Saturday, April 28, 2007

Eight films what I saw

My brain is still absent without leave. I found a meme I meant to do but even that was too taxing. However, I get withdrawal if I don't blog for a few days and I have watched a load of films this spring. So I decided to review all the films I have recently seen which have been released on DVD in the UK since the beginning of 2007, in under fifty words each. If I try to review anything properly, smoke will come out of my ears, but this way you'll at least know what to watch and what not to, given that my taste in such things is impeccable.

In order of least-liked to most-liked:

Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When you see truly bigoted people being taken for a ride, it is all fine and dandy, but some of the people involved in this film seemed both genuine and completely obvious, a combination of which made this embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch.

The Devil Wears Prada. I kind of hoped this would be funnier, but as it wasn't, I found it rather boring. However, it is most likely not my kind of movie. I instinctively imagine the book is better but it’s probably not my kind of book either. One for girlier girls, I reckon.

The Queen. It's very well done and everything, but I didn't really see much point to it. The film merely recounted events which were pretty much as anyone might have imagined events must have been. Still, Helen Mirren is great, even though it is quite discombobulating to find the Queen so sexy.

A Scanner Darkly. From the Philip K. Dick novel about one man’s downward spiral of paranoia fueled by recreational drug-taking and a culture of surveillance. The whole thing has been filmed and then made to look like a cartoon, which makes the whole thing even weirder than it already is. Um, interesting..?

The History Boys. From the Alan Bennett play, which feels very much like a play all the way through. With a few significant reservations, this was really good. [...], however, hated it so much that we had to stop it half way and watch Pretty Woman instead. Some people!

Pan's Labyrinth. This is great, but with surreality compounded in my case by fatigue and subtitles . It is about a little girl who befriends a faun, except with all the darkness and violence of the arse end of the Spanish Civil War, which is, of course, won by the wrong side.

Thank You For Smoking. I liked this film a lot. Our hero is a lobbiest for the tobacco industry, attempting to maintain a positive image for cigarettes. It is very funny, but it’s a kind of subtle wit which is rather rare in movies. Sort of Yes, Minister humour for the twenty-first century.

Little Miss Sunshine. I loved this film. It was one of those movies that makes you feel like you belong. It is a great film about the nature of winning and losing. I really ought to write a proper review some time, but please go and watch it in the meantime.


Edit: Meanwhile, as I didn't see until just after I published this, Timbo has also been going goggled-eyed.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Splashes to splashes, dust to dust

Klutz, 2000-2007Klutz the fish made her final journey to the surface of my Dad's pond yesterday. She survived travelling 250 miles in a dustbin - including the coldest night of the year spent in a carpark somewhere off the A1. Then there was the flood and having to stay several days in the dustbin whilst it was established that we wouldn't be able to set the tank up soon enough. Then she survived being transferred into a pond outside with other, far hardier goldfish.

So she did pretty well but the stress of all this probably got the better of her; she acquired some sort of fungus and despite our best efforts (and eighteen quid spent on anti-fungal stuff), she died.

Which is a shame. And more worrying, both Schmuck and their kid Lucky have symptoms. So we're setting up a Fish Intensive Therapy Unit to try to keep them going; I really would be upset if we lost all three of them.

Klutz will be fondly remembered. Being a fish, she didn't have much personality. She would swim about a bit, eat stuff and lay eggs. She was much like every other fish you are likely to come across. But she was our fish. And now there's only Schmuck left out of the four we started with. You may recall the way that Gimboid left this world.

But apart from that, everything is okay. On the nature front, we saw two swallows, which don't make a summer, but were still nice to see. And I think my head may be ever so slightly clearer today.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Fair to middling.

Sometimes it all seems perfectly fair. Not so much the bigger picture, although there is a temptation to build some poetry around that. Like the idea that illness is the only bit of tremendous bad luck I have really had in my life and I need this in order to balance out all the good stuff. But I know that’s crap. None of us get a fair share of good or bad luck; I could just as easily imagine it was a karma, a test from God or some much. Or that I needed to get sick in order to fulfil some destiny or other. Nope, the bigger picture isn’t fair or orderly, it simply is.

But the day-to-day, sometimes that all seems perfectly fair. This is really about stability as opposed to fairness. Times when whatever I do, I have a good idea how much its going to cost me. I walk the distance between here and there and I know how much it will hurt, how long it will hurt for and how many times I can do it without causing myself trouble tomorrow. Brain stuff too, to a more limited extent. Cause and effect. Consumption and expenditure, of a kind.

And at such times, it seems fair, even though it is a bit rubbish compared to the deal most people enjoy. Enjoy - now there’s an interesting word. Well, not terribly interesting, but I do think that it is enjoyable when life is so orderly. Pain and fatigue are not all bad; I remember it being nice to ache after you have done something worth aching for and there was a certain satisfied sleepiness at the end of an exciting or productive day. There still is, sometimes. Like a sprain acquired during a outlandish sexual experiment that makes you giggle every time it twinges. I should imagine.

When it seems terribly unfair, it does so for the silliest reasons. Like sometimes I have gone out somewhere or done something social when I knew full well what it would cost me, but it wasn't really worth it. I didn't get enough fun out of it to feel like this afterwards. And often I am most frustrated, not during relapse, but whenmy health is doing relatively well. Just not quite well enough to do as much as I feel I ought to be able to do.

Which I guess is where I am just now, really. A wave of fog, but not a nasty discombobulating one. I'm just struggling to write or do anything much useful. It's only been a few days and it'll pass soon enough. What's more, I am not suffering at all; I have been reading lots, watching films, painting a bit (badly, I made a terrible mess actually; I wasn't really well enough to try). I have read five books this month so far, which strike's me as a little excessive. But I really want to feel like I'm getting somewhere. Six weeks time it'll be the middle of the year already. And that's not fair.

No, I know, not much of a post as an exercise in stringing words together into sentences. I shall now go and do something else pleasant on this sunny afternoon whilst the rest of the world is at work. Poor me.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Guilt is a Useless Emotion #2

One of the reasons I don’t blog much about the environment, is because I personally believe that guilt is capable of destroying the planet, or at least altering the surface of the planet beyond a point where it is hospitable for human life. Really. Guilt, as opposed to greed or laziness, is the cornerstone of public resistance to expert messages on climate change. And yet it is quite difficult to talk about this stuff without inspiring that dreaded emotion.

The most profound and easiest response to our guilt is denial. Denial can take many forms, sometimes the more absolute this is not happening as well as this change is not man-made through to this is someone else’s problem and nothing I can do will make a difference. Most of the people I talk to about climate change come up with a variation on one of these. But it is a defensive move, what they are really saying is, “Don’t talk to me about this. I don't want to feel bad about this. It is not my fault.”

And truthfully, it isn’t.

It is not your fault that climate change is happening! Were you present, powerful and in possession of all the facts, two hundred years ago when we started using fossil fuels in our technologies on a massive scale? I thought not. Therefore it is not your doing.

No living organism can exist without making some impact on the environment around it. Some things are pretty much condemned to causing harm to other things whenever their prosper; parasites as well as certain bacteria, viruses and fungi, for example. As someone born in the twentieth century, you were born into a world where we were already dependent on all sorts of unsustainable resources and practices. We were already using fossil fuels, which are by definition, a finite resource. Even if there is no climate change at all, this stuff will run out and before it does, there is likely to be a great deal more conflict and suffering over it.

Possible Outcomes for the Human Race according to our actions or inactions regarding Climate ChangeMeanwhile, unless the vast majority of scientists, who we regard as intelligent, good and conscientious on most other matters, have either made a horrible mistake or are attempting to purposely mislead us over a sustained period of time (in which case, we might as well start entertaining Creationism and Flat Earth Theory), this is also bringing about a dramatic change in our weather systems, one which is likely to become extremely dangerous to human life at some point – when and in what way remaining areas of genuine controversy.

You and I were born into a crisis situation, a crisis which people didn’t foresee and one that has only become glaringly obvious in the last few decades. It’s okay. Your conscience is clear. And indeed, if it all goes to pot, if the human species is overwhelmed by floods, hurricanes, famine and disease within tens or a few hundreds of years, it shan’t have been your fault either.

In fact, this isn’t about you and your conscience at all. To chose to act on Climate Change is a positive choice to make a meaningful contribution to everyone else around the world for many generations to come. Many of us who are alive today are not going to see many of the negative effects of Climate Change, not the real horrorshow stuff. But I believe we can fix this. We must.


On which subject, please listen to this years Reith Lectures with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs; this guy rocks, is optimistic about our ability to sort this mess out and won't make you feel guilty, I promise.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Here, there be monsters

The trouble with monsters is that they’re so damn reassuring. The stories are scary in parts, but afterwards you know you are okay because you can look around and see that there are no monsters in your immediate vicinity. You are not a monster. I am not a monster. Those people over there do not look like monsters. So we’re all safe; we’re okay.

Certainly more should be done about monsters. Oh yes. Because sometimes when you are walking home alone late at night you worry that there may be a stray monster hiding behind the bus-stop, ready to pounce on you. You hear stories. But afterwards, when you get home, you lock the door behind you and you know you are safe.

As monsters go, Cho Seung-hui is particularly reassuring. Ethnicity helps, alas; even here in the UK, we had the headline “Shooter was Korean”. Translates as he was other, a foreigner, he looked different from most of us. But the best and most important message is that he had been referred to counselling. I’m sure there’ll be a more scary-sounding post-mortem psychiatric diagnoses to follow, something more complex and with more syllables than depression. Then there had been complaints about his harassing women students.

So in summary, he is different from most of us in terms of race and disability and the motive was probably immense sexual frustration. As the days and weeks go on he will be presented as more and more other, one way or another. Eventually it will get to a stage where it seems ridiculous that anyone could not have seen this disaster coming. And everyone will feel much better.

Now, I’ll tell you a different kind of horror story.

I felt as most other people felt when I read about the shootings in Virginia. However, by Tuesday the media coverage here was becoming irritating to me; the analysis of nothing, the endless speculation about this or that, the voyeuristic dissection of events and characters. And I thought, my country is involved in an unofficial civil war one and a half thousand miles closer to home. Tomorrow they’ll be more bombings in Iraq; innocent people, just like these college students, people just as bright and bubbly and earnest and loving, will be have their lives snatched away whilst going about their daily business. But that will make for just a tiny wee headline.

The next day, over two hundred people were murdered on the streets of Baghdad.

No monsters. No profiles. No corpses reclining on the couches they couldn’t be coaxed onto in life. No names and photographs even. But ordinary people, faced with circumstances they considered intolerable, consumed with emotions they found overwhelming, chosing to commit evil. Not a good story. Not just because it’s more predictable and not just because it is perhaps easier for some people to sympathise with people who are the same colour and speak the same language as us. But because there is at all nothing reassuring about it.

There is nothing reassuring about the fact that most evil in the world – including our world, not just the war zones - is perpetrated by ordinary people. No, I will rephrase that. All of the evil in the world, including our world, is perpetrated by ordinary people. A tiny minority of those ordinary people, who made extraordinarily bad choices, have mental health labels and even fewer have one of those labels are what is officially described as a serious mental illness.

Cho Seung-hui was not a monster. If we pretend he was, we feel better but we learn nothing. If we pretend he did what he did because he was ill, we feel better but we learn nothing. He didn't snap, he hadn't become completely unstuck from reality; the guy planned this. And nobody saw it coming; people around him will be berating themselves for some time to come about any signs they might have picked up on, but there weren't any above an beyond the angst and morbidity that many young men and women go through. There wasn't nearly enough to suspect he was so very dangerous.

But the most important and frightening thing about the man’s psychology is that his own determination to gain infamy in death - which was what this was all about - completely overrided any consideration for the innocent lives he was going to take. He didn't care about those people at all, he thought himself and his vanity so very much more important. And he actively chose to commit a great evil.

Now that has little to do with an illness.


Some Americans who blogged about their own news story: Blue guesting at Avast!, Yanub and FlawedPlan have written about the mental health blaming exercise, Marymurtz is also turning off the media coverage and Midlife & Treachery is positive about campus life.

And a timely reminder, an article by the great Prof. Phil Zimbardo.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Sex and Gender: An introduction.

One of the phrases that folks type into Google only to find themselves here by mistake is:

How do you tell the gender of a goldfish?

Or more charmingly,

How can I tell if my goldfish a boy or a girl?

And even

Is my goldfish a lady fish or a gentleman fish?


(To which the answer is surely, a gentleman fish always holds the pond-weed to one side while the lady fish swims by.)

The reason such searches lead people here as opposed to more sensible resources on biology or fish-keeping is that there aren’t any boy fish or girl fish, lady fish or gentleman fish. There are merely male fish, female fish and ambiguous fish. The goldfish has sex. It does not have gender.

Sex is biological. It is not strictly binary, but a question of typicality; the typical male of any given species of animal has goolies that look roughly like this (that’s your mental picture, not mine), is about this size and shape and has this kind of chemical and physiological activity going on at the various stages of its development. Similarly, the typical female. Sex is determined in biology according to which group of typical attributes any given organism most closely resembles. In humans and other mammals, there is a focus on the external sexual organs; whether an organism has an inny or an outy. Of course some organisms, in all species including human beings, have both an inny and an outy, some have one or the other but carry sex chromosomes that don’t match and there can be all number of other ambiguities. But these exist naturally; mutations happen, need to happen. Sometimes this means an organism cannot reproduce.

However, goldfish don’t have innies or outies – in fact, a female goldfish’s vent or cloaca (the all-purpose exit) sticks out a bit whereas the male’s goes in. Similarly, most birds don’t mate by penetration; if you are in Europe, are reading this in daylight and look out the window just now, you will be probably be able to see what they get up to, the feathery little fornicators!

Thus, the widest defining criteria of the sexes is the reproductive role; females produce eggs and males fertilise them. What happens next is hugely various – in goldfish, the entire business takes place outside the body and my observations seem to suggest that it is followed by profound embarrassment, resulting in an attempt to eat up all the evidence.

However, big trouble with this is that sex depends on reproduction taking place. Many organisms are not actively reproducing for long periods of their lives – humans being an obvious example. If a person does not or cannot reproduce, cannot produce eggs, cannot fertilise eggs, are they technically sexless?

So you see, although sex is biological fact and facts are immovable, we are looking at something fairly messy, something which is not easy to put into a few neat sentences which summarise the situation of all life on Earth. Just be grateful I didn’t get onto plants.

Gender is something quite different. The first place most people come across the word gender is learning non-English European languages. You use different articles according to the gender of the noun. French nouns, for example, have two genders, masculine and feminine, whereas nouns in Spanish and the Teutonic languages have the addition of neuter. In English we still sometimes treat ships, vehicles and countries as feminine. And that’s what gender is; the quality of being masculine or feminine. In language there are historical rules about which is which. In society, it is more complicated.

Obviously, when applied to people, there is a supposed correlation between gender and biological sex, but there are some major differences.

The first is that gender is completely and rigidly binary; you are either a man or a woman, either a he or a she and it is other people who make this initial determination. Obviously, you arrive in your Birthday suit and everyone present can assess your inny/outy status. This determines whether you are dressed in pink or blue and for the first few years, this is how other people will decide what you are. People really don’t like being uncertain, even when you are far too young to care. Later people will judge you partly by your body shape, skull structure and voice, but also your gait, the clothes you wear, your hairstyle and other behavioural traits that have nothing at all to do with biology.

Thus it is more accurate to ask for someone's gender when finding information about them. It is far easier to determine, and it covers the possibility that someone has chosen to embrace a gender other than the one that corresponds with their sex. It is also the case that if you ever put the word Sex on a form, a proportion of the populace are compelled to answer "Yes please!"

However, despite the immovable concept of two genders, the parameters of the two genders are always changing. Clothes and make-up are obvious, if very superficial, examples; who plays the peacock, which gender should be ornamented, has swung back and forth throughout history. But it gets much sillier than that.

For example, a feminine body-shape. Again, it’s kind of superficial but for that reason it’s very easily understood. With sex, there are some typical characteristics associated with being female, but gender demands an archetype where there is none. Western fashions of the twentieth century alone have seen the feminine ideal be petite, then supermodel tall, boyishly straight, then curvaceous, stick-thin then big-breasted. Folks use the word natural to talk about hairlessness, make-up, shaping underwear. Similarly, different cultures in the world today idealise completely different shapes and sizes and focus on all sorts of different areas of the body to define what is feminine.

Of course, part of this is about aesthetics, but that’s the whole point; gender, our very expectations – as well as our idealisations – of femininity or masculinity, are effected by the aesthetic tastes of a particular time and place. And everything else that’s going on.

And thus we have the tremendous quandary of nature versus nurture. Or sex versus gender.

People start treating you like a boy or a girl from birth, sometimes even earlier. And this effect is not to be underestimated. There have been studies performed which demonstrate that women will usually treat even the smallest babies differently according to their beliefs about their gender; allowing babies supposed to be feminine to cry for significantly longer before feeding and comforting them. Why this happens is immensely complicated and the effect it has is probably quite subtle, but it is there all the time. By the time children can be observed exercising choices, it is already impossible to determine to what extent those choices have been already conditioned by the world around them.

Thus when behavioural difference arise in men and women – again, we must speak of typicalities, typical differences in behaviour and aptitude – it is almost impossible to say which traits are conditioned and which imply a difference in wiring, in hormone levels, in brain architecture. Indeed, our wiring, our hormone levels and our brain architecture as adults have been influenced by our life experiences. If you have never been asked to perform a mathematical task, then you may arrive at adulthood with that area of your brain somewhat underdeveloped.

Ultimately, it’s all a big mess and muddle and nobody really has a hope of dissecting it.

However, it is important to be aware of. It is important to be aware of this very fundamental way in which we are shaped by society and to actively resist it whenever it causes a problem, particular in ourselves. Many people enjoy gender; it helps to enforce a certain order on things, define a role – especially for women. That’s why, in my humble and highly controversial opinion, women have a far greater investment in gender, just as women dominate the opposition to it. Different women, obviously.

But resistance for resistance's sake is no good either. There is a great danger that resistance can wind up with us just swapping our baggage for the baggage of the other gender. Masculinity and feminity are both silly and restrictive in their different ways. However, they also have their good points.

Mary Wollstonecraft was dismayed by her particular society where all the virtues worth having were believed to be the property of men alone; bravery, justice, strength and wisdom. Women weren't expected or encouraged to be these things, and indeed, their restricted lives and lack of education meant that few of them were. These days, there are also certain virtues with which are often accredited to women, such as empathy and compassion.

It is therefore far better to attempt to combine the best bits of both these constructs in deciding who we're going to be, rather than attempting to throw off what we've been given in its entirety.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st, 2007

To read blogs against disablism, please go to the May 1st Post.

Skip to: How to participate in Blogging Against Disablism Day : HTML code for links and banners : Accessibility : Language Amnesty : Leave a Comment

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2007Last year on 1st May, with the invaluable help of Lady Bracknell and with the support of many other bloggers, I hosted the first Blogging Against Disablism Day where almost a hundred and fifty people joined together to write about disability and rail against the discrimination that disabled people continue to face. Both disabled and non-disabled people wrote about all manner of subjects, from discrimination in education and employment, through health care, parenting, family life and relationships, as well as the interaction of disablism with other forms of prejudice.

It was a great success, and as early as March this year, folks began to ask about this year's Blogging Against Disablism Day. So here it comes.

I am not very good at rousing calls, so if anyone is in need of one, I shall refer you back to Lady Bracknell's magnificent One in Seven.


How to Participate in Blogging Against Disablism Day

1. Leave a comment below to say you intend to join in. I will then add you to the list of participants on the sidebar of this blog.

2. Spread the word by linking to this site, displaying our banner and/ or telling everyone about it.

3. On Tuesday, May 1st - or as near to as you are able - post something on the subject of Disabilism, Ableism or Disability Discrimination (see Language Amnesty). You can write on any subject, specific or general, personal, social or political, anything which states an objection to the differential treatment of disabled people.

4. Come back to Diary of a Goldfish to let everyone know you've posted and to check out what other people have written.

This year I am also going to ask folks to place their posts in a category (on the day, not in advance) where possible. Last year, Lady Bracknell and myself read every single post on the day and determined which category the link should go under so that the day was archived in a manageable way (as you can see here). That is simply not be doable this year, at least not within any useful timescale after the event.


HTML codes for links and banners

You can copy and paste the following in order to create a link to this post



or you can copy and paste one of the following onto a blog post or sidebar in order to display a banner which links to this post. I'm afraid the banners are my doing, a somewhat rush job and may be subject to some interpretation. If anybody wants to come up with their own design, you are more than welcome.

Blogging Against Disablism DayThis is the black and white banner which reads Blogging Against Disablism.





Blogging Against Disablism DayThis is the colourful banner which reads Blogging Against Disablism



Edit: You can also have narrower banners, didn't want to clutter this post up too much (ha!) so I put them here.



Accessibility


Everyone is welcome to join in with Blogging Against Disablism day, disabled and non-disabled, as long as you wish to blog against the discrimination that disabled people experience. Last year, I was rather surprised to have questions from people with mental health impairments who wondered whether their experience counted as disability. Of course it does! My one regret was that I initially turned down a person with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (a condition where a person feels the need or desire to acquire a physical impairment, most commonly an amputation or paralysis). As it was, despite my apprehensions, their contribution was entirely in the spirit of Blogging Against Disablism and so they were included in the final list.

If anybody has any access issues, please speak up. I am not an expert in this area. Alternative blogging formats, such a podcasts or video are more than welcome. If you cannot leave a comment on this blog for any reason, please e-mail me (this is temporary e-mail address and will only exist until Blogging Against Disablism is over this year).

Last year the issue was raised that holding this on one day meant that people who were not able to blog that day for various reasons might be left out. This year, I should take the opportunity to emphasise; if you want to do it before hand so that it's done, or if you are late with your post, I am not going to exclude you from the final list. Obviously, it would be good to have as many posts as possible on 1st May, that's the point, but so long as you do it thereabouts, that's fine.


Language Amnesty

The language we use around disability and discrimination varies widely, and talking about language is a very important part of understanding the way that disabled people are perceived by society. Language is a completely legitimate subject for discussion on Blogging Against Disablism day, but I do ask that we allow other people to use the language which they feel most comfortable with. Differences may include the way that disabled people are described; as disabled people, people with disabilities, the disabled, etc.; as well as the very word for the discrimination we experience.

Ableism or Ablism is the term more commonly used in the United States and thus more prevalent on the Internet as a whole. Then there's the simple and perhaps most easily understood term of Disability Discrimination. I am using Disablism because that makes sense to me in the context of my own disability politics; that is to say that I happen to think it is a better term. However, given the breadth and depth of the issues we are facing, I don't wish to argue this too strongly.

If you would prefer to use Ableism or Disability Discrimination, please do so. If there is an interest, I can even create extra banners for this purpose.


Right, is there anything I missed?