Venetian blinders

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My esteemed friend Bill Thompson (whom God preserve) goes to Venice rather a lot. When I berate him for this voluptuous excess (I am a Calvinist in these matters), he replies earnestly that he finds it an excellent place in which to work. Now it just so happens that Henry James also went to Venice rather a lot, ostensibly for ‘work’. So you will understand why I was interested in this stirring account of his working day in John Julius Norwich’s elegant book, Paradise of Cities:

After an early breakfast at Florian’s he would go — weather permitting — to the Stabilimento Chitarin for a salt-water bath, then spend the morning strolling through the city until it was time for lunch, usually at Quadri. Afterwards he would return to his rooms and work through the afternoon, occasionally wandering to the window to see whether ‘out in the blue channel, the ship of some right subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight’. How often such a vessel appeared he does not say, but the trips to the window seem to have been fairly frequent: as he himself was later to point out in Italian Hours, ‘Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The effort required for sitting down at a writing table is heroic, and the brightest page of MS looks dull beside the brilliancy of your milieu.’ The day’s work done, he would spend a couple of hours drifting gently in a gondola before taking another stroll, sitting at Florian’s listening to the music in the Piazza or, two or three times a week, calling on his friend Mrs Katherine de Kay Bronson…

Now I am sure that Bill does not engage in such a leisurely round when he is ‘working’ in Venice. But still…

And I have another friend who has just become Director of a big museum in Holland. She now also has to go to Venice (to the Biennale, especially) for ‘work’. Er, where did I go wrong?

That iPhone

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This morning’s Observer column…

The iPhone has arrived. Yawn. It was one of the worst-kept secrets of the technology world – that Apple had teamed up with Motorola to produce a mobile phone with an iPod inside. For months, Photoshopped fantasies of what the new device would look like circulated on the internet, no doubt elevating the blood pressure of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, who is famously paranoid about the advance leaking of product details. But last week in San Francisco, Mr Jobs came clean, unveiling the Rokr (as in ‘rocker’, apparently)…

Continued here, if you’re interested.

Censorship and news management in New Orleans

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It looks to me (and to some US journalists) that there’s now a concerted effort going on to control and limit the amount of free reporting being done in the disaster zone. See, for example, this report by NBC’s Justice Correspondent, Brian Williams:

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement.

In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois.

And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told.

There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets.

Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

So, has he been fired or not?

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According to CNN,

WASHINGTON — Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen will replace FEMA director Michael Brown as the on-site head of hurricane relief operations in the Gulf Coast, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Friday afternoon. Brown will head back to Washington from Louisiana to oversee the big picture, the official said.

I have this image of Brown painting the ‘big picture’ by numbers.

Network? What network?

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Just back from Oxford, where I chaired a session of the Internet Institute’s conference on ‘Safety and Security in a Networked World. The conference was held in Oxford’s Said Business School, a grim building near the railway station which looks like the headquarters of a dry-cleaning company.

It would be nice to think that the School is named after Edward Said, the late — and distinguished — Palestinian cultural critic, but I fear the money that built it is more likely to have come from commissions on oil and arms sales. In a feeble attempt to give the place a vaguely middle-Eastern air, it’s built around a featureless courtyard.

When I arrived, I asked the pleasant young woman at the desk how to log onto the wireless network. She gave me a nice-but-puzzled look. Her voice said that there wasn’t such a thing; her look said “This is a business school, dumbo, not some technology college”. So I launched MacStumbler and — Lo! — it was So! The University of Oxford’s Business School doesn’t have a single wireless network.

The panellists on my session (on ‘Privacy, Trust & Security – A Zero-Sum Game?’) were an interesting lot: Caspar Bowden, who was an imaginative Director of FIPR before he joined Microsoft as their Chief Privacy Adviser; Fred Piper of London University; Elizabeth France, the Telecommunications Ombudsman; Richard Starnes; and — to my great delight — Eli Noam from Columbia, one of the most stimulating and unsettling academics in the field of telecommunications policy. It turns out that he’s on the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute.

And lest we get too complacent…

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… see this column by Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. Sample:

Before we get too piously smug about America, just imagine a flood crashing through the Thames barrier and drowning London and Essex. What would we see? Essentially the same thing, even if mayor Ken Livingstone did evacuation well. The middle classes would escape to friends and relatives. The poor who have no networks beyond other poor people would collect in camps. They would be as pitifully helpless and there would be millions of them too. In New Orleans people couldn’t get away for lack of the price of a taxi out of town. In London too, floods would expose what is hidden to well-off Britain because we also live strictly segregated lives. Housing-estate ghettoes are never entered by the 75% homeowners, places hidden even in the next street.

Poor London victims would also have nothing more than the clothes they stood in. Nationally 27% of people have no savings, not one penny; 25% of the poorest have at least £200 in debts, which would track them down to their refugee camps; 12% of households (many more individuals) have no bank account – even for those with basic accounts, banks never lend so much as a bus fare to those who most need it. A quarter of households have no insurance; they would lose everything.