They Have All The Time In The World

Well, this was kind of disappointing.

It all started so well. The idea of replacing money with subdivisions of lifespan, so you literally exchange labour for the time you've spent on that labour, is absolutely wonderful.  It literalises the way in which labour requires us to sacrifice elements of our life, for which we are then compensated. The problem comes, of course, when we're not adequately compensated, and here the problem is no longer that we might have to work four jobs and not have enough money to pay for groceries, but that we might have to work four jobs and still end up with less time remaining than when we started the week.

The most affecting scene in the entire film occurs early on, when Olivia Wilde's character boards a bus with 90 minutes remaining, so she can spend the hour's cost for a ride and meet her son in time for him to top her clock up.  With no warning, however, the bus fare has doubled, meaning she can't afford it, and will have to make the journey on foot, a two-hour trip and likely therefore a death sentence.

It's a beautifully unnerving way of making a fundamental point: money does not mean the same thing to all people. For the rich it's just a resource, but for far too many people it's literally a matter of life and death. Something as simple as an increase in bus fares can be disastrous, because it means having to choose between the commute to your job and buying all the food your kids need. And an increase in bus fares can always be arranged, if you need to make sure the workforce is kept too busy to actually protest their situation.  Meanwhile, the rich gather in locations too remote and well-guarded for anyone else to join them, and talk about how evolution requires a certain kind of people to rise to the top, and assure each other that they must be those people, because otherwise they wouldn't be there, would they?

I love that setup. Think what you could do with that, if you wanted to actually dissect how unbearably awful capitalism can get for people constantly poked with the shitty end of the stick.  Instead, after a wonderful first thirty minutes, the film degenerates into a heist movie, Bonnie and Clyde meets Robin Hood as a saviour arises to try and steal a million years (something like half a trillion dollars, perhaps, given a cup of coffee costs around three minutes). Which is just about the absolute least interesting thing you could do here.

It's not completely without merit. There are at least some nice puns in here. Cops are now "time-keepers", criminals who steal your time "minute men", and both are given equal time to screw the working class out of a fair return for their labour. There's a nice scene towards the end where a time-keeper explains they're propping up the system because they've always propped up the system, and rebelling now would be admitting they'd spent the last fifty years doing precisely the wrong thing. Ultimately, though, if there is any kind of message here in amongst Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried taking it in terms to try being smouldering and cool, it's that the best solution to endemic poverty and near-poverty is for a hot white dude to show up and save you.

Which isn't the film's message, of course; the film doesn't actually have a message. Just a phenomenal beginning pissed away in favour of the most obvious film-making imaginable. It's hard to fully engage with a dystopian nightmare of people forced to sell their time when you're too busy wishing you could get 109 minutes of your own back.

D CDs #478: This Is Cheating

Wait, we're allowed greatest hits albums on this list? I thought Alan Partridge had conclusively demonstrated that this is bullshit?



Still, if we're forced to go down this route, there are undeniable advantages, particularly when dealing with an artist like Lynn, whose career covered so great a period, with the earliest recording here hailing from 1964, and the latest from, I think, 1978. That nearly fifteen year stretch represents a healthy slice of musical development - 1964 saw the Beatles singing "Can't Buy Me Love"; by '78 the Clash were already on to their second album.

For all its defiant wallowing the past (more often than not a fictitious one, but that's beside the point right now), country music had to make changes of its own. It needed to pick up an electric guitar like everybody else.  This evolution can be sketched out as we travel through the (roughly) chronological track listing here.  It's interesting from a musical history perspective, but it works in the disc's favour, too, classic country often being a genre that can suffer from diminishing returns. Lynn provides a good example ; the first half here is packed with simple guitar work, smiling honky-tonk piano, and Lynn's clear, if slightly inexpressive voice. All fine in moderation, but there's only so many reworkings of that basic theme a man can take, especially given the limited range of subjects on display here.

I mean, I can't complain too much about the density of "my man's a cheater/other women keep trying to make my man cheat" on display here. It did result in Lynn's own composition "Fist City", after all, the third-best song she ever wrote and presumably only given that title because the '60s Midwest wasn't ready for a song called "Touch My Man And I Will Fucking Lamp You, Bitch".  There's issues to be had about songs blaming other women for "making" your husband cheat, but there's plenty of blame to go around in these first eleven tracks, I guess.

Whatever the progressive objections, though, it's a limited palette to work with. An expansion into more general domestic matters buys Lynn some time - and produces her second-best song in "Coal Miner's Daughter", a song about remembering where you came from and refusing to take any shit about it - but there's an inescapable sense of losing momentum.

It's a this point, though, that we shift into Lynn's second iteration, kicking off with the best song she ever wrote, "X-Rated" - about the absurd difficulties divorced women face in living any sort of normal life for the high crime of having decided to not spend her entire life with a man who no longer does what she needs him to do, whatever that is - and then focus for a little while on her series of duets with Conway Twitty. Presented here as more as a palette cleanser than anything else, the Twitty collaboration offers us an excellent rendition of "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man" (though Twitty brings more to this than Lynn, in all truth) and Twitty's own "As Soon As I Hang Up The Phone", probably the most depressing song Lynn offers up on this disc, and not through lack of competition.

This injection of new blood serves as launch pad for the tail end of the disc, in which the music responds to emerging trends by becoming a little more muscular (just a little, of course; this is still classic country) and the songs push a little further into storytelling territory, though the central theme very much remains the failures of men and the resulting damage done to women.

But then, potentially after some inverting of one or both genders, that describes, at a conservative estimate, something approaching 97% of all art ever created.  No sense in fighting too hard against that, especially considering it's blueprint country. Blueprint country, competently delivered, with three distinct phases to keep things fresh - and remind us of how things were changing in this period - and tempered with the occasional flash of brilliance.

That, in the end, will do.

Seven and a half tentacles.

Monday Pessimus Prime: It's All Got A Bit Too Real

Some background...

Fliss took me to her old university stomping grounds for the first time since we'd met this weekend, so she could perform bridesmaid duties for an old friend. Which was fine; taxi service for weddings is entirely within a boyfriend's remit, and I didn't even really mind having to sit through a church service surrounded by people I didn't know just to make sure sufficient pictures were taken of the bridesmaids - Fliss was worried for some reason that everyone would focus on the bride, like that's important.

Things seemed to be looking up at the reception, since there was a) fewer Bible quotations and b) a bar. Alas, this seeming promised land was naught but a lie, a comforting illusion designed to keep me busy trying out new ciders whilst agents of the Forces of Naughtiness could smash my passenger rear quarter window and make off with my SatNav and wallet.

This, obviously, is Not Good. I was so shaken up by the whole affair I was almost put off my full English yesterday morning, and that wouldn't happen if you told me the sausages were made from my mother.

But! There were upsides. Most important is the sheer meagreness of the villain's score. A battered five-year old SatNav I refused to update and a wallet containing £3.70 and a credit card cancelled before they could use it. According to the police officer who came looking for prints and DNA, they only broke in to try and steal the camera case on the back seat, which was of course empty. It's hard to not imagine their faces falling when they realised just what a waste of crime they'd gone through.

It'll have been a quiet supper in their secret lair and no mistake.

(There is though some personal stuff I've been gutted to lose. The business card Chris made for me in my first term as a teacher, explaining exactly how little of a shit I gave about children on one side and containing my lonely heart's ad on the other. The ID card I got when I turned 18 with a picture of my young, be-curtained self that I would show to children who'd done particularly well in class so they could laugh themselves sick. The two US coins I own, given to me by my sister to give me some kind of tangible connection to the country I spend so much time shouting about. These things I shall miss. Also there was a parking receipt I hadn't claimed back yet in there, so you can imagine how gutted I am over that.)

Watching other people's reactions to the situation has been entertaining as well. The particular denomination of Christians running this particular show took it all pretty hard, believing as they seem to that literally everything that happens is God's will (rather then the far more laissez-faire approach the Methodists I was raised around take, which is that God knew my car would be broken into, but didn't). Frankly, some of them seemed more upset than I was. One woman told us how she'd struggled to get to sleep on Saturday night, because she was so deep into trying to figure out why God would choose to have car thieves strike in the middle of a Christian wedding. For my part I figured "shit happens" and passed out.

In the end, she decided it was fine because so little was stolen. Which, whatever floats your theological boat, obviously. Though it turns out though that there's not a lot of social situations more awkward than a loudly committed Christian expounding how awesome Christian weddings are because God only lets small-bore shit gets nicked, and how lucky we are to be a part of that, then when you politely point out you're an atheist get a sales pitch about how "God protects". I mean, I don't begrudge this woman her faith or the security it clearly gives her, but maybe citing the protection God offers you is a mistake eight hours after it turns out he won't even protect your SatNav.

Other interactions were less awkward. There is something uniquely laid-back and yet acerbic about Yorkshire humour:

Fellow Guest: Sorry to hear about yer car. You got yer cards cancelled? 

SpaceSquid: Yep. All but my Nectar Card. It was tough to sleep knowing the gits who robbed my car might even now be enjoying fractionally cheaper groceries. 

Fellow Guest (prodding my admittedly generous belly): Yeah, yer look like yer wasting way, don't yer?

Or:

Police Officer: See that helicopter? It's from an old RAF base they use for training now. All privatised now, of course. 

SpaceSquid: The government does love its privatisation. 

PO: I think they should privatise the government. 

SS: If we're defining "privatise" as "major corporations get to call all the shots without outside interference", I would like to submit that you already have your wish. 

PO: Fair point. What do they call the big head office again? Eton, in't it?

(I suppose the guy's plan has some merit. If we formalised bribery at least we could tax it).

As of 11am today I have finally waded through the list of tasks necessary to respond to this hassle, including setting my insurers against my glass-replacement company so that whichever one of them was lying to me about the other one could do it to their metaphorical face (so far it's looking like it was the insurance company - no surprise there; these are already the people who've told me my contents insurance which includes personal items and built-in navigation devices doesn't include SatNavs; too car-based to be a personal item, too detachable to be a car feature).

So that was my weekend. How about you peeps?

Friday Talisman

Time to rock it old school as we return to the Elder Days and to the original 4th Edition bundle, and present... the Elf!

In all honesty, I think he's a bit too bright, and I lost too much definition painting his boots brown (my own fault; the paint was too thick). Still, I quite like his hair, and his bow.

Paul The Octopus Has Nothing On Me

Just quickly throwing this out there under the heading of "Thank Cthulhu I don't live in Louisiana". When you're not having your city torn out from under you by a hurricane, shot dead for the crime of wanting food whilst black, or dying in an overcrowded hospital because there's no money to keep anyone but the rich alive any more, you're finding stuff in your drinking water which will literally eat your brain:

The water in St. John Parish is safe to drink, said the CDC, but special care should be taken not to allow it to go up the nose, which is the route the parasite takes to infect the brain. Once inside the brain, the amoebas cause primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), which is almost invariably fatal.

I've no idea who, if anyone, is to blame for this hideous gribbly showing up in the first place.  But I absolutely guarantee you two things. First, there will be a non-trivial number of state Republicans who will argue increased governmental surveillance of drinking water to stop people getting their heads melted will constitute "Federalism run amok".  Second, there will be a non-trivial number of Republican voters on the internet who will argue that since no-one deliberately snorts drinking water up their noses, this is a non-issue that will simply rid us of obvious idiots.

There is simply no bottom with these people.

(h/t to Elon James White over at Balloon Juice.)

Zero Tolerance

Our ongoing tour of the best companions in Who history reaches its end with The Curse of Fenric, and after having to basically tread water with the Sixth Doctor, we have here something we can properly get our teeth into. ...Fenric is not only the greatest story the classic show ever broadcast, but it's got a well-considered role for everyone's favourite teenage anarchist, as well.

Radio Monday: Back To School

Let's do this.