10.29.04
Definitions
defaulty adj.
Of two possible options, the one you didn’t want.
10.28.04
Huzzah
Well, I’ve retrieved the commenting function. Just in time.
Andy offers Neil Gaiman, the late Brian Johnson and Sir George Martin to the shortlist of decent people (see post below for full criteria). George Martin is a particulary good call, I think.
Any more?
10.27.04
Looking for decent people
The sudden, unexpected and bewailed death of John Peel has got me thinking about the very noticeable lack of thoroughly and obviously decent people in public life.
Peel was loved for his passionate and eclectic musical tastes, but just as much for the sense he radiated of being an uncomplicatedly and utterly decent human being. Stories of his modesty, friendliness and deadpan charm abound. Every one, told with wet-eyed fondness, only demonstrates the more how rare it is to find such qualities in the public realm.
There are plenty of people who you would, for one reason or another, stand a pint, though you’ve never met them in person. Peel was one of the few who you would expect to be good company while drinking it.
I was thinking about this on the way home last night. It struck me cold how very few people would make the list of being (a) a decent, essentially good person, (b) a person good to be around, (c) defiantly themselves and (d) in the public realm.
There are, despite appearances, plenty of good and fun people. Many of them are defiantly themselves (infividual, eccentric, call it what you will). It’s just that, for some obvious reasons, there are almost none in the public sphere.
My shortlist was:
Desmond Tutu
John Peel (RIP)
Screaming Lord Sutch (RIP)
Douglas Adams (RIP)
Stephen Fry
At this point I found myself both struggling for names and rather gloomy.
Thank the stars, then, for glorious news that legendary Brazilian footballer Socrates, at age 50, is to join non-league Garforth Town.
Only this weekend I was discussing with a football journalist exactly why Socrates, a lanky chain-smoking socialist qualified doctor, was probably the most eccentrically decent person ever to have graced the World Cup.
With John Peel gone, I’m glad we still have the magnificent Socrates.
The mysterious behaviour of books
As I found last week, when have you taken down all of your books, an immutable law of the universe dictates that they will no longer all fit back into the shelves.
As I found today, however, the same law does not apply to bookshops. There, a reorganisation of the shelves invariably means that you end up with fewer books on display.
The mysterious behaviour of books
As I found last week, when have you taken down all of your books, an immutable law of the universe dictates that they will no longer all fit back into the shelves.
As I found today, however, the same law does not apply to bookshops. There, a reorganisation of the shelves invariably means that you end up with fewer books on display.
10.26.04
Everything breaks too soon
Yes, I realise that the comments are broken. My @rereviewed.com email is also bulging at the seams with spam and is not being used. I wish I had time to fix either of these, but first I’m replacing the sadly declined home PC with a lithe little laptop.
I feel oddly disconnected because I’m currently without a means for complete strangers to contact me: something that I wouldn’t have rated as significant. Those who know how to contact me regardless can of course do so as usual. I am here. I am here.
Peeling the bells
Goodbye John Peel. How awful to think that we’ll never hear that voice again.
10.25.04
9 Songs survives uncut
Michael Winterbottom’s controversial new film, 9 Songs, is to be released uncut.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that it was in danger of going to go down to only eight Songs by various popular alternative bands. It’s the bits in between the songs (which are, um, full of bits), that were under consideration.
Winterbottom - whose Welcome to Sarajevo and adaptation of Jude the Obscure were two of the glummest films of recent years - is undeniably a serious film-maker. Quite why he decided to make a film that features only shagging and shaggy haircuts is a little beyond me, but I’m sure all will become - abundantly - clear when it’s released in February.
In the meantime, the BBFC has added to the gaity of nations by setting the Ann Widdecombes of this world a moral conundrum. According to their director of communication, Sue Clarke, although anyone is welcome to complain, only complaints from people who had seen the film were likely to be taken seriously.
No statement could be more expressive of the 180 degree turn in the BBFC’s attitude in recent years than this calculated brush off to the Concerned of Middle England. Ann Widdecombe won’t be able to complain unless she admits first that she paid her tenner to watch an hour and a half real rumpo show.
10.22.04
Ringing the changes
Somewhere deep in a stately home a bakelite telephone insistently rings. The equally stately butler walks the length of a corridor and picks it up.
The way that we use telephones has changed as a result of the different ways in which telephones now communicate. Most of the focus in the last few years has been on those evil little pillboxes that people carry round in order to fry their heads more rapidly. However, the changes in our use of the home telephone are at least as interesting as the new issues presented by the mobile.
Back when mobile phones were new and the size of a small dog, Umberto Eco merrily distanced himself from smug mobile users on the train by noting that they were not, as they thought, displaying their importance, but rather showing only that they were forever at the beck and call of their work. He gloried in the thought that not having a mobile meant that his time was unequivocably and uninterruptably his own.
The curiosity is that home telephones have gradually taken on behaviours that reflect this issue of intrusion and interruption. I think that these new behaviours are not necessarily to our benefit.
Let’s take the main changes in order. First, answerphones meant that you could take a call even when not at home. This, I recall, seemed little short of earth-shaking and (in acknowledgement of all the Douglas Adams nostalgia at the moment) almost as cool as digital watches. Because phone answering behaviour had no particular pressure to change, answerphones were simply used for taking messages when you were out. People even switched them off until they were leaving the house. The notion of not answering the phone because it wasn’t at that second convenient would be considered as little more than sheer naughtiness.
The second change was Caller ID. I suppose that Caller ID is still filtering through, but I notice that ever more phones are capable of telling you who is calling before you answer the phone. Ask yourself: what is the point of this if not to enable you to not answer the phone? A phone rings, you answer. That is the function of the ring. You cannot possibly increase the effectiveness or efficiency of phone-answering through knowing in advance who is calling. All you can do is enable the phone user to select when not to answer. The effect of Caller ID is therefore to have fewer phone calls answered.
Of course, Caller ID interacts with answerphones. If you don’t answer (if you are for instance, as I was repeatedly last night, up a ladder with a brush loaded with some extremely pungent oil-based paint), then your answerphone will do it for you. I have even heard tell that some people don’t answer the phone if they recognise the number and don’t wish to speak to that person right now.
Well, true or not, the idea of selective answering has taken hold, and has eroded the validity of the answerphone. Callers (myself included) now call, hear the answerphone pick up, are unsure whether there is anyone there or not, and are consequently caught in an uneasy no-man’s land. Does one say “Hello…are you there…hello?” before hanging up, as seems to be the current fashion? Does one launch into a precise and inevitably complex rendition of the exact timing and necessity of the call so that it will still be relevant and make sense when picked up hours later? The latter option is frustratingly likely to be interrupted by a breathless callee who then chooses to pick up rather than face an interminable message followed by the need to call back.
We are left in a state of almost permanent telephonic uncertainty. Calling (or answering a call) becomes an ever more subtle game of bluff and counter-bluff. Is the callee really not there? If I leave a message, am I committing myself to being here to answer the return call? What if I’m up a ladder? What if I’m genuinely inconvenienced, but don’t wish to give the impression I’m call-dodging (I do this a great deal; rushing to the phone in a spray of paint or water)? How do I not answer the phone in such a way as to communicate that I really, really don’t want the caller to try again in a minute ?
Because this is the ultimate issue of telephonic uncertainty: more unanswered calls means more calls. More calls means more unanswered calls. The logic is, well, unanswerable.
That’s why I’m thinking again about the butler walking, slowly, to answer the phone in the corridor. The image seems anachronistic because there’s an idea there that it’s something to do with large houses. It’s not; at least, not now that we have portable handsets.
No, I think the anachronism here is the length of the ringing. In the persistence, the patience, of the ringing there is not just a generous acknowledgement that answering the phone takes time, but also a rather insistent element of communication. If the caller holds on for 10, 20, 30 rings, it’s an indication of how much they want the phone to be answered. An off-chance caller (did we have such things?) would ring off after, say, five. A persistent ring, uninterrupted by an over-panicky
answerphone, allows you to come to the phone at leisure, knowing that if they’ve rung off by the time you’ve got there, it was, by definition, not urgent.
Now, there’s only one problem. A loud, persistent ring is deeply annoying. So how about this?
On your home telephone, you can identify a list of numbers as known. When they call, they can, while the phone is ringing, press ‘1′. This will change the ring from standard to loud (insistent, alarmist, however you care to set it). This means that important calls from known people can always be identified as such.
The corollary of this is that, for the rest of the time and for the rest of the world, the ring can be set to something inoffensive. Something soft, burbling, unobtrusive. Something that can happily ring for a minute or two without causing you to look for a handy screwdriver to jam into the mechanism. Something that asks you to answer without insisting upon it.
I suspect, finally, that the less insistently the phone demands to be answered, the more polite it is, the more it will be answered.
10.19.04
Life with ambiguous headlines
More ambiguous newspaper headlines:
Family fury over bogus cab death
The mind roars enthusiastically down a story path before realising that, oh, it was the cab that was bogus.
10.14.04
Cover his face
The hairdresser and I were just discussing how the next trick for any hair salon worth its salt will be a massage chair when I spotted this fellow sauntering down the street. Full camouflage fatigues, wearing a fencing mask.
To my slight surprise, there are no reports of any local post offices being turned over today.
10.12.04
Wilkins in space
Here’s an object lesson in getting your academic work into the papers:
More than 300 years before the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites and American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon, England had its own ambitious space programme.
That’s the first paragraph from this story in the Independent on Sunday, written by the science editor Steve Connor, about a lecture delivered last night by Professor Allan Chapman at Gresham College.
The ‘ambitious space programme’ turns out to be plans for a spring-powered spacecraft with flapping wings, drawn up by none other than John Wilkins.
Wilkins, who is probably best known these days through the Borges essay, wrote his A Discovery of a World in the Moon in 1638, and added an appendix titled “The possibility of a passage thither” in 1640. I don’t have access to the text to see if it covers all of Professor Chapman’s assertions, but, really, it’s no surprise to anyone that Wilkins was talking spaceships. Two minutes on the web pulls up this Wilkinsism from his moon book:
“I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible to make a flying chariot. The perfecting of such an invention would be of such excellent use, that it were enough not only to make a man famous, but the age also wherein he lives. For besides the strange discoveries that it might occasion in this other world, it would be also of inconceivable advantage for travelling, above any other conveyance that is now in use.”
The shame of it is that I wouldn’t have been able to make the lunchtime lecture (’
The Jacobean Space Programme - Wings, springs and gunpowder: flying to the moon from 17th century England’) even if I’d known about it in advance. Pah. Bah. Maybe the newspaper report was a good thing after all.
More on Wilkins:
Aubrey’s Brief Lives (penultimate entry on page)
Wilkins page at the Galileo Project
Wikipedia entry
Wilkins looking inappropriately sceptical
Film to the Four
I’m slowly growing to love BBC Four. It’s a slow affair because Four is so desperately, despairingly bad at telling you what lovely things it’s up to.
Take this week’s Lukas Moodysson season.
Until ten minutes ago I didn’t know there was one.
It seems that I’ve already missed the dark and daring LILYA 4-EVER, much to my chagrin. I’ve just discovered in time that Moodysson’s first film, Show Me Love is showing late tonight (meaning that I must finally work out how to persuade my video to record from Freeview). Finally, Moodysson’s best-known work, Together is showing on Friday.
Great; but what I want is to be told, in advance, that there’s a Moodysson season coming.
(Addendum: Aha! There is a weekly BBC Four newsletter , as well as a monthly one for the channel’s extensive (if dumbly named) documentary strand, Storyville. Sign up for them here.)
10.08.04
What ho, Boris!
hello Bloggers.
All I can say about this blogging business is that it is very hard work. Please can you wait until tomorrow morning when I will be posting an incredibly exciting article from the Daily Telegraph about radio masts
Boris Johnson is possibly the most troubling figure in modern British politics. He is a jolly, likeable, funny, bumbling old-fashioned Tory. By all rights he should have existed forty years ago. Compared to the ghastly parade of frosty-eyed Redwoods, Howards and Davises, Boris is, well, a human.
He can also write, with a Wodehousian novel (’Seventy Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors’) the latest, probably knocked out, as Douglas Hurd has suggested, in three days flat.
I have a horrible feeling that Boris’s new blog is going to have to go on the sidebar, to give me a chance to resolve my feelings back into a healthy hatred of the man, and in the meantime enjoy his puppyish prose.
Caveat emptor: Most of the blog appears to be written by Boris’s parliamentary secretary, Melissa Crawshay-Williams, who does all of the fawning and who cannot correctly spell ‘The Beatles’. Chiz chiz.
10.07.04
Flashmob: The Opera
Last night, as noted on the linklog and all over this morning’s Metro, there was a flashmob in central London: the self-explanatory Pillow Fight Club.
As a high-concept gag, it looked fun. Far more interesting, though, was what BBC Three did with flashmobs last night. Last night they put on an opera at Paddington station.
You know what? It turned out to be alright.
I watched Flashmob: The Opera, by which I mean that I saw it on TV, not that I turned up myself as part of the mob. It lasted under an hour, and only really involved the mob for the very end of the climactic number.
But it did work.
The conceit was not just that this was a drama interacting with a real space, although it was that too, with the characters trailing about the station waiting for their trains and arguing on the concourse (an engaged couple, Mike and Sally, fall out over football, and she is picked up by a lothario). The real conceit was that this was opera for football crowds.
More about that in a second. First an overview of the key creative decisions involved.
First (and I must say I was initially disappointed by this), the music consisted entirely of well-known arias, with a couple of choruses thrown in. I had a nasty feeling this was going to be Hooked on Classics all over. It wasn’t, largely because the English libretto had been written so well and so wittily (by Tony Bicat). The opening line of the piece was “What a plonker!”, and the tone was set from there.
The first act was pretty stodgy, with the characters separated and a surprisingly large amount of the performance prerecorded (noticably Mike’s rendition of La donn’e mobile on his tube journey).
Incidentally, this was I suspect a moment where life had let down the art a little. Mike was cast as a Charlton fan, and Charlton were, until a couple of months ago, the home of Paulo Di Canio. I’m sure Mike’s opening lines were originally meant to be the chant based on La donn’e mobile that used to accompany Di Canio on trips to Liverpool:
‘We’ve got Di Canio; you’ve got our stereo’
Anyway, things got rather better at half-time, not least because the producers did their best to play up the football theme: veteran commentator Barry Davies gave the half-time analysis. As throughout, this maximised the sense of a football audience meeting opera, rather than opera being brought to a football audience. This also explains the choice to show the piece on populist BBC Three rather than artsy BBC Four.
In the second half the atmosphere grew with the flashmob, who had evidently been asked to arrive for about two-thirds of the way through the performance. It all moved swiftly towards a conclusion with Sally being persuaded to catch the train to sin and Swindon, while Mike failed to grab her attention with a rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’.
Cue the flashmob, circling Mike, blasting out a quick chorus, and sending Sally scurrying back towards her one true love. It was a very basic story tricked out with frills and ruffles (Mike is confronted by an argumentative chorus of Chelsea supporters; there is some business with the carousel in a sushi bar), but that’s what you get with opera.
In the end I think it worked for two reasons:
First, the choice of popular pieces rather than original music was made to work by emphasising that these pieces are part of the popular consciousness. It felt perfectly sensible to hear a Chelsea gang hammering out the Anvil Chorus, and it was probably ‘Nessun dorma’ that gave the piece its football theme in the first place.
Second, I’m a complete and utter sucker for found choruses. The flashmob chorus at the end, a motley bunch of commuters, students and web-types, gave a decent account of themselves and Mike had the nous to look astonished as they accompanied him.
In short, the performance was cleverly angled to take best advantage of its own peculiarities: everything in it was defined by the twin poles of flashmobbing and opera.
Clever, successful, and definitely unrepeatable.
Sight (and Sound) unseen
A quick thought.
I think alone of film magazines I’ve seen, only the BFI’s venerable Sight & Sound does anything other than lump the plot in with the review. Sight & Sound gives you three sections.
The first lists extensive credits (though not, if you look closely, complete credits: every song on the soundtrack will be be listed, but only heads of department will be given amongst the actual film-makers).
The second gives the plot, in horrible detail.
The third section is the review.
Unfortunately for those who would really rather not have the plot given away, the review section tends to assume knowledge of the plot summary, rather defeating the object of the exercise.
Now the idea: what I’d like is film reviews (in particular) divided into two sections. The first part to be read before seeing the film, essentially telling you the genre and style, the overall competence and guiding you on whether the film is worth your time and effort.
The second part is the analysis, to be read only after seeing the film in question. This is the part which is happily left out of tabloid reviews, but causes much heartache in broadsheets. Your broadsheet reviewer earns his or her beans through skill at analysis, not awarding stars. And some of the time they’re not just informative but interesting. Separate it out and allow the reader to read the section that is relevant to them at the time.
10.04.04
Your del.icio.us number
This is really one for the A-list bloggers, but it strikes me that the rather wonderful del.icio.us provides a rough & ready reckoner of that all important position on the power curve.
Method: When you post a bookmark on del.icio.us, note the number of users who have also bookmarked that URL. This is your number, x. Two days later, check that bookmark again in del.icio.us. Divide x by the number of users now bookmarking the URL. Average over a large number of bookmarks. The result is a number between 0 and 1 that represents your place on the power curve.
The Alexander Technique
One of Andrew Marr’s pieces of advice on reading newspapers was to learn to recognise individual writers.
Here’s one I always recognise.
Jeremy Alexander writing on the football in The Guardian. As distinctive as a baby screaming in your ear.
I’ve written before about the curious nature of sports journalism. In essence, I said that sports writing has the task of rendering a shared experience into a shared memory. To this extent it has a tendency to both poetry and playfulness. Most of The Sun’s really memorable headlines (such as ‘Wenger’s wonga makes Bergkamp linger longer’ and ‘Super-Callie-are-fantastic-Celtic-are-atrocious’ ) have in fact been found on the back page, not the front.
So sports journalism is powered by the metaphor, the comparison, the pun.
Sadly, nobody told Jeremy Alexander when to stop, or indeed, that the point of the report is the game, not the pun.
Reread Alexander’s piece. Skip over the first paragraph, noting only that it labours the phrase “ifs and buts” into a riff on Kipling.
It’s the second paragraph that shows Alexander at his unstoppable worst:
He joined Norwich in July for £250,000, a Briton too far for Bolton after Gary Speed’s arrival there. When Nigel Worthington called for a concerted rolling up of sleeves on Friday the doughty defender was a natural master of the rolls.
You’re probably rolling on the floor in pain by now, and hence missed the quick pun on ‘A Bridge Too Far’ that came before the real clunker.
The annoying thing is that the man can write if he stops trying so hard. He describes a surge by Huckerby as “one last pendolino run, tilting and surging like a lurcher on course”. Yes, that’s exactly how Huckerby runs; but make your mind up, are you on dogs or trains. I would have gone for the train, if only because Mr Alexander thoughtlessly follows up with an eminently excisable gag: “It could have slipped the discs of Redknapp’s remaining defenders.” It’s a shame that ’slipped’ following ‘dogs’ can’t help but suggest ‘dogs of war’, which really muddles the issue.
I don’t hate Alexander’s writing, as such. I just wish he’d cut down on the Sunny Delight. He gives me a headache.
As that oafish ex-hack director on the telly might put it, “Calm down, dear, it’s only a match report”.