The other day I watched the BBC’s “Once Upon A Time In Iraq”.Spoilers : Saddam dies, America gets its
bottom kicked, Al Queda turns into ISIS. The documentary follows different
participants in the conflict and showcases their personal stories.There’s the military commander who looks and
sounds like Sgt. Dennis Becker out of the Rockford Files and has the brilliant
idea of putting an entire village behind barbed wire.He talks about killing people professionally.There’s the US Special Marine who drinks tequila
straight from the bottle and revels in his barbarity like he’s wandered off the
set of Tropic Thunder.There’s an old
woman who hid people from ISIS and was given an award by the Iraqi Prime
Minister and was pleased to meet Melania Trump.There’s the author of the underground anit-ISIS blog Mosul Eye https://mosul-eye.org ... There’s a young woman who has seen a lot of
horrible things.There’s the US guards
that Saddam used to beat at Chess…The
thing that really hits home about this documentary is that you really see how
much people have suffered and continue to suffer.And yet they still joke about it.Occasionally someone says “I don’t want to
talk about that” and looks away from the camera.But it’s amazing that people can live through
such perpetual chaos and bloodshed and still carry on.Then again what is the alternative?
I wondered how my ex-boss Dr Ashti Hawrami was getting on out
there and he’s apparently now moved from Minister of Natural Resources to Assistant
Prime Minister for Energy Affairs in Prime Minister Masrour Barazani’s
newly-formed cabinet.Dr Ashti’s
basically been an energy minister since 2005? …over 15 years. I'm not saying he's corrupt - After all, anyone's wife could end up in prison but...
Masrour Barazani’s been in power since July 2019.Previously the Prime Minister of Kurdistan
was Nechirvan Barzani who has been there since 2012 and before that Masoud Barzani
who had been there since 2005.
I don’t
know how much democracy Rumsfeld’s lunatic plans have actually resulted in but if
you want to run Iraqi Kurdistan it helps to be Barazani or Barzani.
Of course the fact so many similarly named people have the top jobs might be a result of the region wanting to break away. Like the SNP always winning in Scotland or...
My lawyers advise me that that’s all I have to say…
Somebody asked why this blog is not a youtube channel. Well, apart from the fact I’m banned from
youtube for reasons which are to this day as yet unexplained … I prefer the
written word.This blog isn’t serious it’s
just a kind of dump of information that I can’t transform into real usable
content like stand up material or fiction.It’s a progenitor of ideas and a dumping ground in which to dump silly
ideas rather than a finished product.When you’re writing you explore a whole range of ideas and there are
always a load of extraneous thoughts that you just don’t know what to do with. So here are mine...
Also the problem with Youtube is it seems to me to be a place full
of ideologues and critics (due to the lack of resources of its creators to make Hollywood blockbusters).
Take, for
example, Science Fiction … Youtube has spawned a whole plethora of professional
pop culture sci-fi critics who all think they’re the new Barry Norman of Sci-Fi. Maybe some are...
Amongst the most well known is Nerdrotic...This is a guy with a beard in the USA who
used to run a comic book shop who sits surrounded by cartoon and TV franchise
memorabilia and spends his time criticising writers and producers.One of his favourite targets is Jodie
Whittaker’s Doctor Who who he “lovingly describes as Dr Karen” – not being
American it took me a long time to get the slang (see here).Nerdrotic’s real name is Gary Buechler and to
be fair to Gary he seems like a nice enough bloke.He spouts his opinions, speculates on gossip
and generally pushes his own agenda but then who doesn’t?His redeeming quality is he seems to actually
care about the franchises that he criticises and seems to want them to be
better.
For the truth is Star Trek was the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry and
Gene’s dead.Everything since he died is
therefore a reinterpretation, reboot, spin off or has some other gimmick in
order to "perpetuate the franchise” (or as we used to call it milk the copyright cow).... someone must constantly think of new angles that are both different and yet the same.
Otherwise you may as well just repeat the old
series and that was cancelled for a reason. Nothing is forever...
Gary doesn’t like the fact that
the new Star Trek serieses (how many are there now?) seem more cynical but I can see how in today’s world –
indeed, I could see a decade or two ago – how the original Star Trek was going
to become problematic to some people.For a start it’s a frontier story where the Kirk is the Sheriff and the
Klingons are the Red Indians Native Americans or something.The Federation doesn’t ruthlessly expand but
it occasionally engages in some questionable ethics.Indeed, Pickard to me often resembled not so
much an adventurer as a minor civil servant - or perhaps the fusion between them. He reminded me of a serman by a Priest decades ago who said that "In the Acts of the Apostles they convert thousands to Christianity a day and people ask why this doesn't happen anymore? The answer is you stop being 'fishers of men' and start becoming keepers of a fish tank'." One imagines that inevitably the huge empire that was the Federation would start having similar fishtank type problems...
Since Star Trek started it was surely only a matter of time till someone started postulating “what if
the federation was corrupt?” Yes, it's an idealised future but drama is conflict. If there's no corruption what is going to drive the plot?
Of course the idea of a corrupted Federation is entirely Terry Nation's Blakes 7 – which even goes so far as to
take the federation logo and tilt it on its side … but that's another story...
I’m sure Gene wouldn’t have liked a lot of what they’re
doing with Star Trek today (if I bothered to watch it) but....Well, he’s
dead.
And when a writer dies no one
continues their vision.
That’s that’s
the whole point of writing.
YOU create
your world.
Thus you can see how the
writers who’ve inherited these franchises seem to end up constantly at war with
their audiences.They want to tell their
stories and the audiences want to be told the same stories.Somewhere there’s a middle way but it all
gets lost in the politics and shouting.Of course if the writers really wanted total creative freedom they’d do
what I do – write a novel alone where you’ve created all the
characters and situations from first principles.But even I have the odd editor
who tells me what to do.Or the odd promoter... “Please don’t
swear mate the snowflake generation don’t like the word and will complain to
the venue…” etc.But, of course, there’s
more money in writing for continuing franchises from sci-fi to soap opera to …
whatever…
Gary Buechler isn’t the only such person, of course, he’s
just my personal nightmare of who I might turn into… there’s a whole array of such commentators including the more sweary and angry
Doomcock – a man in a mask who claims to review content from the perspective of
an evil alien dictator - but who sounds more a Daily Mail reader...
And “Heel vs Babyface” …a chubby middle aged
man in a gamer’s chair who sounds like he listens to LBC and often finds what he's watching so disturbingly bad all he can do is cover his face and hang his head...Sometimes they interview each other on each
other’s channels too which is like The Three Doctors’ Critics' Circle… one expects
Dorothy Parker to turn up eventually.
Of
course there are some female commentators but the point is these are what I
fear I would turn into if I ever turned my webcam on.Oh well I suppose there's worse things to turn into...
Although there are some less predictable commentators - Tzvi Lebetkin if you like your pop
culture criticism Jewish …
I have to say sometime some of
them seem to stretch the “fair use” of movie clips quite far but then who
understands that?Erm…
The other problem with this sort of thing is creating
content of any kind quickly becomes a treadmill and one imagines how exhausting
it must be to constantly find new things to criticise.Might be fun if they moved away from popular
culture occasionally and criticised the films of Federico Fellini or Mervyn
LeRoy… credit to the Critical Drinker for his excursions off-piste – worth watching
if you like your film criticism Scottish and pissed.
Don’t even ask me to attempt to understand political
youtubers like Dick Coughlan or the people he interacts with … I like it that
there’s political stuff out there but … generally I’d rather cut my toenails
than get involved with anything that much… as a natural coward.
So anyway… I just thought it would be fun to do an article
criticising the critics for a change and …
Well, a lot of these
people make me feel like Miss Marple at Bertrum’s Hotel.For those of you who have forgotten the plot –
Miss Marple goes to stay in the hotel because it hasn’t changed.However, the longer she stays there the more
she becomes uncomfortable - for the reason it hasn’t changed is that it is a
front for criminal activity and so the economic pressures that would normally force
change do not.It is an enclosed world
and it has become enclosed because it is unhealthy and it is unhealthy because
it is enclosed.That isn’t to say people
shouldn’t celebrate or enjoy the past but just that occasionally we need to
recognise that the past cannot ever be recreated.That isn’t to say we can’t learn from the
past but…
“I learned (what I supposed I really knew already) that one
can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence
of life is going forward. Life really is a One Way Street, isn’t it?”
Apparently
we're supposed to flood social media with images of ourselves so the
government won't leave it till 2021 or later to do anything for live comedy. So
here's the last ever Pear Shaped again. Right done my bit. That's the
circuit saved. No need to say thank you.
This
channel has disappeared off your website with no explanation.Although it might be that you tried to
contact me but could not as my email had changed but the channel had previously
been up for 10 years with no such action being taken.
I have
appealed this decision but have heard nothing from you and you refuse to give a
timescale for investigation.Due to the
xtranormal videos on the channel not existing on my own servers I would
therefore like them back and therefore am putting in a request for all data
that has been stored on this channel.Therefore I am making a request underthe Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) for all the
video and text data back and for any copies of any correspondence you have
relating to myself or this channel in your archives.
Yours
sincerely
Anthony Miller
Please note since this blog was written Youtube have kindly restored my channel although why it was removed in the first place remains a mystery.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpg)
