The Bluestocking, vol 56: Bombs, Blade Runner and Brooker
Happy Friday!
Or unhappy Friday in my case, as today marks the last day before Labour, then Tory, conference. It's all furtive Twixes in hotel rooms and discussions about Brexit for me for the next fortnight.
This week, I reviewed Hillary Clinton's memoir, and by extension, all the people who are angry about Hillary Clinton's memoir.
Helen
Inside North Korea
Kim also sought to convey an ease with brutality, and embarked on North Korea’s most violent Party purge in decades. He executed two of his father’s seven senior pallbearers—his uncle Jang Song Thaek and the Army chief Ri Yong Ho—and expelled three others. His father had also executed senior cadres when he came to power, but killing Jang, an influential family member with deep ties to China, was an act of extraordinary boldness. The charges against Jang ranged from “treachery” to applauding “halfheartedly” when Kim entered the room. Many of Jang’s children and aides were also put to death, in ways that were intended to capture attention. Some were killed by flamethrowers; others were shot by anti-aircraft guns before outdoor audiences. (Media reports that Jang himself was fed to dogs proved to be false. He was executed by firing squad.)
. . .
Kim Jong Il grew isolated and paranoid. He allowed his voice to be heard in public only once, when he said, at a 1992 parade, “Glory be to the heroic soldiers of the Korean People’s Army!” On foreign trips, his aides brought home his feces and urine, to prevent foreign powers from hijacking the waste and evaluating his health. He was five feet two inches tall, and insecure about his height. In 1978, he ordered the kidnapping of his favorite South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, and greeted her by saying, “Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?”
Because I'm a child, I've highlighted the gawping bits of this fine Evan Osnos report from North Korea, but there's plenty of meat in there too. I'm really struck by his comparison of how hard we find it to read the mad stylings of official DPRK communications - all "hail to the bounteous leader" - and how hard North Korea finds it to understand the deeper purpose of Donald Trump's Twitter feed.
Katy Haber, Deeley’s right hand, suggested the Dutch star Rutger Hauer for the role of Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants. His look was perfect: the kind of blond Übermensch some future Dr. Frankenstein might dream up in a lab. Scott cast him sight unseen, but he wasn’t prepared for Hauer’s impish sense of humor, introduced by way of a gag that relied on the era’s less-than-progressive sensibilities. At their first meeting in L.A., Hauer walked in wearing a Kenzo sweater with a fox across the chest, candy-pink pants, and Elton John sunglasses.
Scott turned ashen. “He took me in the other room,” Haber recalls, “and he said, ‘He’s a fucking woofter!’ ”—British slang for gay. “I said, ‘Ridley, can’t you see he’s pulling a fast one on you?’ ”
This is a really good example of the operation of what I think of as the "Scrutiny Economy". Whatever you think of Ridley Scott's casual homophobia here, it's nothing more than an unremarked-upon aside in this story about the creation of Blade Runner. Who gets to be a richly textured full human in our society, and whose single mistakes or occasional bad opinions come to define them?
Sidenote: I rewatched the original Blade Runner in IMAX last night. God, it's gorgeous.
Happy News Corner
It's my birthday next week, so instead of worrying about turning 34, I'm going to reflect on the fact that the top photo shows Charlie Brooker at 35, and the bottom one shows him at 46. This is the Ageing Dream, people.
Quick links:
- A good time to re-read Jonathan Coe on Boris Johnson, and by extension - the failure of satire to hold politicians to account
- "I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan". An obituary of the colonel who stopped a nuclear war.
- "Perhaps the most obvious sign of the Cartoon Bank’s decline, as any cartoonist will tell you, is its website."
- I enjoyed reading this 538 piece on the likely 2020 Democratic nominee because a) that election cannot come soon enough; b) I like the instant message style format of these articles 538 does. It recreates the chatty tone of a podcast - or a WhatsApp group with your friends - and therefore seems very a natural and "now" way to do politics reporting. I'm going to make the NS team do something similar soon.
- "I wish I was like Amis, I really do, because, damn, that fool can write, but I am not 20 years old any more, standing in a bookshop all afternoon, trying to afford a book I could not put down."
- Thanks to Kieron Gillen's newsletter, I discovered this blog where a man is reviewing all the Number One singles. I don't know why, but I'm here for it.
See you next week!