“The society which has abolished every kind of adventure makes its own abolition the only possible adventure.” Paris, May 1968


Tuesday 24 May 2011

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

If like me you think that television should both inform and entertain, and that the best programmes should leave you feeling that that was an hour well spent, you will have really got off on Adam Curtis' All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace shown on BBC2 last night. Like his previous series The Trap and The Power Of Nightmares this was TV as it should be.

2 comments:

henry said...

Agree. Although many 'pundits' wank on about his 'shallowness'(wtf?) - he is dazzlingly brilliant in what he does. He shames Niall Ferguson & Francis Fukuyama, he makes them look like the Neocon Jobsworths they really are.

He has a lightness of touch and a perspective on recent history that few can match. He mixes tales of self-serving idiocy espoused by grotesque self-serving idiots and charts the intended and unintended consequences of the whole fetid mess. Power corrupts, and absolute power needs an ideology to cover its own shame.

+ his blog is cool, too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/

+ a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan gives the title - and to get a flavour of his westcoast weedy style - it's read by him here:

http://brautigan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.php?page=All+Watched+Over+by+Machines+of+Loving+Grace

+ lots of his other (westcoast weedy) stuff here...
http://www.brautigan.net/recordings.html

Will Part II be as good? Will Curtis turn out to be merely an Eton-educated Csmeroonie with an archive second-to-none? Who knows - but it feels right for this moment...

henry said...

Okay, so episode numero the two?

His line is that machine-ist models have been the cloak of power since the 1950s?

Sounds okay so far?