Swan Vista

Upon first reading, this is a thought provoking essay from today's Guardian:

Here's the full article: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2067489,00.html

but I'll try to provide a precis - it's Oliver Burkeman's examination of 'Black Swan Theory'. The name originates from the philosophical observation that you can never know for certain 'all swans are white' - the sight of one black swan disproves the statement. Life can surprise.

It is also the title of a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who cites September 11 as an example of a black swan event - huge, shocking and leaving a devastating impact. In retrospect, commentators state the tragedy was predictable. Taleb thinks it should be acknowledged as unpredictable (he argues that before 9/11, it would have been impossible to convince airlines to reinforce cockpit doors) and furthermore, we have to accept randomness in our lives. For him, we try to explain the past because it helps us believe we have full control of the future.

At times, his thoughts do not ring true, but his experience as a trader is eye-opening. He decided to trade in options, operating on the basis that he believed something unpredictable would eventually happen. Most days, it didn't and he lost a small amount of money; but, after a while, along came a black swan, he made a fortune and had the basis for a book.

It's a philosophy that warns against the danger of adherence to narrative and retrospective explanation. Fair point, but strip away the marketability of the 'black swan' branding and we're left with a book that, by warning against the allure of self help books, offers a guide to life. It is a more than a little bit ironic, particularly when you consider that one of the more predictable outcomes of a maverick deciding to live a quirky life, is that he will generously share his short term 'journey' with the book-buying public at a later date. It reeks of commercial cynicism.

The public knows life can be random but it is also aware that actions and environment can shape destines. A resident of an inner city council estate, having the good fortune to live to 100, will not receive shredded actuarial tables with his letter from the Queen. Taleb is right to mention longevity as an example of unpredictability but wrong to use it as basis for a philosophy.

His theory is not a book, it's a T-shirt. Life, in most parts of the bell curve, will continue in largely predictable fashion. Taleb knows this, but also knows about black swans.

Most of us know it, but also know 'shit happens.'

Plat Du Jour

From BBC News:

'A man cut off his penis with a knife in a packed London restaurant.

Police were forced to use CS gas to restrain the man when they entered the Zizzi restaurant in The Strand on Sunday evening.'

He was playing 'Stag-Do Monopoly'.

His night when horribly wrong when he read, 'Pay a £10 fine or take a Chance'

No Experience Necessary

In the introduction to his collected screenplays Kevin Smith writes, ‘I used to work in this convenience store. I made a little picture about life in the slow lane.’ It was about a place that was suffocating his ambition, it was a gem called ‘Clerks’ and it won awards.

With the release of ‘Clerks 2’, thirteen years and six films on, one wonders how much ambition he had in the first place. A glance at some of his films’ taglines suggests a rather limited vision:

‘Mallrats’: They’re not there to shop. They’re not there to work. They’re just there.

‘Jersey Girl’: Forget about who you thought you were and just accept who you are

And now, ‘Clerks 2’: No experience necessary.

It is all too appropriate as Kevin Smith seems trapped in emotional stasis.

‘Clerks 2’ replays the same dynamic between two slackers, Dante and Randall. In the original, they were young; they worked in a convenience store and hated the customers. In the sequel, they are in their thirties; they work in a burger bar and resent the diners. To combat the tedium, they do as little work as possible.

In a way that is bound to echo what fans of the original movie will say about the sequel, the characters now talk wistfully about their good times at the grocery store, closed down due to narrative convenience and Smith filing for creative bankruptcy.

He didn’t need to write a plot for ‘Clerks’. This time, Smith, realizing that unless we are to visit these characters every decade, (and let’s not rule anything out) has presented the audience with a test of character as taxing as a question broadcast by ITV play:

Will Dante, who has reached his thirties, seemingly without ever travelling on the New Jersey Turnpike, go with the girl who wants to whisk him away to a new life in Florida; or, will he choose his boss at the burger bar, who lets him paint her toenails and is happy to shop locally?

Moreover, how will this choice affect his best friend Randall as, in Smith’s world, male friendships are awarded higher status than relationships with women?

The question is not worthy of the 97 minutes running time. Kevin Smith attempts to recreate the spirit of the original and it is embarrassing. The dialogue, so appropriate for Clerks, now feels juvenile.

Smith, acknowledging this problem, creates a teenager character who argues with Dante and Randall about the merits of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ over those of ‘Star Wars’. It is generational conflict expressed as hobbit versus ewok. It diminishes Smith’s artistic stature. His work has gone from highlighting blue-collar depression to simply being depressing.

Everything looks stale. In the 90s, Dante briefly escaped his little shop of horror by playing hockey on the store’s roof. In the sequel, the roof becomes a dance floor. It is a tagged on scene designed purely to echo the original and the characters may as well be the puritanical critics who hated Smith’s foul-mouth dialogue, tangoing on the tombstone inscribed with the word ‘Ideas’.

For the now banal dialogue, Matt Zoeller Seitz must accept part of the blame. Smith read the following in Matt’s review of Mallrats: ‘After seeing the movie, I figured out why the enigmatic Silent Bob doesn’t like to talk – when he opens his mouth, everyone realises what a sweet guy he is.’

Smith then states: “I started writing ‘Chasing Amy’ that day.”

That journey of writing eventually produced the ‘Clerks 2’ screenplay, and although Silent Bob still doesn’t like to talk, everyone else has clearly been overdosing on the lyrics of Michael Bolton. The journey has produced a schizophrenic script with an unsettling combination of poor, sexually graphic jokes and watershed moments from the ‘Movies of the Week’ box set.

Its scope is just not worthy of the cinema: Smith is small screen. After the success of ‘Clerks’, he admitted, ‘There was a time when New York City was still somewhat foreign and exotic to me.’ Obviously, it still is. Like the main characters in ‘Pleasantville’, a comedy which has the tagline ‘It’s Just Around the Corner’, Smith is still stuck in a two street zip-code.

In ‘Pleasantville’, a world of originality slowly opens up for the inhabitants and colour blooms in the neighbourhood. ‘Clerks’ was shot in black and white. While ‘Clerks 2’ is in colour, sadly it is devoid of enlightenment.

'I'm On the Touchline, Thinkin' 'Bout the Government'

Maybe Mourinho is right.

On Sunday, as part of his homily, he said he feared 'the end of democracy'.

On an initial viewing, he appears to be attributing a collapse in society to penalty decisions, made in Manchester United's favour. After all, they are a big club and they probably have a subs-bench at meetings of 'The Bilderberg Group', the society of oligarchs that apparently rules the world.

However, to properly understand the blether, it might be helpful to view Mourinho as a Nostradamus enthusiast, simply concerned by current affairs.

Maybe he was aware that 170,000 tonnes of raw sewage has found its way into the Firth of Forth.

Clearly, that was eschatological.

He was no doubt further troubled by reports of Boris Yeltsin's health. As the man responsible for 'shock therapy' economics is ushered into paradise, Mourinho must be pondering the current state of Russian democracy, with its lurch towards totalitarianism.

However, it is the final story that leaves no doubt that Mourinho hears the Lyre of Prophecy. News has reached us that men of bad repute are free to roam our lands. A prisoner escaped from a Kentucky jail by having accomplices send a bogus fax to the authorities, demanding his release. Despite bearing the letterhead of a grocery shop, the fax, which was littered with spelling mistakes, prompted the prisoner's release.

Traditionally, prophecy is delivered in the first person. He can't be far away from saying 'This is not about Jose Mourinho'.

We are waiting 'special one', we are waiting.

'I speak the truth' - Jose Mourinho

Stop the Press

Today, supporters of 'Intelligent Design', the proposition that there is a guiding hand shaping the universe, claim to have discovered incontrovertible new evidence that justifies their argument:



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Are Manners Important?

In the wrestling match of behavioral decision, manners represent Freddie the Face, the Trident of Gentility correctly positioned in his right hand, competing from the tradition of respect, apologies and group dynamics. He is polite, hard to dislike, but ultimately a bit repressed.

In the opposing corner, we have Bruiser Brody, brandishing the Cosh of Impulsiveness and representing the scrapping tradition of uncloaked self interest. Wild, briefly captivating but ultimately prone to self destruction.

The contest is usually settled by submission for, as Jeremy Paxman remarked in The English, our code of manners is largely designed to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Manners disarm aggression and ease communication between two potentially hostile parties. Two English neighbours, if forced into unexpected social contact, will happily gas about the weather. They are less likely to boast about the new garden extension, or bitch for the return of the borrowed stepladders.

It is not proper.

Nor is it appropriate for manners to become too important.

Without a code of propriety, life becomes Animal House and John Belushi pisses on your leg. However, too much concern for communal respectability and we become players in our own comedy of manners, allowing foppish characters such as Frasier Crane, to flick imaginary lint from our lapels.

Both Belushi and Frasier are attempting to dominate with extremes of piss and posh. They are displays of aggression and create status anxiety. We have come full circle with manners and mayhem: they may be no longer in the same ring, but they are both being used to fight.

Manners are important but not at the expense of morality.

“Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.”
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook