Aditya Chakrabortty is an old favourite of this blog, a journalist whose outpourings as the Guardian's Chief Economics leader writer have been a regular source of irritation and comedy over the months and, on reflection, years it has been in operation. In so far as I can bear to read his column in G2, it continues to fascinate, appal and amuse in equal measure.
What has Mr Chakrabortty been up to now? Well yesterday he wrote an obituary of the Welfare State as envisaged by Beveridge. "The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement", he intoned. "That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to welfare . . . It expired peacefully on Monday 7 January just weeks after marking its 70th birthday". You get the lumberingly humorous picture. Because welfare is apparently only for the needy now, it is dead in the water.
I am sad to report that my family's entitlement to Child Benefit ended on Monday as well. Faced with the information that we would be taxed at 100% on the sum (£150 or so every month for our three children), the neat and tidy thing to do seemed to be to go on to the Government's website and cancel it. Which I did on Friday.
Given that Mr Chakrabortty thinks the loss of Child Benefit for people like me marks the end of the welfare state, he might like to know what my wife and I spent it on.
To be clear, we didn't need the money. Contemplating the vast sums we have forked out endowing our children with i-Pods, i-Phones and finally i-Pads, not to mention expensive and unsuccessful skiing holidays ("There was too much snow", complained one of our daughters), my wife and I decided to spend the Child Benefit, on the whole, on wine. We thought that since we paid tens of thousands of pounds tax every year, we might as well get some pleasure back courtesy of the Government.
To start a wine cellar requires that you buy it faster than you drink it. So in the family cellar there nestle quantities of Wirra Wirra Church Block, Domaine de Mourchon, Auxey-Duresses, Chateau des Carbonnieres, various fruits of the D'Arenburg vineyards in Australia, together with quite a lot of champagne, for which we have a weakness. Sitting somewhere in France there is also quite a lot of Rhone red, mostly from Cairanne, "easily the best of the Southern Rhone villages", according to Hugh Johnson (we prefer the lighter reds to the heavy Bordeaux classics), which will be delivered in due course. 2009 and 2010 were particularly good years, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the Rhones, which will be drinkable fairly soon.
All bought at the Government's expense. Well, actually at the expense of taxpayers everywhere, including my wife and I, if you think about it.
Amazingly this situation, no doubt replicated in well-to-do households up and down the land, is one which Mr Chakrabortty thinks should continue. Moreover, he thinks that because the Government has put a stop to it that means the welfare state is now dead.
Oh my Lord.
A couple of points about Mr Chakrabortty generally. I haven't got it in for him personally. He is not clever enough to do his job well, but the real idiots are the Graun's management team for employing him in the first place. True, he isn't in the same class of duffer as Polly Toynbee, but then she is out on her own, and, to be fair, was probably quite good once. It must hurt Larry Elliott, the Graun's main economics writer, to see Chakrabortty cavorting across the pages of G2 while his own writings are secreted away in the paper's flimsy business section, perused only by economics geeks like me.
The second thing is that cutting Child Benefit for those who can afford to spend it on wine might be better viewed as an economic necessity for a country that is borrowing about £2,000,000,000,000 every week just to stay afloat.
The Welfare State was set up by Beveridge in an entirely different social context. At that time people worked because not do so was to risk social shame and destitution.. The provision of benefits for the jobless changed attitudes to work irrevocably. Admittedly the time to do something about that was during the Gordon Brown boom rather than now, when it is so difficult to find a job, but it's a stable door that desperately needs shutting all the same.
The real threat to welfarism is not its withdrawal from people like me, but rather the changing economic and demographic circumstances which have rendered it unaffordable as presently constituted. To give but one example, the average life expectancy of a man at the time of Beveridge was 48. It has increased by at least thirty years in the intervening period, with the attendant massive consequences for the amounts, still rising, HMG must pay out in pensions. I'm still hoping there'll be a state pension for me when I'm 66, but I'm not banking on it.
(In fact only days after posting this, a White Paper proposed that the years NI contributions we will need to get the state pension should increase from 30 to 35. As someone who has 27 and was nearly there, this was something of a sickener)
It saddens me that the Guardian thought it a good idea to get rid of Martin Kelner, who until very recently wrote an intentionally funny column on Mondays, but not Aditya Chakrabortty, who still writes an unintentionally funny one on Tuesdays. Go figure.
Wednesday 9 January 2013
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Not being a composer
When I was thinking of going to music college thirty years ago, someone told me, "If you want to be a composer, try not to compose". If this sounds strange, it was the best piece of advice I received, and I have often wished I could have fulfilled it.
If you can possibly tolerate not composing, I read it as saying, do something else. I was too young and too confident of my own ability to read any serious warning into the nostrum, but I've had plenty of opportunity since to savour its truth.
Writing classical music continues to attract an awful lot of bright and talented people. Despite its loss of cultural prestige, there are still enough names that resonate - your Bachs, Beethovens and so on - across a society now largely dedicated to getting its musical kicks via pop. For the ambitious young musician, probably by some way the most able in his or her immediate sphere, the heady prospect of striding the world like a composing colossus has a tempting appeal.
Unfortunately there are an awful lot of other people tempted as well. If I was the most gifted musician in my primary school, there were others at secondary level; at music college there were two or three other composers in my year; and there will have been other young composers at other colleges and universities around the UK. How many spill out onto the streets each July? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred?
For they and I are not the only people who can do what we do. Far from it. There are thousands of people around the country who can harmonise a Bach chorale, who can write a symphony or a concerto. And how many opportunities are there out there for us? Not very many. Scan the concert programmes of the average professional symphony orchestra - how many pieces do they perform each year, and how many of them are premieres? One or two? Half a dozen? Now consider how many other people are competing with you to get their work put on, and work out the chances of it being your piece brought beautifully to life by professional players. Not great.
Ah, I hear you say, but I'm a better composer than the others. Really? Who says so? I have spent years trying to convince anyone who'll listen that there are no objective ways of judging art, and that, once you can reach a minimum standard of technical competence, it's all a matter of opinion. To paraphrase William Goldman, in classical music No-one Knows Anything. No-one knows whether Pianist A is "better" than Pianist B, and no-one knows whether Composer Y is "better" than Composer Z. If you get your piece put on, it won't be because your piece is better. No-one knows what better is.
No, some other factor will have worked out in your favour. At the most basic level, it might be that the person responsible for the programming liked your piece more than someone else's. Clearly that involves a significant element of luck (as well as the assumption that someone could actually read the scores and hear mentally what the music sounded like, a skill more often claimed than possessed). Other factors may be at work too. I have repeatedly heard variations upon, "Of course you know there's a gay mafia". Sometimes it's a Jewish mafia or an Oxbridge mafia.
A friend who is a virtuoso once said to me, "Of course you know why all these beautiful young men get all the Wigmore Hall gigs?" Since he was born in a country far away on the other side of Europe it would have been ill-mannered of me to point out that one of the variations on the Gay mafia theme is the notion that the English, with a curious inverted snobbery, prefer their musicians to be foreigners.
If I've never personally seen any evidence of any of these prejudices, it's certainly a great help to a composer if your face fits, if you are flavour of the month, if you know the right person, if, better still, you have slept with the right person. It helps too if you're young and good-looking. Why is Eric Whitacre so famous? It can't hurt that he looks like Brad Pitt's brother.
So what happens if your ducks do all line up in a row and it is your piece that gets chosen? How much money are you going to make out of the performance? A few hundred quid if it's on the radio, but no more. What if you've written a Christmas carol? How much in the way of royalties will that get you? In my experience about £0.10 per copy sold. So you won't be running a car on your compositional earnings, let alone the deposit on the freezing garret you'll be writing in.
No, even if you are one of the lucky ones and can run to a dozen or so performances a year, you'll need some other way of making a living. But here comes another complication - most jobs don't leave much time for composition. I wrote an early String Quartet as a toilet cleaner, locking myself in the cleaner's cupboard for hours at a stretch, to the fury of my supervisor. But this was a rare opportunity - most jobs demand too much of you - bought at the price of squalor and tedium. At other times I got up early in the morning and put in two hours composing before going off to work. But this was before children came along, with their night-time demands which made staying awake during the day hard enough as it was without getting up at six just for the sake of it.
I was lucky enough to get married to someone who likes classical music (although not all of mine), and was willing to tolerate my writing it and doing the child care while she got on with her career. But you may not be so fortunate. You might have to go out to work and be the main breadwinner. If you really have a vocation to compose it will drive you crazy. During the brief period I worked as a full-time lawyer, I often went and shut myself in the loo (is a theme emerging here?), sobbing with frustration at wasting my time and talent doing something someone else could probably have done better.
Although I have been much luckier than most, I would have to say that the life of a composer, even a moderately successful one (I do consider myself moderately successful, in the sense that I know others significantly less so) is one in which rejection and even humiliation have to be endured on a monthly if not weekly basis. You are competing with a lot of other people for a tiny amount of work, and mostly you will be losing.
I am not trying to put you off composing (although come to think of it if that reduces the competition it's maybe not such a bad idea). But what may seem like an obvious choice aged twenty has consequences which are as far reaching as those of any decision you will ever make. If you can possibly tolerate not composing, don't do it. Do something else (preferably not a loo cleaner though). You'll be better off and happier.
Like most composers, there have been times when I've wondered whether the game is worth the candle, whether the low self-esteem attendant on being only moderately successful (after all, I know other composers significantly more so) might be dissipated by stopping writing altogether, by reinventing myself as something else. But one's mind works in curious ways. In the last few months some ideas have occurred to me consistent perhaps with being part of another String Quartet. The other day I was finishing some piano practice, and was startled to find my hands wandering over the keys involuntarily, producing some new music which, again, sounded as if it might belong in the same piece. That's the way composition works. You don't choose music. It chooses you.
Sunday 6 January 2013
John Lanchester's elephants
John Lanchester, the Left's go-to guy when it comes to economics, has been writing again in the London Review of Books. Lanchester is an engaging novelist and undoubtedly a well-meaning man, but unfortunately his writings on the dismal science reveal a grasp some way short of competence.
My wife has chucked the LRB into the recycling, so I am going to have to do this from memory.
The thrust of the two pages the editor gives Lanchester are that the economy is not growing, and that therefore George Osborne's policies are not working. Osborne doesn't realise, writes Lanchester, that if you cut public spending then GDP goes down as well, possibly by more than the amount you've actually cut. "This", Lanchester intones, surveying the scene, "is what failure looks like".
Well, not necessarily. Lanchester is guilty of assuming that the success of Osborne's policies should be measured purely in terms of growth. But growth isn't the only criterion. Sure, Osborne would be delighted if the economy were growing. But what he'll be really concerned about is the deficit. As long as he can tell the world the deficit is shrinking in real terms, Osborne will be able to say that he is putting the nation's finances in order. And he'll be right. As long as the gilt markets - who don't have to lend to us, remember - believe in the direction of travel, it will be cheap for Britain to borrow the billions we need every week just to keep going.
To put it the other way round, GDP is not the same as tax revenue. If GDP falls because the government has spent less, that doesn't mean the government doesn't gain. If the tax revenue HMG loses and the extra money it has to pay out in benefits are in combination smaller than the savings from the spending cut, the government wins. That is Osborne's calculation, and that is partly why the deficit is going down. I think Osborne will be quietly pleased with the situation.
Here is a list of other considerations that are strangely absent from Lanchester's article. If you haven't read it, you'll just have to take my word for it.
One, there's no acknowledgement of the headwinds Osborne is facing from a Eurozone economy gripped by an existential crisis.
Two, there's no attempt at suggesting an alternative strategy to Osborne's.
Third, although I think we're entitled to assume that Lanchester thinks there is such a strategy, he shows no sign of understanding that this might just be one of those problems to which there is no solution at all. I think it is not stretching matters to say that no-one really knows what to do now, and that Osborne's way is likely to be as good as any. At least, by enabling us to afford current borrowing, it is enabling us to keep going.
Fourth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the wider context in which the economic crisis is taking place, which is that Western governments and individuals, helped along by the finance industry, borrowed for decades to sustain a lifestyle their income did not justify.
Fifth, there is no acknowledgement that in the long run, states, like individuals, must live within their means. The policies of Balls and Miliband merely pretend that this isn't true, but it is.
Sixth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the consequences of this fact for Western Social Democratic parties. The soft Left is dedicated to the creation of societies with high welfare spending to help those at the bottom end. The events of the last few years demonstrate that this isn't fiscally possible at current levels of general taxation, and may not be politically possible at any level.
Seventh, to look at the biggest picture of all, Lanchester doesn't seem to grasp that, at heart, our problems are a consequence of loss of competitiveness to Far Eastern economies. Until that loss can be restored to some extent, the kind of big state solutions Lanchester favours will never be affordable again in Britain.
If John Lanchester really wants to know what failure looks like, he might want to imagine a room containing these seven rather large elephants.
Does any of this matter? If I still counted myself amongst the denizens of the Centre Left I would be exasperated at the failure of my peers to get to grips with the cause of the UK's problems. I would be appalled by their lazy acceptance of the seductive alternative narrative, one which says it was all the bankers' fault, but never asks what exactly it was the bankers were doing (lending us all money) and why (because otherwise we couldn't afford to live the way we wanted).
It may well be that Labour will win the next election anyway - as long as the Eurozone continues to be a zombie economy it's hard to see the UK's fortunes improving markedly or at all. But if they don't, it'll be because they have failed to put before the public a believable economic case. The task of doing so starts further back, with a clear-headed analysis of how we ended up where we are and what the consequences are for Labour's vision of a good society. That's partly the responsibility of the politicians, but also partly a responsibility of Labour's public intellectuals like Lanchester.
Judging by this article, he still can't see the zoo for the elephants.
My wife has chucked the LRB into the recycling, so I am going to have to do this from memory.
The thrust of the two pages the editor gives Lanchester are that the economy is not growing, and that therefore George Osborne's policies are not working. Osborne doesn't realise, writes Lanchester, that if you cut public spending then GDP goes down as well, possibly by more than the amount you've actually cut. "This", Lanchester intones, surveying the scene, "is what failure looks like".
Well, not necessarily. Lanchester is guilty of assuming that the success of Osborne's policies should be measured purely in terms of growth. But growth isn't the only criterion. Sure, Osborne would be delighted if the economy were growing. But what he'll be really concerned about is the deficit. As long as he can tell the world the deficit is shrinking in real terms, Osborne will be able to say that he is putting the nation's finances in order. And he'll be right. As long as the gilt markets - who don't have to lend to us, remember - believe in the direction of travel, it will be cheap for Britain to borrow the billions we need every week just to keep going.
To put it the other way round, GDP is not the same as tax revenue. If GDP falls because the government has spent less, that doesn't mean the government doesn't gain. If the tax revenue HMG loses and the extra money it has to pay out in benefits are in combination smaller than the savings from the spending cut, the government wins. That is Osborne's calculation, and that is partly why the deficit is going down. I think Osborne will be quietly pleased with the situation.
Here is a list of other considerations that are strangely absent from Lanchester's article. If you haven't read it, you'll just have to take my word for it.
One, there's no acknowledgement of the headwinds Osborne is facing from a Eurozone economy gripped by an existential crisis.
Two, there's no attempt at suggesting an alternative strategy to Osborne's.
Third, although I think we're entitled to assume that Lanchester thinks there is such a strategy, he shows no sign of understanding that this might just be one of those problems to which there is no solution at all. I think it is not stretching matters to say that no-one really knows what to do now, and that Osborne's way is likely to be as good as any. At least, by enabling us to afford current borrowing, it is enabling us to keep going.
Fourth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the wider context in which the economic crisis is taking place, which is that Western governments and individuals, helped along by the finance industry, borrowed for decades to sustain a lifestyle their income did not justify.
Fifth, there is no acknowledgement that in the long run, states, like individuals, must live within their means. The policies of Balls and Miliband merely pretend that this isn't true, but it is.
Sixth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the consequences of this fact for Western Social Democratic parties. The soft Left is dedicated to the creation of societies with high welfare spending to help those at the bottom end. The events of the last few years demonstrate that this isn't fiscally possible at current levels of general taxation, and may not be politically possible at any level.
Seventh, to look at the biggest picture of all, Lanchester doesn't seem to grasp that, at heart, our problems are a consequence of loss of competitiveness to Far Eastern economies. Until that loss can be restored to some extent, the kind of big state solutions Lanchester favours will never be affordable again in Britain.
If John Lanchester really wants to know what failure looks like, he might want to imagine a room containing these seven rather large elephants.
Does any of this matter? If I still counted myself amongst the denizens of the Centre Left I would be exasperated at the failure of my peers to get to grips with the cause of the UK's problems. I would be appalled by their lazy acceptance of the seductive alternative narrative, one which says it was all the bankers' fault, but never asks what exactly it was the bankers were doing (lending us all money) and why (because otherwise we couldn't afford to live the way we wanted).
It may well be that Labour will win the next election anyway - as long as the Eurozone continues to be a zombie economy it's hard to see the UK's fortunes improving markedly or at all. But if they don't, it'll be because they have failed to put before the public a believable economic case. The task of doing so starts further back, with a clear-headed analysis of how we ended up where we are and what the consequences are for Labour's vision of a good society. That's partly the responsibility of the politicians, but also partly a responsibility of Labour's public intellectuals like Lanchester.
Judging by this article, he still can't see the zoo for the elephants.
Friday 4 January 2013
Fiscal cliff? - fiscal kerbstone more like . . .
This morning's Graun reprints a handy guide to the Fiscal Cliff currently going round the City. It takes some numbers from the US financial situation so mind-numbingly large that the intellects of ordinary chaps like me reel at the prospect, and removes eight noughts from the end of each. To illuminating effect.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
Thursday 3 January 2013
John Muir Trust - destroying wilderness's head space?
Once again the arrival of the The John Muir Trust's Journal prompts the thought that the £15 or so I spend on membership every year might be better put to use elsewhere in the economy.
The JMT is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity.
It's partly this transformation that worries me, but I'll come back to that. According to its Journal, the JMT now considers that its role should include creating "new opportunities for enjoying outdoor learning". You may think - I do - that there are myriad charities and government funded groups better suited to doing that, but I guess you might also say that, amidst Scotlands millions of empty acres, what harm can it do? Except it's not in Scotland. The Trust is "now able to support groups in Carlisle, West Cumbria and Barrow" and the groups "will be supported to explore, connect with and care for" inter alia the Lake District National Park.
That's right: a Trust set up essentially to preserve wilderness areas, optimally by buying them, is now engaged in the business of encouraging people to go to a place whose landscape management problems are best characterised by relentlessly excessive footfall. That environmental point aside, what is wilderness when you are there on your own, ceases, paradoxically, do be so when I turn up as well. More people = less wilderness. Why is the JMT contributing to the process of reducing Britain's wilderness?
Elsewhere in the Journal there is news and a photograph of the new footpath on Schiehallion. Now the old path on Schiehallion was bad enough in winter; it must have been a quagmire in summer. But why did the Trust buy Schiehallion in the first place? It is a small conical mountain near the road, easily accessible from Scotland's Central Belt. As long as Britain's post-Industrial society continues in its current form, Schiehallion will never be a wilderness again. The Trust should have saved its money (sorry - our money) until some more suitable property turned up.
The feeling that the Trust has fallen into the hands of those who don't understand its mission is underscored on p.11 of the Journal, where one Chris Goodman, apparently overseer of the Trust's wider footpath management (because after all the Trust has now got to the point where it can afford an overseer of footpath management) is quoted as saying, "We want to bring every stretch of footpath on Trust property up to a wild land standard". This sentence is actually used as a headline.
There is no sign that Goodman or the writer have any sense of the ironies at work here. The Trust's role is not to question the idea of footpaths in wilderness per se, it is merely to make them better, thus encouraging more people to walk into that wilderness. Because it's obviously vital that in wilderness areas, the footpaths are up to standard!
I'd like to think that at this point anyone from the Trust reading this might go, "Oh, hang on . . . ". But then if they can print Goodman's comment unquestioningly, they really aren't going to get it, are they?
I said I would remark on the Trust's transformation from a few beardy blokes clubbing together to buy wild land to an organisation with a glossy journal, a "footpath project officer" and offices in Edinburgh and Pitlochry.
Aside from the bad decisions it seems to me the Trust sometimes makes, its staff seem blithely unaware that wilderness is a conceptual as much as a physical thing. John Muir, and his disciples who set up the Trust, were sick of industrial society's tendency to commodify and package everything. Wilderness was needed as an antidote to this.
But with its corporate sponsors, its merchandising, its compulsive tidying, with the bland management speak that characterises its official utterances, the JMT is in danger of contributing to the commodification and therefore destruction of wilderness's head space, at the same time as it often does useful work to safeguard wilderness's physical reality.
The JMT is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity.
It's partly this transformation that worries me, but I'll come back to that. According to its Journal, the JMT now considers that its role should include creating "new opportunities for enjoying outdoor learning". You may think - I do - that there are myriad charities and government funded groups better suited to doing that, but I guess you might also say that, amidst Scotlands millions of empty acres, what harm can it do? Except it's not in Scotland. The Trust is "now able to support groups in Carlisle, West Cumbria and Barrow" and the groups "will be supported to explore, connect with and care for" inter alia the Lake District National Park.
That's right: a Trust set up essentially to preserve wilderness areas, optimally by buying them, is now engaged in the business of encouraging people to go to a place whose landscape management problems are best characterised by relentlessly excessive footfall. That environmental point aside, what is wilderness when you are there on your own, ceases, paradoxically, do be so when I turn up as well. More people = less wilderness. Why is the JMT contributing to the process of reducing Britain's wilderness?
Elsewhere in the Journal there is news and a photograph of the new footpath on Schiehallion. Now the old path on Schiehallion was bad enough in winter; it must have been a quagmire in summer. But why did the Trust buy Schiehallion in the first place? It is a small conical mountain near the road, easily accessible from Scotland's Central Belt. As long as Britain's post-Industrial society continues in its current form, Schiehallion will never be a wilderness again. The Trust should have saved its money (sorry - our money) until some more suitable property turned up.
The feeling that the Trust has fallen into the hands of those who don't understand its mission is underscored on p.11 of the Journal, where one Chris Goodman, apparently overseer of the Trust's wider footpath management (because after all the Trust has now got to the point where it can afford an overseer of footpath management) is quoted as saying, "We want to bring every stretch of footpath on Trust property up to a wild land standard". This sentence is actually used as a headline.
There is no sign that Goodman or the writer have any sense of the ironies at work here. The Trust's role is not to question the idea of footpaths in wilderness per se, it is merely to make them better, thus encouraging more people to walk into that wilderness. Because it's obviously vital that in wilderness areas, the footpaths are up to standard!
I'd like to think that at this point anyone from the Trust reading this might go, "Oh, hang on . . . ". But then if they can print Goodman's comment unquestioningly, they really aren't going to get it, are they?
I said I would remark on the Trust's transformation from a few beardy blokes clubbing together to buy wild land to an organisation with a glossy journal, a "footpath project officer" and offices in Edinburgh and Pitlochry.
Aside from the bad decisions it seems to me the Trust sometimes makes, its staff seem blithely unaware that wilderness is a conceptual as much as a physical thing. John Muir, and his disciples who set up the Trust, were sick of industrial society's tendency to commodify and package everything. Wilderness was needed as an antidote to this.
But with its corporate sponsors, its merchandising, its compulsive tidying, with the bland management speak that characterises its official utterances, the JMT is in danger of contributing to the commodification and therefore destruction of wilderness's head space, at the same time as it often does useful work to safeguard wilderness's physical reality.
Sunday 30 December 2012
Why I love . . . #4 Marquee Moon
There are some aspects of parenthood which are a disappointment; it so happens that I married someone even worse than sport than I was, and so I have never had the pleasure of standing beside a windswept football/cricket/rugby/hockey etc pitch and shouted enthusiastically while one of my children scored a hat trick or a brisk half century before lunch. My how the tears would have flowed though.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
Wednesday 19 December 2012
Andrew Mitchell, the police and the press
The Andrew Mitchell case has now become a very sticky soup indeed, with the arrest of a serving police officer on suspicion of leaking the Downing Street incident log to the press. At the same time comes the allegation that an officer - possibly the same one - emailed his MP (a colleague of Mitchell's in the Whip's Office with whom he did not get on) posing as a member of the public. This email apparently states that passers-by and tourists were upset by Mitchell's behaviour during the confrontation.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
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