Strange Games : Slow Horses S1 and start of S2

I should have posted about Slow Horses sooner, but the second series (aka Dead Lions) has just popped up on Apple TV. 

It's been sympahetically redrafted for television and has some cracking actors including a shapeshifting Gary Oldman and ice-cold calculating Kirsten Scott Thomas. There's a London atmosphere often in close so the exact setting isn't immediately obvious unless you've been there. 

Plenty of the action takes place at night or in dimly-lit bars or cellars, yet the filming of the series is like the olden days of film noir when they knew how to put haloes around people and brighten up the pieces where there was action. Even an out of focus baby alarm is dramatically filmed. I really appreciate that they've taken some care over making the dark parts watchable. It is the same with the narrative jump edits. Something as simple as going up some stairs will have two 'up closes' and a flicker of a long view between them. Nice and almost non-linear - they didn't have to, but they did anyway and all the better for it. 

 Then there's the blend of dialogue between serious spy talk and bits of ribbing banter and occasionally daft scenes that just get sprung - like the jammed car CD playing Coldplay.

I can see the setup of the Slough House department with its manilla civil service folders is similar to the way the off-the-books setup is played in Killing Eve, and I wonder whether there were any inspirational points borrowed between them? 

 Gary Oldman, who has also played Le Carre's George Smiley, seems to take a delight in this world turned upside down view of espionage. Put all the slow horses (presumed failures) together and rain down often un-PC abuse upon them. A sure fire formula, but I'm not sure for what, exactly. 

 

I'm enjoying this series: 

1. Because it forced me to go back to the first series and watch it all over again. 
2. Because we are now only on book 2, and I'm eagerly waiting for episode 3 to drop. 
3. Because I know there are at least five more books in the Mick Herron series. Oh yes, and Mick Jagger wrote and performs the theme. 

schlecht

 I'll be off to my Stammtisch later for Weihnachtsfeier und Geschwätz. Sad to see that actions of rogue right populism have now leached into the German system, creating an attempt to storm the German goverment buildings. 

 These far right protestors are using the ant-vax capaign to drive support for their wider goals. They previously used Merkel's acceptance of migration and fears of islamisation. 

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) uses its legitmised position to cultivate dissent and even includes 83 members in the German Parliament. Infiltration is part of their modus operandi. 

A German military KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte) special forces unit was disbanded recently because it contained many extremists. Discovered buried in the garden by police, a Sergeant-Major's house had two kilograms of plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition, much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military. 

Some 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 62 kilograms of explosives have also 'disappeared'.

art of the dodge

Remarkable that the dodgy ex-president has now been found guilty on 17 counts of financial crime including tax fraud. How remarkable that he can bounce free from this with a mere $1.62 million fine, which I expect he will contest. 

Plenty rests on a Mr. Weisselberg, who struck a plea deal with prosecutors. Weisselberg admitted that he had reaped about $1.8 million (ie more than Trumps fine) in indirect and hidden compensation, allowing him to evade hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. The benefits included a rent-free apartment in a Trump building overlooking the Hudson River; leased cars for him and his wife; and Trump-paid private school tuition for their grandchildren.

The above 2018 art installation inside a Trump hotel hinted at what was to come. I wonder how many others are hoping to avoid the searchlight?

Trump is naturally calling it all a witch hunt.

enemy of the state? A supermarket hack, man

It has become slightly annoying visiting a wall-known supermarket and innocently setting off the theft alarms when I leave. I decided to ask the security guard what was happening and we experimented with my jacket, then phone and then wallet.

I was convinced it was the phone and had even seen other people complaining about similar effects, but in the end it turned out to be my wallet.

Apparently a single RFID card won't cause it, but put several together and their combined signal is enough to trigger 'modernised' supermarket systems. 

The security guard was quite helpful and suggested I needed an RFID-proof wallet. A truly first world problem?  I could remember enough schoolboy physics such that I could line my wallet with aluminium foil and it should block the signals like a Faraday cage.

It would work like the one that Gene Hackman used in The Conversation and then reprised in Enemy of the State, only much smaller. They are like those mesh bags they give out at some concerts to put one's phone in. 

I also discovered that there are credit card sized anti-RFID cards which can be placed dierctly in the wallet. They are also triggered by the same scanner frequencies but then send out jammer signals. Now that is worth trying, although I expect I'll be tapped on the shoulder again.

Our Tragic Universe

I originally trialled mastodon back in 2018. It was much more of a DIY project back in those days and I even tried setting up a home made decentralised server. I did my usual thing of setting up a test userid, but now I can't find it. Like those bitcoins I left on a server that I eventually scrapped. 

C'est la vie. 

This time I followed a message from Scarlett Thomas, which took me into the world of Mastodon. Thomas has been a positive influence on my attempts at novel writing and also the appreciation of the artifact of a book. A couple of her marvellous black-edged paper novels continue to inspire - The End of Mr Y and Our Tragic Universe. 

Mr Y freaked me out with ideas of homeopathy in a parallel univese and Tragic Universe plays big with these ideas, blending cosmology, physics, tarot and foxy narrative theory, Our heroine(s) in both books wend their way through asking many questions including whether they are a superbeing. I realise that my own novel The Watcher must have been subconsciously influenced by these ideas. 

And at the prosaic end of fun, Tragic Universe also - even after ten years -  has a particular new-book inky-aroma from the pages, which works well if you open it slightly and dive in nose first. 

Penhaligons, take note:  'He's got his nose in a good book' etc. 

And back to Mastodon, and its 7 million subscribers. A subtlety is its distributed nature. Instead of big central servers, the architecture of Mastoden requires the servers to be spread around. Add to that the inconsistencies of the User Experience, different on a web browser from within a smartphone App. 

I'm here 

I can't help think there will be a tipping point when the Signal to Noise tragically increases to the level of other well-known social platforms. I'm following an experimentally curated set of users to see the way that things change. 

Or not.

#LTN: watching and waiting

Twitter has become the news in its own right, a little like some journalists who stumble into the story. I'll bide my time to see how it plays out. After all, many well-known names have been around on the system for a long time. I guess I'm also a #ltn (low twitter number) 

Anyone can find out this stuff.

Despite all the naysayers, I suspect Musk will weed most of the pile-on-noise-merchants out of the system.

But then, I'm holding economically priced Tesla shares as well, since they temporarily became discounted.

tout va bien - A Book of Days - Patti Smith

I've been reading Patti Smith's new book - A Book of Days. It proto-blogs years of her experiences across art, music, photography, poems and features many great moments from a life. Every day of the year features a picture and a short text. 

It's a work of loving art.

I first obtained her music - Horses, - with that Robert Mapplethorpe photo of her emulation of Rimbaud, back when I had a red Ford Escort and worked in Germany.

The cassette - long since gone - accompanied my trips from Ostende to Stuttgart.

Then later - Just Kids - a slim memoire of her relationship with Mapplethorpe all the time continuing music and art. 

In the new book she features many: Murakami, Camus, Kurosawa, Lou Reed and Martin Luther King. Hendrix and the Electric Ladyland Studio where she made Horses and argued with producer John Cale. There's Virginia Woolf’s bed with its embroidered bedspread, Georgia O’Keeffe’s with a more humble covering ; Frida Kahlo’s with a spooky black skeleton above it; John Keats’s, which 'seems to contain the luminous dust of his consumptive nights'.

She holds a Polaroid Land Camera 250 on the cover of the book, which she used in earlier times to take the photos. Later, on her daughter Jesse's advice, she took to Instagram, where she now has many followers.

It's a book to dip into as well as read. There are so many inspirations, given and personal.

8 January

‘As a young girl, I admired the skater’s attire, eventually adopting the look as my own. The plate belonged to my mother who always tried to make me wear bright colours. The skater won out. He dwells beside my copy of Ariel, given to me by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1968.’

disgrace

I'm not watching that football thing. Even as many others are queueing up to see it.

They are staying at the ritziest of hotels, where the sponsor's beer costs $29 a bottle. And fine dining on sliders, which are complementary if you buy 5 bottles of beer.

I suppose if you want to get away from it all, the 60,000 berths of budget priced guest accommodation in shipping containers at £200 per night, might suit.

Surely FIFA is having a laugh?

let the alpha birds sing?

I heard from a little bird that there's been a resurgence in interest in Friends Reunited (2000-2016) over the last few days. I wonder why? 

I'm reminded just how many social media systems have been out there and flopped, including Google+, Vine, Friendster, Periscope, Meerkat, Buzz, Friendfeed and (almost unbelievably) still hanging in there, MySpace. 

Useful characteristics of winners are that they must be simple, work on phones and make it easy to copy information to appear to be smart. Photos- especially selfies - help, too. 

Some consumer insights are useful. According to the graphs, I'm a Boomer, although my interests span far wider. Now look at the Generation Alpha (2010-2024) influences.

The incoming and outgoing technology makes for interesting reading. As does the 2.2 billion Generation Alphas by 2023, now we have a planet with over 8 billion people.

Deeply unfashionable

Blaming Boris might be unfashionable. So might blaming Brexit, which I'm told has been expunged from the Conservative lexicon.  Only the con part remains.

Thus I know I'm deeply unfashionable, because I can still consider these six-year aberrations as a starting point for the mess we are in. The 'long, unpleasant journey' as some Middle Englanders may call it.

twitter as a metaphor for life on mars?

 

I was a low serial number twitterer. I watched it grow and the signal to noise ratio worsen. Then the sheer dumping of extra spam into my twitter feed as the SEO businesses muscled in. No, I don't want your protein pills and my shirts are fine, whatever label they bear. Now we can watch as the whole noisy and increasingly self-referencing platform gets dis-assembled. We can wonder if it will ever have its original promise again. Mars colonisation ?

round trip with sound

They say it is indistinguishable from magic. Advanced technology. There I was, on my 430 mile round trip, and I'd asked the car to play some music. 

"Play Regina Spektor," I said and it had selected "What we saw from the cheap seats." 

I let it run and then noticed that in with the album were mixed a few other tracks, which eventually took over the play list. I could understand if they were 'curated commercial tunes' but this was "Neutral Milk Hotel' and 'The Magnetic Fields'. Even a track by Nico and several by bands I'd never heard of, but all (with a few exceptions) good to listen to. 

 I compare this new car with the sounds played on my prior one, which were mainly from a connected iPod which had 160Gb of tracks I'd downloaded from iTunes/Music. 

This car is permanently connected to the Internet and so has a few more tricks up its sleeve. But the music. It really is excellent.