The Gudgeon

Death of The Gudgeon

2006-01-05T13:14:00.000Z

On a New Year whim, because it just feels like the right thing to do, I have decided to kill this blog and start a new one, over here.

Web 2.0 Software

2005-12-19T09:23:00.000Z

Dion Hinchcliffe offers us an intriguing roundup of the year's Best Web 2.0 Software.

I like the look of the online to-do list software, Voo2do.

He also considers the best online start pages. I've yet to be convinced that any of these will catch on but continue to watch the area develop.

The online file storage and word processing applications he talks about look useful too. Is the definition of Web 2.0 open enough to include these?

Steane's twelve

2005-12-17T18:08:00.000Z

Serena Fenwick at Musical Pointers comments on John Steane's choice of the twelve leaving voices on record, which appeared in the 1000th issue of The Gramophone.

OSINT

2005-12-05T09:09:00.000Z

President Nixon, for example, once belittled the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in words that capture the common mistake: “What use are they? They’ve got over 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.”

A CIA analyst argues that Nixon was mistaken to think that secret sources always beat open sources of intelligence (OSINT).

...

When the above article was linked to by Arts & Letters Daily a couple of weeks back, I expected to see a lot of commentary on blogs about it, since the idea that open source intelligence is often better than covert spying is one that lends itself very strongly to the internet and the information that can be gleaned from it.

Oddly enough, in the course of my normal blog-reading, I didn't see anyone else link to the article, so I thought I'd better so I can return to it again some other time.

...

And as if to underline my take on the article, the internet has just become that little bit more powerful, thanks to Google's Web Comments tool. I've just installed that, and right away I used it to discover that contrary to what I thought, there were plenty of blogs that linked to the OSINT article.

"I was looking for my own sound"

2005-11-22T12:02:00.000Z

"I was looking for something that Chet Atkins wasn't doing, that all the jazz kings wasn't doing, that all the country pickers wasn't doing. I was looking for my own sound"
-- Link Wray, 1929 - 2005

Harvard's musical orgies and more

2005-08-15T19:38:00.000Z

Pliable at On An Overgrown Path has been digging out some amazing streamed music links, including a Harvard classical station which puts on mammoth musical "orgies" several times a year. These are binges on anything from Bartók to Lennie Tristano to Unsane (a band whose first Peel Session is up there with the best ever recorded).

Pliable also had an earlier post with lots of other links, although perhaps Alex Ross beat him to the Arnold Schoenberg Jukebox.

The Home Office "needs" Omar Bakri

2005-08-15T18:59:00.000Z

Jon Ronson quips that the Home Office and Omar Bakri Mohammed are "a grouchy old divorcing couple who know they need each other really but are both too petulant to admit it". Hmm. Bit like the way the bad old neocons need Al'Qaeda? We've heard that one before.

Perhaps Ronson does not understand that Omar Bakri's absurdity does not make him any less dangerous. It was absurd of Richard Reid to think he could explode an aeroplane with his shoe, but he nearly succeeded.

Jon Ronson is an entertainer out of his depth and his latest thoughts are not funny.

A city in decline, a country on the brink

2005-08-12T09:54:00.000Z

I enjoyed the comments on this post at 2 Blowhards more than the article they were attached to. A lengthy submission by Benjamin Hemric outlines his memory of the decline of New York from the mid-sixties into the seventies "Taxi Driver" period. I hadn't thought or read much about how that had happened before.

Michael Blowhard himself then chips in with the following:

I moved to Manhattan in 1978. In my first couple of years here, I was mugged twice, pickpocketed twice, and attacked once. The whole place felt like "Blade Runner" -- like it was falling apart, but (from the point of view of an arty kid anyway) still had a few last grimy drops of glamor and juice to be enjoyed. Money and working people were fleeing the place. The punk scene, which I dabbled on the sidelights of, was all about dancing on the abyss, enjoying the moments before the Final Collapse.

The contemporary punk scene in the UK could surely be described in the same way. And of course, punk in the UK was initially modelled on the Ramones, Television, Patti Smyth, CBGBs and so on - a city in decline inspiring a country on the brink.

The death of the editor?

2005-08-08T14:58:00.000Z

In a Guardian piece about the book industry, Blake Morrison writes that "editing has had its day". He is very persuasive about the important role of the editor, but I could have done with more on the claim that these days, editors are simply too busy to edit. If time is money and money is time, how could have the bygone editors of Grub Street have been less busy?

The anti-Midas touch

2005-08-05T19:56:00.000Z

There was no shortage of faint praise for Sir Edward Heath when he passed away recently. But it was only when I was catching up on the blog of the Social Affairs Unit that I came across this: the most entertainingly mean obituary yet.

Stuck on a train with Haydn

2005-08-04T21:26:00.000Z

Ivan Hewett won't be buying an iPod. He tried a CD Walkman once and didn't like it.

Classical music doesn't belong in this private, mobile space. It was created in a space that's vanishing - the public space of churches, libraries, debating societies and concerts. That's the real reason it's so hard to listen to it on a Walkman or an iPod.

Reading his piece, I feel guilty that nearly all my listening is done using classical music as background music only. In my listening, I feel inferior to Ivan Hewett. I do not sit quietly night after night listening to music any more than I spend night after night single-mindedly reading the books I'm suppposed to read. But I will continue to listen in my amateurish and half-hearted way, to classical music on my iPod.

A sick club of losers

2005-07-28T11:54:00.000Z

Terry Zwigoff discusses record collectors: "it’s definitely sick- a sick club, a sick club of losers!".

Best of the Web's birthday

2005-07-28T09:12:00.000Z

OpinionJournal's partisan but unparalleled Best of the Web Today is five years old today. James Taranto looks back over how it developed and the battles it has fought.

The grave of the Sadducee

2005-06-17T20:16:00.000Z

Euro-intrigue being such a major story this week, there has been much useful online commentary to catch up on. Given the quality of the coverage, and the difference in tone to the reports which have made the television and radio, it looks like Europe will be an issue which will boost interest in many UK blogs as a rival source of information.

At the start of the week, Stephen Pollard quoted extensively from a piece by Dan Hannan putting the British rebate into perspective. Today, Alister McFarquhar at the ASI commented on French diversionary tactics and so, presciently a couple of days ago in the light of this evening's pretense of conciliation from Chirac, did Richard North.

In the interests of reprazenting the Ulster flavas (as Ras Kwame might say if he lived here), I should also link to Slugger O'Toole catching Ian Paisley out defending the CAP in parliament this week. Paisley and his party should be heartily ashamed of their pork barrel politics and Paisley only partly redeemed himself when he pronounced the European Constition as "dead and buried in the Sadducee's grave, which means that it will never be resurrected". Would that the CAP could join it there, despite what Dr Paisley might wish.

Monkeon

2005-06-17T13:47:00.000Z

I like to look in at the Photoshopped images and tall tales on the front page and message board of b3ta every now and again.

On the front page, there's nearly always an upload by a certain Monkeon, like this excellent topical one of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Monkeon's style of photo strips are so detailed that I have to squint over them to make out what is going on. Even the layout of his archive gallery forces me to squint. Perhaps that is limiting his audience a little, despite how consistently good he is. But the overly-detailed style suits his humour, in that it takes a second to register what he is getting at usually, before the joke falls in place.

There seem to be two or three other people on b3ta who have more or less appropriated what he does and do it nearly as well. If I'm right in that, which I can't be sure I am because I'm not there every day, I hope he takes it as a compliment and I hope it is not a harbinger of some TV or radio producer stealing his ideas, because being funny is hard and and deserves credit.

Die Sonate hat sich gewaschen

2005-06-17T11:03:00.000Z

Having realised from Radio 3's Beethoven marathon that I find it hard to get tired of listening to the great man, I've been listening through as many of his works as possible, starting with the early ones. So far I've heard 2 symphonies, 6 string quartets and 2 piano concertos. I've also been going through the piano sonatas, using the complete set still available on demand from Radio 3, recorded by Artur Pizarro. When I reached the eleventh one, I came across Beethoven's own comment on it in the programme notes here. He wrote to his publisher

in colloquial German that 'Die Sonate hat sich gewaschen' - 'The Sonata has washed itself', which the great musical analyst Donald Tovey likened to the English phrase 'takes the cake'.

I would like to adopt this phrase for everyday use, not about piano sonatas necessarily as I rarely compose them myself, but knowing my knack for language, there is little chance of me remembering it even an hour from now.

Foucault's ignorance

2005-06-17T10:38:00.000Z

A new book has been published on the relationship between the influential French philosopher Michel Foucault and radical Islam, entitled Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.

Arts & Letters Daily are linking to an excerpt from Foucault's writing in it and a review of the book in the Boston Globe.

The question is, whether this throws any new light on the tendency of today's far left to make political alliances with Islamists.

What were Foucault's specific errors? The Globe says that this leading scholar

[...] accepted at face value the idiosyncratic reading of Islam promulgated by Ali Shariati, an Iran-born, French-educated sociologist who promulgated a militant Islamist ideology identifying martyrdom as the only true path to salvation. He also spoke of an Islamist ideology shot through with Western elements as if it were a unified and absolute Other. He accepted a mythological rendering of Shi'ism as a historical religion of resistance, when, in fact, it was imposed by authoritarian force upon Iran in the 17th century and had collaborated with authoritarian power more often than it had resisted it.

Like today's apologists for terrorism in Iraq, Foucault didn't know or care to find out what sort of revolution he was in favour of, as long as that revolution was against "industrial capitalism". It is good to have the details of his ignorance on record.

Beethoven's humanity

2005-06-13T09:09:00.000Z

During Radio 3's Beethoven Experience last week, no music but Beethoven was played, with no interruptions, around the clock. Nothing he composed was left out.

A range of opinions about the project have gone up on the station's message boards. While most posters are full of praise for it, a couple of posters feel that to dedicate the station's output to one composer is to go too far.

Before last week, I would have guessed that I would have been bored of listening to Beethoven by the 2nd or 3rd day of tuning in and out to the programmes. I tend to vary my listening on a whim and would never dedicate myself to one composer.

But I found that having Beethoven constantly there was a wonderful thing. Having his music there every day began to make his music that much more human and real to me.

I've also sometimes found Beethoven a bit self-important. Norman Geras posted a couple of links on his blog that relate to this. First, he quoted from a Beethoven-bashing piece in the Guardian:

Most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal.

Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

If overstated, still sort of true. This is why Beethoven for me has been secondary in importance to Bach. Beethoven seems to push himself into his music in a way that Bach doesn't.

But Norm links on to a comment elsewhere, which takes this argument head on. What Beethoven did

was a great departure from earlier composers, who did indeed try to create regular, somewhat mathematical pieces. But those constraints were the outside force; the detachment from true music. Beethoven composed from the heart. He wanted you to feel - to be sad, happy, thrilled, or even to laugh [...] He hadn't abandoned a guiding principle, but rather embraced a different and, I'd say, better one.

Hearing a lot of Beethoven in a week leaves me feeling similarly. While I can't accept Beethoven as Bach's superior, the sheer humanity that comes across from Beethoven's music vindicates his approach.

The strategy of the "colleagues"

2005-05-30T14:52:00.000Z

The profoundly Eurosceptic EU Referendum blog links to the Daily Telegraph's editorial view today: too much effort has been invested in the European project for it to be scuppered by one referendum result.

The blog goes on to anticipate that "'the strategy of the "colleagues"' in Brussels will be to play a cautious and patient game, hoping that if enough effort is mustered, the referendum in Denmark can still be won - and the British referendum too.

By this time, there would be a new French president who in such a new climate could ask the French people for a second opinion.

While this imagined sequence of events is unlikely to come about in exact detail, EU Referendum is surely right to assume the federalists are a long way from giving up their dream.

UPDATE:

(Via Instapundit.) Michel Houellebecq's reaction to the French referendum result? "I am very surprised because normally French are cowards".

Anti-American Tories

2005-05-30T12:30:00.000Z

As part of an article on whether the term "The West" still means anything, Brian Walden discusses European hostility to the United States.

After first identifying the broad swathe of former and current socialists who are opposed to American capitalism, he moves on to a second group of anti-Americans:

These are old-fashioned right-wingers who bear an ancient grudge. The reason for their hostility to America is that traditionally the US has disapproved of European imperialism. This was a great problem for Winston Churchill in President Roosevelt's later years, particularly at the Yalta conference with Stalin.

In the 1950's both France and Britain felt they had reason to be aggrieved by lack of American support as they struggled with the last of their imperial problems. The Suez adventure, which was a reckless attempt to combat the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, by a temporary alliance between Britain, France and Israel was wrecked by the active disapproval of the USA.

The damage this did to relations with America was hastily covered up and a myth was invented to explain the breach. It was said that poor Anthony Eden was physically ill and wasn't thinking straight. The implication was that few other people fully supported the operation. This version of history is most unjust to Eden. Many notables were strongly opposed to Nasser, including Churchill and Labour's former foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison.

America's lack of sympathy towards the imperial problems of its allies has been swept under the carpet as if everybody is somewhat ashamed of the subject. But it's extremely important. Many people on the political right have never forgiven America.

While the Soviet Union was powerful, mostly they kept silent - though of course President de Gaulle didn't. With the Soviet Union gone these right-wing critics see no reason to support America in anything it does. They are, for instance, virulently opposed to the current campaign in Iraq.

Walden is talking about the right across Europe. What interests me is how much this argument can be said to sum up the anti-American elements in the British Conservative party.

In that party, I would guess there is a spectrum of anti-American feeling. At on end, let us say, the rump of pro-imperial conservatives that Walden is talking about.

At the other end of the spectrum, presumably we have what is simply a grouping of the statist soft left (sometimes referred to as the modernisers).

And while I call this a spectrum of opinion, I wonder whether it really is a spectrum, or a marriage of convenience between disparate groups.

If it is the latter, perhaps a robust brand of Conservatism which was Atlanticist and in favour of economic liberalism could exploit the divide, in order to conquer them.

Walden argues that Conservatives cannot ever be fully at ease with the United States because Conservatives can never renounce the heritage of the Empire. But even within the American Right, there is debate about the extent to which their Republic has taken on imperial characteristics.

In any case, the most recent spat between the Tories and the American government was caused by Michael Howard's electoral opportunism, when he tried to be against the Iraq war as well as for it, rather than any ideological differences.

Personal experience in handling cattle

2005-05-26T15:29:00.000Z

Professor Reviel Netz has written something claiming to be a work of history, entitled Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. I remember reading a long excerpt from it a while back, in a magazine I have since learnt to avoid, called the London Review of Books.

Now Arts & Letters Daily has brought the Professor's barbed wire thesis back to my attention, since the book has finally now been issued, and reviewed in the TLS.

Amazon's synopsis runs:

In this original and controversial book, historian and philosopher Reviel Netz explores the development of a controlling and pain-inducing technology - barbed wire. Surveying its development from 1874 to 1954, Netz describes its use to control cattle during the colonization of the American West and to control people in Nazi concentration camps and the Russian Gulag. Physical control over space was no longer symbolic after 1874. This is a history told from the perspective of its victims.

In his TLS piece (at least the portion of it that is on the web), Edward N. Luttwak does not address the totalitarian uses to which barbed wire was put in the 20th century.

However, he does use his experience of ranching in Bolivia to take the book's early sections apart with ease, pausing only to speculate that its faults of its author might be

readily explained by a brilliantly distinguished academic career that has understandably precluded much personal experience in handling cattle.

Having once struggled through a book by Michel Foucault, I always enjoy a takedown of books in this vein, particularly ones endorsed (as this one has been) by Noam Chomsky. Luttwak's review is a classic of its kind.

Radio On

2005-05-24T21:01:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, I was finally able to see the film Radio On, directed by Chris Petit. I would now like to make a blog entry referring to it using my notes of the time. I present:

Memorable scenes from Radio On by Chris Petit

1. A very slow pan around a flat in Bristol, enlivened by the use of David Bowie singing Heroes, in German. This ends up showing the dead brother who is the focus of what plot there is.

2. A strange sequence apparently showing our protagonist DJing in a factory. (We have also been shown his empty London flat, which for some reason, has multiple TVs in it, as well as a moody woman watching them.)

3. Quite a lot of driving about, with a Kraftwerk tape on.

4. An encounter with a frightening squaddie who has been caught up in the Troubles of Northern Ireland, who luckily gets left by the side of the road before he can cause any more grief.

5. A visit to a petrol station, at the back of which the attendant incessantly plays an Eddie Cochrane song. (The attendant being the young Gordon Sumner.)

6. A wander round the flat in Bristol, a visit to a burger van, a meeting with two Germans, who are staying in a hotel.

7. An excellent part: the Germans are looking out of the hotel window, when the camera suddenly zooms past them from the outside, along the weird overpass road that the protagonist's car went along earlier. This is a genuine coup on the part of the film-maker and the most memorable and odd moment.

8. A scene at a pier; a scene in a pub, getting knocked off a bar stool by a horrible woman; a drunken scene in a car, at a quarry, in despair; attempted suicide.

These scenes are not really dramatised. Our interest is generally only held by the soundtrack; and the camerawork; and the roadside scenes, landscapes, buildings, and interiors which are constantly in front of the camera.

My conclusion

Surely this film evokes its period (Britain at the end of the 70s) like no other.

The soundtrack is perfect (it reawoke my interest in the music of the time).

The film evokes its period in a slightly bad way. It is rather broodingly, pointlessly existentialist. Being made by a former leading film critic of Time Out, it could even be seen as predictable social criticism of the early part of Thatcher's Britain, from the viewpoint of some sort of trendy London set.

Yet: the positive side of Chris Petit's very painstaking alienation and passivity is that there is such a strong sense of his being removed from everything happening in the film, that it becomes almost a documentary rather than a work of fiction. He notices so much of the way everything looked at that point in time, that this film is surely a classic despite its faults.

A third listen to David Bowie's Lodger

2005-05-24T18:42:00.000Z

1. Fantastic Voyage
A low key start. I can't dismiss my idea that it inspired the low-key, Bowie-like opener on Pavement's Wowee Zowie. "I've got to write it down/And it won't be forgotten", he says. I suppose "it" hasn't been forgotten yet at least. Good melody.
2. African Night Flight
There is a very annoying start to this song. Eno at his most whimsical. Gets better after a minute or so, but not that much. At least it is not PC in its African imaginings. Some quite decent buzzing noises coming out of the right-hand speaker.
3. Move On
Bowie sounding good at the bottom of his vocal register. Seems to be done in 2 alternating sections. Memorable chord progression in the first section. The second section feels nicely out of step and tuneful.
4. Yassassin (Turkish for: Long Live)
This track is built on an off-beat, hence has a reggae feel that comes across more strongly than the occasional Middle Eastern effects. I have never heard David Bowie try to sound like Damo Suzuki before. I don't really like this and again, I mostly blame Eno for being whimsical here. Although the song is credited to Bowie! The first track on the album that I feel like skipping past.
5. Red Sails
An excellent attempt to sound like Neu!, but with a charming Chinese theme. Some fine wah noises on the guitar. Bugs me in the way it happily evokes communism. Lovely washes of synthesizer and guitars over the driving beat, though. One of the best songs on the album.
6. DJ
The dated backwards string sounds belong to the other end of the 70s but I suppose they are supposed to sound disco, like the bass and guitar. The chugging piano does not quite fit. The lyric and chorus is boring and reminds me of Robbie Williams. But as a piece, not as bad as I have made it sound.
7. Look Back in Anger
A driving hard rock rhythm, possibly modelled on Jaki Liebezeit. A real, early New Romantic vocal from Bowie which works very well. My ear keeps going back to the beat, which could have been mixed louder; I also keep noticing the cymbals and fills. I don't like the way the song has borrowed its title, but this is probably the highlight of the album. Sweeping and echo-ey sounds work so well over hard rhythms.
8. Boys Keep Swinging
More piano-chugging, presumably borrowed from the Velvet Underground. The notion of fashionably bisexual boys "checking each other out" seems quaint. It sounds like Eno is doing the backing vocals and he sounds pretty good. Apparently this is a reasonably well-known song, but like the rest of the album, until last week it was all new to me.
9. Repetition
Nothing to do with the song by the Fall that must have come out slightly before this. A strong bass riff, with very simple drumming, and the guitar gets its wang bar interfered with a lot. Not bad.
10. Red Money
Another red song. What is so good about the colour red? "Project cancelled", he sings. Quite dull. After a minute and a half, I'm still waiting for something to happen. After 3 minutes... still waiting, although it has managed to gradually build... just before it ends, I have to admit it does make sense as a closer.

The verdict:
I was hoping for something as good as the first half of Low. None of it is quite on that level. It is a better album than its individual tracks, but just a tiny bit too much of its time. There is no song as spine-tingling as the song Heroes, from the same time. But it makes me want listen to the album Heroes, which I have never taken to, again. So I am obviously not quite done with David Bowie.

Lebrecht: bargain CDs at risk

2005-05-10T13:46:00.000Z

I recently acquired a lovely CD of Maria Callas singing the lead in Norma re-issued on Naxos for the bargain price of 15 quid. The copyright on this 1953 recording had lapsed after 50 years. I had then been looking forward to snapping up many more such reissues. (I have also been able to get some handy box sets of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong from Proper Records thanks to this bargain-creating law.) But apparently all this potential bounty for CD-collectors is at risk. Norman Lebrecht informs us that the record companies, led by EMI, are fighting to extend their period of copyright.

Bresson's visions

2005-05-01T09:30:00.000Z

L'Argent (1983) is the last film of Robert Bresson (1901 - 1999). In its austerity, it is typical of all the films of his maturity.

He based it on The Forged Note, a short story by Tolstoy.

One deceitful act, the passing on of a forged high-denomination note, leads into a spiral of immorality: first, a false testimony against an innocent man, then robbery, tragedy and murder.

Bresson's storytelling refuses us direct access to his characters' minds. He always cast "models" (as he called his amateur players) rather than actors, because professional performances would not have given him the inscrutable effect he required.

Instead, Bresson's camera scrutinises only the actions of his characters. These are shown with the clarity of an information film showing how to operate machinery.

Bresson's economy of means and power of storytelling set him apart from other major directors, who can look lazy and thoughtless in comparison. There is something self-denying in Bresson's approach, as if he is fasting himself so that he can receive religious visions.

Steve Bell comes good

2005-04-07T13:29:00.000Z

I'm not a great fan of the Guardian and the politics of their cartoonist Steve Bell are repellent. I think it's lazy to make fun of the Conservative leader by comparing him to Dracula. Lastly, I suspect it was not Steve Bell's intention to cheer me up. But that said, I did smile at this.

Classical music on the iPod (2)

2005-04-04T13:03:00.000Z

I wrote before about classical music on the iPod, drawing together as many useful links as I could find at the time. One of the best articles back then was written by Kirk McElhearn, who has now written a couple of new articles on the same subject. He does go over some old ground again, but it is good for another classical iPod user to discover that he is not alone. The first article deals with sound quality and the familiar problem of gaps between tracks. The second addresses how best to tag (or label) your music, so that you can actually find the stuff you want to listen to.

Fair Trade?

2005-03-22T14:57:00.000Z

It is fascinating to watch Fair Trade products becoming more and more popular. I myself was accustomed to buying them sometimes, until fairly recently, when I became sceptical of the thinking behind them.

Fair Trade is a classic example of a movement which has the highest aims, of helping poor farmers. But it can only cause harm, because it is based on faulty economic thinking. It is not Fair Trade but free trade which lifts countries out of poverty, in a transaction which benefits both buyer and seller.

Unfortunately, because Fair Trade is backed by many charities including Christian Aid and Oxfam, anyone questioning it will appear uncharitable.

But questioning the aims of these charities is not the point. The long-term results of NGOs meddling with the market will be to damage the interests of the poor.

I am not aware of any single conclusive refutation of Fair Trade schemes available on the web but posts like this one from The Globalization Institute are invaluable:

Taking coffee as the example, it is said that the grower gets about 5 pence from each £2 cup, or 2.5%. This may seem unfair. But the real unfairness is not that the raw material has a low price, but that the European Union 'protects' itself against processed, packaged end products.

UPDATE, 4/4/05: The Institute now links to this piece attacking Fair Trade in the Spectator.

An iceberg in Belfast?

2005-02-23T12:16:00.000Z

David Vance has been making fun of the artist Rita Duffy and her plans to bring an iceberg into Belfast Lough, as a concrete but poetic symbol that she says would open up a new way of thinking about local history.

I had the good fortune to hear Ms Duffy on the Today programme this morning.

When she began making her case, it was along the partly plausible lines of how this iceberg could function as some sort of allegory.

She says, "This is a good way forward for Belfast - rather than rebuild the Titanic, we should actually look at what interrupted our journey".

I presume she means that we should use the iceberg to stand in for our failure to live together peacefully in this part of the world, and by staring at it in the lough together, we would be able to finally agree that yes, in a sense, we had all crashed into something disastrous.

But after a couple of minutes on the radio programme this morning, she began making a parallel between the building of the Titanic and "imperialism" and putting forward other unlikely views about history, which reminded me of nothing more than the case histories of tedious critical posturings in Roger Kimball's The Rape of the Masters.

In other words, perhaps Rita Duffy is not interested in opening up our imaginations at all, but merely in using this project to put forward a set of conformist views.

I have seen another Duffy project around the city - the portraits of Belfast citizens along the hoarding beside the Waterfront Hall. I was not very impressed by those. The only advantage they had over a normal set of portraits was that they were in public view. It was hard to tell if they were well-painted or not, since they were inevitably seen from a bus or car. As murals, as least they were not in support of a paramilitary organisation.

I also remember her attempts to involve the residents of Divis Flats, a couple of Belfast Festivals ago, in switching the lights of their habitations on to to make a some kind of statement. As I recall, many of these residents declined to take part.

If I am honest, I have some doubts about Rita Duffy's view towards the people of Belfast. She says she wants to help them to speak out, and be represented, but do they really need her to help them do this? If they speak out in a way that she does not like, perhaps even to ridicule her ideas, will she really allow this?

After all, I am writing this only as one of the ordinary people of Belfast who Duffy presumably wants to help using her art, and I am sceptical about her project, and would like to decline her offer of healing, since I am not sick.

If she proceeds to raise the money for this project herself (Christo and Jeanne-Claude have taken no public money for their similar Gates project in New York City), it is all a free speech matter, so I wish her good luck, but I agree with David Vance that not a penny of public money should go towards this.

Finally, I would put forward that Thomas Hardy's poem The Convergence of the Twain is a far more open-ended, original and memorable way of thinking about the Titanic and the iceberg than Rita Duffy's proposed project.

It is freely downloadable from the internet and would only cost a few pence to print out.

Cover art

2005-02-01T13:06:00.000Z

For no reason other than to inspire daydreams of music unheard and books unread, and because they look nice, here are a couple of links to galleries of cover art: first, to a hoard of album covers at New York's Academy Records; second, to a collection of book covers done by Edward Gorey.

The Vacuum: apologies all round

2004-12-15T13:38:00.000Z

The Vacuum, a free paper in Belfast, has had a run-in with the City Council. Certain councillors objected to the contents of issues on the themes of God and the Devil. Since the paper receives council funding, it was required to apologise by the council. But in typical style, it is now exploiting this demand to comic effect, with a day of atonement.

Sorry Day is a nice piece of japery by Factotum, the paper's publishers. But in their attempts to portray this as a freedom of speech issue, they are as clownish as the councillors they mock. If they want to be free of council interference, then why take the council's money?

If Factotum don't like the council having a say in how its money is spent, then speaking as a rate-payer, I can only offer my profoundest apologies.

UPDATE [21 Dec]: Stephen Hackett replies:

Well City council awarded the grant to Factotum based on their own application process-their criteria –which Factotum fulfilled. So we obviously agree with council having a say in how it spends its money otherwise we would not have entered the application. The fact of the matter is they fucked with the process they put in place. And how did we get this silly notion about freedom of speech....
Belfast City council minutes 18/8/04
The Development committee discuss the recommendation of their Arts Sub-committee. Mr. J. Walsh, Principal Solicitor (of Belfast City Council) attends and recommends that 'any decision to withhold the remainder of the allocation could be considered as a contravention of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights'.

Thanks for the email, Stephen. Obviously, I haven't seen the terms under which The Vacuum receiving funding, or whether this amounted to a contract that the council is trying to wheedle its way out of. If the council has broken a contract like that and the contract said that The Vacuum could print what it wanted, then I agree that this is a freedom of speech issue and I would wholeheartedly support it as such.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sceptical that such a contract exists.

My broader point remains this: with regard to future funding, The Vacuum has no right to say what it wants at the expense of rate-payers who don't agree with its views.

Imagine a worker on the minimum wage who also happens to be a church-goer. (There must be many more such people in Belfast than Vacuum readers.) His rates money is being taken away from him under threat of legal action, so that he might even be imprisoned if he doesn't pay, to fund a magazine that's openly ridiculing his faith.

Speaking personally, I've enjoyed many an arts event subsidised by the rates-payer. I've even enjoyed The Vacuum on occasion. I'm uncomfortable to think that people poorer than I am were forced to pay for my enjoyment. And when their representatives complain about this, even if it's on religious grounds that I don't share, then it strikes me as bad taste to complain about freedom of speech.

Das Mäusemuseum

2004-11-11T16:44:00.000Z

Caterina links to Baden's Musée Bizarre. I like the look of their Mouse Museum.

John Peel 1939 - 2004

2004-10-26T21:02:00.000Z

John Peel, who has just died, meant something different to every one of his listeners, but I must try to record something of what he meant to me, clumsy as it will be. This is because as well as coming across as a warm and likeable man, a friend or uncle almost, John Peel was a constant reference point in my life of listening to music.

I first remember hearing his programme coming on after Janice Long’s show, probably around 1984, when I would have been 14. It began at ten in the evening, as far as I can remember, and I would only hear little snatches of it, particularly at the start when he’d read out the list of exotic bands he’d be playing later, such as Skeletal Family. I also remember being mesmerised by the spacious, echoing sound of reggae that was stranger and more fascinating than any I’d heard elsewhere. But John Peel was on too late for me to listen to and anyway, I had decided I preferred Iron Maiden to the Smiths.

By my late teens, I listened to almost nothing but the most comically extreme death or black metal. It had seemed that this music was only played on the radio by the hard rock DJ Tommy Vance, who I recorded every week, but I discovered that a few such tracks also made their way into each John Peel programme.

I started taping Peel, in order to make compilation tapes of this provocatively noisy music, and since I had to listen to the whole programme in order to get at the stuff I wanted, I was exposed to music I grew to love just as much, and then prefer, like rap and indie rock.

I became the classic Peel obsessive, recording every programme, hanging on his every word and nuance, dashing to the record shop every Monday morning to find anything he’d played, scorning anything he hadn’t, and buying as many Peel-approved records as my budget allowed.

Since Peel invariably scattered a few older tunes into every show, whether blues or rock ’n’ roll, these also went on my shopping list. If the master was in favour of it, I was eager to learn, and it rarely stopped me from buying anything even if I didn’t immediately like it myself.

I was the DJ’s pupil. The music press and other DJs, and even my own taste, were obstacles in the way of the urge to know what he knew. Yet while this relationship might sound silly now, I regret none of it. I know that as a result I experienced something of a Grand Tour, taking in 50 years of rock music, its roots and its derivatives. I still own a huge pile of vinyl records, mainly cataloguing the first half of the ‘90s, but also reaching right back into pop music history; and I still have very strong, confident opinions about any new rock music I hear.

My infatuation didn’t last forever. I grew tired of listening to six or eight hours of Peel’s music every week. Some of the music no longer challenged me and some of it sounded too much the same. Diverse and challenging though Peel’s musical world was, it began to limit me and I looked elsewhere.

I rebelled against the apparently rebellious music of rock. Peel was a reference point I used to reorient myself and sometimes argue against in my own mind. I began to think the basis of much of his music not what it had seemed. Peel always ridiculed pretension in rock music, and many of its other faults, but being a reactionary socialist himself, of the sort that fancies itself an old softie, there were faults in rock music he would always have been blind to.

John Peel built a crossroads where many wayward listeners and musicians made unlikely meetings, with rich consequences for popular music. He did as much for his music as any one man could have. Specifically, because rock belongs to thousands of musicians rather than to a small number of geniuses, although he could not play a note, Peel has likely done more for rock than any musician.

Because of the part he played, many listeners and musicians feared losing John Peel. I feared it myself. Now the fear has come true and time will reveal the consequences.

Triumph der schlechten Laune

2004-10-13T09:25:00.000Z

While I rarely listen to the Fall these days, I like to keep an eye on their progress. A rejuvenated band is currently touring Germany and one review, from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, has been translated here, as Triumph of the bad mood (Triumph der schlechten Laune):

The Fall gave the audience what it wanted: Moroseness and rock´n roll (“rock”). A good reliever against bad mood is to inspect people with worse mood - Marks E. Smith is always the correct address for this.

Angels in marble

2004-10-04T22:41:00.002Z

A former member of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher writes in Prospect about days gone by for the Conservative party:

The Thatcher approach was to preach a message and then try to put it into effect. No less important, the Thatcher assumption was that the preaching would be persuasive because somewhere in the depths of the British national psyche it would strike a chord. Just as Disraeli saw working-class Tories as "angels in marble" - that is, natural conservatives awaiting only the inspired touch of the sculptor to emerge as Conservative voters - so Thatcher and her closest colleagues believed in a natural conservative majority.

How different things were back then.

O'Rourke on Iraq

2004-09-29T13:49:00.000Z

PJ O'Rourke:

As of early 2004, America didn't seem to have the answers for postwar Iraq. Then again, what were the questions?

Was there a bad man? And his bad kids? Were they running a bad country? That did bad things? Did they have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Were they going to do more bad things?

If those were the questions, was the answer 'UN-supervised national reconciliation' or 'rapid return to self-rule'? No. The answer was blow the place to bits.

A mess was left behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars; a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons; a mess that cannot systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its citizens. It's a mess with a message - don't mess with us.

In particular, I keep re-reading the first four sentences of the second paragraph. Lovely.

North Korean dog meat and hotel

2004-09-14T09:51:00.000Z

Little point in adding to speculation about mysterious explosions in North Korea.

But I was intrigued to read about this, the spooky Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang (via Gweilo Diaries).

And The Times says that in a daring capitalist experiment, North Korea has ceased to fix the price of dog meat.

Nader to derail Democrats again?

2004-09-13T14:45:00.000Z

Christopher Caldwell thinks that against the odds, Ralph Nader is strongly influencing what John Kerry can and cannot say, and will again inadvertently come to the assistance of George W Bush:

Mr Nader's support would have dissipated after 2000 had politics continued on its ordinary way. His gripes primarily concerned the sameness of the parties' economic platforms, which is less of an issue this year. But history has provided Mr Nader with another cause. He is the only pacifist candidate in this race. Solid majorities still support the war in Iraq, but many of those who oppose it do so in an uncompromising way. Mr Kerry cannot take these voters for granted. A straightforward position against the Iraq war would lose him the election. But a straightforward position in its favour would drive voters to Mr Nader. And Mr Kerry cannot afford to cede Mr Nader even 1 or 2 per cent of the vote in any key states.

Rail privatisation in the UK

2004-09-10T13:51:00.000Z

Rail privatisation in the UK has been less than an startling success. Don Boudreaux believes that the ideas of economist Ronald H. Coase may help to explain why:

political prohibition against greater or lesser vertical integration -- that is, the prohibition on U.K. railway franchisees changing how much of their operations they perform in-house and how much they purchase from outside suppliers -- means that a critical tool is kept from managers who wish to improve rail service in the U.K.

Black metal

2004-08-20T16:17:00.000Z

Swen is linking to the top 10 most ridiculous Black Metal pics of all time.

Berger on Moore

2004-08-20T15:29:00.000Z

Mick Fealty links to a piece by John Berger on Fahrenheit 9/11.

Berger summarises the film's conclusions:

It declares that a political economy which creates colossally increasing wealth surrounded by disastrously increasing poverty, needs – in order to survive – a continual war with some invented foreign enemy to maintain its own internal order and security. It requires ceaseless war.

Note that Berger does not say why inequality of wealth would require constant wars. He proceeds:

Thus – fifteen years after the fall of Communism, decades after the declared End of History, one of the main theses of Marx’s interpretation of history, again becomes a debating point and a possible explanation of the catastrophes being lived.

This statement is particularly laughable when you consider that Marx offered no way of understanding Communism and certainly no way of understanding its fall. Because Marx said Communism would work and was proven as wrong as it is possible to be.

Maybe it's too late for John Berger, who is now quite an old man, to let go of his Marxist framework. But it is sad to reflect on the brilliant mind, and all the other minds as brilliant as Berger's, that were wasted on such stupid ideas.

Classical music on the iPod

2004-08-05T14:30:00.000Z

I hesitated before buying an iPod since I'd read it wasn't ideal for listening to classical music, which is the sort of music I usually listen to, and iPods are quite expensive.

There is some discussion of using the iPod on the internet for classical music, but not a lot, and some of that is faint praise. So it seems worth adding some thoughts, as well as rounding up some links to the discussion I unearthed myself.

The iTunes/Gracenote database classifies music using artist, album, song and composer.

All CDs I've tried so far have at least been recognised by Gracenote. BUT.

The artist field often contains the composer name.

The album name is normally at least on the right lines (some have suggested dropping the album idea and using this for work name; so far I haven't felt the need to do this).

The "song" is awkward to correct: should you include the composer name and work title here, or not? In fact sometimes a CD pops up with the track names in the artist fields. This is not logical, but turns out to display quite neatly when the iPod plays the tracks back.

Album and song titles are often too long to fit in the iPod's screen so that I have to guess which album or song I'm looking at. I haven't arrived at the best way to abbreviate these. But at least the song titles scroll around while the song is playing.

The composer field is often left blank but is easy to correct. Apparently with some earlier iPods, you could not easily browse using the Composer category, but you can with the 4G.

iTunes is good for editing multiple selections at once. There's more on the Gracenote database and use of its fields here, here, here and here.

Care must be taken in ripping (if that is the right word) CDs in which tracks are intended to be heard without a break between. For instance Berg's Violin Concerto which has 4 movements without a break. iTunes has a "join track" facility which solves this. Snag: you might well only realise that one track goes straight into another when you play it back later. Here's a very good article dealing with the "join tracks" thing, which also has some inspiring playlist ideas.

A CD takes about 6 to 7 minutes to copy to the iTunes on your PC. Just long enough to update the details on the last CD you copied up so that you have some chance of locating your latest content later on.

It only ever takes a few minutes to update the iPod with the latest version of the library on the PC via USB.

I may be an atypical classical listener, but audiophile sound quality is not crucial to me. Since I'm normally listening to my iPod in an environment with background noise (people typing or chatting, traffic passing), I don't see much point in encoding my music at a higher bit rate than the iTunes default. It sounds good enough to me. A few years ago I would have been playing cassettes out of a hissy Walkman. And I want to get the most out of my 40 gigabytes.

Why, despite the grumblers, I like the iPod for classical music

In common with many classical listeners, I have more CDs than I have time to listen to. I have been interested in classical music for perhaps five years, only after becoming bored with rock and drum'n'bass and the rest. So I lack familiarity with well-known pieces and even with many of the CDs on my shelves. How to boost this? The iPod may have imperfect music labelling and less than audio-obsessive sound quality but these are pedantic concerns. I use it as background music. Norman Lebrecht would not be happy. But I can listen to Bach or Schubert at the merest whim. If I have a passing fancy to dabble in something harder on my ears, I can follow that fancy before it vanishes. An iPod means there is more choice and at more times. More opportunity for music.

Update 25/1/2005: here are some related thoughts at benzo.org

Lartigue

2004-06-23T11:18:00.000Z

The achievements of photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue are discussed in the Daily Telegraph by Sebastian Smee.

As a further illustration of Lartigue's startling early ability, here is a favourite picture of mine, that he took of his cat, when he was only ten.

More Lartigue here and here.

Little Englanders, wets and Atlanticists

2004-05-25T07:58:00.000Z

More diagnosis of the modern Conservative party. Adrian Wooldridge writes about Little Englanders, wets and Atlanticists in this piece on anti-American Tories.

Thomas Bernhard

2004-05-11T14:11:00.000Z

Eric Ormsby, writing in the New Criterion on Austria's controversial Thomas Bernhard, sounds a little like Bernhard himself at times:

While living in Prague I formed the habit of spending the afternoons at the Goethe Institute on the right bank of the Vltava; there, in a palatial nineteenth-century building, I could browse through the entire range of German and Austrian literature and there too, one day, I came across Bernhard’s last novel, aptly entitled Extinction (Auslöschung). From the first elephantine yet nimble sentences I was spellbound. Not long after I began to read Bernhard’s autobiography, arguably his masterpiece, and from the first sentence I knew that I had come across a “kindred spirit.”

Lacuna Inc.

2004-05-10T10:41:00.000Z

Lacuna Inc. is the company which offers to remove your unwanted memories in the current cinema release Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The ingenious and confusing script is by Charlie Kaufman, who first attracted attention with his screenplay for Being John Malkovich.

Much has been written about cult writer Philip K. Dick's influence on commercial cinema ever since Ridley Scott's Blade Runner back in 1982. Several blockbusters, among them Minority Report and Total Recall, have been based on his books since.

Kaufman's work, though attracting a smaller audience so far, seems to share Dick's obsession with dismantling personal identity and trying to put it back together again. (In fact a web search reveals that he once adapted Dick's novel about drug abuse, A Scanner Darkly, though the script was never used.)

Michel Gondry directs Eternal Sunshine with a lot of invention. As a Kaufman collaborator, he now joins Spike Jonze as an former MTV talent whose career must be watched closely. The turns taken by the script are already at the edge of what the viewer can absorb but somehow Gondry pushes things even further.

Despite Gondry's flair, though, it's Kaufman's mind that becomes more intriguing after seeing this film. His way of taking familiar everyday situations and breaking them down into philosophical problems seems very natural to him, but it strikes most viewers as bizarre. Amusing as it is today, Eternal Sunshine may easily become funnier as the years pass and the absurdity of Kaufman's logic soaks in.

52 former diplomats

2004-04-28T14:35:00.000Z

"TONY BLAIR should be delighted that no fewer than 52 former diplomats have written to him to say that his Middle Eastern policy is 'doomed to failure'" says Andrew Roberts.

Public Intellectualdom

2004-04-28T14:02:00.000Z

Enoch Soames points us towards The Hatemonger's Quarterly, from which I select this Case Study in Public Intellectualdom.

Stockhausen pics

2004-04-28T10:31:00.000Z

Professor Stockhausen introducing his works in the Whitla Hall last weekend.

Stockhausen in Belfast, day 3/3

2004-04-26T11:20:00.000Z

17:30 25/05/04, Whitla Hall, Belfast

The final concert featured three substantial pieces from Stockhausen's massive opera cycle Licht.

Oktophonie (Octophony)
As its title suggests, the music is projected "over 8 groups of loudspeakers in a cube around the listeners". Composed at the start of the 90s, the work lasts 74 minutes and sounds very different from Stockhausen's electronic music of the 60s. Stockhausen explained how he slowed the rhythms down drastically so that the ear can follow the music's movement in space. Furthermore even the timbres are chosen for this end. The result is an emphasis on droning synthesized sounds constantly moving and flowing around the audience.

In his talk, Stockhausen surprisingly stated that the Whitla Hall was more suitable for octophonic music than any hall in Paris, London or Cologne. He also related his childhood experiences in which as a German he suffered 5 or 6 years of aerial bombardment. As a musician, he said he loved the sounds of the enemy aircraft and the firebombs falling.

Mittwochs-gruss (Wednesday greeting)
We were privileged to hear a world premiere performance of this work which lasts just under an hour. It utilises a Kurtweill K2500X synthesizer and an Akai S-2000 sampler. Again, the pace of the music is dramatically slowed down so that spatial movement is more clearly audible. Stockhausen also recommended making occasional head movements to order to better detect the planes of sound. I seem to recall some overwhelming chimes and bruising chords of sound in this piece. The music is intended to "awaken the universe of the fantasy". Stockhausen took the stage at the end to say how pleased he was to finally hear the piece as it had been intended to be heard and to dedicate it to the festival's organiser, Michael Alcorn.

Mittwochs-abschied (Wednesday farewell)
Here, Stockhausen explained his concept of "transreal" music, which goes beyond the surreal, and is composed of sounds "taken from completely different areas of life" but heard in impossible combinations. For instance, in the first section, sounds from a Venetian mass are heard in conjunction with (among other things) small handheld fans used by ladies in the 1920s. These combinations create "fantasy spaces" and the work is made of up 11 of these spaces. I should note that the sounds Stockhausen uses are also electronically altered, for instance to transpose their pitches. The work lasts 42 minutes and it is recommended that we "fly in the free flight of fantasy" for its duration.

The composer received a standing ovation.

Stockhausen in Belfast, day 2/3

2004-04-26T11:16:00.000Z

19:30 24/05/04, Whitla Hall, Belfast

Hymnen (Anthems) (1966-1967)
Stockhausen put this piece into the historical context of the Cold War and also of a touring anthropological exhibition of the time. He began to think of himself less as a German and more as an "earthling". He would listen to international stations on his short-wave radio and
around midnight, he would hear the national anthems of various countries being played. It occurred to him to compose using these anthems as found material.

The piece is divided into four "regions" each lasting about half an hour, so its length makes it a demanding listen. The idealism of the work recalls Beethoven's setting of Schiller in his 9th symphony. After much complex development the work resolves into a final world anthem. Whether this was the composer's intention or not, I found myself scared at what form a world power like this might take. Partly because Stockhausen's sheer mastery of sound, on this scale, is a little intimidating.

Two days into the short series, and the next morning I found myself hearing everyday sounds, like the creaking of a banister or the passing of a car, in a overly-receptive way, trying to relate these sounds to one another as if they were in a Stockhausen piece.

Stockhausen in Belfast, day 1/3

2004-04-26T11:14:00.000Z

19:30 23/05/04, Whitla Hall, Belfast

Dressed in white trousers, a white shirt, an orange jumper and a white jacket, Stockhausen was already at the mixing desk as the audience filtered into the Whitla Hall. The stage was completely empty and blacked out apart from "a small projected full moon" from a spotlight. Speakers were clustered in each of the hall's eight corners. The composer took to the stage to introduce each piece separately and at length. He would end his introductions with the wish that we closed our eyes, the better to leave our bodies behind, and that we had a good time listening.

Electronic Study 1 (1953)
Lasting about thirteen minutes, the stark beauty of this work audibly recalls Webern, but with the expressivity of each sound coming purely from its timbre rather that from that of a musician's hand, say, on the bridge of a violin.

Electronic Study 2 (1954)
Stockhausen stated that he made an intensive study of phonetics before writing this second study though he did not explain why except that he felt that this piece was built from sounds akin to consonants rather than vowel-sounds as in the first study. It is much briefer, lasting less than four minutes.

Gesang der Junglinge (Song of the Youths) (1955-1956)
Stockhausen integrates the voice of a 12-year old boy singing from the 3rd Book of Daniel ("O all ye light and darkness, praise ye the Lord") into his world of synthesized sounds. The effect of the almost drowned voice coming up and up again to give praise in the bubbling stream of sound is surprisingly moving.

Kontakte (1959-1960)
While there is a version of this work which uses two musicians playing live, we heard the purely electronic version of this work. As perhaps his best known piece of electronic music, it is the work of Stockhausen that I am most familiar with, but it never fails to reveal something new each time to me each time I hear it. In this version, without the two musicians, there is less emphasis on the contact between instrumental and synthesized sounds, but when projected over 8 speakers surrounding the audience, the spatial effects are obviously that much more powerful. The abstract sounds never cease to develop and change, creating an entirely new, beautiful and alien world.

Karlheinz Stockhausen is visiting Belfast

2004-04-23T15:48:00.000Z

Karlheinz Stockhausen is visiting Belfast and there will be three performances of his works here over the weekend. This is as part of the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music. I intend to get along to all three Stockhausen events so I've been reading up on him again here at his home page, and also here and here.

Modern conservative thinking

2004-04-22T13:09:00.000Z

Attempts to separate the good from the bad in modern conservative thinking always fascinate me. This is a great example. It's by Michael Gove. He edits the Times on Saturdays, so has an obvious interest in dissecting the Daily Mail as neatly as he does here. But he does a lovely job not only in analysing the paper, but also relating its contents to factions within the Tory party.

Des Canyons Aux Etoiles

2004-04-07T16:27:00.000Z

A few years ago I bought a copy of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony, mainly because I was fascinated to read about his use of the ondes martenot.

While I've explored some of his music for keyboard instruments since, and had the fortune to hear a concert by Peter Hill of Messiaen's piano music, till now I'd never got around to any of his other orchestral music. That's changed with my purchase of the wonderful Des Canyons Aux Etoiles, written to celebrate the bicentennial of the United States in 1976.

No ondes martenot this time, but an orchestra of 44 accompanied by piano, horn, xylorimba, glockenspiel and some curious use of a wind-machine.

As Andrew McGregor writes:

"The variety of sounds is staggering [...] Time stands still when you immerse yourself in this remarkable new recording. Messiaen always was better at eternity than almost anyone else. Go on, lose yourself in the canyons of Utah under a star-filled azure sky."

The music is as colourful as the CD cover suggests and the excellent English sleeve notes are by Paul Griffiths.

Crime and prostitution

2004-04-06T11:16:00.000Z

Theodore Dalrymple came to "the world of crime and prostitution" first through fiction and later through personal experience as a prison doctor:

"I realized that Maupassant was not a wholly reliable guide to the phenomenon of prostitution. There was more to it than jollity, the popping of champagne corks, and impromptu dancing."

To follow his argument a stage further, I suppose we should treat even an excellent short essay such as this sceptically, only accepting what he says if we have verified it from life ourselves.

(Linked from aldaily.com)

Cooke obit

2004-04-02T15:54:00.000Z

The Economist's obit of Alistair Cooke is up.

Evan Parker

2004-04-01T11:38:00.000Z

"If you can imagine the music of the future, why is it in the future?"

-- Evan Parker

Radio 3's Jazzfile is running a three-part documentary on the music of the free-improvising saxophonist Evan Parker.

This week's programme discusses his early period in the sixties. Among other groups, he plays with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and then with the Peter Brotzmann Octet, on their album Machine Gun, which is furiously intense. Almost to the point of comedy.

I've got four or five of Evan Parker's albums. Like a lot of improvised music, I'd describe them as:

- on the margins of the listenable;
- driven by dogmas I don't grasp;
- unlikely to be in the CD player much;
- necessary from time to time, to blow away the cobwebs.

Capsules

2004-03-23T17:37:00.000Z

I'm going to post occasional capsule reviews of films on here and they're as likely to be of classics watched on video or DVD as they are of new releases.

Anyway I finally got around to watching Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie the other night and I've just been browsing through the user comments for it at IMDB to see whether I agree with them. Because I enjoyed the film a lot and I didn't expect to.

Unlike Bunuel, I don't hate the middle class and I don't have anything in particular against the church. His obsessions are outdated.

There are terrorists in this film (as there are in his later That Obscure Object of Desire, for example). In that these revolutionaries are the enemy of the bourgeoisie, perhaps Bunuel would sympathise with them even today, and I would hate him for it.

But Bunuel's opinions are worthless to me. His films lead me into confusing dreams and then abandon me. That'll do.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is not as dark as Bunuel at his darkest. If it once bit as social satire, it doesn't now, but then it doesn't need to bother. In 2004, it's a piece of provocative fun.

Readability

2004-03-19T17:23:00.000Z

Brian Micklethwait says he's never quite got around to reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and reminds me that neither have I. Years ago, I did read and enjoy The Devils though, and last year I read the novella Notes from Underground, which I didn't find a slog at all, but one of those rare "works of literature" that I found so easy to relate to it was a breeze to read. There's an essay by James Wood here at The New Republic that touches on the Underground Man. Some time ago Wood also wrote brilliantly about Knut Hamsun's book Hunger. Again, like with Notes from Underground, I read Hunger in a week. A lot quicker than I can usually get through a serious novel, and purely because I felt so in touch with the narrator's way of thinking. I like Wood's way of throwing light on this type of novel (and narrator) so much that I bought a copy of his own first novel, The Book Against God, but sadly that one's still sitting unread on my shelf.

HItchens

2004-03-16T09:50:00.000Z

Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Serfdom revisited

2004-03-10T16:18:00.000Z

More Hayek. James A. Dorn at the Cato Institute on The Road to Serfdom after 60 Years.

2004-03-10T10:10:00.000Z

John Fonte on transnational progressivism and on Gramsci vs. Tocqueville.

2004-03-10T09:58:00.000Z

The Adam Smith Institute's blog discusses fair trade coffee.

Newspapers online

2004-03-09T15:38:00.000Z

The Guardian and Observer Digital Editions demonstrate a new way to browse newspapers online.

2004-03-05T15:33:00.000Z

The Economist on Friedrich von Hayek: "the theoretical idea he was proudest of -- that only markets, not governments, could gather and disperse price knowledge effectively --helped inspire a wave of deregulation and privatisation. His chief political idea -- that free markets and political liberty were indissociable -- lent strength to the revival of classical liberalism. By his death in 1992, Hayek had joined Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick as one of the three theoretical godfathers of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution".

2004-03-05T14:54:00.000Z

Philip Pullman, who it turns out used to be the chaiman of the Society of Authors, backs that organisation in arguing for protectionism in the book market. The Daily Telegraph has more here.

2004-03-01T10:14:00.000Z

Frank Kermode on Lady Augusta Gregory.

2004-02-25T12:29:00.000Z

This thread at Slugger O'Toole probably isn't as entertaining as I think it is, but I did laugh out loud at one or two of the comments, serious as the subject matter is.

2004-02-25T12:16:00.000Z

"I am Lieutenant Freud of the British 8th Army and I have come to take over your aerodrome"

2004-02-25T12:13:00.000Z

David Elstein, of the Broadcasting Policy Group, outlines why he believes the BBC governors and the licence fee should be scrapped.

2004-02-25T12:07:00.000Z

"The EU is somehow, to the European elite, much more than its observable features, its bureaucratic rules and procedures. It is an idea which is somehow better and more important than anything which it actually is or does."

-- Lexington Green

2004-02-25T11:55:00.000Z

It's sad that anyone has to defend the honour of black and white films as a category. Film history can't be written primarily as the history of film stocks (can it?). But if an argument in favour of black and white cinema has to be made, then it couldn't be made much better than it has been here.

2004-02-25T11:49:00.000Z

Alexandra Mullen reconsiders Chopin (at The Hudson Review, linked to by Arts and Letters Daily).

2004-02-13T15:17:00.000Z

Via Chicago Boyz, a useful Rhetoric Primer.

2004-01-27T10:41:00.000Z

Lord Molyneaux: "I witnessed the dead of Belsen"

2004-01-22T16:21:00.000Z

Mark Humphrys has a great page here with "An open letter to Richard Dawkins" and "People who let me down after Sept 11th" (linked to by Frank McGahon).

2004-01-22T13:58:00.000Z

An excellent piece on Kaliningrad at Electric Review.

The mind of Mark E Smith

2004-01-22T13:16:00.000Z

A glimpse into the mind of Mark E Smith courtesy of the Guardian and Fall news.

2004-01-22T11:54:00.000Z

Brian Micklethwait visits the Tate Modern's indoor sun.

2004-01-22T11:11:00.000Z

Graham Robb takes apart a new book on Baudelaire's opium addiction.

2004-01-22T11:07:00.000Z

Literary Weblogs: An Overview at Complete Review. (Via NormBlog and The Scotsman.)

2004-01-19T14:24:00.000Z

A Panorama special this week will criticise the BBC's handling of the David Kelly affair. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

2003-12-08T11:57:00.000Z

Found this New Criterion piece attacking Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle, from a link posted by Jack Stephens on www.pejmanesque.com.

2003-12-08T09:54:00.000Z

Today programme quote of the day

"I was making the point that 95 percent of children are murdered by their parents"

-- 2003 Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry

2003-07-16T15:25:00.000Z

The Times has what seems to be the best obituary of Alexander Walker.

2003-03-05T14:54:00.000Z

Ken Dodd's stalker pleads guilty.

2003-03-05T11:04:00.000Z

Robert Conquest on Stalin.

2003-03-04T12:57:00.000Z

A quirky biography of Robert Schumann.

2003-03-03T12:59:00.000Z

Here's a new piece by Robert Kagan on Tony Blair and the differences between America and Europe. Also, over at Prospect magazine, Timothy Garton Ash writes about Kagan.

2003-02-28T11:00:00.000Z

The Bad Plus, a jazz trio from Minnesota, played the Linen Hall Library (est. 1788) in Belfast last night. The set was imaginative and fun with the group enjoying themselves as much as the audience. Their current CD on Sony, These are the Vistas, supplied most of the material, though they've added I Will Survive and Every Breath You Take to their trademark portfolio of inventive covers. Compositions not on the album included Neptune the Planet (a mood piece played over a feedback tape) by bassist Reid Anderson and a great blues-based number which pianist Ethan Iverson didn't introduce. From the Vistas material, we heard an ecstatic 1972 Bronze Medalist, written by drummer Dave King, and of Iverson's numerous tunes, Boo-Wah sounded particularly good, though The Gudgeon couldn't work out which one of the Chopin etudes it reminded him of.

2003-02-27T18:14:00.000Z

An interview with David Cronenberg, mostly discussing his excellent film Spider.

2003-02-27T17:48:00.000Z

The Gudgeon is keen on Freedom Suite by the David S. Ware Quartet. It's also listed as one of the best albums of 2002 in a round-up by The Wire magazine. The G was converted to Ware's music by seeing the quartet perform last year, here in Belfast at the Festival.

2003-02-27T17:40:00.000Z

Reminiscences of magic mushrooms from Jeremy Clarke of The Spectator.

2003-02-27T17:28:00.000Z

Here's a clip of Mark E Smith from The Fall appearing on The Adam and Joe Show, courtesy of Stephen Bending's website. Thanks to Fall News for the link.

2003-02-26T17:27:00.000Z

Christopher Hitchens: I wanted it to rain on their parade

2003-02-26T17:18:00.000Z

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