Reviews for European Media Law

The average rating for European Media Law based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-17 00:00:00 Kevin Oliver London was mapped by these drunken and licentious cross-town scrambles, borough to borough, sacred site to sacred site: relics of saints, drums and beribboned phalluses. The walk, responding to astrological prompts, laid down narrative trails that should still be respected. —p.345Iain Sinclair wasn't writing about Lights Out for the Territory here, but these sentences seem directly applicable to his peripatetic project. Sinclair's subject in these collected essays, after all, is London—both The City proper (whose majuscule points to a miniscule bullseye at the center of the Thames-straddling metropolis) and that sprawling estate-agent's melanoma which outsiders are pleased to call "London." Patrick Keiller's London is not your London. —p.301Nor is Iain Sinclair's London my own... my one brief trip to London (lasting one paltry week back in 2013) did not prepare me in the least for the depth and richness of Sinclair's complex, allusive, and impossibly dense accounts. At times I was desperate for an English-to-English translator—if you know what a "crombie" is without looking it up, for example, you're already doing better than I did. ~~~ Sinclair's collection of late 20th-Century essays about London had been on my mental to-read list for years, ever since I heard William Gibson recommend it during No Maps for These Territories (which is itself a fantastic film, although like Sinclair's book it wouldn't be to everyone's taste). I finally ran across this Penguin trade paperback quite by chance—my wife and I were looking through the shelves of British history at Powell's City of Books (unpaid plug), where its unassuming light-blue spine stood out to me like a glimpse of St. Paul's through fog. That Penguin edition also implies, by using the same font for the author's name as for the title, that the name of this book could be read as Iain Sinclair Lights Out for the Territory—an allusion to the ending of Huckleberry Finn that Sinclair makes explicit near the end of this book. That reading of the title makes a certain amount of sense. From the very first page, you can tell that Sinclair's not writing a travelogue or tourist guide:Urban graffiti is all too often a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph. The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic. —p.1Nevertheless, Sinclair employs the same care when cataloguing the graffiti he encounters during his walks across London that he uses with monuments and graveyard inscriptions. ~~~ The main pleasure of reading Lights Out for the Territory was Sinclair's wandering style—his prose ambles metaphorically throughout London the way he and photographer Marc Atkins did physically, stopping to examine points of interest in detail, drawing connections to other points, without much regard for timetables or time of day. That did make it hard for me to write a coherent review of the book, though. I noted a number of individual quotes that struck me during the course of the book... but not much to tie them together: Be wary of fountains. The frolicsome play of water outside some municipal temple is the gush of misspent public funds, dubious set-dressing. —p.38 Her family had no problem in drawing a distinction between the relative merits of blood ties and speculative literature. Their sense of tribal self-interest made the Mafia look like wimps with suntans. Fiction writing was, properly, a kind of hobby: unfortunate, but tolerable if it brought in cash or fame. —pp.161-162 All museums, libraries and galleries, should be banished to Oxford. Let them be for the exclusive use of those who will walk there. London should be left to cutpurses, brigands, hustlers, ganefs, courtiers, actors, whores, and other creatures of business. —p.176 Amid such pyrotechnics of prose, this significantly pithier epigram appears:The dead are the most obedient of models. —p.244 Sinclair occasionally veers into the science-fictional, too, a post-apocalyptic vision of capital excess that has only become more true-to-life in the decades since Lights Out for the Territory was published:If the skyline was to be dominated by a crop of alien verticals, exclamation marks in mirror glass, then we must burrow like moles. We must eat earth. —p.245Sinclair's observations about ubiquitous video surveillance, barricades, suspicious security guards and other aspects of our current predicament serve as a reminder that our 9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum—that the props and flats of our present-day security theatre of the absurd were already being hammered together in 1990s Britain. I had the sense that it was time to retreat to further education, Dublin. This was a wise indecision, a good way of slowing down the inevitable: new light—soft, wet, grey. —p.275 Blow-Up viewed as a video in 1995 provokes an overwhelming urge to rush the tape to the cutting-room for emergency amputation: lose those appalling rag day students, the tennis court mime, most of the secondary performances. Hack it to the bone: some urban driving, some interplay in the studio, the park. Reduce it to essence, to Cortazar's original story. —p.351 ~~~ The moral right of the author has been asserted —Indicia. Absent period per original I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of the way Sinclair characterizes Marc Atkins, his loyal companion for the walks that became these essays:Promise him a free breakfast and the chance of running into a squall of long-legged black women and he'll walk through fire. —p.8Still, you could do much worse than to take a deeper dive into Marc Atkins' singular vision, which is criminally underserved by the few monochrome snapshots that appear as a tease in the center of Lights Out for the Territory. I do think it's telling that no women's names appear in Lights Out for the Territory until page 26, after dozens of discursive pages feature a parade of individuals ranging from Thomas Pynchon to crooner Dean Martin—and even then the first female Sinclair names is the late Marilyn Monroe, rather than any contemporary or fellow author (although, speaking of fellow authors, Sinclair does not seem to admire Jeffrey Archer or P.D. James much, either). This is most definitely a guy's book—where women are present, they are almost always distinctly secondary, although Sinclair does devote an entire essay later on to the work of artists Rachel Whiteread and his later coauthor Rachel Lichtenstein. ~~~ As you can probably tell just from the number of names and topics mentioned above, which is by no means close to the number Sinclair covers, Lights Out for the Territory has an Index like a phone book. Oh, okay, not really... it's only 11 pages long. But that's still a lot of references, and it means Sinclair's book ends well before you think it will, what with that Index, the Acknowledgements and Selected Bibliography that round it off. So in conclusion... while I don't think Lights Out for the Territory will help you get to Hyde Park from Heathrow, or to figure out where John Snow's memorial pump stands in Soho, it is a reliably fascinating (albeit often frustrating) glimpse into the history of a place that might just be almost as significant to history as Londoners think it is...

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-25 00:00:00 Sam Rosas I liked parts of this book. Sinclair knows his way round a sentence and I enjoyed his self-conscious prose. However, this is more a collection of fairly fragmented essays on obscure artists, poets and film-makers, tied together with the vague conceit of the author as a tongue-in-cheek Flâneur in London. Although I enjoyed the sections on Patrick Keiller and Chris Petit and the brief cameo from Howard Marks I didn’t engage as much on some of the longer sections on conceptual and performance artists like Rachel Whiteread and Brian Catling. I wanted more of Sinclair’s writing on London and urban space, rather than his critiques of the artists he obviously admires. At times I felt I might have been better served taking out a subscription with the London Review of Books and going through their back issues on line, given that many of the chapters were adapted from essays from the journal. Throughout reading Lights Out for the Territory, I was constantly making notes of other books to read and films to watch. I would have preferred to be more engaged with what I was reading, instead of feel distracted by the visions and imaginations of artists other than the author.