Quotulatiousness

February 15, 2026

Everything you see in the media is kayfabe

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Wikipedia defines kayfabe as “the portrayal of staged elements within professional wrestling (such as characters, rivalries, and storylines) as legitimate or real. Although it remains primarily a wrestling term, it has evolved into a code word for maintaining the pretense of ‘reality’ in front of an audience.” It’s hard not to see modern political theatre in that light, as Damian Penny points out:

Sgt. Slaughter and The Grand Wizard, February 1984.
Photo from Wrestling’s MAIN EVENT magazine via Wikimedia Commons.

I know a guy who was obsessed with WWF wrestling (yes, I said WWF wrestling, because you kids better get off my lawn before Diagnosis Murder comes on) when he was younger and got to see it live when it came to his city. After the show, he was shocked to see several of the wrestlers — some of them good-guy “faces”, others bad-guy “heels” — being driven from the arena in the same minivan.

For someone who took the “sport” of professional wrestling seriously1 and was extremely emotionally invested in the performer rivalries, this was kind of like finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.2

That’s the first thing I thought about when I came across this piece by Christianity Today‘s Russell Moore, a rare evangelical leader who actually held on to his integrity in the age of Trump, about the Epstein Files:

    Reading through the names of those connected with Epstein, one can hardly believe the range listed there. Some were unsurprising: for instance, creepy filmmaker Woody Allen or the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. But even then, the scope is unsettling. Even the Dalai Lama had to put out a statement noting that he was never involved with Epstein. Just as incredible, many of the people listed were partying with those they spend a lot of time telling the rest of us to hate.

    Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were apparently friendly with Epstein. The New Age syncretist Deepak Chopra is in the documents many times — often with shady, enigmatic phrases — but so are those who accused the pope of New Age syncretism. With Middle Eastern tensions what they are, still the files include both sheikhs and Israelis. All over the files are connections with both left-wing populist provocateur Noam Chomsky and right-wing populist provocateur Steve Bannon. Epstein makes fun of evangelicals yet recommends a James Dobson article.

    How can this be?

    Maybe one reason is that Jeffrey Epstein figured out the deep, dark secret of this moment: The people who fight culture wars often believe what they say, but the people who lead culture wars often don’t.

[…] And if the Epstein revelations didn’t blackpill you hard enough, check this out:

To be fair, I’m not sure it’s an entirely bad thing that so many decision-makers and “thought leaders” who are sworn enemies in public get along just fine when the cameras are turned off. If they really hated each other, our political culture might be even more messed up.

  1. YouTuber Drew Allen says you should take wrestling seriously, and honestly he makes a darned good argument.
  2. I’ll never forget when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, and how I was so depressed and hopeless and wouldn’t leave my bed for days. Finally my mother came into my bedroom, sat down on the side my bed and said, “honey, I know you’re sad but you’re in your second year of law school and really we thought you’d have figured this out long ago“.

December 23, 2025

Vagabond by Tim Curry

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle reviews Tim Curry’s new autobiography Vagabond:

Tim Curry, Nell Campbell, Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Tim Curry is a shapeshifter. I have a childhood memory of the moment I learned that the demon in Legend (1985), the villain in Annie (1982), the butler in Clue (1985) and the cross-dressing alien scientist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were all played by the same man. It was quite the revelation.

Curry’s protean talents have meant that as a personality he has forever remained mysterious. He rarely gives interviews – only grudgingly whenever there is a movie to promote – and fans have therefore tended to project onto this reclusive figure the persona that best fits their expectations or desires. When more insistent fans have formed an emotional bond with the Tim Curry of their imaginations, he has on occasion been forced to put them right. “I’m just a person,” he says, “and I’m not your person”.

Fans will therefore be delighted at the publication of Curry’s memoir, Vagabond, which offers fascinating snapshots from his life. The approach is episodic, with chapters devoted to particular projects in his career. As such, Curry offers us morsels in lieu of a meal. Those who are hoping for salacious anecdotes about his love life will be disappointed, because – as he rightly points out – “specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are – respectfully – none of your fucking business”. Instead, we have a wonderfully compelling account of Curry’s origins and how his philosophy of life has informed his craft.

Tim Curry as Wadsworth in Clue and King Arthur in Spamalot

His vagabond status has been well earned. As the child of a military father, he was forever on the move, and it is easy to see how these early experiences shaped his capacity to embody such a wide breadth of humanity. His first accolade came early when he was awarded the prize for the “Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong”. His family relocated roughly every eighteen months for the first eleven years of his life, which is why he tells us that “mutability felt like a part of my DNA”. It was the ideal apprenticeship for his future vocation.

Writing in 1817, William Hazlitt called actors the “motley representatives of human nature” who “show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be”. For his part, Curry sees the actor as the vagabond of his book’s title. “How can you trust somebody, or truly know somebody, who appears as a king one day and a jester the next? What does it mean when neither role is the true identity of the person, and when that very person might be gone the next day?” In this, he could be paraphrasing Hazlitt’s description of actors as “today kings, tomorrow beggars”, and how “it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing”.

October 7, 2025

An unexpected Gen Z “influencer” – Shakespeare

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia describes the plight of a young man who had to move home after college and falls into a state of depression thanks to his hopeless situation and his dysfunctional home and social life. His name is Hamlet:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s almost uncanny how relevant it feels right now.

So if I were directing Hamlet in the current moment, I’d give the title character an iPhone and game console. I’d have the characters onstage share photos on Instagram — and put up a big screen so the audience could see them posted in real time.

Hamlet could add pithy captions to his social media images. What a piece of work is a man! or maybe The lady doth protest too much!

Yes, Hamlet is many things, but one of them is, perhaps, a failed influencer.

Along the way, we may have answered the classic question about this play. For generations, critics have wondered why Hamlet wastes so much time, and can’t be bothered to take action.

Maybe he’s just too busy gaming and scrolling.

Okay, it sounds ridiculous. But is it really? Shakespeare possessed tremendous insight into the human condition — perhaps more than any author in history. So maybe he really did grasp the dominant personality types of our own time.

The Prince of Denmark still walks in our midst. And maybe — just maybe — careful attention to this play might help us, in some small degree, to heal the Hamlets all around us. Their number is legion.

Of course, the larger reality is that Shakespeare has proven himself relevant to every time and place. We can see that easily be examining how other generations viewed this same play.

Hamlet‘s original audience, four hundred years ago, clearly enjoyed the spectacle of violence and adultery. Nine key characters die during the course of the play — most of them murdered. Audiences loved these kinds of dramas back then, and Shakespeare always knew how to please the crowd.

But more sophisticated viewers, circa 1600, would have seen Hamlet as a political commentary — a reflection of all the tensions and rivalries of Elizabethan England. Nobody knew better than Shakespeare that monarchy is a dangerous game, and he always looked for opportunities to refer to current events in roundabout ways.

But two hundred years later, the Romanticists were in ascendancy, and they saw Hamlet as a very different kind of play. They ditched the politics, and embraced the Prince of Denmark for his pathos and personality. They tapped into the intense emotional currents of Shakespeare’s heroes — and the plays seemed perfectly suited for this kind of interpretation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Hamlet continued to change for each new generation. He always feels timely and relevant.

A hundred years ago, critics began grappling with psychology and the unconscious — and Hamlet was a perfect character for these kinds of interests. In his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud focused on Hamlet as a case study in repression.

And who could disagree?

But fifty years later, Hamlet changed again. It now was the perfect play for those who had survived World War II. Jan Kott insists, in his book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, that these old plays were more relevant than ever during the Cold War — just as timely as Beckett or Sartre or Brecht or Ionesco.

June 24, 2025

Fandom Has Always Been UNHINGED

Filed under: Books, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jill Bearup
Published 23 Jun 2025

Listen, nobody asked for a history of fanfiction but here we are regardless. From Helen of Troy fix-it fic to Holmes fans unsubscribing en masse when the detective was killed in The Final Problem, fandom has always been this chaotic, and fanfiction has always been with us. In one form or another.

00:00 Did you ask for this? Nah.
01:20 Ancient authors ripping off other ancient authors
03:06 Virgil was a Homer fanboy
04:10 Dante was a Virgil fanboy
05:18 Don Quixote and the Case of the Unauthorised Sequel
08:01 The Statute of Anne
12:35 Gulliver’s Travels NSFW fanart
14:40 Geniuses and Originality
16:51 The Berne Convention
17:20 Character Vibes are not Copyrightable
20:46 The First Modern Fandoms (were Genuinely Unhinged)

Link to Der Spiegel article on copyright and innovation: https://www.spiegel.de/international/…

May 19, 2025

Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023

Are you saying I’m a liar?

Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.

October 28, 2024

QotD: Democracy as theatre

Filed under: Government, Greece, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The world does not have much experience with democracy. What we know of it comes from the century or so the West been tinkering with it and, of course, what can be learned from the ancient Greek experiment with it. Unlike monarchy or various forms of despotism, democracy has had a relatively short run. We have more real world experience with various types of totalitarianism than we do democracy, so it stands to reason that we are just coming to understand its benefits and liabilities.

One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.

Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.

This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.

The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.

June 21, 2024

From “invention” to “tradition”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers some “traditions” which were clearly invented much more recently than participants might believe:

Two NYC synagogues, one in Moorish Revival style and the other is some form of modernism (you can tell it’s not Brutalism because it’s not all decaying concrete). Like Scott, I vastly prefer the one on the left even if it isn’t totally faithful to the Moroccan original design.

    A: I like Indian food.

    B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws – do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?

    A: I just like paneer tikka.

This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.

But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!

In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!

But there’s another anti-tradition argument which goes deeper than this. It’s something like “ah, but you’re a hypocrite, because the people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history. They just did what made sense in their present environment.”

There were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent article about a fertility festival in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time.

Most of the people involved assumed it derived from the Druids or something. It was popular not just as a good party, but because it felt like a connection to primeval days of magic and mystery. But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.

Kriss wrote:

    I don’t think the Jack in the Green is worse because it’s not really an ancient fertility rite, but I do think it’s a little worse because it pretends to be … tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time: it turns the past into eternity. The opposite of tradition is invention.

    Tradition is fake, and invention is real. Most of the human activity of the past consists of people just doing stuff … they didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about [a seagull float in the Hastings parade] … in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it. I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.

I’m nervous to ever disagree with Sam Kriss about ancient history, but this strikes me as totally false.

Modern traditionalists look back fondly on Victorian times. But the Victorians didn’t get their culture by just doing stuff without ever thinking of the past. They were writing pseudo-Arthurian poetry, building neo-Gothic palaces, and painting pre-Raphaelite art hearkening back to the early Renaissance. And the Renaissance itself was based on the idea of a re-naissance of Greco-Roman culture. And the Roman Empire at its peak spent half of its cultural energy obsessing over restoring the virtue of the ancient days of the Roman Republic:

    Then none was for a party;
    Then all were for the state;
    Then the great man helped the poor,
    And the poor man loved the great:
    Then lands were fairly portioned;
    Then spoils were fairly sold:
    The Romans were like brothers
    In the brave days of old.

    Now Roman is to Roman
    More hateful than a foe,
    And the Tribunes beard the high,
    And the Fathers grind the low.
    As we wax hot in faction,
    In battle we wax cold:
    Wherefore men fight not as they fought
    In the brave days of old.

(of course, this isn’t from a real Imperial Roman poem — it’s by a Victorian Brit pretending to be a later Roman yearning for the grand old days of Republican Rome. And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.)

As for the ancient Roman Republic, they spoke fondly of a Golden Age when they were ruled by the god Saturn. As far as anyone knows, Saturn is a wholly mythical figure. But if he did exist, there are good odds he inspired his people (supposedly the fauns and nymphs) through stories of some even Goldener Age that came before.

June 1, 2024

So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mere mortals might be tempted to answer “Well, Shakespeare, duh!”, but to the dedicated conspiracist, the obvious is never the right answer:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Shakespeare a fraud? The American writer Jodi Picoult seems to think so. Her latest novel By Any Other Name is based on the premise that William Shakespeare was not the real author of his plays. Specifically, in her story, the poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) pays Shakespeare for the use of his name so that she might see her work staged at a time when female playwrights were extremely rare.

The theory that Shakespeare was a woman isn’t original to Picoult. As with all conspiracy theories relating to the bard, the “true” Shakespeare is identified as one of the upper echelons of society (although not an aristocrat, Lanier was part of the minor gentry thanks to her father’s appointment as court musician to Queen Elizabeth I). Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” – i.e., those who believe that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him – invariably favour candidates who had direct connections to the court. The general feeling seems to be that a middle-class lad from a remote country town could not possibly have created such compelling depictions of lords, ladies, kings and queens.

[…]

The notion that the actor Shakespeare could have hired out his identity to Lanier, or anyone else for that matter, makes no sense if one considers the collaborative nature of the theatrical medium. Shakespeare was the house playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the company that became the King’s Men on the accession of James I). His job was to oversee productions, to write on the hoof, to adapt existing scripts in the process of rehearsal. (This is probably why his later plays such as Henry VIII contain so many stage directions; at this point he was almost certainly residing in Stratford-upon-Avon, and so was not available to provide the necessary detail in person.) It was never simply a matter of Shakespeare dropping off his latest script at The Globe and quickly scarpering. If he was being fed the lines, it is implausible that nobody in the company would have noticed.

[…]

The theory that Shakespeare’s contemporaries – fans and critics alike – would all collude in an elaborate deception requires a full explanation. The burden of proof is very much on the anti-Stratfordians, but proof doesn’t appear to be their priority. They seem to think they know more about Shakespeare than those who actually lived and worked with him. It’s oddly hubristic.

All of this nonsense began with the Baconian theory propounded by James Wilmot in 1785 and has never gone away. The candidates are usually university educated and aristocratic: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Oxford – even Queen Elizabeth I has been proposed. The anti-Stratfordian position seems to be based on a combination of class snobbery and presentism. They assume that the middle-class son of a glover who did not attend university could not have developed the range of knowledge needed to inform his plays. They forgot, or do not know, that the grammar school education of the time would have provided a firm grounding in the classics. Shakespeare would have been steeped in Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and much more besides. Let’s not forget that Ben Jonson, the most scholarly of all his contemporaries, didn’t go to university either.

Moreover, the plays make clear that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. The idea that one must have direct experience in order to write about a subject is very much in keeping with the obsessions of our time, particularly the notion of “lived experience” and how writers ought to “stay in their lane”.

As I’ve joked in the past, I believe the theory that Homer didn’t actually write The Iliad and The Odyssey … it was another Greek chap of the same name.

May 18, 2024

Antisemitism is far from a new problem

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle on some of the historical relics of antisemitism in European history down to today’s revived fascism of the left:

In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens considered “why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring”. Many of us in the west have grown complacent, assuming that the horrors of the Holocaust would prevent this ancient prejudice from re-emerging. But as the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates, few of us can be in any doubt that antisemitism has once again goose-stepped into the spotlight.

Of course, criticism of the Israeli government and its military strategy is entirely legitimate. So too is our profound concern for the innocents of Gaza and the many thousands of non-combatants who are losing their lives. But there is no denying the explicit anti-Jewish hatred that has accompanied these discussions in certain quarters. Criticise Israel all you like, but don’t try to tell me that Monday night’s daubing of the Shoah memorial in Paris with handprints of red paint was anything other than antisemitic.

Social media has opened our eyes to the prevalence of such sentiments. The other day I posted a link to my Substack piece about the Eurovision Song Contest on that hellsite now known as X. My focus in the article was on the narcissism of the “non-binary” performers, but one feminist activist decided to make it all about Israel. Underneath my post, she added an image of Eden Golan, the Israeli entry to the competition, with bloodstains photoshopped onto her dress. She went on to dismiss the victims of the October 7 pogrom as “silly ravers” and to blame the massacre on the IDF. Whatever else one might say about such views, it is clearly evidence of a complete absence of basic humanity.

This is sadly not uncommon. Recently we have seen protesters openly supporting Hamas, or even praising its acts of barbarism. A new poll has found that 63% of students currently protesting at US universities have at least some sympathy for Hamas. There have been overtly antisemitic statements, and Jews have been harassed on campus. It has been reported that at Columbia University, one protester cried out “We are Hamas” while another shouted at a group of Jewish students: “The 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?” These are the very people who have spent the last few years calling anyone who dissents even slightly from their worldview a “fascist”, and yet they are blind to actual fascism when it emerges within their own ranks.

All of this has taken me by surprise, which perhaps reveals the extent of my naivety. Antisemitism is nothing new, and has assumed myriad and outlandish forms over the centuries. Our own country has not been immune; Jews were deported from England in 1290, only to be readmitted in 1656. Before then, only those who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain; specially, they were able to reside at the Domus Conversorum in London, established by Henry III in 1232. Anti-Jewish sentiments were reignited by a plot to poison Elizabeth I in 1594, which was blamed on her physician Roderigo Lopes, a Portuguese man of Jewish ancestry who was executed for treason. This is the context in which the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ought to be understood.

Unpleasant myths about Jews have abounded throughout history, some of which still linger in Islamic regimes and the darker crannies of the internet where neo-Nazis gather to wallow in their bile. The poisoning of wells by Jews was thought to have initiated the Black Death epidemic in 1348. This notion was still pervasive by the time Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Jew of Malta in 1589 (consider Barabas’s mass extermination of an entire convent of nuns by means of “a precious powder”, or his boastful claim: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells”).

May 15, 2024

Disintermediation Now! “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia on the trend for even people at the top of the distribution chain trying to find ways to get around the distribution chain they inhabit:

The Emoji Movie premiere at the Fox Theatre, Westwood Village, 23 July 2017.
Photo by Kristofer Gonzalez-DeWhitt via Wikimedia Commons.

A few weeks ago, 35 of the biggest names in Hollywood collaborated on a business venture. Can you guess what it is?

I’ll help by providing a list of the participants. Here they are in alphabetical order, to avoid wounding any of the huge egos involved:

    J.J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Damien Chazelle, Chris Columbus, Ryan Coogler, Bradley Cooper, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Dayton, Guillermo del Toro, Valerie Faris, Hannah Fidell, Alejandro González Iñárritu, James Gunn, Sian Heder, Rian Johnson, Gil Kenan, Karyn Kusama, Justin Lin, Phil Lord, David Lowery, Christopher McQuarrie, Chris Miller, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Todd Phillips, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Jason Reitman, Jay Roach, Seth Rogen, Emma Seligman, Brad Silberling, Steven Spielberg, Emma Thomas, Denis Villeneuve, Lulu Wang and Chloé Zhao.

What are these movie titans up to?

Maybe they want to make a film together? Or perhaps they’re thinking bigger — planning to launch their own production company or even a movie studio?

Nope. They weren’t thinking big. They were thinking small — very small.

These heavy hitters got together to buy a 93-year-old building.

They now own the Westwood Village theater at 945 Boxton near the UCLA campus. I went there to see films when I was in high school and it was old even back then. At some point it stopped being old, and became historic and vintage. (Maybe if I live long enough this will happen to me too.)

But these 35 investors aren’t just interested in preserving a quaint old building. They want to own a place where they can show quality movies to a flesh-and-blood audience without anybody getting in their way.

We’ve reached a point where even the people in power at the top of the industry want to bypass the system. Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers.

That’s how bad it’s gotten.

May 13, 2024

QotD: Of course, they could try just … acting

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In any case, the demand that actors should play only those parts that are somehow consonant with what we now call their “lived experience” is self-evidently absurd. If taken seriously, Richard III would have to be played by a member of the Royal Family (Prince Andrew, perhaps?), for only such a person could know or imagine what it was like to be a royal person and covet the crown. Taken to its logical conclusion, or its reductio ad absurdum, the argument would mean that the only person an actor could play was him- or herself.

Of course, a happy medium exists, though we are increasingly unable to find it. We should not expect Ophelia to be played by a 90-year-old crone. We should add difficulties in the way of an audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief”, as Coleridge put it, by casting a tall man as short or a short man as tall.

The whole silly controversy reveals to what absurdities we have sunk, thanks to identity politics and a willful misunderstanding, for the sake of personal or group advantage, of what wrongful discrimination is. Storms in teacups can be revealing.

Theodore Dalrymple, “My Kingdom for Some Crutches”, New English Review, 2024-02-06.

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

January 1, 2024

QotD: The Panto

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the worst things my parents ever did was force me to go to the panto. It was Angela’s Ashes levels of misery memoir fodder.

What made it worse was that I was about 14; I’d almost managed to get through childhood without experiencing this strange British tradition and then, just at the age when you’re most vulnerable to cringe, I got dragged in. Anyway, I think I’m over it now.

Pantomime is one of those very British things that makes me feel a strange sense of alienation from my countrymen, like celebrating the NHS or twee. I’m glad that other people enjoy it, and that it brings a lot of work to actors and to theatres during the Christmas period. I just personally don’t get it.

For those who don’t know about the ins and outs of our island culture, panto is a sort of farcical theatre featuring lots of sexual innuendo and contemporary pop culture references; I think when I watched it there must have been one or two ex-Neighbours stars because they all finished by singing the theme tune.

A key part of this British institution is drag, with men playing the roles of Widow Twankey and the Ugly Sisters. Drag is quite an established tradition in England, such a part of popular entertainment that there is even a photograph of British soldiers in dresses fighting in the Second World War.

Pantomime is thought to have evolved from the medieval Feast of Fools, a day of the year (around the Christmas/New Year period) when social norms would be inverted; laymen would be elected bishops, lords would serve their retainers drinks, and men and women would even swap roles. Social norms could be temporarily broken, which continues today in the often risqué humour incongruously aimed at family audiences (hilariously portrayed in the Les Dennis episode of Extras.)

This kind of drag is obviously humourous, the aim being for the men to look as ridiculous as possible; think of the ungainly Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Doctor. It is very different to the later pop culture gender fluidity pioneered by David Bowie in which males might be presented as beautifully feminine, even alluring; that was aimed at challenging and disturbing the audience, while panto is aimed at amusing and reassuring. Indeed, the whole point of spending a day inverting social norms is that, by doing so, you are implicitly accepting and defending those social norms.

This form of drag is obviously quite different to the more modern drag queen, a form of entertainment that can be far more explicit and which has in the 21st century become yet another one-of-those-talking-points, chiefly because people seem so keen on letting children watch it.

Ed West, “The last conservative moral panic”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-08.

May 15, 2023

QotD: How military history shapes cultures and societies

Filed under: Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… war and conflict deeply shaped societies in the past and to the degree that we think that understanding those societies is important (a point on which, presumably, all historians may agree), it is also important to understand their conflicts. I am often puzzled by scholars who work on bodies of literature written almost entirely by combat veterans (which is a good chunk of the Greek and Latin source tradition), in societies where most free adult men probably had some experience of combat, who then studiously avoid ever studying or learning very much about that combat experience (that “war and society” lens there again). Famously, Aeschylus, the greatest Greek playwright of his generation, left no record of his achievements in writing in his epitaph. Instead he was commemorated this way:

    Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian lies beneath this marker
    having perished in wheat-bearing Gela
    Of his well-known prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak
    And long-haired Mede knows it well.

If a scholar wants to understand Aeschylus or his plays, don’t they also need to understand this side of his experience too? I know quite a number of scholars who ended up coming to military history this way, looking to answer questions that were not narrowly military, but which ended up touching on war and conflict. For that kind of research – for our potential scholar of Aeschylus – it is important that there be specialists working to understand war and conflict in the period. Of course this is particularly true in understanding historical politics and political narratives, given that most pre-modern states were primarily engines for the raising of revenues for the waging of war (with religious expenditures typically being the only ones comparable in scale).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

May 13, 2023

Arnold Ridley – “Private Charles Godfrey” – a real story from Dad’s Army

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Chap
Published 1 Feb 2023

The story of Arnold Ridley — Private Charles Godfrey — Dad’s Army

After my last video all about Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army I have been inundated by requests for the real story of another character from the classic comedy series: Private Godfrey.

Private Charles Godfrey, played by Arnold Ridley, is an ageing and slightly doddery member of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard platoon. His comrades are somewhat surprised and concerned when he announces that he was a conscientious objector during the First World War. However, thanks to his sister, the platoon learn his real (well, fictitious as it is a TV comedy show) story. Godfrey was indeed a conscientious objector but like many others he did volunteer to serve his country – just not to kill. Many men who felt likewise, joined the Army Medical Corps. Whilst not fighting they not only served their country and played a valuable role in the war effort but they also put themselves in harm’s way. Many of them became stretcher bearers, going out into no man’s land to fetch the wounded to safety. And many were decorated for their bravery.
William Coltman, became the most decorated NCO in the entire British army during the First World War … and he never fired a shot in anger!

I will be telling the story of William Coltman VC in the near future.

Private Charles Godfrey was awarded the Military Medal for bravery during the battle of the Somme.

What makes Godfrey’s character all the more fascinating is that his actor, Arnold Ridley, was no conscientious objector but a volunteer in World War One. he was severly injured at the battle of the Somme in 1916 and discharged the following year.

Indeed, his injuries would influence how he played his character in Dad’s Army.

After the war, Ridley became a play writer. Arnold Ridley penned over 30 pays, the most famous of which was The Ghost Train written in 1923.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he once more volunteered to serve his country. Following the battle of Boulogne in 1940, he was evacuated to Britain, having been injured, once more, he was again given a medical discharge.

For the rest of the war he worked for ENSA – the forces entertainment organisation — and was a member of his local Home Guard. He continued his acting career through the 1940’s and 50’s before landing the role of Private Charles Godfrey in Dads Army in 1968. He was ever-present until the show ended in 1977. By then he was 81 years old.

Arnold Ridley died in 1984 and is buried in Bath Abbey.
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