Art & Criticism – Page 2

Your Happening World (December browser tab amnesty)

Published on December 8, 20221 Comment

Here are some interesting articles cluttering up my browser tabs:

Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)

Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP — Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.
New dates suggest Oceania’s megafauna lived until 25,000 years ago, implying coexistence with people for 40,000 years — The U-series dating provides minimum age estimates, which means the fossils could be older. But since our estimates are supported by previous accelerated mass spectrometry dating, collectively the data provide a compelling case for the existence of megafauna in Sahul as recently as 25,000 years ago.
Thorsday Thoughts 276 – Thursday December 8, 2022 — While I tend to view Thunderstrike as a continuation of this run, it’s also its own thing. This is the final issue of Thor by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz after taking over at the end of 1987. They did two unrelated issues, one an untold story from Secret Wars focusing on Thor and the Enchantress, and one introducing Dargo, the possible Thor of the future. After a one-off by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Erik Larsen, and Vince Colletta, the run proper began and lasted for just over five years. It’s hard to sum up those five years in a simple statement, because, if there was one thing constant throughout those years, it was how willing Frenz and DeFalco were to change things up.
Scientists Identify 208 Natural Minerals That Formed From Human Activity — A new study has found that the incredible upsurge of new minerals around the time of the industrial revolution led to the unprecedented diversification of crystals on Earth, eclipsing even the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago as the “greatest increase in the history of the globe”.
‘Murder game’ cinema: Rollerball, its precursors and influences — here’s a list of Rollerball related movies I need to watch as well. Recommended fodder for those interested in dystopian sevneties sci-fi. (Some of the less obvious movies on here are by the same director.)
AND WHO DO YOU HIT? Three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel — examing and screening several socialist, realistic documentary movies coming out of seventies West-Germany depicting the life in a particular apartment building. Entirely different from the glitzy Hollywood sci-fi of the above list, but you can see some continuity here, can’t you?
My Stepfather Became My Dad the Day He Took Me to My First Football Match — My dad, Barrie, isn’t technically my dad. He’s my stepdad, but he became my dad on 12 November 1988 when Southampton beat Aston Villa 3-1 at The Dell, the club’s dilapidated former home. My birth father had effectively disappeared by then, leaving my mum with two sons, one of whom was football mad. That was the first game of football Barrie took me to.

I especially recommend Tom Williams’ very personal account of the way football brought him and his dad together.

You need to understand both languages — Martin’s increasingly petty translation rules

Published on August 26, 2022Leave a comment

That sounds obvious right? If you want to translate something, you need to understand what’s being said in the original language, then adapt it for the language you want to translate it in, making sure it still makes sense there and hopefully mean the same. More difficult then you might think. Here’s a good example, not taken from anime this time, but from the Danish version of Taskmaster, as presented by the official Taskmaster Youtube channel.

the Taskmaster asks: do you sometimes move down from the purple to the red field

This sentence makes no sense in English. Clearly there’s some Danish expression or saying being used here that’s been translated literally. From context you can sort of guess that it’s about Julie being angry and needing to calm down, but this whole exchange made no sense in the subtitles. I don’t even know if moving from the purple to the red field means she’s getting angrier or more calm. A clear translation failure where the translator didn’t realise this was some sort of expression and therefore didn’t get the meaning across in English. Had they understood this was an expression and understood what the expression meant, they could’ve either used an English equivalent, or chosen to just get its implied meaning across. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

That’s why just being able to recognise words and sentences is not good enough. You need to understand the source language well enough to know what’s being said, but also what is meant by what’s being said. You then need to understand the target well enough to be able to get the meaning across in a way that both makes sense in it and is reasonably faithful to the original. If you lack the former, you get this mess. If you lack the latter, you get what you see in a lot of scanlations of manga and especially Korean manhwa or Chinese manhua, where the translator recognises the expression in the original but has no clue as to the equivalent in English, so translates it literally and plops down a translation note. (Occassionally you get somebody who does think of the equivalent in English and just plops that in the translation note.)

What you see with this translation of the Danish Taskmaster in general is something that’s just functional enough to have as Youtube subtitles, but that’s it. A pity because the series itself is hilarious, with a nice group of competitors and a great Taskmaster and assistant. If you like the original, you’ll like this one as well. Having those substandard subtitles however makes it just that little bit harder to enjoy.

Not even leaving language untouched

Published on February 7, 2022Leave a comment

This bit in Marco Roth’s review of several Russell Hoban novels hit a chord with me and made me scrabble in my bookcases for my own copy of Riddley Walker:

Unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its logical Elvish languages, intended to provide an ordered universe for dualistic fantasies of good v. evil, Riddley Walker’s world is our own, warped to breaking point. The pleasure of puzzling over Hoban’s inventiveness is complicated by the horror of the novel’s premise. The hellish aftermath of nuclear winter isn’t funny, and every pun or chopped up bit of language is a trace of this, as well as a game for the reader.

Adam Roberts in his foreword to the 2012 SF Masterworks wrote about being sixteen in 1980 when reading Riddley Walker and “the pervasive, acute anxiety that nuclear war might break out any day”. I’m a decade younger than him and I also remember that fear growing up in the eighties, only receding in the latter half of the decade. It might not be a coincidence that this novel, though started the year of my birth, 1974, was only finished and published in 1980. Roth cuts at the heart of Riddley Walker with this paragraph: nuclear war as a disaster that not just destroys society, but language itself. It reminds me of Threads, which similarly argued that the real disaster of nuclear war wasn’t just the war itself, but the destruction of human culture in its aftermath. My own fears at the time were more primeval, as in just not wanting to die in a nuclear war. It’s only later that I understood that as the true horror of a nuclear war. The threat of the destruction of not just civilisation, but of humanity smashed back to the stone age, its history lost, unable to climb back on.

That’s the difference between Riddley Walker/Threads and most American nuclear holocaust fiction. By the eighties it was impossible to pretend here in Europe that a nuclear war could be survived, let alone won; there just isn’t any place to escape to if the bombs had started dropping. In America on the other hand, with its still massive wilderness, you could imagine surviving away from the cities, rebuilding something akin to civilisation. Whether that would’ve been true is another matter.

Translating the untranslatable

Published on August 8, 2021Leave a comment

English speakers have a fascination with foreign language words that don’t translate easily into their own language, as seen in this New Yorker tweet promoting an article on “untranslatable words” describing happiness:

From “utepils” (Norwegian, “beer that is enjoyed outside, particularly on the first hot day of the year”) to “mbuki-mvuki” (Bantu, “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited”), the Positive Lexicography Project gathers untranslatable words describing happiness.

Which annoyed actual translator Jocelyne Allen greatly:

Auuugh!! Nothing is untranslatable! You translated those “untranslatable” words in this very tweet! They were translated, thus they are translatable! Can we please stop with this stuff before I have a rage aneurysm??

I get where she’s coming from, because it is lazy and dismissive to call this sort of thing untranslatable, when in the same tweet they’re perfectly able to at leasst the concepts behind them. It’s also somewhat patronising, this idea of untranslatable words, there’s always that undertone of if we didn’t invent a word to describe this concept, how important can it be. Othering even, emphasising how strange or silly these foreigners are for having a word for drinking beer outside. So I get the frustration.

On the other hand, there is a difference between having a word for something and being able to describe something. You can describe “utepils”, as that anonymous New Yorker social media person did, but do you grok it the way a Norwegian would? Clearly translating it needs more than just describing it, right, because you can’t just drop in a charmless description like that every time it comes up in your depressing Scandinavian crime thriller. So not untranslatable, but translating it does mean it loses a bit of cultural specificity.

Now he lives on anxiety, coffee and chocolate — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on January 24, 20212 Comments

Enjoy this aerial shot of London as you start split Second (1992), as it’s about the last recognisable shot of the city.

And there we have the setting for this movie: London 2008, a city plagued by global warming and decades of pollution, which in practise means most of the sets are covered in scummy water and everything is fogged up. None of this setup actually matters to the plot and there isn’t any real reason this was set in the future. This is the least science fictional science fiction movie ever. Instead this is a combination of a serial killer movie and a buddy cop movie, just gussied up with a few sfnal props and weapons. Apart from the climax of the movie being set in a flooded Underground, there’s no real reason that this movie takes place in London either. In fact, most of the movies takes place on sets that could’ve just as well be used for some random American city.

Rutger Hauer isn’t necessarily the most subtle of actors even in the best of times, but I’ve never seen him chew the scenery as enthusiastically as he does here. Hauer started his career as a teenage heart throb in a medieval adventure series in the Netherland, before starring in several Dutch cult classics like Turks Fruit and Soldaat van Oranje. When the director of these movies, Paul Verhoeven, moved to Hollywood Hauer followed him. You know him of course as Roy Batty in Blade Runner, but perhaps also as the villain in The Hitcher, or from Flesh + Blood or Ladyhawke. His movies aren’t always classics, but they’re always entertaining. In Split Second he’s Harley Stone, a hard bitten cop who lost his partner to a serial killer three years ago. Now the killer is back and Hauer is on his tracks. the stereotypical loner cop, Hauer listens to nobody and doesn’t let anything or anyone stop him from pursuing the killer. Why he has to do all that in an American accent when the movie’s set in London is never explained.

Meanwhile almost every other actor in the movie is somebody who you’d probably remember from having guest starred on Coronation Street or from having had a critically acclaimed role in some worthy BBC drama. Here we have Alun Armstrong as the police chief Trasher spouting the usual cop movie cliches to Neil Duncan, the soon to be new partner to Rutger Hauer. Both of these weren’t new to playing cops, Armstrong having been in The Sweeney and Duncan in Taggart, but here they are in what is clearly an American cop flick, somewhat out of place. Duncan especially, though he’s well suited for playing the book smart, sensitive, health conscious rookie that will get on surprisingly well with Hauer’s paranoid veteran surviving on “anxiety, coffee and chocolate”.

That mixture of American cop cliches and British actors makes for a strange movie. It actually took me until this scene, some forty minutes into its one and a half hour run time that Split Second clicked for me. Once again a familiar scene. Hauer takes Durban to his favourite bar with Durban having won a little bit of his trust. As Hauer munches down on a full English and Durban asks for a fancy tea and a crossaint, they share theories on the serial killer. Meanwhile, in Hauer’s flat, his murdered partner’s ex-girlfriend is having a shower; cue the Psycho music. Cue also a quick glimpse of Kim Cattrall’s breasts, because of course. All this is played completely straight, but the absurdity of this sort of cop movie cliche playing out against a background track of the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin makes it all slightly absurd. And you can’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.

Because even in 1992 everything in this movie was cliched and hackneyed, yet you have a cast of serious character actors who all deliver their absurd lines with complete earnestness. Granted, this could all be a case of “I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen the house the movie bought”, but I doubt it. This feels more like a cast having fun with something they know on its own is bad, but by taking it ultra serious, can be made into something hilarious. And that’s the charm of this movie, even if it was done by accident. Having Hauer and Durban act the shit out of their roles in their own way is what makes this movie for me. Don’t watch it for the plot, or for the science fiction, such as it is. Watch it for actors having fun. Nothing in this movie really makes sense, but you’ll enjoy it nonetheless.