Doom ...

... and gloom. My team loses overnight. Our Mascot Kingsley is not happy.

No-service with a smile

We'll be staying somewhere else then ...

Dear Mr/Ms. Herd,

Greetings from Novotel Singapore Clarke Quay!

Thank you for your email.

We regret to inform you that we do not have a wheelchair bound room in the hotel.

In the interim, should you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact or email us.

Thank you and have an exceptional day!

Even I'm beginning to feel a little nervous

The Donald ... Sorry, I meant Freddy

I may be letting my worst fears cloud my judgement. I still hold to the view that Trump will crash and burn but this nightmarish thought came when I was in the shower this Australian morning ...

What if?

What if a runaway train is crashing through the Republican Party? What if they don't know how to stop it? Maybe the GOP establishment will try to minimise the train wreck by doing deals. Trump goes on to win the nomination. Marco holds back on outright criticism of the presumptive nominee and lets Cruz - who seems to hate everyone except Ted Cruz - be the loser attack dog.

Trump, Rubio and the GOP establishment cut a deal. Rubio is selected as the VP candidate on a ticket with Trump. GOP brokers this deal because it can't stop Trump but thinks this would minimise harm and give it a chance of beating the Democrats. Rubio accepts the deal because - if they were to win - he think his 'Apprentice' years make him unbeatable as Presidential candidate in the future. Trump accepts the deal because it solves his 'Hispanics problem', means he could pass all the day to day grind of politics to his side-kick Marco , and he gets to drive around in the big Presidential limo being Mr. President - not building walls, not banning Muslims - just being a motor mouth constrained by the realities of governing in the real world.

As I said. One's nightmare.

Seven hours of classes on my long Thursday

I need to prepare better. Pic: imgur.com

Today's assignment for HUMN1001 - Digital Culture

Asked to respond to a series of articles orbiting around the question, "is the Internet making us dumber?" I offered these thoughts in advance of tomorrow's tutorial discussion:

Reading Carr’s article in the Wall Street Journal and his comments about detrimental changes to human memory in Genevieve Roberts’ article ("We're missing the real danger, that human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer”) or re-reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cassandra-lite’ narcissist hyperbole (“As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of the, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning” … you may have Mr R but the rest of us got on with lives with their usual share of value and meaning, successes and failures, etc.,) it’s hard not to think of Monty Python Flying Circus’s sketch, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ 

Apart from the world wide web, smart phones, Massive Open Online Courses everywhere, 160 million mobile Internet-users in a country like India where not so very long ago (most of the 20th Century) almost no one had access to a telephone), readily accessible information on almost everything (from Google and Wiki to peer-reviewing networks of Professors in Astrophysics and everything in between), 24-hour banking, instant hotel reservations, pizza delivery real-time tracking and the ubiquitous cat videos … what have the new technologists ever done for us? 

I do not mean to sound like some starry-eyed Pollyanna salivating at the prospect of the next ‘latest thing’ from the Apple Corporation (what can I say, I’m an Android man). Nor am I ignorant of the underpinning social, political and economic realities of this supposedly post-industrial, information age – control and ownership of the worlds means of production, distribution and exchange is more concentrated today in proportionately fewer hands than at any time in modern history since the world was run by Kings, Emperors and Popes. 

But … 

I am genuinely intellectually shocked by what I would describe as the naïve, ahistorical, un-analytical, almost intensely personalised reflections of (debatable) loss by commentators such as Carr, Rushkoff and (in week 2) Lanier, whose “Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century” seems to be built on a personal disappointment that MIDI doesn’t do the sounds of sax with the flair of John Coltraine or the violin with as much invention as Yehudi Menuhin.  The ‘glass half empty’ gang need better arguments than those I’ve read so far.

Just say NO

4 times in 2 weeks . Am I becoming an addict? Or is IKEA simply poor at organising its supply chain?

Bonnie and Clyde - cinematography of America's lost innocence

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

I'm halfway through preparing my first class presentation for my university courses this semester. Specifically I'm laying out my power point slides for FILM1002 - Introduction to Film Studies. I'm asked to talk on cinematography with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde as the reference movie.

So we dive straight in to the birth of the 'American New Wave' with the movie that got there a year before Bullitt, two years before Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy, five years before Badlands. My line of argument will be that it's the first - at least one of the earliest - mainstream Hollywood films to tear down the icons of the 'golden era' of movie myth-making. It's an outlaw movie rather than a gangster film, owing much of its aesthetic interest to the classic Western tradition. Except this is a film premised on the death of the all-American Hero and the rejection of a national mythology of innocence. It is cynical - although perhaps I mean ironic - disrespectful of authority, comical, violent, deeply invested in the (hetero)sexual crisis of identity emerging in 1960's America and it cleverly exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture and the alienation of spectating or viewing.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

All things considered it's a marvellous film. I hope my presentation does it justice.