Category Archives: Asides

Don’t mention the Jews

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Funny story from James Murphy’s review of the second volume of Gore Vidal’s autobiography:

The names continue to drop at a rate unknown outside the pages of Hello! magazine, and the end paper collage pictures the author’s apotheosis, surrounded by crowding celebrities, as it might have been attempted by Tiepolo. Some we have met before, some not. We get to know more of Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, and friends from the hotter media like Paul Newman and the chat show host Johnny Carson, but acting here as his own Boswell, Vidal offers much less anecdotal detail than he gave us before. Still, many of his stories are diverting and some are even memorable, such as the demand which the actor-director José Ferrer received from Hollywood studio executives to exclude all reference to Jews from a film he was making about the Dreyfus Affair…

Beckham’s going home

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BBC Online reports that David Beckham will leave Real Madrid and join Major League Soccer side LA Galaxy at the end of the season.

The 31-year-old former England captain will sign a five-year deal, reportedly worth £128m.

He’s off to his spiritual home: fantasyland.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum

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Due to some mysterious glitch, this morning’s Observer column appeared in the paper edition but not on the Web. So here’s a pdf version. Sample:

The QCA is a fascinating organisation, staffed by responsible adults in suits. It produces tons of earnest documents, all of them possessing a single common property, namely that of reducing their readers’ will to live. Put such an organisation in charge of designing a curriculum on ICT, and you can predict the result: An Old Person’s Guide to ICT.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum (OPIC) has three ‘themes’: ‘using ICT systems’; ‘finding and exchanging information’; and ‘developing and presenting information’. The first involves learning a Key Skill — that of ‘interacting with ICT for a purpose’. Pupils should be taught important things like ‘take a turn playing a screen-based game, using a mouse, selecting options and keying in information’. Teachers should ensure that pupils are able to ‘choose between option buttons displayed on a cashpoint screen’, ‘follow instructions when using interactive TV’ and ‘receive a text message to make arrangements, e.g. where to meet a friend’.

Now I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You think I am making this up. In that case, can I refer you to the QCA’s draft ‘ICT Skill for Life Curriculum Document’ released in September 2005 and available online from www.qca.org.uk?

There’s a surreal quality to the QCA’s ICT curriculum. It conjures up images of kids up and down the country trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving solemn instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

And then the same kids go home and log onto Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’.

And when you ask them what they did at school today they grimace and say ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, Dad. Yuck!’

Vatican goes Wilde

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From Times Online

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, gay icon and deathbed convert to Catholicism, has been paid a rare tribute by the Vatican. His aphorisms are quoted in a collection of maxims and witticisms for Christians that has been published by one of the Pope’s closest aides…

It is said that Wilde converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. I prefer to believe the story that his last words were: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do”.

Another scurrilous deathbed joke from my childhood surfaces. It concerns Michael O’Leary, a celebrated reprobate who never darkened the door of the parish church. But eventually he was laid low by a heart attack and his family, seeing an opportunity to rescue him from the fires of hell, summoned a priest to give him Extreme Unction. In accordance with the rite, the priest bent down and said, “Michael, do you renounce the Devil, and all his works and pomps?” Whereupon Michael, summoning up all his remaining energy, hauled himself up onto one elbow and said, “Jesus, Father, this is no time to be makin’ enemies”.

Eagleton on stereotypes

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Terry Eagleton had an hilarious review of Typecasting: on the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality in the London Review of Books. The article, alas, has disappeared behind a paywall, but here are two passages which made me laugh.

It would make for a bolder, more innovative study than this one to put in a good word for stereotypes, even though academics at certain American universities might find themselves under fire for doing so. Those of us who are not American academics, however, may feel less constrained. It is an open secret, for example, that Ulster Protestants are not by and large dandyish aesthetes notable for their extravagant wordplay and surreal sense of humour. The English middle classes are for the most part less physically and emotionally expressive than Neapolitan dockers. It is unusual to meet a working-class Liverpudlian who dresses for dinner, other than in the sense of putting on a shirt. Corporation executives tend not to be Dadaists.

And,

Academics who study these facts are known as sociologists, and like Stalinists have no interest in individuals. Without stereoypping of some kind, social life would grind to a halt. If the plumber turns up to fix drains dressed in tights and a tutu, I would natually be liberal-minded enough to invite him to perform a few pirouettes at the sink; but if the bank manager insists on discussing my loan in Latvian, I might take my business elsewhere. Human freedom is a question of life being reasonably predictable, not of being joyously liberated from rules. Unless we can calculate the effects of our actions, which includes the way others might typically respond to them, we will be incapable of realising our projects effctively.

Footnote: Apropos plumbers in tights, J. Edgar Hoover, the fearsome Director of the FBI who held even presidents in thrall, was a distinguished cross-dresser who wore tutus to informal social occasions. The absurd thing is that he didn’t have the legs for it, being short and stocky of build, and exceedingly hirsute to boot.

Taste, trust and user-generated content

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Splendid rant by Simon Jenkins…

Whatever the borderline between amateur and professional, skill and artistry, some things are very difficult to do, and most people will admire and pay those who do them. Every creative talent comes with unseen baggage, directors, designers, stage-setters, publishers, editors and coaches. No art is without effort, and the effort is collective. If the electronic marketplace becomes devoid of copyright, producers will devise ways of protecting and “monetising” their appeal. Pulp fiction still seems to be thriving.

The internet has certainly torn up the media of communication pioneered by Gutenberg and Caxton, Marconi and Reith. The anarchist in me is attracted by the sovereignty of the mob. I like to see the market, the audience, hitting back occasionally – even if it does so from the Tower of Babel. Shakespeare had to contend with his groundlings and La Scala with its claque.

But rulebooks there will always be. The popular scientist EO Wilson explained the cultural genetics that guide our myriad responses to group stimuli. Embedded in our DNA, they govern everything from artistic sensibility to habit, style and forms of pleasure. In matters of taste, these genes demand frameworks of trust, whether the proclaimed intermediary be a priest or a fashion editor.

I trust certain writers, directors, composers, artists, even newspapers, to widen my horizons without revolting me. Between their transmitting and my receiving is a zone of faith. That is why, however worldwide the web, there will never be a “blog-standard” newspaper. I need to trust a news-gatherer to adhere to known standards of veracity and taste, or my own judgment will go haywire. Those with no one to trust are not to be trusted.

There is no substitute for a disciplined, rule-bound, edited news-gatherer any more than there is for a formal theatre, movie-maker or publisher. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” will not find its apotheosis in the internet. The message transcends the medium and always will. The fact that a reader’s taste can sometimes be shocked shows the power of the trust on which it is normally based.

The backlash against user-generated content gathers pace.

The Saddam death video

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The Guardian asked me to comment on the video…

It was not an edifying experience, but the poor quality of the cameraphone video mitigated its ghastliness. It is shot from the stairs below the gallows platform. There’s a lot of jostling and shouting in Arabic. The various pre-execution procedures are shown – the black cloth being placed around Saddam’s neck, then the noose with its (to the uninitiated eye, anyway) ludicrously large knot. The rope has a lot of slack. More shouting. Saddam appears to smile, but given the quality of the video, it’s impossible to be sure. Then he is pushed forward. Nothing happens for a bit, except that the camerawork deteriorates further, sometimes focusing on the stairs. Whoever’s doing this is having trouble keeping their lens on the action.

Then there’s a loud crack, and Saddam disappears. Suddenly, one understands why the rope had so much slack. The shouting increases in volume and intensity. The camera focuses jerkily on the stairs for a time. The cameraman is obviously ascending them for a better view. Then there are a few surreal frames of the executed man’s face, now horizontal, which reminded one, bizarrely, of one of those art-movie sequences of a drowned man under water. Then fade to black.

I was the 811,625th person to view it, according to the YouTube statistics box…

Metcalfe’s Law updated

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From Chris Anderson…

Metcalfe’s Law says that value of a networks grows with the square of the number of nodes. Today’s Web, which is as much about contributing as consuming — two-way links, as opposed to the old one-way networks of broadcast and traditional media — allows the same to apply to people. Connecting minds allows our collective intelligence to grow with each person who joins the global conversation. This information propagation process, which was once found in just a few cultures of shared knowledge, such as academic science, is now seen online in everything from hobbies to history. The result, I think, will be the fastest increase in human knowledge in history…

Amazon.co.mars

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From BBC NEWS…

The billionaire founder of amazon.com has released the first images of the launch of a private spacecraft that could bring space travel to the masses.

A video of the cone-shaped Goddard vehicle shows it climbing to about 85m (285ft) before returning back to Earth.

The test launch took place in November 2006 in a remote part of Texas, but details have only now been released…

You’d have thought it would have been cheaper to get FedEx to deliver to Mars.