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ZOOMSHIFT

It is often said that constraints can fuel creativity. Well, the COVID-19 lockdown is a pretty big constraint.

Amid the sadness and death, it has been interesting to see the new art and culture that is already emerging. Creativity working up against the boundaries we have set for ourselves. Artists looking afresh at the technology we are using to communicate, and wondering what new modes of design and storytelling they might enable.

The most obvious example of this is video conferencing software. The grids of images that apps like Zoom use to display the other people in the chat have become part of our visual culture. I really enjoyed the Maltesers ‘Isolation Life’ series of adverts, and I love the video for ‘Phenom’ by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down (intriguing song, too).

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Liam Neeson and #BlackLivesMatter

The actor Liam Neeson is all over the news this week, following some comments he made in an interview with Independent correspondent Clémence Michallon. While discussing his latest film Cold Pursuit, he revealed that several decades ago a friend of his was raped. Since the perpetrator was black, his response was to spend a week prowling the streets, hoping he would find a black man to kill in ‘revenge’:

“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody – I’m ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson gestures air quotes with his fingers] ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could,” another pause, “kill him.”

This has caused justifiable concern, that Neeson behaved in such a dangerous and racist manner. Many people have noted that this is the literally ‘lynch-mob’ mentality, where the protection (or avenging) of women, is considered justification to murder black people. Continue reading “Liam Neeson and #BlackLivesMatter”

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Big Little Lies, Of Its Time In Three Different Ways

Big Little Lies is an HBO TV show, based on the Liane Moriarty novel of the same name. It stars Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, and follows the woven lives of several families living in Monterrey, California.
It was first broadcast in the spring of 2017. Following huge recognition the Golden Globe Awards in January, I decided it was time for me to watch the box set.
Each family has a child attending the local Elementary School, and there’s a murder at a school fundraising gala. A death is announced in the very first scene of the very first episode, but neither the victim, the killer or their motive are revealed until the finale.
The show strikes me as being very much Of Its Time, an emblematic cultural artefact of Western culture at the end of the 2010s. I think it does this three different ways.
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Multiple Matters: Twins in Fiction

Watson: Sherlock, could it be…
Sherlock: It’s never twins.

I wrote a very short piece for Multiple Matters, the official magazine of TAMBA.

Twins are a irresistible plot device, particularly for science fiction and fantasy writers who can have their characters appear to be omnipresent, to teleport, or even return to life. The ploy works for the same reason that random people obsess over the multiples they meet at school or in a buggy at the shopping centre: twins are are part of our natural world, but they are also somehow magical. Continue reading “Multiple Matters: Twins in Fiction”

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How Do We Make Diversity Scale?

It is the Oscar’s this weekend and La La Land is favoured to win Best Picture.
In this op-ed piece for the Independent, Amrou Al-Kadhi laments the way Arab characters exist on the periphery of most Western cinema.

Stories onscreen have the rare ability to arouse empathy for diverse characters in audiences across the world, so leaving out Arab and Muslim voices in such a context of global Islamophobia is particularly damaging. With masterful directors, sublime works like Moonlight happen; now the story of gay black masculinity in the Miami ghetto has become that much more relatable and mainstream. It is my genuine belief that if the TV and film industry had been more diligent in representing Arab characters – with all our humane, complex, intersectional three-dimensionality – xenophobia would not be as pandemic as it is today.

Reading this challenge to the film industry, I naturally began to think of how the literary community measures up on the same issue. Although I don’t exactly work in the publishing industry, English PEN works closely with publishers and writers, and the debate over who gets published and what gets published is always close and loud. Continue reading “How Do We Make Diversity Scale?”