the white rose society

"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be 'governed' without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct."

car park



(needs flash)

tony: should I stay or should I go?
(click on youtube clip)

Moonlight Sonata



Ignacy Jan Paderewski (November 6, 1860 - June 29, 1941) OBE was a Polish pianist, composer, diplomat and politician, and the third Prime Minister of Poland.
this is a piano roll recording he made in 1914 of the first and second movements of Beethoven's Sonata Op.27 No.2: (click here)

(more such goodies here)

decisive moment

resolution


to accept the cruel curse of mediocrity, and to scorn it

both as producer and as consumer, therefore, henceforth to eschew :

pictorialism in any form

the exoticism of poverty

the 'innocence' of children

the alluring 'beauty' of nature

the cuteness of pets

the otherness of animals

the celebration of the trivial

the trivialisation of the sacred

'war-torn' photojournalism - the porn of the culturally anaesthetised

the image whose only raison d'être is envy (that I were there rather than here)

the image whose only raison d'être is relief (that I'm here rather than there)

at least, until the snow comes ...

Battle of the Drums

please call stella

morality test

my england

I had a packet to collect from the post office. In front of me was an old lady of eighty or so - alone, wooden stick for support, thin white hair in an old lady's perm, mac, stockings and shoes all from the generic old lady catalogue - who, passing the missed delivery slip over, was trying to engage the postman at the window in conversation, as old ladies do:

"Can't think what 'tis. Warn't expectin' naught. Cost me twelve pounds in taxi fare to come over 'ere."

Old ladies with hip conditions tend not to be able to use the bus - it's too far to walk to the bus-stop.

The patient-but-not-paid-to-chat postman pointed out to her that there was a phone number - if it was just something she had to sign for she could have arranged for it to be delivered another time.

"Oh, where's that, then?"

"On the back"

"Oh, 'tis on back, is it? Didn't think to turn 'im over."

So he disappears for a minute or two and reappears with an envelope. A white envelope. The sort of envelope that you'd put a birthday card in.

"Oh, 'tis a card, is it? Aye, 'twas my birthday yesterday."

An envelope with no stamp on it.

Which she then had to pay a surcharge on to collect.

Kiwi!

my way code

not for the first time, I find myself completely at odds with the national mood. if I found it hard, at the time, to share in the hysteria or even shed a tear at the high-speed demise of the sad, cheating, doe-eyed wife of the sad, cheating, hangdog heir to the throne, I've found it much harder, now, to share in the hand-wringing tabloid concern for the health of a mildly endearing but otherwise unremarkable TV presenter who happens to have survived another high-speed car crash.

obviously, whenever anything happens to one of their own, the BBC tends to make a big deal of it. but this has gone way beyond the usual tragic loss of cameraman shot whilst filming the invasion of a minor middle east oil-producing nation - this has touched the raw nerve of the sleb-slobbering nation in a peculiarly mawkish way. it's as if this guy actually mattered in a sense greater than being a decent husband and father, which, possibly (it must be true because the TV says it's so) is the case .

Top Gear is the flagship marketing tool of the autophile lobby: its primal appeal operates at the level of massaging the hurt feelings of the driver of the beamer who's been overtaken by a skoda and then been flashed by a speed camera. its main premise is that cars - especially very fast, very expensive cars - are things of beauty, excitement, and fundamental satisfaction, and that anyone who disagrees is a killjoy. 'killjoy' is a word the Top Gear fraternity uses a lot. its main presenter - Jeremy Clarkson, whose presenter personna is a bilious cross between Terry Wogan and Anne Robinson - has become a minor deity in the brotherhood of car worship, his droll comparisons of one piece of motile metal over another elevated to the cult rhetorical status of a latterday Pepys or Pope. unutterably smug, he nevertheless does manage to exert a certain sort of self-deprecating world-weary charm that slightly sugars the pill of his regular weekly message - that cars are wonderful, wonderful things, and that anyone who disagrees is a boring killjoy. a - boring - killjoy.

Clarkson has several cronies - boring straight men (and a token female) to his jovial bullying routine, whose sideshow bob antics are never permitted to overshadow his own krusticentric performances.

it was one of these who nearly managed to kill himself.

what qualifications do you need to go as fast as possible in a jet-powered car? what's the sum total of required skills to 1) point the thing down the runway 2) ignite the burners, then 3) steer straight until the fuel runs out? piece of piss. a hamster could do it. well, almost. courage, you say? bullshit, I say. you're confusing courage and adolescent bravado. any fourteen-year-old would give his (or, sometimes, her) eye-teeth to do it.

the older we get, the more cautious - that's just the way it works: the longer we've been alive, the more chances we've had to assess the risks (of the various leaps of faith, acts of mercy, expressions of desire, contempt, commitment, or disinterest that appear to us as options at one time or other), and, the more chances we've had to experience the consequences (to others - our loved ones and friends - as well as to ourselves) of taking those risks, the less inclined we become to take them. on balance, the pain involved in suffering the consequences of a risk taken and ending in disaster tends to trump the potential pleasure of its ending in a result: the blindingly obvious fact that we're all mortal doesn't, in fact, become blindingly obvious until well past our teens (when, obviously, it's just not true), when, if we're lucky, we've actually had the chance to look death in the face, and, once having done so, choose not to do so again. probably. arguably, indeed, to choose to risk your life more than once in the pursuit of, well, anything, really, can only indicate one thing - that you've lost sight of something essential to your survival - the ability to learn from experience.

that we have lost it - or something related to it - is evidenced by the fantastic surge in the popularity of danger-related package tours. no longer is the world-tour of white-knuckle rides enough - packages that bring our flabby padded bodies eyeball-to-eyeball with sharks, white water and big number g-forces are selling like hot cakes. we can't get too much of that adrenaline rush.

pansies, all of them, of course. wimps and pattiecakes. it's all about fat wallets and crash-cages and fail-safe backup systems and full insurance. any idiot with a spare couple of million can hitch a ride up to the space station now. ditto the sorry index of current soi-disant adventurers and explorers - survival packs brimming with satellite phones and GPS, back-up rescue helicopters keeping their engines warm, and the camera crew hovering discreetly out of sight.

what it's all about, this fascination with the thrill, this absorption in the tedious-but-compelling escapades of the jet-powered croc-wrestling slebs, is the futile stuffing with vicarious sensation of the hole in all our souls that's all that's left of one of the defining aspects of our humanity: the old, old instinct for survival, at whatever cost, has become a folk-memory, something that's so rarely called upon that, like the vestigial tail, it's all but disappeared from our repertoire of experience. the all-consuming physical paroxysm of the fight-or-flight reflex is just the somatic residue of that oldest of instincts. several hundred thousand years of cultural evolution has translated that crucial (if we are to believe that survival is crucial) relationship between terror and action into something else, a web of somethings that itself came to crystallise, long ago, into the proto-religious ceremonies and rituals from which all art evolved.

in the absence of the priests' effective adjuducation between the arbitrary terrors of the universe and our own sense of hapless impotence when confronted with them, we have chosen to anoint these clowns (who desperately want the job, let's not forget - this isn't some sort of punishment) with the holy water of superstition, appointing them as lightning-conductors of the contingent bolt from the blue that, regardless, will continue to strike at random, as it always has. and when, perchance, the clown does earth a strike, the proper reaction, rather than this incontinent burble of misplaced concern and sympathy for the family, should be to tick the box [there but for the grace of god ...] and replace him as fast as possible.

bugger beggary



in the hectic rush to grow up, the child quickly forgets the intoxicating rush of discovering the magical power of words. how awesome was it to learn that, for this feeling, this way of experiencing the world, this previously misty sense of something, something, oh, strange, there was actually a word! a way of sharing it with others who knew the same word and felt the same thing when it was used.

the rather sad thing is that, despite there being a word (I'm obliged to talk about English here, although this obviously applies to all languages) for practically everything that matters, together with the myriad nuances of all that matteringness (for which there is, actually, a better word in German), there are some words that, despite their describing something really, really useful, get restricted to a very limited congregation of users who hoard its riches, not for selfish reasons, but simply because the rest of us have failed, as yet, to discover it, for one reason or another.

'isostasy' is one such word.

isostasy is
the equilibrium that exists between parts of the earth's crust, which behaves as if it consists of blocks floating on the underlying mantle, rising if material (such as an ice cap) is removed and sinking if material is deposited
(which is the Oxford English Dictionary summary of a rather sophisticated geophysical phenomenon involving the understanding of other such splendid terms as lithosphere, asthenosphere, and tectonic plates).

I remember thinking, when I first came across this marvellous word (in a school text-book), what a wonder, that something so huge and seemingly solid as the surface land-masses of our planet might be considered as a set of wobbling wooden blocks of different sizes bobbing about in a bath, and that this way of regarding it has a word, one word, to describe it. although I didn't, at the time, have any clear idea of how Newton's second law might apply in a global sense, or how material of any nature extracted from one environment will have to be balanced out, somewhere, somehow, by its replacement somewhere else, it was a concept that snagged on something very necessary to my own emerging understanding of the world, and it has continued, metaphorically, to illuminate it for me ever since.

the great paradox at the heart of the global economy is that, whereas the market and the work force is now, to all intents and purposes, a global entity (our Nikes and Nokias and iPods being kept affordable because they're assembled in sweat shops in Thailand and China), the individual market browsers - the rich - still have to inhabit individual sovereign states - their so-called country - which are largely populated by the poor. the officially-tagged names of countries is becoming less and less relevant: just as the global map recently acquired a whole brand new country - Terruh - upon which America and the UK have declared war, so each of the continents is partitioned into at least two major administrative areas populated, on the one hand, by the poor, and on the other, by the comfortably-off.

definitions of wealth and poverty are endlessly argued over according to whether or not the definition favours the different agendas of the wealthy or the impoverished - but it's safe to say that around 5% of the population of the UK owns around 90% of the wealth, and that this gap is steadily increasing.

one of the rules of thumb proposed by the European Union and adopted by, amongst others, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Rowntree Foundation is that you are considered to be living in poverty if you are subsisting on a net disposable income of less than 60% of the national average, which, on current figures of more or less £250 per week, makes the official poverty threshold about £150 per week.

the rich tend to cluster - in Surrey, for example - so it doesn't require a maths genius to work out that this ratio of rich to poor requires that for every county of Surrey with a small population of high-earners there has to be an urban conglomeration such as Birmingham or Glasgow with a very large, concentrated population of subsistence-dwellers.

this might be called the isostasy of economic demographics.

clearly, a finely calculated balance has been achieved in all the economically developed countries between the needs of the rich and those of the poor - the relationship between the two being moderated by tax-gathering and social funding. the acquisition of wealth is not, after all, intrinsically wrong, provided it has not been acquired through means that are wrong. the potential social value to be accrued through the establishment of a very successful business - directly, through taxation or the provision of salaried work, or indirectly, through the sorts of philanthropic ventures exemplified by the Rowntree Foundation - is a significant factor in the evaluation of wealth. on the other hand, the social harm caused by poverty - not least in terms of the measurable burdens of crime and ill-health - is an equally significant factor in the evaluation of that balance.

the very poor are, in fact (I can't be bothered to cite source for this - it's so bloody obvious) subject to much higher relative levels of taxation than the rich through the stealth forms of VAT on everything apart from food and clothing and the desperate lures of such fantastic chimeras as the National Bloody Lottery - one of the most cynical deployments of indirect taxation ever introduced in this country. whereas the rich can afford the sort of creative accountancy that makes Darren Brown's street-magic seem like fumbling buffoonery, the same advice is unavailable to the millions who are conned each week into betting their meagre savings on an outside chance so remote that it makes the tote look like a copper-bottomed certainty in comparison.

historically, the inhabitants of the country of the rich have behaved with appalling disregard for the well-being of their neighbours, the inhabitants of the country of the poor. the rich have regarded the poor as lesser beings - either too lazy or too stupid to find their way across the border between the two countries. and, alas, such are the vicissitudes of human fortune, those poor who do manage to migrate across that border tend very quickly to align themselves with the attitudes of their new neighbours on the other side. the notion that with increased wealth comes proportionately increased social responsibility is one that has never really caught fire in the west except amongst a minority of philanthropists.

there seems to exist a fundamental, psychosis-like syndrome at the root operational level of Western society: whereas all nation-states declare - some at a constitutional level - their foundation in the belief that all people are born equal, not a single nation-state - not even in Scandinavia - has managed to translate this fundamental belief into an enduring, functional social form. why - one might ask - do we bother maintaining the fiction that we believe in equality when, manifestly, we don't? is it simply a by-product of a secular society evolved from a Christian one, one which has totally trashed the sentiments of the Beatitudes in favour of rampant self-interest but still feels a residue of guilt about it? or have we really managed to persuade ourselves that, although it is true that everyone is born equal, some - through accident of birth, or some as-yet-to-be-scientifically-verified genetic propensity for the acquisition of wealth - grow up to be more equal than others? or that some, by the same quirk of pseudo-genetic destiny, are doomed to a life-trajectory that dips inexorably towards beggary?

it could be - it has been - worse. at least, that token nod at the worrisome e-word seems to act as a form of conscientious sea-anchor, constraining the worse excesses of exploitation inherent in this sad, tatty parody of a liberal democracy that we pretend to inhabit. and, certainly, the notional equality available to, say, women, or to the non-white non-Christian non-Oxbridge middle classes, is an improvement on the status quo of only a generation or so since. in reality, however, the hilarious idea that Beyoncé or J-Lo are the 'equal' of their bottom-feeding ghetto sistas is as far from the truth as the industry hype that elevated them in the first place, and nowhere better than in those gruesomely toe-curling aspirational lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous MTV videos is the inflexibility of those isostatic laws demonstrated.

the continent-sized mass of corporate villainy perpetuated by that relatively small population of publicity-shy bankers and oil-czars and insurance-walkmen who really run things globally has to be balanced, publicly, with the hollybolly bread and circus world that performs exactly the same function in contemporary society as did the Roman games two thousand years ago: distracting the taxable masses from and actually persuading them to collude in their own subservience, and to continue indulging the excesses of the rich. this appears to be as easily achievable as allowing us little folk to think that we, too, as long as we play the game and don't rock the boat, might one day be fortunate enough to make the great leap across the border that will admit us into that land of eternal milk and honey, to become - let's not mince words here - Americans. the fact that, within the borders of the cash-richest country on the planet, there exists a town called Poverty (pop. 36,000,000 and growing) is just one of those unfortunate paradoxes that there's probably a word for.

In popular mythology, the ostrich is famous for hiding its head in the sand at the first sign of danger. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder is noted for his descriptions of the ostrich in his Naturalis Historia, where he describes the ostrich and the fact that it hides its head in a bush. There have been no recorded observations of this behavior.

(Wikipedia)

how wrong can a rhino be?

(addendum to the previous post)

"Triple Alliance": The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon

the samson option




one of the strengths of agnosticism is that it comes with no preconditional hatreds. unlike the adherents to any of the historical faiths, I am not obliged, as an agnostic, to regard any grouping of non-adherents as despicable scum whose souls - damned for their apostasy - I might safely regard as worthless, and whose bodies are a hateful shell of sinful iniquity. as an agnostic, I am allowed to regard everyone as potentially decent until or unless their behaviour proves otherwise. I am, not, in other words, condemned to believing that everyone who doesn't believe what I believe is my mortal enemy, and to believing that any harm I cause to them is good because it is in a good cause - the cause of their subjugation.

one of the weaknesses of agnosticism is that it comes with no capacity for empathy with the passionate self-righteousness of those who do believe the above. I can bring the full weight of my liberal understanding to sectarian-nationalist violence, but that comes at the price of denying an equal weight of furious scorn for those whose behaviour is driven by ancient, superstitious, tribal hatreds that have as much place in the twenty-first century as the alchemist's alembic.

whereas, as a reluctant scion of the British Empire, I have to accept my share of historic responsibility (the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Mandate) for what's happening currently in the Middle East, it's only fair to point out that the British were only the more recent of a multi-millennial succession of landgrabbing empires - from Assyrian to Babylonian to Egyptian to Roman to Byzantine to Ottoman - to have capitalised on the inherent tribal volatilities of that region. that the Israelites' claim to their patch can be substantiated by a promise made to Moses by Jahwe Himself circa 1000 BC could be - and probably is - matched by several other nationalistic groupings descended from one of the other contemporary pre-Diaspora tribes, but whether such contentious three-thousand-year-old myths constitute a constructive contribution to or a seriously unhelpful distraction from the ongoing dilemma is moot.

with the wisdom of hindsight, few now disagree that it was a catastrophically inept act of political hubris on the part of the fledgling United Nations to establish a western-dependent non-Muslim state at the heart of an Arab nation, to evict the incumbent population and then re-populate it with semitic immigrants. whatever long-term political and economic strategies underpinned this miscalculation - predicated on the cynical realpolitik of the time, which was more about supervising the final controlled demolition of the Ottoman Empire than about finding a home for the survivors of the Nazi holocaust - were ruinously scuppered when it came to light, during the fifties, that one of the richest oilfields in the world ran under and was accessible to almost every state in the region except the one which was meant to be the dominant one. there followed a frantic period of political bed-swappings and manoeuvrings for advantage that resulted in some strange alliances indeed - not least the pre-emptive arming by the US of one Saddam Hussein's Iraq against the perceived Iranian threat - and has resulted in the establishment of a nation state the same size as Wales not only having had to evolve into the most heavily fortified and most ruthless on the planet, but also having, with covert western connivance, developed a secret (officially unadmitted but undenied, and strangely exempt from any kind of international oversight) arsenal of at least 400 nuclear weapons.

it can't be much fun discovering - once you've finished your compulsory military service and started travelling - that you belong to a pariah nation, one that everyone - apart from God's America - despises. why don't they understand? how would they like it if they too had neighbours who behaved like rabid dogs, suicidally intent on driving them into the sea? what other choice do we have than to defend ourselves with unflinching determination from such racist aggression?

well?

the survival of the Jews, as a coherent religious unit, throughout so many thousands of years of forced displacement and persecution, is one of the marvels of human history. all cultures arise from a religious root, those roots themselves having always played, historically, with the exploratory tendrils of neighbouring cultures and neighbouring religions, and few modern cultures are exempt from substantial Jewish influence. those who deduce from the current conflict that it represents an irreconcilable gulf between Muslim and Jew have misunderstood the nature of the conflict. in fact, the Jews' historic relationship with the Muslim world has been largely peaceable and constructive. the five hundred years of settlement in Spain under the Moorish occupation from the eighth to the twelfth centuries are regarded as a golden age in Jewish history. hence 'Sephardic' Jew from the Hebrew for 'Spanish'.

the present desperately dysfunctional relationship between Israel and its neighbours, and, as a result, between Israel and the rest of the world, is primarily a territorial, not a religious conflict. sixty years is long enough to have established that the Palestinians' grievances over the perceived thefts of their land are not going to subside, and that no amount of brutal collective punishment of the civilian populations of Gaza and Lebanon for their respective militias' armed resistance is going to starve Hezbollah and Hamas of its grassroots support. the chilling Roman efficiency with which Israel kills ten Arab civilians (reprisal or self-defence? you decide!) for every one of its own killed has spawned a militant culture of resistance wherein every massacre spawns a whole new brigade of recruits to martyrdom. few on either side remembers - or even cares - how this all started. all they care about now is killing the other.

there is far too much support - not only material, but spiritual and racial - invested in the continuing survival of the Jewish State of Israel for there to be any question that it will survive. already, however, that survival has been achieved at the cost of a grievous expenditure of moral capital. the longer this intifada continues, the more Israel is obliged to respond with less and less concern for the political consequences, and less and less concern for the worldwide outrage at the brutality of its behaviour. this could continue indefinitely, were it not for the single outstanding problem of America's sponsorship. even with the deep-reaching influence of the Zionist lobby on Capitol Hill, there are serious signs of stress already beginning to show, not only on the budget, but on the political will available for this endeavour. this 'New Middle East' that's begun to be talked about is a neo-con fantasy that will not manifest in actuality beyond the terms of the Haliburton reconstruction contracts in Iraq and the medium-term profitability of the reconstructed and re-assigned Iraqi oil wells. America is in a crisis of denial and self-bamboozlement about what this so-called War on Terruh is all about: it is confusing every issue of foreign policy, outstandingly in the Middle East (where the bogeyman Al Qaeda, for example, has no part to play at all, and is regarded with contempt - as a bunch of irritating dilettantes - by most of the engaged Muslim parties) and costing her dear, whilst the world's next emergent superpower, China, is slowly slowly - in its own sweet time - making up its mind on what the terms of the big bail-out will be at the coming global spring clean.

one of the essential sites to visit on the package tour of Israel is the fortress of Masada - a vast ruin on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert that was the site, in 72 AD, of the Zealots' last stand against the occupying Roman army under Lucius Flavius Silva. after holding out under siege for three months, the leaders of this thousand-strong resistance movement, recognising that their situation was hopeless, and that surrender to the fifteen-thousand-strong Roman legion would only result in either slavery or execution, made a decision that rings through the centuries as one of the tragic cornerstones of Jewish history. when Lucius Flavius finally entered through the breached walls of the citadel, he discovered that everyone - every man, woman and child - was already dead, having chosen to die at their own hands rather than submit to the Roman triumph.

the other definitive suicide in Jewish history was, of course, Samson, whose final act of revenge against his Philistine captors was to summon his legendary strength one last time to grasp the pillars supporting the roof of the temple of Dagon and bring it crashing down on his - and his tormentors' - heads.

word has been out for some time in the independent media that a policy of last resort in relation to the development of Israel's nuclear arsenal was devised by the Israeli government way back in the days of Moshe Dyan, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War: this policy is known, chillingly, as The Samson Option.

however intractable this conflict might seem, it is both intolerable and unsustainable. endless war in the Middle East is not an option. Armageddon is not an option. diplomacy and arbitration have to succeed. clearly, however, as long as America is the only active instrument of both, no progress towards a peaceful resolution is ever going to be made, since, as far as a substantial part of the Arab world is concerned, America is perceived as the great Satan, and any deal it tries to broker will only be at the Arab world's expense. somehow, this suicidal deadlock has to be broken, and this will only happen with the collusion - direct or indirect - of Israel's neighbours, people who, themselves, have learnt to live with such internal conflicts as those between Shi'a and Sunni, Druze and Maronite, and whose culture is a thousand times better equipped to negotiate amongst tribal factions than that to which even the most well-intentioned American foreign secretary (and that combination of words has been a definitive oxymoron for quite some time) owes allegiance.

although a sustainable accommodation has been achieved in recent years between Israel and its southern neighbours in Jordan and Egypt, the leading regional candidate for a mediator acceptable to all parties in the conflict is Turkey: Muslim but firmly secular, Turkey has close economic and security ties with Israel (which regards Ankara as a valuable ally in the region), but has also traditionally supported Palestinian aspirations to statehood, thereby inspiring its trust as a mediator. true, Turkey is no angel of peace (let's nobody mention Armenia or the Kurds), but in a situation such as this where the only cards currently on the table are a busted flush and a pair of dog-eared jokers, beggars can't be choosers - radical substitution time - out with the preppy wankers of Washington and in with the bouncers from Istanbul.

anybody got a better idea?

"You can only talk about a few bad apples for so long before you need to take a serious look at the barrel."

Gary Younge

238Pu

to think the unthinkable for a moment - what would actually happen if the UK government were to decide to scrap the so-called nuclear deterrent, instead of committing to the next generation of weapons?

lots of anguished wailing, of course - from the opposition and the media, who would feel honour-bound to vent some steam about the importance of the nuclear deterrent in maintaining the balance of power that secures our place in blah blah blah. some complaints, too - less hysterical, but probably better informed - from the armed forces, who would wonder what was going to happen to all those submarines and the people who sail in and service them. and then there'd be the sweet bleating of the sheepy flocks who just want to be left in peace and - bless the ickle lambs - put their trust in the government and the media and the armed forces to behave in their best interests and defend their right to do so.

but - political baloney and civic naïveté aside - what would actually happen? would the North Korean government, for example (well, I know - North Korean fat bastard psychotic paranoid looney-man dictator - but let's pretend it's a government) - next in line for bogeyman of the century award - conclude that such wimps as didn't have a nuclear deterrent must be ripe for invasion, and therefore declare war on the UK in order to pre-empt a strike by the Disunited States? (?) (double-?) would Russia, in such desperate need of living space (!) (double-!) get there before him? India? France? Israel? (ok, that last one's a joke) (admittedly a very strange joke) is it really true that the security of my family - the security of knowing, in a relative sense, that, provided we abide by the eccentric standing orders of English law and pay our taxes and do our bit to contribute to the local economy, we might reasonably expect to pass our time in any way we choose and proceed unmolested through this adventure of life - that all this is dependent on my country's possessing a ridiculously large number of warheads of such devastating destructive potential that they could never be used except to ensure the fiery murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, of people like ourselves whose lives, like ours, had proceeded, up until the moment of the flash like a thousand suns, on the assumption that they, too, might reasonably expect to pass their time in any way they chose and live their own lives unmolested by foreign interference?

it's all very strange.

well, no, actually, it's all very simple. the madmen in charge of the DS (stand up Dubya, stand up Kim - now, try to spot the difference) believing that God has anointed them top-dog, believe also that in order to maintain their position as top-dog they need to show off the biggest pumped-up cock stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, and that this requirement extends to their fawning economic dependents allies also (provided that thy cock stockpile doesn't get to be as big as mine).

so - no worries, mate. consider it done. how about's we fix you up with my twin virgin sisters while we're about it?

jesus wept.

even the fuggin Commons defence fuggin committee doesn't see the point! on the one hand we're being told that the major threat to our peace and security is terruh, which knows no country and operates by stealth and out of shoes and backpacks and on a shoestring. and on the other we're being persuaded that in order to maintain our peace and security we need to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons that not only will be capable of frying the entire ozone layer at first strike and accomplishing overnight what global warming will be labouring to achieve at best in a hundred years or so (well - safely beyond the political lifetimes of this generation of arseholes, which is effectively the only determining factor), but will also cost more than something like the combined GDP of all those impoverished African states whose poverty we're committed, thanks to the sterling efforts of Saints Bob and Bono, to eradicating (yeah, right).

the nearest this planet ever got to nuclear armageddon was under the presidency of another popular saint - JFK - who, the terrifying hindsight of history has revealed, was perfectly prepared to make real the dictum that the DS has based the entirety of its foreign policy on since 1945 - better dead than red. and if a saint was capable of that, god save us from what this lot's got in mind for us.

oops



mac users call this the grey screen of death - the mac equivalent of the windows blue ditto: that blank folder in the middle is the hard drive saying "sorry but I can't find anything to boot myself up with - nice knowing you, goodbye, and thanks for all the fish."

which is a bit of a bummer.

so, five days later, and a few pounds (£) lighter, all's more or less back to where it was before the crash, and I'm left wondering how it is that this thing - this machine - this typewriter-cum-telephone-cum-television - has come so to dominate my - and your - and most of our lives. for, really, although I was striving, throughout those few days, to occupy my zen-detached place, and to persuade myself that the effective loss of a shocking amount of un-backed-up work was something that I could live with, I really wasn't fooling anyone, let alone myself, and the phrase 'on tenterhooks' came to reveal its quintessential meaning in the manner of my increasingly frenzied squirming on this wretched spike of insecurity the longer the uncertainty continued.

in so far as our sense of selfhood is largely a function of that pesky two-way mirror of perception - how we perceive that we are being perceived - the personal computer (particularly in its form as an interface with the internet and the world wide web) has become either a personality prosthesis or synthetic augmentation depending on how you look at it.

there can't be many people now under the age of twenty-five whose social lives haven't been as entirely circumscribed by e-mail, msn, blogger and myspace as their academic or working lives by Word, excel, and powerpoint (and/or photoshop, cubase, protools, dreamweaver, whatever ... ad-diddly-infinitum), and who regard the pc or mac - either in its desktop or laptop form (or, increasingly, in its mobile phone form) as an absolutely indispensable feature of their lives. the prospect of loss, then, is something that goes way beyond a previous generation's fears of losing their filofax - the loss of data is only a part of what is implied in the prospect of self-erasure faced by those standing staring into the lost-computer abyss. from choice of desktop image to preferred browser to lists of favourites to iTunes playlists, our personalities are embedded in our computers far more deeply than in the way we dress or in our choice of transport, and the potential loss of the machine reverberates deep in our neocortex as something akin to a cross between a partial lobotomy and the death of a very close friend.

this is no more something to be deplored than was the microphone usurping the megaphone, or the calculator usurping the slide-rule: it's the culture optimising the technology, nothing more, nothing less, and, by and large, the dystopian potential - for big brother-like social control, or exploitative naughtinesses of the phishing and scamming kind - is far outweighed by the potential for informed vigilance afforded by internet access.

it is, however, fairly alarming that the sort of nervous breakdown once forewarned by months or years of increasing individual dysfunction and announced by the gradual whittling-away of self-esteem by dint of the diurnal drip of corrosive human intercourse onto the fragile carapace of our tender personalities is now something that can happen in the few moments it takes between pressing the startup button and nothing happening.

the invisible boat





there is a famous, if probably apocryphal story about Captain Cook's first landing on one of the Polynesian Islands he visited during one of his voyages of discovery: the story goes that, so far beyond the native islanders experience was the eighteenth-century European world he came from that they were literally unable to see the boat he had come in. when communication had been established and they asked him where he had come from, and how he had got there, and in reply he pointed to the great three-masted sailing vessel anchored off-shore, they stared in an incomprehension that, quite literally, occluded their vision. the ship conformed to no known configuration of their experience of the world, so it was invisible to them.

it's clear that, in many aspects of our development, we require guidance towards understanding what it is we perceive: that perception precedes cognition, and that the link between the two is the learning experience.

we appear to inhabit an oscillating universe in which our sensory apparatus has evolved to compensate for the ever-moving waves and particles of the material world by adopting a set of oscillating platforms of its own. we are constantly comparing one experience with another at the micro level in order to make sense of what it is we are perceiving. the eye, for instance, is never still - it is constantly vibrating, making tiny movements up and down and from side to side in order that the photosensitive cells on the retina can compare one stream of photons with another and combine these comparisons into a visual representation of what is out there (at least, in the wavelengths that were determined to matter on the natural selection route). all the way up to the macro level, each item of information we acquire about the world is compared with those which preceded it in an ever-expanding library of sensations and memories. and eventually, when we have acquired a sufficiency of experiences and memories, we are able to apply a sophisticated discriminatory function that compares our personal libraries with all those others out there in everyone else's head, and start developing a thing which we call 'taste' - whether we apply it to what we eat, drink, hear, or see, we still call it 'taste' - something which, in turn, helps others to decide whether or not we and they have enough in common to feel comfortable in each others company.

this taste thing - as applied to music - is far more sophisticated, obviously, than preferring, say, sweet foods to savoury, or the other way round. what would the musical equivalent to that be? preferring assonance to dissonance? hard to say, because our relationship with music has less to do with our capacity to hear and discriminate between different tones and rhythms than with the sort of mentoring - direct or indirect - we have received in the course of learning how to hear this cultural construct we call 'music'.

it is often repeated that music is a language, one that is capable of facilitating a form of communication between people whose native spoken language is different, and one that is able to articulate aspects of our experience that words fail at. if both of these statements are true, then it follows that the process of learning about music - that bridge between perception and cognition - is more analogous to learning about gastronomy than about the fundamentals of another spoken language.

everyone eats, just as everyone makes noises, but we require guidance towards the enjoyment of a wide range of gastronomic pleasures, just as we require guidance towards hearing the wider range of possibilities of acoustic pleasure. 'understanding' is never the point, any more than understanding a soufflé is the point. the literature of musicology is constipated with the language of understanding, a language that is often as patronising as it is hermetic. the better commentaries on such non-cognitive experiences as enjoying good music or food tend to be those which abandon the descriptive in favour of the anecdotal – a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the translation of one sensory language into another is a fundamental oxymoron.

for all that, there remains the very interesting question of whether or not music carries any meaning at all beyond the immediately emotional and visceral. and that, in turn, raises the question of the relationship between the artist and his or her audience - how, in the process of its creation, the artwork becomes separate from the artist. the literature of artistic meditation is full of references to the phenomenon of the creation - be it a novel, a piece of sculpture, or a piece of music - taking on a life of its own, of the relationship between artist and artwork being similar to that between parent and child, and of its seeming - literally, in many cases - to determine the course of its own completion. art – particularly Modernist art – has come to be considered almost as an extension of the unconscious, or the libido, or both.

but art doesn't exist in a moral vacuum, and, as a spectator or listener, acquired knowledge about the biographical events surrounding the work is clearly as important as the work itself.

if we regard this painting with uninformed eyes, it appears to be saying something relatively straightforward:



if, on the other hand, we regard it in the knowledge that it was the last painting van Gogh ever worked on, and that he died soon after completing it, it takes on an entirely different set of readings, particularly when we add to that knowledge the commonly understood biographical details about his madness and poverty.

similarly, once we have learnt that Carl Orff was one of Hitler’s favourite composers, it becomes impossible wholly to enjoy his gloriously Rabelaisian Carmina Burana without experiencing a pang, at least, of pc concern.

the same applies to all music which has in some way been contextualised by commentary - and almost all music has, whether in the form of critical assessment or anecdotal annotation.

there have been many more or less erudite attempts to explain the finer points of musical language by analysing particular keys or scales or chord-progressions as utilised by particular composers to achieve particular effects. in the course of the 2006 Reith lectures, for instance, Daniel Barenboim himself demonstrates several such.

I suspect, however, that such repeated attempts to analyse how such and such a chord in such and such a key might evoke such and such a response is more akin to a form of didactic sleight of hand than Mosaic dogma.

if there is sufficient authority behind a particular statement about the world, that statement can quickly become an axiom. the majority of artistic judgements occur in this way.

at the very least, it's a form of tautology. let's say that we hear, for the first time, a certain musical passage which we find affecting, and which we come to understand is expressive of loss, say, or yearning, then an authority such as Barenboim comes along and painstakingly analyses - usually demonstrating on a piano - the musical structures underlying this effect, and, hey presto, our ears are opened and our understanding is complete. our own inarticulable sense of something special having happened when we heard the music has been articulated, redefined in reassuringly comprehensible English, and, henceforth, whenever we hear that kind of progression, or structure, we know what it 'means' because we have been armed with the means (the words) to describe it.

this is probably no more than to say that this is how it – culture – works: that, over time, an aggregation of opinion occurs as to what means what, what matters and what doesn’t, what is good and what is bad, guided by a dependable grouping of authorities whose combined opinions coalesce into a set of doctrines which, in turn, become grist to the continually developing cultural mill.

it becomes impossible, therefore, eventually, to challenge such received opinions as that Mozart’s Symphonies or Rembrandt’s portraits embody the human spirit par excellence because such opinions have become the aesthetic equivalent of Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics – their ‘humanity’ exhaustively analysed as a function of key-changes or brush-strokes.

whether or not music has the capacity to do anything more nuanced than embody the human spirit in this very generalised sense is hardly worth arguing about: clearly it can't describe, for instance, the processes at work in a Shakespearean sonnet or any similar work of literary genius - that isn't the point of music, despite what an army of wishfully thinking pop critics might have us believe. the music can support, and seem to reinforce the sentiment of the average lyrics - either I love you and you love me and we're as happy as we can be in a major key or I loved you but you left me for another so I'm a bit sad in a minor - but, in reality, bereft of the lyrics, we're for the most part left floundering in a swamp of interchangeable genre-dependent sounds that manifest the entire range of the emotional alphabet between A and B (and occasionally stumble on to C).

that we can, and do, nevertheless, find some music either as breathtaking as staggering onto a Himalayan summit, as joyful as the birth of our first child, or as gut-wrenching as losing our most precious possession is a side-effect of our two-steps-forward one-step-back progress towards our evolved humanity, when the cerebral cortex finally wrapped itself around the limbic system. because we can speak, we think we can speak about anything, but, at its best, music occupies the breathing spaces between the words, than which it is no less affecting, and at its very, very best, it articulates that which remains and will always remain resolutely unsayable, but as necessary to the articulation of our humanity as our ability to love.