The skin factor: X Factor and reality TV racism

Leona Lewis is going to be the Christmas No. 1, and we have X Factor to thank for unearthing the new Maria Carey or Whitney Houston. I must admit I'm not sure we need a new Maria or Whitney, but then I'm not sure I needed the old ones. I don't watch X Factor- if I wanted to hear indifferent cover versions of 80s hits, I'd listen to Girls Aloud. But I would in any case be put off by the blatant manipulation of the ever-lengthening pause for the 'and the winner is...', a trend started by Davina and Ant&Dec, but now universal. I now avoid all results shows on principle. Imagine how fresh and shocking it would be if someone were to revert to saying simply 'hand up who's not been evicted - no, not you'. However, we also have the X factor to thank for killing off a tendentious strand of comment arguing that the UK public was too fundamentally racist to ever allow a black contestant to win a reality contest.

This view was first advanced by Faria Alam, philosopher, social commentator and person-famous-for-having-sex-with-slightly-more-famous-people to her Celebrity Big Brother housemates Dennis Rodman and Traci Bingham. She told them the British public would "never let a black or Asian win"; we were denied the opportunity to find out, since the public decided that it wouldn't let Americans or ex-PAs who they'd never heard of win, regardless of colour.

The Guardian's Comment is Free forums then spent the summer bickering about it: white liberals suggesting that the dismal record of non-white contestants was due to chance, their individual performance, or, perhaps, the tendency of the voting public (mainly the old and silly or the young and silly) to promote those who were most similar to themselves (although until BB6 I wouldn't have guessed there was such a large consituency of Portguese transsexuals in the UK). But now we can say straightforwardly that it is not true: the British public will vote for a black contestant. I never really accepted the argument: I think, and hope, that politeness and tolerance are virtues fostered here. I always feel a surge of pride when visiting London to see its astonishing casual cosmopolitanism (a word whose meaning is presumably being shifted towards 'very very interested in sex and make-up').

But what do we really think? The Freakonomics authors have looked at how people behave on the US version of the Weakest Link, to see who gets voted off despite scoring well. They conclude, perhaps surprisingly, that blacks are not discriminated against; the old and Hispanics are, though. There's all sorts of methodological pitfalls with studies of this kind: just how fixed are these racial categories? Are they self-descriptions, or based on the researcher's opinion? Is it based on skin colour, country of ancestry, language, name? But if they are describing a real phenomenon, I'm still not sure that their analysis is correct. They say that the reason that blacks are not discriminated against is because it is no longer socially acceptable to behave in an anti-black way. Why can't they accept that (white) people might not be anti-black?

Conversation in a hotel bedroom

MAN: I had to use your razor: I've left mine at home.

WOMAN: Yuk- I hope you washed it!

MAN: Oh yes, of course ... beforehand.

Last thoughts on Sandi Thom

Sandi's been down in Australia, which would account for the lack of promotion of her current UK single, 'Lonely Girl', which was scheduled for release last week. 'Punk rocker' is their song of the year, having sat for 14 weeks at No. 1. In an article in the Melbourne Age, the webcast myth is taken at face value:

But while her webcasts attract thousands, her popularity doesn't necessarily translate to the clubs. After details of a "secret show" in the city were released online on Tuesday, a crowd of only 25 turned up. The concert was then cancelled.

The article is respectfully titled "Very modern artist longs for age of innocence", but their web editor lets their feelings through by giving the page url as "that-blooming-punk-song".

Review: The Innocence Project

Law works well on television, with its theatrical conflicts, alternation between exposition and rhetoric, rivalries, alliances and betrayals. It's not surprising that it has spawned a long line of iconic series: The Paper Chase, LA Law, Ally McBeal, Law and Order. The British roll-call is less long and distinguished: apart from Rumpole, which plays for laughs, there's what, Sutherland's Law, Crown Court, Kavanagh QC, and Judge John Deeds, which just aren't as good.

Nor is The Innocence Project. As a concept it might have worked: law lecturer helps his students hone their skills by taking on cases of alleged miscarriage of justice the professionals wouldn't touch. But the execution proved fatal (as executions do). The students were too samey, not in the way real students are samey (overweight, smoking and scruffy), but all earnest and moderately well-kempt and deeply dull (and, one might add, wooden: either they are good actors trying to sound ill-at-ease with the concept of speech, or bad ones). This needn't have proved disastrous (much the same could be said of Torchwood, which gets by on energy).

At the heart of the failure is the story-telling. The nitwits sit in the pub, or sit in a big room with a white board on which they try to puzzle out the details:
"If the cat was on the mat, then .. he ... must .. have been ... sitting"
"Omigod, the witness said he saw the victim draw his table leg and point it at the armed officer"
"Hey, maybe somebody was ... lying!"
Faced with quite simple brainteasers for these quite simple brains to unravel, tension has to be created by irritating obliqueness: so we see someone finding a file on Google - what is it? - we don't know, she just says 'yes' and prints it out, and we don't get to hear the answer until the enxt scene, where she says "I've just found this..."

But even with this, and the addition of extraneous sub-plots to show how each of the students is deeply troubled, sensitive or whatever, there isn't enough matter to fill the time. I was watching an episode without access to a clock, and when it finished I genuinely believed I had sat through a two-hour double episode, and doubted my sanity when I found out it was only 9 o'clock. The pace isn't just glacial (glacial in the global warming sense of moving backwards); every scene, every shot, is just a bit longer than necessary. Two of the team are talking as they walk through the campus; they finished their conversation and move out of shot, but the camera stays to show... nothing.

One can only conclude that the BBC decided to show the series at the moment to demostrate that Robin Hood isn't as bad as all that after all. They seem to have come to their senses, though: they are going to drop the last three episodes, presumably in favour of something better, like Eldorado.

Home life of the famous: Monica Lewinsky

Monica returns after a date at the White House, wearing a stained black dress and an odd smile.

FLATMATE: "What's come over you tonight?"

News item: road pricing

With the new road pricing scheme, the congestion charge for gridlocked London will rise to £12 per day- that's £2 mileage and £10 storage.

Radio comedy sketch: Marks and Spencer food advert parody

MUSIC: 'Samba Pa Ti', Santana

VOICE: This isn't just a raspberry pavlova. This is a pavlova with a meringue base made from free-range eggs, separated, and then beaten ... beaten with birch twigs, until they bleed.

Topped with fresh cream, whipped, ... whipped while chained in a dungeon until it begs for mercy.

And raspberries, plucked by hand and pulped beneath the heel of an 8-inch stiletto.


This isn't just food - this is S & M food.

Desolation Row: Bob Dylan's wasteland

Although he now disavows any studious intent in the construction his songs, Dylan's absorption of high and low culture and fashioning it into masterpieces of allusion is undeniable.

"You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images" Wasteland, line 21


I had always thought Desolation Row was his best song in its glorious Highway 61 version, delicately punctuated by acoustic guitar breaks. But now it is bookended by the earlier take, with electric guitar, on the No Direction Home soundtrack CD, and the strummed acoustic Live 1966 version; each is in its way nigh-perfect, but the minor changes in the lyrics emphasise just how precisely right the rest are.

It is a commonplace that the overall shape and structure of the song parallels that of T. S. Eliot's Wasteland, but as I looked at each line possible references came flooding in. This isn't to say that they were in Dylan's head when he wrote it; but they are there in mine when I hear it. I have marked the parallels with ** where I believe they are close enough to represent conscious references, and * the less definite ones.

Lyrics are copyright Bob Dylan.

I

They're selling postcards of the hanging

The bleak thrown-away horror here is masterful. Without the anger driving overt protest, it is as if the commercialisation and celebration of execution were too expected to be worthy of note.

Wasteland reference: line 55 'the Hanged man' [Tarot card reference: tarot=postcard] *

They're painting the passports brown

This line is less clear, although it is notable that the emphasis in this line is on the 'they' at the start: in line 1, it's almost lost, just syaing 'postcards are being sold', but here it is a They who is doing the painting. Brown is associated with soil, shit and death, and 'means noone no good'. My image of this is of visas or identity cards being stamped 'cancelled' before being returned to the now trapped citizens.

Wasteland: line 208 'under the brown fog of a winter noon' and line 211: 'documents at sight'

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

What are the sailors doing there? Presumably being sexually transgressive. The world is turned upside down.

The circus is in town

I connect circus here with carnival and in turn to a feast of the senses, or debauchery, and with the 'freak show' cover photograph of the Basement Tapes.

Wasteland: line 56 "I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring" *

Here comes the blind commissioner

On first hearing, you automatically interpret this as a commissionaire, dressed up in hotel finery: a blind one might not be much good, but unworthy of note. Actually, thouygh, he quite definitely sings and writes 'commissioner', in which case he is presumably meaning some government official with quasi-judicial functions. The 'blind' then presumably relates to his powerlessness or unthinking fairness (blind justice with her scales).

Wasteland: line 46 "(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)" *

They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants

I connect this with walking the plank: justice is not only blind but imperilled. In the early take, his hand is 'nailed in his pants', perhaps a cricifixion reference, but in the final version it appears the commissioner is choose to keep his hand there, presumably masturbating. And you know that makes you go blind.

And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go

The 'mob' of riot police is another aspect of the overturning of authority, when those supposed to uphold the law are keen to breach it.

As the Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row

Wasteland: lines 49/50 "Here is Belladona, the Lady of the Rocks, / The lady of situations" **

II

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style

The narrative here starts in the midst of a scene: clearly the singer has just said something while flirting with her, and she appears to respond positively.

Wasteland: line 253 "When lovely woman stoops to folly and / Paces about her room again, alone, / She smooths her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramaphone." *


And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You Belong To Me I Believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave."

He's in the wrong place because love and sincerity of feeling do not operate on Desolation Row. The 'someone' who answers is presumably the singer.

And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go

Obviously Romeo declines to leave quietly, and a fight ensues.

Dylan, "Pledging My Time": "They called for an ambulance, and one was sent / Someone must've got lucky, but it was an accident"

Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Sweeping up the broken glass from the fight. No Prince Charmings on Desolation Row.


III

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide

Hidden by gathering doom-laden clouds.

The fortunetelling lady

Wasteland: line 43 'Madam Sosostris, famous clairvoyante' *

Has even taken all her things inside

The time to worry is when psychics panic.

All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain

Cain and Abel are too busy fighting; Quasimodo knows his beloved is dead. But sort of rain can be expected from such an ominous cloud?

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row

Charity and good fellowship have been replaced by cynicism and hedonism.


IV

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid

Because she has gone to the Nunnery.

To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness

She chooses death rather than devotion only to God.

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow

The rainbow is supposed to be a sign of God's ultimate forgiveness, so she hopes for redemption.

She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

But she is too aware of reality to succumb.


V

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk

Einstein presumably regrets the consequences of his genius.

Wasteland: line 362 "There is always another one walking beside you/ Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded" **

He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet

Einstein is reduced to an idiot savant.

Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row

Fame is transient; nothing endures.


VI

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up

The doctor's name hardly inspires confidence, and neither does the reaction of his patients. He sounds like a Nazi doctor in the death camps.

Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole

The medicinal use of cyanide confirms the interpretation.

And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy On His Soul"

Wateland: line 52 "And this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see". *

They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row


VII

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast

The Last Supper.

The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest

Judas.

They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get Outta Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"

Casanova is being punished by being crucified.


VIII

Now at midnight all the agents

Wasteland: line 232 "A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits"

W. H. Auden , 'The Fall of Rome': "Agents of the Fisc pursue/ Absconding tax defaulters"

And the superhuman crew

This wraps up Nietzsche's Superman and Shaw's 'Man and Superman', covering both left-and right-wing politics.

Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

The hatred for educated people is a good indicator of tyranny, shared by the book-burning Nazis, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the lunacy of Pol Pot's victimisation of anyone wearing glasses.

Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go

Industrial evil: death factories.
Kafka (the insurance clerk): the Castle, the tyranny of bureaucracy

Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row


IX

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn

Wasteland: line 56 "Fear death by water" *

And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower

While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

Wasteland: line 261 "The pleasant whining of a mandoline / And a clatter and a chatter from within / Where fishmen lounge at noon" *

Between the windows of the sea
Wasteland: line 47 "the drowned Phoenician sailor" *

Where lovely mermaids flow

Wasteland: line 96 "In which sad light a carved dolphin swam"
Prufrock: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each" *

And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row


X

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the door knob broke)

Wasteland: line 411 "I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only / We think of the key, each in his prison" *

When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?

Wasteland: line 115 "I never know what you are thinking." *

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

My reality is unique to me and we can't even agree on what to call things that are 'out there'.

Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row

The letters here are a reference back to postcards at the start, making the song cyclical.

Luck, chance and the perception of coincidence

I have read that it is still inconcievable that a robot can be designed to catch a thrown ball. The casual sophistication of human perception is enormous: to work out from limited sense data not only what is going on in terms of movement, but then to predict and act on it, moving the hand so it is in just the right place. Usually (insert joke about cricketers here). This is achieved by some very clever under-the-bonnet stuff to do with mental spatial models. The human mind is very good at discerning patterns in high-noise data. Sometimes this is meaningful, as when the Greeks observed the planets and calculated their orbits (wrongly, but still); and sometimes it isn't, as when they played joined-the-dots to create the constellations. But being good at making patterns means that we spot 'coincidences' very easily, and are poor at judging probability. That's what keeps astrologers in business: they don't have to be right very often to seem to be on to something. This can be queried: when you look at the people spread-betting on a football match, if 40% bet on each team to win, and 20% bet on a draw, then at least 20% are going to be 'strangely prescient' (this time). And there was also that triumphant moment on the National Lottery when Mystic Meg predicted that those wearing red would be in for a chance tonight etc, but her pyschic powers totally failed to infrom her that that week's draw would be cancelled because of techncial problems.

The reason I raise this is because of the continuing saga of CNPS : Consecutive Number Plate Spotting [up to 48 now- exciting, isn't it?]. And I have borne out Richard Herring's observations on the Gods of CNPS: they are fickle, and they are cruel.

That's the emotional reality of it. Some days, some numbers, they smile, and offer up the numbers like ducks in a row; other days, other numbers, they hide, they cheat, they lurk in shadows, they dive into sidestreets as I approach. And sometimes, to rub in the lack of progress, they arrange parades of the last number, or the one after next, time after time, before getting a glimpse of the right one.

So what's going on, if we start on the basis that the Gods of CNPS (whisper it) don't exist?

Fickleness is easy to explain. As I calculated before, the number of other numbers seen before the right one will vary between 1 and 1000. So some will be long, some short. The long ones of course (duh) last longer, so one's "hours of waiting a long time" seem worse, and so a more memorable. Beyond that, though, I wonder whether the nature of the distribution is disorientating. Most phenomena we experience are bell-curves, where most values occur near the mean (so that rainfall goes up a little, down a little, except this year). But the number-plate probability 'curve' is flat: the extremes are as likely as the mid-range values. This makes it seem even more aribtrary than it is.

The cruelty, the taunting, is even simpler. We are focused on looking for one number, y, but keep seeing the x's we no longer need, or the z's, that we will need next but don't need now. How the Halls of Valhalla must ring with laughter. But, looking at just those three numbers, the likelihood that we see y before z or x is only 1/3. We are more likely to see one of the others. We are just as likely (1/3) to see both of the others before y. No wonder it happens so often. And for repeated numbers: after we have seen an x, there is (again) a 1/3 chance of a y, a 1/3 chance of another x, and 1/3 chance of a z. So building up a conspiracy against me is simple.

I'm not sure how far this gets us, apart from explaining why people are so easily convinced of the workings of fate or luck, and the strength of their convictions, however misplaced.

Overheard

"Have you seen my shower cap?"
"No- what were doing when you last had it?"
"Having a shower"

How to increase your blog traffic

I have posted before about Jakob Nielsen and his comments on blogs, written from the perspective of business-to-business web design. I concurred with most of his recommendations, in a theoretical way. Recently, though, I've noticed that my hit counter has, for the first time ever, shown signs of life (10 a day may not seem like many, but try saying that to someone who got three!). Here are my (experience based) suggestions:

• Give posts clear titles. After half a lifetime reading British newspapers, it seems wrong somehow to just say what something is, without trying to twist it somehow, use a quotation, or make it ironic. Wrong it may be, but nobody will be Googling for your play on words, so you'll be buried deep in page 10,000 of "Big Brother 7" or whatever.


• Guide newbies. Almost all your visitors will be visting only once, to look at a specific subject they are currently interested in. Most will move on. But make it easy for them to explore by having links to your best or most popular posts as part of the sidebar.


• Post often, or regularly. This is where I fall down, because my blog isn't the No. 1 thing in my life- it's down there at number 75 or so. Repeat visitors like to see new content. And of course, the more content there is, the more archive there is to be picked up by searches.


• Don't bother with carnivals, webrings etc. There are 100 million webistes out there. Sharing links and passing around a handful of readers from site to site makes no difference. That's not quite true, but in general I'd say if you're going to invest your time, put it into writing more content rather than chasing links.


• Be topical. My review of Not Going Out might not be very good, or thorough, or even a proper review, but it's currently Google's No. 1 hit for "Not Going Out review". Maybe you can't always be right- but you can always be first.


• Review things. Why? Because one of the great uses for the Web is for people to find out what a film/book/album is like. So people like reviews. Much better than hearing about shoe shopping or your favourite breakfast cereal.


• Link out. Links are helpful to the reader, and raise Google rank. Win, win.

Overheard

Manager 1: Are you going to the training course on Bullying and Harassment?

Manager 2: No, I'm good enough at those already.

Radio comedy sketch: Venus and Mars

FX: PUB BACKGROUND

RICK: There’s your pint.
HARRY: Cheers. Oh- I’ve been reading “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.
RICK: It’s rubbish, isn’t it?
HARRY: No, it’s not, you’d be surprised.
RICK: Why?
HARRY: Well, it seems men’s minds are programmed differently to women’s.
RICK: How do you mean?
HARRY: Men focus on one thing, completely, but women are always multi-tasking, doing several things at once.
RICK: I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed that.
HARRY: Surely you have?
RICK: No, I don’t think so.
HARRY: Well, I’ve noticed that when Sue and I are, you know…
RICK: Having sex?
HARRY: Yes. I’m always concentrating, in the zone, giving it all that.
RICK: Yeah?
HARRY: But she’s watching TV, or checking her nails, or doing the crossword, at the same time.
RICK: That’s odd. She doesn’t with me.

FX: PUB BACKGROUND

Radio comedy sketch: Help desk

FX: RINGING TONE
BOB: Hello? Help Desk here.
ANGIE: Ah, good. Can you help me?
BOB: That’s what we’re here for.
ANGIE: OK, I’m just setting up my home network.
BOB: Fine.
ANGIE: Yes, I’ve unpacked the monitor, the keyboard, the scanner, the printer, the cables, the mouse, the speakers, the power socket and the surge protector.
BOB: And what is the problem?
ANGIE: I can’t reach the door!

FX CALL END TONE. RINGING TONE

SOPHIE: Hello? Help desk here.
MICHAEL: Hi. I’m having some trouble with my system. I can’t install the virus scanner.
SOPHIE: Ok, I’ll see what we can do. Can I take the details?
MICHAEL: It’s a Windows NT system, Intel Pentium, 340 megahertz.
SOPHIE: And the software?
MICHAEL: Version 4.5, SE.
SOPHIE: That should be ok. (PAUSE) What’s your date of birth?
MICHAEL: What? Oh, 2nd March 1980.
SOPHIE: Oh, I see.
MICHAEL: What?
SOPHIE: You haven’t really done your homework, have you?
MICHAEL: How do you mean?
SOPHIE: [READING] “Pisces should avoid IT applications while Mars is in the ascendant”
MICHAEL: I don’t remember seeing that.
SOPHIE: [READING] “... and beware periods of forgetfulness”. You should wait for a more propitious time.
MICHAEL: Are you seriously telling me that in the 21st century I need to wait for my stars to align correctly before I can use one of your products?
SOPHIE: [DREAMILY] Expect good news in the Spring, and get ready to upload Windows-based software when Aquarius rises.
MICHAEL: I’m sorry, I don’t believe in astrology.

FX: HANGS UP

SOPHIE: I’m fed up with all these Pisces.
BOB: They’re so sceptical.

FX: RINGING TONE

BOB: Hello, Help Desk here.
GEORGE: [SHOUTS] Help! Help!

FX: SPLASHING SOUNDS

BOB: Hello, can you hear me?
GEORGE: [SHOUTS] Help! I’m drowning! Please - help!

FX: HANGS UP

SOPHIE: Was that another shouter?
BOB: Yes. It’s just rude, isn’t it?

I'm going to count from 1 to 1000 while I'm driving

Richard Herring's excellent website introduced me to the strange world of CNPS: that is Consecutive Number Plate Spotting. He explains it better and funnier than I can here, but as a pointless longwinded harmelss taks, I felt inspired as I read. He took a year to spot the 1,000 numerical elements of number plates in the right order.

In trying to work out whether that was a good or bad time, I started looking at the probability, assuming at the start that there was a random distribution of numbers. My first approach was to think in terms of the probability that the next car would have the number required (1 in 1000 or 0.1%), or the second (1 in 999 or a tiny bit more than 0.1%), but then I realised that if I ignored duplicates, there was an elegant solution: for a given number (say 123), it could be encountered anywhere between 1st and 1000th, which neatly gives a mean order of 500th. So in order to complete the challenge, you might expect to have to see 500 x 1,000 = 0.5 million cars (about all the cars in Wales).

Thinking about the question of duplicates, it doesn't actually matter that much if there is a peak (say 100 extra cars with 101 in the number): it would mean that searching for 101 will be much quicker, but on the other hand other numbers would take longer to find since there would be extra 101 duplicates to go through. As far as I can, see this cancels out.*Update below

More problematic, and what gives the game its urgency and charm, is that the world has changed. In 2001, the old three-random-digit number elements plus year-denoting letter were replaced by a two-digit number denoting year + letters, which makes 01-06 easy to do, but also means that the pool of larger numbers is restricted to older cars : it may already be the case that there are no longer any cars with some numbers on the road, and there is no way to find out.

There is an odd apsect to the way the statistics work: it doesn't actually matter how long you spend looking on any particular day: fatalistically, if you only see 300 cars you're unlikely to see the number you need, but then, you might see 900 and still not see it.

There is, at a low level, a bit of the thrill of gambling: you sink into a depressed torpor as one wrong number after another flies by, until suddenly you see the one you need: surprise and joy, almost disbelief, lasts for a few seconds, and then it fades, you switch to the new number, hoping this time it'll be quick... in its own way, it's as addictive as nicotine.**Update below


UPDATES

* This is wrong, further thought has shown. The initial assumption is that there are 1000 numbers, equally distributed, and therefore there is 1/1000 = 0.1 % chance that any given number will be that required. If we then inflate the figure by making 5 numbers represented by 200 rather than 1 per thousand, then the likelihood of 995 numbers when being searched for is 1/2000 = 0.05%, and the likelihood of the five numbers is 200/2000 = 10%. Unfortunately, the higher probability only operates when looking for those five numbers; for all the other 995, there are more, twice as many, wrong numbers to go through. So no, it doesn't cancel out, it makes it harder.

** Having gone through this a few times now, and not being a gambler, I can see why they go on about lucky streaks. After initial hope, you fall into a stupor of near-despair- is that number ever going to come up? That's why, when it does, it is as much a surprise as a joy. Now comes the critical point: any logical view would be that having just won, you are almost bound to endure the long period of loss before you win again, and therefore you would think twice about betting again. Except the voice of hope tells you that you are on a roll, that no way will it be so long to the next win, it's worth trying for a bit at least-- and then in no time at all you have lost so much that it would be foolish to give up when you were 'due' a win again. My view on gambling is that you should look carefully at the people who want you to do it: experienced gamblers, gambling companies, the government. Do these often give away money?

The MS Office paperclip: beta version

The heart of darkness: Review of Martin Amis, House of Meetings

Amis is unafraid of the big issues. His obsession with politics, totalitarianism and corporate evil is sometimes interpreted as a bid for greatness, for respect; more likely it arises from a lively moral sense, triggered partly by concern for his burgeoning family, and partly from a feeling that in comparison to modern history the domestic arrangements of middle class Londoners are trivial as a topic.

House of Meetings takes Amis back to Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, and the corrosive effects of Stalin on his subjects. Unlike the broad factual account given in the earlier Koba the Dread, here he provides a narrative of a single family's experience as they attempt to live ordinary lives while being bent out of shape by the demands of the state. The anonymous memoirist who tells the story is met first as an angry dying man, touring the ruins of the Arctic labour camp in which he had been imprisoned; he writes a letter to his stepdaughter explaining his life, describing his loss of conscience. There follows a vivid description of life and death in the Gulag of the 1940s, whence he had been sent following the War, in which he had raped and fought his way into Germany. His uneasy accommodation with camp life is then disturbed by the arrival of his half-brother, Lev, and the news that Lev has married Zoya, a Jewess they both had pursued in their youth. The brothers fight to survive the camp as its regime changes following the death of Stalin, culminating in the provision for conjugal visits in the House of Meetings. Lev's assignation with Zoya leaves his spirit broken, and much of the rest of the book comprises speculation as to the cause. They are eventually released and find themselves marginalised under the Brezhnev regime; Lev chooses moral rectitude and material squalor; the memoirist material wealth, travel, and a series of unsatisfactory love affairs, culminating in the post-glasnost torpor of a society that believes so little in its future that people are reluctant to have children.

Thus the story is that of the nation, in microcosm. In Koba the Dread, Amis took care to show that Stalin was merely the most extreme and arbitrary tyrant produced by October: here, it would appear that Stalin was the sole cause of all woe. It was Stalin's camps that denatured his citizens, rendered them fearful, untrustworthy, and brutal. Nevertheless, Amis argues that the danger from the Russians is different in kind, not scale, from that of present-day Islamists, as represented here by the Chechen attack on School No. 1.

A conventional narrative structure would expose the unbalanced nature of the treatment: the memoirist's shifts in time and focus, and the giving and withholding of confidences, force the reader to grant him a hearing. They do, however, lead to a sense of anticlimax, since the impact of the camp section leaves the post-release saga as a minor addendum, echoing the exhaustion of the brothers. The plot is almost absurdly melodramatic, with its twins, death-bed confessions, and letters from the dead.

This would matter less is the characterisation of the memoirist was clearer. The descriptive style throughout is vintage Amis: clear, startling, elegant, poetic (contact with English culture is unconvincingly explained by the plot). The tension between this tone and his actions is an unresolved issue: we are perhaps half convinced by the evocation of what it feels like to kill, in the wild days when he takes the breakdown in order in the camp to murder the hated informers; but we are unconvinced by the interior view of the rapist, at either end of his life.

Amis expects his readers to know a lot of Russian history; he provides footnotes to identify Russian presidents, referred to by the memoirist by unfamiliar names, but does not elucidate the political developments for those unversed in the country's tragic arc.

But to write an encycopledic narrative would have taken a book much bigger than these 200 pages, which share with the short stories of Heavy Water an inexplicable luminosity, a subtle charge that leaves them resonating in your mind long after you have finished. A similar effect is derived from reading Time's Arrow, and of all Amis's works, it is that first-person narrative, of the other great European tragedy, which is closest in tone to this. A serious book for serious times.

Review of Not Going Out

Not Going Out is a new comedy on BBC1 for Friday evenings. And if that sentence doesn't make your spirits sink, you haven't been watching Blessed, or My Hero, or the under-powered Worst Week of My Life, or My Family, or that My Family clone so bad that my brain froze rather than allowing its name to reach the cerebral cortex. The bar for success is not set high.

It ought to pass it. The writing is sharp and clever, if a little self-indulgent: the inclusion of three zany elements (depressive author, Lee's job packing Christmas crackers, and circus skills class) in a single episode seemed to me to be trying a bit hard, when the core of the comedy has to be the interplay between Lee, Kate and Tim. Unfortunately some of the best lines were lost; Lee's delivery was so fast that he didn't give them space to breathe, and the audience's early laughter often swamped the killer line.

A more serious problem is the location: whatever one may say about Men Behaving Badly, Extras, or even Two Pints of Lager, they all have a distinctive locale, a real place where these characters and their relatives live. In contrast, Not Going Out is set in a vague generic city, the same city as Coupling, with an anonymous flat, anonymous bar, anonymous office, and characters with no history.

Kate is American, so she is earnest and New Age. That doesn't really cut it as back-story. It always amuses me when people say America is a classless society when it is clearly just as nuanced as ours: Friends isn't just six random people, but six people each from a specific social milieu.

Tim and Lee's characters are equally simple: accountant and slacker; so middle class and dolemite; so pompous and sarcastic. It's a bit schematic.

But it's not as if we are spoiled for choice if we want to watch smart comedy, so I'll hope for improvement.


Update

Now the series is over, and it's time to come off the fence.

Actually, my first impressions proved quite reliable: the Tim character proved impossible to develop, and played only a minor part towards the end. The core of the comedy is the relationship between Lee and Kate, one of comfortable coupledom without the sex, masked by verbal bickering. Megan Dodds managed to undercut the excessive kookiness or earnestness of some of her lines with a sly twinkle in her eye that implied her detachment from her statements. Lee remained slightly problematic, partly because his character was boxed in by its narrow definition: the most complex thing he could do was to realise how he felt about Kate; but also because unlike Megan's actorly clarity of diction, his remained a rushed mumble. Jokes about the badness of Kate's cooking aren't funny: strangely enough, neither were the similar jokes in My Family, Butterflies, or The Young Ones. The only halfway good jokes about bad cooking were in (crikey) The Vicar of Dibley. So leave it.

Paradoxically, this was a comedy that tried too hard: it would have been better with fewer wisecracks and a more paced direction. Still, all on board for Series 2 (no, not you, Tim).

Einstein: the delinquent years

Created using the Einstein message creator www.hetemeel.com.

Is he having a laugh? Extras, That Mitchell and Webb Look and Lead Balloon

It is ironic that Ricky Gervaise, who saves his sharpest barbs for what he dismisses as catchphrase comedy, has unleashed a catchphrase himself: in the last week I have heard at least three broadcasters say "Is he having a laugh?", in contexts where it is clear that the phrase has risen from their subsconcious, without any deliberate attempt to reference its source. So people are watching the new series of Extras. It's hard to see why exactly: the three main jokes are repeated each episode:
1. people are more prejudiced than they are allowed to admit these days, and this may be revealed in extreme situations
2. celebrities famous for their amiable image are in real life obnoxious in various ways
3. people (particularly Andy Millman) will sometimes have to deal with the conflict between what they want to do and social norms of behaviour

We haven't yet seen the last variation on the celebrity joke- Jeremy Paxman, Julie Burchill or Richard Littlejohn revealed as mild-mannered and indecisive in private.

But although I have laughed from time to time, the truth is that Gervaise's school of the comedy of embarrassment can get a bit wearing. In the most recent episode, Millman storms into a high-price shop to revenge Maggie's hurt feelings, boldly promised to buy the dress regardless of cost, and then attempts to wriggle out of paying for it once he finds out the price. This is quite funny at first. But watching five minutes of wriggling is painful, or boring. Now that Millman has lost his status as an Everyman figure, since being shown up at a BAFTA awards ceremony is unlikely to chime with many of the audience, the reliance on accuracy rather than gags that made The Office compulsive viewing is unavailable as a fall-back.


I have seen it suggested that putting on sketch-based That Mitchell and Webb Look immediately afterwards was tempting fate, but it bears up well, mainly because unlike most sketch shows its hit rate is close to 100%, probably because it is writer-driven. Some of the recurring sketches, such as the snooker commentary, worked better on radio, but the razor-sharp parodies of pointless gameshows, docusoaps, and lifeswap programmes are both accurate and funny.


Lead Balloon, Jack Dee's new comedy, isn't bad either. It was instructive to compare its first episode with last week's Extras, since both featured an accidental humiliation turning into a media frenzy despite the best efforts of the main character. There were some graces of omission: the tearaway teenage daughter was dealt with in passing in a matter-of-fact way, rather than forming a whole episode as it would in My Family. The foreign au pair was a bit unwelcome; the American agent was the major pain, along with the recursive 'I'm a comedian trying to write comedy' segments which comedians seem to love despite the indifference they inspire in everyone else. Strangely enough, in the light of my comment on Extras, Jack Dee is portrayed as being a nicer person 'offscreen' than in his usual persona.

Change and decay 7

Selections from the Littleworth Estate Papers
Letterhead: Littleworth Estate Telephone Littleworth 102 Telex LITTLEWORTH[Typescript]
Herr Goering
Reichsluftfahrtministerium
Wlihelmstraße 79
Berlin
Deutchsland

21st April 1937

Dear Herr Goering

Further to your enquiry concerning availability of aluminium and magnesium for your Ministry, I am pleased to confirm that we hold substantial stocks of these materials.

It is our understanding that under the recent international agreements restricting the trading of munitions and related raw materials to Spain, it would be advantageous to both parties to handle delivery via Eire, since it is not a signatory and remains open as an entrepot.

We await your instructions

I remain, Sir, your obedient servant

H Eldon

[manuscript] P.S. You must visit us again for the grouse season!

---

Letterhead: Littleworth Estate Telephone Littleworth 2 [manuscript]
Lt H. Eldon
2nd King’s Rifles
South Africa

10th March 1902

My dear Harry

I’m pleased to hear that you are now back ‘in the field’. I trust you are fully recovered – one hears such terrible things of military hospitals. The newspapers here report nothing but victories. You should watch for the arrival of a shipment of barbed wire in the Province, from our mills – we have been contracted to supply 88 tons to the War Dept for use in civilian detention camps. This was most opportune, since we had been contemplating selling the works – there has been much agitation amongst the men over pay and hours of late, and it has been all the police could do to break up their protests. I have sent a parcel of food which no doubt will arrive in a few weeks.

You are much in our thoughts

Best wishes

Edward

---

[manuscript; copy letter in letterbook]

T. Osprey, esquire
Deptmt of Supply
Richmond
Virginia
American Confederacy

10th January 1863

Sir

We are obliged for your letter of 1st ultimo and beg to tender these prices for your consideration:

Swords, forged and tempered £1 per dozen
Daggers, 6” blade 6 shillings per dozen
Bayonets, 8” blade 10 shillings per dozen

We can supply leatherwork, scabbards, & cetera, at little additional cost, but believe that these may be more readily obtained by yourselves locally.

Our company does not manufacture rifles; we would be willing to act as agents on your behalf in securing the same, tho’ our govt’s intransigence would entail some difficulties on our part.

I beg to remain your most obedient servant

Edward Eldon

---

[manuscript]
From: Tom Eldon
Cold Harbour Hall
Kingston
Jamaica

To: Miss Frances Eldon
Littleworth Hall
Littleworth

1st October 1803

Dearest Cousin Frances

You inquired after our situation here. You may have read in the Gazette that the Negro rebels have been defeated and captured at last. The ringleader, styling himself “Captain Moses”, was an escapee from Mr Jones’ estate, just over the creek from us. Jones tells us that he had been making an experiment in educating the savages, but has resolved to desist in such efforts. Captain Moses was hanged by the militia in the Town Square this last week, although our niggers mutter that it was another man and that Moses lives. We have whipped them and keep them locked up at night, yet they do not apply themselves to their work.

We anticipate the arrival of a new shipment within the month, wch will be sorely needed, so many of our current complement having died from malarial contagion. Alas, prices are rising now that supplies are short, the Navy’s patrols having dislocated the traffic.

You should soon receive at the Hall a delivery of Wedgwood’s porcelain – I would be obliged if you would inspect it as to condition, since the factory disclaims any control of its carters. I am as yet undecided where it is best to place; if you let me know it has arrived I shall be put upon to chuse!

I trust that you will not find me importunate in allotting you such a task
And remain
Your loving cousin
Tom

---

Change and decay 6

The papers of most landowning families are testimony to their two great passions: the accumulation of land, to generate income, and litigation, to expend it upon. The Sheldons were, it appeared, more interested in the former than the latter- certainly the correspondence with the family lawyers was mainly about property rather than law. It was no surprise to me, then, that the majority of the records filling the room were legal papers, neatly tied with fading pink ribbon, sealed with cracked red wax, grubby to the touch.

A librarianship student once told me that the ‘dirty bits’ in library books can easily be found because in much-borrowed copies they become physically dirty, begrimed by hundreds of sweaty thumbs, or worse. Old title deeds are similar; the bundles of documents fall open at passages of particular interest (usually financial).

It was clear that the Sheldons were free from any snobbishness about trade: following the Emperor Vespasian’s dictum that ‘money does not smell’. As well as running their park and home farm, and leasing out neighbouring farms, they had a hand in the local ironworks, railways, brickmaking kilns and shops.

Review of Martin Amis: The last days of Muhammad Atta

Martin Amis was born to inhabit the post-9/11 world. His earlier works are rendered numinous by the sense of imminent apocalypse, the feeling that civilisation's grip on survival may slip at any moment. Amis's response has been almost personal, as if he specifically were targeted; the scrappy narrative of Yellow Dog is disordered by the viscerality of his emotion, disarming his critical intelligence. As James Thurber wrote, in the happier and more carefree days of 1930s Europe: "He had always feared that something like this would happen to him, and now it had". So it is no surprise to find that five years on he is still focused on terror and its agents; the question is whether he has been able to apply analysis beyond emotion and narrative.

The Last Days of Muhammad Atta is a longish short story, filling a gap in the real chronology of the attacks with a visit to a dying imam to collect a bottle of holy water. It is based largely on reality, so much so that arguing about what 'really' happened becomes a legitimate critical stance. But since it is also an interior monologue of someone now dead, it also is, emphatically, a fiction.

Most is based on inference. Amis has described the moral revolt of the body, the physiological resistance to ethical sickness, previously, in Time's Arrow, and it seems reasonable that Atta might suffer similarly. In trying to present the thought-processes of a terrorist, Amis is exploring the big question: Why? How could humanity do such things?

From a UK perspective, there is a long tradition of not caring very much about motivation. The tedious horrors of the IRA bombing campaign awakened no desire to know why they were doing it; a dismissive shrug implied that they must, for whatever reason, like doing these things. This may have been partly ignorance: few would have responded to a set of grievances which started in 1690, or 1649, or maybe back in 1167. But it was also the product of a determination that anyone resorting to violence should lose the right to be heard (so much so that the government had to consistently mislead parliament by denying that it was, in fact, negotiating with the terrorists while stating publicly that it would under no circumstances do so). Even 7/7 was met with bewilderment rather than curiosity. Things seem to be changing now: the recognition that there is a vast pool of ill-will rising slowly to the boil is spreading.

Even so, Amis is perhaps wrong to assume that his readers are as interested in 9/11 as he is; certainly his casual mention of the 'muscle Saudis' relies on too much detailed knowledge (the phrase seems to be one of his coinage): not everyone knows or cares too much about what happened, even if their geopolitical concerns leads them to be interested in consequences.

In some ways, Amis cheats, since he does not provide an insider's account of religious fanaticism tied up with modern technology; rather his exemplar is a steely nihilist who has rationally identified jihad as the only contemporary cause worth following. In tone, Atta sounds most like the blandly certain figure of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; and of course this is a reminder that nihilism is not new, going back at least 150 years.

Nor, of course, is zealotry. Although the story only shows the fanatics through the distorting contempt of Atta, this is little loss, since we know zealots, we've done zealots. They are hardly a new phenomenon. Even the suicidal element is not completely new: in the past, nationalists have been pleased to praise those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, either on an individual basis, as soldiers, or on an industrial basis, like the kamikaze pilots.

So perhaps the problem Amis is picking at is not a problem at all; or only a practical problems: people behave in this way, as they have before. How to stop them? It depends on what made them that way. Atta is presented as a sociopath: his world is without laughter, or music, or love, or sex, or passion: the closest he comes to enjoyment is in spite and certitude; if one were to ask what radicalised him, one would have to ask a psychologist, not a politician.

He story has some epistemological flaws: on a couple of occasions, the author reminds the reader of what followed Atta's death (hardly necessary in any case, but in any case unknowable to Atta). There is one clear error: Amis says Atta knew that the steel would buckle, the towers would collapse. He probably didn't, since the architects who designed it didn't know; and there is an army of conspiracy theorists willing to argue that the steel did not in fact buckle, and demolition charges were needed to make it do so. It is more plausible that Atta's sacrifice was made in the expectation that the crash would be gesture, a ruthless, potent, symbol of the illusory nature of the West's invulnerability, rather than large-scale slaughter.

The story is plotted as a circle, a circle of hell, in which Atta is doomed to relive this day, with its petty and great punishments, for ever. This is a plot Amis has used before, in his earlier short story Denton's Death, itself a macabre reworking of Kingsley Amis's short short story Mason's Life. The question of justice hangs over the whole enterprise, of sufficient or appropriate punishment. Theologians across the centuries have found it easier to excuse the suffering of the righteous (since it is good for the soul, or because they have sinned) than the flourishing unpunished of the unrighteous. Amis feels that mere extinction is insufficient punishment, a feeling with popular support, although he might be surprised to find himself agreeing with those who say 'Death is too good for him'.

Although it may not be Amis's intent, his portrayal of Atta as a banal, limited, troubled individual humanises him: these are not monsters. If they were, the action required would at least be clear. But life is not as simple as that.

Sandi Thom: What if I'm crap

The moment of truth for Sandi Thom is nigh. On 31 August, her follow-up single to the No. 1 international smash "I wish I was a punk rocker (with flowers in my hair)" will be released, and we will see once and for all whether it was all hype or if she has established a fanbase. She has spent much of the last few months appearing at numerous festivals, a trick employed with some success by Roy Harper in the 60s, so it is still unlcear whether people will actually pay to see her (and in the light of the webcast saga, it is notable that so few of the people who saw her live in 2005 liked it very much).

I did quite like "Punk rocker": it was at least original in arrangment, going for acapella and then full band, when it could easliy have been Katie Melua style acoustic wibbling. I even smiled at the start, although I tended to get bored by the end. But it was catchy and instantly memorable and energetic. I've only heard "What if I'm right" once on the radio, but it seemed to be none of those things.

Lyrically, it is different (Full lyrics here): the nostalgia of Punk rocker led those who are cynical to suggest that the song was largely written by the co-writer rather than Thom. "What if I'm right" sounds more like a young person's view of the possible future. But it's not very good: here's my comments:

It wont be an uphill struggle, on you I can depend
...
you'll cover me in diamonds, there's nothing I want more

"On you I can depend" has to be one of the most awkward lines ever written, and all to achieve a poor rhyme.
Nothing she wants more than being covered with diamonds?
An odd ambition.

...
And you'll always tape the football
And let me watch my soap

Nothing like being a modern woman, is there? He'll 'let you' watch your soap (which nearly rhymes with coat).

And when I give birth to our children
I will feel no pain

Planet Earth calling Sandi: don't be so superficial. And you know, birth might hurt. You'd certainly thinks so from the screams from the delivery suite.

And you'll bring the showers

What? Showers?

You'll say I'm thin and bring the washing in

What a charming domestic vignette: you're thin, and here's the washing.

And when you need to change the light bulb
You won't hand me the chair

I'm not sure is 'handing you the chair' is some obscure euphemism: it certainly isn't a conventional phrase.

You'll sell your vinyl records
And go get us a loan

She obviously knows someone obsessed with vinyl, since it also came up in Punkrocker (unlike, I would add, Bob Dylan and Neil Young who have always been keen to explore what new technology might bring). As I put it in Written in your heart:

ED: Yes, they ought to warn you when you're 18 that you are forming your musical tastes for life. I've just been buying the Dylan remasters. It's not the same, though. There's something about vinyl. You HAD to respect it- no finger nails, keep it clean, put it away. Not like CDs - Is that a CD or a coffee mat? Answer: both. And the little booklets in one-point type. No substitute for a lyric sheet.

CHARLOTTE: Still, all my vinyl records are unplayable: scratched and warped.

ED: Oh, if you want to be practical! Spoil my Nick Hornby moment!

You'll be my sympathetic lover
And won't steal the covers
But I've got my doubts and what if I'm right?
You won't forsake me
Your mother won't hate me
...

Now, there is a strong tradition of near-rhymes in popular songs, but this is usually used to allow the use of informal and idiomatic language, not drivel about stealing covers, forsaking (FFS), and mothers in law.

It looks as if Punkrocker was a fluke and that Sandi's natural role is as a teenage wordsmith, indistinguishable, apart from by PR, from all the millions of MySpace 'friends'.

Update: a sad statistic from the Sandi Thom official website Forum:
Most users ever online was 24 on Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:53 pm

Freeing Nelson Mandela: the inside story

One of the great mysteries of modern times is why the live TV coverage of Mandela's release from Robben Island prison in 1990 showed an hour of him not walking out in triumph, before he eventually did so. What was happening?

I think I know. As he was tidying up his cell (who knew, it might be De Klerk's next), he had a premonition of his future life outside: meeting Tony Blair and Gabrielle, Prince Charles and the Spice Girls, Oprah, Bill Clinton, Alan Titchmarsh and the Ground Force team, St Bob and St Bono.

He thought, 'Well, maybe prison's not so bad', before reluctantly concluding that suffering seemed to be his lot, and he might as well get on with it.

All at sea: review of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead man's chest

If you only see one film this year, you're lucky. I've seen three already, and one of them was King Kong, and another was Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead man's chest, which was better, and even slightly shorter (a mere 150 minutes). Like King Kong, it could have been a lot shorter still. A swordfight inside a waterwheel careering down a hill is amusing for 30 seconds, and mildly impressive for a further minute, and just boring after that. Also like King Kong, there is an extended sequence featuring cannibalistic savages whose language is not translated. This seems an interesting cultural phenomenon: it has been a hundred years or so since such a portrayal has been acceptable: the last time we saw people with bones through their noses, they were appearing alongside Sting being credited with environmental and spiritual wisdom beyond the ken of modern man. They are, in language and dress, clearly 'other' to both European whites and African blacks: one has to wonder whether this straightforward unapologetic demonisation reflects geopolitical nightmares about the Yellow Economic Peril.

Morally, the Pirates film wriggles, attempting to highlight the evil globalisation of (British) (in) justice and economic exploitation to define one set of real baddies. Nice of that little homespun local outfit the Walt Disney Corporation to highlight this.

There are good sequences in the film, but each is too long, and there are far too many: the proliferation of plot twists is not so much confusing as irritating. There is something of the BB7 effect in seeing the return of every major character from the first film, even the dead ones. Can't we move on? The core plot is potentially interesting, an elaboration of a complex mythology around the themes of Davy Jones' Locker and the Flying Dutchman; it's a shame this wasn't more central.

It was also welcome to have both a relatively complex moral stance (few of the characters are straightforwardly good all the time) and an absence of the emotional bullying that is usually part of a blockbuster, where the music forces you to react in a certain way.

The acting is ok, too, although there are a range of styles, from Johnny Depp, who keeps it turned up to 11 almost all the time, Bill Nighy, whose humanity shows through his faceful of tentacles, and Keira Knightley who holds the film's interest for much of its length. When she's not speaking, she's fine, but unfortunately when she is, she seems out of place. Her quiet delivery might be all right in a period film, but here she sounds bored when talking and petulant when shouting.

All in all, I could forgive the film were it not for the last half hour which is an extended set-up for Pirates 3; I recognised this as soon as it happened, since it effectively destroyed any climax to the narrative, the same fault that crippled Back to the Future 2.

Overall: it's no King Kong, but still.

Change and decay 5

I started to work along the shelves, applying numbered Post-It notes to the piles of papers, when I heard the door open behind me.
‘Ah- you must be the archivist.’
I turned round to see a girl in her twenties, gracefully leaning on the doorpost, a quizzical smile on her face.
‘That’s right,’ I replied, ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Helen – didn’t Ma and Pa say? Have you started yet?’
‘Just now, actually – it’ll take a while.’
‘Found any treasures?’ Helen asked, with a glint in her eye.
‘Well, they are all important, in their way.’
‘Even the rubbish?’ Helen laughed, ‘Are you sure?’
I laughed too. ‘We prefer the term “ephemera”, but yes, for now.’
She walked into the room, trailing her hand along the shelf. She walked with a flat-footed gait; I noticed she was wearing frayed ballet pumps. She stared at me for a second.
‘I was expecting someone older, when they said you were coming.’
‘Archivists come in all shapes and sizes, I suppose.’
She shrugged. ‘I hope you don’t find any family secrets.’
She turned to leave with an offhand ‘See you’.
I watched her go, and then went back to work.

Discovering Japan: review of Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation arrived on Film Four laden with praise from intelligent critics. It was something of a surprise, therefore, to find it tedious, mean-spirited and unconvincing, but there you go. Bill Murray hasn't aged well. Whatever cheeky charm his face may have displayed in Ghostbusters had been replaced by a craggy careworn sack by the time of Ghostbusters 2 and Groundhog Day, and he now looks like a well-preserved mummy. His character's annoyance at being mistaken for a contemporary of Sinatra and the 'lat-pack' is therefore undeserved. Incidentally, it does seem unfunny and tactless to attempt to play for humour the fact that an entire nation has learned a foreign language and has some slight difficulty with some of the sounds. Reviews singled out the 'hilarious' scene where Bill has to decipher the photographer's valiant attempts to pronounce names of film stars as the comic highpoint, which might have been warning enough.

Not that it aspires to be a mere comedy: it is a study of character. Well, I don't mind studies of character if they are interesting. Bill's character is lightly drawn as an actor who is less successful than he used to be but still famous, with an unfulfilling home life as husband and father. He looks pained a lot, especially after sleeping with the (awful) cabaret singer, but articulates nothing more than a generic feeling of dissatisfaction.

Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, is also lost, finding that accompanying her new husband to a foreign country while he works is a bit boring, something that years of academic training had failed to prepare her for. She doesn't really 'get' Japan, or at least seems not to: she spends a long time wandering around sampling classical and popular culture with a bemused look on her face, but we don't find out exactly what she thinks. Her background is even vaguer than Bill's: she 'tried writing but hated what she wrote'. Try something else, then?

Everything in the film takes a long time. Sofia Coppola obviously learned from her father that you can't make a film too long. But films shouldn't try to represent boredom by making us share it. What I think Sofia has managed to do is to create an art-movie lite, something that looks and sounds like a serious film but which has no insight to offer. It's dated too: these days, Scarlett would stay in her room, blogging.

Another blogger gets dooced

Petite Anglaise is the latest victim of blogging at or about work. It's not entirely clear on what grounds her employer sacked her: general loss of trust seems to be the line. This is partly because they claim that her blog revealed that she had not given the full reasons for her absence on two occasions. The hysteria of their response is reflected in this: in any other circumstance, an employee would be asked to explain themselves, rather than sacked outright. After all, there is no reason they should be taking the blog as the truth. It is interesting that the fictional case in my radio play Dooced got it so right, down to the creepy sexism of the male managers (not that that requires the skills of Nostradamus). Of course, blogs do frighten people, not least because they know that whatever they say may be used and given in postings, with whatever spin their employee wishes to place upon it. That's also why company hate tribunals: usually they have very tight control on what emerges into the public domain, but you never know what sort of dirty linen or DNA-stained dresses might turn up in the course of public questioning.

Celebrity Titanic: Love Island and the death of ITV

Love Island isn't a very good programme. Even the deluded who convince themselves that BB7 is worth watching know this. Love Island has managed to deliver the lowest ratings in ITV's history, at a time when success was vital for the survival of the company. It may well be that Fearne 'Jonah' Cotton's latest victim will be an entire television channel.

On the otehr hand, it's good news. It goes to show that it is possible to go broke underestimating the taste of the audience. You can imagine the production meetings when they're planning the series:

"The audience love BB when it's drunken fights and sex: so let's give them that all the time. And we'll make sure she get rid of the wrinklies and fatties, cos who wants to see them up close and personal."

Where did they go wrong? Part of it lies in the premise. Although BB's sexual antics achieved some notoriety, what people remember best was not the quick fumbles beneath the sheets, but rather the developing relationships over time between Paul and Helen (Dumber and Dumberer) or Preston and Chantelle, in which sex hardly featured.

ITV has a difficult task, of course. The BBC can roll out its audience-pleasers, safe in the knowledge that its worthy-but-unwatched and edgy-experimental other product can be shown at other times, on other channels. ITV has to get it right all the time, delivering a stream of viewers who can be sold off to advertisers; if noone watches, no money is made. That is why their scheduling is usually completely ruthless: they literally cannot afford to keep showing underperforming series. And why they have risked so much (£20 million) on creating a programme to take on BB and win. Except it hasn't. Even when potentially moderately exciting things happen on Love Island, nobody knows it: the press have lost interest, the public were never interested to start with. I can only assume that the programme hasn't been shifted to 12.30, when they know nobody will be watching, because they realise 1. that any replacement will also come off worse; and 2. an admission of failure of the ITV's trump card will immediately lead to collapse of the share price and a renewed takeover bid.

The sooner they 'fess up and switch to showing Crocodile Dundees and Die Hards in constant rotation, the better.

Change and decay: work in progress 4

I opened the door and breathed in slowly. This was the bit of my job I loved. Archivists have the reputation of being fussy or authoritarian, protecting their collections from users. But this is just a product of their role – they are responsible for the safety of the archives. If somebody damages a document, then to them it is an accident; to the archivist it is a failure. Not surprisingly, archivists end up being cautious: everything is done according to the rules, documented, carefully; this makes it hard to go wrong. Except now. Before anything had been listed, counted, described – here I could devalue the collection in minutes by rearranging things. As it stood now, the records room’s organisation reflected the process of managing the estate: documents were field together because they were used together. So, before moving any of the bundles, piles, boxes, and (in the corner) heaps of paper that filled very flat or near-flat surface in the room, I walked along, mentally classifying them into types: legal documents, business letters, accounts, and, most common of all, general miscellaneous. All administrators seem to grasp the first principle of record management: keep all the papers you might need. The second, keeping them organised, was usually beyond them.

The revenger's comedy: interpreting The Information by Martin Amis (1995)

I

The plot of The Information is essentially simple; Richard, unsuccessful novelist and book reviewer, attempts to wreak revenge on his friend Gwyn, unaccountably successful novelist. Richard enlists the aid of Scozzy, a self-styled wild boy and drug dealer, to deliver physical punishments escalating in seriousness; after a tour of America in which Richard’s unsellable unreadable novel literally threatens the life of Gwyn and himself by causing a near-crash in a light plane, their relationship changes, and Gwyn loses the inhibitions resulting from his previous envy of Richard. Scozzy’s assaults prove counter-productive: only Richard suffers.

Even in this bald summary, it is clear that the book is much more than the story of two men, although you wouldn’t know this from the reviews it received at the time. This may have been because those reviewing it in Little Magazines were being cautious, since the book is scathing about the quality of British reviewing and questions the entire edifice of modern literary journalism.

II

The rivalry between Richard and Gwyn had a real-life equivalent in the friendship and sporting contests between Julian Barnes and MA which had run from their student days into adult life. Although MA has argued often that it is the job of writers to invent their fictions, he has often used real life as a source, in The Rachel Papers (teenager attending crammer school to get into Oxford), Success (art gallery assistant), Dead Babies (weekend of disasters with various friends and couples), and Money (screenplay writing in America). Since in The Information almost all description adopts the viewpoint of Richard, it is easy to assume that he represents MA (there are short passages where the narrator shifts to cover Scozzy and Gwyn, and MA appears speaking for himself briefly). This lazy equivalence is perhaps justified by MA’s ascription to Richard of his own experiences, including being given a set of bound volumes of the little magazine when he left, and seeing someone reading his book on an Underground train.

The book proved prophetic in its treatment of the other characters: the Julian Barnes friendship ended in the gap between Amis finishing the draft text and its being published, as a result of MA’s decision to drop Pat Kavanagh, Julian’s wife, as his agent. Agents too, particularly lazy agents, have a hard time in the book, particularly Gal Aplanap. MA does not reveal how much he drew on this event in finalising his text, but the rivalry, and its revelation as being not friendly but unfriendly, is structural. So much so that it seems legitimate to wonder whether the strength of Barnes’ reaction was partly in response to what must have read like a barely-veiled critique of his person and work (although it is doubtful that anyone would call his novels unliterary, Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for a Booker prize, after all).

So rivalry is a theme, but not the main one. Richard himself says so: “Gwyn didn’t do it. The world did it.” (p. 140). It takes him a long time to realise that his campaign against fate is therefore aimed at the wrong target.


III
The novel ends with a paragraph which has been criticised as being meaningless or pretentious; but it provides, through back-references to previous events, an abstracted argument, a summary of ‘what the novel is trying to say’ (although Richard gives such questions short shrift: ‘It’s not trying to say anything. It’s saying it. […] It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn’t put it any other way’. (p. 340).

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. [1] Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. [2] Every morning, we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. [3] Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. [4] Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. [5] Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. [6] The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. [7] And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night. [8]

1 The Man in the Moon appears on p. 476 The Man in the Moon dates back to the time when humanity thought itself the centre of the universe; as we get older, we move towards knowing that we are temporary and unimportant; and we know we get older because policeman, doctors, professors even, look young.

2. Tempus fugit. Who has ever needed a skull as a memento mori? Who could forget?

3 This sentence appears on p. 197. We live with decay and dissolution; time’s arrow only points one way.

4 The critic is mentioned on pp. 432 and 476; he has lost his place in the world, his purpose, sidetracked by excess, and no longer matters to anyone.

5 The nun appears on pp. 213, 221 and 413. Why should anyone beware a nun? Partly because they act as a warning: they leave noone behind; but mostly I think because they know something. They already know the information, and accepted it: they are stronger than you.

6 The man at the callbox has cropped up on pp. 46 and 447-8. He is the man without home or family, desperately phoning around to find someone so that he doesn’t have to face death alone.

7 The planesaw whines on p. 172, as one of the urban sounds (although there is no such thing as a planesaw), reflecting the absence of community, the lack of fellow-feeling characteristic of modern life.

8 This sentence appears on p. 452.

It is clear from this analysis that the paragraph is carefully written, and, since it runs through the book, it follows that the novel as a whole is, too. Its style is a little flashy, but that is compensated by sentences, whole pages, of such beauty and clarity that the reader pauses in astonishment. This does some violence to credible characterisation, unfortunately: it is hard to believe that someone who thinks and speaks as eloquently as Richard does should write novels whose highest praise was that ‘nobody was sure they weren’t shit’, and it is notable that dim bland Gwyn and mad Scozzer share a common interior language with Richard, and MA.


IV
So what is the information? The more astute of the reviewers says that it is death, but they are wrong. If the novel were about death, it would treat it more seriously: Anstice and Richard’s doctor are despatched quickly, simply, as jokes. Demi’s father, whose gradual decline in a rotting mansion is described, parodying Catholic Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, is also killed in a sentence. It is not death as such; the information is the knowledge of one’s own mortality. The world is telling you to start saying goodbye, to prepare in the face of inevitable, increasing humiliation.

Without blunting the force of this message, MA does suggest what can help in this task: love, children, and humour; throughout the book, these are quietly advanced as moral markers, good in themselves, and signifiers of goodness. Gwyn’s novels are shown to be bad partly by being humourless; Gwyn’s refusal to have children defines him as bad; Gwyn’s turning away from love is his badness. Because of this, MA is able to end his novel with Richard in what by any objective standard is a worse place than where he started, but being credibly happier all the same.

BB goes off the boil

As T S Eliot says, human kind cannot bear very much reality (Burnt Norton) , and he was of course thinking of BB 7 and Love Island (not Celebrity Love Island, as we shall see).

Big Brother, despite the media hysteria it has engendered, has singularly failed so far to drum up any great enthusiasm in its audience. Watercooler television it is not. You can imagine the producers find this hard to believe: have they not provided madness, surgery-enhanced breasts, screaming fits, and various near-couplings? Well, yes, and more than enough. But BB has also overpacked the house with too many too similar people, and by the tedious and unoriginal second house concept has meant that we still have almost as many inmates as we started with. The main interest as the series develops is usually the interplay between tensions within the house leading to nominations, and then the judgement of the public on those chosen. BB has ridden roughshod over both elements, and there is much less interest in watching the arbitrary acts of an absolute tyrant. Nevertheless, BB has proved a ratings juggernaut, presumably because its target audience, the young, are too lazy, drunk, drugged or stupid to consider doing anything other than watching.

It remains to be seen whether Love Island urges them to turn over. I hope not, but that’s probably because I find the prurience of promoting on-screen sex as the sole purpose for a show distasteful. It is by now established that any discussion of Celebrity programmes must include a joke about Z listers, but I shall break that rule and instead provide a catalogue raisonee of my classification of celebrities:

A superstars whose fame and influence is so great that they can use it to succeed in fields far divorced from their initial area of success (ie Arnie moves from bodybuilding through barely coherent acting to running the world’s fifth biggest economy)
B stars who rule their chosen realm but fail when they move outside it (Neil Young filmmaker, Bob Dylan actor)
C stars who have had a varied career but are mainly associated with one key role (most of the cast of The Bill who started off in soaps)
D stars whose fame is based solely on their one major role (one-hit-wonders)
E other actors (etc) who wouldn’t be famous at all if were not for their extracurricular activities (I’m sure no-one would remember Daniella Westbrook at all if she hadn’t dissolved her nose in cocaine)
F other actors who never made it to fame
G people associated peripherally with F-listers (glamour models, promotion models)
H lovers and children of stars, who achieve fame due to media notoriety
I lovers and children of near stars who achieve fame due to media notoriety
J lovers and children who never achieve fame
K relatives of J listers


This makes some sort of sense to me. So, let’s look at the Love Island line-up. By my count, the highest anyone can get is D (ex-reality), with most in G-H. In some ways this hardly matters, if the series is seen as reality. There is however something much more interesting about Celebrity reality, because it gives an unusual view of people who have an established public persona already. People may well have suspected previously that George Galloway was a pompous bully, or Michael Barrymore was a needy paranoid, or Faria Alam was a manipulative self-publicist, but now they could test this perception, and find out, well, that they were right.

ITV are desperate to turn Love Island into the hit of the summer, having seen their audience, and advertising revenue falling for years. In the absence of positive press (you might say that since the filming is so remote, there was no prospect of bargaining by granting better access), they have persuaded a producer to blog for the Guardian.

The live reality plays directly into my office and I watch as the celebrity stand-ins getting ready for bed. Two snuggle up and I try to imagine how much more interesting it will be when the real celebs are in there in less than a week's time.

Not more interesting at all. And what do you mean, ‘real celebs’? My basic definition of a celebrity is someone you recognize without being told who they area. These you don’t recognise even after you’ve been told.

Sandi Thom: I wish I was a PR man with money in the bank

Her CD has a sticker: "The singer who webcast to the world from her Tooting basement". It is becoming clear that, far from being an impoverished artist using new technology to reach an audience, her success is a triumph of conventional marketing. The webcasts were effectively showcase gigs intended to garner major label interest, after last year's small-label release failed to get any higher than No. 55 despite Radio 2 airplay. The vagueness of ST and her backers about the numbers of viewers of the webcast smacks of fiction: if there really were 70,000 (or, later, 40,000) people tuning in having picked up on an Internet buzz, it is astonishing that so few blogged about it, mentioned in on a website measured by Technorati, or visited her MySpace site: the Internet buzz followed the press reports, not the other way round. It looks as if she used the webcast angle as a way of making unverifiable claims for popularity in order to get the labels hungry. They did, and RCA (or rather Sony BMG, trading as RCA) eventually snapped her up.

Her current success has been driven partly by expensive PR: when was the last time a debut (or 'debut') single was released (re-released) with two weeks of TV adverts? But more than that, there has been the collusion of the press, which has picked up on the webcast thing and given her massive exposure in the print media. A little digging, or even the application of memory or common sense, would have led to a more critical approach, but everyone seems to have concluded, with the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty valance, that given the choice of telling the truth or printing the legend, you should print the legend.

The 'new star created by the Internet' story is a popular one, one that people keep trying to foist on any act with enough savvy to register their own web domain. I think the appeal lies in the Cinderella myth: the daydream that someone can become rich and famous overnight, without having paid any dues. ST has been plugging away for years, touring, recording, session singing, but that's not what people want: they want Chantelle success, similar to the daydream you enjoy in the period between buying a lottery ticket and finding out you haven't won. This is nothing new: when video first came along, Toni Basil found instant stardom (although Wikipedia tells me that her first single was recorded 15 years before 'Hey Mickey'); when Paul Macartney 'discovered' Mary Hopkin, she was already an experienced and well-trained singer in the Welsh music scene.

What is perhaps surprising is the fury that ST's success has unleashed. The air is thick with complaints about a 'cynical marketing ploy', a phrase that has always seemed to me to be redundant: what, you mean it isn't a good old philanthropic altruistic marketing ploy? Yet those who continue to be amazed at the antics of the music business always seem to forget the 'business' part. Music involves money. I can remember one rock god saying despairingly that you could tell you had made it when you were employing people you didn't even know about. Music is expensive. Mainstream acts can revel in this: the manufactured nature of the Spice Girls, Westlife, the Sugababes is part of the fun. But for left-field acts you're supposed to ignore it, so that U2, the Rolling Stones, Sting, retain some credibility (or are supposed to) while also raking in money faster than many small countries. Again, this is nothing new: Pink Floyd appeared in the 60s on the Harvest label, an EMI owned company which was intended to obscure the corporate nature of the organisation behind the band.

It would of course be totally cynical to suggest that the press gave the Sandi story such an easy ride because Sony BMG places so much advertising in their papers. It wasn't like that in '69 or '77. Except it was- as Patrik Fitzgerald said at the time, it was "Come and get your punk in Woolworth's / Bondage trousers - twelve pounds" (Make it safe).

I was going to put a link to Sandi Thom's website, but then I thought, 'Why should I? She never links to mine!' (Copyright the estate of Spike Milligan) Her website needs Flash to view it. These crazy web nuts!


Update

Sandi appeared on BBC Radio 4's arts magazine, Front Row, on Wednesday 19/7/06, and was asked specifically about the webcast/PR controversy. She said the whole 'penniless songwriter' thing had come from the press, not from her, since she acknowldedges she had the backing of a small record label, a management company and a PR firm before the Tooting webcasts started. This is a little disingenuous, since her she has certainly seemed keen to emphasise the squalor of the 'piss-stained basement', as if to imply that she had no backing. Quized about the webcast audience figures, she preferred to talk about how cool it was that people [however many there were] were viewing from all over the world. That doesn't impress me much: even this humble blog is regularly visited by sleepless people in Southeast Asia who want to know what "Blowin' in the Wind" means , or about megalomaniacs. Sher did end by endorsing the Web as a place where people can say what they think, which is good in its way, I suppose.

Bob Dylan and the Dead Sea Scrolls

"You gotta heed the Teacher of Righteousness
If you want to know the Way
The Wicked Priest's a spouter of lies
You can't belie-ee-eeve him when he prays"

Could be a John Wesley Harding , Slow Train Coming or Infidels outtake, but in fact has been cobbled together by me: the phrases in bold are from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Chronicles Vol. 1, and elsewhere, he has made it clear that he doesn't (as most of his commentators imply) sit down with his reference books around him and laboriously construct his songs like a crossword. Instead, he simply inhales a wide range of cultural sources and leaves them to emerge from his unconscious. But for all four of the key elements of the Scrolls texts to reflect so closely his concerns is evidence enough for me that he has at some point come across them.

BB7- the revenge of the housemates

I await with interest the Endemol producers' verdict on this series' selection process: were these really the most psychologically suited 12 people in Britain? Bizarrely, as series runs into series, while the viewing trend is generally down, the number of would-be participants continues to rise, even though it should by now be clear that even winning cannot provide lasting fame or even notoriety.

Previous series have provided most interest in demonstrating the Stockholm syndrome, as the housemates became institutionalised and came to identify with BB who exerted arbitrary power over them. This time around, it's more the Stanford Prison Experiment, as the group divided immediately into two factions and the dominant group then savagely attacked any non-conforming individuals. This might be seen as depressing, especially since many of the silent majority might be expected in other circumstances to protest against such victimisation. The risk, of course, is that to do so is to become a target oneself. But all this really shows is that tolerance is not a 'natural' product of human society: it has to be fought for.

But one has to wonder at those who volunteer to effectively be imprisoned for 3 months, with a group of unknown and possibly hostile co-prisoners, at the mercy of a capricious authority with the power to control sleep, food, and clothing. In the past, resistance by the inmates has been limited to arguing with Big Brother and refusing to cooperate in tasks. By definition, these fail. This time, the three walkers have shown the way. Rather than face the full-length ordeal, or the humiliation of public eviction, they have simply walked out once they recognised that they could achieve no more. Unless BB starts to substantially reward all those who stay the course, or really lock them up, then the merry-go-round of bringing in new housemates to replace the walked will become a standard feature of the series.

There has been some discussion about how to make the concept more interesting (now it is clear that 20s wannabe celebrities have no ability at all to say anything worth hearing), and one aspect that hasn't been explored is the exploitation of the isolation from the external world. For example, it would be very funny (for us) if, as a special concession, details of England's triumphant World Cup campaign were to be provided, so that when the victors emerge from the house, they are mystified at the despondency of the crowd who watched the early departure from the contest at the hands of plucky Trinidad. Or if BB were to announce that a Bird Flu outbreak in the vicinity meant that they would have to take all sorts of precautions, check for symptoms etc. Now that would be worth watching.

Global warming and the madness of crowds

Tolstoy:
"At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second." (War and Peace, Book X Chapter XVII).