My top 10 pop guilty pleasures

I'm finally getting around to publishing this top 10 list, after talking about it for weeks if not months. Putting together this list made me realise how subjective the concept of a guilty pleasure is. You might think that Chic and Abba are guilty pleasures, but as far as I'm concerned, if it belongs on the dance floor, then I'm not going to feel so much as a pang of guilt any time soon.

So here goes, in no particular order except that number 1 truly belongs at the top...

01. Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra- YouTube
02. Make me smile - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - YouTube
03. Blue Savannah song - Erasure - YouTube
04. Ruby don't take your love to town - Kenny Rogers - YouTube
05. Copacabana - Barry Manilow - YouTube
06. Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty - Listen on YouTube
07. Save a prayer - Duran Duran - YouTube
08. American Pie - Don McLean - YouTube
09. Nights in white satin - Moody Blues - YouTube
10. Breakfast in America - Supertramp - YouTube

The Cult of the Amateur

The 2004 O’Reilly-hosted FOO Camp (“countercultural Sixties meets the free-market Eighties meets the technophile Nineties”) is where Andrew Keen experienced a life-changing epiphany. As attendees proclaimed the democratisation of “media, information, knowledge, content, audience, author” by Web 2.0, and the demotion of “big experts” to “noble amateurs”, Keen was seized by a strong sense of unease that led to the writing of The Cult of the Amateur – an expose of the consequences of Web 2.0, the unleashing of user-generated content and the disintermediation of society’s cultural gatekeepers. As a consequence of this process, Keen argues, we can expect information to become steadily less reliable and more chaotic.

Most of us are aware of the devastation being wrought in industries such as music and newspapers. Keen argues that as professional content creators are forced to compete economically with free content, there are simply less resources with which to generate high quality creative works. As he says:

To make a top-quality recording today… an “exquisitely slow and detailed album… ideally would take a full year and, given the price of top contemporary musicians, could cost a million dollars. But this kind of investment… can’t be earned back in a market where people are buying fewer and fewer compact discs. So recording artists necessarily compromise their music because it is not economically viable to hire the best musicians and take enough time making the recording.

He also defends professional journalism, arguing forcibly that at best, citizen journalism can only ever complement professional journalism unless we are to resign ourselves to second-rate poorly-informed information:

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent of the Independent newspaper, for example, didn’t hatch from some obscure blog – they acquired their in-depth knowledge of the Middle East by spending years in the region.

Despite my reservations around the record of professional journalists for delivering a consistently in-depth and accurate view of conflicts such as the second Gulf War (weren't they essentially spoon-fed information from the military?), or the political demonstrations of the
past in which numbers were consistently under-reported, for example, I think that his arguments around the importance of professional journalism are important, not only in intellectual but also in democratic terms.

I’m hugely sympathetic with Keen at a cultural level. I hate the thought of snippets of content becoming so prevalent that people no longer read a book in a linear fashion – have we collectively thought about the intellectual consequences of this? And I do share his nostalgia for Tower Records – in my case based in Piccadilly Circus, just round the corner from Haymarket in London, where I worked for years in my 20s. Yes it sometimes feels like the soul has been taken out of music. Stuart Maconie recently reported on radio 2 that over 40% of people no longer listen to a complete musical track let alone album – they get what they want from it emotionally, and then move on. What room is there for the pop grower, let alone the complexity of classical or operatic works?

But, on the other hand, not everyone had access to the rich variety of music on offer at Tower Records in LA or London, whereas now the cultural divide between kids in Manchester and kids in, say, the Lake District, must surely be narrowing as access to culture levels off with ubiquitous internet availability.

He makes a very very important point with regard to Web 2.0 user-generated content, namely that it is to a great extent dependent on professionally produced content i.e. it’s highly derivative, and yet it is simultaneously destroying that content.

So basically, at the level of description at least, I find much to applaud in The Cult of the Amateur. And that’s really what I expected from this book. I truly expected to identify some sort of soul sibling who shared my commitment to ensuring intellectual integrity in a Web 2.0 context, but who nevertheless espoused new technologies in terms of their potential for furthering human progress.

However early on in the book I started to get a bit concerned. It started here, in the introduction:

It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids.

Plus…

…if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece.

And…

… instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many of them with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

References to “mob rule” and comparisons of human beings with monkeys seemed to me to be a highly elitist and dangerously anti-human articulation of concerns around cultural decline. Why is Keen deploying such unattractive arguments? Personally I’d say it’s a consequence of the overall faultiness of his critique. Keen argues that reasoned informed analysis is now in short supply, as we become swamped with inexpert user-generated content. Yes, Web 2.0 may have exacerbated that trend, and it has certainly surfaced it. But is Web 2.0 really to blame? Did
some golden era of informed analysis come abruptly to an end in 2004 when a bunch of moneyed Californian geeks (that most of us have never heard of) went off camping together?

Keen’s deepest concern is a feeling that truth itself is under threat:

This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse,
encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity.
When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between
fact and fiction becomes blurred.

Surely Keen can’t be arguing that the “undermining of truth” began with the inception of Web 2.0 technologies? I’m no expert on philosophy, but didn’t cultural relativism start to gather force way back almost half a century ago in the 1960s? Yet he does seem to be saying that:

Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus
two equals five, then two plus two does equal five.

The problem is that by failing to trace back intellectual trends historically, Keen seems to be leading us irresistibly to the conclusion that only Web 2.0 can be the cause. Isn’t it more helpful,
though, to see Web 2.0 as a phenomenon that became technically feasible precisely at a point in history where humanity’s uncertainty about its mission has deepened over a period of time, and society has fragmented to the point that:

every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is
just another person’s version of the facts.

So I see the value in Keen’s descriptions of the web’s impact in areas such as music, industry and books. But I’m less certain about his ability to analyse that impact in terms of underlying causes and forces at play.

It’s a very enjoyable and engaging read though. The sheer vitriol is immensely entertaining, not to say refreshing in this politically correct world in which so many of us shy away from forthright statements of conviction.

But towards the end I came to understand that it wasn’t just the analysis that was a problem. Many of my disagreements are rooted in the fact that Keen’s motives for writing the book were at variance from my motives for reading it. When Keen writes that “our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur”, I perceive that
his interests are too narrow to enable him to write the book I want him to write.

It is surely time to examine dispassionately at the broadest level what is gained and what is lost with user-generated content. But maybe that will only become possible once we collectively re-engage with the realm of ideas and re-gain an understanding of what we need them for.

Food for thought from a virgin grazer

I was out with my new friend Jason Smith at Jyoti's on Wednesday (we're planning to set up a Birmingham Salon in conjunction with the Institute of Ideas). Because Jason reads a lot about food, I mentioned the craze that's been sweeping Talis for some time now - namely Graze. For the uninitiated, it's a service delivering a daily box of healthy snacks that costs about £3 a day. I told him that my colleague Grant White started subscribing at the beginning of this week, and that I was monitoring him carefully to see whether he survived the vertiginous drop of food intake.

By coincidence, our colleague Zach Beauvais went off on leave the following day, and forgot to cancel his Graze subscription. So he kindly emailed me and invited me to treat myself to the contents of his Graze box. I'd brought in food for that day so I saved the box for today.

I was pretty nervous, I don't mind admitting, at the thought of surviving a whole working day on only three slices of pineapple, a small portion of "fire nuts" and an even smaller portion of cashew nuts. For good measure, I took along a small banana and a raspberry yogurt to supplement what seemed like a draconian quantity of food.

For breakfast I had what I always have - two boiled eggs and a glass of cloudy apple juice. I had the banana at about 10, and around that time I started eating the fire nuts, about two at a time. By 13:50, I'd finished the fire nuts and eaten 1 of the 3 slices of pineapple. I was stunned to report to my best friend Sandra, who's taking quite an interest in this experiment, that I was feeling completely full and wouldn't be able to eat a thing for the next hour at least.

So it's now 17:15. The pineapple is now gone but most of the cashew nuts remain uneaten. And the yogurt's still in the fridge.

My usual habit is to eat a banana at around 10. Then at 12 I have a (home-made) tortilla wrap containing iceberg lettuce, red onion, red pepper, rather a lot of Pizza Express salad dressing and tuna. By 16:00 I tend to be pretty ravenous and eat a yogurt to try to stave off a trip upstairs to the Talis staff tuck shop for the ever-tempting packet of Walkers crisp.

This previously vocal cynic of the whole Graze thing is starting to get impressed. I'm only slightly hungry, so I'm probably going to tuck into the yogurt. I might take the nuts to the pub.

Dave and I are having an austerity year - saving up to do everything that needs to be done around the house. Hence the home-made lunches. It's simply not an option to spend £3 a day on an ongoing basis. However, going down the Graze route for a month before our trip to France, land of eternally skinny women, is starting to look attractive. Would I spend £60 to lose half a stone before my holiday? This "pleasantly plump" Angl0-Saxon 40-something wouldn't hesitate.

100 Spanish-speaking writers choose the 100 books that changed their lives

Last year I, in common with other Talis employees, posted a list of 100 important novels. This time I'm posting another list which is similar but different. It too is a list of books, but this one is of interest because it reveals to me how Anglocentric I can be in my reading. Maybe other people will experience a similar realisation when they read this list and will broaden their cultural horizons as a result. That could only be a good thing. It was published in El Pais magazine last August. I generally score highly in this kind of list, as I'm quite well read. I also speak fluent Spanish. And yet I've only read 18 of them and a good few I'd never even heard of. It's always good to be jolted out of complacency. I accept that the list has a strong European bias.

1. Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes

2. In search of lost time - Marcel Proust

3. The Odyssey - Homer

4. The trial - Franz Kafka

5. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

8. Selected stories - Anton Chekhov

9. War and peace - Leo Tolstoy

10 - Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

11. Poet in New York - Federico Garcia Lorca

12. The brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

13. Crime and punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

14. The bible

15. The magic mountain - Thomas Mann

16. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo

17. Ulysses - James Joyce

18. The sound and the fury - William Faulkner

19. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

20. 1001 Arabian nights

21. Under the volcano - Malcolm Lowry

22. The death of Virgil - Hermann Broch

23. Essays - Michel Montaigne

24. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

25. The red and the black - Stendhal

26. The Aleph - Jorge Borges

27. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

28. The heart is a lonely hunter - Carson McCullers

29. Heart of darkness - Joseph Conrad

30. The flowers of evil - Charles Baudelaire

31. The banquet - Plato

32. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger

33. A sentimental education - Gustave Flaubert

34. Duino elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke

35. Rhymes and legends - Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

36. This business of living - Cesare Pavese

37. The book of disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

38. Complete works - Jorge Luis Borges

39. Thus spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche

40. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

41. Rayuela - Julio Cortazar

42. Fortunata and Jacinta - Benito Perez Galdos

43. Extraordinary stories - Edgar Allan Poe

44. The city and the dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa

45. The waste land - T.S.Eliot

46. Metamorphoses - Ovid

47. Poems - Emily Dickinson

48. King Lear - William Shakespeare

49. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

50. Trilce - Cesar Vallejo

51. The outsider - Albert Camus

52. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

53. Odes - Horace

54. The long goodbye - Raymond Chandler

55. The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

56. The shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti

57. The first man - Albert Camus

58. The maker - Jorge Luis Borges

59 100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

60. The divine comedy - Dante Alighieri

61. La Regenta - Leopoldo Alas Clarin

62. The waves - Virginia Woolf

63. As I lay dying - William Faulkner

64. The diaries of Franz Kafka

65. Celestina - Fernando de Rojas

66. Richard The Third - William Shakespeare

67. Residence on Earth - Pablo Neruda

68. Demian - Hermann Hesse

69. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

70. Conversation in the cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa

71. Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen

72. The leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

73. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad

74. Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous

75. Journey to the end of the night - Louis Ferdinand Celine

76. Canto General - Pablo Neruda

77. The Iliad - Homer

78. Bohemian lights - Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan

79. The war of the end of the world - Mario Vargas Llosa

80. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

81. Aphorisms - G.C. Lichtenberg

82. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx

83. Mortal and Rose - Francisco Umbral

84. Dubliners - James Joyce

85. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. Peter Pan - James Matthew Barrie

87. Sonnets - Quevedo

88. Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter - Maria Vargas Llosa

89. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

90. The Alexandria quartet - Lawrence Durrell

91. The fall - Albert Camus

92. Orlando - Virginia Woolf

93. The unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro

94. Time and space - Juan Ramon Jimenez

95. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

96. The garden of the Finzi-Contini - Giorgio Bassani

97. The wild palms - William Faulkner

98. Stone and country - Gabriel Aresti

99. Complete works - Pio Baroja

100. The second sex - Simone de Beauvoir

Our Friends in the North

Months ago my colleague Karen Reece lent me the DVD of Our Friends in the North and it languished on my shelf for so long that I had to email her at one point to reassure her that I hadn't appropriated it. I knew I was going to love it but Dave had to be convinced (he has occasional laggard tendencies - not that I can talk: OFITN was first shown back in 1996!). A few days ago we got around to watching the first episode, and Dave pronounced himself "completely hooked" within the first 10 minutes. On Friday we watched the second episode before we went out (as a result we didn't leave the house until 10.30pm), and then came home early, an hour later to watch the third episode, maybe pissing off some of our social circle in the process.

Our Friends in the North is one of those TV dramas to which the term "landmark" is routinely applied. The story centres on four friends whom we first see in Newcastle in the prime of their youth as they make choices that will influence the rest of their lives. The first three episodes, which as I say we've now seen, take place in the 1960s, switching between Newcastle and London as we follow the lives of the main characters (acted by four now household names -Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, Christopher Eccleston and Mark Strong). The story will continue right up to 1995, giving it an impressive historical scope as well as a compelling narrative.

Dave and I are both well into our 40s now so "retro" is often stuff that we can remember from first time around. The first episode, then, set in 1964, made us feel really young because I hadn't been born and Dave was only 3, and as a result, the cultural references mean very little to us. This is a good thing, not least because the kind of cheesy quality that has become commonplace in depictions of the 1960s, and (especially) the 1970s, is entirely absent.

The four friends are still living in their family terraced houses in 1964; the brother of Mary (Gina McKee) is mentally and physically disabled, but whereas in the first episode he's cheerful and chatty in the family living room, by the second episode (1966), he's become so ill as a result of living in Mary's damp high-rise flat, that he's unable to speak or even raise a smile. For some reason, this has really lingered with me, and has made me reflect on the bumpy road to progress that the British working class endured in the 20th century. Indeed, at least part of the success of the drama can be attributed to a tightly integrated socio-economic backdrop to the story which is extremely well realised and apparently so accurate in its representation of real historical figures that there was a strong possibility of litigation.

We tend to cariacature the 1960s as a golden era of promise and prosperity, but in fact my Dad's family were living in housing that was more appropriate to the 19th century than the second half of the 20th (my Dad's words not mine). My parents bought a house in Radcliffe, Lancashire just before they married in 1963. They didn't move in until after the wedding (because you didn't then) so at the weekends, Dad used to go over and do DIY and decorate the place on his own. I remember him telling me of the joy with which he'd run a bath before going home, and lie in his own bath, finally able to control his own hot and cod water taps and stay in there as long as he liked. He and his family had never had a bath in their own home, and at the family's weekly visit to the public baths had always had to ask the attendant for more hot water. Years later, I dated a musician who was quite a bit older than me, and he told me what a great experience he'd had going to a public bath and having to ask for hot water. I remember thinking - you middle class twat. See "Common People" by Pulp for further details.

At the beginning of the 1970s, my Nana, who had recently become widowed, moved from 16 Johnson Street in Lower Broughton, Salford, to a newly constructed high rise called Greyfriars Court. I personally remember this as a very happy period. Nana was in a first floor flat with a balcony, and it seemed that every Sunday afternoon when we went over to visit, there was something new in the flat, often the kind of cheap ornament that kids love. It occurs to me now, watching OFITN, that some lessons might have been learnt from the Newcastle experience, as Nana, to my knowledge, never had any damp or structural problems in her flat.

So Nana's move always felt like progress to me, but I was too young to know how happy or otherwise my Nana (or indeed the rest of the family) felt about it, and that leads me in a roundabout way to another impressive quality of OFITN, namely that it's rarely clear-cut in its observations. Mary is extremely bright and is starting a university course in 1964, but by 1966 she's married with a child to Tosker (Mark Strong). Just when you're thinking how trapped and compromised she is in an empty marriage, there's a powerfully scene in which genuine love is revealed. Following 4 characters over a period of 3 decades gives ample scope to explore the nuances and ambiguities of the finely drawn characters and their relationships.

We can't wait to watch the rest of it, and if you've never seen it, try and borrow Karen's copy!

Flasher at large

After a chore-packed morning I logged onto Twitter to be confronted by multiple tweets proclaiming how beautiful the day was. Everyone seemed to be outdoors except me. So after lunch, a little neighbourhood walk with Dave was in order.

We can only have been five minutes into the walk, and we were already ambling along the River Cole, which we're lucky enough to have at the bottom of our road. As we approached Sarehole Mill (see pic), we were jolted out of our mid-afternoon reverie by some sort of fracas between a couple of men on the other side of the "river" (at the risk of compromising my neighbourhood pride, it's really more like a stream - I think I jumped it once when I was out running). My initial impression, as I focused on the situation at hand, was that they might be drunk, but in any case there was something so aggressive about the situation that I was immediately ill at ease. I smiled one of those smiles that says please don't involve me in your drama and prepared to move on, but Dave had already started to engage with them. On our side of the river there wasn't just me and Dave - there was also a family of about 6 children with their mother. I was sure that at least two of the children were laughing. I turned to the men. One of the men, who was holding the other man down, told Dave, in the midst of a seemingly unstoppable rant, that the other man had been flashing his penis to the children, but was defending himself by claiming that he was actually taking a piss. He was clearly a paedophile, the man said (ranted). Dave calmly asked whether the police had been called, to which the answer was yes. When I looked back at the children, I realised that two of them were crying their eyes out, and as their Mum moved them on, they called out to their Dad, the ranter on the other side of the river.

We passed the mill and crossed over the road, and then before we proceeded with the rest of the walk, Dave stopped and went into self-doubt mode. "Have you got your phone on you?" he asked. Neither of us had brought our phones out. It's a new sort of downturn thing with me that I delight in leaving the house with as few possessions (generally money but other stuff as well) as possible. We wondered whether the man had really phoned the police. We agonised, like the couple of middle class liberals that we are, as to whether we should go back and confront the situation. We worried that the man was going to beat the living crap out of the suspected paedophile.

Above all, however, we questioned whether the man really was the paedophile he was accused of being. He looked like a middle-aged homeless man who might well have been relieving himself after an afternoon of drinking. On the other hand, it could have been more sinister. We waited for a while but the police didn't turn up, for whatever reason.

When I was little, one of my friends was a girl called Katie Warford and she lived on Church Lane in Ashton-on-Mersey. She would delight in recounting to me that the old man in the big house down the road would stand at his front door every Sunday morning and expose himself to all the church-goers passing by. We both thought it was hilarious. We were 10.

Thinking back then to this afternoon's incident, was it really the flasher that had upset those children, or was it in fact the angry reaction of their father and the intensely disruptive effect it was having on an otherwise playful and harmonious afternoon? Does the media's treatment of paedophilia prevent us from taking a measured approach, and in turn, is this causing children even more harm on top of problem itself (horrific though the problem unquestionably is)?

Dave and I copped out of the situation in the end. I argued that I had enough problems of my own without taking on someone else's as well - a position I've pretty much maintained since I intervened in an argument at a party when I was 21 and by some miracle survived the vicious assault that ensued.

My Top 10 experiences of 2008

Along the lines of what Dave and I do every New Year's Eve, here's my favourite experiences of the year, in no particular order...

1. Re-establishing contact with my Spanish friends (lived in Santiago de Compostela in 1985) by bumping into Karen (see pic, second left) in the Modus Vivendi bar, Santiago. Thanks to Dave for giving me the space to catch up properly, and a special mention to Tito (aka Andres Pineiro on left) for travelling from El Ferrol with a day's notice to see me. I was so happy that I sat in the cathedral one day and cried. Also on the picture - Carlos.

2. Seeing David Tennant play Hamlet (my favourite play) at Stratford-upon-Avon, October, with Sandra.

3. My presentation at the ER&L Conference, Atlanta, is a resounding success, in March. Plus I make friends with the indomitable Christine Orr and we dine at Mary Mac's Tea Room - truly a unique experience.

4. The highlight of my first trip to New York at Easter with Dave is drinking cocktails at the Flat Iron Lounge, an Art Deco extravaganza.

5. Sandra and I throw a fantastic party in the room above Patrick Kavanagh pub, Kings Heath, in October. Jo, Alistair and Bill all stay over.

6. Dave and I become very good friends with our neighbours Andy and Helen over the course of the year. One particular highlight is the neighbourhood barbecue in our communal back lane in August.

7. Another great year for the national schools competition, Debating Matters. As inspiring and energising as ever.

8. My headaches become manageable for the first time in 15 years.

9. I run the 10K Great Manchester Run effortlessly in May, and enjoy the whole experience.

10. Dave and I have a fab time at Fiona's 40th in September (see previous post), staying out until 4.30am with Fiona and her friends Ros and Ben.