Waiting for blotto

Film: Adam and Paul by Lenny Abrahamson
Rating: 9/10, unsubtle story of an unsubtle world, artfully told

Almost immediately, you know you are watching a reworking of Beckett’s classiest work. The action opens (and ends) in a Beckettsian wasteland where our heroes (renamed Adam and Paul because any junkie called Vladimir or Estragon would be laughed out of the methadone clinic) begin another aimless day. They could equally have been called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Like Beckett’s and Stoppard’s duos, they are really a single entity, utterly interchangeable. I never figured out which was Adam and which was Paul; it doesn’t matter. They have no idea who they are or where they’re going and, in an unspoken way, they know they are doomed and just want to get it over and done with as quickly and painlessly as possible. Until then, they need to get through each day and, like their predecessors who had people to meet and messages to deliver, they too have a mission – to get their daily fix. You know for sure they are Didi & Gogo when you hear their plan and the pleasure it gives Paul just to know they have one, however improvised:

(naming them arbitrarily)
Paul: ‘ere, do we have a plan?
Adam: … ehhm … into town …
P: … yeah?
A: … see who’s around … what’s goin’ on, like …
P: … yeah?
A: … get some money …
P: … yeah?
A: … and then … score.
P: Cool!
A: Yeah!

This is a funny film, hilarious at times, but neither Adam nor Paul nor anyone they encounter can see this because Adam and Paul are pure tragedy. Everyone knows they died long ago and are just waiting to stop breathing. With their first death went their humanity and watching them we cannot think of them as human. In a superb scene, shot in soft focus, we catch a glimpse of their erstwhile humanity when they share a moment’s intimacy with Orla and her baby. We thrill for a second to the thought that the director is going to reveal that they really are people and slump when we realise that it was a scene from an unrestorable past. They are beyond redemption now. Adam and Paul are depraved and self-centred creatures, focussed only on their daily provisioning task and, yet, so hopelessly unfit for survival in this wicked world that you can’t help loving them, but only in the way you love your pet Labrador. You flinch when they’re hurt and you forgive them when they err, but you know that living has become too painful and it is best if the vet administers the fatal dose.

Whimsical hypothesis

Book: The Jesus Video by Andreas Eschbach
Translated from: German
Genre: Science Fiction – time travel
Rating: 8/10, highly readable impossible yarn

Nice idea! Archaeologists on a dig in Palestine unearth the users’ manual of a SONY Video Camera that is still only in design and due for production in three years time! They postulate that in the near future, a time traveller will head back 2000 years to capture Jesus Christ on video. Knowing that he cannot return to the modern age, he will hide the video to be picked up by his friends and he will remain to live out his life in ancient Palestine. Now the hunt is on for the scoop of the century!

This is an interesting take on the time travel paradox and it set me thinking. If it were possible for the archaeologists to find the camera … before [?] the leap back in time … then surely the time traveller’s friends, once they plan for him to travel in time, could immediately go and collect the hidden video he will [?] leave for them 2000 years ago, before he even travels? Just try writing that last sentence using the correct tenses. And once they have the video, why does he have to bother travelling; on the other hand, if he changes his travel plans, how could they have found a video he never left for them! If time travel is possible, it implies it may be sufficient to possess time travel technology to be deemed to have travelled … a ludicrous idea as imponderable as Schrödinger’s Cat. This is my cue to offer you this poetic summary of another paradox.

Alternatively, maybe the video only appears at the agreed place after the time traveller makes his journey and is then deemed to have been there for 2000 years. That is, history is rewritten, though the books are not changed.

So I speculate (tongue firmly in cheek) that time travel can change history, but only with effect from the moment when the traveller sets out! An interesting idea, but clearly it doesn’t explain more dramatic changes to history. For example, if he saved Jesus from crucifixion, history would record the crucifixion up until the moment he travels and would then promptly refute it, despite all the records!

What’s really cool about The Jesus Video is the way that Eschbach (the author) gives a glimpse inside his own thought processes. A key character is a science fiction writer who is supposed to do the detective work of figuring out where the camera is so he has to imagine how time travel might be achieved, how the traveller might behave, etc. He builds countless scenarios and tears them down and you get the real impression that Eschbach himself might use a similar approach in constructing his own plots.

Towards the end, the plot wobbles a bit with some unlikely coincidences which could have been easily handled more convincingly. The time traveller turns out not to be the obvious candidate but it would have been delicious if he had!

KidsProgrammingLanguage

My twelve year old wants to program games on his computer! The fad will probably last a week, but I thought I better help launch him just the same. First requirement: choose a suitable language. I learned Basic like my contemporaries at a time when getting anything at all to appear on a computer screen was cool, but it’s so passé now with the kind of computer applications kids are used to. Dr. Scheme is so elegant syntactically but not very cool either. After exploring tonight, I’ve come up with this interesting blog discussion on a whole raft of languages and this has led me to investigate KPL (KidsProgrammingLanguage) and its successor Phrogram which look like simple versions of sophisticated object oriented languages and which use nice GUIs. I’ll try it and report back here.

Attitude in the 15th century

Thanks to Brian Boyd in the Irish Times today for drawing my attention to Cool Rules: An Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins (which I have no intention of reading). They trace the origins of cool back to Renaissance writer Baldassare Castiglione’s definition of sprezzatura:

“an avoidance of affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done and said appear to be without effort”.

Their contemporary version is

“an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority. It is a permanent state of private rebellion – cool conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic impassivity”.

I guess that cool, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, but I find both definitions … well … cool!