Saturday 8 August 2009

Mission to Mars and Italian for Beginners

A disadvantage of writing about contemporary experience which includes events in the world outside the confines of my home, is that within hours, let alone days or weeks, what was has written may not just be out of date but proven wrong. The corollary is also true and over the past 24 hours of writing about space and time and what we can do now and cannot had been shown in one aspect to be more accurate that I imagined. I had believed that my original writing for yesterday and been recorded on disk from the desk top which I write to the lap used for the internet, but I had not completed the process and therefore there is opportunity to reconsider what was written yesterday about Thursday and Friday, this Sunday morning. However what I have decided to do is to make this note then stop and then produce a new version of what was written in the light of the aspects of my experience over the past 24 hours, thus making the point that if I could have created a different version, so can others with the technology to intervene in my or your work at anytime and anywhere. End of to day's note.

I am a fan of the late night shown programme this week in which the highlights of the previous week are discussed by a regular participants chaired by Andrew Neil and former Ministers Ms Abbot and Mr Portillo together with an assortment of studio guests some more articulate and of substances than others, Last night one subject which appeared to unite the regulars and those who appeared on Question Time beforehand was the disclosure that conversations between a Member of Parliament and a constituent had been monitored on the authority of the police. The studio guest made the point that the controlled work of the official British Security Services was only a fraction of the extent to which public and private agencies were empowered to monitor and collate information and although this was said in defence of the official security services it is point the implications of which needs to be better known. It should be self evident that this means the official security services do not need to undertake much of the surveillance and monitoring work themselves but can make use of the information of all the others whose number is said to run into the hundreds if not thousands and these do not include the work of other nations, especially those with resources which can be used from bases outside the UK and from space. There is the argument that if you have not done anything wrong you do not need to worry about being observed and a feature of my work is that what we do and say can be viewed, recorded and the record altered by anyone with the technology anywhere and at anytime. It is only recognition of the innate inclination to an exhibitionist and voyeur in all of us. The problem is that the major villains are always one step ahead and probably in control of much of the unofficial and illegal monitoring and recording.

I was also delighted to witness an exchange on the Daily Politics Show that politicians are beginning to understand the law of unintended consequences. Most politicians, the media and most of the general public take no interest in the implementation of new legislation and monitoring its effectiveness and usually the interest is only aroused when something goes wrong. Most legislation is not in fact implemented as intended by the Government or those within Parliament who scrutinise and debate. Sometimes the government does not introduce specific changes, although this usually happens when governments change and the usually way to achieve inaction is not to subsequently approve the finance and the staffing required. Usually however the problem is that insufficient attention is given to unintended consequences. This is typical of bureaucracies especially those led by politicians. In business before any new plan or development is given the go ahead there is a detailed investigation into things like potential markets and costs and options available, but also to what can go wrong in relation to materials, and government and trade union involvements, hence the wisdom of moving production to countries with loss cost and fewest regulatory controls and that most companies aim to spread their interests between countries so that no one country can have a disproportionate influence over the direction and profitability of the company. I find it difficult to believe that governments of recent decades do not undertake an analysis of unintended consequences whenever legislation is brought before the Parliament in relation to new legislation, This used to be the situation and I retain the vivid memory on a visit to the House of Lords where I was monitoring the passage of legislation and had access to the visitors area on the floor of the House, where the Commons stands for the Queen's speech at the state opening of Parliament, to be advised that following representations by an interest over a good meal the Minister had instruction a new amendment which meant that an independent person had to be appointed in situations where a young person in what had been an approved school and which became a community home with education on the premises has been resident for three months without a visitor. Previously the responsibility for visiting such children had rested with the probation service and there was anxiety in some quarters about child care workers undertaking this role. However the amendment was introduced and passed in the lords, reported to the Commons who also agreed and the matter became law. Now here is the rub, when the matter came to be implemented it was discovered that no one in the approved schools/community homes with education on the premises qualified for the appointment of any independent visitor who had to be selected, trained and worked organised and monitored. However it was then discovered that the legislation did apply to special schools where overall responsibility rested with the Education Ministry. This was clearly a good things although it was an unintended consequence.

The film of the day was the 2002 film Mission to Mars which I had intended to see in theatre but had not done so. The film was the subject of much adverse comment by the professional critics and by those in the space industry because of a number of technical inaccuracies and improbabilities but I thoroughly enjoyed and thought the film was good successor to 2001 and 2010 which influenced me greatly at the time they were first released and their the black monoliths were one inspiration for the conception of creating black monolithical constructions, large black four drawer filing cabinets with welded fronts to enclose the confidential volumes as part of my 100.75 artman project The premise of Mission to Mars is credible in that millions of years ago Mars was a living planet inhabited by a colony of advanced humans a vast distance away from their home planet. When the colony faced destruction they returned home or went off to settle in new worlds but in relation to our planetary system they took two decisions. The first was to launch human DNA potential on to the one planet which also had the potential to sustain similar beings, hence the comparatively sudden evolution of humankind on earth and secondly they left a construction on mars which comprised a hologram explanation what happened to the colony, the decisions then taken and the early development of beings into human kind on the earth. They also provided one space vehicle to transport any enquiring and adventuresome human being to the home planet a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The film also poses the existence of other beings without compatible human characteristics as when the construction has a defence mechanism to ward off non humans and an entrance code puzzle. If as what happens when the first Mars landing expedition arrives the visitors are not quick enough to work out the sound code emitted by the structure and use explorative force to investigate, however unintentional and without hostile motives, the structure defends itself, turning the mountainous rock into a vortex of destructive particles. Fortunately one the party survives to send a message to the world space centre in orbit around the earth and is then able to work the air, water and food producing unit to survive the year it takes for a what happened second land mission to arrive not just to tell tale but to explain that he has worked out what the sound means when converted into a pictorial message. The film is paced at the same level as 2001 and 2010 which will not have appealed to those who prefer the fast moving action space adventure of more recent times although I thought the life in the space vehicles and the representation of the red planet was convincing. There was also some good points about team work, the sacrifices made to become an astronaut, including self sacrifice, and the spirit of human enquiry. It was purely coincidental that the film arrived within days of talking about the mind boggling endlessness of space and the possibility of individual human life existing in different dimensions. Increasingly I am of the view that although human beings have existed in their billions, speak different languages are of different skin colours and appearances their behaviour is remarkably similar at its core, There is the endeavour to create clones when is seems to me we are cloned already and given the collective sub conscious and collective memory it is understandable that we come to believe we have existed in different times.

A very different film on DVD is Italian for Beginners. A delightful Danish speaking project in which a group of lonely individuals struggling to find happiness and meaning to their lives are drawn into a small group learning Italian at further education college or centre. There are three ladies possibly sisters who weave and out of the film but are not central characters, there is the kindly Christian receptionist factotum at the local hotel where a new guest is the young first job clergyman temporarily replacing the vicar who lost his faith and thrown the organist into hospital, there is the young worker trying to hold the forty third job since leaving school who has a severe lack of hand and eye coordination caring for her father and a hairdresser caring for her demanding mother, where both parents die and become linked to the young clergyman who in turn joins the class, who lose their teacher and where the job is taken over by the foul mouthed manager of a restaurant at the local football club owned by the hotel, and who previously was a member of the group and a friend of the hotel receptionist and having a essentially sexual relationship with the hairdresser, together with the Italian waitress at the restaurant, who speaks only a little Danish and fancies the hotel receptionist to bits. There is a delightful happy ending sequence in Venice. I saw the film in theatre on a visit to London after extending the Cineworld pass to the capital and added to the DVD internet mail delivered club when the second list of films to see was created, some 100 or so, and where which film is sent depends on availability, so that it was another of those coincidences that sometimes appear to govern my life that it arrived just as I was thinking about where I would live if I won the a chunk of the 95 million last night Euro lottery money or the £7 million this evening, Gibraltar where the kind of property is limited and expensive, somewhere in the Spanish hills in Andalusia, Italian Tuscany with access to Rome, a Greek Island near to Athens, on a little hill town in Southern France where I once hired a villa with a pool, although if I had won the £95 million I could have had million pound homes in all five locations, overlooking a Scottish Lock or Cumbrian Loch, a penthouse suit overlooking the Thames and a property large enough to house and display my installation project, with plenty of change to look after the rest of the extended family and friends and my favourite charities. Ah what dreams may come?
The TV evening ended with the 2008 World film awards from the National Film Theatre which has become a curious affair in which there is a brief review of the films released over the past 15 months which some how enabled Pan's Labyrinth to be included and win the 2008 award and not 2007 when it received three Oscars in the ceremony which takes place after the London World event. The format of the award, there is only one is unusual because in addition to the usual onscreen extracts from each of the five films nominated there are also extracts of a discussion involving three selected panellists which this year included a surprisingly articulate Christopher Eccleston. Jonathan Ross some of whose work and approach I dislike and avoid was the presenter and chair of the panel discussions. The guest of honour was Catherine Deneuvre and Gullerno Del Toro was has come to visit England and Scotland on a regular basis was present to pick up the unusual object of presentation. What was odd is that in the run through of interesting and meritorious films released of the past 12 months there was the Oscar nominated La Vie en Rose, Letter from Iwo Jima and Apocalypto, Curse of the Golden Flower and others which appeared to me to whose selection would have been more justified than the other four works, where admittedly I could only judge on the extracts shown. Perhaps the whole thing is in effect a year in arrears, although I would rate Pan's Labyrinth above La Vie en Rose which I had problems with in terms of its construction but where its brilliance rests with the performance fo the actor playing Edith Piaf. The programme also gave brief reference to the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Antonioni.

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