Clive Davis

2005-05-09T20:00:00.000+01:00

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO A NEW SITE.

PLEASE GO TO.................www.clivedavis-online.com

2005-05-09T19:46:00.000+01:00

THE LAST POST

I suddenly feel quite sentimental about leaving Blogger, in spite of the problems I’ve had in the past. I’d still recommend it to anyone who wants to test-drive a blog. The good points definitely outweigh the bad.

2005-05-09T15:59:00.000+01:00

OFF-LINE

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been busy setting up the new site. Should be ready later today.

2005-05-07T12:36:00.000+01:00

PICTURE PUN OF THE DAY

Yes, definitely a cracker.

2005-05-07T12:25:00.000+01:00

DINOSAURS R US

The Telegraph notes that Michael Howard's campaign manager, Lynton Crosby has been given a tour of the heritage trail:

Lord Strathclyde and the party treasurer, Jonathan Marland, took Crosby to Brooks's Club so that he could see something quintessentially English before returning to Australia.

Very quintessential. No wonder voters believe the Conservatives belong on another planet. I've always thought Howard's main problem is that he comes across as a star turn at the Cambridge Union. As he ponders the Tory leader's decision to bow out, columnist Charles Moore also thinks there is something of the mortar board about him:

Never forget that Michael Howard is a product of student politics - the early 1960s student politics of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, when he vied with John Selwyn Gummer, Leon Brittan, Norman Lamont, Kenneth Clarke and Norman Fowler for the paper hats of undergraduate office. This coup that he has committed against himself is a classic CUCA manoeuvre - secretive, conspiratorial, overcomplicated, probably calculated to benefit some chum or other, so clever that it is stupid.

2005-05-07T00:03:00.000+01:00

JAZZ CONCERT OF THE YEAR?

Ahmad Jamal at the Barbican last night. One hour and forty-five minutes of bliss. And he played "Poinciana" too.

He was a key influence on Miles Davis - Diana Krall loves his music as well - but lots of people still say "Ahmad who?" If you want to make his acquaintance, try these two live albums.

2005-05-06T17:00:00.000+01:00

TWILIGHT OF THE OPERA

Judy Garland meets Hamas? Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram is still scratching his head over the Coliseum's latest Wagner production:

If a producer can give us a new insight into a work of art, or make it come alive or a modern audience, that is ok by me. But this wasn’t anything like that. It was gratuitous and exploitative. (This was signalled before the performance even started by the programme, which contained photographs of the Twin Towers burning, a severed hand amidst post-Tsunami debris, and cows being burnt in Britain’s last episode of foot-and-mouth disease.) The culmination of this urge to grab hold of any random news image or bit of popular culture for shock value was the portrayal of Brunnhilde as a suicide bomber in Act 3. In between we were treated to Siegfried as rhinestone cowboy and Brunnhilde as Judy Garland (opening of Act 1) and Hagen as game-show host (wedding in Act 2). Why does Judy Garland metamorphose into a Palestinian suicide bomber?! I have absolutely no idea.
Utter crap.

2005-05-06T16:08:00.000+01:00

RUDDERLESS

Just when I was beginning to think I'd mis-underestimated Michael Howard, he decides to announce he's leaving. I know the parting of the ways had to come sooner or later, but why couldn't he have stayed quiet, gently shuffled the deck, and watched Labour take the heat for a while? Baffling. Columnist Daniel Johnson is dismayed too. He suggests the Tories might done better to have stuck with Iain Duncan Smith after all:

It is a myth that Howard relaunched the Tories with new policies that were attractive to the electorate. What he did was to strip out any policies that might have appealed to the kind of liberal middle class voters who defected to Tony Blair in 1997....Duncan Smith had intended to emphasize the contrast between Tory and Labour economic and social policies, but also bury the negative image of the Tories as the “nasty party”. He wanted a combination of big tax cuts to appeal to self-interest, plus “compassionate conservative” self-help policies for “the vulnerable” to appeal to middle-class altruism...

But would IDS ever have overcome the charisma gap? I doubt it, although I'm very curious to see what happens with his think tank. Johnson, meanwhile, sees dangers in Howard's immediate legacy:

[H]is failure as a leader is likely to be compounded by his intention to change the rules of the leadership contest to replace him. The very idea that a leader should be allowed to rig the system to ensure that his own nominee is elected should be a non-starter. But Howard will probably get away with it. If he cannot now be king (by the next election he will be nearly 70), he has set his heart on being the kingmaker. And because he knows that the “Notting Hill Tories” (a liberal, privileged coterie whom he has sedulously promoted) are unlikely to be chosen by the party members, he wants to restore the exclusive right to elect the leader to the parliamentary party. This was the system that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in 1990, an act of matricide from which the party has never quite recovered.

2005-05-06T12:20:00.000+01:00

GUIDE LINES

The on-line behemoth, Wikipedia gets an unflattering review from Slate. The criticisms seem a little over-done to me. But they're mild indeed compared with the lashing that the New Criterion hands out to the latest giant tome from the Cambridge University Press.

2005-05-06T11:53:00.000+01:00

THE MORNING AFTER

Mixed signals everywhere. The Tories were never totally credible, but they made the beginnings of the comeback that should have started, but didn’t, four years ago. The Lib Dems’ much-trumpeted "decapitation" strategy didn’t work, but they picked up votes all the same. I think Tony Blair deserved to win, judged solely on Iraq (which is, it goes without saying, the reason so many voters turned against him). Will he be dumped by Labour MPs after a few months? I honestly can’t see it happening - he’s steelier than he sometimes appears. (How astute will Gordon Brown look when the economy dips, as the Economist says it will?) But if Blair is forced out, Iain Murray foresees a silver lining:

I have a suspicion that this election restores business as usual. If Brown moves Labour to the Left, centrists will return to the Tories.

Worst news of the night? George Galloway’s win. (Although it’s hard to shed too many tears for Oona King, the woman who described the US as a f***ing f***ed-up power.") Good news? Jack Straw held out against anti-war sentiment in Blackburn. And the Tories now have a black MP.

I hope Stephen Pollard entered his national results prediction in Norm’s book. He stands a good chance of winning. I’ll draw a veil over mine.

2005-05-06T10:48:00.000+01:00

MEDIA COVERAGE QUOTE OF THE NIGHT

Emily Bell, in the Guardian’s election blog:

The BBC - which is currently demonstrating that unique funding is a short road to ridiculous overspending on strange election geegaws - is getting what look like enthusiastic 6th formers to paint in all the constituencies on a giant floor map. It looks a right mess, and as one youth put it "It's very difficult - the constituencies all have funny names and we don't know where they are", which is a great endorsement of the improvements in education over the last eight years.

2005-05-06T00:04:00.000+01:00

GALLOWAY WATCH

Early signs that the Bethnal Green vote is leaning towards him, although Red Pepper thinks otherwise. I hope Rageh Omaar has his tin helmet with him.

For the national picture, a useful map here.

2005-05-05T23:36:00.000+01:00

CHORUS LINE, PARTY LINE

There I was, enjoying Janie Dee's breezy performance at the Shaw Theatre when she broke off from the song and dance to recite Harold Pinter's poem, "God Bless America". You know, the blood-soaked one that rails at "The Yanks in their armoured parade..."

I'm not really surprised by this kind of thing any more. Just a couple of weeks after 9/11, I heard Kate Dimbleby cover Randy Newman's "Political Science" (a brilliant number, even if you don't care for the sentiments). As soon as she'd finished, she tore down the Stars and Stripes which had appeared at the back of the set.

That really did shock me. Now, I almost expect it to happen.

2005-05-05T22:49:00.000+01:00

THROUGH THE NIGHT

Well, it looks as if my poll prediction bit the dust early on - unless the exit polls have taken a Kerry-esque turn.

There's the promise of spirited live-blogging in the comments section of Harry's Place, with Peter Cuthbertson in the blue corner. A tempting alternative to watching Peter Snow wave his arms around, and certainly a lot more interesting than hearing Joan Collins burble away on ITV's celebrity panel.

Iain Murray is live-blogging too.

2005-05-05T18:27:00.000+01:00

CULTURE SHOCK

Back home in Portland after his trip to Lebanon, Michael J. Totten is still getting used to not fretting about car bombs and secret policemen:

When I wake up in the morning I still think I'm in Beirut and that these are some of the things I'll have to contend with during my day. Then I open my eyes and am first disoriented then shocked that I'm so far away from where I thought I was. I look at the newspaper and think: Iraq looks like a country that has some serious problems. But America is fat, content, and happy. Life in this country is experienced the way a cat experiences a nap in the sun compared to the way Middle Easterners live. I'll forget this in a week or so, but for now that's how it looks.

2005-05-05T18:23:00.000+01:00

FEVER PITCH

I live in a marginal seat, yet I’ve only seen a dozen posters all day on my travels. What does that tell about you this campaign?

2005-05-05T17:56:00.000+01:00

A TALE OF TWO PRESS PACKS

Janet Street-Porter, a guest at the White House correspondents’ dinner, was charmed by all that DC decorum (subscriber-link-only) :

I just couldn’t imagine it happening in Britain. America, the country we’ve spent so long mocking as a load of xenophobic, uncultured, obese simpletons, has turned out to possess in spades the one quality that has been missing at every level from our election campaign: good manners.

I know, it’s a bit ironic, coming from the pioneer of in-yer-face "yoof" TV, but we live and learn. Compare and contrast with Sarah Lyall’s account of the antics she witnessed at the recent British Press Awards.

2005-05-05T09:30:00.000+01:00

THE BIG DAY

In the end, I didn’t have a chance to do the arithmetic for Norm’s polling book, but my guess for the day is a Labour majority of 105. (Yes, I’m even more dubious about the Tory vote than I was yesterday.) Turn-out: 58%.

2005-05-04T17:33:00.000+01:00

SCHEER AGONY

David Horowitz’s memoir, Radical Son contains a portrait of activist Robert Scheer that reaches almost Dickensian heights of disdain. (The chapter on Bertrand Russell is a treat too.) Horowitz goes after his old comrade again in his latest Front Page column. The headline says it all: Is Robert Scheer The Biggest Ignoramus in American Journalism?

2005-05-04T12:31:00.000+01:00

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

"Shaming", "shocking", "cardboard thin", "characterless", "sorry spectacle", "vanity project", "futile", "dodgy", "kitsch, cliche and doggerel", "writing that might have been left over from Lionel Bart's Oliver". . .

It’s safe to say that the Guardian’s critic did not enjoy himself at the controversial Royal Opera House premiere of "1984"

The newspaper ads will, of course, read: "Shocking...spectacle...might..." -- The Guardian.

2005-05-04T12:01:00.000+01:00

URBAN MYTH

The story of Tony Blair telling fibs about watching Fifties football legend, Jackie Milburn has long been a staple of the "He tells lies all the time" campaign.

Sadly for the Lib Dems and other monomaniacs, it turns out the accusation doesn't stand up.

2005-05-04T11:57:00.000+01:00

ONE DAY TO GO

I feel guilty for not having blogged more on the general election but, like a lot of other people, I haven’t been able to work up enough enthusiasm. I just can’t see Blair’s majority sinking below 85-90 seats. And I’ve certainly had enough of hearing John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman doing their cranky old men act.

Is a boring contest for the centre ground necessarily a bad thing? Daniel Finkelstein certainly has a point.

A couple of things about the Tory campaign still puzzle me. Why does Michael Howard think that endless, unbearably folksy footage of him running up and down suburban streets is going to impress anyone? And, unless I’ve been dozing, why haven’t I seen him surrounded by all those ethnic minority candidates we keep hearing about? Wouldn’t that have been the obvious way to counter the accusations of racism? His campaign team seems intent on making things very easy for the other side. Or am I missing something obvious?

On the radio, I just heard that David Davis looks like winning his seat. Good news, for a change. If he hangs on, and George Galloway loses, I'll be a reasonably happy man tomorrow night.

2005-05-04T09:57:00.000+01:00

CAMPUS FOLLIES

Austin Bay recommends Roger Kimball's New Criterion essay, "Retaking the university: a battle plan". With the Ward Churchill case uppermost in his mind, Kimball examines “the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing.” It’s a long read, but the article gets down to specifics towards the end. Here’s one proposal that will definitely cause a stir in the quadrangles. Worth considering in light of the AUT fiasco? Or an example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

It is time to revisit several large issues. The issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.

BTW, Patrick O’Brian fans will also want to read the NC’s piece on the "Master and Commander" novels. I never managed to finish the first in the series. Loved the film, though, so maybe I should try again.

2005-05-03T23:15:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

By the time we reached Bentheim, Mr Norris had delivered a lecture on the disadvantages of most of the chief European cities. I was astonished to find how much he had travelled. He had suffered from rheumatics in Stockholm and draughts in Kaunas; in Riga he had been bored, in Warsaw treated with extreme discourtesy, in Belgrade he had been unable to obtain his favourite brand of toothpaste. In Rome he had been annoyed by insects, in Madrid by beggars, in Marseilles by taxi-horns. In Bucharest he had had an exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water-closet. Constantinople he had found expensive and lacking in taste. The only two cities of which he greatly approved were Paris and Athens. Athens particularly. Athens was his spiritual home.

Christopher Isherwood, "Mr Norris Changes Trains"

2005-05-03T11:50:00.000+01:00

STAR POWER

A Hollywood anecdote from one of Terry Teachout’s readers. Before the cameras began rolling on "Chicago", Renee Zellweger and her co-stars were asked to give the producers a little preview:

So the cast—Reilly, Zeta-Jones, Zellweger, Gere—assembled for a run-through in some performance space or other, and took seats onstage, with the producers down below. Reilly noticed that Zellweger was REALLY scared; he leaned over and said, soothingly, "Don't worry, Renee, it's just like a play...we're onstage and they're the audience."

Zellweger looked at him, and said, quivering, "But I've never been in a play!"

As TT says, "If it's not true, don't tell me ......"

2005-05-03T11:35:00.000+01:00

COMING SOON. . .

It seems like ages since I said I was planning to move this blog to a new site. Deadlines and formatting complications held everything up, but I hope to make the jump this week. Fingers crossed (again).

2005-05-03T10:57:00.000+01:00

RIGHT - AND WRONG - ON IRAQ

Labour activist Alan Johnson issues a rousing call for a sensible left-wing, anti-Guardianista strategy on Iraq. But along the way he makes some very odd assertions about neocons. ("They talk of freedom and democracy, they may even sincerely want it…") It’s always hard to generalise about neo-conservatism, because it's such an amorphous, contradictory beast. Yet surely the one thing that has got neocons into trouble with traditional cons is their passionate belief that democracy is a universal, not a purely Western or American value. As for the claim that they don’t understand "the pivotal role of civil society", neocons spend most of their waking hours reciting Tocqueville.

There’s nothing sinister either in arguing for US primacy, either, in a world where the EU bows down to China and Russia is slipping back into its bad old ways. (What does Alan Johnson's "doctrine of the international community" mean in practice? Would left-wingers necessarily be happier if the UN was based in Beijing?) And how many neocons really "dream" of a US-led military intervention in Iran? Michael Ledeen is the leading voice on the subject of how to get rid of the mullahs, and to the best of my knowledge he wants the US to support a popular uprising. Nor does being a neocon mean opposing a two-state solution to Palestine.

The one point I’d partly agree with Johnson on is that neocons, by and large, have become enthusiastic free marketers. Although Irving Kristol, the real godfather of the neocons, (don’t believe all those conspiracy theories about Leo Strauss) used to insist on giving only two cheers for capitalism, my impression is that he’s now happy to offer the full quota. But that doesn’t mean he’s some sort of grind-their-faces-in-the-dirt plutocrat. Irwin Stelzer sums it up in the introduction to his recent anthology: "Neocons tend to distinguish between Franlkin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society." In short, they approve of the former, but think the latter undermined the lives and values of the working poor.

Kristol expands on this point in one of the essays in the book, calling for a welfare system "consistent with the basic moral principles of our civilization and the basic political principles of our nation. The essential purpose of politics, after all, is to transmit to our children a civilization and a nation that they can be proud of. This means we should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse, which is the normal conservative predisposition."

I think a lot of Labour Party members would agree with him on that. I’m not trying to argue that neocons are flawless (although I think post-war Iraq might have gone more smoothly if they’d had a bigger say in the main decisions) only that they have more in common with the Left than some people like to think.

All credit to Alan Johnson, nevertheless. I’m more than happy to give him two cheers.

2005-05-03T00:02:00.000+01:00

ON STRIVERS' ROW

In the New Republic, Reihan Salam - co-blogger at The American Scene - comes to the defence of the straight-talking Bill Cosby, and takes chunks out of radical academic Michael Eric Dyson. Seems Dyson thinks Tupac Shakur is a better role model than Mr C. Salam is having none of it:

There is another more odious species of elitism, one that Dyson's tract embodies from start to finish. That is the elitism that celebrates not the petty-bourgeois but rather the enlightened clerisy. It is the elitism that has only scorn and derision for the contemptuous working poor folk we've discussed, but that very nearly celebrates the dysfunctional poor as rebels against a deeply corrupt social order.

2005-05-02T16:16:00.000+01:00

STANDING TO ATTENTION

Campus conservatives in Rhode Island are in trouble for sending up the annual V-Day celebrations inspired by “The Vagina Monologues”. As Christina Hoff Sommers explains in National Review, “P for Penis” Day and its mascot “Testaclese” didn’t go down too well with the authorities:

[College Republicans] papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America.

“Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,” the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom.

Hat tip: Emanuele Ottolenghi, who, on a much more serious note, also has a piece in NR on the repercussions of the AUT’s Israeli boycott.

2005-05-02T16:04:00.000+01:00

A PLAGUE ON ALL YOUR HOUSES

Melanie Phillips has a must-read today:

Labour pretends to be progressive, but in fact its agenda is one of social control, reducing the public to serfdom as more and more depend on the state for either work or welfare.
What’s needed is to take Neil Kinnock’s famous warning not to be old, poor or sick under the Tories and show that currently it is the old who are being abandoned by the inadequacies of state-run policing, the poor by state education and the sick by state health care. But who will do so? Labour is the problem; the Lib Dems don’t understand what a problem is; and the Tories run away from the problem, because to tackle it means taking great political risks over such things as welfarism, Europe and the cult of public sentimentality.

"Progressive" is a word that makes me feel uneasy. It always reminds me of standing ovations for Erich Honecker, and a school magazine article I read when I was twelve, confidently announcing that the future belonged to Emerson, Lake & Palmer. We all know what happened to progressive rock, don’t we? For a definition of what the term should really mean, see Melanie P’s essay, "Why I Am A Progressive", first published in the New Statesman and now available on her web-site.

2005-05-02T14:56:00.000+01:00

A NEW STAND-UP STAR IS BORN

Move over, Margaret Cho. I'm not sure Laura Bush's hilarious press dinner speech has had much coverage in the UK. You can watch it over at Jackson's Junction.

2005-05-01T19:45:00.000+01:00

FRONT LINE

I’ve never been caught in a sandstorm, and if these extraordinary snaps from Iraq - posted by Black Five - are any guide, I’m not sorry to have missed out on that particular experience. The other photos in the “Picture of the Week” series are worth scrolling through as well.

Soldiers and milblogging: Mudville Gazette muses on the complications as he quotes from a maverick known as Just Another Soldier.

2005-05-01T14:37:00.000+01:00

A BRIDGET JONES ACCESSORY

RConversation unearths an item you won't see on sale in Kensington High Street.

2005-05-01T14:32:00.000+01:00

AN ANNIVERSARY

Chicago Boyz and Vietpundit search for words to express their feelings on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

Vietpundit’s earlier link to a Vietnamese-Canadian writer Nam Dao is worth pondering too.

UPDATE: Irritated by some of the rosy media coverage, Vietpundit reminds us of some the country's voices of conscience.

And I forgot to mention that Neo-neocon continues to work her way through painful memories.

2005-05-01T14:14:00.000+01:00

COMMUNITY CHEST

Michael Kinsley comes dangerously close to saying something nice about George W. Bush’s social security reforms:

Why Bush has taken this on remains a mystery. There is no short-term political advantage, and there are other real long-term problems that are more pressing. But he has done it, to his credit...
Unless they are complete morons -- always a possibility -- the Democrats could end up in the best of all worlds. They know in their hearts that Social Security has got to change in some unpleasant way. Bush, for whatever reason, is willing to take this on and to take most of the heat. And all he wants in return is the opportunity to try something that will alienate people from the Republican Party for generations to come.

2005-05-01T13:49:00.000+01:00

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

The report about the BBC sending hecklers to a Michael Howard rally has had a lot of coverage. It’s only fair to point out that Corporation executive Peter Horrocks offers a lengthy response in today’s Telegraph:

…[T]his was not about creating a news event, disrupting the meeting or targeting the Conservatives. The programme was a light-hearted, engaging study of the art of the political heckle and observed a heckler accompanied by two novices attempting to heckle at public meetings. The results were entirely innocuous.

2005-04-30T23:51:00.000+01:00

POWER OF NONSENSE GOES WEST

The "Power of Nightmares" PR offensive continues. I wonder if any bloggers will be around to hear BBC documentarist Adam Curtis being interviewed at the San Francisco Film Festival tomorrow? It would be nice if someone asked a few hard questions. Somehow I have a feeling that Curtis’s host is unlikely to give him the third degree: Film scholar David Thomson, who will interview Curtis on Sunday when the SFIFF presents the filmmaker with its Persistence of Vision Award for nonfiction filmmaking, called "Nightmares" the "most arresting thing I saw in 2004" and a must-see for "every citizen."

UPDATE: Just in case you assume that only raving right-wingers have doubts about TPON, take a look at Jonathan Raban’s assessment - part of an essay on 9/11 polemics - published in January in the impeccably liberal NY Review of Books. (I linked to it at the time.) Raban has complimentary things to say about the programme (“…it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.") But even he admits that it is “best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies..”). Which is exactly how it hasn’t been received in Britain. And why shouldn’t UK viewers assume it's a reliable piece of journalism, considering that it came out of the BBC’s current affairs division?

Here, finally, is what Raban has to say about the portrayal of the villains of the piece:

Curtis's neocons—Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, the Kristols, father and son, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pipes, Michael Ledeen— might as well be equipped with masks, black cloaks, and vampire teeth.

2005-04-30T20:55:00.000+01:00

THE NEW MEDIA AGE

United "Pajamas" International? This sounds very interesting.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Little Green Footballs detects more weirdness at Google News.

And PooterGeek tweaks the Guardian's blog (via Harry).

2005-04-30T20:45:00.000+01:00

HEARTLAND

An amusing article by John O’Farrell in the Daily Telegraph (not on-line yet) recounts the trauma of standing as a Labour candidate in my formerly true-blue constituency. He gets in some nice jokes at the expense of the village where I live:

The tanned, Moschino-wearing inhabitants of this corner of Middle England somehow give the impression of having been nouveau riche for 10 successive generations. My challenge was to knock on their doors and persuade them to vote for a minimum wage of £4.20. Lucky for them that their Croatian nannies couldn’t understand a word of English.

Touché. There is indeed a corner of this place that goes by the nickname of “Berkshire’s Beverly Hills” (no, it doesn’t have the right ring, does it?). And it is sometimes possible to spot Ulrika Jonsson or Chris Rea in the convenience store. But most of us wouldn’t know whether you put Moschino on your head or your feet (I’ll get the answer on Google in a minute), and I’ve always been struck by the fact that, in fifteen years, I’ve met only about a dozen conservatives. Even fewer locals ever seem to have a good word to say for the US: Clinton was just about tolerable, Bush is absolutely beyond the pale. Which is why I am regarded as a bit of a village idiot. The local Lib Dems, who have gone from strength to strength in the past decade, are pushing for a win on Thursday. They seem pretty confident and extremely well-organized. Middle England is a strange place today. I’m surprised John O’Farrell doesn’t feel more at home here.

2005-04-30T20:40:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

Please don’t feel badly about not sending me money. The discipline, you know, of not having anyone but yourself to depend on is quite good, especially for a man like me. I discover in myself all types of aristocratic traits, without, you know too well, the means to keep them alive. Whenever I go into a new town, I go into the best hotel, just to feel comfortable, sit in the lounge, read all the newspapers, borrowed from clerks who are usually very obliging, and drink coffee. I like comfort. And, whereas in Trinidad, I was tremendously shy of going into even into a Civil Service Office, now I go everywhere, firmly believing that I have as much right to be there as anybody else. That is the one good thing Oxford has done for me.

V.S. Naipaul, "Between Father & Son: Family Letters"

2005-04-30T20:32:00.000+01:00

PERCY HEATH, R.I.P.

Norm notes the passing of Percy Heath, last surviving founder-member of the Modern Jazz Quartet. As he says, the MJQ used to thought of as desperately unhip but, like Dave Brubeck, they eventually made a comeback in the critical stakes. I only ever heard them once, at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, not long before they disbanded. Quite an evening. John Lewis, the fastidious creator of that unique baroque-jazz sound, came to London to play a solo date a few years ago. A couple sitting almost next to the piano indulged in romantic chit-chat all through his set, but he was too much the gentleman to tell them off.

The greatest MJQ track? I have a soft spot for "Ralph’s New Blues". But it really has to be “Django”.

2005-04-30T19:13:00.000+01:00

RAPPING

I mentioned my friend Martha’s book on pop’s nihilistic tendencies just the other day. Although she’s more of a film person nowadays, she still slips into music mode occasionally. Her latest piece, in the Wall Street Journal, reports on attempts to roll back the gangsta rap industry. Attending an Al Sharpton-sponsored forum in New York, she watched as smooth-talking suits from the hip-hop biz hijacked the proceedings:

Watching this happen was like watching an SUV collide with a bicycle: The big machine (the rap industry) kept rolling, while the little one (the community) got crushed. The industry's primary audience is not black: Between 70% and 80% of all rap CDs are sold to whites. Yet because rap draws its talent and mystique from poor black communities, the executives present seemed to regard sessions like this as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

Martha digs deeper into pop’s malaise in this interview at Jerry Jazz Musician. Food for thought, too, in Thomas Sowell’s Journal piece on the relationship, as he sees it, between black and redneck culture (via Arts & Letters Daily). His new book should attract some very lively reviews.

On a much more frivolous note, Chase Me Ladies supplies his own response to rap's excesses. He’s ready to indulge in a little gunplay of his own.

2005-04-30T13:48:00.000+01:00

THEOCRACY, USA?

A Texas libertarian take on the big debate, from Samizdata writer, Robert Clayton Dean.

2005-04-29T19:58:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

It is the self-imposed assignment of neo-conservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.

Irving Kristol, in "The Neo-conservative Imagination"

You'll find more about Kristol's legacy in Charles Krauthammer's column on the end of an era at The Public Interest.)

2005-04-29T14:41:00.000+01:00

TEMPUS FUGIT

A Corner reader writes:

Watching a press conference in which both the press and viewers struggled to stifle yawns as the President tried to compete against baseball, sitcoms, polls and pop star contests, all I can think of is how far we've come in just 42 months, from a point when every sentient being on the planet sat on the edge of their seats relishing every expression of this President's response to the worst attack on American soil in history. And what little credit we give him for leading us through that journey, back from the precipice to the relative ho-hum of a present day preoccupied with old-age welfare projections 30 years out.

2005-04-29T14:29:00.000+01:00

I’M MUDDLED, GERARD BAKER’S NOT

"There is no alternative (alas)" Today's cover story in the Economist

I’m going to vote Conservative next week, not so much because I’m crazy about Michael Howard, but because I want to keep the Lib Dems out in my Tory marginal (MP: Theresa May). Still, I really won’t be disappointed if Tony Blair is returned to power - I’m assuming he’ll have a 80-90 seat majority - because he was on the right side of the most important issue - Iraq. (Howard continues to dig himself deeper into a hole on that one.) And - perhaps I’m hopelessly optimistic - I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that a sound mandate will encourage Blair to get back to the business of transforming Labour into a grown-up party.

Is that too much to ask? Gerard Baker thinks it is. His powerful op-ed in today’s Times dissects the statist, tax-and-spend world-view of both main parties, nurtured by the "stultifying" orthodoxies of the new Establishment. With the commentariat, naturally, at the top of the tree:

I haven’t lived in Britain for more than a decade now, having spent most of my time in the US. But back in the country for the election, I’m not surprised at the palpable sense of futility. The British people are steadily being reduced to a state of cringing dependence on an ever-more voracious and aggrandising Government and a political establishment of almost unconquerable scale that supports and sustains it.
. . . Above them all are the media, the self-selecting and self-perpetuating elite in broadcasting, newspapers, the arts (have you ever heard a novelist express an original political view?). This is the pinnacle of the Establishment that offers its highest recognition to people who make such programmes as The Power of Nightmares, the “documentary” whose tendentious bilge flowed from a manifestly false premise that the terrorist threat was all invented by neoconservatives (did the producer ever speak to a member of the Clinton Administration, which spent its last two years increasingly obsessed with the terror threat?).

I can’t disagree with a word. Yet somehow I’m still clinging to the belief that Blair will deliver in the end. Such is the power of wishful thinking.

2005-04-29T11:45:00.000+01:00

SPEED READER

Not content with writing a biography of Louis Armstrong, keeping tabs of Broadway and the future of blogging (his forthcoming piece in Commentary should be a must-read), the indefatigable Terry Teachout is now immersing himself in Proust. Judging by his past work-rate, he’ll have burrowed his way through the whole damned sequence by the end of the weekend.

BTW, he also links to Rick Brookhiser’s elegiac piece on the dead tree biz, if you haven’t already seen it.

2005-04-29T00:09:00.000+01:00

MORE ON THAT WHO'S WHO

I suppose that if Fallujah is Guernica, Tracey Emin must be Picasso.

2005-04-28T18:29:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

In its 1992 obituary, The Independent wrote that Lindsay Anderson “may well have been the most important individual in post-war British cinema.” And yet, like a long line of uncompromising directors, he found it increasingly difficult to attract industry support. He made only a handful of films in a 30-year career. At the end of his life, after a projected adaptation of The Cherry Orchard was rejected by one executive with a letter that read: “Dear Mr Chekhov, I’m afraid this isn’t quite the kind of thing we like to make,” he was reduced to shooting a documentary about the pop group, Wham.

Michael Arditti, reviewing Gavin Lambert’s "Mainly About Lindsay Anderson", The Independent, May 24 2000

2005-04-28T17:44:00.000+01:00

IRAQ

It's Saddam Hussein's birthday. Think of him as you read the latest outpourings from the UK's anti-war camp. (There's a detailed rebuttal here.)

While George Will takes an unflinching - and chastening - look at the insurgency and its prospects (“Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians -- Hobbes's subtlety reduced to the ruthless cunning of one idea…”), Iraq The Model's Mohammed notices that Al-Jazeera is doing its best not to notice progress at the national assembly:

Something I also wanted to mention which is not a surprise at all is that Al-Jazeera totally ignored today's session and while it allocated long hours talking about the delay in announcing the government in the past few weeks, the channel chose to ignore the important event and was instead broadcasting a history report with the running news subtitle talking about violence and explosions!

For years before 2003, a day like this ... was one of the worst days of the year. We were forced to watch disgusting theatrical celebrations showing Iraqis happily and cheerfully celebrating Saddam's birthday. While today I was following Iraq's birth with true joy and hope and instead of trying to avoid facing the TV screen like I used to do in the past, today I was flipping channels like crazy trying to find more and more details about this great event.

2005-04-28T16:58:00.000+01:00

ACADEMIA & ISRAEL

Norm and Melanie Phillips both have responses to the AUT boycott of two Israeli universities. Emanuele Ottolenghi has just e-mailed me this letter:

To: Sally Hunt, General Secretary,
The Association of University
Teachers,

Dear Sally Hunt,

Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.

Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to illiberal minds and repressive regimes. Based on this, the AUT's definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only. Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The
AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.

In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me.

Sincerely,

Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi
The Middle East Centre
St Antony's College
Oxford University.

2005-04-28T16:04:00.000+01:00

RADIO RIFFS

I knew that classical music was struggling to survive on America’s radio airwaves (Andrew Ferguson wrote a lament in the Weekly Standard last year.) But as the NY Times reports, rock is going through a similar crisis:

Music executives say the lack of true stars today is partly the reason. Since rap-rock acts like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit retreated from the scene, none of the heralded bands from recent rock movements, be it garage-rock (the Strokes, the Vines) or emo (Dashboard Confessional, Thursday), connected with radio listeners or CD buyers the way their predecessors did.

…Ratings for rock radio stations have been languishing for years. The share of the 18-to-34 age group that is tuning in to alternative stations has shrunk by more than 20 percent in the last five years, according to Arbitron, while stations playing rap and R&B or Spanish-language formats have enjoyed an expanding audience.

2005-04-28T12:41:00.000+01:00

VOTE-WINNER?

I’m still trying to figure out what “Mein Kampf” is doing in the middle of GBJab's election spoof. The pop video send-up of Tony Blair, Michael Howard & Co isn’t as funny as Jibjab‘s "This Land", but it has its moments.

PS On the subject of silly WW2 metaphors, Harry's Place notes that a Guardian reader puts Blair-hater Richard Gott in his place.

2005-04-28T09:37:00.000+01:00

THEOCRACY, USA?

It’s confusing. I thought George W. Bush said the right things on the Terri Schiavo case, but I sympathize with some - though not all - of the concern about the dangers of religious over-reach.

There's room for compromise.

Chicago Boyz offers a thoughtful and generous response to Andrew Sullivan.

On the other hand, Jeff Jarvis talks sense too:

I think it's more than that religion is a distraction from the nation's business. I think Americans get scared when they confront people who are too religious -- especially when they do that on the other side of the church/state wall. This doesn't mean the Democrats should be godless; they should just be religously moderate (read: sane). In the primaries, we will find odd and new coalitions among conservative Catholics and born-agains pushing the Repubicans further to the religious right. But in the general election, a religious mainstreamer can win over a fringer.

2005-04-28T09:11:00.000+01:00

REFLECTIONS

Back from working with Lebanon's pro-democracy bloggers, Michael J. Totten comes up with a score or more definitions of an enigmatic city:

Beirut is people who say in public whatever they want.
Beirut is Syrian secret police who listen to everything everyone says.

2005-04-28T09:04:00.000+01:00

WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE

Yet another columnist can’t be bothered to think a few new thoughts about the new journalism. Caitlin Moran, in today’s Times. Surprise, surprise. If you only look at boring weblogs, you’ll be… yes, bored:

The blog is one of the most disappointing technological advances of the past ten years. At their inception, blogs — online diaries — promised finally to give the quotidian experience of people like us the same global reach as that of statesmen or stars. However, it swiftly became apparent that the potential of the blog was going to be used, in the main, to chronicle uneventful dinner parties, sunsets, and a series of mediocre dreams about former classmates.

2005-04-27T23:57:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

"I am not at all in his favour. I dislike him particularly. For anything I know he may have sold pencils about the streets like any other Jew-boy."

"He goes to church just as you do - that is, if he goes anywhere; which I dare say he does about as often as yourself, Mr Wharton." Now Mr Wharton, though he was a thorough and bigoted member of the Church of England, was not fond of going to church.

Anthony Trollope, "The Prime Minister".

2005-04-27T18:11:00.000+01:00

GREAT MOMENTS IN DIPLOMACY

Five Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire asks Charles Kennedy: when was the last time he was drunk?

He refused to answer. Good for him.

(There's an audio link, but I can't guarantee it will work)

2005-04-27T17:57:00.000+01:00

SPRINGSTEEN

His new record is reviewed at length by Christiane Culhane in the New Republic (subscriber-only):

It is Springsteen's characters that have sustained his devoted following and Devils & Dust doesn't shy away from a broad cast: we're brought into the minds of soldiers, lovers, mothers and boys... The album's eponymous first track follows the internal struggle of a soldier; unsure of what is before him he looks into the eyes of an Iraqi and sees "devils and dust."

Worth reading in conjunction with David Hajdu’s overview, published in the same magazine a couple of years ago.

2005-04-27T16:20:00.000+01:00

THE UTTERANCES OF GREAT MEN

Marxism may be alive and well in the academy, but if Marx and Engels were around today they probably wouldn’t last five minutes on your average, ultra-enlightened campus. Some of their more undiplomatic thoughts are assembled on Marx & Friends In Their Own Words. You’re unlikely to take offence unless you happen to be of Jewish, African, Slavic, Chinese, Irish, Mexican or Indian descent. (Hat tip: Emanuele Ottolenghi)

2005-04-27T14:30:00.000+01:00

APRIL IN PARIS

Ah, the romantic glow of a roomful of laptops. Adriana Kronin-Lukas has a series of posts on the international cyber-conference known as Les Blogs.

UPDATE: A long piece on the blog-industry in Business Week. The round-up includes links to Iranian political analyst, Hoder. (Via Oxblog)

2005-04-27T13:03:00.000+01:00

HIS SECRET

Vietpundit can't resist eavesdropping on "recovering liberals". Some smart publisher should make an anthology out of their blog posts. There must be a big market out there among people, like me, who've had to ditch their old opinions and start from scratch.

2005-04-26T18:37:00.000+01:00

GREAT MOMENTS IN TV REPORTING

Channel 4 has an item on Michael Howard’s failure to wash his hands before meeting a hospital patient. The Leader of the Opposition duly appears to explain himself. Over on Sky, they are discussing whether or not pupils at a London school booed Tony Blair when he paid a visit today. Or were they just being their normal, charming selves?

Now I know why I haven’t been watching much of the coverage.

Stephen Pollard’s quandary is a lot more interesting.

Iain Murray, who hasn’t given up hope of a Conservative win, seems pretty underwhelmed by the campaign so far:

At this election the choice may be seen as between Labour lies and Tory uselessness.

And John O’Sullivan has some good advice for the blues:

Instead of concentrating on the prime minister's "untrustworthiness," Tory leader Michael Howard would do better to argue that it was Blair's (and his party's) left-wing deference to international law and the U.N. that got him into trouble.

Absolutely. But I don’t suppose it will happen.

2005-04-26T18:27:00.000+01:00

ECHOES OF R&B

Does soul music still exist? When you listen to Whitney Houston, you’re tempted to assume the spirit died years ago. But the real thing is still out there, as the audience discovered last night at the closing instalment of the Barbican’s Memphis festival. Quite a show. The essence of Stax: Booker T & The MGs, Eddie Floyd, William Bell. Real musicians playing real songs.

In the closing pages of "Sweet Soul Music", his evocative history of Sixties R&B, David Guralnick couldn’t help striking a valedictory note. That’s not surprising when you consider his description of Booker T’s white sidemen, Steve Cropper and “Duck” Dunn, being escorted through a mob outside the Stax studios on the day of Martin Luther King’s death. Guralnick knew that an era had finally ended.

He was right, of course. But last night it was possible to believe nothing had ever changed.

2005-04-26T10:17:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

The structures of power may change quickly: new men arrive, new routes of social ascent are opened, new bases of command created. Yet such dramatic overturns are largely a circulation of elites. Societal structures change much more slowly, especially habits, customs, and established, traditional ways. Our fascination with the apocalypse blinds us to the mundane.

Daniel Bell, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism".

2005-04-26T08:29:00.000+01:00

RED MIST

It's always fun to watch a dinosaur of the Left frothing at the mouth. Here's Richard Gott, in the Guardian, comparing Tony Blair to Neville Chamberlain:

Like Chamberlain, he is an arrogant and God-fuelled appeaser, the unseemly ally of an unbridled country that presents a global threat similar to Germany in the 1930s. Instead of seeking a grand alliance to confront this new danger - "a coalition of the unwilling" that would include the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese - Blair has sided with the evil empire.

To be fair, a little bit of reality does intrude later in the article:

New Labour may be self-destructing, but old Labour is in no better shape. It was
already in a terminal state of collapse in the 1970s, as the recent obituaries of Jim Callaghan have recalled. The idea that a lively party exists that might rally behind Gordon Brown is a forlorn hope.

Poor old Gott. If he really feels so irrelevant, will he decide to join the Lib Dems too?

UPDATE: Norm's response, just in case you missed it:

What is it that has led to this intellectual and political debacle of so much of the left of (roughly) my own generation? The pathology of anti-Americanism? The failure to call certain political phenomena by their proper names? A loss of nerve and/or moral perspective in face of a capitalism seemingly everywhere triumphant? Perhaps (three times). But a debacle is what it is - the loss to progressive opinion of half a generation or more of those who might otherwise have been expected to pass on a mature wisdom to younger others. Instead, this shameful legacy.

2005-04-25T12:04:00.000+01:00

BRITBLOGS

Tim Worstall has posted his latest weekly round-up. He now has a sponsor too.

2005-04-25T11:11:00.000+01:00

HONOURS LIST

Because I don't pay too much attention to gong shows, I only just noticed that Adam Curtis's documentary series, "The Power of Nightmares" won the Factual Series category at the BAFTA awards. Form beats content, again. It now looks as if the programme will follow the Michael Moore trail to Cannes.

Ahead of screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival, Curtis set out his stall last week in The Village Voice:

The film touched a nerve—a public feeling that there was something not quite right or real about the fundamentals of the war on terror. No U.S. networks have so far expressed any interest in showing it.

As a matter of fact, I think the series should be shown in America, if only to generate a reasoned debate about its, er, eccentric thesis. (Curtis likes to imply that only neo-con "outriders" disliked the programme. I don't think David Aaronovitch quite falls into that category. Sadly, most of the UK coverage that I saw was woefully uncritical.) In a BBC Q&A, Curtis laments the lack of a response from Tony Blair. But he does point out (and I assume he's being ironic again) that he has one or two VIPs on his side:

...[T]he Archbishop of Canterbury liked it and the President of Venezuela has asked for a tape.

If you haven't yet seen the series, try this link.

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips has more. She also highlights Tom Gross’s Jerusalem Post article(registration required) on London’s latest hit play, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie”. As I predicted the other day, the Royal Court production has been a big success with the youth audience.

2005-04-23T23:29:00.000+01:00

TALKING HEADS

Confused about the latest goings-on in the UN oil-for-food probe? Jackson's Junction posts a brisk video clip of a "Kudlow & Company" discussion involving Austin Bay, Roger L. Simon and Claudia Rosett.

2005-04-23T20:28:00.000+01:00

ADRIFT

Still trying to get my bearings, I took the political compass test, as recommended on Boris Johnson’s blog. I came out as a slightly leftish authoritarian. The nearest VIP on the graph was John Paul II. Hmmmm.

2005-04-23T20:12:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

Once I had thought that here at the centre of events, the place to which all threads ran, you would have the best and widest view of all. But we were standing behind the scenes and didn’t know what was happening on stage. Only the director knew the play, all the rest of us just learned our parts, and no one knew exactly what part anyone else was playing.

Traudl Junge, "Until the Final Hours: Hitler’s Last Secretary"

2005-04-23T16:32:00.000+01:00

A CRITIC

While I hate to be out of step with a historian as distinguished as Michael Burleigh, I’m still scratching my head over his TLS review of the magnificent Berlin '45 film, "Downfall". (Sadly, the piece isn’t yet on-line.) Burleigh loathed almost everything, from the "amateurish" battle scenes to the decision to cast “a Bruce Willis lookalike as the SS medical corps answer to Florence Nightingale”. Not to mention the failure to show Hitler killing himself:

We see plenty of SS men blasting their brains out, but the film turns coy when it is the Fuehrer’s turn. We see a corpse wrapped in a blanket, and a bit of blood on the sofa, but not the annihilating moment. But then to show Hitler shooting himself might indicate a certain finality, the last thing anyone inadvertently collusive with Nazi myth-making seems to welcome.”

What a strange article. File under "missing the point". For a more rounded view, try Martha B.

2005-04-23T16:20:00.000+01:00

FINAL EDITION

In the Weekly Standard, David Skinner pays tribute to The Public Interest, one of the great magazines of our times. If you missed it before, David Brooks’s farewell can be found here.

2005-04-23T15:07:00.000+01:00

FOR SERVICES TO JOURNALISM

Orla Guerin’s ability to put a spin on every Middle East story she covers deserves some sort of award. The Walter Duranty Prize for Objective Reporting, perhaps? No wonder the Israelis are angry at the news that the BBC reporter has been made an MBE. (Hat tip: Tom Gross)

2005-04-23T13:03:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

Soon Uncle Vanya was firmly established in the Art Theatre repertoire and praised by everyone except Tolstoy, who told Chekhov later, "You know I can’t stand Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse than his."

Philip Callow, "Chekhov: The Hidden Ground"

2005-04-22T12:40:00.000+01:00

THINKING WHAT THEY’RE THINKING…

A leaflet from UKIP drops through my door. The first thing to catch my eye is the call for a curb on immigration. Then there’s the reference to ending “political correctness”.

That makes me feel uneasy.

Then I hear liberal commentators comparing Michael Howard to Enoch Powell because he raises the subject of asylum and immigration.

They make me feel uneasy too.

Can I have it both ways? I’m trying to put my thoughts in order. I know what I think about the race issue in this election, but it’s hard to find a way of expressing it.

Here’s what Daniel Finkelstein had to say in the column I linked to recently:

“My experiences of raising the immigration issue have not been good ones. When I worked with William Hague on a very carefully worded speech on asylum policy a few years ago, The Independent ran a cartoon with William’s face on the front of a train going to Auschwitz.”

Daniel made a point of prefacing his comments with details about his own immigrant roots. I know why he did that. As I’ve mentioned before, my father came to Britain from Jamaica during World War Two; my wife, who is Indian, came here from Kenya in the late 1960s. We both grew up in working-class neighbourhoods. If you have our kind of background, you feel extra nervous about discussing race.

Twenty years ago, I was punched in the face by a complete stranger as I was walking near Oxford Street early one evening. Ten years ago I was head-butted by a yob who was strolling through the peaceful little backwater where I live. One night, just after 9/11, we had an idiot on our doorstep, calling us “Pakis” and accusing us of belonging to “Bin Laden’s lot”. I tried not to assume there was a racial element in the first two incidents, but I’m pretty certain it was lurking underneath. (Once you’ve been involved in that kind of thing, it’s very hard to accept the calm conservative view that the criminal law should be colour-blind when it comes to motive.)

An old friend came for lunch a couple of weeks ago. He has spent virtually his whole life in a poor inner London borough. His parents are hard-working Jamaicans of the old school. He and I don’t often have a chance to discuss politics (I think he may be scared I’ll try to sell him membership of the George Bush Appreciation Society.) This time, though, he seemed keen to talk about what he sees in the area where he lives on a modest, non-yuppie salary. He worries that the neighbourhood is deteriorating fast, partly because the population is too transient to care much about the social fabric. He thinks the welfare system makes it more difficult for newcomers to be assimilated. Many people are exploiting it. Because he is involved in council work, he gets to see close-up how the committee system works. Lots of central government cash is coming into the area, but much of it, he reckons, goes to waste on worthy, race-related projects. My friend calls it “conscience money”, designed to help the middle-class activists and their sympathisers sleep easily at night.

Am I wrong in mentioning our conversation? I’ve been wondering whether it’s a mistake to post on this. Utimately, I don’t think so, even if there’s a risk it will be seized on by the likes of the BNP. Is it ever a good idea to allow bigots to muzzle debate?

We need to air all this. Michael Howard should be bringing more ethnic minority candidates into the debate. (I haven’t seen one addressing this issue on TV. Have I been watching the wrong programmes?) And Labour and the thinking classes should stop pretending that a multiracial country is just about having lots of nice restaurants to choose from.

2005-04-22T09:54:00.000+01:00

ROSE-TINTED

James Wolcott rubs his hands over a list of omens - including Hugo Chavez’s latest PR campaign - suggesting the Right’s days are numbered. We’ll see. I suspect that if there’d been such a thing as left-wing bloggers in, say, 1981, they'd have been crowing (just as I would have been - mea culpa) about the imminent demise of Reagan and Thatcher. A couple of weeks ago, Wolcott was looking forward to the end of the Blairite side of the axis of righteousness. No mention of TB now. But a Venezuelan strong man is dishing out copies of “Don Quixote”, so all’s well with the world.

At the Guardian, meanwhile, Polly Toynbee goes into Marie Antoinette mode on the subject of crime ("a vast industry of mendacity has a vested interest in scaring people witless...")

But maybe those reassuring statistics don’t tell the whole story.

UPDATE: More background information on the real crime figures in this election briefing from the Civitas think-tank.

2005-04-21T23:31:00.000+01:00

THE ODD COUPLE

Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard on the same stage? The NY Times runs a review. (Via Power Line) There's another account here.

And Expecting Rain links to the NY Observer's assessment of the new Dylan book by Greil Marcus:

Had Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident killed him, he could have gone out as a prophet, the voice of his generation, and all the other lazy phrases from the land where op-ed sonorousness meets a P.R. flack’s hyperbole. Instead, Mr. Dylan became deeply inconvenient. Which is why, when he shrugged off years of indifferent or lazy albums in the early 90’s and started making music that mattered again, it was baffling to some to have to treat him, after all these years, as something besides a has-been or an oldies act.
UPDATE: Marcus also pops up in a Dylanology essay in The Nation. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

2005-04-21T22:16:00.000+01:00

QUIET-ISH

Sorry for the lack of posts today, but I'm feeling slightly under the weather. My turn to catch the family bug...

Last night, I had the pleasure of spending a few hours in the company of Oxblog's Patrick Belton. He's American, but has an Irish accent, and seems to be fluent in every subject imaginable, as you will have noticed from his posts.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen David Brooks' surprisingly optimistic column on the culture wars, Patrick's colleague Josh Chafetz can lead you to it.

2005-04-21T20:08:00.000+01:00

THE NEW CONCLAVE

Gerard Baker thinks critics of the new Pope are missing the point. As does George Weigel. Andrew Sullivan could hardly agree less. The American Scene links to a contrarian column on priests and marriage.

Richard John Neuhaus, writing before the papal announcement was made, enjoys seeing the media put in their place:

There is something deliciously satisfying in watching the more than six thousand reporters accredited to these events, along with their hundreds of satellite trucks and anchorpersons at the ready, being forced to watch a stove pipe for a puff of smoke.

2005-04-21T12:02:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

It was and is still my fate to like the settings and the personalities that enlightenment creates without wanting, myself, to be thoroughly enlightened.

John Updike, "Self-Consciousness"

2005-04-20T17:50:00.000+01:00

OUT OF SIGHT...

Still based in Beirut, Michael J. Totten fears that the pro-democracy movement is slipping off the radar:

The single biggest media disaster in the world right now is the Western
reporting from Lebanon.

Talking of journalistic ethics, I just caught up with Stephen Sackur's essay bidding farewell to life as a BBC foreign correspondent. I never much cared for his reporting from Washington (although he wasn't quite as irritating as some I could mention) but this is a honest and thoughtful piece of self-analysis. Journalists really do have different hard-wiring. I was visiting an editor friend in Broadcasting House a couple of hours after the Oklahoma bombing, and I vividly remember watching a household name cheerily singing a song of the South as he started tapping away on his keyboard. He was having a very good day.

2005-04-20T10:23:00.000+01:00

POLLING

Can't blog much until later today. As soon as I have a chance, I'm going to take that voting test. And I note that Alice Miles has developed an allergic reaction to the British electorate.

That's my first election post in days. What does that tell you about the campaign so far?

UPDATE: Well, I just took the test. Here’s how it came out:

Con 21
UKIP 17
Lab 0
Lib Dem -32
Green -28

Interesting…. I don’t believe in pulling out of the EU, yet the figures have me looking like a closet UKIP supporter. I was surprised to find that I ticked hardly any of the “strongly agree/disagree” boxes. And there I was thinking I had strong opinions.

2005-04-19T15:32:00.000+01:00

TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

Arthur Chrenkoff posts encouraging news from an Iraqi opinion poll, but Michael Rubin’s dispatch from Baghdad suggests American diplomats are being less than diplomatic:

Iraqis take great pride in their sovereignty. The White House does too. Unfortunately, no one has yet told the American embassy.

Oh, and back on the polemical front, Efraim Karsh, long-time denizen of Commentary, gives Juan Cole a mauling in the New Republic.

2005-04-19T14:39:00.000+01:00

MOVIES - 1

If you’re remotely interested in why modern films are the way they are, take a look at Martha Bayles’ superb review of Edward Jay Epstein’s book, The Big Picture. All right, I admit it, Martha’s a friend (I got to know her a decade ago, when she published her book on the decline and fall of popular music) but her piece is terrific all the same. Is the new Hollywood as dumbed-down as the old studio system? Is Wal-Mart becoming the new Hays Office, and if it is, would that be a Good or Bad Thing? I’d class Martha as a cultural conservative, but that doesn’t mean she opts for any kind of party line. If you want to read more of her work, get yourself some Serious Popcorn.

2005-04-19T14:29:00.000+01:00

MOVIES - 2

Is there such a thing as the British film industry? Screenwriter Jonathan Gems argues that it actually died years ago, when the old subsidy system - known as the Eady levy - was abolished. What remains is essentially a Hollywood service industry. The free market, says Gems, works for lots of industries, but not in this particular case. He favours the French interventionist model. I don’t know enough about the finances to argue whether he’s right or wrong. (Ask my accountant what he thinks of my money skills.) Anyone else have any other suggestions? Here’s the crux of it:

France, despite constant howls of rage from the US government, continues to protect its film industry. By law, foreign companies are precluded from owning a greater than 70 per cent share of the French market. This guarantees 30 per cent of the movies released in France are French. French filmgoers complain about this because most French films are crap - they'd rather see more American ones. What they don't understand is: you have to make bad films to make good ones. Of the hundred-or-so French films released each year, about 90 are bad - which is why the French get so pissed off. But the French industry's hit ratio (approximately 10 per cent) is much better than Hollywood's.
America makes about 2,000 movies a year, of which about 460 are released, out of which 50 are profitable. America's hit ratio is only 2.5 per cent. The French government knows its industry is four times more successful than Hollywood's, but because Hollywood makes 2,000 movies a year, and France only 100, the playing field is not level. So, legislation is used to adjust it. Without this adjustment, French films would be destroyed - and destroyed unfairly.

2005-04-19T10:09:00.000+01:00

MONUMENTAL

This is coming to Hampstead Heath. (To get an idea of its size, note the man standing on the left, near the leg.)

The Independent has details:

The six tons of steel, 1,000 pounds of wood, and several hundred nuts and bolts that make up the work will be shipped from Rome where it has been on display for two years.. [Giancarlo] Neri, who has made large-scale installations for 20 years after giving up a professional football career with the New York Apollos said it had been warmly received by writers. "They all identify with the condition of being prisoners of their desks, of the confinement that it requires to actually write about the outside world. The idea was to reverse that sense of captivity and put the writer on public display."

Breathtaking, isn't it? But if it’s going to be true to the spirit of Hampstead, Neri will need to add a well-thumbed copy of “Stupid White Men”.

2005-04-19T09:30:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

The Honorable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the English Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes. He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having amused or enlightened the mind of a single man.

G.K Chesterton, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"

2005-04-18T22:49:00.000+01:00

BLACK SMOKE

And so we wait. Meanwhile, Biblical scholar Geza Vermes has suggestions on where the Catholic Church should be heading. I’ll have to get hold of his book. Judging by his Telegraph op-ed, he's on Andrew Sullivan's side in the big debate:

It would be presumptuous for an outsider to offer advice to the conclave, but may be be allowed a dream? In this dream, the new Pope is urged by God to revitalise Catholicism from within by concentrating on the authentic gospel of Jesus, on the message conveyed by him to his disciples, and not on the doctrine about Jesus developed by St Paul and two millennia of Christianity. This is a simple and moving message, which Jesus formulated in his own language for his simple Galilean audience, about God, the heavenly Father, the dignity of all human beings as children of God, a life turned into worship by total trust, an overwhelming sense of urgency to do one's duty without delaying tactics, a sanctification of the here and now, and, yes, the love of God through the love of one's neighbour.

PS The American Scene linked earlier to Richard John Neuhaus's Rome Diary. Both should be well worth checking in days to come.

2005-04-18T19:48:00.000+01:00

MORE ON CORRIE

Melanie Phillips casts a sceptical eye over the reviewers, and quotes yours truly. I seem to be in a minority so far.

2005-04-18T15:28:00.000+01:00

CEDAR TREES

The pro-democracy campaigners in Lebanon have set up their blog. The indefatigable Michael Totten has photos.

2005-04-18T14:03:00.000+01:00

THE REAL SCOOP

A UK branch of the Henry Jackson Society? Sounds like a great idea. Oliver Kamm has more on "one of the great figures of modern liberalism".

2005-04-18T13:45:00.000+01:00

OBJETS D’ART

I know, I know, I know. I really shouldn’t link to Terry Teachout’s every move, but he’s so damned interesting. Turn your back for an instant, and he’s produced another unmissable thousand words or more. No wonder his iBook has had a nervous break-down. Here he is again, on why the high arts still have a future, if they forget about chasing the mass market, and why the great Orson Welles might have been better off staying with the theatre rather than going to Hollywood:

Art isn’t religion, but it has something important in common with religion: it’s a form of soulcraft. Souls can only be changed one by one, and each one is as supremely important as the next. Hence there are no small audiences, only small-souled artists. Blessed are the arts that can be experienced by a mere handful of people at a time, for theirs is the kingdom of beauty at its most intense and precious. Orson Welles might not have made Citizen Kane if he’d remembered that, but he probably would have been a happier man—and a better artist.

2005-04-18T13:15:00.000+01:00

FAMILY VALUES

Jane Galt takes issue with a Crooked Timber post devoted to "baby-farming" in Victorian England.

2005-04-18T12:41:00.000+01:00

THOSE ANTI-JAPANESE PROTESTS

Wall St Journal contributor Benjamin Robertson (subscriber-only link) noticed something odd about the demonstrators in Beijing:

After spending eight hours on the road last Saturday, I did not see one person marching who looked over 40. In a protest that claimed to be about World War II history, it is remarkable that those with personal recollections of that history largely failed to come out.

One old man was cajoled into shouting slogans as he was trying to cross the road. He doesn't seem to have been all that enthusiastic:

He eventually gave in, crying out, "Give back the Diaoyu islands," "Don't rewrite history," "China live forever," each time throwing his arms up in the air for additional emphasis. At the time, I couldn't help but wonder if the old man was reminded of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, where overzealous students had then forced their seniors to do the same, albeit with harsher penalties for noncompliance.
The contradictory themes of the marches posed many puzzling questions. But perhaps most important for the protesters to consider is why the city's older generation mostly stayed at home. Could it be because they have seen this all before, and know where it can lead?

2005-04-18T12:15:00.000+01:00

QUOTABLE

"Anybody could rule this country," said George. "I could rule it."
We were seated in the garden of the Kaiser Hof at Bonn, looking down upon the Rhine. It was the last evening of our Bummel; the early morning train would be the beginning of the end.
"I should write down all I wanted the people to do on a piece of paper," continued George, "get a good firm to print off so many copies, have them posted about the towns and villages, and the thing would be done."

Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men On The Bummel"

2005-04-18T11:06:00.000+01:00

DEATH OF AN ACTIVIST

Here's my Times review of the Royal Court's new play, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie":

THE inevitable problem with political theatre is how to avoid preaching to the converted. Being outraged about Guantanamo Bay is not enough in itself to make an interesting piece of drama, and I suspect that the acclaim lavished on David Hare’s sloganising Iraq play Stuff Happens had more to do with the audience’s visceral contempt for the Bushies and Blairites than the script’s intrinsic qualities.
My Name is Rachel Corrie is an unabashedly one-sided tribute — directed by the actor Alan Rickman — to the left-wing American activist who was killed in Gaza two years ago while trying to prevent an Israeli army bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian house. (The exact details of her final moments were hotly disputed, a point not acknowledged in this production.)
A member of the controversial International Solidarity Movement, Corrie has since been turned into a martyr of the Palestinian cause. A website honours her memory, and on press night campaigners were handing out literature promoting the campaign launched against the American manufacturer of the bulldozer.
Rickman and the Guardian journalist Katharine Viner have skilfully woven together extracts from Corrie’s journals and e-mails. Megan Dodds delivers a compelling performance as a Washington State romantic who despises consumerism and keeps a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl lying by her bed. The evening is suffused with a sense of a tragic waste of life. But does it convince us that we are in the company of an individual of exceptional gifts and perceptions? Not really. Rachel Corrie was 23 years old when she died, and — I feel heartless saying this — most of her writings are exactly what you would expect from a bright, young, progressive woman from a bright, young, progressive background.
As for the scenes set in Israel — brilliantly evoked by Hildegard Bechtler’s bullet-pocked concrete set — an element of unvarnished propaganda comes to the fore. With no attempt made to set the violence in context, we are left with the impression of unarmed civilians being crushed by faceless militarists. Early on, Corrie makes a point of informing us that more Israelis have been killed in road accidents than in all the country ’s wars put together. As she jots down thoughts in her notebook and fires off e-mails to her parents, she declares that “the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance”. Even the late Yassir Arafat might have blushed at that one.

2005-04-18T10:38:00.000+01:00

OUT OF PRINT

Hard on the heels of Murdoch, Tina Brown - some-time Stasi-hunter and wife of a Fleet Street legend - peers into the media's future during an interview with the Indy:

Even the mighty Washington Post is, she says, losing circulation month after month as more and more of the younger generation get their news online. "I am a magazine junkie, but I have to say I am downloading much more individual articles rather than going out to buy the magazines," says Brown, who believes publications are being damaged by the internet because of the absence of a workable financial online model.

What does Sir Harry think? "He thinks it's a real transition, a real problem, and newspapers seem to be the most damaged," she says. "I think we are going to get to a situation where you will have to accept a much smaller number of that core newspaper audience and another economic model has to make the rest of it viable.'"

2005-04-17T23:24:00.000+01:00

BRITS - GOOD NEWS & BAD

As well as the latest instalment of the Britblog round-up, Tim Worstall offers some scary thoughts on the prospects for the UK economy.

2005-04-17T22:44:00.000+01:00

ON THE HORIZON

I still get pitying looks from media friends when they hear I’m a blogger. In their eyes that makes me about as worldly as a practising Druid. At least they don’t call me a member of the pajamahadeen - but that’s only because they’ve never come across the word before. Perhaps I should e-mail them some of the coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s speech on new media. Jeff Jarvis has plenty to say, while Terry Teachout looks at the implications for arty types. Even Le Monde is all abuzz. But then the Old Grey Lady of Paris is already au fait with these things.

PS The Guardian's Emily Bell strikes a more sceptical note.