Matt, Andrew G and I sat down last night to watch the joyous Norwegian zombie movie that you can’t help but love: Død Snø, or Dead Snow.
The film focuses on a group of hapless young medical students having a break in a log cabin in the remote snowy Nordic mountains under which are buried … frozen Nazi zombies!
Obviously Nazi zombies is a great gimmick and they don’t disappoint. They look great with their grey faces and camp evil uniforms. There’s a wonderful scene where loads and loads of them climb out from under the snow and stand there looking fantastic against the white mountain slopes.
The stark white snow is also a good canvas for the copious quantities of blood spilt throughout this film’s many inventive slaughter scenes. Beautiful red on white, splattery and bright.
The film revels in its gore, it’s funny in the tradition of Evil Dead, but with more intestines. Indeed, there’s even a fabulous scene where one young student is hanging off a cliff clutching to an implausibly long length of intestine attached to a Nazi zombie with its eyes bulging and black blood spurting spasmodically as it is impaled around a tree.
Død Snø isn’t a brilliant film, but it is very entertaining, stylish, assured, with a rocking Norwegian heavy metal soundtrack. And it builds towards a suitably silly and gory finale that leaves you with a happy smile on your face.
The beginning of 2010 has seen a fair few pieces of bad news hitting home. Times are a little hard and cold right now, like the bitter weather, but the thaw will come.
The small tragedy closest to me and Matt was the death of our dear old cat, Mouse, last week. Over the last six years she’s been a troublesome, demanding but ultimately loving companion. She mellowed out a lot in the last three years, becoming ever more endearing. But I think we were both surprised by how hard it was when the time came to say goodbye.
She had been unwell before Christmas and then went downhill quite sharply, not really eating and getting thin and weak. She was still Mouse and still had her moments, but it was clear she wasn’t going to get better. We took her to the vet for the last time on 4th January.
We were pretty unconsolable afterwards and had to spend the afternoon putting all her things away and rearranging the flat to distract ourselves. It so happened that we had taken the Monday and Tuesday off work, which really helped. The death of a cat is not the sort of thing I would ever request compassionate leave for, yet it struck me what a serious event this can be, one that society may not always respect, though friends have been very kind to us.
Matt and I went to one of our favourite annual rituals today, the Twelfth Night celebrations on the South Bank. We took our own mulled ale (wassail) and helped to drink some old English toasts to the river Thames, the Globe Theatre, and the George Inn on Borough High Street.
It was very cold, freezing in fact, so the Mummers play by the riverside was performed vigorously and in good time!
Hugo Chávez sums it up the best, condemning the “pitiful” sums of money being offered to poor countries to adapt to climate change.
$10bn a year is a joke. The military expenditure of the US is $700bn per year. If the climate were a bank it would have been saved already.
But this isn’t Babylon 5. Copenhagen was never our last or best hope. Politicians alone, and certainly not corporations, a highly flawed institutional form if there ever was one, can’t deliver the change we need.
The long term structural changes to our economies and societies will require a large, powerful, global people’s movement that wields an enormous amount of political power, to build the change from below and force political elites to act in the common interest. Building that movement has only just begun.
Matt and I were at the very enjoyable and good value for money Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People last night. It had quite a furtive geeky atmosphere which I wasn’t expecting, but on reflection that does make sense. Science and atheism seem more embattled in the public and media domain than they ought to be really. You can’t move without bumping into something homeopathic, religious, science-denying or superstitious these days. Irrationalism is on the march!
But it wasn’t at the UCL Bloomsbury last night. It was a marvellous bill, a mix of comedy, music and informative lecture. There was Robyn Hitchcock doing his droll slightly mad monologues and a song about trilobites. There was Johnny Ball doing dirty old man jokes and being contagiously enthusiastic about the amount of amazing knowledge we have at our fingertips in this country. The boyish and clever Baba Brinkman did an amazing rap re-working Dead Prez’s “I’m a African” so that it was a self-reflective ode to evolution and common humanity. Barry Cryer got us all on our feet screaming “peace and quiet” over and over again. Josie Long explored with us what ghosts might eat (if we were foolish enough to believe in them of course).
My favourite one was fast talking and enthusiastic physicist Brian Cox, who is working at the Large Hadron Collider. He gave a presentation about simplicity and complexity in the universe, about very very big things and very very small things. He pointed out how everything in the universe is made of just a few elementary leptons and quarks, glued together by just four forces.
There was a great bit quite reminiscent of the old Powers of Ten video where he used Hubble pictures to zoom into one piece of the night sky, the size of a 5p coin. As you zoomed in, what was empty space filled up with growing specks of light. Each speck of light was in fact a galaxy, there are over 100 billion galaxies each containing over 100 billion stars. The universe is indeed extremely big.
Brian also showed us some stirring pictures of Earth from space. One was the famous 1968 picture of our world from the moon, the picture that is sometimes said to have launched the environmental movement.
The picture I hadn’t seen before, but which moved me greatly, was the farthest away picture of the Earth, taken by Voyager from 4 billion miles away as it left the Solar System. It’s the little dot in the photo below.
Brian then made a plea not to cut funding for the kind of scientific research that leads us to explore these vast distances, pointing out simply that it helps us to understand ourselves. Much as an archaeologist or anthropologist studies the farthest reaches of human history or cultural variation in order to shed light on our own condition.
He ended with a TS Eliot quote from the Four Quartets, which did actually make me cry.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Our last London Film Festival film last night, Forbidden Door, was an Indonesian psycho-thriller directed by Joko Anwar.
I was expecting a full on horror film in the South Korean style, but it was more of a mix of genres. The opening credits were all 1950s Hitchcock and retro James Bond shapes of bright colours, even though the film seems to be set in the present day. Much of it is classic horror movie, but there are also some genuinely funny gory scenes with Cronenberg blood spurting all over the place too, and dark Freudian and sexual themes.
On the one hand I liked the fact the film went off on its own unclassifiable path, on the other hand I did find the mix of styles unsatisfyingly incoherent at times. I would have liked the horror to have escalated a level too. A lot of the suspense and fear had dissipated by the end of the film, though there are a couple of good shocks for later on.
Overall though, well worth seeing! A very distinctive and competent voice.
Went with Alex F and Steve W to see Valhalla Rising, a pared down brutal dark ages film, with a group of Vikings journeying across a strange desolate landscape to find Jerusalem.
They travel apparently from Scotland, across the sea, to the New World. The scenery is bleak and misty, there are no built structures anywhere in the film, just bogs and hills and rocks. There is blood and madness, and in the end pretty much everyone dies.
A D&D fighting fantasy film that’s a significant cut above the competition.
Matt and I went to see The Wind Journeys, a beautiful London Film Festival offering about an old accordion player who travels across Colombia with a teenager seeking to return his cursed accordion to his former mentor.
It’s a slow moving film set across vast beautiful country landscapes, with occasional musical set pieces, like an dramatic accordion duel in one town, where two players improvise verses against each other until one falters.
I’m back from an exhilarating weekend of direct action at Ratcliffe on Soar power station with Alex F, Kate B, Matt P and Dave L.
We went as a band of satirical painters and decorators, ‘Greenwash & Go’, which was also our group rallying cry through the weekend.
Saturday morning saw us gather with other swoopers up on a wooded hill above the power station, police helicopters chopping overhead to welcome us. At noon we all filed down in columns, advancing through the woods, then emerging to cross a bare earthen field, finally a road and then the power station fence, and battle was joined.
The general aim was to get into the power station, some people were prepared to lock on to equipment and shut things down, while others like us were prepared to do some theatrical pranks, in our case get on the coal heap and paint some of it green! The station was well defended though, and few groups got past the two fences and lines of police for very long.
See if you can see any of us in this ITN video clip!
There are few people who look sympathically on this kind of direct action, with its overt intention of tearing down fences, damaging property and disrupting a corporation’s lawful business. It looks to many people like wanton vandalism, yet how different it feels from the inside. It takes lots of thinking, lots of preparation, exploring how far you are willing to go, and seeing who will go with you.
In the thick of it of course, the bigger mission is still there, but it becomes enjoyably tactical. There were moments when I looked around and noticed how much fun both sides seemed to be having. Police and protesters seemed to be released from normal civilised conventions, as if playing a grown up and somewhat violent version of cowboys and indians. We moved away from the main charge early on to form a decoy group which satisfyingly diverted lots of police to follow us along the fence. Then we skulked off into the woods, moving here and there to dodge the bright yellow jackets of the law. It was all very hit and run.
I come out of it uplifted and excited, but wishing I’d gone further and done more. How much is enough? Objectively, we can probably never do ‘enough’.
World leaders meet in Copenhagen to put together our last best hope for the climate in two months. According to the latest analysis from the World Resources Institute the carbon cuts currently promised by rich countries fall well short of what the IPCC estimate is needed to give us a 50:50 chance of avoiding 2 degrees C of warming. And even the IPCC recommendations look increasingly optimistic month by month.
A new study assessing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by looking at the ratio of boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae both supports the CO2 records of the last 800,000 years from Antarctic ice cores and pushes back records to 20 million years ago, as well as reaffirming the tight link between atmospheric CO2 levels and global climate temperatures.
It makes clear that you have to go back at least 15 million years to find CO2 levels on Earth as high as they are today, a time when the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland. With no meaningful political action on cutting carbon emissions yet forthcoming, we are currently headed for scenarios that are beyond catastrophic. You can read the gory details here.
The science says time is running out, the climate is rushing towards a new state that will not be kind to human beings as it unfolds over the coming decades and centuries, and meanwhile the political debate is lagging far behind.
When you look hard at these truths, how can anything be ‘enough’?
But ‘enough’ is also a very personal measure. It means accepting stoically and with good humour the tasks that face us, exploring our fear and doubt, and challenging ourselves each time we act, going a little further than we intended or dared, and expanding our own boundaries of possibility.
As one of the inspiring swoop text messages said: the biggest fences are in our minds!
I’m feeling very jolly this morning about climate change actions. Kate B, Alex F and I went on a really inspiring direct action training day yesterday. We were talking through lots of scenarios, exploring how far people would go, and at one point our whole group went for a wander to a nearby mesh fence and spent twenty minutes discussing ways to climb it and bring it down! There’s a very exciting naughty thrill you get from thinking about how easy it could be to tear down a fence!
Last week saw two successes for activists opposing government plans to expand aviation and coal fired power in the UK.
E.ON announced that it is suspending construction of a new coal power station at Kingsnorth. The company are citing the reduction in electricity demand in the UK due to the recession, which means they can no longer justify the investment. But of course the context for that is that activists have made building new coal power stations in the UK such an unpopular, drawn-out and expensive undertaking that it is no longer worth the effort.
Meanwhile, BAA announced they would not be submitting a planning application for a third runway at Heathrow airport. As well as the massive amount of activist opposition over the last few years, it’s the Tories saying they won’t let the expansion go ahead that seemed to be the tipping point. One of the few benefits of a likely Tory victory at the next general election I guess.
And this morning saw a group of hardy Greenpeace activists holed up on the roof of the Houses of Parliament. You’ve got to love those high profile Greenpeace direct actions.
This video has some people talking about why this sort of thing is more and more necessary. Petitions, letters and marches are not going to bring about the radical political, economic and social shift that the climate crisis demands.
The government continues to be content with leaving it to market forces and conscientious individuals to haul society on to the right path, a massive abrogation of political responsibility. Gordon Brown is tinkering round the edges when we need ambitious policies like a nationwide energy efficiency scheme retrofitting all existing buildings with insulation and ensuring all new buildings meet zero-emission standards, or cutting coal and instigating a massive shift towards the use of renewable energy for heat, electricity and transport.
Meanwhile, month by month the increasingly accurate scientific forecasts for global warming look worse and worse. The Met Office’s latest modelling predicts 4 degrees centigrade of global warming in my lifetime, by as early as 2055 if we go on burning fossil fuels as we are now. It is hard to comprehend how different the planet will look if this is allowed to happen.
So ditch the heavy weight of fatalism, be not the martyred slave of inertia, and consider putting yourself out there, obstructing the well trodden path of business as usual! Direct action is the way ahead!
