2011 Big Brother (3)

Marion wrote:

I don’t follow about the language?

The HMs tend to speak a special language (not dissimilar to that spoken in the original Anthony Burgess book of ‘Clockwork Orange’ (and in the film, too?)) that I don’t understand! (Sometimes mingled with something called Wrap?)

2/10/11

I think Alex is the only conceivable vote from me to eventually win the whole BB. She has a gawky charm – and a naive sense of humour. Clockwork Pink not Orange.
Aden is a strange cove. Old for his age in many ways. But even younger in some of his other ways. I think he believes his own tears – even when they’re forced out by a frowning imp with narrow sideburns.

(later) Anton was predictable in his childish wielding of regal power!
And the fooling of him with a no. 1 hit was a damp squib.
Louise is shaping up for a celebrity romance with Jay who played a blinder spelling out sweet nothings in love heart sweets under her pillow.
Meanwhile, overall, can this BB season sink any lower…?

4/10/11

Could Jay’s ‘faux pas’ – in the light of Jade / Shilpa and that other girl who once used the N word and was chucked out from the House – become what this BB season will eventually be remembered for?
Aaron’s reaction was no doubt a conscious or unconscious reflection of that BB folk-hinterland.

5/10/11

Well, Mark has a new variation on toothbrush-talking – using a finger to mutate the words.

Alex and, when serious, Mark – to watch as eventual winners.

The disconnections of this group of people are sometimes painful to watch. I get the impression we are quietly mocked by others here for watching it at all. But if they read our reports since 2004, they may begin to espy some valuable pattern amid the crudity and fauxmances and celebritification and meaninglessness (a contention that I also briefly mention, when asked by the interviewer, during my forthcoming interview in Black Static #25).

6/10/11

Marion wrote:

Nothing became him in the house like his leaving of it.

Agree with all that Marion, assuming Mark does leave. The Mark ‘going’ and the others’ reaction to it – a candidate for classic BB of a genuine touching quality.

I was impressed with Jay yesterday. There I’ve said it. I didn’t know I could get it out. Impressive both as suited boss and aspiring poet and reactor to Mark’s going.

Marion wrote:

– a stinking fish gleaming beautifully in the moon light is still a stinking fish.

Brill.

7/10/11

Marion wrote:

No one could possibly be attracted to this gross beast of a man.

Feral love?

Once again, I am left agog by Marion’s report. So much more enjoyable than the show itself.
Although I did enjoy last night’s show. I really admired the wildest act of foolhardiness I think I have ever witnessed. And that’s not just Harry’s Zeroism of food-ordering! More that act of feral love.

Mark’s departure was another act of self-sacrifice disguising an act of self-fulfilment, or vice versa. That’s the beauty of BB – it teaches that one never really knows what is real in reality.

I am reading this new academic book at the moment:
Deceit and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers (Allen Lane). From the books’ preface:

“The time is ripe for a general theory of deceit and self-deception based on evolotionary logic, a theory that in principle applies to all species but with special force to our own. We are thoroughgoing liars, even to ourselves. Our most prized possession – language – not only strengthens our ability to lie but greatly extends its range. We can lie about events distant in space and time, the details and meaning of the behaviour of others, our innermost thoughts and desires and so on. But why, why self-deception? Why do we possess marvelous sense organs to detect information only to distort it after arrival?
[…] It is a dark and opaque side to ourselves, one that we leave untreated at our own peril, but it is also a source of endless humour and amazement, so that we can also enjoy the subject as we suffer it.”

(later) Well, Maisy goes and someone new is due to enter the house – someone apparently whom Faye knows. Another wrestler?

Just before watching tonight’s show, I saw a remarkable documentary on BBC4 about the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, known to his friends as Slava. I saw him perform in 1987 in London (on the night of the big storm and the same night as Jacqueline du Pre’s death). One of his previous pupils, on this documentary, told of an incident of seeing him teach another cellist who seemed to play perfectly and then Slava said to him: “Imagine a suitcase, a perfect suitcase, with crocodile skin and beautiful gold fastenings etc. Imagine opening it. And see what you find inside. Absolutely nothing. And that’s your playing.” Or words to that effect. Tonight, a few minutes later, Faye said almost the same things about herself and her glass bowl she brought into the House.

And a big row tonight about food dye and clothes steeping in the bath after having been washed. Aaron asks why people like the perpetrator are still in the House. Well, it’s better than the House being empty, I say. And a Jay in the House is one less Jay in the real world.

Ah, that banana man-shape. Another crocodile suitcase.

8/10/11

Marion wrote:

Are scripts for the HMs being written ?

A fascinating question figuratively and literally.
Literally because induced self-deception from a third party is a serious phenomenon being discussed in that book I’m reading.
(A symbol in the sky from Maisy’s Dad and a pre-determined implant from Darcy (Faye) Steele’s sister – and former Gladiator – Jemma Palmer).

[Going back to the Rostropovich documentary there is a review of it here where it says:
“He was just a bit of a brute. Like the time he showed his two daughters what he thought of their new jeans, a luxury in Soviet Russia. He took them outside, poured on petrol, and set fire to them – the jeans, not the daughters.”
Remind you of BB?]

{Later}

Marion  wrote:

I don’t like Faye’s sister coming in, with her knowledge of all that has gone on in the house. And I very much suspect that she has an agenda set by BB.

I agree. Have you noticed that some, if not all, the HMs, these days, are semi-celebrities already – each one knowing what is expected of them to make a mark (no pun intended) within the now traditional House scenario. With mock amenability or mock rage, they’ll even put up with humiliations and damage to themselves or to their belongings or to their food or health, to fulfil this pre-determined or retrocausal role.

9/10/11

Marion wrote:

Faye’s sister Jem is a right royal pain in the neck. Hardly in the house, shes ordering her sister not to smoke or she’ll throw her cigarettes in the pool.

I rather think Faye smokes like you describe Aden smokes, and, if so, a good thing Jem the Stubber has arrived.

I was rather taken with Jem’s statement in the DR that she feels she has been ‘sucked into a television’. Whovian?

I agree, like in all good fiction, we’re not being ‘shown’ the whole picture but, as grown-up viewers, allowed to infer – or create a tantalisingly incomplete gestalt from rationed leitmotifs. Perhaps we all need to do a task to earn a luxury gestalt?

{Later}

Marion wrote:

WE spend our whole lives creating gestalt from incomplete or ambiguous data.

I presume the emphasis of ‘WE’ was accidental?
Yes, I agree, anyway, but nobody except readers of certain fiction and possibly Big Brother viewers can actually begin to fully understand what that instinctive and often unconscious part of the human condition really means.
Not that Big Brother does it deliberately in that sense. It derives from them only having an hour to fill! (What happened to the 24 hour streaming?)

{Later}

Marion wrote:

I can only speculate on how very awful it must be to be shut up in the house with that oaf.

As I said before, a Jay in the House is one less Jay in the real world.
Phew!

{Later}

Quite impressed with Jem tonight – she has a surreal dream of Jay examining her face for imperfections – and talks very intelligently about most things – with those geeky glasses in contrast with her brazen personality. Blind strength and beady-eyed sensitivity combined.

Say what yer like about Jay – he too has a schism of instincts, a treebark-voiced brashness dovetailed with a certain sensitivity … a bodily uncouthness and a sensible pragmatism when faced with Aaron’s stonewalling.

11/10/11

Marion wrote:

This has to be one of the most cringeworthy scenes ever seen on BB.

Indeed, we have reached rock bottom with these Jayouisms – after a few nights’ worth of random intellectual gristle wreaked from the general banana peels of this patchy BB season.

I am however impressed with the synergy of the Palmer Sisters – their characters are quite interesting together and, now, as a result, separately, even given the now strictured behaviour of Faye when in her cups..

Why did Faye nominate Aaron? Was it sheer cynically televisual bravado? A gratuitous act from an Albert Camus book?

12/10/11

PREVIOUSLY
they were not allowed to discuss noms –
now, in a cinema near you, the pathetic games of strategic life-changing chess turn inward with daggers striating the Kings’ and Queens’ heads shaped like crowns…

But then there is the Knight…

Marion wrote:

Harry , for me, was rather the man of the evening.

Harry Wharton of the Remove giving Frank Richards a run for his money and Anton Quelch -and Billy ‘Jay’ Bunter… and Tom Merry …
Next week a mixed ball with the girls’ school.
Cave or Caveat…

13/10/11

Anton’s ‘madness’ seems the first of its kind in BB history. I now wonder if this BB season is really a documentary – ever common on Ch 4 and Ch 5 I think – of ‘interesting’ people with physical or mental features likely to interest people watching those channels.
The men with yetis growing out of their shoulders. Or, at least, live tattoos.

Just before BB last night, I watched Tracy Emin’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ There was an ancient treadmill photograph from Chelmsford Prison where prisoners stepped up and down in a row, for hour after hour, unproductively climbing their own version of Anton’s Ben Nevis.

(Excellent report, again, Marion, btw. I, too, am fed up with feeding tasks. A bile sandwich short of a retched-up picnic).

14/10/11

Thanks for keeping us up to date with the niceties (!) of the House politics, Marion. But I couldn’t find anything about a freezer in that Youtube. Can you brriefly let me know what it is about to save me searching through that clip again. I think an hour of these people per night (plus your embroidery) is the optimum situation for me!

Two hours of dancing to one tune! I am sure the world psyche is becoming more Philip-Glass-like by the minute. (I was first minimalist in this strict sense in 1982 although I did conduct similar ‘happenings’ in the Sixties).

COMMENTARY CONTINUED HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/2011-big-brother-4/

—————————————

ABOVE ARE EXTRACTS FROM: http://ttapress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=182 where Marion’s posts are also shown in full.