathom why they need or would want to use dry ice. I'm guilty of leaving rubbish around Glastonbury when I'm too drunk or waterlogged to remember to put it somewhere more appropriate (for the first time ever this year I left a gazebo and a sack truck and felt guilty about it, but at least they'll probably get recycled). The number of people who just dump plates of food in the middle of the Pyramid Stage field making it a horrible, filthy place to sit always depresses me.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Hippies in 'inconsistent' shocker!

But yes, this year it looked as though the situation couldn't really get much worse, whatever individuals did.

[666inmyheart.livejournal.com]

Apparently hippies run around the fields tracking down left behind tents and wellies and make sculptures out of them to put in the Green Fields. W came back with four pairs of wellies this year because he couldn't bare to see them go to waste. We had "Wellie Idol" on the phone last night. He's going to wear them to work and see if he gets sacked.

xx

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Oliver James makes Raj Persaud look like a towering intellect, doesn't he? Why do all TV psychologists seem so dense?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The moment when I went from vague disdain for OJ to wanting his head on a spike was when he drooled an 'oooh, aren't babies luvly?' article in which he claimed they were free of adult vices like selfishness. What? Every bit of a baby that isn't a malodorous product of its digestive system, is selfishness. That's a basic failure to grasp your field comparable to an astronomer casually mentioning the Sun orbiting the Earth.

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

I misread narcisstic disorder yesterday as 'sarcastic disorder' and feared that all of Livejournal were about to go murder their parents as well.

sarcastic personality disorder

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The level at which one can now diagnose a 'disorder' is such that I wouldn't be surprised if that were next.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

Whilst NPD is something I don't think I've got, like other mentalisms, it's certainly something I fear could be either dormant or just festering, and ready to make itself known in a big way.

But it sounds like the exact condition that afflicts all the Bond baddies, doesn't it?

And it's got the best name for a condition I've heard in ages. How long before it's a band name or album title, I wonder?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But most Bond baddies *do* have great achievements and *are* great men - they just come up against the one person who's even better.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

He does it quite often. He did it on tuition fees and gambling. It's a way of abstaining while proving that you did turn up, I think. You probably have to be able to sprint a bit, they do lock the doors eventually.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

So essentially it's the equivalent of spoiling your ballot? What a scoper.

[drasticsturgeon.livejournal.com]

Yesterday there were huge queues across the road from my office, as people waited for tickets to watch Live 8 on the big screens. Yes, that's right - to have the same experience as going round to their mate's who has a big TV, but with worse toilet facilities

Exactly. We are arranging the screens and the security and the fencing off of the entire park, though in the office we just think it would be far better to watch it on TV. The number of nutters who want to get involved for some sort of compulsive 'I have to be there' reason is immense, though perhaps unsurprising. When Joe Public is told by the media that they have to be there, Joe Public feels like they have a need to be there, even if it means standing on a damp patch of over-crowded grass with very little chance of hearing or seeing anything, Joe Public likes to say that he was there.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

One of the very few compelling bits in the book I just abandoned had people travelling from around the world to watch a great funeral on big screens in Rome, "just from a need to be near". Joe Public needs a sound kick in the head.

[mrs-leroy-brown.livejournal.com]

thing about real actual narcissism is that it gets really, really OLD. it's good there are people who are confident and like themselves and yay. but it is also easy to glide on the love and take advantage of the fact that with this confidence comes a power over people. weak people yes, but power. so you end up with someone who needs 24-7 love and support to prove they are right.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

If anything, that sounds like a very fragile narcissism. I mean, there was this guy at my school called Vikas Joshi, and he was the only person who didn't think he was a total tosser. And yet, not once did I ever see that belief falter even a little. Baseless as it was, it was the one thing about him anyone could even vaguely respect.

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

Nobody's picked you up on The Red Shoes yet. It's wonderful.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yes, at the very least I was expecting Brane to have said something about it...but then nobody mentioned Ipcress yesterday either. Classic cinema is wasted on these people!

[(Anonymous)]

Richmond Fontaine, then. How is he?

NP x

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

They rather than he...though our database seems to have made the same mistake.
This one's from Obliterated by Time, which got its first listen this morning, and is perhaps a little too frenetic, just as The Fitzgerald is a little too dreary. Winnemucca, though, sits between the two and is, Goldilocks-style, just right. Possibly the most American music I own, but in a good way.