Film Review: Lucy (2004): Stupider than we can possibly imagine

 Sweet baby Jesus, I feel significantly dumber for having watched that film.

I’d avoided it because of the stupid premise - the idiot idea that we only use 10% of our brain - but fancied a daft action flick, saw it on Netflix and thought “yeah, go on then.” I can suspend disbelief if a piece of work puts in the effort and remains internally consistent, after all.

Unfortunately, this film was not only more stupid than I anticipated, but possibly more stupid than I could have anticipated.

I’d heard enough to know that Scarlett Johansson got a package of drugs sewn into her abdomen by Korean gangsters, which was ruptured leading to her apotheosis - but as soon as this happens she begins to defy gravity.

Oh-kay, thinks I, is this a metaphor for the effects of the drug? If it was, I’d expect some change in lighting or some other visual queue. I suspect not.

Oh, she is instantly able to kill one of the bad guys with her bare hands and shoot another six like a videogame character.

And it just gets more idiotic. The character, Lucy, quickly develops god-like powers which she then fails to use when it would have been useful to do so. After the initial assault on Lucy, she is so powerful there is no sense of threat, no stakes whatsoever, as she can do literally anything she wants. And some of the lines are just cringeworthy; both Johansson and Morgan Freeman state “we were given life a billion years ago” - aside from a huge problem with the word “given”, this is just wrong as a quick visit to wikipedia would show. Freeman is supposed to be one of the world’s leading genetic researches but every word that comes out of his mouth is utter nonsense.

It isn’t a total shitshow - some of the visuals and action scenes are quite striking, and I’m actually quite impressed that Johansson and Freeman somehow manage to deliver their absolutely insane dialogue with a straight face (“you can type this shit, Luc, but you can’t say it!”)

Three out of ten if I’m being generous.

Book review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin: Not Quite the Sum of Its Parts

It's taken me a while to get around to this review, as I've really needed to cogitate on how I felt about this book.

I really loved aspects of this novel - quite a few aspects, actually - but overall I liked rather than loved the book as a whole, and it's taken me some thought as to work out why.

First off, the things I really liked: I loved the characterisation. I loved the premise. I loved the way Jemisin played with tropes - especially the Lovecraftian aspects, a thing that is very much in the zeitgeist at the moment with Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle and others. I loved the social commentary, even when it was far from subtle (the whiteness of the Enemy and the threat of gentrification chasing out the "real New Yorkers". The whole problem with Staten Island being part of New York, but separated - more because of White Flight and racism than a stretch of water.

But there was something that, for me, prevented the whole from coming together satisfactorily. I know it is the beginning of a series (although it follows on from the excellent short story The City Born Great) so that may be part of my issue with the structure, but it still seemed somehow lacking.

This book is very much a love-letter to New York City, to its resilience and culture and vibrancy, to its melting pot invention, its ability to absorb all comers and make them New Yorkers whilst allowing that diversity to add to its strength (not unique to NYC, of course; London is very much the modern prototype of this kind of metropolis).

I listened to the audiobook and must give a mention to the performer, Robin Miles. This is simply one of the finest readings of a book I have ever encountered, a full performance of character and subtlety and strength, aided by some superb production with the barest use of effects and music.

I may well amend this review - the book is clearly staying with me - and may well listen to or read it again before the next instalment.

A moment in time

I took this photo around eleven years ago. I’d been struggling with depression for a few years, leading me to lose my job. I’d been suicidal, had ups and downs, but been unable to pull myself out of the mire.

I had a wonderful girlfriend, who I’d met through work, and was living with her. She supported me, looked after me selflessly, and let me be a house husband and a step dad to her fantastic son.

But I couldn’t push the darkness away. I felt increasingly worthless and I’m sure some of that came out in my behaviour to her. Worse, I felt the depths returning - whether it was just the fluctuations of my brain chemistry, or the pressure of trying to be the good person I knew I needed to be but felt that I wasn’t.

I began to get terrified that the darkness would engulf me and this time take me, and one day she’d come back from work, having picked the boy up from school, and they’d find me bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

So, instead of trying to fix it, fix myself, I ran away.

I don’t know if she saw if coming, but one day I’d packed a bunch of my stuff into my backpack and waiting for her when she came home. I told her that I had to go away, for all of us, that I felt broken and couldn’t be there any more. I’d done it before but she didn’t let me go. This time she must have know I meant it, or just couldn’t take it any more.

“I’d have done anything for you,” she said.

I croaked out “I know.” I wanted to say but I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve you but that would have felt like begging to stay, and I really didn’t deserve that.

So I hurt her and the child who had come to see me as his father because I was hurting so much.

The next couple of years are hazy. I probably spent a lot of time laying on the floor trying not to feel anything. Somehow, I stayed alive.

I had a few lucky breaks that came along at times when I was able to take advantage of them. I connected with someone online who became a good friend, a nourishing relationship. I inherited a dog (on the second attempt; my sister had tried to get me to look after one dog that needed a home but I was far too angry with myself to be a good dog dad; the second time I was just up to the task, and the relationship, having to care for this other creature, helped me look after myself).

That lead to another thing. I’d joined a gym with my sister (again, thanks sis!) to try to regain the fitness I’d lost from all that lying around on the floor. We joined together so that we’d be letting someone else down if we didn’t go. She stopped after awhile anyway, but I really got into it (I’d always hated gyms). When I got my dog I thought “well, I walk him two or three times a day and never manage to burn off his crazy terrier energy. I’m sure running outside is just like the treadmill; let’s try that a couple of times a week!”

For the record, running outside is much harder than on a treadmill - especially as where I live “flat” is an alien concept - and I initially hated it. I stuck with it and, after about a month, something clicked. I became a runner, addicted to that endorphin lift and the trails and even the hills. I now run a half marathon at least once a month, have run a full marathon and, since I turn 50 next year, I’ve decided to run a 50k at some point to mark the occasion.

Then another thing cam along. I’d applied for hundreds of jobs and rarely got any response, bottled the few interviews I had because I was so nervous and unsure and afraid. Then one job I applied for gave me a callback. It was an emergency recruitment for a call centre who needed to take on a lot of staff, and didn’t have time for the normal interview process so were doing group assessments. Somehow, I came across as friendly and personable and competent and smart, and was hired on the spot. It was a sales job - inbound at least - but it was a job, and I found I was really good at talking to people on the phone.

Then, within a month of joining I was asked if I wanted to move to a more technical customer facing department. “It’ll be much more complicat-” I barely let my new boss finish the sentence “Christ, yes! Sales is making my brain leak out of my ears!” How had I come t believe in myself so quickly?

Life hasn’t always been easy. I had a couple of relationships that I wasn’t able to commit to. through fear. The depression and anxiety waxes and wanes but has never been as bad as it was eleven years ago when I took this picture.

I feel that I was so lucky. Firstly, that I survived this condition that came so close to killing me, that my sister did so much to help me (and the woman I hurt, and others), that my dog came along a point when I could return his love (he’s still with me and even though he likes to think he has the energy of a pup, his joints mean our outings are limited to walks), that a job fell into my lap and demonstrated that I had skills and intelligence and worth. There have been times I’ve almost been in tears when a customer has thanked me for going out of my way to help them.

I’m with someone else now. It’ll be five years next summer since we met at a comedy club. We don’t live together (partly as she has a cat and I have a crazy terrier) so maybe there’s less pressure, but sometimes I’m still terrified that I’ll hurt her. Early one she told me that she has a good bullshit detector and zero tolerance for it, though, so I count on that instinct.

So, if anyone reading this is going through any stage of the hell that is severe mental illness - as I once read, depression and anxiety together is its own special kind of hell - know that if you hold on things can get better. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, randomly - things can improve. Every day that you make it through is another chance to find light, to find joy, to find yourself.

You owe it to yourself to survive, and to those people who love you, and those people you don’t know yet who will come to love you.

( originally posted as an answer to a question on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-is-that-one-picture-that-describes-the-lowest-point-in-your-life/answer/Paul-Perry-6 )

Book review: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth: Rethinking the economy

 While I say that as well as fiction I read non-fiction, really I typically only read popular science, ancient history and some travel. One area that I never expected to be reading is the wannabe science of economics - but, as with politics, you might not take an interest in economics but it will take an interest in you.

There have been a slew of popular progressive economics books in recent years - from examinations of our broken system like John Lanchester’s Whoops! and Grace Blakely’s Stolen, to those that are more focused on looking at how we build better systems (The Spirit Level and Utopia for Realists), to the more hardcore economic theory (I swear I’ll get round to reading Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis!), and Kate Raworth’s book may be the best I’ve read at both outlining the problems and offering potential solutions in clear, straight-forward language.

It is an idea she has been presenting and working on for almost a decade. While her degree is in economics she was disenchanted by the blinkered, systematised thinking that shackles the discipline (as she points out early on, and again at the end of the book, while other social sciences seek out an encourage different ways of thinking, economists are taught that certain core principles are not to be questioned - no, more than that; they are indoctrinated into the mindset that there are no other ways of thinking.)

The idea of the doughnut is simply this: the hole in the middle is the lack of human dignity - insufficient food, water, shelter, healthcare, education. Those basics that we should allow to all people as a right.

The outer circle is the limit to which we can live with the finite resources of minerals, energy, food production, clean air, clean water.

The doughnut, therefore, is the space between those, where we as a species, as a culture, can provide a decent standard of living for every individual for the long term, without threatening the environment that we rely on for our survival.

It seems like almost too simple an idea - and an even simpler diagram, however she begins by pointing out how important visual signifiers are to us - the iconic map of the London Underground, Copernicus’ illustration of the heliocentric universe - the rising curve of progress and Paul Samualson’s simplistic Circular Flow diagram, picturing the economy as a closed loop that is taught in Econ 101 to this day. Raworth references sharing the ‘doughnut’ diagram with activists who respond effusively stating “YES! That is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to say!”

And if that was all this book was, it would be no more than an interesting idea. I am sure there are many who are happy to scoff exactly so without engaging, but Raworth both delves into the history of and problems with economic theory, and outlines ideas - both conceptual and real-world ideas actually being implemented - for how we can, and must, do things differently.

She points out how so many of the great economic theorists of the past are selectively understood - Samuelson knew his diagram was a simplification ad absurdum, of use as only the most broad idea for non-specialists; when Simon Kuznets came up with GDP as a measure of productivity, he specifically warned that it was necessarily a narrow measure that should not be used as a benchmark to gauge progress; back to John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (I always find it remarkable that most people who quote Smith appear completely ignorant of the half of his work in which he talks about social responsibility and warns against the dangers of subverting everything to the acquisition of wealth).

She thoroughly dismantles the consensus idea of economics that growth is the Ultimate Good (quoting a respected economist whom she doesn’t name, when asked why perpetual growth is possible simply responds “Because it has to be!”) to a more thorough debunking of some of the assumptions and models that underpin a pseudoscience that has come to dominate both public policy and public consciousness to a degree that neither the public nor policy makers feel they can question it.

On top of this, the author outlines the generalities of what we need from a new economics and gives examples that work in the real world, along with concepts that should be used in general. 

But this is not a utopian exercise; Raworth makes sure to state that change will be far from easy, and requires some extremely difficult choices. Nonetheless, the tenor of the book is ultimately hopeful, pointing out possible routes out of consumption-driven catastrophe to a future that is not only survivable and sustainable but equitable and regenerative, where we are not merely ameliorating the damage we do to our life support system but actively improving it.

I mostly consumed this via the audiobook, while dipping into the ebook - hence the sparsity of notes. I feel I need to go back for a closer read, to fully embed the ideas. I should do the same for some other books - the ones mentioned at the start of the review. For all the economics is a pseudoscience, it may be the most important factor in how we cope with the coming decades, impacting on everything from our jobs to the welfare state to climate change and alleviating mass extinctions, to production of food and energy and technology.

A must read, and must act on.

The world looks much more frightening through the cracks in the wall

OK, so that was weird.

I had my mental health assessment earlier this morning, a fairly straight-forward phone interview with a perfectly pleasant lass, mostly answering questions on a 0-4 (never, some days, most days, every day) or 0-8 (avoidance and impact of various mental states on various activities), then a more general discussion ahead of a more thorough consult. My throat clamped up a bit and at the end of it I had a little cry - just broaching these things is totes emosh when you've been doing everything possible to avoid it - then I headed out on my bike to do some chores (and clear my head, truth be told). I got back, had lunch and suddenly decided to put on music and do housework.

Before you could say White Winged Dove, I was boogying away to Stevie Nicks (don't you dare judge me) all over the house wielding the vacuum cleaner like I was Freddie Mercury wanting to break free. Cool, I thought, I guess that's just the elation of release, because I'm finally doing something about it. Then Leather and Lace came on. I sang along with Stevie's part and dropped my voice for Don Henley's and suddenly my throat contracted on "Could you ever love a man like me?"

That's it. I was done. I'd fallen from elation to despair in a moment and it was all I could do not to collapse in a heap. I know how I feel about myself, was it that? AM I so fragile? This had never been "our song" with any of my partners, but it did take me back to the time my first relationship, my longest by far, my most painful breakup. Was it every failure since, every time I've run away or sabotaged a relationship before it could - as it inevitably would - end of its own accord?

Or is it just that my emotions are opening up, ever so slightly, after being buried? Is this why I've built this shell around myself, because I'm afraid of truly feeling anything, afraid that I can't control my emotions and they might destroy me as they almost have before.

I need to try to be brave enough to face the world outside, but it takes a lot. Facing it without the shell is all the harder. And if I'm having this much trouble listening to Stevie, who knows when I'll be up to Judie.

Book review: Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman: Are we the bad guys?

Starting as dusk gathers on Brighton pier and the evening strollers are transfixed by a murmuration of starlings, Julian Hoffman takes us around the world showing us how human activity is ravaging the wonders of nature that both nourish our sense of wonder and are vital to our health and wellbeing as part of a thriving ecosystem. It is not a happy book. The awe that Hoffman superbly captures at the beauty of the natural world only underlines what we are destroying by our wilful blindness and our obsession with economic growth and measuring everything with a short-term monetary value. From a previously unknown species of spider in an abandoned English quarry to the magnificent Balkan lynx and the few scraps of tallgrass prairie in the American midwest, we are pushing out irreplaceable biodiversity with roads and shopping malls and monocultured crops. 

The author makes it clear he is not merely arguing for preservation for nature for its own sake, but because it is vital to human health and survival in the short, medium and long term. In one chapter he writes about an established set of allotments in London that not only provides food for locals but an area of green growth teeming with life, and an area of abandoned "waste ground" in Glasgow that nearby residents have turned into a park and nature reserve. Both are under threat from development and he begins by telling us "Of the following two places, one will be saved, the other destroyed." 

He does show us successes, and how small groups of determined people can fight and even sometimes win against the encroachment - as well as the above, there is some success on those tallgrass prairies, a patch of ancient woodland not five miles from where I write this (which, along with mention of other Sheffield woods in which I played as a child and have visited regularly since really brought home the value, as if that personal connection were needed), the former British Army testing site that, due to the danger of left-over munitions has remained undeveloped and become a remarkably vibrant and important habitat. The rejection of a new motorway that would destroy much of the Gwent Levels on the South Wales coast. 

However, despite this, I was left feeling bleak at the prospects. Yes, I am a depressive and currently managing a particularly low patch which may feed into my pessimism, but these patches seem so fragile, so vulnerable, so at odds with the economic forces that see everything as a resource to be exploited. In his final chapter he points out how many pieces of good fortune were needed to ensure that we still have a few slivers of the Cambridgeshire Fens that are undeveloped, and when we see that a drug for cattle is approved in Europe despite evidence that it is responsible for almost eradicating vultures when used in India, or that - despite a law and specific court orders making mining small islands in Indonesia completely illegal, this is openly ignored and corporations land heavy equipment to strip the vegetation and topsoil to scour the minerals beneath, causing run-off that buries and poisons the most valuable reefs on the planet, I find it difficult to hold out hope of change. 

I have known since I was young that talk of "destroying the Earth" is pure hubris. We are a blip on this planet and, whatever we do, it will continue and repopulate itself with new organisms, new diversity. We are here now, for this moment, and have a choice of how to treat our home and the creatures we share it with, a choice for the legacy we leave our children and grand children and great grand children. 

Still, as the cartoon says, for a brief glorious moment we had great shareholder value. 

Increasingly, I think I'm on the side of the David Morse character in 12 Monkeys.

Book review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

 Wow.

As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.

One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.

The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.

Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")

Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.

I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".

A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.