Sand Wars (2015)

     Sand Wars (2015) Our civilisation is built on sand. We have used so much of it that it has become a scarce commodity, worth stealing and smuggling. Almost all land-based sources have been used up. Australia exports huge quantities of it. I don’t know if Canada does, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This documentary shows that removing  sand from beaches and the sea floor is causing unexpected and dangerous consequences. You can find the doc here:
     http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/sand-wars
     Watch it. Sand is an example of how our taking the environment for granted prevents us from seeing what we are doing. “Selective inattention” is the psychological term for this phenomenon. ***

Margery Allingham. Pearls Before Swine (1945)

     Margery Allingham. Pearls Before Swine (1945) Campion, on leave from his overseas assignment (whatever that is) finds a dead woman in his London flat. She has been transported there by Lady Carados, mother of his friend Johnny Carados, an RAF pilot and war hero, who is about to be married. Lugg had helped Lady Carados. Campion only wants catch a train to Nidd, where his wife and child await him, but Supt. Oates ropes him in to assist in the inquiry. And so an extremely tangled mix of plots begins.
     Of course Campion and Det. Supt. Oates solve the crimes, but it’s an extremely tangled path. It feels very much as if Allingham invented an overly ambitious take with multiple plots and red herrings strewed about like so much confetti. Or rather bombing debris, the time is sometime in 1944. There’s the typical Allingham satire of British upper class twits, but since the plot involves traitors and black markets and blackmail as well as murder, she treads more lightly than in the pre-war novels.
     An OK read. **

Batman Begins (2005)

      Batman Begins (2005) [D: C. Nolan. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, etc]
     A typically convoluted story about good and evil in Gotham City. Well-done CGI of the city, the usual slam-bang-boom, fire-and-crash destruction, plus Ninja-style fighting. It’s a good attempt at providing a psychologically plausible back story for Batman, whose parents were murdered (deliberately) in a mugging when Wayne was about 10 years old. It invokes chivalry, loyalty, courage (defined as accepting one’s fears), and of course duplicity and narcissistic self-aggrandizement among the evil doers.

     Does it work? The Batman of DC comics was more of an abstraction of the Knight. This Batman is human, the fights are staged to emphasise his vulnerability. He nearly dies learning the fighting skills he needs. Alfred has to rescue him a couple of times. He has to work through some pretty heavy (if a bit hokey) psychology to become the Dark Knight.
     The movie is a fable, abstract patterns of in/justice, good/evil, protectors/destroyers, and so on threaten to overtake the human story without which the fable becomes merely an essay dressed up as a story. The figures that represent or express these values risk their lives, which engages our sympathies (even the evil Ducard, who wants to destroy the world because compassion has upset the balance that he identifies as justice, is complex enough to make him believable.) Romances happen in a fantastic universe, here technology stands in for magic, and a wise scientist-inventor for Merlin.
     I liked this version of Batman. He’s not really a series character, though. I suspect the sequels will focus more on spectacular crashes and ingeniously cut fight scenes than psychology. ***.

The Theatre of the Mind (2005)

      Jay Ingram. The Theatre of the Mind (2005). I re-read this because of a newsgroup thread about free-will, conscious vs conscious learning, etc. There’s obviously a lot of half-knowledge and mistaken assumptions out there. This book is 10 years old, but much of the research Ingram refers to is still not well known. Nor is it out of date.
      Two take-aways this time round:
      a) Our conscious mental life is like the glitter on the surface of the water.
      b) “Who can tell the dancer from the dance”?
     An excellent introduction to the problem of consciousness. Ingram doesn’t answer the central question, and doesn’t pretend to. He thinks there will always be a mystery at the core of consciousness, and I think I agree. ****

A Study in Scarlet (1933)

      A Study in Scarlet (1933) [D: Edwin Marin. Reginald Owen, Anna May Wong, June Clyde] One of the lamest Holmes movies I’ve ever seen. Terrible production values, dumb script, poor lighting and photography, and acting that would shame a high school acting class. Available as a free download, a waste of bandwidth. I watched the whole thing with a kind of horrified fascination: how could something this awful make it into the movie houses? BOMB

Artists of Alberta (1980)

    Suzanne Devonshire Baker. Artists of Alberta (1980) A survey of 95 artists, published with the help of the Canada Council, and with a somewhat misleading title. Most of the people represented here are instructors, full or part-time, at university art departments or colleges of art, and a large proportion are “of Alberta” only in the sense that they now live and work there. It’s a puff-piece. U of A press produced it, it was well printed in Winnipeg, a stamp on the fly-leaf states “With the compliments of the Canada Council”, it was a freebie for somebody. Not me, I found it at the local food-bank’s permanent yard sale, paid a toonie for it, worth more than that, I think.
     The biographical and artistic details appear in a standardised format, and as far as I can tell the works represent each artist’s style and subjects. They’re all technically well done and interesting, but only a few engage me. I recognised a few names, Thelma Manarey and Norman Yates for example. Abstraction of one kind or another and conceptualism dominate; it’s a very 70s/80s collection. As a record of what was being done in Alberta back then, it’s useful. But like many such surveys, it’s more a snapshot of the market than of art. Many of the pieces could have been done by anyone. There’s not much sense of personal vision or passion here. The pieces are pleasant to look at, most would function well as private or public decor. A few decades from now, someone may be able to trace a nascent Prairie School.
     Still, the book is a keeper, and worth a second and even third look. **½

Josephine Tey. To Love and Be Wise

     Josephine Tey. To Love and Be Wise (1950) A classic, with a twist that the alert reader will probably see before the denouement. I like Tey’s satirical eye: here, she skewers an artist’s colony that’s established itself in Salcott St Mary, a pretty little village in Orfordshire. They supply a nice field of suspects for DCI Alan Grant of the Yard. There’s also implicit meditation on the nature of love and marriage, shown, not told, through the various relationships, one of which is the driver of the crime. Like Austen, Tey believes that a good marriage rests on mutual respect as well as passion. Grant and Marta Hallard really should get married; maybe Tey would have manoeuvred them into this blessed state if she’d lived long enough to write more mysteries.
     As a police procedural, the book just barely passes. Grant’s relationship to his Sgt Williams is friendly as well as collegial. Commissioner Bruce can be testy, but is basically a decent sort. There are enough scenes of police at work to create the illusion, but Grant is really a private sleuth in police clothing. As such, he relies on intuition (“flair” Bryce calls it), and isn’t satisfied with a neatly solved case if one or two little details niggle at him.
     A good entertainment. ***