I don’t agree with everything he says but overall this is brilliant for anyone interested in the issue of drug use and prohibition, and particularly the varying legal and media responses to drugs. What I find a little uneven is his quasi-prohibitionism regarding alcohol while being much more open minded about illegal drugs.

Part of the problem I think is that he thinks of drugs as essential drivers rather than as operating in a dynamic relationship with the user. Also, he seems to think of drug use as independent of social conditions; the world is not what it was a few decades ago and it stands to reason then that this would be reflected in drug use patterns.

But overall, the coverage of how policy tramples over evidence is great.

I did not set out to plumb Nigerian-born female writers but here we are – two books very worth reading. The first, Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, I have not yet finished but offer the passage below as a teaser.

Like many books I like it is one of a tale containing many more tales. I suppose I might label its genre as constrained fantasy.

Young men at Madame de Silentio’s Academy learn practical skills that set us in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women. Here is a sample of the things we are taught:
Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence.

Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the whole class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanor.

In an interview, it was reported “Despite her impressive success so far, Oyeyemi doesn’t see writing as a full-time career, thinking it would be weird not to do a “proper job”. ” I hope she has changed her mind on that.

The second book is Ndeki Okorafor’s Who Fears Death.

I’m going to take the easy way out and quote from a Village Voice review of the book that describes it better than I could.

In the process of constructing this unabashedly neofeminist fable, Okorafor critiques Africa’s endemic poverty, gender prejudices, female circumcision, and the twin plagues of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism.

It’s an ambitious agenda for a single book, particularly since Okorafor also reworked the prose style of her award-winning teen fiction to better suit this, her first adult novel. But with few exceptions, it all comes together beautifully. Her pacing is tight. Her expository sections sing like poetry. Descriptions of paranormal people and battles are disturbingly vivid and palpable. But most crucial to the book’s success is how the author slowly transforms Onye’s pursuit of her rapist father from a personal vendetta to a struggle to transform the social systems that created him. SF and fantasy already claim many classic tales that are thinly veiled allegories of the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, even China’s “cultural revolution.” So little wonder that Okorafor appropriated the narrative strategies and loopholes of speculative fiction to tell a cautionary tale inspired by the more recent political horrors of Biafra, Rwanda, and Darfur.

He’s quite serious and I’m not sure of the origin of the usage of boning but it reminded me of Al Pacino in Scarface being confronted by Paul Shenar:

And then about the same time I ran across Lauren Bacall singing in To Have and Have Not:

She sings like someone who is pretending to be a bad singer – or shall we say if a frog sang this is what it would sound like.

Though it can be hard to get past the styles of acting in older films, in general the portrayed world is more aesthetically pleasing. There is not the same clutter we live with. Fewer signs whether commercial or regulatory. And even the interiors seem to have cleaner lines.

And that lack of clutter while sating the eye throws the focus back onto the characters and the narrative. I would also say that people seem to look more dynamic against these backgrounds (free from the signs of regulation).

I would also say that nothing kills action more surely than computers and cell phones and nothing makes an action film more interesting than having no guns (or very few) to rely on.

When characters actually have to figure things out, when they cannot fill their time texting and surfing, they tend to do things more interesting to watch. They, and we, are forced into the moment.

Fifth Element, one of my favourite science fiction films, has plenty of guns but it has few computers and no smartphones.

Dallas' mother reaming out the President

It zips along partly because people are not constantly connected. When they are not quite sure where exactly someone else is, or whether things are going as they should, they are anxious, and their actions become slightly uncertain.

Life is more interesting when you are discovering things rather than looking them up and people who are discovering things are much more fun to watch. Those perfect heist films only work because things go wrong.

But in the process of catching up on my noirs I caught the older Maltese Falcon (1931) (as well as the execrable Satan Met a Lady (1936). And though missing Greenstreet and Lorre, and not even in the same ballpark cinematographically, it was nonetheless a greater pleasure than I thought it might be.

The narrative is much more ham handed and much of the acting is still making that transition to naturalism (much of the widened eye checking for a reaction) but it is a sexier version. The older film was made before the code and thus they could get away with all sorts of things. Though Spade is a womanizer in all versions, Bogart is quite restrained in comparison to Ricardo Cortez. Another difference is that Bogart and his doomed colleague grin wolfishly and look the ladies up and down, and overall seem like just barely repressed rapists. In the earlier film, Cortez not only obviously sleeps with every woman he encounters but seems to actually enjoy it. He genuinely likes the women much more than Bogart does.

Of course, some of my feelings about the film are influenced by not understanding anyone finding Mary Astor compelling. Though in real life she had just come off of quite the scandal (one of her ex-husbands had made public her diary which detailed her many indiscretions) she seems dispassionate and quaint while Bebe Daniels (and also Spade’s secretary played by Una Merkel) are steamy in comparison.

But before I was distracted with the above I was thinking about one of my chief pleasures in these older films is seeing older and often quite beautiful versions of everyday objects in everyday use. For instance in the Falcon, Bogart uses a nifty flint to light his cigarette.

Ronson Lighter in Maltese Falcon

And in In a Lonely Place, they serve coffee from one of these..

And then in Dassin's Rififi, the heist crew having coffee in Paris are brought these things.

Apart from just being very good, Case Histories as a huge advantage of having one of the more intelligent and subtle actors today and the narratives are based on the brilliant books of Kate Atkinson. See this dialogue of the two of them..

Isaacs is one of those Brits who have created near iconic American roles (see Brotherhood) just like Dominic West on The Wire)

Case Histories like may other British shows of this ilk has a fondness for bluesy country music ala Lucinda Carpenter. The tune that struck me in this last one which I misidentified as Rachel Yamagata was actually Kris Delmhurst’s Since You Went Away. (Speaking of Rachel, check out this cut (video below) from her latest Chesapeake.)

But as much as I love this show, after The Wire it pales.

I’m into the second last season of The Wire and I’ve noticed that effect of many great shows in that it isn’t so much the involvement in the show itself but how other shows seem so weak after. I had heard that Once Upon a Time was worth a look but a few minutes in I just could not be bothered with this juvenalia in comparison to the deeply drawn characters and context of The Wire. Its almost impossible to find film that can compare when you realize how much resonance can build up when you have 30 hours of development versus 90 minutes.

But if I am stuck with film I will go old these days. I’ve been catching up on my noirs and what pleasures they are and like The Wire, they make a lot of modern films seem like crap. More on the next post on the specific pleasures of watching older films.