Wis[s]e Words

Videostore Nostalgia

Published on August 24, 2025Leave a comment

At the end of an article in Vulture about the restoration and rerelease of a whole host of Hong Kong cinema classics, Bilge Ebiri engages in a bit of nostalgia for the time when he first discovered them:

Rewatching these films today, in all their restored glory, I can’t help but get nostalgic twinges about this period. It was an intoxicating time to be a young cinephile. While kung-fu films and other genre movies from Hong Kong had for decades fed the grind-house circuit and the growing network of Chinatown cinemas in North America catering to the diaspora community, the work of directors like Woo, Tsui, Ringo Lam, Sammo Hung, Ching Siu-tung, and others broke through among audiences, especially young film buffs, in dramatic fashion during the late ’80s and early ’90s.

A nostalgia I share, having been in my early twenties when these movies started hitting my local video store in the early nineties. I grew up in a sleepy provincial town in the Netherlands; if there was the kind of grind house circuit he mentions anywhere here, it was in cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam. My own town for years didn’t even have a cinema, and when it did it showed worthy ‘eat your spinach’ documentaries and arty films, not kung fu. As for television, there were only two over the air channels, no cable, until the late eighties. Dutch television did show movies, but again rarely the sort of cult fare talked about here. It was either the usual sort of family friendly blockbuster like The Sound of Music or kiddie friendly olden Age of Hollywood fare we got on a Sunday morning, Burt Lancaster pirate movies and the like. Which means I wasn’t much of a movie watcher until we finally got a video recorder, again sometimes in the late eighties.

Luckily we had a very good video store nearby, one that still exists though it now only sells tobacco. An independent store, at first I mostly rented all the big science fiction movies I’d read about but never seen, or only seen once on tv: the Star Wars Trilogy, Alien/Aliens, Terminator, Predator etc. But it also had a cult section where I found some of the weirder movies like Videodrome, Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats and documentaries about cyberpunk. And at some point it started an anime section, using Manga UK imports which is how I first watched Akira and Bubblegum Crisis.

Then, as Quentin Tarantino had made crime movies stylish again with Reservoir Dogs, the store also started carrying some Hong Kong action thrillers, again imported from the UK. The ones I remember are all by John Woo: The Killer and Hard Boiled, movies Tarantino referred to in interviews. That whole period, from roughly 1988 to 1996 or so was really formative for my tastes in movies, even though I spent years not watching much. I’ve never been a cinema goer, preferring to watch them on video and later DVD/bluray. It’s now easier than ever to do so, but I still sometimes miss heading out on a Friday night to select the movies to watch for the weekend, three for five from the bargain bucket and deciding whether it’ll all be Star Wars again or gambling on some weird looking cult offering.

free Palestine, end the genocide, and the BBC is complicit

Published on August 20, 2025Leave a comment

Over at Dazed, James Greig talks to Callum Johnson-Mills, who took the opportunity of being interviewed by the BBC over his A-level results to say “free Palestine, end the genocide, and the BBC is complicit”:

She also said, ‘Gaza is a whole different subject’, but I don’t think you can make that separation. You can’t escape this, no matter how hard you try, even on A-level results day. I recognise the ability for me as a teenager to take exams without fearing for my life, to pick up results without worrying about getting killed, and to be able to wake up in the morning and have breakfast. These are things which Palestinian people have been robbed of, especially Palestinian children who have such huge academic dreams and career aspirations. A lot of them don’t even have their lives now because of Israel’s actions.

Good lad.

Updown Girl, She’s Been Living in Her Early Medieval World

Published on August 13, 2025Leave a comment

This is quite interesting. DNA research done on 7th century burials in Kent and Dorset showed West-African ancestry in several individuals:

Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain. Focusing primarily on a sub-adult female from Updown in Kent, the authors explore the societal and cultural contexts in which these individuals lived and died, and the widening geographic links indicated by their presence, pointing back to the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa in AD 533–534.

Which means that even in the depths of “Dark Ages Britain” there were links with the outside world, stretching as far away as (North) Africa. As the research makes clear, the Updown Girl was clearly part of a family already settled in Kent for some time before she died. We already knew that African people lived in Britain during the Roman occupation, but having evidence they were also present afterwards is new, as far as I know.

It’s also shows off how much can be learned even from old archaeological finds: this girl was originally exhumed in 1989, when this sort of DNA based research was not even dreamt off.

Ruri and Nagi are in a proper teenager/adult relationship — Ruri no Houseki

Published on August 10, 2025Leave a comment

I really like this quiet little scene in the middle of episode five of Ruri no Houseki:

What’s being said here is unimportant; it’s the body language I wanted to show. The way Ruri, the blonde girl in the middle, acts towards Nagi, the woman to her right. She leans towards her seeking protection from the mild joke Yoko, the other woman, is making at her expense and ends up laying on Nagi’s lap as the sun goes down. That’s the behaviour of a child with their parent or other trusted adult and it sums up the relationship between Ruri and Nagi well. Ruri trusts Nagi to the point that she can act like the child she is, completely comfortable with her. In turn, Nagi remains the adult she is, not afraid to scold Ruri when she needs it, as in this scene from episode one:

Ruri's face is held firmly in Nagi's hands as the latter warns her about following the rules

At this point Ruri and Nagi had just met. Ruri liking jewelry but not the prices she needed to pay to buy even small jewels, came up with the cunning plan to go hunt for them up in the mountains, where she ran into geology student Nagi. As Nagi takes her along further up the mountain, they come across a sign forbidding entry. Ruri is all for ignoring it, but Nagi pulls her straight. If Ruri wants Nagi to help her, she needs to obey the rules. A very mature way of setting her boundaries, letting Ruri know the consequences of her actions and trusting that Ruri herself is sensible enough to do the right thing. When she does, it’s not mentioned again.

This is not the sort of adult/teenager relationship you see much of in anime. Anime parents tend to remain in the background, while in a slice of moe hobby series like this, when adults share the stage with their teenage protagonists they tend to be on the childish side. A good example being Akiyama Haruno from last season’s Mono, a lazy, slightly irresponsible mangaka who hangs around with the cinephoto club to gain inspiration for her manga series about a high school photography club. The only difference between her and the slightly mature for their age cinephoto club members is that she has her driving licence.

By contrast, the relationship between Ruri and Nagi is that of a child and adult. There’s a certain distance between Nagi and Ruri that you don’t see with Haruno and the cinephoto club members. What’s more, Ruri is also far more childish than most protagonists in this sort of series, in a very believable way. She throws tantrums sometimes, gets easily upset when things go badly, has a tendency to whine. She sort of reminds me of one of my nieces, old enough to be in the second grade of secondary education, very much turning into a proper grownup teenager, but who occasionally turns back into the child she was just recently. there are plenty of childish characters in anime, but none as realistic as Ruri. That’s what makes Ruri no Houseki stand out for me.

Can’t have a broad church if one faction just wants to wreck it

Published on August 1, 2025Leave a comment

This is an interesting anecdote to open your big article with about how Labour should be a broad church but the left can never be in control again:

Let me be more specific. In the summer of 2019 I was writing a regular monthly article for the online New Statesman. Within hours of publishing my latest piece, where I suggested Corbyn would do less harm as Prime Minister than Boris Johnson, they withdrew it. I was told I could continue writing for them only if I stuck to economics and did not mention to anyone what they had just done. I didn’t accept the latter condition, and have never been invited to write for them again. It meant I briefly felt I was doing the right thing and in reality the potential audience for my writing shrank.

I wasn’t following Simon Wren-Lewis back then, but did he ever mention it at the time that he was censored by a supposedly leftwing magazine for preferring Corbyn over Johnson? Not that I imagine it would’ve mattered much either way, but it seems sort of important that this happened. It certainly seems to have left an impression on him, but I fear Simon learned the wrong lesson from this experience.

As that last quoted sentence indicates where he regrets taking the right moral stance but losing his audience as a consequence, Simon seems to think it’s better to acquiesce than to fight and applies it to the party as a whole. The idea presumably that some compromised flavour of Labour in power is better than one out of power, no matter how ideologically pure. It’s the morality of the beaten dog:

However, while it is essential for the left to be part of the Labour party, it is also crucial that it never controls that party. To many who are not on the political left this may seem obvious. You just need to mention Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader, after all. But this is partly because the mainstream media treats ideas and many individuals on the left as ‘beyond the political pale’ while simultaneously treating ideas from the far right as worthy of discussion or even mainstream.
My own reasons for believing this part of the proposition are two-fold. First the Labour right will not tolerate the left controlling the party, and would rather sabotage the party than allow the left to control it. As they have demonstrated in more than one recent historical period they can be very effective at that. Second, Labour led from the left will never win power in today’s UK except by accident, because the forces against it are too strong (see also below). In both cases those facts may be regrettable, but they are nevertheless real. Many on the left believe it is better for the Labour party to be pure than to be in power, but I don’t.

In other words, a truly leftist Labour can never win because neither that internal clique of Blairite bangers nor the rightwing forces arranged against it outside the party will allow it and that’s why that very same clique should be in control. Simon doesn’t quite come out and say this, but that’s clearly what his analysis here is driving at. It’s all a bit vague because Simon insists in portraying everything in terms of “left” and “right” without ever defining these groups. It makes engaging him on this incredibly frustrating, as various critics have found out. He keeps retreating to this theoretical construct of the Labour party he created with minimal acknowledgment of the party as it exists right now.

But if the only groups mentioned are “the left” and “the right” and the former should never be in control of the party as his main proposition has it:

The Labour Party only works if it is a broad church that spans left to right, but only if the left does not have control.

The only conclusion you can draw is that Simon wants the right in control of the party because in his view it’s the only way it is allowed to take power.

He’s not wrong in this, as 2017, 2019 and 2024 have shown. The 2017 election was one Labour was widely expected to lose and lose badly, but instead it came in a hair of winning outright and slashed the Tory majority to the point it had to depend on the DUP for control of Parliament. That put the fear of god into the UK establishment and the next five years saw the mobilisation of all forces to prevent a repeat and destroy the left as a force in Labour. 2024 was the culmination of that project, a hardline Blairite party elected with an overwhelming majority. It neatly vindicates Simon’s thesis that the party can only win without the left in control, a shame the outcome is so shit.

And this is why Simon needs the left to remain in Labour, to provide the vision and morality the Blairite headbangers lack.

The first is that Labour’s right needs the left to at the very least critique its own ideas, and more generally to provide ideas and some vision. As Steve Richards writes, the current government is desperately lacking a political vision, and is even failing to point out the failures of the visions of other political parties (e.g. privatisation). The second is that the left can provide a much needed moral compass, as the Labour’s governments complicity in what many believe is genocide in Gaza clearly shows, and what a Labour government treating as terrorists civil disobedience groups who had become annoying (in part because of the habit of juries not to convict them) also shows. The third is that the left represents the views of a sizable proportion of the population, and it is better having that in the tent than outside it.

The Labour right also needs the left to remain in the party because otherwise Farage will be allowed in power:

The Labour right is delusional because the left also has the power to help put Farage/Jenrick in power. They can sabotage Labour, not in the same way as the right did when Corbyn was leader but to the same effect. They can help us get a Trump type government in the UK [3].

You think this is a problem for the Labour right and their responsibility to set right, but no because:

One of the delusions of many on the left is not to recognise the shift in UK politics that has occurred over the last few decades. It is a shift which means that, under a FPTP voting system, the left has no chance of gaining power.
[…]
But what many on the left find difficult to accept is that the struggle now requires them ultimately to make common cause with more centrist social liberals. While every attempt should be made to get a Labour government to pursue more socially liberal and less authoritarian policies, it has also to be recognised that Labour are never going to abandon trying to attract socially conservative voters, because only by attracting those voters can it stop the election of a right wing populist government.

It’s hard not to get the impression that Simon wants the left in Labour to completely and unconditionally submit itself to eternal rightwing rule here. What’s missing is any acknowledgement of the fact that this was already tried, from 2019 and Corbyn’s resignation onwards. There has been little to no resistance to the Blairite takeover of the party, indeed there was an eagerness to cooperate and start over, but Starmer and his clique have responded by intensifying their purges.

The right doesn’t want the ideas and morality Simon correctly sees as necessary, they’re happy with the state of the party and country as it is. Farage is not the threat to them Simon thinks he is either, as they’re perfectly happy enacting the same policies and engaging in the same rhetoric. Nor can you scare the left with him if Starmer himself is doing Enoch Powell cosplay already.

The overwhelming feeling I have about this article is that it might have been relevant in 2018, 2019 at most, when it was still possible to entertain the idea of a Labour Party that could do Corbynism without Corbyn, before it was clear that nope, the Blairites would wreck any party they weren’t in control of. The best time for a broad church Labour was when Corbyn was in charge and attempted to create just that, but the right overwhelmingly rejected it. To think we can go back to trying it in 2025, without the wreckers having been run out the party first is delusional or even downright criminal.