Is this Cthulhupunk? And Zombiecore?

It came from Mars … to ROCK!

Saturday night saw me at Ikebukuro Chop, a tiny underground live venue, to see a couple of bands. My partner’s friend’s friend’s husband is the singer for the band pictured above, The Lechery From Mars, whose style clearly begs to be described as Cthulhupunk. The music is a kind of raucous light metal, not really gloomy enough to fit the standard goth rock pattern of bands like Sisters of Mercy, and definitely with an edge of punk to it. You can hear it at the band’s myspace site. It’s a bit like a collision between Jello Biafra, the Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I don’t know what they’re singing about but I get the impression they take a light-hearted approach to horror and occult topics.

A servant of the elder gods?

In style, this band resembles a carnivalesque distortion of Garden of Delight or Fields of the Nephilim, and I suspect that the themes of their songs are similarly light-hearted reinterpretations of the original invokers. Garden of Delight act as if they really do believe in the ancient Sumerian gods and creeping abominations that they sing about, whereas The Lechery from Mars are probably just a bunch of guys having fun. Though I guess it’s possible that the bassist really is a creature from beyond space and time.

Invoker or Invokee?

Anyway, they were fun. Sadly – and this problem followed all the bands this evening – even though they were clearly playing with gusto and had a lot of skill, it was impossible to get a clear sense of what their music was all about, because the sound system was absolutely appalling. In a small room with low ceilings it’s a really bad idea to turn it up to 11, and on top of that the mixing didn’t seem to be very clear. There was a huge amount of that low-key electric humming sound when the bands weren’t playing, so I think something was wrong with the set up. In the tight confines of this space, the extreme volume simply meant that you couldn’t make out any sound beyond a roar. Taking these photos actually hurt when I crouched near the speakers (though maybe that was another manifestation of the dark will of the Elder Gods). Live Inn Rosa is vastly superior to Chop, and if you go there you would be well advised to wear earplugs. Though last time I went the sound was fine, so maybe it was just last night’s technicians…

After The Lechery From Mars we made a switch to the band Baal, a three piece that could probably best be described as operatic hardcore: a kind of high-tension mix of bands like Insurge with good old fashioned hardcore power, Ministry meets ebm. You can hear them at their myspace page, and their website gives a nice range of promotional pictures that pretty much capture their style. Their visual style is very reminiscent of post-apocalyptic, mad-max style survivalist, but when they played Chop they had added zombie-attack style injuries to their necks. It’s hard to see in the photos I took but it really gives them a zombie survivor look. Have we finally stumbled onto Zombiecore?

Post-apocalyptic Magua got bit!

It’s a nice mixture of post-apocalyptic zombie survivor, punk, and basic hardcore aggression. I frankly thought that hard core was long dead, smothered by its own genre restrictions,  but it’s nice to see new things being done with it in the city of lights … hardly surprising though, considering the amazing quality of Japanese live acts. Which makes the terrible sound mixing even more of a disappointment – these bands should have been raising the roof with their style, aggression and skills, but instead we were all being stifled like experimental subjects for some kind of new sonic death ray. Hopefully next time I see them the sound mixing will be better, and I’ll be able to experience the full joys of this new musical genre, Zombiecore!

 

 

Statistical Proof A Game of Thrones is Misogynist

I want this to go smooth and by the numbers …

The chart above shows hits on my old blog post A Game of Thrones and the Misogyny of Imagined Worlds between 23rd February and 19th May 2012. The second season started on 1st April, and there’s a clear series of weekly peaks in views on my post, that occur between Tuesday and Thursday each week – corresponding to blog searches in the USA on Monday – Wednesday. The peak varies by week, but they’re a week apart and anyone who has any experience with time series can see in that data a shift in level, probably change in variance, and strong seasonal signal. Additionally, the height of the peak varies from week to week and I soon noticed it corresponds with just how nasty the treatment of women was in the episode of that week. So, in this post I’m going to show the effect, and give a numerical estimate of the extent of misogyny in each episode of A Game of Thrones, using crowd-sourcing based on google hits on my blog. Note that almost all the hits shown in this data series – 245 in April – are from google searches (though I think one week there might have been a link put up on facebook). This post is nearly a year old, and usually my year old posts (bar one or two techy ones that attract continual regular hits) get very few hits, and certainly never attract a pattern.

Methods

(Skip this if statistical methodology makes your eyes bleed).

I built a simple log-linear regression model using time, cyclical pulse functions for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (the date for the first, second and third day after the show is released in the USA) and episode. Episode was set to zero for all days before the 1st April. This enabled the peaks to be (partially) fitted, and also allowed a specific magnitude effect for each episode. The model was not adjusted for serial correlation because serial correlation is notoriously hard to fit in series with low numbers of observations. I also suspect that the tight nature of the seasonality (7 days) compared to the unit of observation (1 day) in a short series and the sharp peaks will prevent models from converging, and this is what happened – I tried fitting a generalized estimating equation model with exchangeable correlation and got divergent estimates of correlation. Standard backwards stepwise model-building methods were used to eliminate unnecessary variables, with the usual strict inclusion criteria (a variable was out if it didn’t get a p-value less than 0.05 on a Wald test). Given the small number of observations, small counts in early parts of the series, and the fact I was driving this model like a Westerosian Ox-cart as it was, I figured it was best to avoid interaction terms of any kind.

The exponentiated coefficient for episode 1 incorporates a general effect of increased interest in the show with the onset of new seasons, but by calculating ratios of other exponentiated coefficients, one can estimate the degree of misogyny for all episodes relative to episode 1. Predicted values were also produced and plotted against observed values.

Results

Results of the model are shown in Table 1. Hits increased by a factor of 2.4 for episode 1 compared to pre-release hits, and each week the peak was on Wednesday, when hits were twice the values for Monday or Thursday. Hits declined by 1% per day over the period of data collection.

Table 1: Model Results

Variable	Odds Ratio	95 % CI	P value
Intercept	4.69	3.44 – 6.38	0.001
Time	0.99	0.98 – 1.00	0.2
Tuesday Peak	1.44	1.09 – 1.91	0.01
Wednesday Peak	2.06	1.61 – 2.63	<0.001
Episode 1	2.38	1.50 – 3.78	<0.001
Episode 2	2.58	1.51 – 4.43	0.001
Episode 3	1.95	1.03 – 3.72	0.04
Episode 4	3.63	1.79 – 7.36	<0.001
Episode 5	1.31	0.56 – 3.08	0.5
Episode 6	2.07	0.82 – 5.20	0.1
Episode 7	3.04	1.12 – 8.27	0.03

Note that episodes 5 and 6 are indistinguishable from background (pre-release) noise in their intensity of misogyny. Figure 1 shows the predicted values derived from this model, plotted with the observed values, and shows relatively good fit, although the model fails to reach the dizzying heights of misogyny displayed in some of the observed hits; but this could be the fault of that facebook link creating outliers, so we won’t get too angsty about that.

Figure 1: Observed and predicted numbers of views

From these results we can estimate the relative degree of misogyny of each episode, shown in Table 2. All estimated misogyny ratings are relative to episode 1.

Table 2: Misogyny Ratings for Season 2, Episodes 1 – 7

Episode	Rating relative to episode 1
Episode 1	1
Episode 2	1.08
Episode 3	0.82
Episode 4	1.53
Episode 5	0.55*
Episode 6	0.87*
Episode 7	1.28

*Not significantly different from background noise.

Thus, the most misogynist episode was episode 4, while episodes 5 and 6 were indistinguishable from background noise. Although episode 3 was of lower misogyny rating than episode 1, it did attract significantly more views than during an equivalent period before the release of the show.

Conclusion

Viewers around the world increased their rate of searches about misogyny in A Game of Thrones, and rates of searching increased most in the days immediately following the release of each episode. The most misogynist episodes were:

• Episode 4: Sansa is stripped and beaten in public in the throne room; Joffrey forces one prostitute to beat (or sodomize?) another after they are sent to him to “sap the poison” though he will remain “a cunt”; Malesandre gives birth to a wicked shadowy abomination after an improbable pregnancy
• Episode 7: The strange and overly sexualized encounter between Jon Snow and his prisoner in the North; Sansa relives her near-rape in the previous episode; Jaime successfully taunts Catelyn with the memory of her husband’s infidelity; Daenerys loses her dragons and is reduced from her previous pride to dependency on Ser whatshisface
• Episode 2: Theon Greyjoy uses a woman like an object in his ship, abandons her and then fails to recognize and subsequently tries to fuck his own sister

In contrast, the least misogynist two episodes were:

• Episode 5: Theon is shown no the respect by his men, who obviously fear and obey his sister; Brienne proves herself to be tough and honourable; Daenerys rejects a marriage proposal; Arya is generally excellent
• Episode 6: Talisa the field nurse shows herself a spirited pacifist; Arya is once again generally excellent; Osha the wildling girl saves the Winterfell boys; this episode has some rape scenes and the delicious hypocrisy of Cersei’s attitude towards Sansa compared to her own betrothed daughter, which would be why its misogyny rating is higher than episode 5 – presumably Arya and Talisa save it from being higher

I think the relative ratings are generally quite representative, though perhaps an adjustment for the downward time trend needs to be incorporated to make them more accurate. This model fairly accurately fits to the data on search hits for this topic, and in my opinion sorts nicely between the most and least misogynist offerings. There is strong evidence that web search numbers correspond with the density of common signifiers of misogyny in any one episode (rape, mistreatment of prostitutes, degradation of childbirth through black magic, vicious anti-woman language, use of women as sex toys without regard for their feelings or identity, and women’s sexuality being either used as a tool for personal gain or expressing itself in incongruous neckbeard-fantasy ways). Hits are much lower on weeks where strong female characters take control of their own lives and act sensibly, even where their situation is difficult and/or oppressed.

Obviously, no one believes that google searches are reflective of some underlying truth about what is or isn’t misogynist or sexist. But I think they do at least show that a lot of people are disturbed by the images and themes in the show – disturbed enough to get on the internet and look to see what others think of the issue. This show has a deep streak of misogyny, and it isn’t going unnoticed.

 

Current Viewing: John Carter of Mars

John Carter came out late in Japan, but I got a chance to watch it last night after a day of role-playing, and while I was impressed by the authenticity of its representation of Barsoom, I wasn’t so impressed by its general cinematic properties. It was a fun romp but it suffered from what seems to be a way too common problem in modern action/SF movies: too much plot. In this case the plot had been laid on thick because the movie had too many themes, but in its defense most of these themes were attempts to work all the essential points of the setting into a single movie. So we had white apes, treacherous Therns, Tharks, a bit of lost-princess plot from one of the later books, the river Is and the environmental problems of Mars all rolled into one movie. It probably would have been a much better idea to make the movie a relatively faithful representation of the first book, and then run on to making a series if the first one had been successful – it could be quite a good franchise if the first were a hit. Instead, the movie has the major components of three or four books compressed into the one plot, and it made the plot unnecessarily complicated and broke the flow of the story.

It also suffered from another common problem – silly plot devices that don’t work and just waste time, something that also happens in TV. For example, why did John Carter have to go attack Zodanga only to discover that the battle was around Helium, then suddenly have to rush back with all his Thark mates? That’s 2 minutes of a long movie that just aren’t necessary and add to the sense of silliness – it seems to have taken him just a few minutes to get from Zodanga to Helium, where previously it took a whole night, and somehow a whole horde of Tharks flew after him even though none of them had ever flown before, without crashing. This kind of stuff isn’t bothersome in isolation but as it adds up across the course of the movie it changes the tone from “I’m suspending disbelief here so I can enjoy the four armed men slaughtering each other” to “oh come on, this is getting ridiculous!” In movies like this, you need the story to pare back on unnecessary suspension of disbelief so that you can accept the existence of a 9th Wave Ray Gun without dispute.

The 9th Wave Ray Gun, as far as I can recall, wasn’t in the original books and was inserted entirely so that we could have Therns in this story rather than waiting for book 3. As a change of plot I’m fine with that, since we get Therns; but I guess the purests will disapprove on principle, and also it adds complexity. The plot of the original book was quite fine, thank you, and we could have happily had a simple adventure involving Deja Thoris (who, by the way, was a stunner!) and the Tharks and left it at that. Ray guns were really unnecessary.

Ray guns were especially unnecessary since this movie was already struggling against a significant design flaw, that is very hard to solve on the big screen: the world and all its races are fundamentally preposterous, and if you’re going to have to sit down to watch this stuff you need, once again, for all the unnecessary preposterosity to be stripped out. You have blind white apes, a dog like a slug that can run at the speed of sound, levitating skyships, great big 8 legged mounts, transportation to mars, and did I mention the four-armed blue-skinned freaks who hatch from eggs and live in a horde without families or education of any kind, and have tasks and are twice the height of a man? I suppose compared to all that ray guns are pretty bog-standard actually… in any case, the setting all the characters and most of the plot were preposterous, and I think that might explain why it was a bit of a flop at the box office. A shame, really, because it’s a pretty fun movie, overall, and if they stripped out the extraneous stuff it could have been a really really good adventure movie and a very good interpretation of the books.

I do think its interpretation of the books was quite good, and I think it also had some very well done adjustments to small points that make it palatable to a modern audience without changing the main thrust of the original. For example, John Carter’s civil war record is unchanged but his rejection of his military history enables the viewer to be sympathetic to the struggles of an ex-slave holder; his encounter with the Apaches is subtly reshaped so that, while they remain a threat and he has to flee from them, their “savageness” can be more easily interpreted as a matter of perspective rather than absolute natural fact … that is, they have their own motivations, which Carter tries but fails to appeal to, rather than just being inchoate savages who want to kill him. Deja Thoris retains her spice and sassiness, rather than being weakened for the movies, and although occasionally seems to need Carter’s help just a bit too much, avoids that common pitfall of modern action movies of being suddenly rendered useless halfway through. The savagery of the Tharks is retained, but all the stupid stuff where Carter teaches them how to do their own cultural stuff better is dropped, and we also get something resembling an explanation for his rapid comprehension of the language. His super-hero status is much less maddening in this movie than in the original, though it’s still hard to understand why everyone thinks he can save the planet just because he can jump high. Deja Thoris can build an experimental ray gun, but she obviously finds this kind of ability nowhere near as useful as Carter’s ability to leap buildings with a single bound, and appeals desperately for him to help her take on a guy whose super power is “destroys cities with a wave of his hand.” Maybe she’d read the novel, and understood that no harm will come to her hero…

This is a good rendition of the setting, with some fun action scenes and very attractive lead characters, and the plot is broadly comprehensible though it fails in the usual ways that modern action movies do. If you’re a fan of the novels and you haven’t seen this already, I recommend giving it a go. If you enjoy pulp science fantasy and want to watch a swashbuckling film from the genre, it’s a good way to spend two hours. But if you’re a serious connoisseur of SF action movies and won’t settle for B-grade silliness at any point, I’d say this is probably not worth your time.

 

Six Against the Stars: Carnivalesque Space Opera, with Gods

Six Against the Stars is a two volume space opera adventure by Stephen Hunt, whose work I have reviewed many times before. Six Against the Stars has an unlikely crew of adventurers thrown together against their will to try and prevent a rebellion in a far future stellar confederation. The main character is a useless rocker from Earth, whose only interests are bedding women and preserving his own skin but who has been tricked by circumstance into meddling with interstellar political affairs. The other characters include a strange book-shaped robot, a mass murdering martian who is a member of a weird orientalist death cult, a brain-enhanced academic,  a kind of nice version of Novacks from Altered Carbon, and a spunky female clone assassin. The universe they adventure through is a recognizable cross between the universe of Firefly and the Culture, but the whole thing is imbued with Stephen Hunt’s consistent imagination for the slightly strange, the mystical and the chaotic. One of the alien races that vies with humans for control of the galaxy is a race of machines that slaughtered their makers; another race are centaur-like monsters; and at one point we are introduced to distant creatures that swim in gas giants, and were created by a mad king who aimed to forcibly re-engineer his entire population to be gas-living winged creatures. Earth is an isolationist clique of Gaiaists, who have redesigned their planet so that they never have to do any work – they just step outside and pluck medicines off a tree, and even their racing cars are sentient genetically-engineered animals. Just as in the Culture, ships are sentient AIs patterned on humans, and as is becoming increasingly common in many modern SF novels, sublimed races essentially equivalent to gods are commonplace in the universe.

It’s a fun galaxy to romp through, and the lead character is sufficiently open-minded and rumbunctious to be willing to take it all in and make the most of it. Hunt is also obviously having fun with the genre, playing around with silly and far-fetched ideas on many occasions and doing his best to make his galaxy fun enticing. To give a sense of the carnivalesque nature of his creation, I’d like to share a little section from one chapter, in which we learn the back story of a single, largely pointless character who is present for about three chapters of the entire two novels. This cyborg briefly shares a cell with our hero the bard, and has this story to tell about his origins on earth:

I was an officer in a war, a great war, although in the end I think I realised there was precious little greatness in it. Unfortunately for my future prospects, I discovered our war leader was receiving unholy advice from a terrible entity. With the prejudices of my age, I believed it to be a demon, though with hindsight I now believe it was a traveller from the future. When I investigated further, myself and a small group of army commanders uncovered a rival time traveller at work, a woman trying to oppose the madness worming its way through our society. We allied ourselves to her in an attempt to halt the war.

When asked whether they won, he tells our hero:

Hardly. We attempted to murder our leader, but to my shame we failed in the matter. The rival time traveller saved my life from a traitor’s death, if you can call what you see remaining before you saved. My family buried a corpse with no brain inside its skull, and I was secretly transported offworld on the ship of a species called the archivers. How the archivers had been bargained with by my time travelling ally, I do not claim to understand; they certainly made poor hosts. I lost everything that was dear to me when I was forced away from Earth: my son – my darling wife – my career and my name.

The finale of this conversation proceeds to the inevitable revelation of the cyborg’s name:

“We are brothers of Earth. You shall call me Erwin, my friend.”

“Erwin,” Horatio said the new name. “I think there is a world in the Stobb Clouds called Erwin’s Luck.”

“Perhaps,” said the cyborg.”But if so, it is not named in honour of my unhappy life. Never named after Erwin Rommel.”

So there you have it. A throwaway page of book 2 of the story, but it turns out that Hitler was a time traveller and Rommel spent the next 10 or so millenia trapped in a cyborg’s body, wandering the universe at the beck and call of a mysterious alien race known as the Archivers. Who knew?

I think for many people this carnivalesque style will be a disappointment – it certainly sets a very different tone to the gloomy seriousness of Iain M. Bank’s Against a Dark Background or the slightly over the top striving of Star Wars. But I enjoy the creativity and the playing with the genre – sci fi can be a tad too serious at times, and it’s nice to see space opera treated with a slightly lighter tone, without tripping over into Space Balls style puerility. It also has some really good ideas mixed in – for example, like everyone who writes space opera, Stephen Hunt has specific visions of hyperspace, and in this novel we’re treated to the Ebb, a strange area of the galaxy in which hyperspace travel slows down and becomes unpredictable – and where bandit civilizations flourish. He also has a fairly brutal conception of the colonization process, and some nice ideas about AIs and the relationship between human and machine which, though superficially sillier than Banks’s visions, are actually pretty cool.

As always, this novel falls down when we start to experience intervention by god-like creatures to help kick the plot along. I think I’ve read 6 or 8 Hunt novels now, and in all but two of them the plot has been dependent on divine intervention. I’m used to it and it often fits well within the story arc and the cultural framework, but it also leaves me with a slight feeling of disappointment. Fortunately his characters are excellent and his story-telling very pacy, as well as being thick with ideas, so it’s easy to overlook the Deus Ex Machina; but I do wish he would give it a miss occasionally. Otherwise I think that this might perhaps be his best work, though there’s a wide range of material to judge from and the comparisons are hard. But if you’re interested in a light-hearted space opera with cool characters, fast plot and a chaotic feeling, then this is the tale for you. And, once again, I would like to recommend Stephen Hunt’s entire corpus (or at least, everything I’ve read) to my reader(s). He is great!

 

 

The Artist: Exploring Neo-Liberal Industrial Policy Through Silent Film

The Artist is superficially a silent film about a love affair between two movie stars in the 1920s. On a deeper level it’s an exposition of neo-liberal, or even Randian, industrial policy.

Essentially the movie charts the entrant of a new company into an established industrial sector. The new company offers a new production mode, and rapidly steals market share from the old company. This company rapidly loses sales, and soon is reduced to selling off its assets in order to maintain even a minor presence in the market (in an ironic filmic twist, even though these assets are sold on the open market in a clearing house, they end up in the new company’s asset portfolio). The CEO for the new entrant, being a bit sentimental – and perhap having some New Deal-style political ideals – offers to use some of its considerable assets and popularity to help the old company adapt to the new market conditions[1]. However, the old company have imbibed the Randian ideology of their times, and refuse to accept any form of charity or support – the CEO prepares to liquidate his remaining staff, but at the last minute the CEO of the new company realizes a way they can combine the classical skills of the staff with the technology of the new company, and the old company is revitalized – able to develop into a niche market combining the new technology with the old artisanal skills.

I guess this could be a metaphor for many of the great market battles of the last 30 years, especially in the technology sector – Apple vs. Windows, fixed line phones vs. mobiles, China vs. Japan, Japan vs. the UK, etc. The main weakness in the metaphor, in my opinion, is brief moment of weakness when the CEO of the new company offers charity to the old company – it breaks the otherwise forcefully presented focus on competitiveness and survival of the fittest. In comparison to the seamless perfection of the analysis of homosexual sexual politics in 300, The Artist is a weaker political metaphor, but I think it makes its point well. Particularly, it’s clear by the end that everyone – producers and consumers alike – is enriched by the competitive atmosphere, and that any attempt to protect the old company would have been bad both for its own staff, its rival and society as a whole. As the CEO of the new company says, “people are tired of seeing actors mugging at the camera to get their point across.”

The movie’s medium is, in my opinion, its greatest flaw, although I understand the purpose of presenting the movie in the outdated medium and having the crucial benefits of the new technology break through at crucial moments. The mechanism by which the new and innovative ideas of neo-liberal industrial policy are presented is itself out-dated and old, and makes the characters and ideas hard to engage with. Perhaps the story would have been better presented as a computer game? Also, it’s hard to have sympathy with a lead character who would rather shoot himself than take a job offer from a woman. But otherwise, it’s an okay love story (with very attractive stars) and nice presentation. See it if you like teary love stories and/or Randroid politics.

—

fn1: could this part of the film be an attempt to posit a voluntarist anti-trust atmosphere in Randian market places?

 

Tokyo Zombie Survival Spots: Hakone

Your zombie getaway vehicle...

As a holiday location Hakone is a little over-rated, but as a zombie survival spot it has some good points. It lacks the defensibility of Mount Takao, but its relative remoteness, inaccessibility, climate and water features offer some survival opportunities. It’s also quite a beautiful spot to be torn apart by zombies in, though that’s not our intention here. Hakone is located about 2 hours’ journey West of Tokyo (if you catch the bullet train part way) in the province of Kanagawa, and consists of an ancient volcano caldera, with a lake in the middle of thickly forested hills. From some locations within the caldera it is possible to see Mount Fuji, though the weather around here is quite bad and it is often cloudy or obscured. The nearest large town is Yumoto, which is on the far side of the hills from the lake. Hakone itself is accessible through one or two twisting, winding roads that ascend and then descend the caldera. There is also a train and a cable car. The lake is a tourist resort in spring, summer and autumn, and features a rather amusing ferry fashioned on a pirate theme (see below), as well as a variety of paddle boats and smaller cruisers. There are three towns on the lakeside, linked by a single road that winds through thick forest, and by the pirate ferry.

Pirates vs. zombies!

Review

Location: Hakone is reached by only a small number of winding roads, which feature many switchbacks and narrow, easily blockable chokepoints. The road is, of course, lined with towns, but these are small and easy to pass through and mostly lower down the mountain – also unlikely to be zombified before the larger towns closer to Tokyo. It would be quite easy to pass beyond a certain point and block the road against zombie encroachment, forcing them to work around the blockade and struggle up through densely forested steep mountains.

This brings us onto a new aspect of zombie hording theory: how do zombie hordes proceed? I presume they flow along the path of least resistance, which in an urban setting would mean that they flow along roads, with more zombies on wider roads. Furthermore, all the work I’ve read and seen on zombies suggests that they have very limited, if any, information exchange. This leads to some interesting dynamics, because it means that they don’t behave like ants or bees – they don’t lay paths and follow them. So it seems reasonable to suppose that as they leave cities they are more likely to move down major roads, and if they don’t find prey they will slowly disperse. Thus, only small numbers can be expected to proceed along narrow, winding, low-prey-density country roads, and at some point they can be expected to stop and mill around – as we see in quite a few scenes from the major documentaries. This suggests that a remote location reached only by narrow, winding roads with low-density settlements sparsely located (as is the case on the higher reaches of Hakone) is likely to be missed by the majority of zombies.

Defensibility: Hakone has a harsh winter – right now, in mid April, the cherry blossoms have not yet bloomed, for example, which must mean that between December and March it is very cold – it even snowed when I was there last weekend. A lot of people think that zombies freeze in the cold, which in the case of Hakone evokes the possibility of a kind of “zombie line,” above which zombies can’t pass. Defenders of Hakone could venture into the snows of late winter/early spring and slaughter frozen zombies on the slopes of the mountains. Additionally, this winter cold, though harsh on people living in Hakone, offers the possibility of a three month respite from zombie attacks – surely a valuable haven of stability in a zombiepocalypse.

Also, Hakone has the lake, and the pirate ships. In a pinch, one could sail one of these pirate ships to the middle of the lake, dragging a couple of pedal-powered swans with it, and set it up as a safe haven far from the zombie hordes. The pedal boats could be used to travel to the shore for supplies. At least in the short term this offers an opportunity to ride out the worst of the initial period of the apocalypse, and to work out what to do next. Then, there are many areas of the shore which are so thickly forested that they are almost impossible for a zombie horde to enter rapidly without making a noise. One could clear a section of this forested area and set up some fields and a house, combining potato crops and potentially a rice field or two with fish from the lake (and seabirds). If zombies attacked, a quick hop onto a pedal-boat would get one out to the pirate ship and temporary safety. There are also, of course, buildings higher up the hillsides, which could be quite easily fortified. Unfortunately a lot of these are large hotels, which offer the advantage of being able to hide deep inside, but the disadvantage of being extremely difficult to secure.

Concealment: Being in a bowl, most of the locations inside Hakone are visible when one enters the valley, so things like smoke and lights at night might be visible to zombies cresting the mountains. However, from the valley base each town is largely disconnected from the other towns, with the bulwark of the mountains and thick forests preventing zombies in one town from seeing another. Setting a barricade on the roads between the towns, it would be quite easy to ensure that the only zombies that approached the town did so along a narrow and defensible road – those that entered the forest would likely soon lose sight of human habitation and wander listlessly, losing their horde properties and becoming less threatening to a community.

Sustainability: Hakone has a lot of tourist establishments, offering short-term sources of food, and it has a guaranteed supply of water (the lake and its tributary streams) as well as the opportunity to fish for food for most of the year. However, the steep mountains and harsh winter weather may make long-term survival here difficult, and it is likely that, outside of fire wood, there are no more reliable sources of energy – perhaps a dam could be built, but it would be a significant engineering task. Enterprising survivors could turn the many onsens in the region into a power source, but this would likely require the support of some skilled engineers. Thus, if one wants to make Hakone sustainable as a survival location, one would need to ensure that one had at least one engineer and someone with a fairly robust knowledge of farming when one arrived. Otherwise, it is likely that Hakone would serve best as a winter redoubt, somewhere to retreat for the first winter after the apocalypse while one attempted to work out a long term survival strategy. Things could get bitter here in winter, and not all survivors could be guaranteed to emerge at spring, depending on how well stocked the hotels were and how many survivors fled here.

Conclusion

Hakone offers short-term survival opportunities, the chance to build a home and spend a winter free of zombie harassment while a group of survivors tries to develop a long-term plan. The steep hillsides, harsh winter and lack of local power supplies mean that it may not be a viable long-term survival location, but its secluded location and the presence of many hotels means that it may be a suitable location for a small number of survivors to sit out the worst of the initial stages of the apocalypse. It’s worth remembering that in the first stages of the apocalypse, 30 million or so Tokyo residents are going to zombify and head into the country – having a secluded location to wait for this process to stabilize is a very useful first plan. So there are worse places to go than Hakone, but it is potentially less defensible and more difficult to survive in than Takao. It lacks one significant aspect of Takao – height, and the ability to make low-tech zombie traps. But it has one significant advantage – the opportunity to retreat to the lake centre if a horde approaches. As a short term survival choice, it is not perfect, but definitely better than attempting to survive within Tokyo.

 

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries: Australian Crime Fiction Exotica?

I’ve started watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, an Australian TV show based loosely on the series of Phryne Fisher murder mystery novels by Kerry Greenwood. The basic idea behind these novels and the TV show is simple, effective and fun: Phryne Fisher is a young (28 year old) Australian woman who has returned to Melbourne after serving as a nurse in the Great War (1914-1918), having received an inheritance and a title from a distant aunt in the UK. Suddenly wealthy and flung into the licentious era of the twenties, she starts an investigative agency, and begins meddling in police affairs, as well as having many affairs. She’s “not the marrying kind,” and of course in the twenties this kind of attitude is scandalous but also increasingly accepted. The implication in the TV show (I’m not sure about the books) is that she comes from a poor background and has a sad past (in the books this is her wartime experience as a nurse; in the TV show it’s her younger sister, who was murdered). Since 1918, she tells us, she “hasn’t taken anything seriously,” and this is the atmosphere in which she conducts her investigations. She also collects poor people around her: she has adopted two orphans, and is close friends with a pair of communist activists, one a wharfie and one a cabby.

The TV show definitely has its flaws – sometimes the acting is a bit wooden and it feels like the directors weren’t sure if they were writing a comedy or a drama – but this is the normal experience of watching Australian TV. Typically, the only TV shows that Australian directors can make with any confidence are shit-boring dramas about enormously boring middle-class suburban lives, quirky comedies about rural idylls, or gritty stories of political corruption. Anything else is approached with a kind of self-conscious dread of being caught being pretentious, and this trepidation inevitably spoils the product as the director tries to inject a bit of self-deprecating humour, or gets caught looking over their own shoulder checking that they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. It’s an Australian thing. This self-consciousness is why Australia can make excellent quirky rural comedies (e.g. Seachange) but will never, ever produce a decent science fiction show. Something like Firefly is physically inconceivable to the average Australian movie critic – merely glancing sideways at the script for an Aussie Firefly would cause 99% of Australian movie critics’ heads to explode[1].

So, having attempted to break out of the standard mold of Aussie drama, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is already painfully self-conscious. But if you can deal with that (and I’m sure it will relax as future episodes are unveiled) you get an actually pretty excellent TV show. Phryne is a fun character: she’s got guts, she’s going against convention, she’s clever, she’s compassionate and she’s lusty. Her two working class friends, the wharfie and the cabby, are intensely Australian men, laconic and kindly and macho all in one, simultaneously shy and big-hearted. Her maid, Dot, is an amusing combination of sassy girl-next-door and Catholic repression. The setting is unashamedly Australian – the Ballarat express[2], the Melbourne University boat club, flying a Tiger Moth out to the countryside to meet “Vic” – who leans in the doorway and talks out the side of his mouth in just the way you expect of an Aussie shearer – the dodgy Turkish baths and the backyard abortionist behind the pie shop, they’re all classic Australian settings. The characters also convey that strange Australian combination of conservatism and vital, progressive energy that makes our politics and culture simultaneously so small-minded and so visionary. For non-Australian viewers this show manages to present Australia in a suitably exotic light even though it’s set in Australia’s second largest city. It’s a nice introduction to some of Australia’s wilder history, as well as to the very special physical environment of South East Australia, which in its own way is easily as exotic as the Top End. At any moment you expect Phryne to just waltz out of the city and go solve the mystery of hanging rock.

Another thing that this show does very nicely is its depiction of gender issues. The twenties were an era of newfound sexual liberation against a backdrop of essentially very conservative sexual values, and this show does a good job of depicting the sexism of the time without making it menacing or overbearing: it depicts this sexism as contested and malleable, as also is the homophobia and racism, so that we don’t have to endure a stultifying atmosphere of overpowering misogyny such as mars shows like A Game of Thrones. Phryne is clearly liberated not just because she is a woman in the twenties, but because she is rich; the women around her are not so lucky, and we see this, but we also see how they make their own place in the world despite adversity, and how the men of the time adapt and respond to these challenges to traditional gender roles. Even though as a crime show it has license to be grounded in “gritty realism,” we get a much better example of how to depict institutional sexism without creating an atmosphere of woman-hating, which I think directors with much bigger budgets might benefit from watching.

I guess for people living outside Australia this TV show is going to be hard to see – it’s been produced by our public broadcaster but it’s not available over the internet if you live outside of the country. I’m sure there are ways, though … and if you’re interested in seeing a nice depiction of how Australians view our own history, through the vehicle of a fairly well-designed (but occasionally overly self-conscious) murder-mystery show, then I recommend this. Obviously, as well, the twenties are a fun era full of progressive girls wearing splendid clothes and men who spout over-the-top English. However, if you can’t abide shows with slightly stilted acting that don’t quite know what they want to be, or you can’t handle anything that isn’t standard American crime fare, then you should probably steer clear. I like it though, and will be watching more where I get the chance.

—

fn1: oh, I wish someone would write one!

fn2: which seems to take all night, even though Ballarat is – what – 3 hours from Melbourne?

 

A Weekend of Monster Documentaries

Too Lazy for Monster-hunting

I and the Delightful Miss E both have colds this weekend, so we decided to have a lazy weekend in the house, watching monster documentaries. We weren’t quite as lazy as the pictured monster, who couldn’t even be bothered lifting his head through most of the weekend, but about the only time my pulse rose above resting level was when I learnt about the kinds of horrors that ordinary citizens in Madrid have to endure. And my god, were they horrible. It’s nice to sit safe in your home learning about the kinds of troubles that people in the Western Hemisphere face, being reminded of how much more civilized life in Asia is. Although I must say that I sometimes got the impression that the third documentary I watched wasn’t real. Sometimes it just seemed, well, acted. Here is my review of the three documentaries I watched.

Rec: Violent zombie bio-containment in Madrid

Rec is an accidentally-shot documentary about an incident in a Madrid apartment block, filmed a few years ago. The film starts off as a simple TV show, with a presenter and her cameraman planning to spend a night with the Madrid fire brigade filming their activities for a show called While You Were Sleeping. I think they must have changed the name of this show for the documentary because I can’t find any evidence that it’s real, but it is an excellent idea for a TV show so I think people should make this kind of show. Anyway, after a few hours of boredom the team are called out to an incident in an apartment block, where a woman appears to be locked into her apartment, and the documentary crew go with them. When they arrive they are greeted by the apartment residents, who are in the hallway, and two policemen. The “normal incident” turns out to be a monster situation – some kind of zombie in the apartment attacks one of the policemen, and mayhem breaks out. However, before they can do anything to flee the building is surrounded by police and health inspectors and sealed off, and they are warned that any attempt to leave will have “drastic consequences.” They are then required to stay in the apartment block while, one by one, the residents and visitors turn into zombies. The whole thing is recorded by the documentary crew.

This documentary is genuinely one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, after The Descent – which we all know was just a movie. The people are so ordinary and unprepared: the residents consist of an uptight mother and her daughter, some Chinese migrant textile workers, a seedy older man who thinks he still has it, and an intern from the local hospital. No one has any idea what’s happening until the dead start coming to life, and they all start blaming each other (until they settle on the Chinese as scapegoats, of course). They can’t agree about a plan, refuse to follow the orders of the policeman, and don’t have any community feeling to bind them together in adversity. Meanwhile, they’re being lied to by the police outside and hunted down like animals by a terrible beast inside. The panic builds towards an incredibly tense and terrifying conclusion, and much of the action happens in claustrophobic, tangled spaces, or in the dark or just the light of a single spotlight. It’s one of those situations where everyone needs to understand the basic principles of zombie theory, be ready to apply them, and be ruthless and steadfast in sticking to them. Sadly they don’t do this and every time the group fragments or fails to get it fast enough, someone dies. The editing of the documentary is very well done too so it’s sparse with extraneous details, doesn’t make you feel sick or confused from the jumbling images, and gives you a clear sense of what’s going on. It’s so good it could be a movie, and indeed I did feel like I was watching  a movie as the facts were being unveiled. Unfortunately a few years later an American director made a movie, Quarantine, based on the events in Madrid, and in watching the preview for that movie I got a spoiler showing me how the situation finally is resolved. My advice is not to watch the trailer for Quarantine. Why do people put the ending in the trailer? That’s crazy.

This documentary is hard going but very powerful and educational, and it again reinforces the lessons learnt in The Descent: if you’re up against a countable number of undead/generally grey-skinned opponents, and your resources and strength are limited but you have a couple of good weapons, absolutely the best thing to do is to take a stand in one, strong, defensible position and destroy them as they come at you. Do not attempt to run and hide, do not try to find out more about what is going on than you immediately need to know, do not split up and most of all destroy them before you start to run out of energy, light, or esprit de corps. Especially if you are in a building surrounded by police, so all you need to do is survive until they can work out what to do. And most of all, don’t go creeping around in dark hallways and rooms trying to work out who is still alive and what is going on. The lessons of this movie will help anyone who is faced with a supernatural or viral zombie threat of the kind we all need to prepare for.

Trollhunter: The truth about Norway’s troll control program

Trollhunter is a found-footage documentary, based apparently on 283 minutes of footage that turned up at a Norwegian TV station and was verified and pieced together by its editors. The documentary was filmed by some college students who were originally on the trail of an unlicensed bear hunter, only to discover that he is actually a troll hunter. Initially cold, he finally opens up to them and allows them to follow him in the troll hunt. Apparently Norway has always had trolls, but they are confined to specific territories and if they escape those territories the troll hunter, Hans, is sent to kill them. These trolls aren’t like D&D trolls: they’re up to 100m tall and enormously powerful, and they can smell the blood of a christian. The documentary tells us quite a bit about their biology and habits and so we learn that they aren’t supernatural at all, though they can be killed by exposure to sunlight: they’re just very big, very old predators that have been driven into the wilderness by humans. Unfortunately, the government is keeping their existence and the existence of the troll control program a secret, which might explain why the documentary is based on found footage.

This documentary isn’t terrifying like Rec but it is a fascinating, occasionally violent and disturbing, and very exciting kind of animal documentary, like going in pursuit of 100m tall lions or something. It has a good pace, although they do sometimes spend too much time filming shots of the fjords, and it unveils the truth of the situation in the same way that the filmmakers themselves learnt it, which is an excellent technique for documentaries about monsters: by giving this point-of-view style, the documentary maker encourages the viewer to feel like they have themselves stumbled upon these hidden facts about the supernatural world, and so makes the viewer more likely to believe the truth of the story – though obviously as an avid RPG player, I didn’t need any convincing as to the existence of trolls. I just didn’t realize they were so big! Or so well controlled by the Norwegian government, which is apparently up to its neck in conspiracy and cover-up to prevent panic and chaos. Usually when people talk about the dark secrets behind the Scandinavian success story it’s something about suicide or youth unemployment, but I never realized it was actually troll control. A fascinating insight into how the government handles supernatural problems in a stable, social democratic society and well worth watching.

Diary of the Dead: Badly made Zombie hoax

This “documentary” is really, really hard to believe. First of all, although it’s easy to believe that I could miss news about a single weird situation in an apartment in Madrid, it’s really hard to believe that the kind of chaos this documentary describes could have happened in the USA without my noticing it. For the brief period of the documentary it’s as if the world has ended, though obviously that can’t have happened since, well, I’m sitting here writing this and the person who filmed this documentary openly admits that she was able to edit it and release it to us. I really hate it when documentaries about serious subjects like zombie incidents try to exaggerate the importance of them, like the world has ended or something. The second hint as to the falsity of this documentary is its title, which is clearly a play on the names of the famous zombie movies – I even have a suspicion that Romero had a role in this. The third clue that it’s a hoax is that it appears to be acted, and badly acted at that. It’s like a bunch of student actors thought they could reproduce the success of the Blair Witch Project, but through a hoax zombie outbreak. Only they did it really badly.

The documentary claims to be the work of some film students who were out in the woods making a horror movie for class when a huge zombie outbreak occurred in the USA. As the social fabric breaks apart they travel across Pennsylvania in a Winnebago, first to find their families and then to find a friend, while one of the students films everything that happens. It is this film that becomes the documentary. Thus the documentary makers claim to have been in position to film the situation as it happened, though they admit that they edited a little and added soundtrack and effects “to scare you: because perhaps if you’re scared you won’t make the mistakes we made.” Unfortunately, I was really unconvinced that they were doing anything except making a B-grade movie. The acting is so bad as to be self-evidently badly acted, and the narrator tacks on this self-important moralizing about the role of the cameraman and the media, as if they were a seasoned (but tedious) war photographer, rather than a jumped-up student; and this moralizing is almost begging you not to take their “documentary” seriously, especially since in between the moralistic voice-over we’re constantly being reminded that they have no choice in doing what they’re doing. Also they all seem emotionally really shallow compared to the behavior of the people in Madrid. I know those people were Spanish, but they reacted more realistically and emotionally to the deaths of strangers than our student documentary-makers do to the deaths of their own family and friends. While it takes the people in that apartment a good half the movie to work out that they’ve stepped out of ordinary life and into a horror movie, these kids figure it out as soon as they hear a radio broadcast about a single dead person coming back to life. After that, they’re acting like survivors in a zombie movie with nary a whisper of complaint. It just doesn’t work. As a documentary, this movie is uninformative, overblown, overly moralistic and shallow. As a work of fiction (which is what I think it really is), this movie is badly acted, self-referential, poorly scripted and sentimental.

It’s also really cheap to portray a movie as a documentary without warning the viewer. Honesty is essential to the production of documentary film: how are the people desperately trying to tell us what happened in Madrid or Norway going to be believed if there craft is undermined by movies  posing as documentaries? People should know what they’re seeing from the start, or the educational and important messages of a film like Rec will be missed amongst the dross. So, give Diary of the Dead a miss but watch Troll Hunter and Rec if you want to educate yourself about how to deal with the ever-present zombie and troll threat.

 

Can Zombies Cross Water Barriers?

Extreme Fishing ...

In comments on my review of Mt. Takao as a zombie survival spot, commenter’s Claytonian and Paul raised the complex and controversial issue of Zombies and water. Claytonian even went so far as to raise the radical (but in my opinion very interesting and challenging) notion that zombies might retain some human instincts:

come to think of it babies can swim so zombies might have the instinct left

This raises a lot of issues for zombipocalypse survival planning, since there are a lot of benefits to establishing a water barrier. In this post I’ll describe these benefits (essentially rehashing my response in comments) and then look at some of the possible planning problems that arise from consideration of zombies and water barriers.

The benefit of water barriers

Water barriers aren’t just good because of their ability to keep out zombies. If the barrier has freshwater, it provides a potentially unlimited source of water and sewage for a small community (only the latter if its seawater). Water barriers offer an uninterrupted view which, while it may be useless against zombies on the sea floor, is very useful for identifying incoming human threats – and these are not to be discounted in the post zombie world. If the water is flowing, it offers the potential for long-term construction of energy systems (water wheels). But perhaps most importantly, a water barrier contains fish, which means that in addition to establishing a buffer zone, a community on an island can use this water barrier as a source of (potentially unlimited) protein, which can be obtained with limited skills and without needing to make a great deal of noise or effort. Furthermore, it’s fairly likely that fish don’t attract zombies, whereas mammals might, so as a protein source fish are a much much safer option than farming. By finding a suitable island within a reasonable distance of a city, it may be possible to establish a sustainable community, with easy access to valuable resources in the city, that is relatively well protected from zombie assault. The biggest problem the survivors are likely to face is then going to be marauding groups of survivors: islands will be in high demand after the zombiepocalypse, and people will kill to take them.

Can zombies swim?

Water barriers will be most successful if zombies can’t swim, but the definitive text (World War Z, 2006) suggests that they can walk underwater, and that they will slowly spread out under the sea as they seek human prey. This means that eventually zombies will arrive at your island, and that in the science of that textbook, they will appear randomly and intermittently without warning. This means at the very least you will need to keep a constant watch, though a random process of diffusion suggests that the further your island is from shore the lower the rate at which zombies will arrive. Obviously some system of inshore nets or wires may help in the watch process, but these may require a lot of work and be hazardous to establish. Claytonian’s swimming suggests that Zombies will have a more purposive process of attacking islands, choosing to swim towards them if they sense food but otherwise not swimming – if one assumes that zombies function according to some kind of basic laws of energy conservation, they will presumably prefer the least energy inefficient method of movement when there is no reason to use a more intensive one. Of course, it may be that zombies aren’t governed by such constraints, and that hordes or individuals will occasionally choose to swim and can potentially swim huge distances without effort. This problem can still probably be partially managed on an island, since if it is more than a few hours from shore the action of wind and water will likely disperse hordes sufficiently to render them much less threatening if they stumble on an island.

So then, an important question arises: can zombies communicate and form hordes underwater, and do they retain the ability to hone on prey when travelling by water?

Zombie hording patterns

It seems reasonable to suppose that zombies find movement underwater more difficult than on land -there are special obstacles and the water impedes movement, not to mention the issue of currents – and that they require some kind of sensory function to identify prey. This suggests that even if a horde encounters evidence of humans living in an island within sensory distance of shore (e.g., light on an island 300m out) they won’t necessarily be able to approach it as a horde. Seeing the light, they enter water as a horde but once underwater they are disoriented, blind, no longer able to see the light, and the horde begins to break apart. Walking along the bottom they will soon enter lightless zones, and won’t be able to communicate; presumably then the horde begins to disperse, but furthermore, in those zones they will have no knowledge of where their target is. This suggests that the horde will then behave as a random entity, with zombies heading in all directions. Assuming they entered on a straight line path to the island, some will likely wash up ashore, but their arrival must surely be staggered and incoherent. The only way they can arrive en masse is if they are both attuned to each other through a supernatural force, and attuned to supernatural emissions from quite distant life forms. But there is no evidence from any of the extensive research on zombies that this is the case: they seem to require some sign that a human is there, and can even be fooled by smell (The Walking Dead, 2011) or by convincing acting (Shaun of the Dead, 2oo4) or by various forms of stealth and silence (28 Days Later, 2002).

This suggests that even if they can walk underwater and cross very large distances under the sea, zombies will not be able to attack an island as a horde with the same ferocity as they can attack a survival spot on land. In remoter areas this may mean it may be possible to run lights and sound at night, with relatively little fear of intrusion, even on an island relatively close (say, 500m) to shore, because even a large horde will be broken up by water and arrive in a staggered and easily destroyed fashion.

Conclusion

The obvious benefits of islands as a long-term sustainable community setting, combined with the potential for a water barrier to disrupt zombie horde accretion even when located quite close to land, suggests that islands are ideal survival settings regardless of the particular level of aquatic adaptability of the undead, and that even islands quite close to land – within sight of occupied areas – may be suitable survival settings in a zombiepocalypse. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you will be safe on an island 30m from the shore in Tokyo bay, but it does mean that a reasonably well placed island with no direct land access provides a very strong base to establish a community of survivors in relative safety. The value of islands as a survival location increases significantly if the survivors are fleeing in an area of very dense population (e.g. Tokyo or New York) since even if ultimately the island is overrun, its facility in slowing down hordes will provide survivors a location to regroup and gather supplies before moving on to a more distant island.

The most significant problem in choosing an island to escape to is likely to be human survivors, who will defend their location ferociously precisely because of these benefits. The best advice is to get there first, and heavily armed.

 

The Decline of British Civilization Through Boxing

Saturday night was boxing’s equivalent of a neckbeard giving a naked reading of Carcosa on Sesame Street. It was the chavtastic moment when the final nail was hammered into the coffin containing heavyweight boxing’s credibility. The first hint of the sport’s rapid decline was evident when Tyson returned from prison to “knock out”  a series of patsies; it looked beyond salvation when that same man turned cannibal; but briefly under the rein of the Klitschkos we could all pretend that it had regained some life. But on Saturday night, surely, the sporting public gave up on the farce that is the “sport” of heavyweight boxing, as two classic representatives of everything that is wrong with modern Britain re-enacted a classic Friday night in Guildford, while the only civilized representatives of the sport looked on in horror and barely-disguised scorn.

Of course, the brawl was just the sad end of a sorry series of events, any one of which would have seen the end of a man’s career if perpetrated in a less forgiving, more reality-based sport. The scene was the face-off between the 40 year old Vitali Klitschko (46 fights, 44 wins, 40 KOs), “Dr. Ironfist,” from the Ukraine fighting out of Germany; and 28 year old Dereck Chisora (18 fights, 15 wins, 10 KOs), whose win record is lower than Klitschko’s knockout rate. Klitschko is one of a pair – between him and his younger brother Wladimir they own all the titles in heavyweight boxing – and the talent is so thin on the ground that they have to stoop to beating up men like David Haye, the third leg in Saturday night’s sad showdown. Chisora, perhaps hoping to psyche out the un-psychable Ukrainian machine, Chisora engaged in a series of pre-fight antics that would embarrass anyone with any taste: first he slapped Vitali Klitschko at the weigh-in; then, he spat water in Wladimir Klitschko’s face during the pre-fight introductions. In between this, he refused to allow Wladimir to witness his hand-wrapping, which required some sensitive negotiations and led to a delay in the fight. The Klitschko’s response to this behavior was typically level and measured: after the slap, Vitali was heard to say “You’re fucked now Dereck, you really are fucked,” but otherwise didn’t do much (and revealed in the post-fight press conference that he wasn’t able to knock Chisora out because his right hand was injured). The video of the water-spitting incident shows Wladimir (59 fights, 56 wins, 49 KOs) licking his lips and giving a tight little smile, but no other response – this man is his brother’s prize, and there’s a lot of money at stake, so he restrains himself from taking revenge on a man who is so clearly beneath his regard.

Really, these are not men you want to anger. And it’s a sad indictment of the management of the sport that Chisora even tried: had he engaged in either of those antics before a rugby match, he would certainly not have been allowed to play, and would most likely have been banned for life. The press is talking about 6 months for Chisora, and only because of what happened at the post-fight press conference.

It was at the post-fight conference that we really saw how much British boxing has lost of the dignity it built up under Bruno, Hollyfield and Lewis. Klitschko’s promoter was asked if he would bother with any more British contenders, given the behavior of Chisora and Wladimir’s previous opponent, David Haye, who famously promised to “hospitalise” Wladimir and taunted him continuously in the weeks leading up to the fight, but then put in a terrible performance on the night, that he blamed on a broken toe. The promoter said he would look elsewhere, but was interrupted by the infamous (now retired) Haye himself, from the back of the conference, demanding a fight with Vitali. The promoter’s response, in perfect English: “You don’t get to fight anyone. Chisora showed his face, you just showed your toe.” Chisora’s promoter then suggested a face-off between Chisora and Haye, with the winner to face “a Klitschko” (like a penitent at the altar of boxing …) Haye’s response: Chisora had already lost 3 fights in a row, so why should Haye bother? Chisora took offence to this and walked up to Haye, demanding that Haye “say it to his face.” And so the schoolboy brawl commenced, and ended with Haye swinging a camera tripod around and nearly braining his own trainer. In the video you can see, while all this is happening, Klitschko standing on the podium like some gentle giant, sneering down at his defeated British opponents as they brawl with each other over their own failings, like spoilt children.

This is British boxing in the new millenium: being sneered at by civilized, educated boxers from Europe. There is no talent left in Britain that the Klitschkos will deign to face, and even if there were, on reputation alone the British are best left well outside the ring, brawling in car parks where they belong. Britain has always been one of the top two countries for heavyweights, and British heavyweights have carried the sport with a certain dignity and poise, but in just 10 years the division has been dragged into the gutter by its reprehensible promoters and fighters.

The problem for those of us who enjoy a fighting art mirrors, in many ways, the problems role-playing faced in the 80s through accusations of satanism and addiction. Those of us who enjoy boxing and understand it know that it is a thing of beauty when done properly, but for those looking in from the outside it clearly resembles nothing more than a sanctioned brawl, in which barely-civilized men pound the crap out of each other for excessive amounts of money. We ask them to trust us that this sport is more than mere barbarism, and we point to its elements of discipline, courage and respect – which we like to hope are more than just a silly myth – as evidence that it is worthy of a little more respect than mere brawling. We also want people to think it’s not a particularly dangerous sport – which compared to Rugby it probably isn’t – and we point to the strict adherence to rules of combat as evidence of this. But it’s kind of hard for the general public to believe us when they see the sports peak performers bashing each other with camera tripods and threatening “I’ll fucking shoot him.” It’s the Carcosa problem, in essence, only being played out in front of the cameras on national TV. And it has a spillover effect: as UFC is gaining popularity and professionalism, its more popular cousin, boxing, is making fighting arts look like uncivilized brawling. How is UFC going to make headway then? And how will we be able to, for example, over turn bans on women fighting (often justified on the basis that it’s “uncivilized”) when the men at the top of the art are doing their best to encourage a ban on anyone fighting?

Some promoters have clung onto another great stereotype of the sport that I think has been used to gain it respect it probably never deserves: the “rescuing urban yoof” myth, that boxing offers working class and poor kids “a way out” and offers youth involved in gangs and crime a way to reform and learn to respect themselves and others. Watching the behavior of Haye and Chisora, and comparing it with PhD-endowed Vitali Klitschko, the conclusion is obvious: education makes men better, boxing makes criminals more dangerous. Society might consider itself well-served in asking: perhaps instead of sanctioning these poor kids’ efforts to beat each other up in the ring, we should ban men like Chisora’s trainer from being allowed to teach poor kids from deprived neighbourhoods any skills that might in any way resemble what we see on display in that video? Because it doesn’t appear to have improved their respect for themselves or others, or their wit: it’s just made them bigger and nastier. Perhaps they might be better off staying away from the boxing gym and doing their homework …?

With this sad display, boxing joins the long list of activities that Britain invented or codified, but lost out on to the rest of the world through indiscipline, inequality and poor education. Other notable activities that went this way are:

• Naval warfare (to the Japanese and then the Americans)
• Cricket (to Australia)
• Rugby (to the Antipodes, but increasingly, just about anywhere)
• Soccer (to everywhere else)
• Statistics (to India, and then the rest of the Commonwealth, and the USA)
• The English language (to the Commonwealth)
• Heavy Industry (to Germany, Japan and the USA, and now China)

I guess so long as they have the Falklands, the British can still lay claim to being the masters of colonialism. It’s important to be good at something, after all! But it’s a long and sad decline that Britain has gone through since the end of the war, and boxing, though hardly likely to be the thing British society will most miss, has now sadly been outsourced to Mexico and the Ukraine. What have the British got left to lose?