An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Sunday Times and the Lesbian Avengers, c. 1995

I've lately been reading Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, an excellent book-length attack on the dire state of British journalism. Grimly informative for the most part, it does turn up a few headslappingly ridiculous events. Like the aftermath of when a protest group called the 'Lesbian Avengers' invaded the Sunday Times offices:

Ellis, formerly of the Sun, was managing editor responsible for news and he really didn't like what the lesbian avengers had done, so he put his head together with a couple of other executives and decided that what was needed here was a bit of infiltration: they would put an undercover reporter in among these women and expose their evil ways. And no sooner was the idea agreed than the reporter was chosen. Ciaran Byrne would go in undercover. This was an odd choice because Ciaran Byrne was a trainee with little experience of reporting and none at all of working undercover, which is always demanding and sometimes dangerous. Furthermore, Ciaran Byrne is a man. That caused a little trouble.

Byrne didn't want to do it. The women would spot him immediately, as soon as he started to speak, he complained. No problem, said the executives: they'd get him a voice coach to teach him to sound likme a woman. And they would get a clothing coach to teach him to dress like a woman. Byrne protested that he still wouldn't look like a woman. But that wast he point, explained the executives: 'They're all so bloody ugly, they look like men!"


'Course, by picking up and propagating the most ridiculous passage in the book, despite the story not existing anywhere else on the internet, I'm doing exactly what Davies gets justifiably grumpy at the press for. Mea maxima culpa.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Richard Cory

The Guardian is asking readers to suggest songs about class.
This may seem odd, given the amount of punk I listen to, but the one that consistently catches me is from Simon & Garfunkel:


Their starting-point is a not-particularly brilliant poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.


Paul Simon takes this twee "it's tough being rich" piece of sap, and turn it upside down. It only works because of the last repetition of the chorus:


He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be (x3)
Richard Cory.


Class warfare it ain't. Still, it got throughly under my skin when I was a teenager ashamed of my own cowardice in not killing myself, and has stuck there ever since.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

A night in Budapest

I've not written much about my time in Budapest. Partly because it was a fairly grim time - nothing wrong with the city, just not a pleasant place to be alone, not knowing anybody, and without the slightest ability to speak Hungarian. But, looking through old diaries, I come across a pretty nice account of an evening out there. So I'll repost it here, two and a half years later:

A good place to begin is last night. I get in about 9, Ali pops his head in the
door and syas he wants to go out to a disco. Fine - I've backed out twice before, and meeting people is good, so I agree. He spends the next hours getting ready, and we don't leave the flat until well gone midnight. By this point I'm pretty tired (I practically fell asleep over my book while I was waiting for him, and I would quite happily have gone to sleep at that point), and I'm somewhat pissed off at his idea of lateness.

As it turns out, he was in the right and I was in the wrong. It's not much before 1am when we arrive at B7, the club, and the place is still empty. The dance floor has an octet of girls on it, dancing really rather well. At least, they were outclassing just about any goth I've seen, with the exception of molotov bitch.

Like everywhere else in Hungary, this place has a yearning for 50s americana. But there's also a bit of an international feel with a small Korean (?) contingent, and a lot of English being spoken.
The oddest thing is the girl collecting phone numbers. She goes up to every guy on the dance floor, one at a time, looks cute at them, and asks for their phone number. Then she gives the phone back to her partner, a guy who seems entirely approving of her flirting with every man around.

So, this looks totally like a scam of some kind. But I can't work out why, I can't work out what. Is it some guerilla marketing for the phone, hoping that people will admire something while a beautiful girl is asking them to put their number into it? Is it collecting phone numbers for advertising of some kind? I could imagine that if you, say, collected a few thousand numbers of people in clubs, then you could promote events by SMS.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Rolling Stone has a surprisingly good line in long, serious articles about politics. As if Naomi Klein, there's also stuff like this on the politics and power-plays of the financial crisis:
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab
....
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
....
The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.


The last third of the article is particularly excellent, raising things I haven't seen discussed much so far:

[from May 2008] the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).

People ask us why we don't use fly spray. Well, where's the sport in that?

Via Liberal Conspiracy comes news of an anti-mosquito laser gun. Granted, it's the kind of hilarious story that could only be the product of some very skilled PR, but it's just too fun to pass over. As LC say:
It’s a LASER BEAM that locates, targets and shoots down individual mosquitoes. There is nothing in that that isn’t cool.

And the very serious professional zoologists in my office have all agreed it has to look like an individual robot gun that spins on a dome-shaped turret, saying ‘target acquired’ in a little robot voice. Because what would be the point otherwise?


Meanwhile, I couldn't pass over the topic without a link to the obvious Monty Python skit:

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Asking for the moon

Also in the convention on modern liberty, George made (the germ of) an important point, about how the movement for rights hobbles itself by being so conservative in its demands. Talk is usually of defending and preserving liberties, not of claiming the ones we want. Rights are justified because we, supposedly, always had them, not because they are, well, right.

This conservative tendency is probably inherent in a lot of politicl movements. Think of how many English riots - not merely reactionary ones - were held under the banner of 'church and king'. One fringe benefit of the lack of a British written constitution is to keep a lid on this kind of obsession, compared to the American worship of the founding fathers. Appeals to Magna Carta can only happen on a purely emotional level, since so few of us have any idea what was in the thing.

Rhetorically useful as this trope may be, if we only demand the status quo that is the best we can get. That's perhaps enough for tories, but not for me.

The cute donkey theory of censorship

I love stories of people resisting censorship; bolshy muckrakers are my action heroes, fags and booze and cynicism included. So I loved listening to the press freedom panel from the Convention on Modern Liberty. Particularly the account of how the Pakistani press, when articles were censored, used to print blank spaces in their place - or, when that too was banned, pictures of donkeys.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Occupied dreams

This essay by Zadie Smith is a delight to read. It's about Pygmalion and Obama and Smith herself, about how people trim their speech and their actions to finesse multiple group identities, and how that is not always a bad thing. She pulls together some more examples -- do we need more? -- of how supremely articulate the President is, and how he is able to capture the speech of different groups. From his memoir, she picks up on this phrase:
"Even as that spell was broken," he writes, "and the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been."
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It's more interesting.


I love this idea of 'occupied' dreams. It suggests re-purposing, the ability to take advantage of soemthing. It's a novel way of looking at how we inhabit and twist our parents' and our societies' expectations, find a way of being ourselves within the ideological framework of our upbringing. I'd go beyond occupation: what we're doing is squatting dreams.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Why no national outrage? Oh yes, the Mail

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt. [source]

Not much you can say to top that, is there?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Reykjavík Finance 101

Long article on Iceland's financial crisis by Michael Lewis, mainly built around gags and stereotypes:
I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad.


But also some wider points worth hammering home:
One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.

...and throw away the key

According to this article:
There are more people serving open-ended or life sentences in jails in England and Wales than the whole of Europe

I'd take the figures with a large pinch of salt, given the difficulty of comparing figures across several dozen states, and the difficulty of interpreting "open-ended or life sentences". (e.g. a 150-year sentence presumably doesn't count). Still, I'd love to see the real figures behind it.

Criminal Defamation

On Monday, a LibDem MP is proposing an amendment on Monday to abolish the offence of 'criminal defamation'.

But...all I can find about it is from Richard Ingrams and a letter in The Times. so I assume this is a one-man crusade which won't be supported by the other parties, and so won't go anywhere.

Good on Evan Harris MP, anyway.

Friday, March 20, 2009

good news, from Munich to New Mexico

I'm liking the amount of good news I'm running into today, from fairly unexpected places. So from New Mexico comes the abolition of the death penalty in that state. This is part of a trend in the USA away from executions; New Mexico is the fifteenth state to end Death Row.

Then, Munich. Which, apparently, has a 500-strong Uighur community. And, better still, because of this the city is willing to take in 17 Uighurs who are currently being held in Guantanamo. Never again will I say that Berlin is the only place in Germany that I like.

Moldova

It's a pity that reporting from places like Moldova tends to come from news agencies, either directly or in thinly-veiled rewrites. This week, Dmitry Medvedev has been 'mediating' the dispute between Moldova and Transdnestria, one of the saddest and most pathetic situations in Europe. Reuters cover it, but with a news-agency style of being so placid as to be totally useless:


Russia is pressing hard for a resolution because that would show it still maintains influence in settling ex-Soviet conflicts after last year's war with Georgia damaged its reputation as an honest broker.
Medvedev will meet Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin in his Barvikha residence near Moscow, a Kremlin statement said. Separatist leader Igor Smirnov will join the talks later.


More spirited, and much more informative, is the commentary from Radio Free Europe:


As for Smirnov, he is always ready to participate in whatever meetings in whatever format Moscow dictates. He is a Russian citizen who was sent to Moldova in 1987 in order to foment and lead a separatist movement to counterbalance the nationalist movement that was emerging in Chisinau. And he accomplished this task brilliantly.


I don't see any reason to believe this meeting will count for anything - but if it has to be covered, I wish we could more easily get beyond the agencies' name-soup style.

Explanation and expiation

This follows my usual trend with anything I write, the problem of tricking myself into writing anything publicly, rather than beating myself into silence with the force of my unwillingness to write anything imperfect.

So...this blog is aiming for volume rather than quantity. I'm keeping it all private to begin with, although i may open it up in future. I'm hoping to use it mainly as a mine for future material, taking paragraphs from here and there, while building up enough momentum to eventually transfer into writing a frequently-updated blog of my own.