Gonzo in retrospect

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On Saturday we went to see Alex Gibney’s documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which was simply wonderful. It’s a warts-and-all portrait which does not shy away from Thompson’s amazingly powerful instinct for self-destruction. I’m old enough to regard him as a contemporary, but Gibney’s film will give younger generations an insight into how remarkable a writer and personality Gonzo was. What I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time (partly, I suppose, because in those pre-Internet days, very few people on this side of the Atlantic had access to Rolling Stone magazine) was how moralistic (in the best sense) he was. I hadn’t realised, for example, how committed he was to George McGovern’s presidential campaign (as tragically flawed, in its way, as Al Gore’s in 2000). And how he was largely responsible for catapaulting Jimmy Carter from the obscurity of a Southern governorship to a successful presidential candidate.

The film is thus very informative. It is also outrageously funny, intriguing and moving without being sentimental. Johnny Depp reads from Thompson’s works (and is revealed as a friend and loyal admirer). And by using Thompson’s writing as voiceover, it reminds one of what a terrific writer he could be. At his best he was like Hemingway without the macho crap.

One of his great gifts was that he was a maestro of beginnings. Anyone who writes for a living will envy him that because the toughest thing is to find an arresting way of opening a piece. I know from my own experience, for example, that if I wake up on a Friday morning with a good first sentence for my newspaper column, then the job is half done. Thompson had a way of starting that took you by the scruff of the neck and dumped you, rubbing the sleep out of your psyche, into the middle of things.

LATER: Critics were less impressed by the film than I was. The great Philip French, for example, was relatively detached:

Gibney’s elaborately textured film draws on much home movie footage, new interviews, old TV appearances and clips from the feature films inspired by Thompson’s antics (he’s played by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It’s often hilarious and captures the spirit of the time, both in its early hopes and its inevitable disillusionment. Yet it’s a sad movie and somehow inadequate in its lack of true pity or understanding. Thompson’s first wife, Sondi, mother of his son Juan, put up with him for 20 years, until his excesses and egotism forced her to leave, and it is she alone who says: “I think his story was tragic.”

And it is she who demurs from a general agreement that his suicide, like that of Hemingway, was somehow a courageous act. In this documentary, we watch a man go insane and destroy himself, his final act of madness being the funeral he organised in which his ashes were sent into the skies with red, white and blue fireworks from a self-aggrandising tower he’d designed with the help of Steadman.

Peter Bradshaw was marginally more positive:

Young radicals become old reactionaries, of course, although unlike many gung-ho liberals, Thompson never lost his nerve and supported the military adventures of George W Bush. His uncool male-pattern baldness made him resemble Philip Larkin, and that cigarette-holder was a weirdly bohemian, almost Cowardian affectation, which passes unremarked by Gibney or anyone else. In the end, a lot of his work is like a massive improvised guitar solo. Maybe you had to be there. But he emerges from this film as a real American original.

And today one of my colleagues, an English don, gave me a hard time today for being hard on Hemingway. I have an awful feeling he may have been right. Sigh.

Aperture and the Nikon D700

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Aperture — Apple’s digital image management software — displays a strange glitch when one’s trying to upload photographs from a Nikon D700. So long as the images are jpegs, there’s no problem. But if you’ve been shooting RAW then Aperture can’t see the images on the camera — and therefore won’t upload them. (Interestingly, iPhoto can see them.)

Initially I thought that this was because I needed to install some extra plug-ins, but as far as I can see I’m up to date with everything. After Googling the problem it became clear that it’s a problem with Aperture not seeing the camera as a mass storage device. But if you take the CF card out of the camera and insert it into a USB card reader, then the program can see the RAW images and you’re home and dried.

LATER: Richard Earney writes:

Grabbing images off the camera directly can be a cause of data corruption, due to differences in the way the concept of mass storage devices are treated by various OSs and whether the USB ports have the right power.

So Adobe, for instance, strongly recommend using a card reader!

The road less travelled

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After days and days of muddy brown light, the sun shone this morning. So I packed camera and lenses and went for a walk in the woods. There was a freezing wind up on the ridge outside Wimpole, so much so that it was painful to hold the camera, even with leather gloves on. And yet it was lovely to be there, listening to the wind sighing through the trees, and picking my way over rotten branches and fallen trees. At one point I was standing contemplating the view and thinking about lenses when I heard voices raised in desultory conversation, and then two horsemen passed me and politely said “Good morning”. After they’d moved on, I fell to thinking of one of my favourite poems. And took the picture.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

LATER: Quentin reminded me of his own poetical venture in this territory!

Wealth capture

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Great Observer column by Simon Caulkin.

What's been lost over the last three decades is only now becoming clear. Some of the warning signs were already visible in the succession of increasingly frequent panics and scandals of the last decade and a half – Enron, the dotcom boom, LTCM. Less obviously, the last 30 years have seen a steady erosion of balance between stakeholders. While layoffs of staff – "the most important asset" – were once a last resort for employers, they are now the first option. Outsourcing is so prevalent that it needs no justification. And the company's welfare role is now so attenuated that it barely exists. First to go was the notion of career; more recently, the tearing-up of company pension obligations is another unilateral recasting of the conditions of work – a historic step backwards – that has aroused barely a ripple of objection.

The justification for this behaviour is, of course, the pressure of the market. But this is to disguise a betrayal. As a class, ever since the separation of ownership and management in the 19th century, managers have always occupied a neutral position at the heart of the enterprise – neither labour nor capital, but charged with combining the two for the benefit of both the company and society itself.

Everything changed in the 1980s, however, with the advent of Reagan, Thatcher and Chicago School economists who preached the alignment of management with shareholders in the name of "efficiency". In effect, "efficiency" came to mean short-term earnings to the detriment of long-term organisation-building; what was touted as "wealth creation" was actually "wealth capture", from suppliers, clients and employees as well as competitors, on the grandest scale since the robber barons. Its purest expression was private equity.

Managers never looked back. As late as the 1980s, a multiple of 20 times the earnings of the average worker was perfectly adequate CEO pay. But under the compliant gaze of shareholders and remuneration committees, performance-pay contracts boosted the ratio to 275 times by 2007.

As we now know, "performance pay" was a misnomer, an incentive for financial engineering that has destroyed value on a heroic scale. But it's not just shareholder value that has suffered. By severing any common interest between top managers and the rest of the workforce, fake performance pay has fatally undermined the internal compact that makes organisations thrive in the long term.

Googling vs. boiling

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Interesting ‘revelation’ in Times Online.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

Hmmm… This Wissner-Gross seems to be a bright lad. He’s a Fellow at the Harvard environment Center where his bio says that in 2003 he “became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics, while simultaneously graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering as the Henry Ford II Scholar.” According to his home page he has seven granted or pending patents, and fourteen published papers in addition to his PhD. And he was a boy soprano for the New York City Opera. He’s also set up CO2stats, a site that claims that it “makes your site carbon neutral and shows visitors you’re environmentally friendly”.

I’m not convinced by the search vs. kettle calculation, but I am sure that the environmental impact of computing is one of the Next Big Stories.

Thanks to Darren Waters for the original link.

Inane email disclaimers

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This morning’s Observer column about inane email disclaimers.

A friend sends you an email saying "How about lunch?" and it comes with this implicit threat that if you so much as breathe a word of it to any living being the massed litigators of Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne will descend upon you. The practice is now so widespread that most of us have become inured to it. We treat it as a penance to be borne – like muzak in lifts and the "we really value your call, please hold" mantra of customer "help" lines.

The funny thing is that the practice is, at best, legally dubious…

I’m collecting examples of this idiotic legalese. Here’s one that came in this morning:

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential, and may be subject to legal privilege, and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error or think you may have done so, you may not peruse, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message. Please notify the sender immediately and delete the original e-mail from your system. The contents, comments and views contained or expressed within this correspondence do not necessarily reflect those of [sending organisation] and are not intended to create legal relations with the recipient.

LATER: A comment on cearte.ie says:

But don’t forget that, in Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd [1964] AC 465, [1963] UKHL 4 (28 May 1963), the case that established liability in principle for negligent misrepresentation, a disclaimer was effective!