April 2005 Archives
April 30, 2005
Oh God...
The tension is unbearable. People (like Brian Walden in his Radio 4 essay) are saying that this is a dull campaign but I disagree. Could it be less dull? Blair's Nixon moment will affect the outcome not at all (hardly anyone knows who the Attorney General is, let alone what his contribution to the conduct of war could possibly be) but the steady erosion of Labour's position is going to make the last week almost unbearable for the Howard-averse (and the Kennedy-phobic).
Anyway, since I reckon there's a reasonable chance that you Googled your way here, searching for 'Hertsmere election' or similar, I need to make sure that if you have any interest in getting rid of James Clappision, our third-rate Tory MP, you need to vote Labour. Voting Liberal won't work. In fact, according to Tactical Voter, if enough of you Liberals tactically switch to Labour, we'll be rid of Clappison all together, which would be nice. Come on guys, do the right thing!
April 27, 2005
Life after iPod
The night before I left for NYC my iPod died. It's four years old so I suppose I should be grateful it lasted this long. It went to consumer appliance heaven with a horrible grinding and whining noise, finished off by the sort of goose-sucked-into-jet-turbine howl-and-crunch that you'd think would require an actual goose. Standing in the kitchen at 2 a.m. it was quite frightening...
Anyway, a return flight on a 25 year-old, filled-to-capacity Air India 747 (me: 'what's the capacity of this plane?'. Stewardess: '411'. Me: 'how many on board today?' Stewardess: '412 [giggles]') with nothing to listen to (except the fascinating but inaudible Indian music coming though those crappy plastic tube headphones) left me with plenty of time to read.
So I read: the mighty Paul Johnson on the wickedness of the Darwinian fundamentalists in The Spectator. Simon Hoggart on Paxman vs. Blair in The Guardian (incidentally, Hoggart has Blair winning this particular punch-up, unlike some other outlets). Michela Wrong on The Pope ("He did more to spread Aids in Africa than prostitution and the trucking industry combined") in the New Statesman.
From the same issue of The Spectator – and this time FREE – Germaine Greer's entertaining invocation of Shakespeare as inventor of our shared fantasy of Englishness and Daniel Hannan's provocative but authoritative analysis of French reasons to vote 'no' to the Euro constitution. Fred Vogelstein's detailed analysis of Google vs. Gates from Fortune. Philip Roth's unpublished interviews with Saul Bellow from the late nineties (this is what you buy The New Yorker for. Dazzling and inspiring). The Economist's really quite persuasive special report on flat tax (plus the in-flight magazine, the menu, the emergency card and the Daily Mail – but I'll keep those to myself).
April 26, 2005
Well, I'm enjoying it...
The prevailing mood of high cynicism makes it hard for me to say this but I have to say that this is a lively, fascinating, scrappy and wide-open election campaign. It's exciting (tell me Sedgemore and the Oona and George Show and The Heckler and postal votes and all the other brilliant sideshows haven't got you glued to your favourite news source!) and combative and fun.
Opinion polls aside, the three parties have a kind of parity of presentation that's really quite impressive – they're all doing an effective job but by sharply different methods and with intriguingly different results. Lay the three manifestos out on a table and you have a snapshot of a rich and intelligent political process.
If this campaign (which is the best I can remember) doesn't revive interest in politics by at least a few percentage points then it's probably not possible to do so (maybe we should just accept that). I don't (can't) admire the Tories' mean-spirited effort but I have to say that, together with their opponents, they've produced an election campaign that's a testament to this country's vigorous and healthy democratic culture.
[Insert ethnic group here] hysteria
Good to know that the Daily Mail's stand on refugees and immigrants is at least consistent. From an excellent and moving BBC 4 documentary I learn that the Mail campaigned vigorously for the expulsion of 4,000 kids brought to Britain for safety after the bombing of Guernica in 1937.
The Basque children deserved better but, because of the Government's reluctance to 'intervene' in the affairs of a sovereign state (which, of course, also led pretty directly to the fall of the the Spanish Republic to the fascists), they were taken care of by an entirely voluntary committee of ordinary families, many of whom subsequently adopted those kids orphaned by the fighting and subsequent purge, and who received no state aid at all.
The 1937 headlines (wish I'd noted them down) read strikingly like the Mail's latest crop of [insert ethnic group here] migrant scare stories.
April 25, 2005
24 hours in New York
I know. I know. I didn't even see The Gates. I was in town to conclude a deal with my new friends Brad Bowers and Matt Comyns from Black Inc Ventures. Brad code-named our joint venture 'Whiplash' and, for the time being, that's all you're getting...
Matt and Brad took me for a proper American breakfast at The Pershing Square Cafe opposite Grand Central Station and then to a friend's groovy West Village apartment to sign our agreement (cue Gillette moment: slow motion high fives, back slapping etc...) and get some brainstorming done. It was the first time we'd met, after four or five months of discussions in email and Skype and on the phone.
Of course, I'm pathetically excited by this new opportunity and generally stunned by the Americans' readiness to trust a virtual stranger to run their precious business – the business equivalent of those women who befriend their death row pen friends and then marry them sight unseen. Anyway, watch this space.
I may have been there for less than a day but I did, you'll be glad to know, manage to take a couple of hundred pictures.
April 20, 2005
Pope Idol 265, day two
The second day of Pope Idol 265 saw the first eviction and... er... a winner. Not sure if I understand these rules (and not very happy with the TV coverage either. As far as I can tell there were precisely no cameras at all in the house the entire time, despite the killer interior).
Anyway, the winner, it says here, is the first German for a thousand years and his stage name is going to be Benedict, which is a bit 1970s but has to be better than 'Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger'. Luckily he's only 78 so the Catholics won't have to do this again for a while (hopefully they can improve on the 'light a fire and produce some nice white smoke' task a bit in the meantime: the housemates cocked it up again and loads of people thought they'd selected a new Pope hours before the final decision).
April 19, 2005
Howard returns to type
Nice to see Howard's disreputable move into immigration and asylum come back and bite him but his campaign is still flatlining (I do like that phrase) and his team rebelling so, let's face it, we're going to see more of this ugly stuff in the next week or two. After all, if the Tories' share of the vote does come out at the wrong end of the 30s as the polls almost universally predict, the blood-letting within the party will be spectacular and immediate: Howard will be spending more time with his family so quickly they'll barely have time to get the kettle on. With his campaign in such trouble, any incentive he may have had to run a respectable and positive campaign has evaporated so I think we'll see a strong return to type for Howard.
Remember, Mr Howard has form. His stock-in-trade while in Government was the slick and effective delivery of some pretty ugly politics: saloon bar nastiness like Clause 28, the absurdly bulging prison population and, of course, the pointless and divisive poll tax. Hold on to your hats.
April 17, 2005
Ivor Cutler
When I was a kid (this would be about 1970), I discovered, in a cupboard at home, a huge open-reel tape recorder, bought by my Dad in the 1950s. I can't remember the manufacturer but I seem to remember him telling me it was German (or maybe Swiss). The thing was the size of a very large suitcase. It was made of black vinyl-covered wood and it was too heavy for me to carry.
It was a massive treat to get it out and set it up on the bedroom floor. Its valves produced so much heat and so much light that you could do without both while listening. In fact, I remember the thing keeping me warm on cold nights in our badly-heated house. It was engineered like a Motor Torpedo Boat, detailed like a Messerschmitt and was so tough it would certainly have survived a parachute drop. It had a tiny splicing gadget built-in at the front of the machine, so you could edit and repair tapes as you listened.
Dad had quarter-inch tapes recorded mostly from the radio in the 50s. I listened to The Goons, Tony Hancock, Round the Horne, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, Lonny Donegan, Tom Lehrer, (and other exotic American comics) plus others I can't remember now (Tommy Steele? Joyce Grenfel?) and, without a doubt the strangest, Ivor Cutler. Lots of Ivor Cutler. All of this came back to me while watching BBC4's terrific, affectionate Cutler profile the other night (they're bound to repeat it). Cutler, perhaps Britain's strangest and loveliest man, is a sort of gentle Scottish Ginsberg or like one of those happy Swiss Dadaists or your oddest and happiest uncle – but also a proper artist and a great poet. Brilliant.
While you're at it you'll probably want to be looking at this obsessive and brilliant museum of old audio gear.
April 16, 2005
Protect your family...
Best spam this week... Easily. In the picture, that's a model, right?
“Armored Vehicle protection. So you have it covered, finances in place, investment portfolio don't stable, don't under control... Terrorist target. You know as well as I do the scum bags that under control want to work for a living, just want to steal what you have, car jack your vehicle, extortion, kidnapping. So... Protect your family.
Click the pic for the whole, glorious thing.
April 15, 2005
Murdoch gets religion (finally)
In 1995 I tried (for about ten minutes) to persuade Rupert Murdoch to give the keynote speech at the Internet World London conference that year. In my address book (which is a huge and largely pointless guide to what people's telephone numbers used to be) I've still got direct lines for his various PAs. Of course, that's as close as I got to Mr Murdoch back then. I might as well have been asking him to address 'Fruit World' or 'Top Hat Expo'... You see, Murdoch's purchase of pioneering ISP Delphi the year before fooled me into thinking that he might actually be interested in the Internet. He wasn't.
He is now, though. In a speech to a newspaper industry conference in the US Wednesday he called the Internet "a fast-developing reality we should grasp" and said "The trends are against us... so unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of five or six years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans." So what's happened to finally get Mr. Murdoch's attention? Well, it could be the unstoppable expansion of the blogosphere or the arrival of RSS as a serious news distribution platform or – more likely – it could be the research he's commissioned that shows only 8% of 18-34s find newspapers useful. Ouch. The Newspaper publishers have got the fear because of the real possibility that their almost universal gradual decline (at least in Western economies) might turn into a collapse as the news-reading public ages. Could the newspapers turn out to be the Internet's first real Old Media victim?
April 14, 2005
I'm impressed (and relieved)
Really. I am. Labour's campaign is good. On stage yesterday, at the manifesto launch, the front bench was awesome – handing off and harmonising like The Beach Boys. Brown's seething resentment is impressively under control – and I mean really under control (did they drug him?). There's a seriousness and professionalism on show that's reassuring. Blair's cabinet looked, at the press conference, like an experienced, un-flashy board of directors and I think that'll play well with even pissed-off voters. Howard's unremarkable gang are going to need to lift their game a lot if they're to stand a chance against Labour's really polished team and the Liberals look, frankly, like the Three Stooges in this company...
Watch the BBC's news coverage of the manifesto launch. Read the manifesto... and you'll want to be reading Simon Hoggart on "a major serving of sound gristle".
April 13, 2005
John Berger is back
When I was young, I used to love John Berger. Then I went off to college in the Big City and quickly learnt that he was out-of-date: a crusty old humanist in the cold universe of infinitely deferred closure and inaccessible meaning (and all that). So I put his books up on a high shelf and tried to get on with the unloveable Red Brigade of deconstructivists and post-structuralists I was supposed to identify with now. It didn't really work (I did my best) and, twenty years on, the old Bolshevist has conspicuously and happily outlived the 'theory' nihilists. In London this month, there's a celebration of the man's life & work.
Sean O'Hagan wrote a lovely piece about him for The Observer last week and here are a couple of emotional pieces by the man himself from The Guardian: one about his old friend Cartier-Bresson (another sad old humanist) and one about Fahrenheit 9/11.
When I was about eighteen my Dad, who used to visit a village in the Haute Savoie close to Berger's, walked the couple of miles up the mountain to Berger's fantastically remote house – no electricity and no running water at the time – to ask him to sign my copy of Another Way of Telling. Berger was out but his wife promised he'd sign and return the book by post so my Dad left the book behind. When he told me he'd troubled the great man in his mountain hide-out I was mortified but, after a couple of weeks, it turned up, politely and tidily inscribed. I'm looking at it now.
April 12, 2005
My fantasy
My wife thinks I'm naive (or it might have been 'stupid' – I can't remember). Anyway, I have a fantasy: Tony and Gordon are good mates. Really. They've been together too long to let a bit of professional rivalry come between them. Tony gets impatient with all that Presbyterian, son-of-the-manse bollocks and Tony's high church mumbo jumbo makes Gordon feel slightly sick. Their wives don't get on, of course, and they hate each other's friends but, basically, they like and trust each other and they're serious about working together to win the election and lead the country into a healthy, modern, fair and un-neurotic future. Of course, I could be wrong.
April 10, 2005
So long Longbridge
Heart-breaking business reality finally steam-rollers the Rover dream. Having been through one liquidation (a bit smaller, I'll admit) I feel pretty confident in saying that Rover is tragically but definitely history – its passing will be painfully and pointlessly deferred, though, because the UK Government can't acknowledge that the Phoenix route may have been the wrong one – at least not until after the election. The sad thing is that I can't have been the only person who thought Rover was done for five years ago when the Phoenix fantasy got the Government OK and £500M in cash.
What I'm wondering now is: what if some clever and realistic executives (not the ones who just took £30M out of the business, for instance) picked up the assets left behind and turned them into a green transport powerhouse. There are no significant UK manufacturers of hybrid or Hydrogen powerplants, of interesting non-carbon transport tech or of low emissions vehicles in general. Since the Hydrogen war has already been well-and-truly won (in a few years we're going to be talking about Big Hydrogen and the people behind Big Hydrogen are going to be... Big Oil!) now's the time to invest in Hydrogen transport tech. Wouldn't it be exciting if those 6,000 jobs (or a serious fraction of them) could be recycled into a really promising, really long-term business instead of being flushed down the toilet..?
Update: Wired this month has a bunch of interesting green power articles: Brendan Koerner looks at Toyota's ambition to be the number 1 hybrid/Hydrogen manufacturer, Paul Eisenstein tests all the current hybrids, and there are a lot of them: they're going to catch on quicker than you expected. Lisa Margonelli reckons the Chinese will be driving hybrid uptake, which is encouraging.
April 08, 2005
Book review: Hypercard reborn?
Going on twenty years ago Hypercard, created by Bill Atkinson, felt like something helicoptered in from a William Gibson novel. "Make my own computer programmes? Pretty ones with sounds and visuals and proper interfaces? I am as a God!" Of course, I actually used it to make crappy catalogues and half-finished tools (sometimes half-finished catalogues and crappy tools) but, like everyone else, I could tell there was something big and important under the skin and, of course, some people actually built big, important things with it.
There was the mind-blowing Voyager CD Companion Series which used Hypercard to provide historical and musical context to classical music recordings – applications which I reckon would still seem pretty cool today (in all their one-bit glory) – and countless useful programmes interfacing Macs to cash registers and power stations and knitting machines – and millions of perfectly serviceable membership management stacks for Round Tables and scout troops and athletics clubs.
So it was really dispiriting to watch Hypercard disappear without trace over the next ten years or so – killed off, I suppose, at least in part by Mr. Berners-Lee's less friendly but more flexible HTML, which, cleverly, allowed you to connect not just to resources on your hard drive but to stuff on other computers. Hypercard still exists in various specialist forms, some even adapted to the web, but it's more-or-less irrelevant. Not exactly a hotbed of developer creativity (why not, I wonder?).
Anyway, the latest version of Applescript and its integration with OSX Tiger looks like a minor revival for the spirit of Hypercard (which is what got me thinking about it in the first place). Adam Goldstein, irritating geek prodigy, has written an excellent Applescript 'Missing Manual' for O'Reilly which I reckon is pitched nicely at people like me (old-timers with failing short-term memory) as well as at ordinary Mac users and which could conceivably get us all coding again.
Tiger, apparently, comes with some useful Hypercard-style dev tools for Applescript which could kick off a real renaissance for home-developed tools and gadgets just like Hypercard did all those years ago. The metaphor is different but the goal is the same – a library of useful and reusable scripts and applications that make life easier. I'm going to keep this book next to my Mac for a while and see if it triggers any creativity. Yeah right.
April 07, 2005
Phil Gyford fixed my blog
Not many people can say that. The master has very kindly been picking over the entrails of my blog and it should now be working nicely on all platforms and browsers. I trust him because he's got the distinctive coat-of-arms of the Guild of Master Blog Fiddlers painted on the side of his van (and because he looks like he was such a nice boy).
I'm back (like you've been missing me...)
I've been to Ireland with the family for a few days. We stayed on my cousin's farm (complete with ducks and calves and so on) and we are now sorely in need of a rest from listening to my Dad going on about... well, the kind of things grumpy old Stalinists go on about. I took some photographs, of course (actually I took about 400 photographs – you should consider yourself lucky).
Now that I'm back, and the election campaign is under way (exciting, isn't it?), and the bloggers are looking pretty important all of a sudden, I'm interested to read the fiend's thoughts on the scary obligations of bloggers (yes, you) as journalists and publishers.