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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Monday, March 29, 2004
Dreamers Wake
To the Landmark Lumiere yesterday for an afternoon showing of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which I'd been keen on seeing for some time. Not so much for the Bertolucci -- I was only recently introduced to his work a few months ago when, feverish and clutching a recuperative bowl of Chinese soup laced with garlic, I finally felt able to tackle the three-hour DVD of the Last Emperor. No, it was Paris in 1968 that intrigued me. Hell, any reenactment of the spirit of 1968 intrigues me, possibly because I never get sick of hearing "For What It's Worth" on a soundtrack. But the Parisian student revolt I knew very little about, except for one slogan I'd picked up tangentially in a book on the Beatles: "Sous les pierres, la plage" (beneath the cobblestones, the beach). This, the book said, symbolized the Situationist spirit behind the revolt that John Lennon amongst others became infatuated with: that life is a dream, and therefore we as dreamers have a responsibility to make it beautiful. I like that sentiment. The older I get, the more subjectivist the universe appears, the more it makes sense. We are each of us in charge of dreaming our own dream. A fearful or pessimistic outlook on life will inevitably turn it into a nightmare.
So this was the spirit in which I entered The Dreamers, hoping to learn a little something more about life and dreams and a time and place in which both seemed important. Bertolucci himself was in Paris in May 1968. What could he teach me? The answer: not very much. The Dreamers, in fact, is two movies stitched together in a not very artful way. The first concerns a Parisian brother and sister played by Louis Garrell and Eva Green, who adhere to just about every haughty French stereotype in the popular imagination. With a melange of incestuous intrigue and Godard references, the pair seduce an American movie buff played by Michael Pitt -- a relative unknown whose main aim here seems to be to provide European directors with a younger, cheaper clone of Leonardo diCaprio, right down to the floppy hair and wide-eyed mannerisms.
The second story, given incredibly short shrift by Bertolucci, is that of the revolt itself. Which, if his confused storyline is to be believed, effectively begins when the government fires the head of the Cinamatheque Francaise at the start of the film. After that, we see only the briefest snatches until the equally confused closing scenes when it suddenly invades the dreamers' melancholic and suicidal reverie. Bertolucci's sole attempt to stitch the two narratives together is to make Garrel's character an all-talk-but-no-action Maoist. Which feels like a terribly half-hearted addition to his character: we can all see the hypocrisy in quoting the little red book but never leaving one's apartment. It doesn't take the intrusion of a DiCaprio clone with ambiguous views on Vietnam to point this out.
What Bertolucci evidently wanted to make was a film about a love triangle and bodily fluids (boy, does he love his bodily fluids). He also wanted to make a film about film. He's really good at that sort of thing. A genius, in fact; the images stay with you long after you leave the theater. And perhaps he wanted to point out that all political movements rise and fall on the actions of people on its periphery, those who are only dimly aware of politics. Point taken. But what of the more fully fleshed-out characters at the epicenter of the drama? The real dreamers of 1968, it seems, will have to wait a little longer for their homage.
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