tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66046282024-03-07T14:52:17.376-12:00The Police Diver's NotebookDon't take your work home with youNick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.comBlogger205125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-1950026481310164052014-03-07T15:03:00.001-12:002014-03-07T15:03:19.821-12:00Songs That Make You Cry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Following Robert Barry's Quietus Essay exploring <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/14628-music-crying-science-emotion-evolution" target="out">why music makes people cry</a>, I have written a short piece about Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' for a Quietus feature called <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/14551-favourite-songs-that-make-you-cry-list" target="_blank">Tracks Of Our Tears: 50 Songs That Make Quietus Writers & Artists Cry</a>. It features superb writing from some of my favourite Quietus scribes including Joe Clay, Phil Harrison, Luke Turner, Rory Gibb, Valerie
Siebert, Wyndham Wallace and Ned Raggett, and tops it off with words from artists such as living legends Matt Berry and Aidan
Moffat. It's a beautifully affecting and personal collection.<br />
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<br />Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-67127746279740858902013-11-06T01:41:00.000-12:002013-11-06T01:41:53.476-12:00Flying Saucer Attack's debut, 20 Years On<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've done a piece for the Quietus, thusly: <br />
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/13788-flying-saucer-attack-anniversary">http://thequietus.com/articles/13788-flying-saucer-attack-anniversary</a><br />
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FSA are easily one of the top five biggest influences on Gravenhurst.Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-38653495823321727522013-10-08T13:19:00.000-12:002013-10-08T13:25:03.471-12:00Rupert Bear and the Spatially Extended Nature of Regret<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Whilst little of the work of John Marshall Stamp (1901-1973) drew much attention outside of academic circles, his work as Professor of Ontography at the University of Oxford and as General Secretary of the Royal Brotherhood of Ontographers ensured his name was familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the technical difficulties peculiar to this obscure sub-branch of paralogical enquiry. Ontography has been described as the study of the interface between meta-aesthetics, number theory and necronautical plane geography, but this description does little to illuminate it in the mind of the layman. Stamp took it as his life’s work to make ontography explicable and appreciable to the layman, and felt that his reputation should stand or fall on his success in that endeavour. Stamp was his own harshest critic (aside from Perigrine Shoosmith, of whom more later), and while many of his peers considered his successes in furthering the understanding of ontography to be significant, they would also doubtless consider this work alone to afford too narrow a picture of this complex man. As executor of the will of John Marshall Stamp it is my duty to publish here an exhaustive bibliography of Stamp’s written output, both published and unpublished, academic and popular, as well as work that was likely intended only for private consumption, along with detailed descriptions of each item as necessary. This was his wish. I also provide some personal reflections on the list and its significance. This was a liberty taken, but I am confident it was an appropriate one.<br class="kix-line-break" /><b><br class="kix-line-break" /></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1922a. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Golden Mean and Its Continuing Relevance.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Oxford (PhD dissertation, unpub.)<br class="kix-line-break" />1922b. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Golden Mean</span></i></b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><i>.</i> </b>Oxford: University of Oxford Press<br class="kix-line-break" />*The metaphysics scholar Ferdinand Shankfoot described this as a ‘Rush to publication in a naive attempt to capitalise on the popularity of Wittgenstein’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a puzzling pronouncement given that the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tractatus... </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">would not become popular - if it could ever be said to be popular at all - for at least several more decades. Stamp’s PhD adviser at Oxford cannot be faulted for his enthusiasm however, and the book at least ensured his protege’s name was known to paralogicians globally. Post-doctoral research followed at Oxford and University College London, after which Stamp spent the next five decades at Oxford.<br /><br />1923 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Pike: Some Reflections On Its Temperament Mid-Season. Punch Spring Edition</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />*Stamp’s enthusiasm for angling led to a short-lived radio show for the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">BBC Light Programme </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">entitled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now I Really Must Tell You Why I Absolutely Adore Angling. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Described as “Baffling… has nothing to do with fishing, or fish, at all, as far as I can make out” by Angler’s Weekly, the show was shelved after two broadcasts. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />1924 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ontography In Focus. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Usborne Books For Boys<br class="kix-line-break" />*The first of several attempts at promoting a wider appreciation of his calling with the average reader, this naive volume initially attempted to introduce meta-aesthetical number theory to an age group that barely has a grasp of multiplication let alone the intricate coupling of plane geography and Aristotelian virtues. At the behest of the publisher Stamp hastily re-drafted the volume aiming it at “the enthusiastic adolescent” but this simply had the effect of making it even more laborious to read and impossible to understand. A review in The London Observer simply read “Ontography out of focus” while the Manchester Guardian described it as “obscure”. No records exist of the numbers printed or sold. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />1926 The Shape Of Evil. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Proceedings of The Royal Brotherhood of Ontographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Vol 42<br class="kix-line-break" />*In this, his first significant post-doctoral work of scholarship, Stamp immediately ruffled feathers in the hide-bound paralogical community by suggesting “If we can know the name of evil, we can know its face; if we can know the face of evil, we can know its shape; if we can know the shape of evil, we can work out where it is standing, and do something about it”. The notion that evil as a property extends into four-to-five dimensional phase-space and has a distinct smell (a radical form of meta-ethical modal realism) was entirely new. To this day controversy persists over whether Stamp actually believed this or was playing devil’s advocate; a more cynical view is offered by Peregrine Shoosmith (of whom more later) who wrote “I don’t think Stamp knew what he believed”. Certainly at this time Stamp began to exhibit many of the eccentricities that would become defining hallmarks of his character, leading to the epithet “Stampian” being used to describe the worst excesses of academic obscurantism. The number theorist Gertrude Sivers described a meeting around this time in which Stamp explained that he was (for reasons he never made clear) three years into rewriting the entire collected works of Pythagoras, word-for-word but upside-down. When Sivers suggested he could simply turn an existing copy upside-down he replied “Are you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">mad</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">?! And read it from the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">back</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">?!”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />1926 Response to ‘The Shape Of Evil: A Response’. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Proceedings of The Royal Brotherhood of Ontographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Vol 43<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp’s article resulted in a flurry of responses with the most acidic coming from the pen of William Bogghosian of Yale, kicking off a life-long rivalry and mutual loathing. <br class="kix-line-break" /><br />1927 The Shape Of Evil: Another Perspective. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Proceedings of The Royal Brotherhood of Ontographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Vol 44<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp muddied the waters by writing a critique of his own work under the pseudonym Fabian Descant. According to Gertrude Sivers, Stamp later seemed to have genuinely forgotten that the article was written by him and referenced “That bastard Descant” for stealing his ideas.<br class="kix-line-break" /><br />1930 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ontographie In Aktion. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press<br class="kix-line-break" />*Another stab at popularising, this time for the German market, which following the success of Heidegger’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sein und Zeit </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">was perceived as more intellectual and technically-minded than the British. No sales figures exist. <br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1932 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Monoverse: A Proposition</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (unpublished draft)<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp’s earliest formulation of a theoretical universe in which everything is the same size. The rejection of his submission to the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Proceedings </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">journal on this subject led to the first of Stamp’s recurring periods of depression and disillusionment with academia. Stamp took an extended sabbatical from Oxford during which he spent most of his time fishing and painting until he finally began work on the first of his books for children. Appropriating the Daily Express character Rupert Bear without permission, the character’s creator Mary Tourtel initially disapproved of the venture but later gave it her blessing. <br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1936 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rupert Bear and the Island Of Lost Numbers </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London: Northcliffe Press<br class="kix-line-break" />*Starting off as a typical story of adventure, Stamp quickly attempted to introduce paralogical concepts into the whimsical stories of Rupert and his friends. After the discovery of a mysterious map, Rupert and Bill Badger set off for an island where they hope to find the lost treasure of Blackbeard the pirate. On arrival they find the island under the spell of the mysterious Lord Hawksmoor who commands a slave-like devotion from his followers. Hawksmoor initially appears friendly and offers to aid the friends in their quest, but things turn awry when Algy Pug becomes indoctrinated by Hawksmoor’s mystical views, believing that only years of scholarly study of the Kabbalah will reveal the location of the treasure, via a decoding of the ‘true tetragrammaton’, or hidden name of God. Rupert Bear counters this with a bewilderingly complex argument based in modal realism, while Bill Badger favours a middle-way ‘pragmatic realism’. The plot inevitably breaks down into a series of increasingly obscure ontographic dialogues, and by the middle of the book the characters of Rupert, Bill, Algy and Hawksmoor are all but abandoned and the plot forgotten, with the narrative assuming the quality of a technical treatise. To the surprise of no-one save Stamp, the book was poorly received but this didn’t discourage him from writing another four titles in the series.<br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1938 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rupert Bear and the River of Particulars </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London: Northcliffe Press<br class="kix-line-break" />1939 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rupert Bear and the Spatially Extended Nature of Regret </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London: Northcliffe Press<br class="kix-line-break" />1940 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rupert Bear Considers Arguments For Ontographic Realism </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(self-published)<br class="kix-line-break" />*By the second book it was clear that the illustrator Alfred Bestall was uncomfortable with the appropriation of the character for the purposes of ‘paralogical propaganda’, finally throwing the towel in after the third. At this point the patience of Lester Eaves, editor at Northcliffe Press was also worn out: “(Stamp) kept saying ‘Don’t worry - the next one will be entirely charming and mainstream’ but Stamp’s idea of mainstream was peculiar… He couldn’t remember what it was like to be a child, but then he didn’t believe childhood existed, because he didn’t believe in time, did he? ‘</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All events happen to me now, forever</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’, and all that..” remarked Eaves in his memoirs.) The fourth volume was a brave attempt, with Stamp taking on the illustration duties himself. Quickly realising his limitations in this area, he substituted one dimensional polygons for the hitherto careful renderings of Rupert and his friends, and other artistically challenging elements were replaced by pie charts and graphs. Stamp sold copies of the book from a trestle table in front of his house on saturday mornings. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" />1942 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rupert Bear Fights The Nazis! </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(self-published)<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp created this marvellous work of ‘boys own’-style adventure-propaganda apparently in an attempt at clawing back the favour of his former publisher. Hugely surprised by the entertaining volume, Eaves offered Stamp another deal, but was to be let down once more. When the finished manuscript arrived at the printers for duplication, a watchful assistant noticed that the contents were not what was expected, and stopped the press. Once again, and this time duplicitously, Stamp had attempted to smuggle an impenetrable ontographical treatise into the covers of a popular children’s series. Rupert and his friends are not mentioned once; indeed the volume contained no illustrations save the front cover, a swashbuckling image of the bear and his friends raiding Colditz and freeing Allied prisoners of war. The illustrated draft manuscript that had renewed Eaves’s interest turned out to be the work of Mary Tourtel, whom Stamp had paid privately to create the book with the expressed purpose of tricking Eaves into publishing another work of technical scholarship. Tourtel bought the work back from Stamp but personal disagreements prevented its publication; the sole copy sold recently at an auction of Rupert Bear memorabilia for a six figure sum.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1948 The Monoverse Explained </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Proceedings of The Royal Brotherhood of Ontographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Vol 54<br class="kix-line-break" />*Significantly reworked, Stamp’s theoretical universe was finally given the seal of approval by the journal and marked his return to academia. Rival ontographer William Bogghosian expressed the not uncommon conviction that it was a change in personnel rather than any change in the substance of Stamp’s arguments that resulted in the theory’s acceptance. The necronautical paleographer Occard Wills, criticising Stamp’s theory in the controversial journal </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Radical Ontography </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">many years later remarked that the publication of the piece marked the beginning of a period of decline in academic ontography: “Intellectually scelerotic, stuffy and incestuous work was published on the basis of who you went to school with; safe, sterile, an intellectual parlour game, providing ammunition for the enemies of ontography.” Rising to prominence in the 1960’s, Wills’s daring fusion of dialectical modalities and aesthetic terrorism was hugely influential, bringing a dose of revolutionary Marxist panache to the stodgy respectability of the paralogical sciences<br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1953 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ontographical Investigations</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Oxford: University of Oxford Press<br class="kix-line-break" />*Perhaps hoping to cash-in on the popularity of Wittgenstein’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Philosophical Investigations</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Stamp wrote this in a voguish, oblique and fragmentary style. Eschewing technical arguments and syllogistic deductions in favour of short, numbered paragraphs posing vague postulations and rhetorical questions, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Investigations </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">would go on to be his most popular work. A book which many people bought but few actually read, surely even fewer understood it. Boasting statements such as “Time is a game that plays itself, cheats, wins and then demands a rematch”, and “When the waiter returns, the chef is already burying himself alive”, it is most famous for its apparent furtherance of the theory that Germany’s embrace of Nazism was an inevitable result of the country’s location at the centre of a tectonically fixated land-mass, thus popularising the notion that fascism is impossible in countries that suffer from earthquakes. Many years later it was revealed that the word ‘tectonic’ was a misprint of the word ‘teutonic’, but this did little to make Stamp’s theory any more coherent. Nonetheless it was fashionable among Parisian students in the 1960s. “It seemed that Stamp’s work was more appreciable when it didn’t try to be understood” remarked Peregrine Shoosmith (see below). <br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1955 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aesthetic Terrorism</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Edinburgh: Heresy Press<br class="kix-line-break" />*The relative success of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ontographical Investigations </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">led to Stamp being asked to write this introduction to the nascent theory of Aesthetic Terrorism. Somewhat outside of his comfort zone, the book suffers from shriekingly awkward attempts at utilising the casual inflections of ‘beat lingo’. An admirer of ...</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Investigations, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the forward-thinking head of Heresy Press, Solomon P. Solomon genuinely believed Stamp to be a ‘British William Burroughs’. Quite how a shy and naturally conservative academic paralogician came into the orbit of clubbable hipster intellectuals such as Solomon and the Scottish writer and pornographer Alexander Trocchi, is still unclear, but the experience had a lasting effect on Stamp. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aesthetic Terrorism </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">attempts, via a somewhat tortured and self-consciously knowing prose style, to explicate the neo-Marxian theory of ‘reflexive dialecticals’. Underwritten by a loose strain of aesthetic number theory, it posits that social control is achieved by the suppression of ‘hidden numbers’, and emancipation can only result from their discovery via a ‘Godless mysticism’ expressed in spontaneous bursts of violent artistic activity. A kind of secular take on the doctrine of the ‘hidden name of God’, it borrows heavily from the Hermetic Kabbalah, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the sigil theorist Austin Osman Spare, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and the work of sixteenth-century occultist Dr. John Dee, all sewn together with plenty of hoary Marxist dogma. Illustrated with reams of enochian tables, sigils and magickal diagrams, its most enduring creation is a cut-out-and-keep ‘urban tarot’ deck, replacing the familiar members of the Major Arcana with such oddities as “Canal Of Crushed Dreams” “The Gloating Number 9” “The Cloven Hoof” and “Rats In An Alleyway”. Its effect on the ontographical community was one of mute confusion. “Either he’s taking the piss or he’s cracking up” remarked Peregrine Shoosmith (see below.) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1959 The Gloating Number 9: A Warning </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Radical Ontography</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Volume 1<br class="kix-line-break" />*Though it would later become a source of much criticism of his work, Stamp was involved in the launch of this flagship journal of applied ontography. Coming at a time of social radicalism and renewed interest in Marxist theory, a group of young ontographers with necronautical paleographer Occard Wills at its centre sought to transform ontography into a practical discipline with a potentially transformative effect on society. That said, Stamp’s submission to its debut volume was traditional and oblique. While nominally following a modal sceptical line, Stamp argues that the number nine is a ‘special case’; unlike other numbers, or indeed any other universal abstract properties, which have no separate existence aside from their instantiation </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">qua </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">particulars, the number 9 is ‘all too real’ and ‘probably looking at you right now’. Stamp goes on to suggest its location, in a sub-dimension that has yet to be identified. In addition, while Stamp usually argued that there could be no uninstantiated universals, he made a special case for ‘number 9’s secret friend’. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1960 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Monoverse Reconsidered</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> unpublished draft</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">*A modification of his earlier theories, Stamp here abandons his explication of a world in which everything is the same size, in favour of a world in which everything is only </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">roughly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the same size. Occard Wills later stated that Stamp eventually abandoned this view in favour of a world in which everything is the same shape.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1961</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The Golden Era </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London: Routledge</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">*Stamp’s first and only attempt at adult fiction is a turgid fantasy taking place in the realm between sleep and waking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“where dreams fade but reality has yet to take hold”.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The plot struggles to develop as Stamp waxes lyrical on familiar territory, with unknown events taking place in undiscovered dimensions perpetrated by entities no-one can conceive of. The number nine figures prominently.<br /><br class="kix-line-break" />1963 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Das Goldene Zeitalter </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Berlin: Taschen<br class="kix-line-break" />*To everyone’s great surprise the German translation was a runaway hit, popularly interpreted as a dark pastiche of German bureaucracy. Critics who gushed over Stamp’s “menacing curlicues of serpentine invective and bitter irony” were disappointed to discover his true intentions. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1969 The Moon: Rise Of The Interloper</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Radical Ontography</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Volume 13<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp’s final paper for the Radical Ontography Workshop posits that the Moon is an intruder from an undiscovered dimension, and that all forms of psychiatric illness are caused by anxieties about things that haven’t happened and would be instantly removed if a list could be compiled of all the possible counterfactual events from the Big Bang onwards. “Contrary to popular belief, all the things that have not happened are more causally relevant than those that have” suggests Stamp with typically breezy authority.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1970 The Sonic Mystery Cults </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">London: Sourcebooks<br class="kix-line-break" />*Stamp’s last published work is a historical survey of little-known tribes of ancient Britons who worshipped “loud or moderately loud noises”. The authenticity of Stamp’s scholarship was called into question by the historian Ronald Hutton, an expert in British folklore: “No-one other than Stamp has heard of these people. Fascinating.”</span></span></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-20296255372531313792013-09-29T02:08:00.001-12:002013-09-29T02:08:40.443-12:00Lessons In Ghetto Ethics From A Shaved Albino Ape<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-5c09667d-4bc3-449f-568b-2a6f9ac222c4" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYWpwhvUi6O5mJtBwiCcw72nW8iJhBDSun4N38HS4Fz-0iG1N11_ZyVSH7BjiEn0eqXPiGEX9wiGemGuop8ThwsPvd1UO8wmM5g2mSNZhJXCaTkQJGNyhI8fOqSdBCLMTktJmiwA/s1600/paul+nash+the+bay+woodcut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYWpwhvUi6O5mJtBwiCcw72nW8iJhBDSun4N38HS4Fz-0iG1N11_ZyVSH7BjiEn0eqXPiGEX9wiGemGuop8ThwsPvd1UO8wmM5g2mSNZhJXCaTkQJGNyhI8fOqSdBCLMTktJmiwA/s1600/paul+nash+the+bay+woodcut.jpg" width="320" /></a></b></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">I
popped in to see a friend for a cup of tea yesterday, and bumped into
someone I’d not seen for a long time. Within a few minutes I’d got sucked into one of the oddest
conversations of my life; a car-crash social encounter. Tim used to
drive a few bands around back in 2003. He used to work in television but
escaped for a less stressful life in France. Tim is a strange guy.
Squat, muscular, simian, bald head, blonde-hairy body with a voice
that doesn’t match - effeminate, pained, high pitched with an
affected sensitivity. Sentences that rise up a few semitones as they
approach a perpetual question mark, as though asking for permission
to opine. A verbal tic that suggests a lack of conviction. But
everything Tim says is</span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">strident,
defensive and expressed in neutral positive public-sector speak.
Every anecdote or conversation point is an opportunity to express a
lesson learned, wisdom gained. The uptight hippy raging with
neophyte fervour disguised with a veneer of smug placidity and a
painful amount of pop-psychological phraseology. <br /><br />We somehow got onto
drug dealers. Tim thinks it’s ridiculous when his friend complains
about how his dealer cuts the coke so much. As far as Tim is
concerned, if you can do a better job go and do it. Don’t complain
about it; if you could deal drugs better go and deal drugs. This was
odd because his friend was complaining about the quality of a
product. Surely it is legitimate to complain about a product without
it necessitating spending a day in the life of the person dealing
that product. But no; Tim thinks that there will be a good reason the
dealer cuts it; it will be because of pressures peculiar to being a
drug dealer. Everything is for a reason. Dee dah. </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">You
don’t know what it is like to be handling that sort of money and
dealing with those sorts of people.</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">What
this really comes down to is Tim can always find extenuating
circumstances. </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">“</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Judge
ye not lest you be judged!” shall be the whole of the law.</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">That
of course invites the question “what if I’m happy to be judged?”
Indeed, I’d prefer to live in a world where people can and do judge
each other, and are confident that they will not be found wanting.
But I moved it on, because I wanted to keep it simple and see whether
there was anything he would uniformly object to. I said that what I
find loathsome about hard drug dealer culture in Bristol is the fact
that the young men involved in it aspire to a gangster rap norm they
have learned from Youtube, with all the homophobic and misogynistic
trimmings. I know the mother of one dealer; I used to rent a flat
from her. I’ve seen the way he treats her and his (conspicuously
high-achieving) sisters. If you want extenuating circumstances to
explain this, the recurring background narrative is an absent father,
a lack of positive male role models and the alluring example set by
older siblings in expensive trainers already slinging drugs. But the
ethics of drug dealing aside, those homophobic and misogynistic views
must be challenged regardless of their genesis. <br /><br />Tim didn’t
follow me here. He thought it was wrong of me to judge these drug
dealers because I’ve not been in their position (an
assumption, but granted) and known the pressures on them. He believes
drug dealers deserve respect. I was baffled, or rather I pretended to
be baffled to argue my case. What of human agency and responsibility?
Is there </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">nothing</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">,
are there </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">no
</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">kinds
of behaviours that we can simply judge to be abhorrent? No. Tim’s
view is ultimately that judgement is only legitimate if you’ve been
in the position of the person being judged. Presumably this entails "Don’t judge that rapist
until you’ve tried to control the urge to rape, then you’ll
understand!" I started to point out the general lack of fit
between this position and the one taken by wider society but i gave
up. It’s utter horseshit, but it’s completely typical of the
received cultural and ethical relativism through which many people
make sense of the world. I was just waiting for the absolute pinnacle
of self-defeating positions “It’s wrong to make moral
judgements!” but it didn’t come, and it would have been cruel to
coax it out. At one point there was a clue to the source of Tim’s
hyper-relativistic defensiveness - he mentioned he has a son
who he only sees once a month, and alluded to the </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">wrongness
</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">of
judging how other people raise their kids. (The rapist point had no effect so I didn’t mention the
polish boy who was force fed salt and starved to death recently.
There is a problem with introducing extreme examples. While they can
be used to create a </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">reductio
ad absurdum</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent;">-
if someone argues position X, you place X in an extreme scenario so
as to reduce the position to absurdity - this frequently fails to
play to the audience, because they fail to see the logical
relationship between the extreme and the non-extreme; they fail to
see that if one is nonsense so is the other. They just see it as
irrelevant exaggeration. So don’t expect this kind of argument to
work unless you’re in Ancient Greece.) </span></span></span></span></span></span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">But the
biggest problem was actually that the whole time Tim spoke, he sat
cross-legged on the floor, rocked back and forth, fidgeted and
scratched his whole body compulsively, lifting his tight white muscle
tee high above his chest as he dug his thick, stubby fingers into his
hairy blonde trunk, rolling his sleeves up to his shoulders and
scraping his shoulder blades in a bear-hug while dragging his arse
across the carpet as though driven half-mad by piles, rolling his
trousers up to his calves and scratching at his ankles. Then he took
his shoes and socks off and began to pick at his hairy, yellow,
hobbit-like feet, peeling off scaly flakes of dead skin,
inspecting them closely before chewing and swallowing them, then back
to the chest and back scratching, and now the armpits too, an orgy of
dermatitic exploration and excavation, a part-shaved albino gorilla
with a peculiarly effeminate disembodied voice eternally approaching
a question mark. This mixture of defensive, self-defeating
hyper-relativism, the strident judgement that all forms of judgement
are wrong, which fails to see that it is itself a judgement, the
peculiarly effeminate, pained, high-pitched, disembodied voice, the
question mark-plagued verbal tic, the totally unselfconscious
scratching, picking, chewing, undressing, and autophagic
self-grooming that increased in urgency as he got more worked up…
was completely fucking vile and it was turning my stomach. I made my
excuses. I think they felt I’d lost. I had. I wasn’t convincing
anyone. The Sherbet Fountain I had been looking forward to was dumped
on the way out the gate.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<br /><br />
</div>
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<br />
</div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-25534202251678158822013-09-26T12:27:00.001-12:002013-09-26T12:27:55.592-12:00After a Healthy Interval: Young Knives Interviewed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhFE5mIKFwrH3iUY8_NShpfrN7-vE4s2oO2F0fki9tJ0KunD3T9XW6SMr0Rr_xNG0X4lDnwSmu4dr5v97WotJoATbrNMULhfGBhJlUKIGuS-RiTU0qbbws3frd80_ZzO7BGTYDJw/s1600/young_knives_2_1380202988_crop_550x498.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhFE5mIKFwrH3iUY8_NShpfrN7-vE4s2oO2F0fki9tJ0KunD3T9XW6SMr0Rr_xNG0X4lDnwSmu4dr5v97WotJoATbrNMULhfGBhJlUKIGuS-RiTU0qbbws3frd80_ZzO7BGTYDJw/s1600/young_knives_2_1380202988_crop_550x498.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
I recently interviewed Young Knives for The Quietus and you can read the resulting feature here: <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/13447-the-young-knives-interview">http://thequietus.com/articles/13447-the-young-knives-interview</a><br /><br />It was an enormously enjoyable piece to work on at every stage. The band are warm and entertaining company, and it was exciting talking to people who are in thrall to a creative process. Inspired people are inspiring. The band's story is edifying and any young person with ambitions in the music industry should pay attention to it. To anyone who instinctively believes that the best music is the result of autodidacticism, cooperation and self-determination it will come as no surprise that the band's finest work has emerged from a period of total independence.<br />
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-58505862118017893322013-08-20T03:23:00.000-12:002013-08-20T04:26:05.277-12:00Fear and Loathing in Great Bookham, Surrey<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://both.tumblr.com/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibEbT0kHL4JfniCb12YwQBAK136vzIyO6cuJDdbvNn_11jZXTz6vCILFkoLkoa4bSksOwjzx5U0XZI2VIjadWqVa3HIg5RS0Cogv5B1ecNSt87K1LwilI-IuuAftNo6Z3wqaQKIw/s1600/edd+bagenal+imaginary+landscape.jpg" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://both.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Edd Bagenal <i>Imaginary Landscape</i> 2013</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
rivalry and mutual loathing between the boys in my year and those in
the year above was legendary. As a shared experience it was an
elemental constant, with no beginning or end, but each of us would be
able to name a personal genesis; an event earlier in our childhood
that proved to us that the year above were utterly loathsome scum.
For me it involved a magic wand and my first experience of true
injustice. I had taken up an interest in conjuring, and unwisely
brought my magic wand to school; a piece of yellow and black plastic
from a Paul Daniels magic set. Thusfar the wand had exhibited no
magical properties but that would surely change with the correct
incantation. Inevitably the wand was lost, in the morning break. This
was distressing enough, but at lunch time I saw that it was in the
hands of a boy in the year above called Bradley Reese. This was the
worse possible outcome. I protested that it was mine, and in response
he just exaggerated the mannerisms with which he luxuriated in his
enjoyment of it, enhanced immeasurably by my loss. He leaped about,
casting spells. I could have told a teacher, and if he was a younger
boy I would have done exactly that. But I knew in my heart it was
utterly hopeless. He was in the year above. No-one would believe me. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Events
a few weeks later magnified the loathing. My best friend Will and I
were trying to throw stones onto the roof of the school. I was a poor
thrower. My stone hit a window. The glass cracked. A cold wave of
terror ran through me, and I turned to see Bradley behind me (it
would be Bradley, of the hundreds of children in the school, it had
to be Bradley), his hand immediately shooting up into the air as he
ran calling to the teacher on playground duty. Ratting us out. The
kind of thing that would get you jugged in prison; treated worse than
a nonce, but in the playground was felt to curry the favour of
authority. In the distance I saw Bradley with the teacher, pointing
at me and Will, the teacher rushing towards us, Bradley's eyes
shining with the exquisite pleasures of <i>schadenfreude</i>, his strange
hateful hooked nose, Bradley telling everyone, everyone watching as
Mrs. Braille dragged us to the Headmistress. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
was impossible trying to explain that we weren't trying to smash the
windows, but only trying to get stones onto the roof. Like with the
magic wand, it was useless. As far as me and Will were concerned,
Bradley would be believed because he was a year older than us. All
credibility rested on age. I don't remember the dressing down we
received from the Headmistress; I have no ill memories of the woman.
But Mrs. Braille was absolutely terrifying; the incident seemed to
transform her whole face into an ogrish rictus. It was this I
remember, because it was this that I saw at the moment of our total
betrayal at the hands of Bradley Reese. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
got worse. Within weeks we knew we were to find out who our teacher
would be the following year. There were two possibilities – Mrs.
Brennan or Mrs. Braille. I prayed -my earliest memory of desperate self-directed
prayer- that it wasn't Mrs. Braille, the witch who surely hated me
and would make my life hell. Every night I prayed. On the last day of
term, a golden day of fun and laughter, a day full of giddy
possibility, the summer stretched out before us with the promise of
base camps, tree houses and endless adventure; on this last day my
fate was sealed. I was going to be in Mrs. Braille's class. Bradley
Reese had ruined my life.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of
course I now realise that he hadn't – but he certainly ruined
my holiday. Every day I would wake up, absolutely ecstatic that there
was no school, and within seconds that feeling was overshadowed by despair, in the way only a child's heart can be. Every day
brought me closer to the beginning of the autumn term, the beginning
of a living hell at the mercy of the sadistic Mrs. Braille. Every
bright thought was darkened, every spark drowned, every leap dragged
down into darkness. All because of that malevolent coward Bradley
Reese. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One
of the strange things about my childhood, and the child's wildly
crooked perspective, is that it was never an option to tell my
parents about these fears. </span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Had
I done so they surely would have explained that I had nothing to
worry about; that Mrs. Braille would be a very nice teacher and she
wouldn't hold the incident against me. But I didn't tell them because
I didn't want them to be mad at me for throwing the stones. At the
heart of my anxieties was the secret of a terrible crime, so the
burden would remain mine alone. But none of it would have happened
had it not been for the tell-tale rat Bradley Reese, stealer of
wands, ruiner of summers. <br /><br />It's safe to say I had many reasons to hate
Bradley Reese.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mrs. Braille turned out to be a very nice teacher who probably didn't
even remember the incident and certainly wouldn't have held it
against me. But it still took me months to shake off the feeling that
the crime wouldn't be whipped out at a later juncture and used
against me. For now though, things were good. Will and I were able to
rejoice, as we were in the top year at school; the year above had
left for Middle School. But that held a greater fear. The following
year we would have to start there – surely a place of routine
bogwashing that we were convinced still used the cane - and worst of
all, we would have to face the year above, their smug authority, and
the myriad injustices that befell us in their wake.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Middle School years saw Will with his genius for mischief repeatedly
winding them up by running off with their tennis ball and hiding
their bags. Intervention from the headmaster just saw the matter
transferred to outside of school hours. A face off between Us and
Them in the streets of Bookham saw the front wheel of my racer
buckled. One of Bradley's friends rode into it intentionally with his
vastly more expensive and vastly more rugged mountain bike. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">By
the time we had reached secondary school one might have expected us
to have grown out of this but instead the rivalry was magnified by
hormones. They reserved a special loathing for my friend Ben because
he was screwing girls in their year. That was never going to play
well. Their greatest crime, to me and my self-consciously
counter-cultural friends was that they were jocks; they were beer
boys. At sixteen many of them had already begun to resemble their
fathers, scowling pub leopards with nascent beer bellies, blokeish
banter and received right-wing opinions. We smoked weed and took
acid. Alcohol was for these wankers who voted Tory in the school
election. At 36 I now know that alcohol is very much for me as well,
and drugs are not counter-cultural, but it was the early nineties, I
was a teenager and at least I fucking behaved like one.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Looking
back I have no firm idea of what they talked about when they stood
huddled, sniggering at me and Ben and Ben's girlfriend(s), affecting
an air of removed cynicism to mask their glowering jealousy. Ben was
taller, suaver, more handsome and a shit-load cooler than any of
these pricks, and the girls liked that of course. I wasn't tall,
suave, handsome or cool but Ben is one of the most loyal people I
have ever known and had no problem with my being a sartorial sinkhole. Greasy curtains, four eyes, spots, tie-dyed items. It
didn't occur to me at the time but it likely enraged the beer boys
that someone so radically disastrous-looking was even in these
girls' orbit. It was only because of Ben, but I'm sure it stuck in
their craw nonetheless. </span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
may strike you that from my tone it seems I haven't entirely moved on
from my loathing of these people. You'd be right. These issues run
deep. (I found myself reflexively doubting the testimony of
whistle-blower Bradley Manning as a result.) I looked up Bradley Reese on
Facebook. He's there, and it seems he's making up for those lost
years; his profile photo shows him holding court, surrounded by six
women, all laying their hands adoringly on his chest. Harmless.
Normal. Perhaps. But I'm inherently suspicious of self-irony that
plays the same hand as self-aggrandisement. It's a way for people to
get away with indulging bad behaviour. Maximum deniability. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Hey!
Don't take it so seriously. Can't you take a joke? </i></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The
conservative who says they just enjoy winding up liberals, and does
this by espousing their sincerely held conservative beliefs. The
wolf in wolf's clothing. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Bradley
– give me back my summer holiday 1985 and I'll give you the benefit
of the doubt. You can keep the wand. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">(Names
have been changed to protect the guilty stealer of wands and ruiner
of holidays Bradley Reese.)</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-75578246830006565312013-07-09T10:35:00.000-12:002013-07-12T22:48:44.694-12:00Ian Brady and the Twitter Feeding Tube<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2II7-H_aUOKKaCf2mCWgBL3Y8hMu5I149iOAIHJeikXH1bcXM5izM2efLIoI_fDxnGh25W_0scj5kYMQFYfgRqRq34e90LvxZNxL1qP6shri5xilp8moLHyJ0mxUEzy2sRQeRGg/s1600/turner-dutch-boats-gale-bridgewater-sea-piece-L297-fm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2II7-H_aUOKKaCf2mCWgBL3Y8hMu5I149iOAIHJeikXH1bcXM5izM2efLIoI_fDxnGh25W_0scj5kYMQFYfgRqRq34e90LvxZNxL1qP6shri5xilp8moLHyJ0mxUEzy2sRQeRGg/s1600/turner-dutch-boats-gale-bridgewater-sea-piece-L297-fm.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">True
crime is a genre that is read mainly by women. It has been suggested
that women are more interested in psychology generally, and therefore
the mysteries of the psychopathic mind specifically, than men. This
offers me a degree of comfort; it's a nice statistic I can pull out
when I want to justify what I'm sure some of my friends think is an
unhealthy interest. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
have at times considered studying for a graduate degree in
criminology, not because I desire a change of career, but because I
want to justify my morbidity to myself and to the world. But of
course this would achieve nothing of the sort; it would be a sticking
plaster of respectability on a wound that needs disinfecting. That
sounds a bit over the top, but I do wonder about myself. When people
talk about the Dunblane Massacre I talk about Thomas Hamilton. When
people talk about the Moors Murderers I can remember the address at
which they committed their crimes (16 Wardle Brook Avenue). I know
the names of all the victims. I have eight books about Fred and
Rosemary West, three books on The Yorkshire Ripper and have read
countless other accounts of hundreds of sordid and degraded crimes.
Why? What has this done for me? What have I learned? The most useful
outcome, pro bono, is perhaps that I have written some good lyrics
about it, but I've also written some really bad ones too. When there
are genre-defying works like Gordon Burn's <i>Happy Like Murderers</i>
it is extremely doubtful whether much else of value is left to be
said about such people as the Wests. But still my interest persists,
still I buy and read books about horrible, horrible crimes, and still
I'm not entirely convinced that pure intellectual curiosity is a
sufficient, and sufficiently noble explanation for wallowing in this
uncleanness. I've learned a lot, but it's hardly been a slog; there
are no intellectual gymnastics required to understand what is going
on. Psychopaths are not the exotic enigmas that people like to buy
and sell them as. They are statistically unusual, but given the sheer
amount of humans on the planet, their acts are also not uncommon.
Like other kinds of human violence and degradation, their motivations
are based in selfishness and obsession that has always been with us,
and so if their behaviours didn't have terrible effects they would be
considered routine and tedious.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So
it may be surprising to hear that I found the Guardian's recent
coverage of Ian Brady distasteful. On the 25<sup>th</sup> June 2013
we were invited to follow the proceedings of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/17/ian-brady-mental-health-tribunal?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487">The
Ian Brady Mental Health Tribunal In Live Tweets</a> from the court by
Helen Pidd. Something about this didn't sit right with me, and I
wasn't quite sure why, and I've spent a while thinking about it.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Tweeting
feels to me an inherently whimsical and often flippant activity. One
of its worst aspects is the tendency for people to use it to validate
their involvement in an activity while it is happening, and in doing
so, inadvertently devalue it. Many people are sincere when they tweet
that they are enjoying gigs, but clearly they enjoy even more their
ability to tell everyone so. For such people real-time social
networking status updates have become a way of verifying their existence and enjoying
immediate validation from others. I exist. I am here, now, and others
know it. Events cannot reliably be known to have taken place, and
cannot have any integral value, unless they are simultaneously
reported upon and that reportage commented upon. The circle must be
completed immediately or the event vanishes. And then it abruptly
vanishes anyway, replaced by a new event requiring validation.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
excitable tone and the inherent disposability and fleeting, transient
nature of twitter feeds feels inappropriate for coverage of such
events. We would have learned no less had Helen Pidd filed a report
for the newspaper at the end of each day after some careful
reflection, rather than tweeting mid-session. Perhaps this was felt
to be the cutting-edge reportage format for an event of huge public
interest. If so, a gauge of how much this level of coverage misjudged
the public mood is the half-emptiness of the public gallery. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">One thing that has come from my 'studies' of psychopaths is the knowledge
that no matter how much time we spend on the subject, we will never
be as interested in them quite as much as they are in themselves. The
one thing we can be sure of is that Ian Brady, a vain, boastful, and
laughably pseudo-intellectual name dropper, craves power and control,
and this kind of publicity is exactly what he wants. Brady says he
wants to be transferred to a normal prison so he can be allowed to
die. But his forced-feeding regime was shown to be nothing of the
sort; it is a prop. We cannot know whether he wants to die or not;
but we do know he is motivated
by power, and whatever choices he makes are done with this in mind.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
only power he has over the world ultimately resides in the
possibility that he knows where Keith Bennett's body is, a
possibility that he guards jealously and gloatingly. Everything else
surrounding that is theatrics, little power-plays where he casts
himself as the rebel against the system, the loner among the
unthinking masses, the intellectual in a confederacy of dunces. His
hunger-strikes, his petitions, his hints of knowledge of the burial
site, released at precisely the points when he senses people have
lost interest in him, these are transparent attempts at coercion, and
we would do well to realise that. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It
is a glum enough prospect that necessary coverage of these events
give him the oxygen of publicity. But communicating it through
real-time tweets felt a bit “Brady hunger strike? LOL!”</span></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-88550202714918289282013-06-11T00:53:00.000-12:002013-06-11T01:17:04.261-12:00Myth Congeniality: John Gray Interviewed<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9yhbAjPdsWil4kx_E221BXWdnc7-2JfUibQvfnxtlsv1NQ04QRE0q82u3qBNwb0SMHDcMxKf9-_XSDX281YVOlsl2qJyHVHwkUg-GnaxYvp-FgPJw_FAQsJvSOOAaUx06XD9p0w/s1600/Silence_of_Animals_1370764668_crop_399x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9yhbAjPdsWil4kx_E221BXWdnc7-2JfUibQvfnxtlsv1NQ04QRE0q82u3qBNwb0SMHDcMxKf9-_XSDX281YVOlsl2qJyHVHwkUg-GnaxYvp-FgPJw_FAQsJvSOOAaUx06XD9p0w/s1600/Silence_of_Animals_1370764668_crop_399x600.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
<br />
Here is my latest piece for the Quietus, an interview with the philosopher John Gray:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/12496-john-gray-silence-of-animals-interview">http://thequietus.com/articles/12496-john-gray-silence-of-animals-interview</a><br />
<br />
He was an absolute pleasure to interview. He comes across like a warm and patient uncle who could be destroying entire cities through the power of thought alone, but is perfectly happy to spend the afternoon helping you swot up on Nietzsche's conception of tragedy in the pre-Socratic era. Think 'Professor X Goes To The LSE'. <br />
<br />Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-39809721921409867392013-06-07T03:28:00.002-12:002013-06-07T03:28:51.984-12:00Made Of Stone Premiere
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg56O7E6J19qsEqeCIcWOW6hB27-nX9u1tyXmuVGOAkO1ZoGJU8GjdXA56_BejaFDdH5CNsrRKvdxQWY6zrVOTTsxeBLvbk8WdUF44dMG-Rl4cPjA9tk1uubTMdrDOzCkNB5J54Ig/s1600/stoneroses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg56O7E6J19qsEqeCIcWOW6hB27-nX9u1tyXmuVGOAkO1ZoGJU8GjdXA56_BejaFDdH5CNsrRKvdxQWY6zrVOTTsxeBLvbk8WdUF44dMG-Rl4cPjA9tk1uubTMdrDOzCkNB5J54Ig/s1600/stoneroses.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still best to remember them at their best</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I was swept up by the
euphoric atmosphere at the Made Of Stone premiere, but had a feeling
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
my music would turn up
when the story took a sour turn. Gravenhurst is kind of the
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
opposite of the Stone
Roses-euphoric and funky versus dour and
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
plodding. It was
certainly a fan's film, not the warts and all expose it could have
been,
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
but I think once Shane
Meadows had their trust he was anxious not to lose it; they are
volatile enough without prying and constant surveillance. An ugly
moment in Amsterdam demonstrates that the fact they got it together
to reform doesn't mean they've learned to deal with the tensions that
pulled them apart before. When Reni leaves the stage due to screaming
feedback in his in-ear monitors, someone
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
could have explained to
the audience that due to technical problems an encore was not
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
possible. Instead, full
of disdain., Ian Brown prowls the stage saying "the <i>drummer...</i>
has <i>gone </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>home</i>...the
<i>drummer...</i> has <i>gone home</i>". The <i>drummer</i>...
as though Reni is the lowest ranking band member and should know his
place, despite being the best musican (and singer) in
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the band, and generally
recognised as the most naturally gifted drummer of his
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
generation. I'm just
glad they held it together long enough for Shane Meadows to finish
this joyful, celebratory and often very funny and moving film.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
At the after-show party
the music was <i>absurdly, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">larynx-shreddingly</span>
loud for what was ostensibly an opportunity to network; I spied Chris
Morris, Alice Lowe, the entire cast of This Is England and a good few
other people I would have liked to talk to. I think I would have
found it hard to justify my presence there; “I wrote that
depressing bit of music they used when Reni left (again)”, so
perhaps it's for the best that my voice gave out after half an hour.
I wish it would come back now though.</div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-90879917358434096812013-06-05T04:14:00.001-12:002013-06-05T04:15:05.727-12:00Anta interview for the Quietus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaSEt3i5NorxMyhpnfB5gXW5mXcoEkqIxOEk-mX2nVfX42UZlTuF4lCDM_YocCaFkAIkQASVqPiBwyXIPlwBgyP5yfb6cCsYgBcpgD01V1Amm3jufHY4nepPbcQ0zjaaHvzfHBjw/s1600/seizure.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaSEt3i5NorxMyhpnfB5gXW5mXcoEkqIxOEk-mX2nVfX42UZlTuF4lCDM_YocCaFkAIkQASVqPiBwyXIPlwBgyP5yfb6cCsYgBcpgD01V1Amm3jufHY4nepPbcQ0zjaaHvzfHBjw/s1600/seizure.gif" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I've interviewed instrumental rock quartet Anta about their new album Centurionaut<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/12411-anta-interview">http://thequietus.com/articles/12411-anta-interview</a>Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-79202053875800013222013-05-16T05:42:00.000-12:002013-05-16T05:42:59.715-12:00Philicorda for sale
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1RV6YBKudrnPWee9zHPV2FxX-363WgD89qtEcku5KVudqEu_m8ycqGp670K_PO8AAYjfHVxvk4isCUo9ijXW1vdgL7gisockYB-ZZIQWgT3j1prMsyMl3Rc46lrmF_bLND1QIA/s1600/Phili+4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1RV6YBKudrnPWee9zHPV2FxX-363WgD89qtEcku5KVudqEu_m8ycqGp670K_PO8AAYjfHVxvk4isCUo9ijXW1vdgL7gisockYB-ZZIQWgT3j1prMsyMl3Rc46lrmF_bLND1QIA/s1600/Phili+4.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />I am selling my
Philicorda 751, a combo organ. It is one of the early compact
single manual models, from the early 1960's with the spring reverb
and the removable metal legs (not one of the cumbersome later Philicorda
Rhythm models), and it has some unique features. It
sounds awesome and the Scandinavian-aesthetic woodwork is in
good condition and looks lovely. I've used this Philicorda on all the Gravenhurst albums.<br /><br />The Philicorda is a unique transistor
organ with a sound all of its own; sonically it's closer to a Vox
Jaguar or a Farfisa Compact than a Hammond organ, but it is capable
of a much more powerful and thick sound than either. It has found
favour with producers in recent times; one was used on Adele's '19'
album by producer Jim Abiss, but perhaps more interestingly it's a
favourite instrument of many bands including The Coral (who take two
of them on tour apparently), The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, Movietone,
Crescent and Gravenhurst (naturally). I sought out the Philicorda because I loved the sound of it on Crescent's classic albums <i>Electronic Sound Constructions</i>, <i>Collected Songs</i> and <i>By the Roads and the Fields.</i> I wanted that sound for Gravenhurst and after a couple of years of searching I finally got hold of one. If you hear any organ sounds
from <i>Flashlight Seasons</i> through to <i>The Ghost In Daylight</i>, it's this. It's been used for a large range of sounds, from
full-on speaker frying psychedelia ('See My Friends') to subdued, mournful and mellow ('Nicole'). It's also regarded as the most beautiful looking combo organ there
is. While that's not that difficult given how dodgy and plastic most
of the competition look, there's no doubt it's a rare bird.</div>
<br /><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2e6shy6f9KBeIl7XOnNAp2VS8dpT2yYIHfg2KWIHbWpJECK-oJkvjwbuwMcdsHmx0o3TgLTTLj9aJkLM8l4DTXbsgPcqtECgVDXg53wtoo1FKRat1PHWIPu8OrsGBxDyGDd-69Q/s1600/Phili+3.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2e6shy6f9KBeIl7XOnNAp2VS8dpT2yYIHfg2KWIHbWpJECK-oJkvjwbuwMcdsHmx0o3TgLTTLj9aJkLM8l4DTXbsgPcqtECgVDXg53wtoo1FKRat1PHWIPu8OrsGBxDyGDd-69Q/s1600/Phili+3.jpg" width="320" /></a>The instrument has a
built in spring reverb, vibrato and 5 switchable stops. There is also
an extra ‘voxchord’ setting, which splits the lower half of the
keyboard into single-key chords, for left hand accompaniment. Lots of
different tones can be had by different combinations of switches.
Also, unknown to many, if you turn up the internal speakers to
maximum you can get the spring reverb to start feeding back on
itself, which makes an incredible roar. Also banging the unit lightly
with your fist gets the spring going with an amazing sound.
Loads of the distant clanking sounds on <i>Fires In Distant Buildings</i> were created by this method. Most 751
models only had the old-fashioned DIN output connectors, but this 751
has a normal quarter inch jack output for easy connection to
recording equipment, so you don't have to use the internal speakers;
this gives you loads of scope for production/engineering
possibilities; it also has a switch that turns the speakers off so
you can play silently, with the signal only coming through the jack
output. This addition of a regular jack output
must be a modification because according to all the sources I've
seen, this jack output only existed on the later 753 model. So that's
another reason this one is unique – you can record it silently.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
One of the
eccentricities of this organ is that it was originally sold with a
bunch of vinyl LPs, <span style="font-size: x-small;">"Philips rhythm/accompaniment
records"</span> which you could play along to, and actually plug
a record player into the organ and have the sound of the record
coming through the Phili's speakers along with your accompaniment. This raises an interesting possibility: if you seek out or wire up a DIN cable you could even feed other sounds <i>into </i>the Philicorda, using its reverb and speakers, instantly making anything sound fifty years old.<br /><br />The vinyl that came with mine is long-lost, as is the volume pedal,
and the sheet music stand. Also, the 'power on' light doesn't light up.
None of this effects the playability though. The foot pedal adjusted the volume of the bass to lead, but this can be done with the balance dial. According to one review,
posted below, finding a Philicorda with the spring reverb working is
rare – so this one is a find. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguxepizE5FR7jNG7s0juB2xdRT58Hp7j0DonMfOPq11d9YjZtOpUqHnBhfjeV6YS4rmmRLbXpM0XapKQt-7QJMeF2wCo_m9GQ7r_e81bajYjp_gRxLDwBOE7xvbXvMOPeIIJaCtw/s1600/Phili+5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguxepizE5FR7jNG7s0juB2xdRT58Hp7j0DonMfOPq11d9YjZtOpUqHnBhfjeV6YS4rmmRLbXpM0XapKQt-7QJMeF2wCo_m9GQ7r_e81bajYjp_gRxLDwBOE7xvbXvMOPeIIJaCtw/s1600/Phili+5.jpg" width="320" /></a> <br /><br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To recap, here are the
main points of interest:</div>
<br />* 751 model with a
switch to turn off the internal speakers<br />* quarter inch jack output - unique modification feature of this
particular unit<br />* spring reverb which can be made to overload
and feed back<br />* DIN input socket allows sounds to be fed into the reverb and speakers<br />* variable vibrato dial<br />* five voice
switches giving loads of tone combinations <br />*3 bass
switch settings:<br />position
1: The whole keyboard plays treble voices - no bass section
<br />position 2: Converts the first 17 notes to a polyphonic bass
section<span style="font-size: small;"><br /> position 3: Drops the pitch of the
bass section an octave, and alters the timbre</span><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;">* <span style="font-size: small;">b</span>alance
knob controls the relative volume between the bass ('foot') and treble
sections.</span><br />* lovely Scandinavian-looking wood finish<br />* unique history; used on every Gravenhurst album</div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1RV6YBKudrnPWee9zHPV2FxX-363WgD89qtEcku5KVudqEu_m8ycqGp670K_PO8AAYjfHVxvk4isCUo9ijXW1vdgL7gisockYB-ZZIQWgT3j1prMsyMl3Rc46lrmF_bLND1QIA/s1600/Phili+4.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Detailed technical
info on the Philicorda can be found here:
<a href="http://www.combo-organ.com/Philips/">http://www.combo-organ.com/Philips/</a><br /><br />More
info from the Sonic State
site<br /><a href="http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/philips_philicorda/">http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/philips_philicord</a><br /><br />The
entry from user Professor Spodnick says<br /><i>"The early single
manual Philicorda is probably one of the coolest 60's transister
organs,unfortunately they were replaced by the ghastly double manual
'philicorda rhythm' The singles sounds range from the sublimely
delicate to full on speaker frying depending on the mix of vox and
foot settings,a variable vibrato and spring (reverbio),add
effect,the keyboard can play either full organ,split lead/bass or a
thundering one finger chord bass with lead, The early philicorda is
quite portable but be careful of the wood case which marks easily,
but gives it that scandinavian retro/designer looks which other keys
would die for!<br />Exellent 60,s organs sounds 8,4,2 plus 5 vox
switch,has vibrato and spring reverb,but I not found one with its
spring reverb still workingsounds variable on vox and footage,from
delicate to exteeeme powerful(bury's vox or farfisa duo) " </i>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Philicorda is currently in Bristol and it can be collected or sent by courier.<br />Send a message via the Gravenhurst Facebook page if
you're interested:<br />https://www.facebook.com/gravenhurst</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Price £500</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1RV6YBKudrnPWee9zHPV2FxX-363WgD89qtEcku5KVudqEu_m8ycqGp670K_PO8AAYjfHVxvk4isCUo9ijXW1vdgL7gisockYB-ZZIQWgT3j1prMsyMl3Rc46lrmF_bLND1QIA/s1600/Phili+4.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a> </div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-32209774668720831282013-05-08T03:17:00.000-12:002013-05-08T04:01:32.745-12:00Against Tolerance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/w2n-7K0Ef6Y?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/12203-sea-power-endorse-anti-ukip-campaign">http://thequietus.com/articles/12203-sea-power-endorse-anti-ukip-campaign</a></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I welcome and support
British Sea Power's endorsement of a campaign launched as a reaction to the success of
Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party in the recent local government
elections. The plan is to try and get the band's pro-immigration
anthem 'Waving Flags' into the hit parade in response to UKIP's
populist anti-immigration rhetoric. (The Facebook campaign is <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/366190826833372/" target="out">here</a>).
However, I have serious misgivings over the language that is used on
this side of the argument.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
BSP's Jan Scott Wilkinson writes: <i>"It
seems that over the last year or two especially there has been a rise
in anti-immigration sloganeering and propaganda. For several reasons
this seems rather stupid, and what is more disappointing is the way
that so many people in politics and the media who should know better
have largely not challenged this view. Obviously times are hard and
the economy is not going well, and it seems the old story of 'blame
the last ones in' rather than looking towards real solutions has
become popular. It's a kind of superstitious nonsense akin to witch
burning. Instead of hearing about the NHS being staffed and kept
going by conscientious hard workers from other parts of the world,
we're told that it's groaning under the strain of newcomers. It seems
obvious that immigration is being used as a scapegoat for all the
problems caused by greed, ignorance, bad luck and a lack of planning.</i></div>
<div class="western">
<i><br />"It would be easy to get angry at all the
fools and the sanitised racism, but i would prefer myself to stick to
the attitude of 'Waving Flags'. This is a positive song of
pro-immigration, an embracing of different cultures and a welcoming
of tolerance, a quality lacking these days and one which we could do
with a lot more of in the UK. “ (from http://thequietus.com/articles/12203-sea-power-endorse-anti-ukip-campaign)<br /></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-right: 0.26cm;">
I welcome this move,
and pretty much all of what Wilkinson says is correct, but promoting the
language of <i>tolerance</i> is the wrong move; it sends out the
wrong signal. This is why: tolerance encourages people to indulge a kind of sensitivity towards something they
instinctively disapprove of. Toleration means putting up with
something you don't like; it means realising that you have to let
something slide even though you personally disapprove of it. Many
people disapprove of homosexuality but they tolerate it because they
value the principle of individual freedom above the fact that they
find homosexuality repulsive.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Tolerance implies
disagreement with the thing being tolerated, thus we shouldn't be encouraging tolerance. We want people to <i>agree</i> with immigration,
not put up with it. People who have a problem with immigrants are not
going to be won over by people preaching tolerance, because that just
seems to them like a bunch of overly-sensitive, hand-wringing liberals failing to engage with
what they see as a genuine problem.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What we should instead
be furthering is the notion that immigration should be welcomed, not
tolerated. It must be spelled out why immigration and cultural diversity is good for
society and good for the economy. This is an argument that needs to be <i>won</i>; it cannot be resolved by sympathy alone.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When there is division
between different cultural and religious groups, rather than
promoting tolerance, we should be promoting the recognition of what
these groups have in common. White British people should not be told
to <i>tolerate</i> Romanians, Bulgarians or Muslim Somalians, people
who they perceive as different to them – they should instead be
encouraged to see what they have in common. They go to the same
football matches, they go to the same shops, they share the same
sense of humour, they watch the same TV shows, they have they same
fears and hopes for their children's futures. They need to be
encouraged to see that their similarities are greater than their
differences.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Tolerance should only
be preached when there is irreconcilable differences between two
groups; tolerance is a <i>last resort. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The
problem with immigration is that the native groups do not see how
much they have in common with the immigrant group – and they do
have a lot in common. This message of commonality is what should be
promoted – not tolerance. You tolerate things you dislike but have
to go along with; this is emphatically </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
the message we want to send out about immigration.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So while I support
British Sea Power's campaign wholeheartedly, I strongly urge that we
pay close attention to the language we use and the message we send
out. Tolerance is not the issue.</div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-45217619790942035432013-04-12T02:04:00.000-12:002013-04-12T06:28:27.842-12:00The Ballad of Mick Philpott and The Iron Lady <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN-o_bY7i-xCt4o6XIiEumXryjiazQXznJf0JsFAsFARHUNI_2T23y4dNVm1UC9xcxNxrlN2m_RYLfGSXh-uUX0MDtw7BAq865zMzI282S-iNde3s_xXcrX-XouksFl8qV1RRZwg/s1600/bear+baiting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN-o_bY7i-xCt4o6XIiEumXryjiazQXznJf0JsFAsFARHUNI_2T23y4dNVm1UC9xcxNxrlN2m_RYLfGSXh-uUX0MDtw7BAq865zMzI282S-iNde3s_xXcrX-XouksFl8qV1RRZwg/s1600/bear+baiting.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
baulk at the notion of rejoicing in anyone's death, there is nothing
to be gained from it and only one's dignity to lose. Thatcher may
have been frequently misguided and deluded by hubris but she wasn't
evil. Those who gloat over her death should be ashamed of themselves;
gloating disrespects her loved ones right to grieve in peace.
Gloating and hateful -is that the face the Left wants the world to
see? And these people miss the point: there is nothing to celebrate,
because she won. Throughout her reign her ideas were tacitly accepted by
enough people in Britain to win her three elections and they continue to dominate our
culture. Her mixture of free market individualism and Right-wing
moralising is the reason the coalition is able to demonise anyone who
claims benefits, even though the majority of claimants are working<span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">but simply paid too little to survive</span></span>. A
puritan work ethic has triumphed, where those who do not succeed do
not deserve to. Lack of social mobility is seen as the fault of the
individual. These attitudes have become ingrained, and it is Thatcher
and her henchmen in the Right-wing press that were responsible for
disseminating and normalising them.</span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Popular
music drowns in trite language of self-realisation; add an element of
ritual humiliation and you have the currency programs like The
X-Factor trades on; all the logical result of the culture of
individualism perpetrated by the New Right. Instead of thinking how
they can contribute to their community, young people have been
encouraged to indulge egoistic fantasies. <span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less, has just tarred all benefit
recipients with the brush of a psychopath, insinuating a causal link
between the welfare state and the killing of children. T</span>his is
morally outrageous, and would have been unthinkable before
Thatcherism; but he does it with his characteristic smug
self-assurance that in the eyes of the public he is on the right side
of a shockingly squalid argument.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
his book The Silence of Animals John Gray writes “All human
institutions are stained by crime... Explaining human nastiness by
reference to corrupt institutions leaves a question: why are humans
so attached to corruption?”. Mick Philpott was addicted to
appearing on TV programmes such as </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Jeremy
Kyle</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ann
Widdecombe Versus The Benefits Culture,</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
modern forms of bear-baiting and gladiatorial combat,
pressure-release valves for a frustrated society, and he killed his
children in a botched attempt to engineer another appearance on them.
The stained institution we should be examining in great detail is the
'look at me' culture of egoistic self-realisation. Mick Philpott was
behaving in just the way the 1980's buccaneer capitalist ideology
encouraged us to: take whatever you can get, give nothing back, every
man for himself. Bankers continue in this vein despite having just
screwed over the </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">entire
world</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">. Peter Oborne
wrote after the 2011 riots “The moral decay of our society is as
bad at the top as the bottom”. He's right, and people learn by
copying the behaviour of those at the top. We have Thatcher to thank
for all of this; her project was an unbridled success. Her death
won't change that.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">Addendum: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand-margaret-thatcher" target="_blank">This pie</a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand-margaret-thatcher" target="_blank">ce by Russell Brand</a> is<span style="font-size: small;"> very funny. (Yes, really; </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">h</span>e's a great deal cleverer than he sometimes comes across</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>). He describes her voi<span style="font-size: small;">ce as <i>"</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring"</i><span style="font-size: small;"> which made me laugh <span style="font-size: small;">louder than anything else this week. </span></span>It's also a very intelligent reflection on <span style="font-size: small;">what she did to the country.<i> "</i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or
exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context.
They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll
stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck,
they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I
hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was
solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the
advancement of those who had most<span style="font-size: small;">"<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">And if <span style="font-size: small;">you</span> really want to understand why she is hated, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2013/apr/11/margaret-thatcher-legacy-best-writing#ken-capstick" target="_blank">Ken Capstick<span style="font-size: small;">'</span>s piece</a> explains it beautifully<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-57253889121531060612013-03-29T04:26:00.000-12:002013-03-30T02:42:37.522-12:00Dartboard Aggressional<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCz2TstDtD8Bq2ZeG0eHWZ-TDcqissLSu3ooRXJ6PDsHV_1oy25wtf0dS71bb338YIahisw3lUFCpghSaZ0jLWwXgZDEogUmd_jTf3PX7hwcU_uzXcR-mhOprg5UncNe-BB8KiZQ/s1600/carrabba.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCz2TstDtD8Bq2ZeG0eHWZ-TDcqissLSu3ooRXJ6PDsHV_1oy25wtf0dS71bb338YIahisw3lUFCpghSaZ0jLWwXgZDEogUmd_jTf3PX7hwcU_uzXcR-mhOprg5UncNe-BB8KiZQ/s1600/carrabba.jpg" /></a></div>
<h2 class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
article by Luke 'Twin Falls' <a href="http://www.twinfalls.co.uk/post/46359460181/how-dashboard-confessional-stole-my-identity-a">HOW
DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL STOLE MY IDENTITY: A Cautionary Tale For Bands</a>
is a thoroughly dispiriting episode conveyed with considerable wit
and humility. Put briefly, an established Emo artist chose the name
Twin Falls for his new project, didn't check that the name has been
used by someone else for five years (or judging the artist to be
obscure compared to his towering status as Emo-auteur </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">n</span></i></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">onpareil,</span></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
didn't care), and when the five-year-old Twin Falls tried to contact
him he found himself talking to lawyers rather than discussing it
like adults. Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional had been using
the name for three months when Luke Stidson got in touch, and rather
than consider another name, Carrabba's management sicced their legal
rottweillers onto him who kicked off proceedings by disputing whether
Stidson had really been using the name for five years, as his gigs
and releases would attest. </span></span></span>
</h2>
<h2 class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
Carrabba never communicated with Stidson directly but via his
management and lawyers, given that his team stated that “Chris
Carrabba and band intend to keep using the name” it seems safe to
assume that Carrabba was notified of this saga and made this
decision. Carrabba may have the money to bully Stidson into
surrendering, but given Stidson has already released three Eps and a
debut album, no amount of litigation will prevent confusion. In this
scenario it would be in the interest of all parties for the
three-month-old Twin Falls to just come up with a different name. </span></span></span>
</h2>
<h2 class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
instead Carrabba's team displayed an arrogant and brattish mentality;
one that would rather see all parties lose out, themselves included,
than to see a perceived rival benefit. Such pride and tin ears
reminded me of the Saudi prince who complained that the Forbes Rich
List erroneously placed him 26</span></span></span><sup><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">th</span></span></span></sup><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
richest person in the world; a man so wealthy that he can't find
anything better to do with his time than attempt to rig his way
higher up the list. <br /><br />"Of the 1,426 billionaires on our
list, not one - not even the vainglorious Donald Trump - goes to
greater measure to try to affect his or her ranking," the
magazine claimed. "This is how he wants the world to judge his
success or his stature," an anonymous source was quoted as
saying. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21665997">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21665997</a></span></span></span></h2>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Carrabba
would rather create confusion for promoters and fans than compromise
his dazzling artistic vision, which in this instance consists of
naming his band after a town. Now this is an area where I don't think
it would be arrogant to say that I have considerable experience. You
might even say I'm an expert. And I can confidently state that it
didn't require much artistic vision and I'd be hard pushed to
convince anyone that it did. I found a town and named myself after
it. What genius of process! What elegance of poise! Quiver in the
palpable waves of Blakean prowess. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So
Mister Carrabba, please consider this: changing your name now will
not affect the artistic impact of your music. People don't care that
much about band names but they do care about turning up to the wrong
gigs and buying the wrong albums. And the big rich guy bullying the
little guy – I'm no style guru but I'm pretty sure that's not a
good look for a sensitive singer-songwriter. Swallow your pride and
change the name. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Update:</b>
<a href="http://www.twinfalls.co.uk/post/46557282462/carrabba-gate-an-update">Carrabba
has announced that he is changing the name of his new band to Twin
Forks</a>. He's done the decent thing, but still something doesn't
sit right. Was it finally a matter of conscience or merely one of
public relations? If influential names like DJ Tom Robinson hadn't
tweeted 'shame on you Chris Carrabba' would he have started caring?
But the biggest mystery of all is why he changed the name to Twin
<i>Forks. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Why not come up with
something completely original, rather than something that could be
misheard, and will always be associated with this sorry saga? It
makes it look like a reluctant move, still trying to lay claim to the
name will being forced to abandon it; grouchy, passive agressive. Or maybe that was simply the
best he could come up with. Actually, <span style="font-size: small;">i</span>f you listen to his music and lyrics
that s<span style="font-size: small;">eems</span> entirely plausible.</span></span></span></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-10067401714250646272013-03-25T01:54:00.006-12:002013-03-25T01:55:09.099-12:00Electronic cigarettes offer us a once-in-a-life-time opportunity for harm reduction and must be embraced<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
I blog exhausted and angry, with
none of the comfort of the removed cynic. This is a piece I hoped
I would never have to write. But to my horror, in an act of classic
collective knee-jerk reaction, all around us countries move to ban
electronic cigarettes. They have <span style="font-weight: normal;">already
been banned in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, and New
Zealand, restricted in Finland, Malaysia, and Singapore, are pending
restriction in the UK as a drug, and the subject of law suits by
attorneys general in several US states. </span>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It may sound like the
stuff of conspiracy theories, but we should consider that a seemingly
unlikely but wholly pragmatic alliance of tobacco companies and
anti-smoking zealots have most to gain from ensuring that this marvel
of technology is stamped into the ground before it has a chance to
really do good. I can't bear to see it being dragged out from under
our feet.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Are electronic
cigarettes harmless? The jury is out, but they are surely safer than
smoking cigarettes. The main danger from cigarettes is in the act of
inhaling smoke and all the toxins it contains. Electronic cigarettes
do not produce smoke, they produce vapour – steam. The vapour
contains nicotine, but nicotine isn't the big danger – its the tar,
smoke and numerous other chemicals that are responsible for the lung
and throat cancers.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The hysterical and
alarmist rhetoric from the opponents of E-cigs emphasises the fact
that nicotine is a poisonous chemical, but posionous chemicals are
found all over the house – children are taught not to drink bleach
or petrol. E-cigs are new and people aren't yet sure where to place
them. Given the right information they will learn.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We would do well to
consider this in terms of a balance of probabilities rather than a
unanimous verdict. We can say unanimously that smoking is bad for you
and the healthiest option is not to smoke or take nicotine at all.
But nicotine replacement therapy in the form of gum and inhalators is
prescribed as a quit smoking aid because it is safer than smoking. It
will take time for us to know for sure how safe electronic cigarettes
are, but the fact that they do not involve inhaling smoke tells us
that on balance of probabilities they are surely safer than smoking.
I also know how I feel. I am a singer and smoking was ruining my
voice. Since I took up vaping I haven't smoked in many months and
feel so much better for it. I initially found vaping gave me a dry
throat but I found that drinking more water sorted this problem out;
after a few months of vaping my smokers cough is gone, my lung
capacity has increased and my room and clothes no longer smells bad.
The point isn't that e-cigarettes are primarily a quit smoking aid,
but rather offer a safer alternative to smoking. Many people have
been arguing this, to little effect.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
Elaine Keller, vice president of the Consumer
Advocates for Smoke-Free Alternatives Association, said: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1350381/E-cigarette-face-ban-unregulated-quit-smoking-device.html">'I
would still be smoking if not for this product.'</a> Ms Keller said
she has been tobacco-free since March 2009 after 45 years of smoking.
She added: 'I can't point to anything to say it's 100 percent safe,'
she said. 'The thing is, it only needs to be safer. The only standard
is that it's safer than smoking.' Scientists at the University of
California, Berkeley, who studied the device said the device had
great potential in reducing the harm of smoking. Writing in the
Journal of Public Health Policy, they said: 'We conclude that
electronic cigarettes show tremendous promise in the fight against
tobacco-related morbidity and mortality.' Meanwhile a<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/01/30/electronic-cigarettes-seem-to-work-psychologically-and-physically/">
top US doctor, Keith Ablow, has come out in favour of them</a>. By isolating nicotine, e-cigarettes should carry far fewer chemical
risks than regular cigarettes, said Michael Siegel, a tobacco
researcher at Boston University. Tobacco contains about 5,000 known
chemicals, he said, with as many as 100,000 more that haven't yet
been identified. E-cigarettes eliminate many of those ingredients.
Siegel and a colleague reviewed 16 studies that analyzed the contents
of electronic cigarettes. In a paper just published in the <i>Journal
of Public Health Policy</i>, they reported that levels of certain
harmful chemicals were on par with levels found in nicotine patches
and hundreds of times lower than what's found in cigarettes. <br />
"The relevant question is not, 'Are these
things safe?'" he said. "But are these things much safer
than real cigarettes, and do they help people quit smoking? The
answer to both of those questions we know is yes."</div>
<div class="western">
"What New York is doing is equivalent to
outlawing lifeboats on a sinking ship because they haven't been FDA
approved," he added. <a href="http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/e-cigarettes-health-nicotine-tobacco-1101271.htm">"It's
a really crazy approach to public health."</a>
</div>
<div class="western">
The anti-smoking zealots argue that electronic
cigarettes will 'normalise' the act of smoking and get people into
smoking. The answer to this is 'only if you now ban electronic
cigarettes'. Electronic cigarettes taste and smell so much better,
the notion that they would lead anyone onto smoking is absurd.</div>
<div class="western">
But the harm reduction argument is lost on these
absolutists. They fail to see that if deprived of electronic
cigarettes, those of us who are now happily vaping will likely return
to smoking tobacco, and all the greater dangers that represents. It
is a crashingly depressing prospect. We must stand up and be counted.
Many of us feel embarrassed that we vape, perhaps a little ashamed
that we haven't instead completely quit our addiction to nicotine.
Instead we enjoy the vaping experience and feel better than we did
when we were smoking. We must be given the individual liberty to make
this harm reduction decision for ourselves. It may sound ridiculous,
but now is the time to say “I vape and I'm proud”. Otherwise we
will no longer have the option. The nanny state and Big Tobacco will
make sure of it.</div>
<div class="western">
I am thankful that the wheels of the law turn
slower in the UK than elsewhere, and I beg that the powers that be
consider electronic cigarettes to offer a harm reduction alternative
to smoking which must be regulated, licensed and embraced..
Meanwhile, I have stocked up on enough liquid nicotine to last
another month. I dearly hope that our government does the sensible
thing. But there are certain corporations who have so much to gain
from making sure they don't.
</div>
<div align="LEFT" class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; padding: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-48725176052297672612013-03-13T04:49:00.000-12:002013-03-13T04:49:43.091-12:00Peter's World
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFc3RYHn4Ng7I7vI1PRL6PcvySvvB_fNQq_TILSQtPg15g9RQO6ctfMUSRlTrDmfGKSUPXVsiL6_B0OpJgaco53Q3XEZHnGzgOwXu2KV-YqRkalCQdRtgG7hmi429-zpWsUTOSHw/s1600/peter-hitchens-with-a-gun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFc3RYHn4Ng7I7vI1PRL6PcvySvvB_fNQq_TILSQtPg15g9RQO6ctfMUSRlTrDmfGKSUPXVsiL6_B0OpJgaco53Q3XEZHnGzgOwXu2KV-YqRkalCQdRtgG7hmi429-zpWsUTOSHw/s320/peter-hitchens-with-a-gun.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Peter gets tough</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.countthecosts.org/">The
tide is turning on the War On Drugs</a>. Slowly but surely, more
politicians and law enforcers are willing to admit that the war isn't
working, that it is counterproductive, that the unregulated black
market is making criminals hugely wealthy, pointlessly criminalising
millions when drug use should be treated as a social and health
problem, not a crime. For authoritarian conservatives such as Peter
Hitchens, such arguments don't wash. If the war isn't working, <a href="http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/cold-as-charity.html">it
needs to be fought harder</a>. For Hitchens drug use is immoral, and
the law must enforce morality. This argument deserves to be taken
seriously; the law does indeed have a moral backbone. We penalise
murderers because murder is morally wrong, not because it is
unhealthy.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Hitchens believes drug
use is immoral because it allows one to experience an ecstacy and
euphoria that has not been merited by effort or virtue. But this
simplistic notion of morality quickly leads to absurdity. If the only
legitimate pleasures were those merited by effort or virtue, what
would such a world look like? Welcome to Peter's World – a world
that Peter would clearly not want to live in. In this world of pure
meritocracy, the first thing to go would be inherited wealth, and a
state machine would redistribute wealth evenly to ensure all
pleasures are earned by honest toil. Masturbation would be immoral,
as there is nothing virtuous in the pleasures of the palm (though
some effort is required -but no more than the effort to roll a
joint). How would Hitchens qualify his argument to exclude such
absurdities? Perhaps he would argue that it's ok to enjoy inherited
wealth because wealthy people are <i>job creators</i>. But as many
are not, the law would have to distinguish between those who create
jobs and those who simply sit on their wealth, moving their money
around to maximise its value. Perhaps masturbation would be allowed
because it is<i> natural. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Alarm
bells should ring whenever anyone plays the 'nature' card. Looking
back over human history, war appears to be a natural state for humans
to engage in, and every civilisation has found a way to alter their
consciousness with substances and celebrate in a non-virtuous and
ethically neutral way – (it's called fun, Peter, look it up). Human
beings are part of nature, and regardless, whether something is
natural or not tells us nothing about whether it is ethical. Hitchens
often resorts to special pleading. In an interview a journalist
pointed out that the coffee he was drinking was a drug. “But it's
</span><i>coffee</i><span style="font-style: normal;">!!” Hitchens
shrieked; that appeal to </span><i>common sense</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
so often the haven of those who want to escape the hole their
arguments have dug for them.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Hitchens
set up a moral system based on meritocratic precepts of effort and
virtue, and when this narrow ethical system has unintended
consequences, he is forced to bolt on </span><i>ad hoc</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
justifications. Hitchens would not want state interference in
inherited wealth (though as a strict moralist its possible he would
be happy to police the bedroom, not the boardroom). </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
second part of his argument is that the law </span><i>must</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
enforce morality. This is manifestly false. There are numerous things
we regard as immoral that we would be loathed to criminalise,
infidelity being the obvious example. One is free to be a bounder and
a cad without legal ramifications, but using drugs, without harming
anyone else will land you in trouble. Why is this? The fact is that
our ethically based legal systems must allow room for individual
liberty; people differ on where and how they play the liberty card,
but they all play it. For conservatives this liberty keeps the
state's hands off their inherited wealth; for liberals it keeps the
state's hands off their drugs, for libertarians, it keeps the state's
hands off their guns. Hitchens values individual liberty when it
comes to his personal wealth, but discounts it when it comes to the
drugs debate.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Hitchen's
argument for the criminalisation of drug use is based on an absurdly
one-dimensional view of both morality and legality. In reality, for
something to be made illegal there needs to be not just widespread
agreement that it is morally wrong, but also widespread agreement
that such criminalisation is socially useful and practically
enforceable. That is why adultery is wrong but legal. People broadly
agree on the ethics but recognise that criminalising it would be
ridiculous; people need freedom to lead personal lives outside of
government interference. So Hitchens cannot hide in his thin moral
world; he must engage in the arguments over whether the
criminalisation of drug use is socially useful and practical, because
the law is based not only on morality but on issues of social harmony
and the practicalities of enforcement, and in the context of the war
on drugs, those are the areas most in dispute. If he wants to engage
in such arguments, he would do well to start <a href="http://www.countthecosts.org/" target="_blank">here</a>. But I doubt he
will.
</div>
<br />
<br />
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-23779694631096423482013-02-25T12:31:00.000-12:002013-02-25T12:31:19.751-12:00The Music-Related Artwork of William Schaff
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokoJixYJRoOH9g4A14VRdvlrGVyXbotKko38MWsnVjczjTg7Q8sfI5A2sLKUhMOaqts-M2qpqE9PYiig_eN5hwt06pLRBxYwrDNlYyUU5-X8BaQjO3_m5PbSoQ82QbQsVAqYOJg/s1600/valleyofthebones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokoJixYJRoOH9g4A14VRdvlrGVyXbotKko38MWsnVjczjTg7Q8sfI5A2sLKUhMOaqts-M2qpqE9PYiig_eN5hwt06pLRBxYwrDNlYyUU5-X8BaQjO3_m5PbSoQ82QbQsVAqYOJg/s400/valleyofthebones.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Several
years back Will Schaff contacted me because he was compiling all of
his music-related artwork into a coffee-table friendly collection,
and wanted written contributions from all the musicians he had worked
with. I happily wrote my piece, and several years later I heard from
Will again, this time asking for my address, which I duly gave him.
Nine months later a package arrived for me – today in fact. In it
was probably the single most beautiful artefact I have ever been
given. 'From Black Sheep Boys To Bill Collectors' is an exquisite
full-colour hardback collection of his music-related works along with
'Autumn Bird Songs' an exclusive eight track green and white marbled
10” vinyl record by J. Molina (Songs: Ohia), written and recorded
specially to accompany the book. The whole package is published and
printed by Graveface Press, and my eyes water at the thought of how
much it must cost to produce something of such beauty. The hardback
is exquisite, and I lack the technical vocabulary to describe it
accurately, but the fine matte paper sleeve protects a fabric textile
covered binding with a mysterious debossed silver insignia on the
front cover, and the vinyl slides out of a large paper envelope fixed
on the inside back cover. It even smells elegant. If you love
beautiful things I urge you to checkout the <a href="http://www.graveface.com/graveface-catalog.html">Graveface
webshop</a>; if you can't afford to shell out for the hard copy, a
PDF & mp3 bundle version will give you at least half the joy for
a fraction of the price. Will always slips little extras into any
thing he posts you; this time I received a single piece of a jigsaw
puzzle, a page torn from a random paperback and his new “G.G. Allin
Kid's Activity & Colouring Book”, (#2 of 14 copies) which is so
deeply wrong it made me really hurt from laughing. I want to scan
some of it in and show the world but I’m not sure it's wise.
Actually no- I’m sure it's not wise. Perhaps you will be able to
find some of it on <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/samsa1973/">Will's
Flickr page.</a>..You probably don't know that you probably know
Will's artwork. Reprinted below is my piece from the book, which
explains why. </div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br />***</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">A
few years ago I promoted a show for a band called The Iditarod, at
the Cube Cinema, in Bristol, England. In the foyer, the drummer was
displaying and selling copies of his own paintings, sketches and
collages. Looking through them I noticed a piece familiar to me from
a Godspeed You Black Emperor album. “Oh so you’re that guy!”.
He was that guy. People leafing through the prints were saying “God,
this stuff is really dark”. This was true but I found myself
thinking “this stuff is hilarious”. In a single frame he had
offered the most perfectly searing satire on the post-9/11 American
psyche. A man dressed in Twin Towers merchandise furiously
masturbates his missile-penis in front of a television. Corpses spew
from the screen and he holds his fist aloft with righteousness. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">But
Will also drew strange but charming and affectionate pictures of dogs
he had seen in the local park. On tour around the New England area,
Will had a photo of his own beloved dog on the dashboard, to which he
had glued a patch of her hair. Other works occupied the space between
these two extremes. Recurring themes, characters and symbols allow us
to peak in on an internally coherent alternative world. By rendering
our mortal concerns in a vulnerable, almost comic book style, the
issues are inescapable, jolting us out of our desensitized
world-view. Cartoon people aren’t meant to get raped and murdered.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Not
long after, an album of mine called Flashlight Seasons was due for
release. Will listened to the album and came up with three pieces. We
settled on a startling red and black image of a strange quadraped
figure plodding through a forest, a parasitic twin piggy-backing him
like a malignant growth. Marching alongside is a family of origami
chickens. This bewildering tableaux of suggestions fitted the album
perfectly. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
next album was called Black Holes in the Sand. The title track
featured the lines</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
held the hand that threw the stone that killed the bird that woke the
city/and I could not feel the flower in my hand”. Will randomly
emailed me, and as ever, attached a piece he happened to be working
on. It was a red and white paper cut of a bird of prey perched on a
flowering branch. Will had yet to hear the record. This was Jungian
Synchronicity at its most irrationally compelling. Will’s world was
making the decisions now. Like the perfect servant, it knew what I
wanted before I knew I wanted it. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Songs:
Ohia, Godspeed You Black Emperor, The Iditarod, the Eyesores and many
others have been captivated by the world of William Schaff. Damn. I
wanted it all to myself.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">(Written
in 2008)</span></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-82939808437227180832013-01-16T06:44:00.001-12:002013-01-16T06:44:29.792-12:00Creeping Informality
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC45YUHH9O3uSC2nIImyU_D3oX1xWcqEBxkBIVvf1EgucPNWeSrvV7OU2IpyNO0Lo_CYAfOV4Fa3l0HF_D8vzPNS8Rt-8Ixz-O1uS0okktG28Vc-kGbv_HCfuBNg9B2BjIN4R_IQ/s1600/smug2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC45YUHH9O3uSC2nIImyU_D3oX1xWcqEBxkBIVvf1EgucPNWeSrvV7OU2IpyNO0Lo_CYAfOV4Fa3l0HF_D8vzPNS8Rt-8Ixz-O1uS0okktG28Vc-kGbv_HCfuBNg9B2BjIN4R_IQ/s320/smug2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/08111-michel-houellebecq-robert-montgomery-opinion"><br />Joe
Kennedy's piece in The Quietus </a>on “the widespread employment of
baby-talk “ raises an issue that I’ve been meaning to write about
for a while but hitherto not found a substantive angle. Joe points
out that the artist Robert Montgomery indulges in the grating,
infantilising language that has become the standard in today's
advertising; the advert that claims to know you and know what you
want, or worse, to know that <span style="font-style: normal;">you</span>
acknowledge <span style="font-style: normal;">it</span> knows what you
want, because you both want the same thing; a nicer world, nicer
trade, nicer capitalism. You are not customers, you are friends.
Intimate friends with identical values. It's absolutely vile. On an
Easyjet flight recently I parted with £4.50 for a 'snack box'
consisting of two biscuits, a thimble of hummus and a few olives. I
had some difficulty ordering it because I refused to refer to it by
name. Even typing it makes me cringe - “The Yumble Bumble Snack
Box”. I just pointed at the picture; the air steward wasn't able to
tell which of the two 'snack boxes' I wanted. So the interaction went
“Which one?” “Erm...” “The Yumble Bumble Snack Box or the
Feel Good Snack Box?” “The former” “Sorry?” “The first
one” “The Yumble Bumble Snack Box?” “Yes”. Urgh. <i>Feel
Good. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The price alone is a
violation, being forced to adopt baby talk is a humiliation too far.
They're sodomising me over a barrel and barking “Call me Uncle!!”.
Another company guilty of this sickening enforced intimacy is the
smoothie manufacturer Innocent. Their smugness isn't restricted to
name alone; the packaging is an orgy of vainglory, whimsy, sanctimony
and tedious self-celebration that culminates in storage guidelines
that refer to the product in the first person: “I like to be kept
chilled, and once you've opened me, drink me in a couple of days...”
etc etc. They clearly believe this kind of emetic chumminess will
break down the barriers and make us forget that we are customers and
they are salesmen; that we should somehow be impressed, glad,
grateful and indeed rather touched that they've taken the time to get
to know us so well. It's part of a wider culture of creeping
informality, one where bank managers seem to think it's ok to call me
by my first name. Well, how about this for informal: fuck you,
Innocent. You're not a kindly face in a cold world of commerce;
you're a stranger rubbing up against me on a crowded commuter train
for your own gratification. And you are selling </span><i>fruit</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Grow up. </span>
</div>
<br />Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-3655317208914776102013-01-12T11:55:00.000-12:002013-01-13T05:28:14.072-12:00Dear David and Gideon...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYx-dqJqHha7mWbUrOPleeh596RUx5BxRzT6foXQHqSfQyrtzLaI4olI-09_JF9vUNHs-MUL64iOMI3yppPgRuhs5j70bvZCyT5h05V6Y7d8H-jN2WmB4TkLIJXEGDtyjVET8uyA/s1600/guillotine+french.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYx-dqJqHha7mWbUrOPleeh596RUx5BxRzT6foXQHqSfQyrtzLaI4olI-09_JF9vUNHs-MUL64iOMI3yppPgRuhs5j70bvZCyT5h05V6Y7d8H-jN2WmB4TkLIJXEGDtyjVET8uyA/s320/guillotine+french.jpg" width="289" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><br />Dear
David & Gideon,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
hope you are having a nice day. Actually I don't care. Fuck the
niceties, I'll just get to the point.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">What
a lot of people are wondering is whether you are completely out of
touch with ordinary working people, or that you don't care about
them. I believe that it is both.<br /><br /><b>The Toxic Blend: Two Types Of Tory</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">First,
let's look your backgrounds. You are millionaires; as such it is
natural that you would want to protect your assets. There are broadly
two kinds of Tory. Those like yourselves are so privileged that you
have never had any need of the welfare state. You've never had to
survive on £71 a week Jobseeker's Allowance, a chunk of which must
go towards paying the rent because Housing benefits doesn't cover it.
Even with the most imaginative forms of sympathy, you just have no
idea what it is like. Sympathy can never be empathy. The other kind
of Tory are those like William Hague and David Davis, self-made men
from working class backgrounds. Hague and Davis do know what it is
like to be poor; however, their ability to empathise is compromised
by a tendency to universalise their experience. They are unusual;
most people are not highly intelligent, hyper-motivated
over-achievers like them, but they don't seem to realise this. Like
Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, the classic working class Tory
thinks to themselves “If I did it, why can't everyone else?”.
Like the chronic optimist puzzled by the clinically depressed, they
just can't relate to the poor and the benefits claimants.
These two kinds of Tory form a toxic blend; a class of people who are
opposed to the welfare state because they cannot relate to the people
it is their to protect. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><b>The
'Big Lie'</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
budget provided ammunition to those who argue that you are not
uncaring but out of touch. By increasing VAT, a tax that hits the
poorest hardest, slashing benefits while simultaneously cutting taxes
for the very richest, you rewarded your class whilst punishing the
poorest so brazenly that for most people it defied belief. It doesn't
take a public relations guru to tell you that this looks bad. Even if
there was a possible world in which it was the right thing to do,
(there isn't) it looked so bad that only the most myopic would fail
to see that it was a suicidal move. But the counter-argument here,
from those who argue that you just don't care, is that you were
working on <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitlerlie.html">the
principle of the Big Lie.</a> The idea here is that people would
think “Christ, that is so intuitively awful, so crassly wrong,
that you MUST know exactly what you are doing. You must be an
economic genius who knows something we don't, and this decision is so
crucially important for the future of our country that you are
prepared to look like an arrogant thieving toe-rag in order to get it
done”. The give-away is your use of weasel words like
“wealth creators” and “job creators” instead of “the rich”.
You use those words because you know how useful they are. This brings us into the real battle ground, the
real area in desperate need of scrutiny – the realm of ideology,
and the biggest single achievement of this coalition government so
far: successfully blaming a crisis of capitalism on the Left. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><b>Myths
And Mantras Of The New Hegemony</b><br />I've got to hand it to you –
you've done an amazing job. With the help of your delivery
boys in the media and a Labour opposition too scared to fight back,
you've managed to convince virtually the whole country that the
economic state we are in is because Labour Spent Too Much. The Right
has never had a problem of pandering to the lowest common
denominator, never been afraid of underestimating the intelligence of
the public, while the historical mistake of the Left has been thinking it could win if only it
could get people to follow the logic of its arguments. The Right has
a genius for emotive and populist propaganda; this has been it's
crowning intellectual and psychological achievement. The following
mantras have been so comprehensively tattooed onto the brains of the
public that even many with Leftish sensibilities believe them. They are as follows:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><i>The
debt crisis is because Labour spent too much; there have to be some
cuts, we are all in this together. We are in a debt crisis, and paying back the debt is the number one
priority. </i><br /><br />As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has
been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. From 1918
to 1961 the UK national debt was over 100% of GDP. During that period
the government introduced the welfare state, the NHS, state pensions,
comprehensive education, built millions of council houses, and
nationalised a range of industries. The public sector grew and there
was economic growth.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Now you want to turn back the clock by dismantling the NHS, comprehensive education and
the welfare state.Your are not doing this because the country is on the
verge of economic collapse, you are doing it because you are
ideologically opposed to public services and the welfare state, and
committed to handing over more of our public assets to big business.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Before
the 2008 crisis, Labour's spending plans had been matched by the
Tories. The sudden huge increase in government debt was caused by the
necessity of bailing out the banks; if Gordon Brown hadn't done this,
there would have been no money in cash machines. His plan of action
was copied by countries the world over. The cause was a crisis of
capitalism, due to a poorly regulated global banking industry. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><b>The</b>
<b>Household Budget Analogy</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">A
crucial part of the idealogical war that the Right is winning, is
the propagation of the <span style="font-weight: normal;">Household
Budget Analogy</span>. By comparing the UK economy to a household
budget you've terrified everyone into going along with austerity.
Household debt can be terrifying. But households are not
like economies. In an economy, you're spending is my income, and my
spending is your income. It is a two sided relationship; a household
is one-sided. Economies are dependent on two types of spending;
private spending and public (government) spending. As we are in a
recession, private businesses don't want to spend; they are wary of
investing, they hold onto their money. If governments do not step in and spend, the recession
continues. The Right always argues that if government shrinks away,
the private sector will automatically fill in the gap, providing the
services. This hasn't happened, isn't happening, and hasn't happened
historically. What got us out of previous depressions was government
spending. During World War II the USA's
national debt soared to 120% of GDP – nearly twice the size of
today’s US debt. The New Deal spending plan not only got them
out of the Great Depression but set the stage for a prolonged period
of sustained economic growth in the 50s and 60s. Massive investments
were made in science and technology, American workers were re-trained
and re-employed, private investment was encouraged, and consumer
purchasing power was increased. That 25-year post-war economic boom,
with the most rapid increase in living standards in our history,
would not have happened without government stimulus. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">There
are plenty of excellent commentaries by celebrated
economists such as the Noble Prize winner Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Martin
Woolf of the Financial Times – hardly what you would call
Left-wingers - who are able to debunk the myths you propagate. (See
Appendix below). Some would argue that you should study their works.
But I believe that you already know them; you instead choose to
exploit people's ignorance with simplistic but powerful ideological
mantras.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><b>Disaster
Capitalism Comes To Britain</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So why, if you know that
the way out of a recession is government spending, and that a
scorched earth austerity policy will create a double-dip (now ensuing
triple-dip) recession and massive unemployment, why did you go ahead
with it? The answer is that you have used a crisis of capitalism to
further your ideological agenda. You oppose the welfare state, and
you have used this crisis to engineer popular consent for its
dismantling. This is a perfect example of the historical technique of
'Disaster Capitalism” brilliantly analysed in Naomi Klein's The
Shock Doctrine, arguing that sudden crises are intentionally
manipulated to push through extreme free market policies that were
otherwise not politically possible. In the name of promoting “freedom
and democracy”, a shady partnership between the CIA and Chicago
School Friedmanite economists succeeded in organising military coups
to topple democratically elected, stable, popularly supported
centre-Left Developmentalist governments in South America and beyond
in order to strip the publicly owned and tax-payer funded assets so
they could be sold to foreign multi-nationals at bargain prices.
In this tsunami of Corporatism, worker's rights, minimum wage and labor laws were dismantled,
dissenters rounded up, tortured and disappeared in their thousands, while a tiny few made a killing. The
destruction it wreaked was huge, the economic, political and human
costs were staggering but clearly quantified in Klein's forensic
analysis.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Now,
you guys won't get away with mass incarceration and torture, but you
don't need to – the financial crisis was a massive blessing for
you. The language of belt-tightening, the household budget analogy,
'clearing up Labour's mess','we're all in this together'; these have
worked brilliantly in convincing the people that this is all
necessary. And like the unreconstructed Marxists who insist that
the Stalinist atrocities and poverty of the Soviet experiment can't be evidence against the feasibility of central planning because it wasn't 'true Communism', and the the
Chicago School economists who explained away the chaos their policies
created by saying that they were somehow thwarted from implementing
the <i>truly</i> earth-scorching policies that would have resulted in
their vindication, the triple-dip recession we are entering is just
seen as evidence that we need yet <i>more</i> austerity. Like the
scientists who held onto their theory of the non-existent
Phlogiston in the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of
Oxygen through continual ad-hoc readjustments to
their theory, where every piece of counter-evidence is selectively
reinterpreted to fit with their convictions, your propaganda for
re-election will be along the lines of “yes, it's tough, but we've got this far, it's
not long now, you can't change the Commander in the middle of a war –
stick with us and you'll see we're right – don't let Labour undo
all the progress we've made”. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><b>Divide & Conquer:</b> <b>Benefit Fraud Vs The Tax Gap</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">You
believe in low taxes and looking after your own. You believe that the
private sector will provide where the public sector is cut back,
because that is what suits your economic interests. And if
the private sector fails to provide the public services, for you that's just the free market indicating the such services are not required. And you've nothing to lose there anyway; you don't want those services and if you're stuck in a corner you can just blame the previous government. You have pioneered a
divide and conquer strategy, turning working people against one
another by smearing benefit claimants as scroungers whilst saying and
doing nothing about the tax gap, even though benefit fraud is less
than 1% of the tax gap – the £25 billion in tax lost through tax
avoidance, £70 billion in tax evasion and £26 billion in tax
uncollected. (And there is that £6 billion that you wrote off for
your pals at Vodafone). In total that's £120 billion - more than
three-quarters of the annual deficit. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><b>Housing Benefits: No Social Housing Means Taxpayers Subsidise The Rich</b></span><br />You propagate myths about
housing benefit: that it is a benefit for the unemployed, when in
fact only one in eight claimants is </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/previous_years/2010/june_2010/housing_benefit_warning" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">out
of work</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
(not a statistic that you'll find reported in most newspapers). The
majority of those who claim housing benefit, including the under-25s,
do so to compensate for paltry wages and extortionate rents. And because Housing Benefits, fixed at 90's rent prices by the faceless Rent
Service (to whom there is no appeal process) so rarely cover the
rent, the meagre Jobseeker's Allowance has to make up the shortfall.
(In my case the shortfall was £65 a month; my rent at a very modest
£315 a month, Housing Benefit only covered £250 of it). And because
there is so little social housing, these rents go to private
landlords. Housing benefit subsidises the wealthy while propagating low wages. That's right;
the people who clean your streets earn so little, and are charged so
much for their rent, that housing benefit has to top it up, and in an obscenely unjust cycle, the money is syphoned back to the rich via
the private rental market when it could and should be going towards public housing. You aim to cut housing benefits, with no
plans to build more affordable public housing. You talk about 'making
work pay' and 'incentivising work'. You do this by making sure
benefits are in insufficient to survive on, instead of making the
minimum wage a realistic living wage. You protect the right of banks
to pay bankers whatever they need to get the best talent; you thus
recognise that higher pay is the incentive to work. Therefore you
must realise that people will only work if it is worth them doing so.
For many with children, the cost of child care that full time work
necessitates undercuts any increase in earnings. What is the point of
working if working people do not have enough to live on? The only just way
out of this is to increase the minimum wage to a <a href="http://www.livingwage.org.uk/" target="_blank">realistic Living Wage</a>. But you won't do this, because it
is not in the interest of your class, your financiers, your family,
friends, your rich constituents in safe Tory seats. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><b>Bring
Forth The Guillotine</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">And
here is where you may well run into trouble. I hope it doesn't come
to this, but it might. If enough people lose their jobs, and find
themselves trying to survive on benefits, and when the cuts in public
services really kick in this year of 2013, you may find yourselves on
the wrong side of the argument. The divide and conquer strategy only
works if the worse off are in a small, hopeless and disenfranchised minority. If things get bad enough it will engender solidarity. People will
question not just the logic of austerity, but more importantly, the
Right-wing hegemony. This hegemony has been carefully crafted over the
last few decades, and since 2008 it has gone into overdrive. It
consists of a raft of beliefs – that benefit claimants are
scroungers, that the ill and disabled are faking it, that public
workers are pampered whiners, that trade unions hold the country to
ransom, that the 'undeserving poor' are taking us all for a ride. But for every alleged free-rider at the bottom of society, there is a free-rider at
the top, born into wealth, creating no jobs, manufacturing nothing,
simply moving money around and avoiding taxation. But we don't hear about
them, because the largely Right-wing press is run by and funded by such
people.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Here,
for you, is the rub: for all your hatred of the welfare state, it may
be the only thing keeping you from the guillotine. In A History Of
Modern Britain, Andrew Marr suggests that the reason Britain is one
of the few European countries to have avoided revolution is because
the welfare state has buffered the worst injustices of capitalism.
When there was a powerful Left, a Keynsian market strategy and a
welfare state were the necessary table scraps that kept the people
sufficiently placated. Indeed, that is why many on the far-Left were
opposed to the welfare state; it prevents the exploited from fully
realising their exploitation; it prevents them from becoming class
conscious. It may do you well to consider if they are right. If you
dismantle the welfare state, there may be nothing standing between
you and the jobless, baying mob. 2013 may be your Poll Tax moment.
Bring it on, I say.<br /><br />Goodnight and sweet dreams boys.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><b>Appendix</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Addressing
the ‘tax gap’ is a vital part of tackling the deficit. Figures
produced for PCS by the Tax Justice Network show that £25 billion is
lost annually in tax avoidance and a further £70 billion in tax
evasion by large companies and wealthy individuals.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">An additional £26
billion is going uncollected. Therefore PCS estimates the total
annual tax gap at over £120 billion (more than three-quarters of the
annual deficit!). It is not just PCS calculating this; leaked
Treasury documents in 2006 estimated the tax gap at between £97 and
£150 billion.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><img align="LEFT" border="0" height="180" name="A-comparison" src="http://www.pcs.org.uk/filemanager/root/site_assets/camapaigns/alternative/images/A-comparison.jpg" width="300" /><br clear="LEFT" />If
we compare the PCS estimate of the tax gap with the DWP estimate of
benefit fraud, we can see that benefit fraud is less than 1% of the
total lost in the tax gap (see diagram above).<br /><br />Sources:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/campaigns/campaign-resources/there-is-an-alternative-the-case-against-cuts-in-public-spending.cfm">http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/campaigns/campaign-resources/there-is-an-alternative-the-case-against-cuts-in-public-spending.cfm</a></span></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://falseeconomy.org.uk/cure/myths">http://falseeconomy.org.uk/cure/myths</a><br /><br /><a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/</a><br /><br />http://www.ft.com/comment/columnists/martin-wolf</span></u></span></span></div>
<div class="western">
<br />
<br /></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-63118250053405002732012-12-28T06:04:00.001-12:002012-12-29T16:35:35.770-12:00Records I Have Enjoyed This Year<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyTfGBO4gUJVsP8AehVTklP_L_Tggwe436hl6bhFJZxhz3oIVZxdcCYyxetNUHMcVQo9OAvOenEuBa6vZ-YF6zGLt_N3pCsCmuPrKEzPLwCFLqIjQTvycpncaHIPRv-0ZfayGqg/s1600/turner+fishermen+at+sea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPyTfGBO4gUJVsP8AehVTklP_L_Tggwe436hl6bhFJZxhz3oIVZxdcCYyxetNUHMcVQo9OAvOenEuBa6vZ-YF6zGLt_N3pCsCmuPrKEzPLwCFLqIjQTvycpncaHIPRv-0ZfayGqg/s400/turner+fishermen+at+sea.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br />
This list is not intended as a Best Of
2012, I've not listened to enough music to make any such claim, it's
merely a survey of records I've enjoyed. There are many others
released this year which are clearly excellent but I've not explored thoroughly
enough to write about (Eamonn McGrath's <i>Young Canadians</i> and
R.M. Hubbert's <i>Thirteen Lost & Found </i>being examples).
Hopefully this list will make you want to explore further.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Sweet Lights –
<i>Sweet Lights</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Technically sophisticated but
entirely accessible, dozens of instantly memorable melodies make this
feel like an album you've known your whole life. One of those
'songwriter's songwriters', Shai Halperin makes it all sound so easy, but it
takes a peer and rival to fully appreciate why it's anything but. The
album George Harrison never made.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Land Observations –
<i>Roman Roads IV-XI</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This eight-part survey
of ancient highways and byways is composed from the simplest
ingredients; picked harmonics and looped guitar riffs evoke a
sensation of internal travel, it's unusual in being an ambient record
built around propulsive rhythms rather than drones and field
recordings, tracing a map rather than capturing territory. A sonic
gazetteer for the armchair navigator.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Warm Digits – <i>Keep
Warm With The Warm Digits</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Rarely is a band so
suited to their name; digital music served with the warmth and depth
of mulled wine, this record is a playful sonic pillow fight.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Neil Halstead -
<i>Palindrome Hunches</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Mainstream music
journalism's obsession with 'authenticity' has resulted in a critical
medium reaching a dead-end, a satellite orbiting a dying star,
sending back increasingly absurd reports – the ascetic log cabin
retreat and the 'primitive' recording equipment, the beard and the
buffalo plaid; for many, such ludicrous framing devices seem to
resonate louder than the music. Fortunately not all music writers are
so easily hoodwinked, and not all record labels are so patronising. Neil Halstead has found
a natural home at Nat Cramp's wonderfully understated Sonic Cathedral imprint. 'Palindrome Hunches' is Halstead's darkest solo album so far, but
more importantly it's his most focused, his penchant for whimsy
reined in and his plaintive melodies allowed to suspend in the air
until they dissolve. While the fact remains that many artists write
their strongest work under duress, albums like this don't need a back
story.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Kuedo – <i>Severant</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Severant is on first
blush a straightforward arranged marriage of Tangerine Dream
synthtopia and cutting-edge footwork percussion, an album with each
foot planted firmly in a different decade, but the melody lines are
so strong and the sound-scapes so sweeping that the listener will
find themselves asking more of it. What then emerges is a world where
humans are long gone, each hi-hat tick is the footfall of an army of
synthdroids terraforming a newly claimed planet, overseen by an
infinitely wise and benign Philosopher-King supercomputer. Beautiful
and unabashedly escapist, Severant is an intergalactic holiday
brochure for wistful robots.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Burial - <i>Street
Halo EP / Kindred EP</i></b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Will Bevan made life
difficult for himself in a way that Portishead did a decade before
him. Creating an aesthetic so instantly influential it left them
without room for manoeuvre, by the time Portishead got round to their
second album, a thousand indie bands had pointlessly bolted a pair of
turntables onto the side of the stage, and with the echoes of Dummy
ringing endlessly in a hall of mirrors, Portishead's sound was no
longer theirs. So they took their time, adapted and moved on. Both
artists stand in a grand tradition of sonic pioneers weaving a noose
to hang themselves with. My Bloody Valentine have yet to rise to
their own challenge, The Stone Roses made a pig's ear of their's, but Bevan continues to hone his occult craft so elegantly that
no-one has come close to cracking the code, and by releasing EPs
instead of albums, he has avoided the issue, forcing people to
appreciate his music outside of the arbitrary strictures of track
counts, running times and size formats.
</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />Emptyset – <i>Medium</i></b></span><br />Put
up microphones in an ancient building, record the sound of nothing,
play it back through a P.A. in the same room, record the results.
Repeat this process indefinitely. Will you capture the murmurs of
ghosts? Definitely.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Happy New Year.</div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-81377104095733326022012-10-24T14:34:00.000-12:002012-10-24T14:34:35.658-12:00Circadian Video * Opening The Archives Of Demonology: Gravenhurst's Patented 'Subaquatron: Sonik Mysterie Kult' Bucket Brigade Analog Delay Pedal<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding: 0;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSwBKjBAgg64Lcr8qGeHyDa9y49ssx97bwK6eZRbQhAdDaxmSsCg77DsfQ3327AE2t0pfqSUUalVm1_cG_5LrOLpWtFlrqcHIFvlPM-nzeXqZ5o1NAQqc4AdF8pUlmw9yZC3fAdA/s1600/circadian+video+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSwBKjBAgg64Lcr8qGeHyDa9y49ssx97bwK6eZRbQhAdDaxmSsCg77DsfQ3327AE2t0pfqSUUalVm1_cG_5LrOLpWtFlrqcHIFvlPM-nzeXqZ5o1NAQqc4AdF8pUlmw9yZC3fAdA/s320/circadian+video+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="color: #3a352a!important; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-top: 3px; padding: 0; vertical-align: top;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #3a352a!important; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-top: 3px; padding: 0; vertical-align: top;">
Heigh ho – who is there? No-one but me my dears.</div>
<div style="color: #3a352a!important; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-top: 3px; padding: 0; vertical-align: top;">
<strong style="font-style: normal; font-weight: bold;">'<span class="il">Circadian</span>' <span class="il">Video</span></strong>
<br />
Tremendously exciting news this week – my pal Sam Wisternoff (aka
Anticon-signed Bristol drone troubadour SJ Esau) has given album opener '<span class="il">Circadian</span>' the <span class="il">video</span>
treatment it deserves. Featuring Vinka symbols invading internal
organs, slow-mo lip-synching and self-generating crayon diagrams, with a
cinematographic palette moving between the manufactured nostalgia of
saturated Super 8 and scratchy 'found footage' VHS, a disorientating
array of recurring images play out against a continually shifting
background of psychedelic textures and stop-motion animations, mirroring
the song's cyclical rhythms and ambiguous lyrics. This being the first
time I've been personally involved in a music <span class="il">video</span>
from the outset, Sam and I spent a sunny afternoon in the St Werburgh's
area of Bristol filming me suffocating myself with a bin liner, before
police broke up the fun following a phone call from a concerned
resident. Most of those scenes would have been too unpleasant to use
were we not able to offset the atmosphere of misery with footage of a
man dropping his car keys into a hat.
<br />
Watch the <span class="il">video</span> for '<span class="il">Circadian</span>' <a href="http://link.warp.net/redirects/1351021037-363676b470a41b32fdd72924b3c29059-7923dc6?pa=256522939234958238" style="color: #597bb7!important; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">here</a>
<br />
Friends in Germany, you can watch the <span class="il">video</span> <a href="http://link.warp.net/redirects/1351021037-c7d06c04f7a5e412e6ba22c6ff759771-7923dc6?pa=256522939234958238" style="color: #597bb7!important; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">here</a></div>
<div style="color: #3a352a!important; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-top: 3px; padding: 0; vertical-align: top;">
<strong style="font-style: normal; font-weight: bold;">Sonic Cathedral 'Celebrity Pedalboard'</strong>
<br />
Nat Cramp at Sonic Cathedral invited me to contribute to their
'Celebrity Pedalboard' page, divulging the secrets of my patented
'Subaquatron' Bucket Brigade Delay Pedal. Join the Sonik Mysterie Kult <a href="http://link.warp.net/redirects/1351021037-316abc910b1108d5a62980eb8681a504-7923dc6?pa=256522939234958238" style="color: #597bb7!important; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">here</a></div>
<div style="color: #3a352a!important; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-top: 3px; padding: 0; vertical-align: top;">
Merrie Beltane,
<br />
Nicodemus & Pliers</div>
</div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-19197745128188351172012-10-14T10:44:00.000-12:002012-10-14T11:03:59.826-12:00Gravenhurst Show at Init for the Roma Ultrasuoni Festival : A Statement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
The show at Init for the Roma Ultrasuoni festival was ruined for us and the audience because of circumstances completely beyond our control. I hesitate to point the finger of blame at people publicly but in this situation I have no choice because we are absolutely furious about this and it needs to be made clear that the chaos was not our fault. We drove for eight hours to play at this festival and were met with a completely shambolic set up and incompetent staff. The sound check was totally pointless as the engineers clearly had no idea what they were doing, and we stood on the stage for an hour while they milled around slowly plugging and unplugging things, then they cut us short before we could finish, saying we had run out of time. We then went off for our dinner, which was served to us cold, and we were given only water to drink. Cold food and water after an eight hour drive, nice hospitality; while all around us the public were being served hot food and drinks. So contrary to what we were being told, the kitchens were open, but just not for the artists. Still, we were determined to play a good show. When we got on stage we could not hear our voices. We were singing 'deaf'. You know the way deaf people sound when they talk? They sound like that because they cannot hear their voices. That was the situation we were in onstage. Try singing like that - you won't sound good. We are not a difficult band to engineer. All we need is to be able to hear our own voices in our monitors, Rachel needs to hear her synth and Claire needs to hear my guitar. That's it. That's all there is to it. Instead, Rachel and Claire's voices were coming through my monitor, while my voice was not in any of the monitors. We struggled through the first two songs, continually telling the engineer of our monitoring problems, to no avail. Then in 'Saints' my microphone dropped out completely, so the audience could not hear my voice either. The staff scrambled around trying to sort it out; it transpired that Rachel's monitor wasn't even plugged in. If you know anything about sound engineering or performing you will be sympathetic to our plight - the onstage sound was a complete nightmare. Eventually I tired of telling the engineer where to put our voices and simply walked across the stage and switched my microphone with Rachel's, a coarse but completely essential intervention, thus solving a problem that should have been done at the sound desk at the beginning. We were then told we had to play our last song, so we played ' 'Black Holes In the Sand' as well as we possibly could in the circumstances. Anyone who has seen Gravenhurst live will attest that we are a professional band that knows how to play live. I've played live for fifteen years, hundreds and hundreds of shows all over the world, and i've never come across a situation like this - total incompetence. Between us, Claire, Rachel and I have played over a thousand gigs. We are good at our job - the people running this stage were not. It was a humiliating waste of time for us and our audience. We are sorry for the fans who were looking forward to the show. We will play Roma again, and we will ensure we play in a professional venue suited to professional musicians. Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-4742814100980235662012-09-12T05:32:00.002-12:002012-09-12T05:32:57.296-12:00The Quietus Presents: The Jovian Bow Shock Prize 2012<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Bt0xqJptNcoyOUl_tDbtD7dZB018du2WUQ8EpyCkRpUqNygYezR5JHra7Nu7VgrCbk4gg6o9rTiT8xaWUovCS7SD3dSQc2zFLNaaOJEM2a1tBLLvr1n1vUOQfcctfFtxwOX-lA/s1600/jovian_1347390835_crop_550x425.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Bt0xqJptNcoyOUl_tDbtD7dZB018du2WUQ8EpyCkRpUqNygYezR5JHra7Nu7VgrCbk4gg6o9rTiT8xaWUovCS7SD3dSQc2zFLNaaOJEM2a1tBLLvr1n1vUOQfcctfFtxwOX-lA/s320/jovian_1347390835_crop_550x425.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Sod the Mercury! It genuinely makes me feel much prouder that
Gravenhurst has been nominated by The Quietus for The Jovian Bow Shock
Prize 2012. A fascinating and downright educational list. Thank you Mr.
Doran et al. <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/10003-jovian-bow-shock-award-2012" rel="nofollow nofollow" target="_blank">http://thequietus.com/articles/10003-jovian-bow-shock-award-2012</a>Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-346247149563480712012-09-04T12:57:00.001-12:002012-09-04T13:06:04.991-12:00Exit Through The (Insert Pun Here) or The Problem With Banksy<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx9ZB7sS8CaDIud3GEZKdzm7dLreoHuiClOUQrRWJdgFp5c9q2QFLZNSgK53Rp8F2FIMb88ZtQ6rq4zE5vPp5eNkBczPYs0Ed1TZ76ZSjReoYNyHLfemxj2eQwKGZNG5h1kEz2Lg/s1600/turner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx9ZB7sS8CaDIud3GEZKdzm7dLreoHuiClOUQrRWJdgFp5c9q2QFLZNSgK53Rp8F2FIMb88ZtQ6rq4zE5vPp5eNkBczPYs0Ed1TZ76ZSjReoYNyHLfemxj2eQwKGZNG5h1kEz2Lg/s320/turner.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h3>
<i>The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Its Last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838 Joseph Turner</i></h3>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I read on an internet
forum that it has become fashionable to knock Banksy; this is
confusing, because I was under the impression it was fashionable to
like him; I just can't keep up. But either way I'm sure that one's
opinion of Banksy can be informed by something more than social
trends. There is an argument to be had.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Banksy's failure as an
artist serves as an object lesson in art theory. Aesthetics 1.0 “When
Art Fails”. If visual art does anything more than look appealing,
it suggests the possibility of a non-semantic form of communication;
the conveying of meaning without words. In other words, bad art is
easily described, good art isn't. No matter what I tell you about
Joseph Turner's depiction of boats docking on the Thames, no matter
how sophisticated my description of his extraordinary renderings of
colour, or how nuanced my meditation on the reflections of light
bursts on the ships beams, no words can put anything like it into
your mind if you haven't seen it yourself. I may as well be
describing custard. But if I describe a trail of white paint around
the floor of a gallery, at the end of which crouches a policeman with
a rolled up banknote, you don't need to see this staggering
achievement of art-as-polemic. And if I say “you know that famous
photo of a rioter throwing a molotov cocktail, right? Well, Banksy
has done that, right, except they are throwing a bunch of flowers”
you can save yourself the cost of a train fare to Bristol, or
wherever. Banksy trades in feeble pictorial metaphors conveying
nothing that could not be conveyed in words alone. The great mystery
at the heart of visual art, the very reason why it is said that
writing about art is like dancing about architecture, is missing in
his work. He can be explained, decoded, reduced. With great art we
say “well you really have to see it”, with Banksy you just don't.
</div>
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But many would argue
that this is irrelevant, that Banksy isn't an artist, but a satirist or prankster, and should thus be judged not on the content of his
work but on the effect it has had. Alas, this leaves him on even
shakier ground. A Banksy exhibition brought a lot of visitors and
money to Bristol in 2009. “Do you agree with his anti-capitalist
political message?” asked a BBC reporter of a woman queueing for
the gift shop. “Oh no, not really..” she replied. “So what
brought you here today?” “Oh well, you've gotta have your Banksy
posters haven't you?”. This airy, wholesale acceptance of his work
has brought him to my very front door; the block of flats over the
road has a wing named in his honour. The Cedars, The Gantry, The
Banksy. I live in an area with a tradition of naming roads after
local heroes; the physics genius Paul Dirac; the cricketing legend
Arthur Milton. Banksy's enrolment into this particular hall of fame
demonstrates how far he stands from where the satirist defence would
have him be. Banksy is no outsider, no <i>enfant terrible</i>
straddling the line between crime and art. He has more in common with
Stephen Fry than Chris Morris. He's become a National Treasure.
'Banksy = Sell Out' – you see that sprayed around Bristol. He
left himself vulnerable to such accusations by buying so heavily into
a political platform of simplistic anti-capitalism. It takes a nimbler mind than his to successfully
navigate fame and fortune with outlaw credibility intact.
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Ultimately Banksy has
failed in that he fails to upset anyone. The properties he graffitied
quadrupled in value, so the most transgressive aspect of his work,
the act of vandalism, is rendered toothless. Which leaves only the
conceptual content: cheap visual puns. If these vague, witless jabs
at free-market capitalism and the police state count as satire, if
satire can be so toothless and whimsical, then that is worrying,
because it means you have to do very little to be taken seriously. In
a world where the encroaching police state and rampant buccaneer
capitalism are truly frightening things, and the jaded acceptance of
them as social norms, or worse, as natural states may end up
destroying much of what is good about civilisation, I'd like to think
there are heavier weights fighting our corner.
</div>
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<br /></div>
Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6604628.post-91763652306357741492012-08-03T04:35:00.000-12:002012-08-03T05:03:55.816-12:00Intellectual Comforts and Ethical Cop-Outs: The Libertarian Mindset<br />
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSefWQvnjvSqhclkfDiQfUi_qEp-2A2HBKgWXBymahueWXsrvmefNT833NC3MlhwAnlo7DsMpPDJyyQB_4tDPdp5w1Dw8gSwFB71I0q6Uand-tpgzirrpYKv5QYwKJlsHubNk8cw/s1600/2322308625_obama_socialist_in_chief_xlarge.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSefWQvnjvSqhclkfDiQfUi_qEp-2A2HBKgWXBymahueWXsrvmefNT833NC3MlhwAnlo7DsMpPDJyyQB_4tDPdp5w1Dw8gSwFB71I0q6Uand-tpgzirrpYKv5QYwKJlsHubNk8cw/s1600/2322308625_obama_socialist_in_chief_xlarge.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If Only!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://exiledonline.com/its-hip-its-cool-its-libertarianism/">It's
Hip! It's Cool! It's Libertarianism! By Connor Kilpatrick at Exiled </a>
is dead on target and vital in this climate; the US Right has been
pushing libertarianism not just as a political philosophy but as an
entire lifestyle choice complete with an intellectual smugness that
says "you see, liberals mistake politics for a <i>binary issue</i>,
of Left versus Right, but in fact libertarianism is the only
consistent program for real freedom, and cuts across that <i>tired
old dichotomy</i>" with added pseud-points for the words
'binary' and 'dichotomy'. It appeals particularly to net-savvy male
college graduates who have been raised in a socially liberal
environment, being pro choice, down with human rights, cool on sexual
equality etc - basically all the things most people now believe
anyway- but don't want to have to contribute economically to society
in any way. Like Kilpatrick says, when people start bandying around
the word 'freedom', we need to ask "freedom for <i>whom</i> to
do <i>what</i>?".<br />
<br />
Isaiah Berlin made a crucial
distinction between negative and positive freedom; respectively,
freedom <i>from</i> constraint, and freedom <i>to</i> flourish and
realise your potential. Libertarians believe governments should only
protect the former, and that any attempts by governments to promote
the latter always results in totalitarianism, like here in Britain,
and in America, which Kilpatrick notes, suffers the tyrannies of
<a href="http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/25/almost-everything-were-taught" target="_blank"><u>child
labor laws</u></a>,<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003500.html" target="_blank"><u>
the Civil Rights act</u></a>,<a href="http://www.lp.org/news/press-releases/libertarian-%E2%80%9Cprosperity-plan%E2%80%9D-repeals-income-tax-ends-corporate-welfare" target="_blank"><u>
federal income tax</u></a>,<a href="http://reason.com/archives/2009/07/30/a-minimum-wage-equals-minimum" target="_blank"><u>
minimum wage laws</u></a>,<a href="http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/20/social-security-cola-increase" target="_blank"><u>
Social Security</u></a>,<a href="http://mises.org/daily/579" target="_blank"><u>
Medicare</u></a>,<u><a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=8B1AC89695EB242A4153B97D6759382D.journals?fromPage=online&aid=3105456" target="_blank">
and food safety</a>.</u> Given that we can point out such instances
of government intervention successfully expanding people's positive
freedom, the onus is on libertarians to show how it results in
tyranny, when all around us we can see that manifestly not happening.
</div>
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<br />
The recent rise of
libertarianism has seen young high achievers picking a political
tribe that reflects their social values but hawkishly protects their
economic interests, and, crucially, allows them the luxury of a
consistent theoretical superstructure that can defend these values
and interests and provide simple answers to social problems. It
appeals to smart successful people because they <i>do</i> think
things through, and so are liable to be plagued by the dilemmas that
the world's problems throw up. Unlike traditional conservatives, they
can't just ignore them or believe God moves in mysterious ways; they
need some way of settling these nagging issues - and libertarianism
does the job wonderfully; it answers all the questions systematically
by reference to a simple and consistent theoretical framework. You
pop the problem question in one end and the machine relates the
problem to the value system and provides an answer -an answer
guaranteed to come with no price tag. And all of a sudden it's a very
easy world to navigate, because you simply wipe away any questions of
social justice, inequality, class, social mobility, social closure,
ingrained poverty; anything that requires any kind of government
intervention. Any such questions are null and void because government
intervention is Wrong In Itself, because it contravenes their
one-dimensional conception of freedom. Libertarianism permits black
and white thinking, and is very satisfying to someone who would
rather get on with being successful and not have to feel bad about
inequality. I myself have tasted the allure of the libertarian
mindset, and it sure is tasty. Libertarianism is basically
consistent; starting from such simple principles it's not difficult
to be, and that consistency is very appealing. But just because
something is consistent doesn't make it true, helpful, useful,
practical or ethical. And a purely negative conception of freedom is
none of those things. It's a cop-out.</div>
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<br />
Robert Nozick, who
held a God-like status amongst libertarians, having written the
fearsome tome 'Anarchy, State and Utopia', the libertarian bible with
its declaration that taxation is akin to slavery, in the last decade
of his life pretty much reneged on it, basically saying it was all horseshit and
John Rawls was right.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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For more on the ethical
poverty of libertarianism, read <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/">this</a></div>
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<br /></div>
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Thanks to Brother Sean
and Alex B.P. for their input on this piece.</div>
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<br /></div>
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For some light relief:
this fun, informative and surprisingly plausible <a href="http://www.joenice.net/files/mixmag_dubstep_family_tree.jpg">Dubstep
Family Tree from Mixmag</a>!<br />
<br />
Update: I've finally updated the blogroll on the right; if you think you should be up there and you're not, or you've moved your site or something, let me know and i'll add it or update it. If you have an interesting blog or site and think you should be up there, get in touch. It's a bit random; for instance there are loads of good political blogs but listing all of them would take ages, and many of them are well known, so I just include ones I've had some kind of connection with. All the blogs on the right are interesting and well-written.<br />
<br />
</div>Nick Talbothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10122332897189553465noreply@blogger.com0