.
This should have been posted two days ago.
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Jarvis Cocker was featured on a Sky Arts programme last night, about songwriters and their techniques. A whole hour of the wonderful Jarvis explaining how to compose, even if you only have a rudimentary ability to strum chords on the guitar. At one point he used the very same ancient model of Casio keyboard my children played with two decades ago, complete with little orange percussion pads. He was having a laugh, to be sure, but also demonstrating that he's no snob about having the coolest instruments, and showing that you don’t need expensive equipment in order to write and be creative.
There are three excellent and very different versions of Pulp performing ‘Common People’ on Utube. As Jarvis says, it’s only three chords: C, G and F.
Coincidentally I was thinking just last week how imperceptibly we make progress with playing an instrument. What sparked that thought was memorising and playing the chords for Lennon & McC’s ‘In My Life’ on the guitar.
Eight years ago I had to abandon the attempt to play the song, but suddenly, now, it seems quite doable - to move easily from A to F#m to D, then Dm and back to A, and so on. Whereas getting three fingers squashed into an A chord used to be an almost impossible task, it’s now even become possible to nail that B7 that sneaks into the final sequence.
We really need a campaign in this country to implement the Venezuelan scheme that enables all children to learn to play an instrument. I believe it ought to be a basic right of every child in this country, and if it can be done in Venezuela then it can surely be done here.
---------------------------------------------
Saturday’s Guardian Review carried a curious two-page spread giving massive publicity to a new book by Iain Sinclair, “A bittersweet love letter to the London borough of Hackney”. Eh?
So what’s he have to say? He came to live among the common people some 40 years ago. He doesn’t like the new flats next to the new Dalston station. He can’t bear to leave “the repository of memory” (i.e. Hackney) where the children of this Welshman were born. He can see the end of Hackney as he knows it, and he feels like he’s ‘crumbling in synch with the old Hackney’. He’s “deeply disturbed and angry” at the Olympics site that’s taking shape just across the River Lea, calling it “a folly”, “apocalyptically catastrophic”, and “brutalising”. And . . . Er . . . That’s about it, according to the author of the piece, Rachel Cooke.
For a mere £20 you can buy the book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, out now in all good booksellers. Don’t all rush at once.
Apparently NuLabour’s tosspot of a Mayor, Jules Pipe, has banned Sinclair from doing readings in Hackney libraries, since Sinclair’s so anti-Olympics, and they can’t allow “controversial topics” to be discussed in libraries. No, that would never do, Jules - clearly he's the mayor that likes to say No.
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Technically, and statistically, Hackney is a dump. However, it has huge pockets of poverty, but it also has more parks and open spaces than anywhere else in London; parts of it have more artists per square mile than anywhere on earth, and it also has some nasty and vicious gangs who fight one another for territory and control of the drugs trade.
Property prices are high, rents are high, many of the common people are extremely poor. It’s incredible that there isn’t far more crime and danger on the streets.
This morning my local cornershop owner was livid about the bonuses that the bankers are still determined to pay themselves, in spite of their spectacular greed and incompetence having totally fucked up the economy. He was absolutely fuming. He’s been a pillar of my local community for two decades, and operates an informal community centre, with a loyal customer base that values both the shop and the family that runs it.
And now he’s struggling with pressure from the bank, and lack of credit facilities. Plus customers whose spending power is seriously depressed. To know that the bankers are still stuffing their own pockets with cash when all else are suffering is just too much. The bastards wouldn’t even have a job if we, the people, hadn’t bailed them out, and they still expect to keep their snouts in the trough. Unbelievable.
Martin Rowson’s cartoon in the Guardian sums it up superbly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/cartoon/2009/feb/08/banking-crisis-executive-pay-cartoon
As Johnny Prescott said on Newsnight last night, “They’ve bust our economy and they’ve a lot to answer for”. Yes Johnny, and whose government allowed them to get away with it, and who was Deputy Prime Minister for ten years and said not a word about the need to re-regulate casino capitalism and put and end to the bonus culture and the obscene salaries the fat cats awarded one another?
Today in Parliament four of the former top guys in the bust British banks faced questions from a committee of MPs. They appeared to apologise, but as someone said, since they didn’t own up to any personal incompetence and liability for fucking up our financial and economic system then their apology’s worth nothing. Off with their heads!
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Nick Cohen, in his Observer column, makes the point that the government’s greatest desire is to restore the status quo ante to the wonderful capitalist system we still have - just.
They still hope that the model of free trade and globalisation can be put together again. Property prices will shoot upwards. The tax receipts from financial services will flow. The City will resume its primacy and all will be right with the world.
In this intellectual climate, reforms that appear obvious to social democrats remain unthinkable to insiders. Closing tax havens, regulating hedge funds and stopping high street banks behaving like investment banks so that never again do we have the obscenity of taxpayers bailing out speculators are items the agenda-setters have no wish to put on the table.
Much to their discomfort, however, our leaders are realising that although the Washington consensus lives on in London, it is dying in Obama's Washington. Now when they talk about Paulson there is a faint whiff of nostalgia. Say what you like about old Hank, but at least he wanted to consult us. We wish we could say the same about his successors.
Every day brings news from Washington our rulers find profoundly unsettling. Conceivably, Labour may have to imitate Obama's pay cap on executives of firms that have taken public money. The power of the American example, combined with the public's disgust at the remarkably dumb yet brazenly rapacious executives of Lloyds, Barclays and RBS, could be too much for any government to resist.
But, trust me, they will hate intervening if they forced into it. They still yearn for the roaring days when the moneymen were getting richer and Labour was winning elections. Salary caps and bonus bans are alien inventions from a strange, new world they neither like nor understand.
[Alistair Darling] argues for international co-operation to stop the banks bringing the roof down again, but there is no echo of the talk in Washington about closing tax havens or regulating hedge funds.
In my view, tax havens are centres of organised crime and, like everyone else, I find the sight of bankers enriching themselves at public expense revolting.
I also know, however, that Whitehall regards such social democratic views as naive and extremist.
But I sense as I watch startled ministers react to the changing line from Washington that they are beginning to suspect that perhaps normal is dead and gone; that maybe, just maybe, there is no normal to get back to.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/barack-obama-protectionism
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The Observer’s editorial, meanwhile, says,
The bonus culture encouraged short-term risk and irresponsible behaviour, leading eventually to the banking sector's near collapse and rescue by the state. With the taxpayer now in charge, the bonuses must stop.
What is baffling, then, is why the government has seemed unable to exert any power on this matter despite having majority opinion and moral authority on its side. Authorities in France, Germany and the US have all used the leverage of state bail-out to demand pay restraint in the financial sector. The British government, by contrast, has appeared impotent, relying on vague exhortation and thinly veiled pleading. Now at last it seems a government review is to be launched.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/banking-salaries-bonuses-government
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The Torture Papers
Andrew Rawnsley’s column focuses on the complicity of the Blair government in torture and kidnapping in the ‘war on terror’.
Torture was sanctioned by George W Bush early in 2002 when he signed the now notorious memorandum declaring that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
From those strokes of the presidential pen flowed the outrages in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cages of Guantánamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and CIA "black sites" in Europe and around the world. From that sprang "extraordinary rendition", the Orwellian euphemism for state-licensed kidnap, and "enhanced interrogation", the spin-torturer's way of describing his trade in pain.
Charles Guthrie is no one's idea of a bleeding heart liberal. He served with the SAS and was commandant of the intelligence corps before he became chief of the defence staff. As he puts it, torture is not only illegal, unethical, ineffective, cruel and counter-productive, it is also plain dumb. "Western use of torture to counter terror has been a propaganda coup for al-Qaida and a recruiting sergeant for its global jihad. Our hypocrisy has radicalised our enemies and corroded the power we base on our proclaimed values."
David Miliband has just suppressed the publication of grave allegations about the activities of US and British officials in the case of Binyam Mohamed. In the view of two high court judges, what happened to him "gives rise to an arguable case of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". There was a "very considerable public interest" in publication, they argued, "particularly given the constitutional importance of the prohibition against torture".
The David Miliband that I know is a humane and liberal man who utterly abhors torture. Yet he finds himself suppressing a dossier about the crime, doing so in the name of national security, the very invocation used to justify torture in the first place.
On the same day that the foreign secretary was facing accusations of a cover-up, Tony Blair was in Washington wearing his faith on his sleeve. At a "prayer breakfast" with Barack Obama, the former prime minister made more than 30 mentions of God and declared: "We pray that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will."
Only God knows how Tony Blair reconciles his conscience with his role in this disgraceful period. It was not as if the Bush administration made much pretence about it. "Bad things happen to bad people," baldly declared Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Did Tony Blair never ask what was going on? If he did not ask, was it because he knew he would not like the answer? His own law officers were highly uncomfortable with the legal black hole created at Guantánamo. Charlie Falconer, not only his lord chancellor but also one of his closest allies, tried to persuade his friend to raise his voice in opposition. He failed. "An anomaly" was all Mr Blair would ever say about Camp Delta when he was prime minister.
The true extent to which British officials colluded in torture is yet to be established. In terms of ethical complicity, I think we can already begin to return a verdict. As the God-fearing Tony Blair knows, there are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. "We have condoned with our silence torture committed by others," says Charles Guthrie, his favourite general.
That was arguably the biggest moral failure of Tony Blair's premiership.
The biggest? Hmmm - maybe. We might give equal status to his failure to regulate the fat cats; his failure to prevent the gap between the poor and the rich increasing; his failure to prevent the rich becoming obscenely rich; and . . . oh yes - the little bit of a failure to keep this country out of Iraq and thereby have no part in the unlawful and unnecessary killing of thousands of innocent men, women and children, the common people indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/tony-blair-human-rights-torture
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Friday, February 13, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Layer 119 The Rich and the Super Rich
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Several years ago, returning from Italy via the south of France, I turned left at Monaco to go and see for myself the supposed delights of Monte Carlo, since they’d never been all that apparent from television.
It turned out to be pretty much as expected - a boring, depressing, ugly and sterile place with a harbour full of fabulous expensive boats and so-called ‘yachts’. It’s a tiny town made up almost entirely of tall blocks of flats, with a casino at its centre.
Last night there was an hour long documentary on television featuring Piers Morgan (good project Piers!) traipsing around and examining the people of Monte Carlo and the place itself. And what did we glean from this chipper little documentary?
Monaco is a depressing, dull, ugly place full of millionaires and billionaires, their latest squeezes, and their insanely expensive toys - Rolls, Ferraris, Lambos, Porches, Bentleys and utterly mind-blowingly expensive boats.
And why do they queue up to live there? Duh! - They pay no taxes! Say no more.
But several more interesting bits of info emerged.
* A one-bedroom flat with a crap outlook on to other blocks of flats will set you back a million and a half Euros.
* A four-bedroom flat with superb views of this very ugly town full of tall blocks of flats will set you back ten million Euros, six million of them being for the cost of the view, or ‘location’.
* Cross the border into France (where people do pay tax - though not if you’re a tax-avoiding billionaire presumably) and similar properties or houses with even better views plus access to gardens will cost one tenth as much.
* The ‘workers’ of Monaco can no longer afford to live there - they commute on a daily basis.
* The place is full of high-class hookers who go there specifically to snare a millionaire or even a billionaire - and are very successful in doing so, according to Mick Hucknall, who happened to be there for a concert.
Mick himself came across very well in his interview - saying, for instance, that he wouldn’t dream of becoming a tax exile, and he was proud to pay his taxes in Britain.
--------------------------------------------------
Taxes in Britain
“This crisis must spur us to take on the tax avoiders”, said Vince Cable in the Guardian this week:
The evidence of systematic tax avoidance by rich individuals and UK-based companies strikes a particularly ugly note in these straitened times.
There is surely some basic justice in the proposition that companies should pay the government of their host country for the infrastructure and other tax-financed services they receive: education, health, transport systems, policing.
In the case of the UK-based global banks . . . to see these catastrophically mismanaged institutions going cap in hand to the government while simultaneously organising tax avoidance schemes at the expense of the UK taxpayers beggars belief. One of the important supplementary arguments for the government assuming direct control of the banks it has rescued is to bring such practices to an end.
There is only so much governments can do in isolation. Tax arbitrage involves playing off one state against another. Governments can limit that game by co-operating. The British government's dogmatic opposition to any EU tax harmonisation has inhibited sensible, practical initiatives like agreement on a common EU tax base (not harmonisation of rates but agreement to treat depreciation and other accounting conventions in a similar way). Britain has formed a bizarre alliance with Ireland and the Baltic states to block co-operation.
Tax havens are the big challenge for the UK, which has spawned a substantial number in its dependant territories. There has been limited progress in stopping the grosser abuses, such as money-laundering, but non-criminal tax-dodging continues apace.
There is now a mood in the Obama administration and the EU to crack down on havens through such measures as withholding taxes to prevent leakage outside the main jurisdictions. The UK has traditionally dragged its feet on measures to curb tax havens, on the basis that these helped the City of London to attract business. It is to be hoped that straitened fiscal circumstances and a less credulous approach to the City will now persuade the government to turn its guns on the tax havens and tax-avoidance industry.
Well said, Vincent.
------------------------------------------------
Obama and Salaries
The new President has decided that NO executives of banks applying for government assistance will in future be allowed to earn more than $500,000 per year. So there!
How come we’ve not thought of imposing such restrictions? Obama just makes our pathetic government look more pathetic by the day.
----------------------------------------------
Monbiot and Blears
Talking of which, Hazel Blears has the audacity to hit back at George Monbiot in today’s paper. Ha!
.
Several years ago, returning from Italy via the south of France, I turned left at Monaco to go and see for myself the supposed delights of Monte Carlo, since they’d never been all that apparent from television.
It turned out to be pretty much as expected - a boring, depressing, ugly and sterile place with a harbour full of fabulous expensive boats and so-called ‘yachts’. It’s a tiny town made up almost entirely of tall blocks of flats, with a casino at its centre.
Last night there was an hour long documentary on television featuring Piers Morgan (good project Piers!) traipsing around and examining the people of Monte Carlo and the place itself. And what did we glean from this chipper little documentary?
Monaco is a depressing, dull, ugly place full of millionaires and billionaires, their latest squeezes, and their insanely expensive toys - Rolls, Ferraris, Lambos, Porches, Bentleys and utterly mind-blowingly expensive boats.
And why do they queue up to live there? Duh! - They pay no taxes! Say no more.
But several more interesting bits of info emerged.
* A one-bedroom flat with a crap outlook on to other blocks of flats will set you back a million and a half Euros.
* A four-bedroom flat with superb views of this very ugly town full of tall blocks of flats will set you back ten million Euros, six million of them being for the cost of the view, or ‘location’.
* Cross the border into France (where people do pay tax - though not if you’re a tax-avoiding billionaire presumably) and similar properties or houses with even better views plus access to gardens will cost one tenth as much.
* The ‘workers’ of Monaco can no longer afford to live there - they commute on a daily basis.
* The place is full of high-class hookers who go there specifically to snare a millionaire or even a billionaire - and are very successful in doing so, according to Mick Hucknall, who happened to be there for a concert.
Mick himself came across very well in his interview - saying, for instance, that he wouldn’t dream of becoming a tax exile, and he was proud to pay his taxes in Britain.
--------------------------------------------------
Taxes in Britain
“This crisis must spur us to take on the tax avoiders”, said Vince Cable in the Guardian this week:
The evidence of systematic tax avoidance by rich individuals and UK-based companies strikes a particularly ugly note in these straitened times.
There is surely some basic justice in the proposition that companies should pay the government of their host country for the infrastructure and other tax-financed services they receive: education, health, transport systems, policing.
In the case of the UK-based global banks . . . to see these catastrophically mismanaged institutions going cap in hand to the government while simultaneously organising tax avoidance schemes at the expense of the UK taxpayers beggars belief. One of the important supplementary arguments for the government assuming direct control of the banks it has rescued is to bring such practices to an end.
There is only so much governments can do in isolation. Tax arbitrage involves playing off one state against another. Governments can limit that game by co-operating. The British government's dogmatic opposition to any EU tax harmonisation has inhibited sensible, practical initiatives like agreement on a common EU tax base (not harmonisation of rates but agreement to treat depreciation and other accounting conventions in a similar way). Britain has formed a bizarre alliance with Ireland and the Baltic states to block co-operation.
Tax havens are the big challenge for the UK, which has spawned a substantial number in its dependant territories. There has been limited progress in stopping the grosser abuses, such as money-laundering, but non-criminal tax-dodging continues apace.
There is now a mood in the Obama administration and the EU to crack down on havens through such measures as withholding taxes to prevent leakage outside the main jurisdictions. The UK has traditionally dragged its feet on measures to curb tax havens, on the basis that these helped the City of London to attract business. It is to be hoped that straitened fiscal circumstances and a less credulous approach to the City will now persuade the government to turn its guns on the tax havens and tax-avoidance industry.
Well said, Vincent.
------------------------------------------------
Obama and Salaries
The new President has decided that NO executives of banks applying for government assistance will in future be allowed to earn more than $500,000 per year. So there!
How come we’ve not thought of imposing such restrictions? Obama just makes our pathetic government look more pathetic by the day.
----------------------------------------------
Monbiot and Blears
Talking of which, Hazel Blears has the audacity to hit back at George Monbiot in today’s paper. Ha!
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Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Layer 118 Snow, Social Pedagogy, The Musical Divide, Paying Taxes, and the Discontented.
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The heaviest snow for 20 years had a transformational effect on London and south-east England yesterday. Such japes! If only every winter was like this one. Mass break-outs of community spirit, as someone said on the radio this morning.
In London there were no buses and trains running, so all schools and most work places were closed. The overnight snow had spread a blanket of brilliant whiteness nine inches deep over everything. There was virtually no traffic moving - just a few cars creeping slowly and crunching quietly down ungritted streets. There was silence everywhere.
This virtual bank holiday enabled parents and children, and grandparents, to go out together into a cityscape that very few of them had ever seen, or could recall from living memory. By the end of the day local parks and playing fields were populated with snowmen standing singly and in groups, like an Anthony Gormley landscape made of snow and ice.
Adults were playing in the snow! Making giant snowmen without a child in sight! Snowball fights! Some were taking photographs on their phones of one another’s snowmen. People were spontaneously chatting in public spaces that are normally empty except for occasional dog walkers. Kids were out with sledges, having a brilliant time.
In my local park I had conversations with people from Poland, Turkey, Slovakia, India, the Caribbean and Russia. Someone had proudly put a small banner with the word POLSKA on it across their snowman.
The dog that I walk these days went completely crazy the second she bounded into the street - rushing back and forth, ploughing her face into deep drifts, skidding and sliding. Since I’d forgotten to take a tennis ball out with us she was happy to rush after snowballs, bounding through the snow, looking puzzled and affronted when the snowball she was chasing disappeared into the deep stuff, and when she did manage to leap on the snowball she was chasing biting it and eating it like a lollipop, to the great amusement of passers-by.
Even after darkness fell there were people out in the parks and green/white spaces, and in the streets, just sightseeing and playing in the snow. It was a reminder of how community spirit in our cities is literally dampened by our climate - which in normal years is neither hot and dry enough or cold and snowy enough the bring people out of their homes to enjoy open spaces in significant numbers.
Most amusing image of the day today - Peter Mandelson tottering gingerly along Downing Street in shiny black loafers, terrified of going arse over tit in front of the lurking news cameras. Second most amusing - twattish women in stilettos.
------------------------------------------------
I felt so pleased for those children whose parents allowed them to go out in the snow yesterday. We sometimes talk about a work/life balance for adults, but rarely consider whether it’s the right balance for children to be experiencing an enforced didactic education five days a week, with only two days a week for play, fun and self-direction.
Today we have news of another report on children’s wellbeing, another grim review of the diabolical things we do to children in our stupid society.
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The buzz-word for today is Social Pedagogy - and both BBC radio and BBC TV have today run features on Denmark’s provision for looked-after children, since 6 out of 10 of such children in Denmark go on to higher education, compared with 6 out of 100 in Britain.
Somebody commented that it’s possible to have high-quality provision in Denmark because they pay 50% income tax and 25% VAT. But the point is surely that they see the need to have high-quality provision for children generally, and are therefore willing to vote in governments to pay for and run those services.
Barry somebody, the Chair of an all-party committee on children and childhood said, “Something dramatic needs to be done.” And indeed it does. A totally new look at how we care for and provide for children.
I guess it's worth saying one more time - it's about time we prioritised the well-being of children by prioritising the development of their social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, and in order to do that we need to develop those intelligences in adults.
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The Musical Divide
Ennio Morricone is 80 this year, and is still going strong, both as a man and as a prolific composer of contemporary orchestral music. It’s interesting to compare contemporary and ‘classical’ orchestral music.
On Radio 4 last week someone who knows Morricone well said, “To be as accomplished a composer as Morricone you have to be deeply in touch with your own soul.”
How many of us are deeply in touch with our own souls? How would we describe to ourselves, or convey to others, the contents of our souls?
I have a new theory about the divide between enthusiasts for ‘classical’ music on the one hand, and on the other hand people who find the majority of ‘classical’ music absolutely dull, soulless, spiritless, tiddle fiddle twaddle. (No bias showing here, I hope.)
Indoctrination, snobbery, ignorance, pretentiousness, fear and narrow-minded prejudice are the key concepts here.
On the one hand we see middle-class, predominantly Eurocentric, Arian people who grew up in households where classical music was played on gramophones at a sensible volume, and where the aspirational offspring were given expensive musical instruments and private tutors, plus private or grammar school education where they learned to play in the school orchestra.
On the other hand . . . we see the rest of the world, whom the aforementioned would see as the deprived, uncultured, ignorant, untutored and unenlightened. Whereas, in point of fact, most of the rest of the world has listened to classical music and decided IT SUCKS. We see people who enjoy other forms of music that expresses THEIR sensibility, the reality of their lives, their feelings, their passions, their joys, their sadness, their spiritual experience.
Listening to Desert Island Discs, it’s so interesting how all the bourgeois, high-achieving anodyne individuals who go on the programme so rarely choose more than a token track that actually rocks, swings, grooves or moves the body and soul. Why is that?
Who was it who first said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”? Must google that.
It’s obviously a mark of being ‘cultured’ if you profess a love of somebody singing something solemn and portentious in German or Italian, something most people find incomprehensible and dull, even on a purely musical level. And of course to be properly bourgeois you must sit up and beg when you hear the words Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bach, etc.
I very much doubt whether these classical music-loving desert-islanders have ever listened properly to the greats of jazz, blues and rock, including Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, Louis Jordan, Slim Gaillard, Ray Charles, Keith Jarrett, Lester Young . . . to say nothing of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Dave Gilmour, Manu Chao, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, etc.
To say nothing of the great folk and roots artists of Africa, India, Japan, China, the Caribbean, etc.
All of them deemed inferior and unworthy of a trip to the desert island.
In the words of the great Leonard Cohen - “But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”
This week I’ve been working on my Desert Island Discs, and have managed to shortlist around 300, which is my minimum, otherwise I don’t go. These are my legacy tracks, and I will now begin the task of assembling them on sets of CDs to give to family and friends.
--------------------------------------
Brooooce
Last week there was a brilliant TV broadcast of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘folk music’ ‘Seeger Sessions’ 17-piece big band, filmed in London, featuring a veritable host of great musicians, and Bruce himself in great voice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140317/
Bruce and his E Street Band then lit up the interval of Sunday’s Super Bowl - a mini-show of incredible energy and passion, in the middle of what was one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time.
------------------------------------
Pay Your Fucking Taxes.
This week The Guardian began publishing its investigations into tax avoidance in Britain, in a series of articles that can only cause incredible fury in anyone who gives a fuck about exploitation and social justice in what we laughingly call our ‘society’.
“Pay your fucking taxes!” said Jon Stewart in The Daily Show today, talking about some American fat cat.
And talking about the bank bail-outs, Stewart called those trillions that were given to the bankers in order to keep the banks solvent “Revolution Insurance”. Quite so.
-------------------------------------
Rumblings of Discontent
Meanwhile the working classes in places like Britain, France and Greece are beginning to find ways to express their fury about the bank bail-outs, the bankers who caused the economic crisis, the job losses, the ineptitude of politicians, etc.
The growing number of demonstrations and strikes are looking ominous to those who fear civic unrest and fear demands for radical changes to the way this country runs its businesses, its economy and its politics.
-----------------------------------------
The Doves Are Dead
Here are some voices speaking from the depths of their souls - voices from Israel - reported on R4:
“If someone hurts us - I say bomb them out of existence.”
“The doves are dead.”
“Israel has to be tough - we’re on our own here. People all over the world hate us and want to destroy us.”
“The early Zionists had vision. We don’t have that any more. We just have to protect ourselves.”
“The Israeli media hardly report the images of the destruction in Gaza.”
----------------------------------
Of course virtually those same words could have been spoken by any Right-wing American talking about America since 2000/01, since Bush and his gang stole the election, and since the twin towers came down.
----------------------------------
Dementia
An all-party Parliamentary enquiry into the care of people with dementia started work last week. It seems that people who work in care homes for people with dementia have to have training on health and safety, etc, but do NOT have to have training in understanding the nature of dementia, or understanding the needs of people with dementia.
Does this seem like an acceptable situation? No, it fucking doesn’t. So how come it’s allowed to happen? Would I like my mum to be in a care home and looked after by people who didn’t understand her difficulties or her needs? No I fucking wouldn’t.
.
The heaviest snow for 20 years had a transformational effect on London and south-east England yesterday. Such japes! If only every winter was like this one. Mass break-outs of community spirit, as someone said on the radio this morning.
In London there were no buses and trains running, so all schools and most work places were closed. The overnight snow had spread a blanket of brilliant whiteness nine inches deep over everything. There was virtually no traffic moving - just a few cars creeping slowly and crunching quietly down ungritted streets. There was silence everywhere.
This virtual bank holiday enabled parents and children, and grandparents, to go out together into a cityscape that very few of them had ever seen, or could recall from living memory. By the end of the day local parks and playing fields were populated with snowmen standing singly and in groups, like an Anthony Gormley landscape made of snow and ice.
Adults were playing in the snow! Making giant snowmen without a child in sight! Snowball fights! Some were taking photographs on their phones of one another’s snowmen. People were spontaneously chatting in public spaces that are normally empty except for occasional dog walkers. Kids were out with sledges, having a brilliant time.
In my local park I had conversations with people from Poland, Turkey, Slovakia, India, the Caribbean and Russia. Someone had proudly put a small banner with the word POLSKA on it across their snowman.
The dog that I walk these days went completely crazy the second she bounded into the street - rushing back and forth, ploughing her face into deep drifts, skidding and sliding. Since I’d forgotten to take a tennis ball out with us she was happy to rush after snowballs, bounding through the snow, looking puzzled and affronted when the snowball she was chasing disappeared into the deep stuff, and when she did manage to leap on the snowball she was chasing biting it and eating it like a lollipop, to the great amusement of passers-by.
Even after darkness fell there were people out in the parks and green/white spaces, and in the streets, just sightseeing and playing in the snow. It was a reminder of how community spirit in our cities is literally dampened by our climate - which in normal years is neither hot and dry enough or cold and snowy enough the bring people out of their homes to enjoy open spaces in significant numbers.
Most amusing image of the day today - Peter Mandelson tottering gingerly along Downing Street in shiny black loafers, terrified of going arse over tit in front of the lurking news cameras. Second most amusing - twattish women in stilettos.
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I felt so pleased for those children whose parents allowed them to go out in the snow yesterday. We sometimes talk about a work/life balance for adults, but rarely consider whether it’s the right balance for children to be experiencing an enforced didactic education five days a week, with only two days a week for play, fun and self-direction.
Today we have news of another report on children’s wellbeing, another grim review of the diabolical things we do to children in our stupid society.
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The buzz-word for today is Social Pedagogy - and both BBC radio and BBC TV have today run features on Denmark’s provision for looked-after children, since 6 out of 10 of such children in Denmark go on to higher education, compared with 6 out of 100 in Britain.
Somebody commented that it’s possible to have high-quality provision in Denmark because they pay 50% income tax and 25% VAT. But the point is surely that they see the need to have high-quality provision for children generally, and are therefore willing to vote in governments to pay for and run those services.
Barry somebody, the Chair of an all-party committee on children and childhood said, “Something dramatic needs to be done.” And indeed it does. A totally new look at how we care for and provide for children.
I guess it's worth saying one more time - it's about time we prioritised the well-being of children by prioritising the development of their social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, and in order to do that we need to develop those intelligences in adults.
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The Musical Divide
Ennio Morricone is 80 this year, and is still going strong, both as a man and as a prolific composer of contemporary orchestral music. It’s interesting to compare contemporary and ‘classical’ orchestral music.
On Radio 4 last week someone who knows Morricone well said, “To be as accomplished a composer as Morricone you have to be deeply in touch with your own soul.”
How many of us are deeply in touch with our own souls? How would we describe to ourselves, or convey to others, the contents of our souls?
I have a new theory about the divide between enthusiasts for ‘classical’ music on the one hand, and on the other hand people who find the majority of ‘classical’ music absolutely dull, soulless, spiritless, tiddle fiddle twaddle. (No bias showing here, I hope.)
Indoctrination, snobbery, ignorance, pretentiousness, fear and narrow-minded prejudice are the key concepts here.
On the one hand we see middle-class, predominantly Eurocentric, Arian people who grew up in households where classical music was played on gramophones at a sensible volume, and where the aspirational offspring were given expensive musical instruments and private tutors, plus private or grammar school education where they learned to play in the school orchestra.
On the other hand . . . we see the rest of the world, whom the aforementioned would see as the deprived, uncultured, ignorant, untutored and unenlightened. Whereas, in point of fact, most of the rest of the world has listened to classical music and decided IT SUCKS. We see people who enjoy other forms of music that expresses THEIR sensibility, the reality of their lives, their feelings, their passions, their joys, their sadness, their spiritual experience.
Listening to Desert Island Discs, it’s so interesting how all the bourgeois, high-achieving anodyne individuals who go on the programme so rarely choose more than a token track that actually rocks, swings, grooves or moves the body and soul. Why is that?
Who was it who first said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”? Must google that.
It’s obviously a mark of being ‘cultured’ if you profess a love of somebody singing something solemn and portentious in German or Italian, something most people find incomprehensible and dull, even on a purely musical level. And of course to be properly bourgeois you must sit up and beg when you hear the words Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bach, etc.
I very much doubt whether these classical music-loving desert-islanders have ever listened properly to the greats of jazz, blues and rock, including Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, Louis Jordan, Slim Gaillard, Ray Charles, Keith Jarrett, Lester Young . . . to say nothing of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Dave Gilmour, Manu Chao, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, etc.
To say nothing of the great folk and roots artists of Africa, India, Japan, China, the Caribbean, etc.
All of them deemed inferior and unworthy of a trip to the desert island.
In the words of the great Leonard Cohen - “But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”
This week I’ve been working on my Desert Island Discs, and have managed to shortlist around 300, which is my minimum, otherwise I don’t go. These are my legacy tracks, and I will now begin the task of assembling them on sets of CDs to give to family and friends.
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Brooooce
Last week there was a brilliant TV broadcast of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘folk music’ ‘Seeger Sessions’ 17-piece big band, filmed in London, featuring a veritable host of great musicians, and Bruce himself in great voice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140317/
Bruce and his E Street Band then lit up the interval of Sunday’s Super Bowl - a mini-show of incredible energy and passion, in the middle of what was one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time.
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Pay Your Fucking Taxes.
This week The Guardian began publishing its investigations into tax avoidance in Britain, in a series of articles that can only cause incredible fury in anyone who gives a fuck about exploitation and social justice in what we laughingly call our ‘society’.
“Pay your fucking taxes!” said Jon Stewart in The Daily Show today, talking about some American fat cat.
And talking about the bank bail-outs, Stewart called those trillions that were given to the bankers in order to keep the banks solvent “Revolution Insurance”. Quite so.
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Rumblings of Discontent
Meanwhile the working classes in places like Britain, France and Greece are beginning to find ways to express their fury about the bank bail-outs, the bankers who caused the economic crisis, the job losses, the ineptitude of politicians, etc.
The growing number of demonstrations and strikes are looking ominous to those who fear civic unrest and fear demands for radical changes to the way this country runs its businesses, its economy and its politics.
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The Doves Are Dead
Here are some voices speaking from the depths of their souls - voices from Israel - reported on R4:
“If someone hurts us - I say bomb them out of existence.”
“The doves are dead.”
“Israel has to be tough - we’re on our own here. People all over the world hate us and want to destroy us.”
“The early Zionists had vision. We don’t have that any more. We just have to protect ourselves.”
“The Israeli media hardly report the images of the destruction in Gaza.”
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Of course virtually those same words could have been spoken by any Right-wing American talking about America since 2000/01, since Bush and his gang stole the election, and since the twin towers came down.
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Dementia
An all-party Parliamentary enquiry into the care of people with dementia started work last week. It seems that people who work in care homes for people with dementia have to have training on health and safety, etc, but do NOT have to have training in understanding the nature of dementia, or understanding the needs of people with dementia.
Does this seem like an acceptable situation? No, it fucking doesn’t. So how come it’s allowed to happen? Would I like my mum to be in a care home and looked after by people who didn’t understand her difficulties or her needs? No I fucking wouldn’t.
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