Thursday, 31 December 2009
Highlights of 2009
1. Dave and I made a decision in January that 2009 would be the year of home improvements. As such, there've been no weekends away, no spectacularly expensive holidays, and very little in the way of fine dining - our usual avenues of extravagance. However the house now looks fantastic and we're totally in love with it. There are still things to do and buy - but aren't there always? It's been totally worth the lifestyle austerity of the first half of the year in particular.
2. This year was a great year for live music, one great reason for living in the UK, imo. The best live act I saw this year was The Leisure Society at The Glee Club in Birmingham (which provides a much more relaxed experience with live music than it does with comedy). The concert that meant most to me though was Magazine at the Manchester Academy, in company with what seemed like the whole of the Mancunian punk generation. Sound quality could have been better (and that's not the fault of the venue) but it was still a great experience, given that they're my all-time favourite band, and they split up in 1981, when I was only 16 hence too young to have seen them. Other good live acts I saw this year were David Byrne at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Great Lake Swimmers at the Glee Club, Handsome Family also at the Glee, and Blue Nation at the Actress and Bishop.
3. At the beginning of April 2009 I moved into the Marketing team at Talis, and this turned out to be a great move, into what is probably the best team I've ever been a part of. Professionally, it's been a very good year - my writing has come on in leaps and bounds, becoming a lot more versatile, and I've also made a mark with podcasting in both library and educational contexts.
4. Easter. The home improvement austerity drive meant that a weekend away was out of the question, so we stayed at home instead and did loads of amazing things. We saw Nottingham Forest play Bristol City on Easter Saturday, and it was a staggering 3-2 victory (always indicative of a great game), stopping in the unassuming Swan in the Rushes pub en route for a very tasty oxtail and cheddar mash for £5.99. In the evening we met up with Fiona for a curry at Lasan's in the Jewellery Quarter, but apart from that we were on our own for the weekend, and we loved it, filling our time with the Our Friends in the North DVD, lent to us by Karen Reece, The Watchmen at the pictures, and other stuff.
5. Together with Jason Smith from Workers Education Association and Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education at University of Birmingham, I've helped set up The Birmingham Salon for debate of contemporary issues in the city. Our first meeting, in partnership with University of Birmingham and the Institute of Ideas, will be held on Tuesday 9th February 2010 at The Studio on Cannon Street. See you there?
6. We had a lovely summer holiday in France, spending a week in a gite in the Loire Valley and a week in a windmill in our own meadow just inland from La Rochelle. La Rochelle was too busy to be a highlight, and anyway, we'd had bad news from home that morning, but we had a perfect meal at the restaurant at St Savinien, which we walked to from the windmill through fields and deserted lanes, and the other French people there were really friendly, coming to our table to chat. We also had a very good meal at nearby Tailleborg. Meanwhile, our meadow provided an ideal vantage point for a spectacular meteor shower.
7. My friend Sandra invited me to her 7 year old daughter's dance show in Solihull. As a non-parent, I rarely get a chance to see stuff like that, and I loved it. In fact, this evening I'll be watching the DVD of the show with Sandra and Rachel, and then hopefully reading a bedtime story to Rachel and her elder brother Ben, before we start eating and drinking to see out 2009 with Dave, Andy, Sophie and Geoff.
8. This year I was privileged to see Usain Bolt run at Crystal Palace with my friend Sally. We saw the full two days of athletics, staying at the best B&B I've ever experienced. It was enough to make a BNP member apply for Jamaican nationality (I'd like to think). It was also good to see Mo Farah win the 5000 metres, in fact I nearly fell into the row of spectators below me with the excitement.
9. Dave and Andy Collins perform Sweet's Ballroom Blitz at Fiona's birthday Curryoke. You had to be there - I laughed so much I couldn't breathe.
10. Jo and I spent a perfect day in London, centred around a matinee performance of Carrie's War which was wonderful. We saw an exhibition and lunched at the Courtauld's Institute, and mooched around our old West End haunts.
11. I had another good day trip to London, this time with Dave. Dave's sister and her kids had bought us a wine-tasting experience for Christmas, so we built a day trip around it. We went to the Imperial War Museum, and Dave tried not to get annoyed with my delaying tactics in the Holocaust section. We launched in the Oxo Tower, browsed around the Borough Market, and then went wine tasting.
12. We remembered my Dad on May 3rd, the 10th anniversary of his sudden death on the golf course of North Manchester Golf Club.
13. The Sopranos! We've just started Series 5, and we wonder how we'll fill our lives when it's over (the answer is The Wire, according to just about everybody).
14. It was another good year for theatre, but the best play I saw was the almost unknown Orphans (by Dennis Kelly) at the Birmingham Rep. Other strong contenders were The Winter's Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon with Sandra, and The Good Soul of Szechuan (Brecht) at the Library Theatre Manchester with Bill.
15. Just before Christmas, I met up with my friends Jacqui and Brenda at the Farmer's Market in Moseley. Bought some nice Christmas treats for me and Dave, and then we went off for a coffee at The Cross. There was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground, just enough to make you feel really festive, and I saw loads of people I knew. It reminded me to count my blessings about my lovely friends and acquaintances.
16. We had a perfect Christmas Day with Dave's family at the house of my sister-in-law, Lyn. Lots of champagne cocktails, wonderful food, wii dance games, and other
treats.
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
My top 10 pop guilty pleasures
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
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
The Cult of the Amateur
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:
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: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.
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 theThomas 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.
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.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Food for thought from a virgin grazer
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
100 Spanish-speaking writers choose the 100 books that changed their lives
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Our Friends in the North
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Flasher at large
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.