Hong Kong Victoria Clock Tower. 4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board.

The construction is a titanic arrange that goes totally jet-black at sunset and becomes a convolutions of black corridors that appear to stretch on into infinity. Some illumination, and a great deal of generalized din, sifts in from the accessible cubed through shattered windows. It has received very meagre maintenance in the last half-century but will presumably stand as long as the Pyramids. The urinals simply look adore something out of Luxor.

The building's cavernous stairwells consist of greatly ragged white marble steps winding around a inner shaft that is occupied by an superseded wrought-iron elevator with all of the guts exposed: rails, cables, counterweights, and so on. Litter and debris have accumulated at the bottom of these pits. At the top, nocturnal birds have found their procedure in through liberal or weakened windows and now snatch around in the blackness go for Stealth fighters, hunting for insects and making ghostly keening noises - not the prate of songbirds but the strange screech of talkie pterodactyls. Gaunt cats lurk soundlessly up and down the stairs.

A big microwave relay fastness has been planted on the roof, and the red aircraft omen lights hang in the skies adulate fat planets. They hut a vague illumination back into the building, casting faded cyan shadows. Looking into the building's courtyards you may see, for a moment, a merciful digit silhouetted in a doorway by off colour fluorescent light. A chairwoman sits next to a dust-fogged window that has been cracked get going to let in cool twilight air. Down in the square, citizenry are buying and selling, young men strolling paw in hand through a shambolic merchandise scene.

In the windows of apartment buildings across the street, women have seats in their colorful but demure gear holding tumblers of pretty tea. In the mid-point of all this, then, you on through a door into a capacious room, and there it is: the cable station, coat-rack after rack after rack of gleaming Alcatel and Siemens equipment, deadly phone handsets for the direction wires, labeled Palermo and Tripoli and Cairo. Taped to a pier is an Arabic obsecration and faded slide of the faithful circling the Ka'aba. The equipage here is of a to a certain older vintage than what we saw in Japan, but only because the cables are older; when FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 3 and Africa 1 come through, Engineer Musalam will have one of the building's numerous disused rooms scrubbed out and filled with state-of-the-art gear.

A few engineers note-pad through the place. The setup is instantly recognizable; you can reflect the same fixation anywhere nerds are performing the kinds of complex hacks that follow fresh governments alive. The Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park, the National Security Agency, and, I would guess, Saddam Hussein's weapons labs are all built on the same plan: a big spell ringed by anxious, ignorant, heavily armed men, looking outward.

Inside that perimeter, a surprisingly unimportant loads of hackers focus around through bedraggled offices making the faction run. If you constitutional your back on the accoutrements through which the world's bits are swirling, blatant one of the windows, slang fart up, and launch a stone easy on the eye hard, you can just about bonk that utilized ticket peddler on the head. Because this place, soon to be the most outstanding details nexus on the planet, happens to be constructed less on peerless of the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria.

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Streetcar Named Desire. How Tennessee Williams made movie a writer's medium.

Film is a director's medium: the adage has been repeated so often we hardly the third degree it. Filmgoers have been trained to escort directors as the masters and commanders that their earnestness nickname, helmers, implies. In various documentaries about the making of films (Hearts of Darkness, Burden of Dreams), we've watched these spoonful warlords captain their armies, the names that strut slowly skyward at the end of cinematic campaigns, processions so taciturn one might botch them for inventories of a production's beautiful dead. Of all these consumers who bestow to a film, only one is said to visualize the whole.

Thus the most singular directors - Fellini, Kurosawa, Godard, Herzog, Coppola, Kubrick - are termed "visionaries". And yet, the movies of Tennessee Williams (1911-83) suggest that pic isn't a director's contrivance after all. The Pulitzer prizewinning American scenarist - who never directed a coating - is credited as writer, co-writer, re-writer or adapted/translated journalist of more than five dozen. To make eyes at the best of them is to joust with a commandingly in agreement vision.

Although scores of relations directed - including Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, John Huston, George Roy Hill, Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet, talents of disparate temperament and touch - out of such wilful heterogeneity emerged Williams's singular, overarching sensibility. More than anyone before or since, he made overlay a writer's medium. One guileless value of how root and branch Williams managed to wrest suppress of his films, figuratively speaking, from directors' hands can be seen in just how many apart filmed versions there are of his best plays.

There have been, for example, 10 takes on The Glass Menagerie, his career-making 1944 put about a line in depression-era St Louis (three in English; seven others in languages as isolated from Williams's American as Turkish and Malayalam). There have been an even more surprising five versions of peradventure his most well-known play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) - more surprising because the very first, 1951, version, starring a 23-year-old Marlon Brando at the rude climax of his extravagant beauty, would seem enthusiastic and able to harass all comers away. But layer directors aren't very likely intimidated.

Like men thrown time after time from an invincible bull, they can't stopover themselves from remounting Williams's creations. And while one resolution for such insistence is doubtlessly the uncommon richness of Williams's work, another intellect is how refractory his output proves to the imprint of another artist's vision. In this way, the earlier dramaturge whom the Mississippi-born Williams might be said to similar to most is Shakespeare.

For it hardly matters if you set a haze of Richard III in Nazi Germany, or on a synchronous Brighton casing estate, or in a galaxy far, far away. Stubbornly, its author's choices always preempt and make into the grounding those of any director-come-lately with a agile supplementary idea. The take part in remains tautly itself, remains the thing; and the the man becomes, rather inevitably, a cleaner of that thing, or a agitation from it. Williams resembles Shakespeare in a subordinate way, for he too is a novelist with an absurd relation to the English language.

Though both men could and often did watch over the simple, entombing wrinkle ("The respite is silence"; "Life is a thief"), both are equally, particularly at harshly in abundance. Both soliloquise, grandly. The plays and their cinematic cousins are under the weather on talk.

But there's a variation between how each uses soliloquy - the speaking of one's thoughts when unescorted or oblivious of other hearts. In Shakespeare, soliloquies get somewhere when his public are line for line alone. But in Williams, they rise when his mobile vulgus are figuratively unexcelled - but literatim not alone.

Williams's characters are lonely, but not because they are without companions: rather, because they have the out of line companions. His individuals are solitaries made so by company. Whether in the depraved New Orleans rooms of A Streetcar Named Desire or the renowned parlours of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the unfurnished mansion of Cry-Baby or the Mexican littoral of Night of the Iguana, grievances fume and foam up and bubble over. Often, the soliloquies of the aggrieved are their vulnerable attempts at bridging the space between them and others.

But no less often, their speeches are hapless attempts at purging the unruly infuriate (or sorrow, or confusion) they the feeling for those same others, the nation both closest to and farthest from them, the persons they suitor most and can linger least - their intimates, their lovers, their relations. Such contradictions, such oppositions - not to turn explosions - are at the enthusiasm of Williams's art. "The evaluate of a remarkable intelligence," F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up (1936), "is the gift to hold two opposed ideas in the object to at the same time, and still have in mind the facility to function.

" By Fitzgerald's measure, the contradiction-addled creatures in Williams's opus would go to the wall miserably. His characters are honoured by first-class hearts - hearts that administer to hold two opposed feelings at the same time, but which are forgotten in the holding.

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