Tuesday 1st July 2025
Blog Page 2247

The Ting Tings – We started nothing

0

Tiresome. Uninspiring. Unoriginal. Just some of the words that have been used to describe me over the years, but ones that could equally well be applied to this collection of MOR indie from awfully monikered, in-at-the-moment-but-won’t-be-come-the-next-issue-of-NME, Salford two-piece, The Ting Tings.

Now I’m willing to confess that prior to even listening to the album I’d already formulated that pithy opening in my head. However, after thirty-seven uneventful minutes in the company of these ten songs I felt little compulsion to reconsider.

 

Their sound inspires unfavourable comparisons to the bland, risk-free sound of bands like The Gossip, replete as they are with the same lacklustre attempts at choppy beats, catchy melodies and girl-punk candour.

 

Even when they try for something a little sweeter the best they can muster is the nauseating sub-Lily Allen ‘Traffic Light’ which is close to unbearable. Katie White’s vocals are pretty unassuming and often unassumingly pretty, which makes for particularly unconvincing effect when she tries to channel her inner rock-bitch during the functionless funk of ‘Shut Up and Let Me Go’.

 

Admittedly latest single ‘That’s Not My Name’ has been rattling round my cranium for the past couple of days, but honestly that’s not much to go by – I’ve also had the jingle from the ‘I Love Horses Magazine’ advert stuck in my head lately.

 

Ultimately this is just another offering from the endless cavalcade of identikit indie-poppers that are shoved down the ever grateful gullets of the credibility-seeking scene flitterers that devour this kind of stuff with relish, only to shortly thereafter excrete it into the void without a second thought, greedily awaiting the next musical morsel.

 

And for that reason I pity them but not quite as much as I would do, had they not produced an album quite so depressingly forgettable. Harumph.

 

One star. 

Interview: Johnny Flynn

0

Let’s get the adulation out of the way first. Johnny Flynn – blue-eyed boy of twee folk pop – is very, very, very good-looking. Fortunately, ours is a telephone interview, so I am confident of my ability to sport a coldly professional air.

More fortunately still, this proves to be unnecessary. He turns out to also be very, very, very nice. I thaw, and we chat.

The singer, who will continue to tour the UK throughout May with his band The Sussex Wit, says that music has become a pretty much full-time occupation since he finished his last run with the RSC last July, though confesses that there hasn’t been much time for indulging in rock & roll trappings.

The band have been kept busy with shows and with the recording of their first album, out later this month. On top of this, they are good friends with most of the other key players in that lovely London scene of almost-folk – Noah and the Whale, Slow Club, Jeremy Warmsley, ETC. He used to live with Jeremy Warmsley, actually.

These friendships do not, apparently, herald the appearance of a new, violin-toting ‘Bloomsbury Group’ equivalent – imposed identities, he says crossly, are not helpful – but they do mean that everyone plays on everyone else’s records. Which leaves even less time for smashing up hotel rooms.

I ask Johnny whether any particular ‘creative routine’ lies behind his music. He says it’s more of an organic process – he’ll come to the band with a song and a melody, and they’ll work out each separate part at the same time as they record.

It means that when each song is complete, it has a distinct set of associated feelings and emotions, arising from the day and place and mood of its creation. A lot of these feelings are centred around his kitchen table, he says.

I tell him that I like listening to his music while I hang up the washing, and he laughs, and replies that what he likes about taking his songs on tour is the opportunity to colour those associated sensations in each song by removing it from that particular place of creation and airing it elsewhere. I laugh too, because that’s almost a laundry pun.

When I ask him to explain how he thinks this music that evokes such particular memories for him translates into similar feelings in his listeners, he ums. Then he says that it’s like ‘some common consciousness’.

He makes the songs to please himself, but it stands to reason that some of the things he like will also please other people. I assure him that this is the case, indulging in a little more adulation before we say goodbye.

1968 did not take place

0

                                                                                                                           Picture: Claire Little

 

I can’t help but think that this whole 1968 exhibition is nothing but a huge, marketed, branded, pre-packaged cliché.  It is so very Southbank, so very Verso, so very liberal left.  If the Guardian has reviewed it, they probably love it.

 

Why? Because anything exhibited at the Hayward brings with it a kind of love-hate guilt-trip, a ‘what will happen if someone finds out?’ appeal about it. It’s like the Starbucks Latte.  It’s creamy, it’s frothy, it’s warm and it soothes. Even better, it’s Fairtrade.

 

Yet at the same time, it’s a white coffee (so imperialist and non-Left Bank) and is made by a multinational corporation who, despite their greatest efforts to convince us otherwise, have destroyed all hopes of local business flourishing. How to reconcile the ‘Free Palestine’ regalia and the green-tailed siren? Just don’t buy a Frappucino.  You’re saving the ice caps, right?

The environment aside, the Hayward is cool. And that’s why it’s fitting that a new exhibition of posters from the 1968 revolts in Paris should be put on there. I couldn’t think of anywhere better. In many ways the Hayward epitomises ‘New London’ – of which the Southbank is the epicentre.  Here is a clash of the urban and the conceptual; the ‘60s meets the 21st century.

 

I am talking about the difference between sixties war-crimes which supposedly count as architecture (the BFI, the Royal Festival Hall, etc), and the new Southbank Centre and accompanying Hayward Gallery. The clash is strangely epitomised by that random skatepark which sits next to Centre, just underneath the walkway.

 

I’ve always wondered how that popped up, and why there always people there. I remember asking my dad as a child: ‘Why aren’t those men at work?’ I was a naïve soul.

So, why would the Hayward make a fuss about some ’68 posters? Well, it’s forty years on, as if I needed to remind you after the million and one supplements, special editions and culture spreads about ‘1968 and all that.’

 

How many old-time reactionary socialists have been dragged away from the non-existent picket line, from the long-abandoned factories, to comment on ’68? They’ve been waiting for this for forty years. No doubt Chomsky, Zizek, Eagleton et al. wrote their ‘reactions’ about ten years ago, when postmodernism got a bit boring and there was nothing conceptual left to critique.

 

But now that 2008 has come along, they can lift the lid of the dustbin of history, accustom their eyes to the harsh light of the twenty-first century and furtively make a list of all the contradictions they can feast their eyes on in their Moleskine notebooks.

 

So the Hayward has got together a pretty wide collection of these posters. And they are impressive. They are striking. In fact, I got a real sense of being there. It must have been the Hendrix and Dylan playing. It must have been those grainy photos – instilling within me a feeling of fraternity with my fellow étudiants. A single sentiment grew within me: a feeling of contrariety, of rebellion.

 

The slogans enveloped me: ‘La Lutte Continue’ (the struggle continues) with a pumping wall of a fist resounds throughout the exhibition; symbols representing the police state with ‘Pour la violence, la haine et la repression’ (For violence, hate and repression) scrawled in black and white lettering.

 

For it was this lutte contre le cancer gaulliste which drove thousands against the police in the streets of Paris. The photos prove it. It must have happened.

Immediately striking is the sense of immediacy which characterises all the art on display, even forty years on. An impression of urgency thumps out of the canvas, as if one of the huge fists had burst forth from it aand given me a good shake, before proceeding to stick its middle finger up at me. 

 

And this in many ways reflects the apparent spirit of the movement – the urgency was real as the posters were rushed off presses in the ateliers populaires and onto the walls of the Sorbonne.

 

The artist, in this sense, becomes a kind of guerrilla operative; the art of flyposting no longer means putting up posters for ‘Sex on the Beat’ next to cashpoints, or advertising the Trinity garden play in the KA. Instead, it becomes a cloak and dagger movement – the steadfast of the bicycle riding, baguette wielding anti-fascist brigade.

 

Nonetheless, it’s important that I felt a ‘real sense of being there’. Because I don’t have a clue what it was like to be there. All I have to go on are the numerous accounts, poster exhibitions, The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ and Dylan’s shameless publication of his song lyrics.

 

And yet I was convinced, on walking out of the Hayward, that I had ‘been there’. I could relate. I had felt the urgency of the cause, and soaked up the atmosphere of ’68. I was a Child of the Revolution, in the purely T-Rexian sense.

 

Yet I am a member of an entirely different generation. I am by no means a soixante-huiter. Even my parents were only 7 at the time.  So what was it that made me feel so alive?

It appears to me that the exhibition, for all its glory, for all its good faith, is a clear example of the relationship and fine line between revolutionary art and propaganda. The posters, with their bold, iconic images and unequivocal messages, are hard hitting. They are direct, like the action they propose.

 

And while they may have been convincing when they were stuck up on the walls of the Sorbonne forty years ago, today they have but one function: the perpetuation of a myth of ’68, and all its associated peripheries.

 

There are several reasons for this – and, at the centre, is the very basis of the poster itself: the image, the nature of which has changed dramatically over the last forty years. Today is the day of the electronic image – there is no way getting around this.  Online advertising, forums, downloadable media, podcasts, RSS feeds, YouTube politics: all are the lynchpins of the technological revolution, and all influence and feed the 21st century opinion.

 

So for these posters to have any real effect, they’ll have to go online, or at least be marketed on electronic billboards. The exhibition will have to be made into a YouTube music-video montage (‘La Lutte Continue’ with a mish-mash of Dylan and Hendrix). And then, for full effect, Justice will have to do an electro remix. The day it is played in Eclectric will be the first day of the revolution.

 

And why is this? Because the image has become a commodity. I can’t walk to the Taylorian without being bombarded by a thousand images: advertising and marketing has appropriated all ‘space’. Forty years ago, in a massive reversal, this ‘space’ was the commodity, to be used as a means to a revolutionary end by students and workers alike.

 

This is why the posters worked, this is why they stirred, this is why they moved people to action. Not so today.  With posters and images all over town, the popular protest has changed direction: the revolution has sold up, packed up and moved from the Faculty wall to the Facebook wall.

 

So, the Hayward’s collection doesn’t really do a great deal, apart from give a false picture of popular protest. It makes a myth of ’68 and turns it into the herald of a golden age. Now detached from any real significance, the image of ’68 is the spectre no longer haunting Europe. It is pure surface – just giving a quick-fix sensual effect, before being shooed away.

I’ve always held that the single thing which makes or breaks an art gallery is its gift shop. So, before consigning ’68 to the dustbin of history, let’s see what’s on offer. We have the usual: the memento rubber, pencil and sharpener set – this time complete with pumping fist; this is the stationary which will topple the order, or at least rub it out, and rewrite its literature. We also have ‘copies’ of the posters, at £50 a pop. Baudrillard, anyone?

But most entertaining are two gifts in particular. The first, a Converse sneaker, complete with the ‘La Lutte Continue’ image on the reverse side to the Converse emblem. Never before have I seen such an incredible representation of this appropriation of space.

 

In a single revolutionary sweep, the left has appropriated the means of production and redistributed its literature upon the stamping ground of the capitalist regime! Or they’ve just sold out.

The second are the Peace Dolls, made from 100 per cent biodegradable material, and a snatch at £9.99. These ‘Peace Dolls’ probably come complete with a ‘peace scarf’, organic snacks and a free one year trial membership to Hezbollah – get yours while stock piled nuclear arms last.

 

You can imagine my disappointment when I couldn’t find the ’68 Action Man – complete with stones, placard, a copy of Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed and a jump suit, ready for quick escape when the fascist pig policeman comes to drag him to servitude (all made from organic produce by collectivist workers in South America, or back issues of ‘New Internationalist’ and ‘Red Pepper’, and carbon neutral, of course).

But enough railing for now. I suppose what really emerges from the Hayward Exhibition is this: that ’68 has become nothing more than a myth. It has been used by the intellectual liberal left, forty years on, for a specific end: the proliferation of discussion about the counter culture, about the nature of revolt.

 

For old time trade unionists, ’68 has become revolution – the real McCoy. Any deviation from this is reactionary, in their eyes. In actual fact, the myth they have created will haze the direction of any real action.

 

So is the exhibition worth the time of day, and, if so, what’s the point?  Firstly, yes, it is worth a look. For all its inauthenticity, for all its harking to a golden age, the posters do serve an important point: they show the importance of resistance, and the power of the popular voice. So long as ’68 is appreciated as a historical phenomenon, and not drawn upon for future action, all will be well.

For all his irrelevance, Dylan was right in one case: the times they are a changing. If we’re going to play his records over images of ’68, we should really take heed of his message. By all means, go along to the numerous ’68 conferences. Read the special issues of New Statesman, Prospect, and so on.

 

Just don’t reminisce.  If you do, imagine the fist popping out of the canvas and giving you a shake. And then, before it has the chance, stick your middle finger up at it. It’s probably for the best.

Shorts in the North

0

Lenin was being re-waxed. Well, they will tell you that he wasn’t and that the body is real, but others say that his head fell off some time ago, and the great revolutionary is actually a Madame Tussauds rip-off.

Whatever the truth, his body had been whisked off from its place in Red Square and was either being injected with lots of embalming liquid or dipped in some industrial-sized vat of Communist wax. And to think I just wanted to thank the man for his contribution to my history course, which, to be honest, would be so much sparser without his happy trip to the Finland Station.

Russia has played a big part in my life, and it was time to pay the place a visit. Being born in Eastern Europe and studying in a school named after Pushkin, the giant of Russian poetry, meant that it was time to experience the gaudy mix of the great Russian soul, although no-one seems quite sure what that involves right now.

Well, at least at a first glance it involves mullets. And I don’t mean the fish. You possibly didn’t believe that mullets were still an acceptable hairstyle. Thanks to a certain pop star called Dima Bilan, they are in Russia. The streets of Moscow are full of mullets, in amongst all the dust, grand boulevards and cars.

There is a certain vanity amongst many young Muscovites who, unable to resist a shiny, polished shop window, just have to turn and check themselves out. A group of 15 teenage girls did just that outside the hostel I stayed at and nearly tumbled into the opening of an underpass. I think this may answer a few questions about the demographic crisis in the country.

That said, there is a special charm about the biggest city in Europe, something that you won’t find in St. Petersburg. Moscow is the mix of Europe and Asia; all the influences that define the country.

The onion-domed churches testify to the European influence that stretches through Byzantium and arguably back to Rome, prompting some Russians to see the city as the third Rome. The Kremlin’s battlements bear the influence of the East.

The Soviet architecture helps – many of the grand boulevards are lined with blocks of flats that have little to do with the drab tower blocks that ‘Soviet’ conjures up – classical columns, large facades, arches.

It’s all pretty exciting, especially if they have a supermarket underneath where you can stock up on Russian favourite suyroks – an outer layer of chocolate, something like cream cheese inside it and then a core of whatever flavour you have chosen: blueberry, vanilla or even potato.

But you can read about Moscow in any guide, really, so I won’t bore you. You’ve seen the pictures, you’ve heard the tales. What you won’t have heard is, for example, somewhere like Yaroslavl’. The town is situated on the Volga, about four hours to the north-east of Moscow by train.

Four hours in ‘obshtiy klass’, the collective carriages are, I shan’t lie, an uncomfortable experience. But in Yaroslavl’ I had the chance to experience a bit more of authentic Russian life – a babushka! A breathing, talking, cooking, smiling babushka!

It was a good day, not least because of the meals that she put on. Word of advice – when going to Russia, break into one of their apartments and make them give you home-made kompot. Well, maybe knock rather than break in.

Yaroslavl’ is different. Despite being the size of Liverpool, it has a more provincial feel (and yes, this does mean yet more mullets.) It also has more soldiers than Moscow – which is a surprise, given how many there were in the capital in the first place. Uniforms everywhere – there was a military band trying to tune up on a corner, though I didn’t wait around to hear them.

The place is also full of churches, everywhere you turn. The town was a capital of Russia for a while, and also the second biggest city before Peter the Great built his new capital in 1703. There is a small Kremlin, impressive cathedrals, and of course the Volga.

Europe’s biggest river is, well, big. And dirty. On closer inspection it seems a curious mix of brown and purple with interesting rainbow splatters floating past you. Pretty.

What is really beautiful though, is the price of beer. A quick trip to the supermarket reveals bottles of two and a half litre for about fifty five roubles. At an exchange rate of about forty two roubles to the pound, you can do the math. Basically it equals lots of Russians with lots of bottles in their hands.

Surprisingly, they seem to function fine. Not many places would tolerate the sight of a woman ambling along with her little child, all the while sipping from a bottle of Baltika 3 – but in Russia, it’s a matter of course.

The remnants of old times are also absolutely great. There are not only statues of Lenin and hostels named after him, but bars called USSR and Che. I recommend the latter – good milkshakes and those excellent radios you’d expect to see in Cuba circa Castro’s rise to power. It was all my dreams come true.

And then there was the weather! Sunny. Hot. Un-British. Bizarre. Russia is really not what you’d expect.
Of course there are horror stories. The visa application process can be a nightmare. The country is rising again and is starting to challenge the legacy of Yeltsin’s years, which is of course disconcerting to the West. The KGB simply changed its letters. But there are horror stories everywhere.

Russia also has charm, culture and history. A country that gave humanity Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy or Pushkin can be excused for giving us Dima Bilan (well, we will be subjected to him sometime in early May when Eurovision comes around).

Moscow may be dusty but it is also grand and breath-taking. The Volga may seem like a big oil-slick, but it is also serene. People do not carry wires. The police ignore you. A babushka may even feed you.

And for all that you should give it a go, even if Lenin is being re-waxed. Wearing shorts in Churchill’s ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ is a good barometer of our new Cold War.

Interview: Michael Palin

0

Maybe I could join an all-male voice choir,’ muses Palin – and is on the point of elaborating when the harassed-looking photographer hovering nearby finally pounces and bundles him into the back of a van. I watch it tear out of Christ Church’s Tom Gate, swerve into the oncoming traffic, and disappear down towards the river. Then I walk off.

This unlikely encounter with a fully operational legend doubtless came on one of Michael Palin’s more mundane days. In Oxford on a flying visit to shoot a few promotional scenes for one of the Vice-Chancellor’s access videos, tea in the Cathedral and a jaunt to the river cannot have ranked highly on his list of colourful exploits.

 

Author, Python, traveller and film star, Palin has had an asteroid named after him and been assailed by bandits, the Vatican, and student journalists. The weight of his experiences shows in furrows and lines creasing his open face – yet he still exudes vitality and energy. All in all he comes across rather like the kind of wise and ancient tortoise a Polynesian community might once have worshipped.

 

It is this wizened face which causes me to double take as, carefully negotiating tourists through Christ Church cloisters, I brush past a more elegant duffle coat than usual. Ten minutes later, Palin has been tracked down, and I snatch an interview on the move.

It would hardly be like Palin to remain still. For the past nineteen years this son of Yorkshire has been travelling the world, filming for the BBC, circumnavigating it Phineas Fogg-style in 1989’s Around the World in 80 Days, taking the land-based route from Pole to Pole three years later, going anti-clockwise for 80,000 kilometres around the Pacific in 1996, retracing the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway in 1999, and in this century, taking on the Sahara, the Himalayas, and Eastern Europe.

 

Palin has visited 85 different countries in the course of his travels – 86 if you’re counting Bosnia and Herzegovina as two – and written nearly 375 best-selling coffee table books. ‘The Palin effect’ has played a major part in global tourism; from Cappadocia to Machu Picchu, regions or places featured in his programmes and books have done very well out of the attention.

Certainly this was the intention with Eastern Europe – to open up the old Soviet states to western eyes, and promote everything from understanding to commerce. Yet as the world becomes increasingly aware of the adverse impact of its travel upon the environment, is foreign tourism really what a man as popular as Palin should be advocating?

 

The question is unfair, and I confess I was too embarrassed to phrase it so bluntly. Palin has, after all, always preferred more traditional methods of travelling – hitchhiking, buses, elephants, smelly trains filled with goats and chickens – the personal experience is improved immeasurably. Yet a certain amount of flying is inevitable? Palin agrees reluctantly, and comes out with a slightly shocking statement.

 

‘I’m not planning any more adventures any time soon. I’ll be staying close to home – I’ve had enough of airports and departure lounges.’ He cites his bones (the man is 65, remarkably enough) as a more pressing reason than carbon footprints – ‘and of course, I have to edit volume two of my diaries…’

 

I ask Palin what his next step will be – presumably the hermetic life is not for him? And indeed not; it’s the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War this November, and Palin has plans to mark it. He admits that ‘history, and especially television history, is a crowded field’ – but this isn’t about to stop him from walking those crowded fields himself.

 

A series is scheduled for broadcast in November, shot in France and Belgium. Fewer exotic locations, perhaps, than on previous outings, but Palin is clearly deeply affected by the work; his brow furrows even further, and he talks more sombrely about the tragedies of war – yet more animatedly too.

 

The project has certainly grasped both his imagination and his conscience. And he has something like the requisite training; he read History at Brasenose back in the early ’60s. It was there that he struck up a fruitful comic partnership , writing for Cherwell no less.

 

He points out that ‘I had a comedy column going for ages with Robert Hewison,’ the man who pushed him into comedy as a career. But did he ever read the rest of the paper? ‘Of course – I read Cherwell avidly. Before wrapping my chips in it!’

 

Irrepressible as ever, we clearly haven’t seen the last of Palin yet. His personal ambitions are yet to be fulfilled – I ask him if there’s anything that, in such a long and varied life, he still feels the need to achieve. After chuckling contemplatively and talking about other things for a while, he finally comes out with two. Both are as simple and worthy as you’d expect from such a man.

 

‘I’d love to play trombone in a brass band.’ A noble goal indeed. Perhaps feeling this wish a little too simplistic, and unable to elaborate further, he advances a second desire. ‘More than anything else, I’d like to learn a new language.’

 

This seems more logical. Having spent the first few decades of his life advancing the boundaries of his own in surrealist and comedic directions, he has spent the past two decades exposed to a bewildering variety of other tongues. But which to choose? Swahili – very useful across Africa? Or something more niche – Mongolian?

 

No; ‘Something like Welsh.’ Trying not to seem taken aback, I make encouraging noises. But why Welsh? ‘It’s an extraordinarily beautiful language – I heard the most beautiful Welsh song yesterday.’ Palin seems to be exhibiting that whole spur-of-the-moment whim that apparently lies within all great travellers and improvisers.

 

He continues earnestly, ‘It’s essential to understand the native language to really understand any country,’ logically enough, before pursuing his logic to its inevitable conclusion. ‘I could join an all-male Welsh choir!’ Do I sense another television series in the pipeline? ‘Well, perhaps’, he demurs.

 

In wrapping up such a piece, it is customary to draw out some unique insight into the interviewee’s psyche. Yet Palin leaves me facing one very stark conclusion: he really is every bit as lovely as we’ve all been led to believe.

 

Always the housewife’s favourite Python and the very model of a favourite uncle to all, the man is charming, entertaining, interested and humble. It is entirely in keeping that he reveals his favourite Python sketch to be, not something as hackneyed as the Dead Parrot, but the scene towards the end of Life of Brian where he plays the obliging centurion – ‘line on the left, one cross each.’

 

He seems delighted with the most prosaic of my questions, exclaiming ‘brilliant!’ or ‘aha!’ at each new line of enquiry. Best of all, when asked whether he’d mind being featured on the Icon page, he responded, with the greatest sincerity you could possibly wish for, ‘how lovely!’

Modern art is rubbish

0

On Little Clarendon Street, there’s an art shop. In the window, there’s a framed, printed target. Above the target are the words ‘the first printed target’.

As if you weren’t already gripped by the staggering sub-fucking-versiveness, it’s followed by a question mark. And beneath that’s the price tag: two grand.

When I get older, I’m going to sell art, because it’s the easiest job in the world. My first piece will be a centimetre-wide green triangle on an eleven-foot white canvas. I’ll call it ‘War’.

Just in case you aren’t gripped by the staggering sub-fucking-versiveness, I might add a question mark (‘What is “war,” anyway?’).

When I get to the dealers, I’ll tell them it was drawn by an autistic Colombian genius over five months, at one dot per day. It’ll sell for forty grand.

Art today is idiocy made expensive. I don’t mean to generalise, but it all is, so I will. Take Banksy. Now, he’s seen as the aerosol Messiah at the cutting edge of the forefront of tomorrow.

But he’s rubbish; a more irritating equivalent of a stoned friend at a party asking the toaster why the world can’t just get along.

He can’t sneeze without someone bidding on the snot, but everything he does boils down to ‘capitalism is bad’, or ‘war isn’t nice.’

I’ve spent the last week building a Random Banksy Generator – when I press the button, I get ‘art’. The first one’s of 9/11, except instead of the planes, there’s cups of Starbucks, and from the fiftieth floor, Mickey Mouse is crying.

The Statue of Liberty is crouched in an orange Guantanamo jumpsuit, and the flames are made of Britney Spears. What does this actually mean? Nothing much, but I hear it pays well.

Some people once genuinely thought that art is a reflection of the self. Of course, we’ve all forgotten this now, and all we have now is contrived ‘points’ with pretend ‘depth’, the artist’s job being to look slightly cleverer than you do.

Look at any student poetry magazine, and you’ll see my point. Here’s one poem: it’s written upside down, every ninth word is in Danish, and the sentences start with full stops.

It’s called ‘Dubya?’, and if you don’t get it, you’re a philistine.

Yet at the end of it, we’ve learned nothing about either the author or ourselves. It’s hardly art at all; and if so many bereted dustbrains fall down in worship, more fool them.

Oxford’s brim-filled with these types, it seems, who think that writing with a pin and a dictionary make them ‘postmodern’. But they’ve forgotten that art is about the emotion and the message.

We’re sliding towards Banksy’s cold, pretentious idiocy, when I’d actually give anything for a little feeling.

Interview: Joseph Nye

0

Behind the much-televised world of presidents, ambassadors and cabinet ministers, there is another layer of the cast of international relations: the academics who develop theoretical analyses of the same problems wrestled with day-to-day by governments.

One such academic is Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, ranked #6 in the country a survey of the most respected political scholars, who has spent years on both sides of the divide.

After graduating from Princeton and Oxford and going abroad to study East Africa and Latin America, he joined the Harvard faculty. Periodically, however, he shifted from academia to government.

During the Carter administration, he chaired the National Security Council Group on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. During the Clinton administration, he was chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs.

Throughout this tenure in the political world, Nye has distinguished himself as an often isolated optimist with regard to America’s future and a tireless proponent of ‘soft power.’

While most Americans today would think of the late 1980s – in which the USA began to pull definitively ahead of the Soviet Union– as a high point of Western power, Nye explains that he spent most of those years battling pessimists who saw America’s influence as on the wane.

These arguments led him to the concept of soft power, a phrase he coined around twenty years ago: ‘I was trying to explain why I thought the USA was not in decline.

I looked at American military power and economic power, but I thought that there’s something missing…soft power is the ability to get what you want not through coercion or payment but through attraction.

That rests on a country’s culture and its values as well as its policies being seen as legitimate.’

As the 1990s proved, Nye was correct in forecasting continued American strength. More controversially, he believes that the same conclusion still holds true today.

‘I think people haven’t realised that what we’re seeing is less an American decline than the rise of the rest of the world,’ he affirms.

‘The US is still in the lead not only militarily but also by staying at the forefront of the Information Revolution.’

Nye compares America’s position today to that of Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, based on its strength in information technology: ‘If you look at Britain after it lost the American colonies in the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole was complaining that ‘we are now reduced to a miserable little island.

‘What he missed was the Industrial Revolution, which gave Britain a second century in power. I think you could make a similar argument today, that the USA is still at the forefront of what has been called the Third Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution.

‘This is going to have a very powerful effect not only on the economy but also on society, through what is sometimes called the Web 2.0, the relationships that rest on peer-to-peer contacts – and the US is still ahead in terms of pioneering that.

‘You’ve seen that this year in American politics; Obama has been able to harness the Internet like no candidate before. I think that by and large the US is still at the forefront of these technologies, and that’s one of the sources of my optimism.’

However, Nye does not deny that America has suffered under President Bush. The end of the Bush administration, he thinks, will offer the country an vital opportunity to recover some of its soft power; all of the new candidates for President have worked at this, but Nye is particularly positive about Obama. ‘I think George W Bush squandered a great deal of American soft power with his policies in Iraq,’ he admits.

‘I think either McCain or Obama will be better than Bush in terms of restoring American soft power. I think Obama has a particular appeal locally because of the fact that he has an African father, he grew up in Indonesia…these are different characteristics in an American president.

‘So I think he will, if elected, by the nature of his life story, do a great deal for American soft power. Now that’s not sufficient; policies also matter, so policies will have to be adjusted. But I think that we’re likely to see some improvement with the end of the Bush administration.’

Nye has additional advice for the government concerning two problems that once confronted Carter and Clinton and have recently risen up again: nuclear weapons and national security. He reasons that non-proliferation is especially important in a world in which Iran and North Korea have faced sanctions over their nuclear ambitions.

‘Trying to slow the rate of spread still makes a difference, because in a world with a large number of nuclear weapons and a lot of uncertainty the chances of their being used are higher. So I think that we should uphold the non-proliferation treaty and that America, too, should continue to reduce the nuclear power it holds.’

He also offers an analysis of America’s much-derided intelligence agencies: ‘One of the things that’s been pointed out by commissions is that better coordination is needed between the agencies. One of the great problems of walled bureaucracies is what are called silos, people who speak only to the people above or below them rather than horizontally.

‘I think the American intelligence agencies – of which there are sixteen – could do a lot more to improve the cross-flow of information. The other thing is an analytical point – to make sure there is a proper statement of the assumptions on which assessments rest.’

In recent years, Nye has devoted himself to applying his concept of soft power to individual leadership. His book The Powers to Lead (OUP), lately reviewed in the Economist, asserts that so-called soft skills have become more important to leaders in the 21st century.

‘In the industrial era, we tended to view leadership as hierarchical, to think of the leader as the king of the mountain, the commander…Today, there’s an argument that in the network and information world, the leader is not king of the mountain but the centre of a circle, and it’s important to draw people to him.

‘The problem with George W Bush was that he saw himself, in his words, as “the decider”… he lacked this contextual intelligence.’

Thus explained, Nye’s concept of soft power does not seem particularly revolutionary. The idea that a country’s culture and values contribute to its stature or lack thereof globally seems painfully obvious even without an academic grasp of international relations or Nye’s theory of complex interdependence (which we lack the space to explain here).

What is truly significant about Nye’s idea, then, is not the idea itself but the essential shift of political responsibility that it entails. ‘A good deal of soft power is produced not by the government but by civil society, everything from Hollywood to Harvard,’ he explains.

Therefore, even average citizens who have lost confidence in their politicians can still influence their country’s future through the civil society of which they are all a part.

Each citizen is a representative of his country, and it is this sense of responsibility that Nye hopes to instil in the future leaders who spend time under his aegis at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

A Candle in the Wind

0

Dr Binayak Sen is a human rights protestor and a public health specialist, imprisoned by the Indian Government for supposed links to the Maoist movement, an allegation which he strongly denies.

Like thousands of forgotten or little-known political prisoners, his plight is unfortunately only as important as the international community decides it is.

But now Binayak has received the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights award and, on the 14 of May, protests were held around the globe in support of his right to receive it.

Their protests were no doubt entirely peaceful, small, law-abiding, well-considered, andlargely ineffectual.

At a recent discussion at the Maison Francaise about the 1968 Parisian Riots, members of student societies across the political spectrum agreed that public apathy – the reluctance of our generation to join in large scale protest – was more about circumstance than culture.

The kind of protests we see in this country are largely peaceful and restrained because they are about things which are removed from everyday life.

It may sound trite but it is true that human nature allows us to feel outrage and empathy at the plight of Dr Sen but not the visceral national anger we felt about the poll tax.

Often we get more impassioned about local post office closures than the atrocities in Darfur, and there is very little point either trying to excuse this or flagellating ourselves about it.

Nor should we belittle the subjectivity of protests – only about one person in a thousand has the kind of personality which will allow them to put their life in danger.

More of us than we imagine probably have the capacity to do so for something which directly affects us.

We have lost our belief in protest as a cultural force or even a cultural phenomenon. Many of us, instead of choosing to show our dissent and disillusionment by joining an organised group or movement, now do so by abandoning politics altogether.

But this is by no means a universal state. Worldwide, the last year has been one in which protests have rarely been out of the headlines.

We have watched as the citizens of Burma, Kenya and Tibet have demanded the world’s attention. Before last September only a handful of campaigners knew the full extent of the Burmese military junta’s atrocities.

Not even experts predicted the monks’ uprising, but now, at a rather high price, the government’s oppressive policies have become apparent to the world, as well as the extraordinary courage of those opposed to them.

However, this has not alleviated the plight of the Burmese, nor have the international statements of solidarity or the thousands of letters and petitions calling for a halt to the violence.

So what is the point of a protest? Is it to show solidarity or is it to provoke action, and does it matter if it is successful? It’s back to that old irritating question about whether a tree falling in a forest can make a sound if no one is around to hear it.

If, as a recent facebook event invited me to do, I light a candle in my window before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games to show my solidarity with Tibet, does it matter that no one is likely to see it apart from the sheep in the field next door?

Is that little vigil at all the same as setting myself on fire in outrage?

It’s probably in rather bad taste to even suggest that the two actions are the same and I’m sure that none of the organisers of the event would condone a comparison.

Yet under different circumstances, outside the protection of a Western democracy, both could be potentially dangerous acts and I would not like to think too hard about whether I would still light a candle if the stakes were higher.

Although we are very lucky to live in a society where we have the right to protest, this does not mean this right is completely enshrined.

Is it more important than ever to protest in a society in which we now can request police permission to assemble in parliament square and do so, or should we count our blessings and focus on those who can voice no dissent at all?

Should we be more concerned that our own rights to protest are being curtailed than about protecting the rights of others or is that missing the point of protest altogether?

If politics is all about exposure and spin, the way in which events appear and the way in which they are reported, then in a sense acts of protest have one thing in common – their context affects their impact and significance.

We are probably much more likely to be able to change the mind of our government than we are that of Burma.

But to protest is also a rebellion against the idea that you have to work directly through the political system to achieve your aims.

This of course is widely dependent on what kind of system you are protesting within – a flawed democracy with a sometimes slightly dubious human rights record or a one party state with an extremely dubious human rights record.

However, now that events are interpreted internationally as well as nationally, these two worlds often collide.

Whether you think that protest is helpful or not, the sight of Chinese security guards clothed in blue jostling and threatening protestors among the path of the Thames as they ‘guarded’ the Olympic torch cannot have failed to send a slight shiver up the spine, or to remind us that we are never as far removed from the effects of political oppression as we might think.

This is why it is distressing that the outcome of the Burmese protests was not conclusive in the quest to achieve democracy, despite the fact that they had so much impact on international consciousness.

Binayak Sen’s wife Iliana argues that she and her husband are part of a wider movement supporting dissent, but this is not dissent for its own sake but the ability to improve life for his community.

To consider protesting worthwhile for just its symbolic value is not a luxury any of us really has.

Dawkins, Einstein, and God

0

Despite the fact that we live in a world enlightened by scientific discovery, the supernatural and the superstitious are still dominating the lives of people who seem to despise truth unless it panders to conspiracy or fantasy.

 

Those who are purposely insular in order to convince like-minded individuals to believe in the supernatural are frustrating but not overtly sinister. It is the defamation of scientific iconoclasts which is unacceptable.

A common theme in the latest exchange between religion and science is the enlistment of scientists, dead or alive, through misquotation, in the fight against the trendy sport of God-bashing. ‘Darwin didn’t even believe in evolution, and he prayed whilst on his death bed!’ argue believers.

 

But this week a letter from Albert Einstein sold for $404,000 at auction.

It laid bare Einstein’s true thoughts on the supernatural: ‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.’

 

Einstein is often cited as a deist by a number of religious apologists looking for support from someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Those looking for a romantic, tantric love-in between religion and science are always reminding us that Einstein once said, ‘science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’

 

Similarly, we are reminded that Hawking ended ‘A Brief History of Time’ with, ‘for then we should know the mind of God’ and that Darwin said, ‘to suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.’

 

Some readers were very excited indeed by these passages. With Richard Dawkins being somewhat like Marmite in this conflict – love him or hate him – there were  many pleased that three of the most famous scientists of all time disagreed with him.

 

In reverse order then. Immediately after Darwin suggested doubt in his own theories, he wrote, ‘When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false… reason tells me… the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.’

As for Einstein and Hawking, the concept of Einsteinian religion is well understood. ‘God’ and ‘religion’ are certainly being used as metaphors to explain the deep mysteries of the universe and the enticing nature of science, not a supernatural creator.

 

In fairness, there are a number of very famous scientific icons who were deeply religious: Newton, Faraday and Kelvin for example.

However, a 1998 Nature article by Larson and Witham showed that only 7% of members of the National Academy for Sciences believed in God.

 

Eminent modern day scientists who do believe in a personal God (such as Francis Collins, a leading figure in the human genome project) are anomalous and often the subject of bemusement.

This would suggest Newton et al were products of their time, while their contemporaries today are by and large liberated by scientific understanding.

To conclude, then, I leave you with one last quotation, this time from former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director of New Scientist Alun Anderson: ‘What’s happening in science is the most interesting thing in the world, and if you don’t agree with me just fuck off.’

A Bad Week

0

This week MPs voted to allow the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for experimental purposes.

 

This will inevitably be applauded by the scientists keen to pioneer this novel way of creating stem cells to model disease and develop treatments.

It will certainly be celebrated by those representing the sufferers of terrible degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s who have pinned their hopes of a long-awaited breakthrough on this technology.

But does this momentous decision really make this a good week for humanity, in which sense triumphed over superstition, compassion over ideology?

Is it really progress towards a world of less suffering and greater human dignity?

 

Or could the Luddites perhaps be right? Could this technology be a step too far, worthy in its aims but ultimately immoral and counterproductive?

 

Well, it would seem to be a bad week at least for the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research, which has to date led to the development of over 70 therapies currently under trial.

 

According to leading scientists, it is adult and not embryonic stem cell research that offers the best chance of safe and effective treatments.

Since research funding is limited, hyped-up embryonic research will inevitably divert funds away from these more promising avenues.

 

But the worst thing about this decision is not this pragmatic concern; it is the undermining of the foundational ethical principles that humans are more valuable than animals and that one human life is worth just as much as another.

In creating human-animal hybrids the fundamental categories of human and non-human have been shattered.

 

Our MPs have sanctioned the creation of entities that are neither fully animal nor fully human. And logically, they must have a moral value somewhere in between.

We have consented to the logical – if not practical – possibility of the existence of a less-than-human human, worth less than other humans.

 

It is the crossing of this moral Rubicon that makes this week a bad one for humanity. The aims of creating useful human-animal hybrids are – even if naïve – worthy.

But the unintended result will be degradation of human dignity and consequent abuse and oppression.

 

In time, the new category of human-but-not-quite-human will grow in our consciousness and, in place of the historic human/non-human all-or-nothing moral system, a sliding scale of value will be set up in our minds as we judge worth by other criteria, such as physical beauty, intellectual capacity, or economic productiveness.

 

In our moral reasoning, all humans used to be equal, at least in theory. But now, some will be more equal than others.