Some Thoughts on Episode 1 of American Gods

• The look is quite different from what I'd imagined. Gaiman's book was marketed as "better than Stephen King or your money back" and that was more or less how I'd pictured the visuals. For that matter, Stephen King is more or less the only popular author nowadays who still writes about an America that Hillary Clinton (to her cost) refused to believe still existed. What better place for the Old Gods to carry on existing, where people believe (albeit less and less as time goes by), than flyover country? Only outsiders like Gaiman still dare to venture to such a place - which is genuinely sad, because the people who live there are (in their own way) genuinely splendid.
• Shadow in the book is "mixed race". In the series he appears to be just a stereotypical whining black man, which is unfortunate. By making him mixed race Gaiman both held up to scrutiny a Marxist vision of America the "melting-pot" and implicitly queried its validity in a stubbornly multicultural world. (This was before 9/11!) What gods, indeed, does a "mixed race" man worship? At the same time, he gleefully subverted the standard "magic negro" trope so familiar from King's prison drama The Green Mile (for example). Shadow is a "black" man, but he's almost the only character in the story who doesn't have magic powers.
• Obviously it's always difficult to transfer a cerebral type of hero, with internal monologues and long descriptive observations and angst, from the page to the screen, but even so, Shadow in the book is much more likeable than he is in the TV-version.
• The idea that female flight attendants are like völvas or Valkyries actually played out clearer and funnier in the TV-series than it did in the book, though arguably that was just a function of the executive producer source material-author (i.e. Gaiman himself) seeing that the more "important" jokes from his work got transferred over to the screen version properly.
• In the late '80s Ian McShane was Lovejoy, a smug wide-boy antiques dealer who ran rings round the yuppy denizens of London's home counties whilst getting off with the daughters of the minor aristocracy. The last time I saw him he was a special guest star (one episode only) playing a smug fantasy trendy vicar in Game of Thrones. And instead of playing Prof Merriman Lyon from The Dark is Rising Sequence (the tall, ancient, kindly, otherworldly Great Uncle Merry character from the books), in the film version of The Dark is Rising he played a smug and wonderfully violent butler. And now here he is playing a smug conman version of Mr Wednesday that is nothing like the Creepy Col Sanders character from the book. But that is perhaps permissible and (more to the point) more enjoyable on telly. And an Englishman playing an American character for once works rather well, given that Mr Wednesday is, of course, not "really" American. 
• The mindless violence is surprisingly unnecessary, as are the four-letter words. Some things have been unnecessarily coarsened, others surprisingly bowdlerised. Making Bilquis into an internet date rather than a hooker was a disappointing example of the latter. Americans even after Game of Thrones still seemingly can't deal with a character who practices the world's oldest profession.
• And on the subject of Bilquis, was she supposed to be beautiful? Was the point that she isn't but men still desire her? Or was she supposed to look younger and more beautiful at the end of her scene than she did at the beginning? In the book Bilquis had brown hands, and even in the script she has a cherry red mouth. But in our modern Marxist dualist (or post-modern) western culture, where it doesn't matter what things look like (q.v. Lily Potter's eyes in the final Harry Potter film!), and, more to the point, in an American popular culture that currently only recognises two races as authentically "American", she has to be played by a black actress.
• On the one hand it feels hammy, over the top, shiny and slightly gaudy. On the other, it feels low budget, much like Auntie's revival Doctor Who series (or their dreary version of SS-GB, come to that). Miscasting can make a show feel just as cheap as shabby sets and poor dialogue can, and more specifically the problem with racial miscasting (so far Shadow and Bilquis are the most obvious, though of course McShane too is an odd racial fit, given that he doesn't look particularly Nordic) is that American Gods implicitly is all about characters from different races and cultures who, having come to America, are trying to reconcile what they are and where they're from with the world of today. With a casting director who doesn't care where people are from, either ethnically or (implicitly) geographically and "religiously", the show has arguably got off on the wrong foot.
• All-in-all though, the whole thing is watchable, nay enjoyable. Early episode weirdness can be quickly ironed out, and provided it can carry on being fresh and inventive it should be able to keep its audience until the end.

Did "Viking Age" people really look like this?

I'm not so sure, but it's nice to think.

Negroes in Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, negroes were employed in various parts of the entertainment industry, such as film studios and touring ethnic shows like the Hillerkus Afrikaschau circuses. By 1940 these operations had been taken over by the SS, who converted them to serve propaganda purposes.

For instance, Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels realized that in order to spread the Nazi Gospel of white Aryan supremacy, he needed to exploit the most popular entertainment medium of the time — German feature films. Propaganda pictures such as Kongo Express, Quax in Africa, and Auntie Wanda from Uganda were made to present Germany as an enlightened, benevolent colonial power. Thus under Nazi control the film industry provided employment for Black Germans.

As Black actor Werner Egoimue explains, “We had an agent then, who had all the addresses of Black people in Berlin. The Reich's Chamber of Commerce was in touch with him, and when they were casting a film, it was fun—inside the studio ... you were as safe as in a bank.”

See: World History Archives

Norbert Bisky

Norbert Bisky (born 1970) is a German painter based in Berlin, best known for his frescos depicting adolescents.

He was born at Leipzig in the former German Democratic Republic. The son of a Communist official, he grew up in a home in which Communism assumed the power of a religion. He studied from the mid 1990s at the Hochschule der Künste where he was a master student of Georg Baselitz in Berlin and at the Salzburg Summer Academy in the class of Jim Dine.

His work is greatly influenced by the socialist realism which was the official art of the GDR. In recent years he has shifted to darker themes of disaster, disease and decapitation while retaining the consummate painterliness which is the hallmark of his work.

His figures, in many cases are floating, falling, tumbling, without any gravitational axis. The tumult surrounding the figures is punctuated by the cross pollination of cues from Christian ideology, art history, gay culture, pornography and apocalyptic visions. Bisky transmits an impression of instability on the canvas that distinctly resonates with our contemporary state of affairs.

I've left a comment on this blog here.

A Connexion Too Easily Made?

'Blond hear [sic] and blue eyes, maybe, but young boys without T-shirts? I would say that the critics that hold these opinions are unconsciously influenced by the connection that we too easily make between homosexuality and fascism.'

[Raymond van de Wiel]

The Three Races

Behold, my child, the Nordic man,
And be as like him, as you can;
His legs are long, his mind is slow,
His hair is lank and made of tow.

And here we have the Alpine Race:
Oh! What a broad and foolish face!
His skin is of a dirty yellow.
He is a most unpleasant fellow.

The most degraded of them all
Mediterranean we call.
His hair is crisp, and even curls,
And he is saucy with the girls.

[Hilaire Belloc]

Family

The British Race?

As it happens, yes, I do believe there is a British race. Ii just happens to be matrilineal. One way or another, most British people (or at any rate most of those who "self-identify" as ethnically English, Welsh or Scots) will find that they have mitochondrial DNA that goes back to ancestors who have lived here since the Ice Age. One way or another, most of us can legitimately say that this is where we're "from". And yes, if all your folks came over here at any time in recorded history then, no offence, but you are "different".

I saw this though recently and it irritated me. (Ditto my friend Dom B's "ethnicity estimate"!) And the more I think about such things the more they irritate me.

Partly there's the philosophical problem that looking up the "ethnic origins" of one's ancestors only kicks the can further down the road. If you're British and your ancestors were from Scandinavia then what of that? Where did their ancestors come from? And so on! And that of course leads us on to the question of how one's supposed to classify genes. If a high proportion of modern Scandinavians aren't "really" Scandinavians then what exactly is "Scandinavian DNA"? Which is really just another way of asking the more pertinent and less politically correct question, which is of course that of race. Because these aren't races we're talking about.  There is no Italian race.  There never was an "Anglo-Saxon race". Why do we even use such terms? What actually is a race anyway? And how much "difference" does difference actually make?

The main problem with the race question, of course, is simply that people (nowadays especially) are just plain squeamish about asking such questions, let alone using racial terminology. On the other hand though it's also fundamentally unclear whether or not races even exist in the first place. If they do then it could be fair enough to make generalised statements about groups of people based on skin-colour or hair-texture. Are men with blond hair and blue eyes likely to be cleverer than men with dark skin and big penises. Maybe yes, maybe no - provided, that is, these are genuinely different races we're talking about and not just purely accidental differences that have no bearing on anything else. If they are then we can test for such things, if they aren't then what difference does it make and why should anyone care anyway? (It's possible that skin-colour really is just skin-deep.) In reality, of course, no one has ever suggested that there even are any "pure" races - or at least that there are now or have been since the Ice Age. And as for "selective breeding", isn't that what we all do anyway?

But yet another part of the problem, but just as obviously, is that people nowadays know nothing about history - their own or other people's. (Which country do they think the Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from - though of course this is also a particularly English problem, if only because in England history has always been about kings and queens rather than actual nations, but probably also because Anglo-Saxon England was scrubbed from the curriculum after the Great War, the Middle Ages went with the second war, and most of the British Empire had disappeared - on paper as it had in actuality - by the end of the 1960s.) And so whereas it may (or may not) be a fair enough point to make that there's no real reason to think that the people who live in Greece nowadays have very much (if anything!) in common with Alexander and Aristotle, let alone Homer and Hesiod, it's genuinely sad to reflect how little awareness modern Englishmen have of their shared ancestry with their European cousins - especially given the tragic consequences such attitudes have had in (still, just about) living memory.

In truth, a genetic test that discovers you may have some distant Romanian ancestor (who may very well have come over with the Romans) doesn't particularly prove or disprove anything. And if you're only 10% British then why not be proud of that (though to be honest being proud of who one's ancestors were is a fairly feeble thing to be proud of)?

Aryan Migrations

What are the implications of the two theories about the Proto-Indo-European homeland? Were they farmers in one place (Anatolia) or riders, hunters or warriors from elsewhere (such as the Steppes)?

The "mainstream" theory is that they were horsemen from the Steppes c 4,500 BC, who spread their culture comparatively quickly. The alternative view is that they were farmers in Anatolia who had been there since c 6,500 BC and whose influence only spread slowly.

One would like to imagine of course that they might have been both - that they could have been the people who lived at Çatalhöyük and who then became the fearsome horse-lords of the Caucasus.

But that is almost certainly fanciful.