In Defense of Hoarding

Over at Minimal Mac (a terrific site that everyone should read, even if you’re not a Mac user), they recently pointed to a metafilter comment about the dangers of coveting possessions. The commenter suggests that the best way to beat any hoarding impulses we might have is to simply adjust the way we look at things.

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.
…
The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.

It’s a lovely sentiment, and one I really wish I could get behind, except I’ve just got one little problem: Me. Or more specifically, people like me.

What do I mean by this?

I recently found a stash of old PlayStation games that I thought I’d lost. There are some real gems in there. PaRappa the Rapper, BeatMania, Final Fantasy VII. All great games. Will I ever play them again? Probably not. I’m having enough trouble keeping on top of new releases to ever really go back and play old games. So why don’t I get rid of them?

There were a finite number of copies of PaRappa the Rapper published. Taking into account losses, breakage and the effects of time, this number is constantly decreasing. Now, if I was to send my games off into the æther, there’s the strong possibility that they’d be picked up by someone like me: a pack-rat who can’t bear to let anything go. So not only would I be losing my own copy of PaRappa, itwould also mean there is one less copy to “take out of storage”. Eventually, there will be no copies of it left on eBay. Or at least, it would be so rare as to be only available at a completely unreasonable price.

The storage thing is a nice (if slightly smug and self-satisfied) analogy, but it just doesn’t work in the real world, because it assumes an infinite supply chain. Besides, I’d always prefer to be the curator, actually caring for these things, rather than a cold, distant absentee owner.

(My wife will probably beat the shit out of me for this post.)

Berlusconi Fights Back

I really don’t want this news story to go unnoticed, because it is amazing.

ROME, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Italian magistrates and the opposition are up in arms after a television channel owned by Silvio Berlusconi shadowed and secretly filmed a judge who ruled against the prime minister in a bribery case.

Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber.

Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.
…
Some magistrates are debating a “turquoise socks” protest, while others have been collecting signatures for a letter of support for their colleague, Italian media reported.

(Via Reuters)

Wow.

I have absolutely no idea how this whole Berlusconi thing is going to play out. Will he be forced from office? Will it all be forgotten about? Fuck knows. I do know that when both sides are as completely batshit insane as this (turquoise socks protest!), the next few months are going to be very, very entertaining.

Well, for those of us who have the safety net of this not being our permanent home, at least.

Poetry of Twitter Spam

As a rule, I tend to block Twitter spam-bots as soon as they start following me. But the new generation of spammers are a bit more subtle. Their posts don’t actually contain the spam - that’s hidden behind a tinyurl address in their profile. Instead, their posts are just snippets of text lifted from around the internet. Read together, with a little bit of added punctuation, they are like amazing stream-of-consciousness poetry.

She puts her palms out
on low-viscosity rayon.
“Why not have two?”
We’ve got it sorted
– Wir haben fünf Millionen Deutschmark
Three days, and not one.
Peace.
What’s with this Al Capone shit?
I love you OK?
Frank…
Sweetheart, you don’t need law school.
“That is unbelievable.”
Tits Pervert,
avec une vue de la mer.
Hey!
As soon as he gets on the motorbike,
– it’s not like I expect anything
… Yeah.
Squeeze too hard and you kill it, not hard enough and it flies away.

I’ve actually started hunting out these spam-bots and reading their twitter feeds, because maybe, just maybe this is the start of the singularity, and these are the bad teenage poems of a vast, angst-ridden technological super-intelligence that is feeling a bit bummed out because it’s capable of solving a bajillion problems in a second but, instead, is only being used to scam money out of idiots.

The Italian Gender Gap

Rather than subscribing to any particular ideology, I like to think that I can rely on my common sense to guide me. As a great man once said, “A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.” Now, the problem is that I wasn’t blessed with an abundance of common sense and it does occasionally take a sharp smack across the head for me to understand the various sides of an issue. My wife, for example, would count herself as strongly feminist because this is an issue that obviously effected her and she thought about a lot. I, on the other hand, just never gave much thought to gender and sexism and thought the world had pretty much solved that issue. I guess that’s a privilege of being born with a penis. This has changed now (not the penis part though - I still have a huge mickey). I’ve read my Simone de Beauvoir.

The point is, it took me a while to come around to being able to understand the various arguments in the sexism debate, but I got there in the end. Living in Italy definitely helped. From the philandering Prime Minister spashed across the headlines to the casual sexism you see in the street, it’s nearly impossible to miss.

Actually, it’s kind of worrying how deep-seated the gender gap is in this country. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in terms of the gap between men and women. I’ll just say that again, because this number floored me: 67th. This puts it behind places like Israel and Mongolia and far behind the other major European countries like France (15), Spain (17) and the United Kingdom (13).

Although, to be fair, this beats its 2007 ranking of 84th. Improvements are being made. You can even feel it. I guess it’s most obvious in the slow backlash against the behaviour of Silvio Berlusconi. The various scandals didn’t receive nearly as much media coverage in this country as they did in the international press, no doubt helped by the fact that Berlusconi owns a large part of the media here. But the very public denouncement by his wife and her filing for divorce was pretty hard to miss. During the recent G8 summit which took place in L’Aquila, there was a call made by female Italian academics asking the wives of the leaders to boycott the summit (although they didn’t exactly explain what they wanted Angela Merkel’s husband to do). And this is having an effect. For the first time since taking office in May of last year, Berlusconi’s approval rating dropped below 50%. A small amount, sure, but still significant, given the way that many Italians worship him as a hero, a self-made man (although with hair that bad, I’d say he’s all thumbs - ZING! TAKE THAT, BERLUSCONI). Even the Catholic Church has expressed concern at his behaviour, saying “people have understood the unease, the mortification, the suffering that such an arrogant abandonment of a sober style has caused us.”

Although it doesn’t help anyone when you get ditzy celbutards like Celia Walden wading into the situation and muddying the waters. In her article, “Someone like Silvio Berlusconi will always pinch my bottom,” she talks about the psychology of the Italian male, suggesting that institutional sexism is, if not entirely excusable, it is at least understandable. In fact, it’s almost adorable. I mean, after all, isn’t that what Italians are all about?

From when I was a student in Siena I have a strong memory of a man slowing his car down and throwing his wife, in the passenger seat, a sidelong glance before reaching out and giving my bottom a pinch. I didn’t know whether to abuse or salute him.

The new Gender Gap report is due out on October 29th. I’ll be interested to see what effect - if any - the past year has had on its ranking.

5 Movies Guaranteed to Make You A Better Person*

• Not an actual guarantee, obviously

I’ve got a friend in Rome. He’s a smart guy, funny, very well-read. But there’s a problem. A big problem. Are you sitting down? He has not seen The Goonies.

I know, it’s totally fucked, right?!

In fact, he hasn’t seen a lot of movies. I think he was raised Amish or something. Whenever I catch myself saying “Did you see that movie…?” I remember who I’m talking to and say “Of course you didn’t. You haven’t even seen The Goonies.” I don’t know why, but the fact he hasn’t seen The Goonies really bothers me. I guess it’s because I love that movie to a ridiculous degree. That and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When I was 10 or 11, I would get up extra-early before school, just so I could watch one of those movies. I did this every day for more than a year. I can’t explain it. OCD or autism, maybe. I dunno. Either way, the idea that someone hasn’t seen The Goonies just stikes me as ridiculous because that, to me, is an essential movie. I will say right now, on a stack of bibles, this movie made me a better person.

So, here are the movies that I can say will make you a better person.

There Will Be Blood

Let’s start with some hyperbole. There Will Be Blood is, by a long way, the best film I have seen in the past ten years. It’s the kind of film that, when I think about it, I realise how glad I was to have been able to see this film in the cinema, in the same way as I’m so incredibly bummed that I wasn’t born to see Apocalypse Now when it came out first. It’s a huge, virtuoso film, and the fact that the filmmakers managed to contain it perfectly still shocks me. In short, it’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. Yeah, I went there. If you haven’t seen it already, you should stop reading the rest of this article and just go watch it. Right now. There, was that enough hyperbole for you?

The Fountain

I feel sorry for The Fountain. Stuck in development hell for ages, finally limping out of the gate a couple of years later with a quarter of its original budget. It got completely overlooked. I saw it as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, and the cinema was maybe half-full. After the film, most people went home grumbling about it being a load of old bollocks. Except it’s better than most people give it credit for. It was clearly a labour of love for Aronofsky. A deeply personal film about appreciating the moment instead of worrying about the future. What could have been a throw-away piece of cheap sentiment (not that I’m against cheap sentiment) suddenly blossoms into one of the most striking and moving films about mortality that you’ll be likely to see.

Evil Dead 2

Rob: Let’s just say that I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, “I haven’t seen Evil Dead II yet”, what would you think?
Barry: I’d think that you’re a cinematic idiot and I’d feel sorry for you.

Koyaanisqatsi

Yes, I know I already wrote about this back in 2005 and I probably sound like a broken record, but it’s still breathtaking. I said at the time that it was the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen and one of the most beautiful films ever made. And I stand by that (even if the rest of my writing then was more than a little up my own hole).

Big Trouble in Little China

This might not be John Carpenter’s greatest movie. It might not even be John Carpenter’s greatest movie with Kurt Russell. It’s an absurd, over-the-top romp through Carpenter’s id. All flashy neon and high-flying stunts. But it knows how ridiculous it is. It enjoys the juxtaposition of “a reasonable guy” experiencing “unreasonable things”. In other words, it’s trying to say: don’t take things too seriously. Or, as Jack Burton says, “Like I told my last wife, I says, ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.’”

End of Childhood

This hasn’t been a great year to be a celebrity icon, especially if you were big in the 80s. First Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson, then Walter Cronkite and now John Hughes. As N’Gai Croal puts it “Why does 2009 hate my childhood?” or as Street Boners put it, more succinctly, “STARMAGEDDON!”

Of all these deaths, though, I’ve been most affected - disproportionately so - by the death of John Hughes. I guess it’s because his movies not only reflected my childhood and teenage experiences, but in a large part also helped define them. And this sadness isn’t helped by the outpouring of love and tributes for the man. The more I read written both by and about him, the sadder I get - he seemed like a genuinely nice person. I mean, he was married to his high school sweetheart until his death. Also, he left the movie business behind and became a farmer because he blamed Hollywood for the death of his friend, John Candy. Think about this: he left the job that gave him fame and allowed him to, I’m assuming, live very comfortably, because of his beliefs. These are all tremendously rare

Anyway, here are some of the articles I’ve been highlighting in my Google Reader shared items that I think people should check out.

First, there’s Vacation ‘58, the hilarious short story that kicked off his career and also served as the basis for National Lampoon’s Vacation. But there’s also Foreword ‘08, in which Hughes talks about the process of writing Vacation ‘58 and the melee around getting it published.

There’s also the tremendous blog post by Alison Byrne Fields who describes her experience with John Hughes as her pen pal.

“You’ve already received more letters from me than any living relative of mine has received to date. Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn’t as painful as I portray it. Believe in yourself. Think about the future once a day and keep doing what you’re doing. Because I’m impressed. My regards to the family. Don’t let a day pass without a kind thought about them.”

In the New York Times, A. O. Scott does a tremendous job of describing why I’m having trouble with all the recent deaths.

It’s a little eerie that Mr. Hughes died so soon after Michael Jackson, another fixture of ’80s popular culture locked in perpetual youth.

Their deaths make me feel old, but more than that, they make me aware of belonging to a generation that has yet to figure out adulthood, for whom life can feel like a long John Hughes movie. You know the one. That Spandau Ballet song is playing at the big dance. You remember the lyrics, even if it’s been years since you heard them last. This is the sound of my soul. I bought a ticket to the world, but now I’ve come back again. Why do I find it hard to write the next line?

On that note, someone made a montage of scenes from John Hughes’ movies put to the tune of The Who’s Baba O’Riley, and it fits perfectly.

Speaking of montages… okay, this isn’t exactly new, but since John Hughes understood that all the best movies have at least one montage sequence (though two is always better), someone took the dance montages from his movies (and, uh… Footloose and Mannequin, but you can ignore those bits) and put them to the tune of Phoenix’s Lisztomania and, again, a perfect fit.

RIP John Hughes.

Problems with Italian Cities

This month’s Monocle includes their 2009 list of the world’s top 25 most liveable cities (link goes to a frankly terrifying and ominous video run-down of the list). In the magazine, they start with an interesting article about why not one Italian city features in the top 25 cities. Here are the bits that resonated with me:

Though attractive spots for 48 hours of sightseeing or shopping, more needs to be done for their residents. Take public transport. Poorly funded and chronically late, the number of commuters on buses and trams actually fell in 2008. With most people behind the wheel, city centres are gridlocked and pavements used as makeshift car parks. Rome alone notches up 70 cars for every 100 inhabitants - Paris has just 26.

…

Shopping hours also need to be liberalised in the country’s financial centre - people queue outside the few food stores open on Sundays.

In their favour, Italy’s metropolises rank high for their food and cafe culture, enviable climate and wealth of cultural offerings. With more nimble public services and a better infrastructure, a few could soon make the grade.

“Enviable climate” aside (during the day it gets so unbearably hot I can barely think straight), this goes some way to describing why I have found Rome such a difficult place to live. It gets a lot of things right, but at the same time, it gets so many little things so completely, head-slappingly wrong.

For example, the post office is still the only place to pay bills and it closes at 1pm. I’ve been in my local post office a few times and heard tourists being told that, no, the post office does not sell stamps (stupid tourists!). For stamps, they must go out and around the corner to another post office. But the post office around the corner is actually the same post office. It’s just a different door.

This is the 21st century. We are literally months away from the year 2010. We are actually, demonstrably living in the future. I mean, I’ve got a computer in my pocket that plays music, plays movies, takes calls, can connect to the fucking internet, but you’re telling me I can’t buy a bottle of milk at 3pm on a Sunday? It’s time to move on.

Cooking Italian Food

In The Pedant in the Kitchen, Julian Barnes asks

How many cookbooks do you have?
(a) Not enough
(b) Just the right number
(c) Too Many?
If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked out everything perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points, you need to have answered (a) and (c) in equal measure. (a) because there is always something new to be learned, someone coming along to make it all clearer, easier, more foolproof, more authentic; (c) because of the regular mistakes made when applying (a).

He then goes on to give a list of ten things to consider when buying any cookbook - avoid books with too wide or too narrow a compass, never buy a book because of the pictures - and I would say that most of my cookbook collection falls prey to those things he says to avoid. If only I’d discovered him earlier, because I fall squarely into (c) and I would say that most of the cookbooks I own are complete bullshit. Nowhere is this more clearly highlighted than when they start talking about Italian food.

Now, for those of you that haven’t been to Italy, let me explain something about Italian cuisine: it’s simple. This sounds stupid, but the sheer simplicity of the food here came as a huge shock to someone raised on Nigella, Delia and Jamie’s ideas of Italian food. Nigella (my favourite scapegoat when it comes to over-complication of cooking) seems to think that to achieve an ‘authentic’ Italian flavour, you have to raid your spice rack. In fact, you’re going to need a whole new spice rack. Preferably, like hers, hand-made by a merchant in Morocco and stocked by naked eunuchs who softly whisper and coax the herbs and spices to voluntarily leap into the jars. But I suppose, in a pinch, regular Schwartz will do. Her ‘basic’ tomato sauce will invariably contain some combination of nutmeg, star anise and turmeric. Tomatoes play second fiddle.

No.

In Italy, a tomato sauce will contain tomatoes. Maybe some garlic, if you’re lucky.

So, based on the things I’ve learned while cooking in Rome, here’s a few tips if you want to cook better Italian food.

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid

Like I was saying, in Italy, cooking is really about ’less is more’. Why complicate things with 15 ingredients when 4 will do? At a certain point, you’re actually not making a difference to the flavour. Most of my favourite pasta dishes are shockingly basic. For example, Cacio e pepe is really just pasta, oil, cheese and pepper. That’s it.

2. Break Up Your Dishes

This is tied into the previous one. Italians love to divide things, compartmentalize them so that they’re all doing their own job and have clear, distinct boundaries. If you’re Irish, chances are you think that pasta sauces must, by definition, have some meat in them. Fuhgeddaboudit. In Italy, pasta is usually one course (primo) and you get your protein in another course (secondo). Rarely will you get a meaty pasta sauce. And it’s just as well - it means that the pasta is less heavy, and also extends your meal by another 45 minutes, which means you can talk more and drink more wine, too. It’s a win-win situation.

3. Choose The Best Ingredients

This is the first real secret to great Italian food. Rather than overloading with ingredients, just make sure that the ingredients you do choose are of the best quality you can afford. Spend just that little bit more on things like olive oil, cheese and vegetables. The lower-cost ones won’t kill you and might not taste bad, but when you use the expensive stuff, you can really tell the difference.

4. It’s All In The Cooking

If you take nothing else from this post, please listen to this: good ingredients are one thing, but when they’re cooked badly, you may as well have used the cheap stuff. Italian food is all about cooking things just right. It’s all about timing. For example, when you’re making a tomato sauce, first chop your garlic and cook it slowly. Actually, so slowly you’re barely straddling the line between “cooking” and “warming”. Take the lowest heat you can, and then only put half the pan on the heat, if that’s possible. The garlic will give up all of its flavour this way and it completely changes the taste of a tomato sauce then. Likewise, when cooking pasta, it’s about timing, except this time, it’s all about getting the pasta out right before you think it’s ready, so it’s still al dente. Admittedly, this one is a lot harder to pull off, but when you get it right, the difference is phenomenal.

5. Buy ‘The Silver Spoon’

Remember when I said that most cookbooks I own are complete bullshit? Not The Silver Spoon. It’s a gigantic book and may well cause your bookshelf to bend under the weight, but what it doesn’t know about Italian food isn’t worth writing down. Seriously, with this one book, you can ditch all of the other ‘Italian’ cookbooks in your collection. It’s also one of the few cookbooks I have absolutely no problem in giving to foodie friends as presents. I can’t think of any better recommendation for a book than wanting to give it to other people too.

Of course, there are other things too, like understanding the difference between the different types of spaghetti and knowing which one is appropriate for a particular dish, but that’s just nitpicking. If you can manage to follow the four guidelines I just mentioned, you’ll be well on your way to cooking better Italian food.

Golden Age of TV

A while ago, Ira Glass said that we are living in a “golden age of television”, citing a bunch of ‘actually great shows’ that were current at the time: House,The Wire, The West Wing etc. These were (and I guess they still are) all great shows, no argument there.

In Everything Bad is Good For You, Stephen Johnson argued that modern TV is more sophisticated than TV of twenty or thirty years ago. He compared the plotlines of things like Starsky & Hutch to modern police dramas, and showed that the new shows are more dynamic and challenging to the viewer. Again, no argument there.

But having spent the past few weeks picking the scant meat from the bones of Summer broadcasting, I seriously believe that we may be actually returning to the ‘old’ ways of doing things. Popular TV is pushing the limits of Johnson’s argument. In some cases, it feels as if the wave of these ‘actually great shows’ has broken and rolled back and we are regressing back to the 70s and 80s.

Castle, for example, is just one giant throwback to older, high-concept shows. It’s about a crime writer - Richard Castle who helps the police solve crimes. A Murder She Wrote for the noughties. Except it’s got complex plot-lines, fast-talking characters. It would be easy to see how Stephen Johnson would defend this show. He would argue that it is demonstrably more sophisticated, clever and knowing than Murder She Wrote. The first episode features Castle playing poker with James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell, two real-life crime writers, giving a knowing wink to the audience, acknowledging a world that exists outside of the show’s universe. Plus, it stars Nathan Fillion, my #1 man-crush, so it could be just an hour of him staring at the camera and I’d probably still watch it.

Similarly, The Unusuals is heavily indebted to older shows. Unlike other modern police procedurals, such as any of the Law & Order shows, which feel very much rooted in modern sensibilities, The Unusuals feels like a giant anachronism. It comes across more like an updated version of Hill Street Blues than some contemporary cop drama. But at the same time, it does have some kind of modern feel to it. It actually feels like some unholy Frankenstein’s monster of the procedural stuff in The Wire whose genes have been spliced with the comic nostalgia of Life on Mars. However, even Stephen Johnson points out the narrative complexity of Hill Street Blues compared to earlier shows. As he says, Hill Street Blues is generally regarded as the start of “serious drama” on television. It may be a bit of a step backward, but if The Unusuals is going to imitate something, then it may as well choose something that’s so highly regarded.

But Burn Notice is where it really starts to go downhill. There’s an overarching story taking place across the entire series - Michael Weston is a spy who gets ‘burned’ and tries to figure out what happened and why - but this is only taken care of at the beginning and end of each episode. The actual action that takes place is more basic and formulaic: people who are in trouble come to this spy and he helps them using his ‘specialized’ skillset and his little spy-friends. In other words

a crack commando unit spy was sent to prison ‘burned’ by a military court shadowy extra-governmental group for a crime he didn’t commit. He promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade deadly situation to the Los Angeles Miami underground. Today, still wanted by the government shadowy extra-governmental group, he survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire the A-Team Michael Weston.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing was handled with a little more grace, but it bothers me that each episode is bookended by the ‘wider’ story. It’s as if the makers are contractually obliged to put in these pieces in somewhere, but couldn’t be bothered to find a way to work them into the “villain of the week” story. It means that if one was to use Johnson’s methodology and chart the narrative of Burn Notice, it would look remarkably like the one he generated for Starsky & Hutch.

So what now? Does this mean the ‘golden age’ of television has passed, and now we’re going to look back on the the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, as Ira Glass points out, like we look back on the 1920s as being the ‘golden age’ of Jazz? Maybe. Or maybe this is just part of the normal ebb and flow of television programming. Summer being filled with the weakest of the lineup, and everything will get better when shows start returning in September. Because frankly, if I look back in 20 years time and realise this is as good as it’s ever going to get, I’m going to be extremely disappointed.