Apart from the busyness of the design, that is, and the now dodgy associations of the fasces. To be fair, there are a lot of cluttered flag designs featuring a coat of arms, and Ecuador's isn't the only coat of arms to still feature a fasces - there's one on Watford Borough Council's coat of arms, too.
Watford Borough Coat of arms (image credit Heraldry Wiki contributor Knorrepoes)
Spooky coincidence; the fasces-bearing arms of Watford Borough Council were granted in October 1922, the very same year and month when Mussolini marched on Rome and then took power in Italy.
Anyway, back to Ecuador's flag, and the oddest thing about it (in my opinion). Look at the coat of arms in the middle.
The odd thing isn't the condor on top, the fasces on the bottom or the shield (?) depicting a sun, mountain, river and ship in the middle. It's what flanks the design; halberds from which are draped ... Ecuadorian flags. It's a flag containing little copies of itself. A recursive flag. A bit like the Droste effect, only not quite, with more than one small copy.
I'm now idly wondering whether there are any other flags which contain images of themselves. I think there probably must be some (although not necessarily national flags). My very quick web search hasn't turned any up, although it did come up with some recursive flags identified by Redditor and vexillology enthusiast Cawren. The trouble is, Cawren's definition of recursive wasn't quite what I was looking for; the flags cited are ones where you can zoom in infinitely, keeping the same aspect ratio and the flag will stay the same, i.e. a very boring fractal, as illustrated below.
But it's flags which literally contain pictures of themselves that I'd like to see and some time when I have more time and energy I'll devote more than a couple of minutes to looking for more examples. Or maybe I won't. Who knows?
Watch this space. Or don't.
Anyhow for no other reason than it seems appropriate, here's my favourite remix of that 1997 banger Ecuador, originally a hit for the DJ and record production team Sash!* (it got to number one in Flanders, Romania and Scotland).
Enjoy.
.
*I should point out, for those too young or old to be aware, that the exclamation mark is part of Sash!'s name, like Westward Ho! But the asterisk isn't. Obviously.
To mark a friend's 60th birthday, and because why the hell not, I'm taking a quick step 60 years back in time.
It's Wednesday 22 February 1961, and Rubber Ball by Marty Wilde is at the top of the UK singles chart. Wilde (born Reginald Leonard Smith), is one of Britain's foremost American-inspired rockers, along with those other young Turks, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. Here's a vido of Marty performing his hit with Cliff Richard on the 23rd of February 1961 (look out for the Buddy Holly-inspired vocal stylings):
As of now, Marty, like his more famous partner in that duet, is still with us. As his Wikipedia entry notes:
The UK's Conservative, old Etonian Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan has just completed four years in office, having taken over from Anthony Eden as a result of Eden's failing health and fatally damaged reputation after the national humiliation of Suez.
As in February 2021, the USA has a new Democract with Irish ancestry in the White House, although JFK is a sprightly 43 years old when taking office, a contrast with Jo Biden's venerable 78 years. The world didn't know it on February 22nd, but the new Kennedy administration already had a mini Suez-style fiasco of its own in the planning stage, as Kennedy and his advisors weigh up the options for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion (spoiler; none of the options are good).
Also in the States, February 22nd sees the release of the biopic The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis as the serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara, whose career of deception ncluded faking the identities of a doctor of psychology, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a teacher, a monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a naval surgeon.
The real (?) Demara had some interesting tips for aspiring rogues:
"...if you come into a new situation (there's a nice word for it) don't
join some other professor's committee and try to make your mark by
moving up in that committee. You'll, one, have a long haul and two, make
an enemy."
Why try to rise up through the existing committee structure, Demara reasoned, when you can start your own committee?
"That way
there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can
anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past
laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own
rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into
the power vacuum!"
Which is quite an interesting take from a couple of angles. Firstly, the notion of moving into vacant ecological niches clearly has wider applications than just con artistry; from starting a business venture to chosing an area of academic research, to your chosen form of artistic expression, it's a legitimate strategy.
Secondly, it's interesting to look back at the career of a genuine outsider from 2021, a historical moment where even our impostors are fake. Demara came from a formerly prosperous family which had fallen on hard times due to the Great Depression by the time he ran away from home aged 16 to become a Cistercian monk. To succeed as an impostor, Demara had to use his wits to practice his deceptions.
In contrast, our highest-profile contemporary rogues, from Donald J Trump, to Nigel Farage (currently running an investment grift which recycles his old "take back control" schtick), to pro-virus activist and professional whiner, Laurence Fox, tend to come from firmly establishment, often elite, backgrounds.
Caveatemptor.
Our most notorious contemporary deceivers aren't outsiders, shrewdly taking advantage of gaps in the hierarchy which others weren't smart enough to spot. They're insiders, born to privilege, leveraging their connections within existing power structures, rather than adroitly spotting and exploiting gaps in those structures. Their biggest, and most successful, con is to convince their dupes that they're the plucky outsiders taking on the establishment, when they are the establishment.
Perhaps the most egregious example is Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson, a man who couldn't be more part of the establishment furniture if he was one of the leather armchairs in White's of St James's. The problem with these fake impostors, as opposed to real rogues like Demara, is that there's no selective pressure on them to have any actual talent. Where your deceptions succeed or fail purely on the basis of your own sharpness of wit, you gotta be good to be at the game.
Whatever his morals, or lack thereof, Demara was smart, and not just at being an impostor. For example, while pretending to be a naval surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy he actually managed to be a pretty competent naval surgeon:
What Demara did possess was a strong intellect, plus a phenomenal
memory. Posing as [Dr Joseph] Cyr, he performed numerous minor surgeries, including
dental work on the infected tooth of CAYUGA’s commander, Captain James
Plomer. Demara apparently studied up on the necessary techniques by
reading text books and relying on the help of his Sick Berth Attendant,
plus generous supplies of anesthetic and antibiotics.
Following a commando-style raid off the west coast of Korea, three
seriously wounded casualties — all South Korean guerillas – were brought
aboard CAYUGA. Cyr aka Demara is said to have removed a bullet from a
man’s chest and amputated a foot. His patients not only survived, but
Cyr’s fellow officers were so impressed with his coolness that they
planned to put his name forward for a medal. Talk of such an award, and
the attention surrounding his Korean exploits, was probably Demara’s
undoing.
The Canadian Navy apparently discovered Demara was using a false
identity after the real Dr. Cyr’s mother spotted a news report in her
local paper. War correspondents had picked up the story of the CAYUGA
medic and broadcast it far and wide.
You can fake a lot, but you can't fake that level of basic competence.
But fake impostors like Boris "not really my first name" Johnson don't have to keep it real, relying on contacts, wealth & more general social capital, rather than quickness of wit. When a fake impostor buys his way into power, what you can end up with is someone without the basic competence or work ethic to carry out the role he's blagged his way into.
It would be a stretch to imagine Boris Johnson rising to the occasion, as Ferdinand Demara did in the medical bay of HMCS Cayuga, when Johnson, even with the combined resources of the Prime Ministers' office, the Conservative Party and mostly compliant meda behind him, struggles to rise to the level of impersonating a guy who can successfully operate a mop:
That's not to say that Demara was some kind of hero, a Robin Hood figure. He described his own motivation as being "Rascality, pure rascality." But most of us have a sneaking regard for the exploits of the cheeky rascal, hence the box office draw of Tony Curtis, or Leonardo de Caprio retelling the stories of real-life tricksters like Demara, or Frank Abagnale.
But it still stings to see not-very bright establishment insiders fraudulently appropriating the persona of the clever rogue and visiting the fruits of their incompetence on the rest of us.
tl;dr: inequality of opportunity tends inevitably towards kakistocracy. Grow your talent pools, people.
In 1961, in the UK, the talent pool was on the shallow side in other senses. After being recuruited into a wide range of responsible and challenging jobs in the war, the 1950s was somthing of a low point where either low-status work or low-status housewifery was seen as the default social position for half of the population.
The introduction of the birth control pill with its upside of greater reproductive autonomy (and downside of assumed sexual availability) was still the best part of a year away in early 1961. It wouldn't be until 1964 that a revision to the Married Women's Property Act gave married women the right keep half of any savings they'd made from the allowance paid to them by their husbands (bear in mind that, in many workplaces, it was still the norm for women to be forced give up work on marriage at this time). And, as for abortion this wasn't legalised until 1967 and, in Northern Ireland, abortion rights are still a high profile battleground in 2021.
As in sexual politics, racial politics was also a story of systematic exclusion for a whole section of society. 1961 was the year when Mahesh Upadhyaya arrived from Aden (now south Yemen) to a UK where minority citizens looking for lodgings were still routinely greeted by signs reading "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish."
There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mahesh when he arrived in the UK, but he would go on play his part in the history of his adopted nation in 1968, when he became the first person to bring a racial discrimination case under the newly-introduced Race Relations Act. Mahesh related the following story:
After I found a job with a regular salary I set about searching for a suitable home for my family. We found one on Penistone Road, at the edge of Huddersfield, close to my employer’s transport routes.
I arranged an appointment and everyone, my parents, brother, my wife
and myself, went along. We found no problems at all with the house, a
spacious three-bedroom semi, and wanted to make an offer. So I rang the
developers, George Haigh & Sons, later that day.
The person on the phone said, “Are you the coloured family who had a look around earlier?”
I said that we were.
The person on the phone said, “Our policy is not to sell to coloured
people because that will jeopardise the sales of our other properties.”
For LGBTQ citizens it was a similar time of limbo, with equality still a distant dream, but with hints of the first stirrings of a move away from automatic prejudice and exclusion. At least it was for gay men, still suffering from the effects of Nineteenth legislation which their lesbian peers had been spared, thanks to Victorian prudery (the prudery didn't come from Victoria herself, contary to popular belief):
The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, was published in 1957, three years after the committee first met in September 1954. It was commissioned in response to evidence that homosexuality could not legitimately be regarded as a disease and aimed to bring about change in the current law by making recommendations to the Government. Central to the report findings was that the state should focus on protecting the public, rather than scrutinising people’s private lives.
It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private. Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.
Over the last sixty years, the general direction of travel in terms of equality in terms of gender, race and sexuality has been clear and encouraging. Which is a cause for modest celebration, rather than the noisy wailing coming from those noisy, well-connected fake outsiders:
I don't go for nostalgia in a big way. Sometimes the familiarity of the past can feel reassuring, but it's always worth remembering that there are bits that were bad, have got better and can continue to get better if we live in the present, not the past.
But, when it comes to pretenders, the modern ones really are rubbish and some of the old ones really were great...
*Update: Now I've seen it and cannot unsee it, it would be remiss of me not to add this clip of Boris Johnson disinfecting a chair, set to one Richard Attenborough's wildlife narrations, to that picture of him ineffectually moving a mop around:
A slightly late Happy New Year to everybody out there in Blogland. How are we all enjoying living in those interesting times the Chinese (allegedly) warned us about?
Like most people, I've spent most of the past year doing whatever it takes to get me through the day. Like reading books, then meeting up with friends to talk about them ... only with an extra helping of everybody being on the other end of a Zoom call and a side order of silently screaming "You're on mute!" Happy days.
Apart from the social interaction, however degraded by Zoom fatigue, reading groups have two great features. They introduce you to books you wouldn't otherwise have read, and reading a more diverse selection of books means that some of those books will fulfill what those old Heineken adverts used to promise, and refresh the parts other books cannot reach.
Our last two books were good examples. Both fiction, but each one refreshing completely different parts:
On different levels, I enjoyed both books, although they're chalk and cheese. Of course, opinions differed, but I'm not here to debate whether any specific book was "good" or "bad." I am here to say that your reading diet, like your actual diet, is healthier if it's varied.
Fifty-Fifty is a plot-driven courtroom drama and thriller, which kicks off with the discovery that a colourful Italian-American former mayor of New York has been brutally murdered in his own home.
Yikes! Be careful, Rudy!
The central mystery is that, when the ex-mayor was murdered, the only other two people in the house were his grown-up offspring, Alexandra and Sofia Giuliani Avellino. In this whodunnit, each sister accuses the other one of the murder and there seems to be no conclusive evidence to show which one of them actually did it (or, for that matter, whether the two sisters conspired together to do their old man in).
Enter hard-boiled criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, defending the sister who, his gut instinct tells him, is the innocent party. Is Eddie's instinct right? Expect the classic whodunnit menu of red herrings, the killer(s) covering her/their tracks with acts of ruthless brutality and twisted ingenuity, unexpected plot twists and startling revelations.
Fifty-Fifty is your classic airport thriller done well (in my opinion). The part of me it reached was the part that wants straightforward entertainment, puzzles and distraction. It's not going to change me on a fundamental level. Now that I've read it and know how the mystery gets solved, I've no particular desire to re-read it, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.
But it does what it does pretty well. It's easy to dismiss this sort of genre writing, especially when, like Fifty-Fifty, the book gets singled out as a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick of the week, the literary equivalent of getting kissed by your mum at the school gates and for ever blowing your chances of hanging out with the cool kids.
But, literary snobbery aside, think about these facts. It's easy to write. Almost all of us leaned that stuff at school. But it's hard to write well enough that people want to read what you've written, and carry on reading it for several hundred pages. Even if you have this talent, it requires a pretty special blend of talent, determination and luck to actually get published. Most books which make it into print don't sell that well. Fifty-Fifty did pretty well and, although it reads well enough as a stand-alone novel, it's only one of a series of books that Steve Cavanagh's written about the reformed con artist turned criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, showing that the guy's not just a flukeish one-hit wonder.
But it's also a work of genre, which stands at a remove from the real world. It contains several tropes of the crime genre. Eddie Flynn, for example, is an instantly recognisable type - the dogged, incorruptible, rebellious, maverick outsider hero with a troubled personal life. The same goes for what he's up against - out there, there's a devilish plot, an elaborate game being played against law enforcement and natural justice, planned by a brilliant, but warped, mind (or minds - you'll have to read to the end to find out which). We've been here before, from the evil schemes of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter, to the elaborate mind games of a TV series like The Bridge.
Now I'm no expert on crimes and solving crimes,* but I'm pretty sure that, in real life, this isn't generally how it works. From what I gather, solving crimes is a team effort and most stuff gets solved by following established, tested procedures, at least in functioning systems of law enforcement. Where there's systemic corruption, incompetence, or even just institutional groupthink, some team members need to stand up and go against the flow but, in real life, I don't think most crimes end up being solved by some Eddie Flynn or Philip Marlowe type going rogue and kicking doors open.
As for violent crimes, yes, in a lot of real-life cases the victim and perpetrator are known to one another, so that's like the crime scene in Fifty-Fifty. But that's where the similarity ends; in real life, these sorts of crimes are mostly unplanned or poorly-planned and easy to solve. Even in those very rare cases of ruthless, high-functioning game-playing killers who plan and carry out their crimes methodically, the offenders rarely turn out to be warped geniuses of the crime fiction trope, but exceptions who fall through the cracks due at least partly to luck, or to an outbreak of the groupthink. incompetence or corruption I've already alluded to on the part of the authorities.
Although the rules of the genre are not the same as the rules of real life, Fifty-Fifty does a pretty decent job within the conventions and limits of the genre. Most of what happens is internally consistent and believable within the world of the book. The police and court procedure stuff sounded convincing and well-researched to me and, though it was a work of genre fiction it also touched on real-world social issues from unequal access to justice for rich and poor, to sexism, which gave it more of a feeling of heft and believability than many less accomplished crime novels.
Redhead by the Side of the Road is a different kind of novel altogether. From the opening, I had a sinking feeling that this book wasn't going to be a barrel of laughs:
"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps himself to himself; his routine is etched in stone."
Sure enough, it turns out that Micah is a self-employed tech guy, living the proverbial life of quiet desperation, just about getting by with very few limited and unsatisfactory relationships with his fellow humans, scraping just enough of a living to afford a rented apartment which he keeps spotless with an unvarying cleaning routine. In his rented box, Micah writes notes to the other residents of his block, complaining about their persistent failure to flatten their cardboard packaging when the recycling goes out on bin days.
At this point, I cheered myself up by checking the page count. Only 178 pages? Phew! At least it looked like I wouldn't be spending too much of my down time with Micah and his rather bleak little life.
So I stuck with it, and was very surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this book. Unlike the event-packed Fifty-Fifty, nothing much happens for most of the book. Only once does something fairly major, dramatic and unexpected happen to Micah, But what does happen turns out to be surprisingly compelling.
Unlike Fifty-Fifty, the entertainment here isn't straightforward. There's lots of everyday miscommunication and conflicts, especially between orderly, routine ways of living and messy, spontaneous lives, observed in a way that can be simultaneously sad and hilarious (there are points where both you're seriously willing Micah not to innocently say that wildly inappropriate thing he's about to say to his semi-detached girlfriend and can't help finding it funny at the same time).
There are puzzles here, too but, again, they're not the slightly detached clear-cut "It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room" puzzles of the whodunnit but as messy, ambiguous and often unresolved as the ones from everyday life.
As for distraction, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Except that, by a chapter or so in, there is. It's just a change of mental gears from Fifty-Fifty, slowing down and seeing the universe of small detail you miss when you're speeding, pedal to the metal, through the big, noisy world of the plot-driven thriller.
That's a wonderful thing about books. They're fractal - you can zoom in or out to any scale and still be drawn into a dense, engaging landscape where you can uttely lose yourself.
I don't think I've done justice to how well-written and unexpectedly absorbing Redhead By The Side of the Road is, but just take my word for it and give it a go. After all, what have you got to lose? It's only 178 pages and, if you're stuck in lockdown while the world around you burns, you might as well try something new.
Anyway, as the omnishambles that was 2020 lurches into the existential horror show of 2021, have a good one and stay safe, everybody. I don't know about you, but after a weird and terrible year, I'm starting to feel a bit more chipper about life. There are obvious reasons to be more cheerful (we have vaccines, alleluia!), but I'm sensing another sort of shift.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a feeling that we're pretty damn close to rock bottom and the only way is up. The abject failure of the Trump putsch only heightened a sense that a toxic boil is bursting and change is coming. It feels like a time for reflection, a time to take stock. So, after sharing a couple of literary discoveries from the last year, I'd like to close by sharing my piece of music of the year which, I think, perfectly captures the zeitgeist.
It's not celebratory, in fact it's downright mournful. But it's also spine-tinglingly powerful, beautiful and utterly appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy the legend that is Annie Lennox and the socially distanced London Voices Choir, totally smashing it with this awesome rendition of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:
"We have always been surrounded by terror and by the beauty that is an inseparable part of it."
*If you are, examples, corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments (comments moderated by me, but I'm happy to publish any reasonable feedback).
Musical discovery of the week, courtesy of BBC Radio 3; Icelandic Dances, Opus 11, by Jón Leifs. Maybe it sounds characteristically Icelandic, but without anything else Icelandic to compare it to (other than Björk), I wouldn't really know.
To my ears, the first dance has a slight Chinese quality (or at least the quality of a Western pastiche of Chinse music), while the second definitely has a Scottish feel, as if the players were imitating bagpipes.
My favourite, though, is the wild, raw theme in the third dance,* which alternates with contrasting quiet, pastoral passages. I don't know whether it's typically Icelandic, but it's certainly got an epic quality that would provide an appropriately steely soundtrack to implacable Atlantic storms, longships** and erupting volcanoes:
*"Allegro moderato ed energico"and 7' 45" in, if you want to skip to the best bit (IMO).
* *"their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf", to quote Joyce's fantastic line from Ulysses.
Meet Alex. Alex is quite big in America. I don't know what he's talking about, but Alex is very loud indeed:
Maybe you're thinking "Only in America." If so, you'd be wrong. In the UK, fans of weird outbursts of RANDOM SHOUTING can just turn to whatever the headline writers in the Express are having a self-induced brain aneurysm about today:
Left-wing activist STUMPED in fiery BBC clash when she FAILS to answer simple question
'It's political suicide!' Lord claims Brexit WILL be reversed but is SHUT DOWN by BBC host
'MILITANT trade unions' responsible for rail misery, blasts Transport Sec in radio row
Davis and Hammond UNITE to warn EU against UNNECESSARY Brexit trade barriers
'It hasn't stopped!' Lorry drivers are ATTACKED by Calais migrants EVERY DAY, haulage boss
'EU will get hurt FAR MORE!' Farage warns Barnier's EU 'religion' could come CRASHING DOWN
Toby Young RESIGNS from universities regulator: 'Forced out by TWITTER MOB'
Now ban DRINKING STRAWS: Conservation group calls for crackdown on plastic
'We're eating through YOUR airtime!' Tory MP completely LOSES IT with Sky News host in row
French flu WARNING: Already battered by Aussie strain – now NHS faces new DEADLY virus
Which reminds me of everybody's favourite heavy metal quote "..could we have everything louder than everything else?.." A few years ago, we were told that comedy was the new rock n' roll. These days, it looks as if frothing outrage is the new heavy metal.
I guess that Ian Gillan actually had a sense of the ridiculous when he made his remark and intended it to be a funny comment about rock excess (such is the self-parodic nature of the genre that Spinal Tap could only ever have been an affectionate send-up). It's this self-awareness that seems to separate ridiculously loud rock bands from ridiculously loud opinionators like Alex Jones* and the Express headline writers.
I suspect that Alex and the tabloid shouty brigade would really struggle to get their heads round the idea that making everything louder than everything else is an inherently funny concept. I don't think they'd appreciate the element of paradox and logical impossibility. Or, for that matter, stop to think that if you shout everything at the top of your voice, eventually nothing seems especially loud or important.
I, for one, miss the playful self-awareness and sense of the ridiculous of Gillan's quip. For example, if only we'd held on to such a keen sense of the absurd, Michael Gove's malign career would have ended the moment he said, with a straight face, that all schools must be above average. Politics these days isn't just show business for ugly people; it's heavy metal for the thoughtless.
King of toys and hippopotamuses, full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus
He was born in a wonderful christmas tree
Run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run
Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run
Rudolph, run, run
Rudolf the new born King.
I think Mariah Carey has finally lost Christmas. From a festive post on Janelle Shane's Letting Neural Networks be Weird. Our seasonal Bible reading is taken from Psalm 10010111:
And the wild beasts of the field exult about the sheep of thine anger
Their heart shall be abundantly satisfied with frogs...
So how were the attacks carried out? My personal theory is that Operation Earache was a false flag operation, masterminded by Brian Blessed, who was living a double life as Fidel Castro until he faked his own death in 2016, acting on orders from the Freemasons, or possibly the Illuminati, who were in turn contolled by those humanoid reptilians from the Alpha Draconis system who secretly control all the conspiracies on planet Earth. And, to prove it, beyond any reasonable doubt, there's a YouTube video:
You can't argue with evidence like that. Bite me, sonic attack sceptics!
It's easy to criticise a public figure for having a "gaffe" or a "car crash interview." But most of us, if we're being honest, couldn't have done much better.
A lot what we think of as success is performative, especially in these days of self-branding. The skill of coming across as warm, persuasive, interesting, confident and fluent may not always be a reliable indicator of being well-briefed, of having good ideas, or of being competent, but it's still a skill, and one that few of us have reliably mastered. I know in my heart of hearts that most public figures performing below par in a "car crash interview" are probably doing about as well as I'd do on a good day. It's easy to mock, especially if you disagree with the person in question, but generating a convincing public persona is hard.
The gaffes you can enjoy guilt-free are the ones when a public figure blurts something damning that's consistent with both the character they usually present and what they actually do.
So their fantasies and obsessions are as toxic as the things we already know they've done to people less powerful than themselves, and the way they bear themselves in public. On one level, there's no mystery here. Hiding beneath the arrogant persona of a weirdly callous, self-satisfied bastard is a weirdly callous self-satisfied bastard. No hidden depths, just surface, like the guy in American Psycho.
What does puzzle me, in these days when image is king, is how a person can get so far in life while still rocking the crazed stalker/psycho killer look. Given the way we speak of an unbalanced aristocrat as "eccentric" and a mentally ill person on a bus as a "loony", I suspect that the halo effect of already possessing a large stash of cash plays a role.
Anyway, on to my musical interlude of the day. Bet you can't listen to this without picturing George Osborne adopting that strangely David Byrne-like power pose:
Google News headline/image pairings - the gift that goes on giving, at least for lazy bloggers...
"Nasa forced to deny there was a long-lost 'civilisation' on Mars after questioning by Republican congressman"*
If the MC who presides over that parallel universe called Eurovision came from a habitable planet Mars which exists in a slightly alternative reality, rather than from the Dublin suburb of Clondalkin, as he's always claimed, that would explain a few otherwise inexplicable mysteries. Including, for example, 2006 Eurovision winners Lordi:
California Republican Dana Rohrbacher asked whether the fact that Mars once had a vastly different atmosphere meant that it could also have supported an entire civilisation that was now lost.
"You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago," he said. "Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?"
His question was answered by Kenneth Farley, who is a project scientist on the Mars 2020 rover mission and a professor of geochemistry at California Institute of Technology and was one of the scientists answering politicians' questions.
He pointed out that the "evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago. Not thousands of years ago".
He also said that there is "no evidence that I'm aware of", that the planet was once inhabited.
That wasn't enough for Mr Rohrabacher, who asked: "Would you rule that out? See, there's some people... Well, anyway."
Professor Farley said that such a possibility was "extremely unlikely".
It isn't clear who Mr Rohrabacher was referring to when he suggested that "some people" think there was a civilisation on the planet. But there are a limited number of people who have proposed what they believe to be proof not only of ancient civilisations but existing ones – including a guest on Alex Jones's InfoWars programme who suggested that Nasa has put child sex slaves on the red planet.
In the light of this performance, maybe they need to change the boilerplate strapline which follows American political campaign adverts ("I'm Dana Rohrbacher and I approve this message"), to something more useful, like "You can't win. If you vote me in, I shall become more stupid than you can possibly imagine."
"Why every American graduation plays the same song"[sic] was the title of this video I just came across. Never having been to an American graduation, I wondered which "song" (or rather "tune") it was. I guessed Brahms' Academic Festival Overture (or at least the tune of Gaudeamus Igitur, the rousing student drinking song that Brahms recycled at the end of his piece). Alternatively, I know from my wife, who organises degree ceremonies, that Charpentier's Te Deum and Purcell's Trumpet Tune often get an airing on these occasions, too.
Anyway, I clicked play and discovered that Americans celebrate their academic successes to the tune of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1 - the "Land of Hope and Glory" tune. For a Brit who associates the piece with the union jack-waving crowds at the last night of the Proms, this just felt weird.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the discovery - I'm better disposed towards the piece, now that I know that lots of people associate it with a celebration of hard work and intellectual curiosity, not just a strain of jingoist Imperial nostalgia that's embarrassing at best and delusionally destructive at worst. Here's the vid:
"Take back control", they said, and showed me how...
Are you fat and flabby? Or skinny and gawky? Are you short-winded,
pepless? Do you hold back and let others walk off with the prettiest
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Now, nobody will ever dare to laugh at me again...
... a T. Rex that lived 65 million years ago is closer to seeing a live Miley Cyrus concert than to seeing a live Stegosaurus.
Fellow dinosaurs who are old enough to remember Marc Bolan can insert their own jokes here.
This public information announcement was brought to you via the short animation The History andFuture of Everything - Time, on the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt.
... in Russia long ago (although any similarity to an actual person, living or dead, is purely coincidental). I had to put that last bit in for legal reasons, which Duncan Fyfe will now explain:
Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it ...
... For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.
I'm sure you feel better for knowing that. I know I did. You probably know what's coming next and, assuming you're any kind of right-thinking person, you'll feel better for that, too...
According to one of the most famous opening sentences in English literature, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." And I reckon L P Hartley pretty much nailed it with that line. Our personal memories of times past and of our own former selves are limited, imperfect, distorted versions of what we actually thought, knew and felt in the past. And if hindsight rewrites even our own experiences, imagine how heavily it edits the thoughts and motivations of others in the historical past.
It's almost impossible, for example, to get into the minds of the people who argued so bitterly and passionately over the theological disputes that divided the early Church. There were heated debates about whether Jesus was wholly human, wholly divine, or a bit of both. Those who subscribed to the "bit of both" hypothesis argued endlessly about whether the divine bit and the human bit were separate, or all mixed up together, or whether the human bit or the divine bit was dominant, or whether the two bits lived together in perfect harmony. And you probably wouldn't have wanted to get those guys started on the nature of the Holy Spirit, or indeed on how any member of the Trinity related to the other two bits, or even whether there was such a thing as a Trinity.
There were epic spats, like the famous one between Arius who believed, not unreasonably, that God the Father must have existed before His son, Jesus, and Athanasius who argued that Father and Son had both been around for, like, ever. Eventually Athanasius's formula became the official version and Arianism a heresy (although a popular one with the Goths, back when Goths were fearsome conquering barbarians rather than pale, misunderstood teens with black eyeliner). Such spats escalated from name-calling and shunning to the eventual killing of heretics in the name of Very Serious Theological Differences, which almost nobody cares about any more.
Modern non-believers obviously don't care about the exact nature of a man's relationship with a supernatural being (or, as some heretics seem to have believed, supernatural beings) they don't believe in. Ditto people of different faiths, who don't accept the underlying premise that Jesus was - in whatever sense - the son of God. Ditto most modern Christians, for whom these questions are now settled and who are perfectly happy to just repeat the formula of the Nicene Creed at the appropriate point in the service, rather than pausing half way though to wonder what the "begotten, not made" bit even means.
Now that the battle to define Christianity has been won, a few theologians and historians take an academic interest, but that's about it - the differences that once brought furious mobs out onto the street, sparked outraged denunciations and even provoked people to kill the theologically unsound are just curious footnotes in the history of ideas. A few people know about this stuff, but nobody cares any more.
If you want to get a hint of the passions that these debates once stirred, you have to leave discussion of Christ's personhood and the nature of the Holy Ghost behind and be controversial about something people still actually care about. To get a taste of how early Christians felt about heretics, well, think about how British fans of Eurovision and the late Sir Terry Wogan, along with the British media and Twitter, all feel about Christer Björkman right now:
The producer of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest has accused the UK of not taking the annual event seriously enough – and even going so far as to blame Sir Terry Wogan for the public’s attitude.
Christer Bjorkman launched the astonishing attack while attending a lecture in London, telling iNews that the nation should stop making fun of the contest and try harder, if they ever wanted to win again.
Sir Terry Wogan’s gentle humour, loved by millions of television viewers and radio listeners, was not to the liking of the executive responsible for the Eurovision song contest.
Christer Bjorkman, the producer of the programme which has been a fixture on television screens for decades, said the show’s credibility was ruined by Sir Terry, who died in January, aged 77.
Sir Terry, who hosted the broadcast for 28 years, refused to take the show sufficiently seriously for Mr Bjorkman’s tastes.
BBC defend Sir Terry Wogan for his 'unique sense sense of humour' after Eurovision attack
The BBC have swooped to defend Sir Terry Wogan after Eurovision boss Christer Bjorkman hit out at the late star, claiming his sarcasm had tarnished the competition.
British veterans from the international song contest leapt to the late presenter’s defence and said Swedish producer Christer Bjorkman should get a sense of humour
To know what anathema and excommunication feel like in the 21st Century, just admit to being unamused by the British sense of humour* and by Sir Terry's genial banter, or to enjoying the Eurovision Song Contest in an unironic way.
We may not give a stuff about the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, but woe to anyone who dares to question our national self-image as a unique island of subversive hilarity just off a continent of stereotypically humourless, rule-bound foreigners. To judge by all the pompous lectures Mr Björkman is being given about the urgent need to get a sense of humour, I think he just hit a nerve, threatened our complacent sense of our own identity and essential rightness and questioned the idea that there is only one way for right-thinking people to look at things.
And while we're in a doggy mood, Belka and Strelka might have been the first space dogs to survive their flight, but it was poor, doomed, Laika whose memory lingered longest. Especially in the hearts of a marching squad of silver-booted, disco-loving Norwegian lesbian space marines, apparently:
I'm not entirely sure that I'll be humming that one any time soon, but full marks for turning the weirdness up to eleven, girls. Humanity needs more of this kind of thing, I feel.
I'm just back from church. No, I haven't asked Jesus into my heart or anything like that - I just felt that it would be polite to be there for the last service taken by the retiring rector of the Benifice of Newport Pagnell, seeing as he married me a couple of years ago (to my wife, I mean - the Church of England may be getting more relaxed and open-minded, but they're not quite that open-minded).
Anyway, I was quite impressed by the organ music that opened the service. I stopped enjoying Vivaldi's Four Seasons years ago - way too overused as irritating elevator/call-centre hold music, back in the day - but it makes an upbeat, rousing anthem when transcribed for the organ and I actually found myself liking "Spring" again for the first time in years. See what you think:
Television not having been invented yet, nobody was able to turn the incident into a Bear Grylls-style survival documentary, so they turned the story into a carol (allegedly). I've got the Radio 4 series A Cause for Caroling to thank for the folkloric heads up.
Popular music has been stuck in a rut since the 1990s. So has fashion. The kids are dressing like their parents and listening to music their parents would like. At least according to Rick, who wonders what the apparent fossilisation of youth culture means:
In other words, the strange death of youth culture is the canary in the coal mine. Kids no longer have more cash to splash than their parents did. Inexorable political, economic and technological forces have destroyed full employment and secure employment. With no higher education, you can avoid massive debt, but you're left with meagre job prospects, or alternatively, you can get qualifications that come chained to a massive iron ball of debt. These trends look set to continue. Your only hope for the future is to conform, keep your nose clean and your head down, and hope that your boss never finds out about the time you confessed on Facebook that you love playing in a band with your mates almost as much as you hate your stupid day job.
Great. Can I just kill myself now?
A clear-headed assessment of the irresistible forces shaping the future, or sad donkey economics? Today, I feel like being a glass half full person, not because I've turned into a Carneygroupie, but just because I'm getting tired of the crushing weight of gloom. Here's an alternative explanation (which may be just me whistling in the dark, but what the heck). Youth culture was never quite as revolutionary or liberating as its hype and it's now growing old, getting sick and succumbing to its internal contradictions:
1. Youth culture was never quite as great as the bits we remember.
For instance, in Britain with almost 60 million people, less than one million bought the best-selling single records in a week, while over 20 million regularly tuned in to watch The Black and White Minstrel Show on TV...
...It is popularly believed that the Beatles were the unbeaten kings of the charts with 22 top ten hits; but Cliff Richard had thirty eight. South Pacific was top selling album for 46 weeks. Two versions of The Sound of Music occupied the charts for over five years and sold more copies worldwide than the Beatles’ top seller, Abbey Road.
While miniskirts were an iconic image of the times, outside London and the major cities they were slow to catch on. It was not as easy for young people who were not rock stars to acquire cocaine, cannabis and LSD as is assumed, or as is the case today
2. Bright colours look brighter against a drab background.
The generation of parents who grew up wearing the conventional uniform of respectable adulthood and were truly baffled and outraged by their kids' alien dress, music and hair and are mostly dead or in retirement homes by now. Many parents of today's teenagers remember defiantly waving their own rebellious youth culture in the face of the stuffy adult world, as did many of their parents before them. Young people entering a rebellious, oppositional subculture is now seen as a normal (if not quite universal) rite of passage and, with each generational iteration, the process loses a bit more of its novelty and edge.
3. Fake authenticity fatigue.
We've seen plenty of yesterday's hell-raisers morph into establishment-friendly national treasures and grow old, along with the youth industry itself, which is now a mature sector of the economy. From the start, the industry that invented the teenager has co-opted, assimilated, re-packaged and commodified bits of folk culture, street culture and counter cultures for re-sale back to its chosen demographic and has manufactured its own teen-friendly product when the seam of authentic got too difficult to mine. Maybe this established process is becoming increasingly hard not to notice. 4. Kids dressing like their parents? What do you expect, now that parents dress like their kids?
Off duty, at least, many adults dress however the hell they like and diversity is a tough look to define yourself against. Back in the '90s, an older colleague in an insurance office told me about an incident from the 1960s, when one of her male colleagues was summoned to see the boss
and sent home in disgrace for having dared to turn up for work in a pale blue shirt,
back in the days when 'white collar job' meant exactly that. These days, you just can't rely on the new boss to be a stuffed suit any more, even if the new boss is functionally the same as the old boss. You could up your game from cloth to ink and try to hack your parents off with a tattoo, but since this would make you precisely as wild and edgy as Samantha Cameron, or David Dimbleby what, honestly, would be the point?
5. Did youth culture really power the sexual revolution?
Well, it gave a few alpha male peacocks more opportunities to get laid, but changing sexual mores had more to do with women's access to more reliable contraception. Not playing Russian roulette with the creation of a new human life is one heck of a big deal. It also takes two to tango and the liberation of the female partner (which lagged behind the 'liberation' of male chauvinist pigs boasting about how many chicks they'd bedded), owed more to feminism and progress towards relative female economic independence. Perhaps youth culture did help gay liberation on its way, but Quentin Crisp* was no youthful spring chicken when he achieved iconhood and Roy Jenkins (whose contribution to gay liberation and the 'permissive' society was still making Daily Telegraph columnists harrumph when he died in 2003), was no rock star.
6. Who says youth culture can only ever be about fashion and new music genres?
Maybe there's a problem of definition here. OK, so let's accept the proposition that the generation of innovative music genres has dried up, but maybe kids are just spending more time on other things - social media, computer games, whatever?
7. Hollywooditis.
OK, they might have nothing to do with proper young musicians trying to produce something new and original in the back bedroom, but Simon Cowell and the other gatekeepers of mass popular entertainment have a lot to answer for. The process of producing a crowd-pleasing big hit suffers from the same constraints as producing an expensive Hollywood blockbuster.
The studios don't want to lose a lot of money, so they too often play it
safe with high concept, focus groups, re-writes to eliminate the
challenging and difficult bits that bummed people out in the test
screening, squeezing the very last drops out of a profitable formula or
franchise, or 'reimagining' one that was popular back when we were kids,
rather than risking anything crazy like being new, or different. The
resulting product is too often bland, safe and derivative. Rather like a
musical product moulded under pressure, in the glare of the TV lights
and quality-controlled by a crowdsouced focus group of phone voters.
8. A (fake) working-class hero is something to be.
Rock n' pop made stars of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds, to be sure, but it wasn't all social mobility. If you didn't really struggle your way up from the wrong side of the tracks, you could always wrap yourself in a proletarian rebel attitude as easily as putting on a distressed leather jacket, like Mr Bob Geldof, alumnus of the fee-paying Blackrock College. 'Well, then what can a poor boy do. Except to sing for a rock n roll band' sang the comfortably middle-class Mick Jagger, having considered and rejected alternative career paths involving study at the London School of Economics, followed by a possible stint in politics or journalism. The Beatles didn't have to fake their street cred - except for John Lennon who wasn't quite the working class hero. Music's still a route out to something better - it was, for example Radiohead's way out of the ghetto of Abingdon independent school (current fees £15k for day pupils, £28k for boarders).
Among the poor boys and girls made good, there were also rich kids, dressed down in faded jeans and estuary English. There still are, although most of them don't bother with the mockney accents any more.
I don't want to be completely cynical and negative about youth culture - enthusiastic youth fandom has done a lot to break down barriers and to raise the status of people who've been discriminated against for just being themselves - inspirational female, black and gay artists who have commanded not just acceptance, but respect, and who have recruited new foot soldiers to the struggle of making the world a better, saner, less arbitrary, more open-minded place. And there's nothing wrong with the musical genius who creates an insanely catchy pop song that's never going to change the world except by making it a fun place to be for the next three minutes.
But did we really have a rock n' roll revolution every few years? If we did, most of these revolutions seem to have shared one slogan - 'the revolution will be marketed.' The rebellious attitude that was going to change the world was quickly turned into product. My parents went to Woodstock and all I got was this lousy Che Guevara T-Shirt. But never mind if the last generation of youth heroes sold out, kids, there'll be a new one along any minute ... who'll also be flogging jeans to fill their pension pot in a few years time. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Today's kids face a difficult future, which, if current trends continue, could contain more stifling conformism and less spontaneity and social mobility. But no trend lasts for ever and maybe this one is itself a mere blip within a bigger, more positive trend. And, perhaps, the apparent stagnation of popular culture is less the expression of the current societal malaise than the fulfilment of a pop culture prophecy. Pop has finally eaten itself.
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
