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December 29th, 2009
10:02 pm - read 'How to be Idle' by Tom Hodgkinson
Amazing. A guide to life I think I may start handing out to my friends.
Going out all the time can be oppressive. It's hard work. Trying to keep up with the latest bar, club, movie, gallery, show or band is a full-time occupation, and one always feels as if there is something better going on somewhere else... So the declaration that you are going to "stay in" is a little victory for the soul, I believe. It means that, for a night at least, you have put aside the world and its seductions. You have said to yourself, "I don't care." - p 147
...Entertainment is often undertaken out of duty, and is not of one's own choosing. Planned schemes of merriment [...] rarely turn into the best evenings, which are usually unplanned ones, when you have abandoned yourself to fate and chance and chao. - p 148
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December 14th, 2009
01:58 pm - My carbon is your carbon
Excerpt from an article in this week's FT. Final paragraph addresses the subject of which countries pollute more and highlight how everything is connected. Winning cheap points by pointing fingers might get votes and viewers but it doesn't help things.
"[...] The entire concept of victims and perpetrators breaks down when it comes to global warming. Economies collude in pollution. It is less accurate to say that China has a large carbon footprint than to say that China is the place where the world's carbon footprint is located. The gases its factories emit are required to manufacture the stuff that western consumers think they need. China's pollution makes the US and Europe cleaner than they would be if they did that manufacturing themselves. Similarly, US pollution, the result more of consumption than production, enriches the exporting countries of Europe and Asia. It may provide the margin required to make the greening of those economies in the first place. Global warming is not a bilateral problem. It is a global problem."
FT - Christoper Caldwell: Climate change, the great leveller
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December 7th, 2009
01:10 pm - read 'Changing My Mind: Occassional Essays' by Zadie Smith
Good book, not much to quote though, except this:
... that bind [David Foster] Wallace himself defined as postindustrial: the need always to be liked. - p 256
So I suppose that need isn't just my own then?
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10:27 am - An Agreeable Article on the Last Decade in Music
Review of the decade: Alexis Petridis on pop
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/06/review-of-the-decade-pop
Believe it or not, pop got smarter in the noughties
o Alexis Petridis
o The Guardian, Monday 7 December 2009
There is a parlour game you can play to gauge how dramatically rock and pop music has changed in the course of a decade. Imagine a music fan from the start of the decade is transported to its end, and plonked in front of the Christmas Top of the Pops: how confused would they be? In the case of the 1960s, their bafflement would be total: imagine the fan from 1960 – with his Brylcreem, his Tommy Steele albums and his suspicion that trad-jazz might be the future of pop – gawping incredulously at the sight of Thunderclap Newman and Jimi Hendrix.
The same would go for the 1970s: what would even the most forward-thinking "head", their mind recently blown at the Isle of Wight festival, make of the fact that Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues had been supplanted by punk, disco and Gary Numan?
But the fan of 2000, shuttled forward to 2009's Christmas Top of the Pops (handily taken out of mothballs this year), would probably feel weirdly familiar with the show's contents. They might wonder whatever happened to nu-metal, although the rise of emo might have given them an inkling; and they might be bemused by the sheer number of synthesiser-prodding female singer-songwriters, such as Lady Gaga and Little Boots.
In truth, though, the music that's big in 2009 isn't all that different from what was big in 2000. Rock's lingua franca remains the post-Oasis, post-Radiohead big stadium ballad, replete with keep-your-chin-up lyrics, usually suggesting you "hold on". R&B isn't quite as staggeringly strange and futuristic as it seemed at the start of the noughties: in perhaps the decade's solitary example of genuinely odd and innovative music that wasn't by Radiohead finding a mass audience, producers Timbaland, the Neptunes and Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins competed to see who could make the weirdest-sounding No 1 single. Yet, judging by the sound of Beyonce's Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), R&B is still the source of the most thrilling pop music.
Unbelievably, indie music still appears to be either in the post-Britpop doldrums or in the grip of a post-punk revival that was stirring at the start of the decade – and now appears to have lasted about eight years longer than post-punk itself. The one thing that seems genuinely different is pop of what you might call the Smash Hits variety, had Smash Hits not turned up its toes in 2006. Despite the ongoing threat to national sanity posed by The X Factor, such pop is no longer the embarrassing province of the unctuous boyband, or pitched strictly at the tweenage market. It's become infinitely more intelligent and postmodern than it was a decade ago. Liking it is no longer something to be ashamed of, if you're old enough to cut up your food unaided.
This doesn't mean there hasn't been some fantastic music; there's been a vast amount across the genres, from Girls Aloud to the DFA to Burial to Elbow to Lil Wayne. But there hasn't been the kind of dizzying, rupturing musical progress that once came as standard. Instead, everything got revived, from folk to rave to early 80s synth pop. Quite why is a moot point, although it's worth noting that the noughties was the first decade in which attention seemed to switch from rock and pop music itself, to the means by which music was transmitted and consumed.
In fact, vastly more ink was spilt on the subject of the internet, MP3s, iPods, filesharing and their attendant effects on the music industry's finances than on even the biggest pop star. There were moments when music seemed to struggle to be heard over the tocking of iPod clickwheels and the wailing of record company executives. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest there have been no genuine musical developments. Urban and electronica have thrown up endless new sub-genres: there was crunk and hyphy in the US, while in Britain you could take your pick from dubstep, grime, fidget house, purple wow, sublow, 8-bar or eski-beat.
A million tiny audiences
The UK innovations frequently seemed the best; yet, despite predictions to the contrary, virtually none of them crossed over and really made a dent beyond the specialist market. With a couple of exceptions (there's an argument doing the rounds that a track by Britney Spears, of all people, bore a dubstep influence), none of them have impacted much on the way pop music sounds, in the way acid house or trance did. Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder began their careers rapping on east London's grime scene, but they only really became household names when, for better or worse, they abandoned grime's thrillingly edgy clatter and starting making commercial pop-rap.
Perhaps grime and dubstep were simply too abrasive and strange to be successfully watered down for mainstream tastes. Instead, they were big on the web. For all the talk of the MySpace-assisted success of Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen, it's hard not to think that one of the web's biggest effects might actually be the opposite of the kind of will-of-the-people surge that powered those artists into the limelight. Instead, the net might have made music a more scattered, microcosmic experience, where a wealth of blogs and messageboards mean that anything, no matter how recherche, can find an audience – just not a stadium-filling, platinum-selling one.
In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments. And perhaps we'll never see mass movements like punk, Britpop or rave again, nor the kind of rupture in mainstream tastes that would baffle a time-travelling Top of the Pops viewer. It might not be the sort of progress we're used to, but it would be progress nevertheless.
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November 23rd, 2009
05:51 pm - Burial interview from the Wire magazine
The Wire
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/347/print
Burial: Unedited Transcript
* Issue #286 (December '07) | In Writing
* By: Mark Fisher | About: Burial
Wire: Vocals were always central to your sound, but they have become even more important on this album than they were on your first LP.
Burial: I was brought up on old jungle tunes and garage tunes had lots of vocals in but me and my brothers loved intense, darker tunes too, I found something I could believe in... but sometimes I used to listen to the ones with vocals on my own and it was almost a secret thing. I’d love these vocals that would come in, not proper singing but cut-up and repeating, and executed coldly. It was like a forbidden siren. I was into the cut-up singing as much as the dark basslines. Something happens when I hear the subs, the rolling drums and vocals together. To me it’s like a pure UK style of music, and I wanted to make tunes based on what UK underground hardcore tunes mean to me, and I want a dose of real life in there too, something people can relate to.
So when I started doing tunes, I didn’t have the kit and I didn’t understand how to do it properly, so I can't make the drums and bass sound massive, no loud sounds taking up the whole tune. But as long as it had a bit of singing in it, it forgave the rest of the tune. It was the thing that made me excited about doing it. Then I couldn’t believe that I’d done a tune that gave me that feeling that proper real records used to, and the vocal was the one thing that seemed to take the tune to that place. My favorite tunes were underground and moody but with killer vocals: 'Let Go' by Teebee, 'Being with you remix' by Foul Play. Intense, Alex Reece, Digital, Goldie, Dillinja, EL-B, D-Bridge, Steve Gurley. I miss being on the bus to school listening to Dj Hype mixes. Sometimes some other kids would get us tunes, I'd record off of pirate radio all night.
Wire: You started off listening to music because of your older brother?
Burial: My older brother loved tunes, rave tunes, jungle, he lived all that stuff, and he was gone, he was on the other side of the night, almost. He was the one who wasn’t back, he was out there, going to places. He’d tell us stories about it. We were brought up on stories about it. Lleaving the city in a car and finding somewhere and hearing these tunes, and he’d bring them back. He would sit us down and play these old tunes, and later on he’d play us ‘Metropolis’ , Reinforced, Paradox, DJ Hype, Foul Play, DJ Krystl, Source Direct and techno tunes. When you’re younger that stuff blows your mind. But then they, they didn’t lose interest in it, but they got on with life and I was stuck for years. And I would still buy the tunes, and my whole life was going on missions to buy tunes and try and impress em by putting together compilations I thought that they would like. I thought I was holding a lighter up for that stuff, I'd cane Jaffa Cakes and make compilations, slip the odd garage tune in. And even when I started making tunes I was trying to impress them, I still am, but I think they hate my new tunes though. When I grew up I thought everyone would be into jungle and garage tunes but hardly anyone I knew was, in the end.
Wire: Your music seems to be about the after effects of Rave, about never actually experiencing it.
Burial: I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it. My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn’t believe I had ‘em. It was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you're only little. I’d get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world, and my brother would drop by late and I’d fall asleep listening to tunes he put on.
Wire: I suppose your contact with Rave through your brother is what makes your records so mournful: you know what is missing now, whereas others might not even know what they are missing.
[page break]
Burial: I don’t know if it exists any more at all. A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and hear something in the tune that makes me feel sad, - a few of my favourite producers and DJs are dead now too - and I hear this hope in all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK, but they couldn't, because the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn't as artificial , self-aware or created by the internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. No mobile phones back then. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like super-clubs, magazines, trance, commercialized. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone, now there's less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can't hide, the media clocks everything. The internet or whatever, but DMZ and FWD have that deep atmosphere and real feeling, the true underground is still strong, I hear good new tunes all the time.
Wire: Kode9 says that the new album has a feeling of ‘downcast euphoria’, whereas the first one was just downcast.
Burial: When I listened to these old tapes, I took what these jungle MCs were telling me seriously. Rolling a tune out, I took it as a commandment about how to make a tune: roll it out, do it fast. I was into old hardcore, darkside, trying to do a properly dark record. Not this new, pumped up tech sound. I liked the old tunes, properly darkside like finding a body in a lift shaft: dank moody tunes, suburban tunes. I want to go back to that hardcore era of darkside someday, which would be rugged, film samples just pitched up and down with strings. It wasn’t just that pure monochrome thing, it was something else, it sounded like tearing through an empty building. But the thing is, I had this bunch of tunes for my 2nd album that were dark tunes, and I just scrapped them. I took ages on them. I was worrying, because after my first album I felt a bit of pressure to follow it up. I worked for hours on these tunes, and I was trying to learn these programmes. These tunes were darker, more technical, all the tunes sounded like some kind of weapon that was being taken apart and put back together again. But then I got sort of sick of them, because I spent so long on them, I was moody about other things. So I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up. Instead of doing those dark tunes that took ages and were really detailed, I wanted to make a record fast. Something warm, glowing, junglist and garagey. I was listening to these Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals but I can’t get a proper singer like him. So I cut up acapellas and made different sentences, even if they didn’t make sense but they summed up what I was feeling. I love those Foul Play and Omni Trio tunes where it was just the girl next door singing, So I got a lot of those quite low-quality vocals and started to pitch them up and down. You can do it really fast. I sort of did the whole album in about two weeks. Most of it in the final week. When I made this a lot of things were wrong. It was nice to say, ‘fuck this’, I’m just going to make it well fast. So I’m quite defensive of it. When you’re making a tune and it’s really late… I heard this thing on EastEnders about burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower, I was making tunes in the middle of the night, if I didn’t have the vocal to keep me awake, like singing a lullaby, trying to hypnotise myself so I didn’t fall asleep
Wire: It’s like a reverse lullaby in a way – instead of sending you to sleep, it’s keeping you awake! With the first album, it felt like the references were early-mid 90s jungle, whereas with the new one, it’s as if things have moved on two or three years, to UK garage and 2-step.
Burial: I love UK garage, I love 2-step and Todd Edwards. For a long time I felt that no-one liked it, some music people cussed it because they're stupid, but its music for real people, those tunes still sound better than most stuff when you’re out. I don’t know many people who like tunes but I had one mate who had a car and let me test my tunes, I always liked deeper nighttime tunes, a bit more rolling - garage, dubstep is half pulse, half sway, so it sounds good in a car at night.
I wanted to make a half euphoric record. That was an older thing that UK underground music used to have. I think that type of euphoria is a British thing, like UK tunes, old rave tunes used to be the masters of that, for a reason, to do with the rave, a half smile, half human endorphins and half something hypnotized by drugs. It was stolen from us and it never really came back. Mates laugh at me because I like whale songs but I love ‘em, I like vocals to be like that, like a night cry, an angel animal. Old hardcore tunes would throw these sounds in, anything to create the rush, descent into another world, like Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London. love this one feeling, it only happens to you when you’re out in the cold, when your down, this shiver attempts to warm you up, bring you back. For a moment you get this weird, eerie distant feeling like it’s just for you, you get taken out of yourself. Certain tunes just nail that. So I had to do that, but have cut-up vocals and have that slinky bumping feel to it, and not get weighed down in big drums and the big snares. With Garage the drums are taken back, they’re quite soft, it’s more about being slinky. They’re like a fishbone, a spine, an exoskeleton that cradles the sounds. It’s not about the deepest kick or the biggest snare. The drums are more about trying to thread sounds and vocals together, they flicker across the surface of the tune, it circles around you, its not just chopping you up, its not about the sounds being big.
Wire: That’s the part of the reason you’re not happy with using sequencers?
Burial: Also because I don’t know how to use them!
Wire: Yeah, but you could learn! But things often sound sequenced when they are.
Burial: That’s happened to a lot of music. It's detailed in a boring way. I’m not into big intros, because if you’ve got a big intro, the rest of the tune is forever the rest of the tune, and the intro’s forever the intro. You can never get lost in it, you know where you are in most tunes, and that just takes away the only reason a tune should exist to me, I can't relate to grey music. I like tunes that just dive straight in, there’s a jump off and once you’re in it, the awareness that you’re two minutes into a tune, or four minutes into a tune is gone. That’s how I like my tunes. Or something like Robert Hood, just pure presence, shark-like, elements woven together. You can sense them sitting there rolling out the tune.
Wire: Your tunes are like being in a fog, it’s diffuse, but it’s all around you.
Burial: Then a couple of sounds might come up, glow, the rest of them sink down and burn out.
[page break]
Wire: I saw you mention it in another interview, that when you’re used to making tunes and looking at a screen, you can just see that grid when you hear the tunes.
Burial: I’ve seen people using sequencers and I’ve tried hard to use them but it’s blocks in different colours and I'm only used to just seeing the waves. I don’t need to listen much to the drums because I know they look nice, like a fishbone, rigged up to be kind of skitty, sharp. My tunes are a bit rubbish and messy but it's all I know. One day I want to make a tune people can have a dance to, I've tried.
Wire: What did you think when people were saying that you hadn’t produced it all in Sound Forge, it’s a scam.
Burial: Who?
Wire: People on the internet, saying he can’t possibly have done that whole album in Sound Forge.
Burial: Really? Yeah well I did. I'll leave those people to their internet or whatever. Yeah I wish sometimes that I’d gone to college to learn music production, but other times I’m like ‘no, fuck, I’m happy I didn’t’.
I don’t really go on the internet, it’s like a ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in.
Wire: The tracks you made and discarded. Do they still exist?
Burial: Some of them I lost because my computer’s dead. But I’ve got a few of them and I might resurrect them. I lost faith. I want to learn but its difficult, I've made mistakes. Next album maybe I'll gather my forces, make a true darkside Burial album. Step up and do it.
Wire: One of the greatest things about your music is the sense of place, and it’s so specific to South London. When I first heard it, I lived in South London and as I listened to the LP walking around, it was a perfect fit.
Burial: Thanks for saying that. I spend a lot of time wandering around London, I always have. Sometimes it’s because I’ve got somewhere to go, sometimes it’s because I haven't got anywhere to go. So I’d be wandering endlessly, getting in places. Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you. In London, there’s a kind of atmosphere that everyone knows about but if you talk about it, it just sort of disappears. London’s part of me, I'm proud of it but it can be dark, sometimes recently I don't even recognize it.
It's about being on a night bus, or with your mates, walking home across your city on your own late at night, or being in a situation with your girlfriend or boyfriend, or coming back from a club, or putting tunes on an falling asleep. If your well into tunes, your life starts to weave around them. I’d rather hear a tune about real life, about the UK, than some US hiphop. 'I’m in the club with your girl' type thing. I love r&b tunes and vocals but I like hearing things that are true to the UK, like drum&bass and dubstep, Once you've heard that underground music in your life, other stuff just sounds like a fucking advert, imported.
Wire: Even though your music really captures what it’s like to be in the UK, it connects with other people outside Britain too.
Burial: If you alone could hear someone upset on the other side of the world, then maybe then you could do something about it. I was once in these mountains, you’d see these fires, other people sleeping out in the mountains, traders across the border, and that gives you this feeling, night time, awareness of other people sleeping. But all it is just a fire light. You see their firelight and you know they are there, that’s all you need. That’s what ties cities to places that aren’t together, deserts, forests, people. You watch over your city or area at night, you see the distant lights, fires burning in other places.
Wire: Angels are mentioned a few times on the album. Why is that?
Burial: You see people, and you’re disconnected from them, they mean fuck-all to you, but other times you can invest everything in someone you don’t even know, silently believe in them, it might be on the underground or in a shop or something. You hope people are doing that with you as well. Some people, even when they’re quite young, and they’re in difficulty, maybe taking a battering in their life, but they still handle themselves with grace. I hope most people can be like that, hold it together, I wanted this album to be for people in that situation.
It's easy to fall away and fuck up and for many people there's no safety net. Sometimes one tune can mean everything, it's like a talisman.
Wire: The people on the album seem like wounded or mutilated angels: angels whose wings have been clipped, or who have been trapped or betrayed.
Burial: Yeah. When you think of some of things people go through, everyday troubles, relationship things, other stuff. Everyone knows those sorts of feelings. I wanted to do songs about that low-key stuff. There are a couple of tunes with the vocal to do with angels on it. Sometimes I’d be hearing a song … I was worrying, I’d made all these dark tunes, and I played ‘em to my mum, and she didn’t like them. I was going to give up, but she was sweet, telling me, ‘just do a tune, fuck everyone off, don’t worry about it.’ My dog died, and I was totally gutted about that. She was just like, ‘make a tune, cheer up, stay up late, make a cup of tea’. And I rang her mobile twenty minutes later and I’d made that ‘Archangel’ tune, and I was like, ‘I’ve made the tune, the tune you told me to make.’ And I heard this vocal and it doesn't say it but it sounds like ‘archangel’. I like pitching down female vocals so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing. It can sound sexy as fuck.
Wire: That works. When I listen to the record, I can’t work out whether the vocals belong to males or females. And angels aren’t supposed to have no gender.
Burial: Really? Well that works nice with my tunes, kind of half boy half girl, but that can be dark too. Sometimes in a mirror people see the devil's face for a second, that wrong aspect, the eyes, in your own. When you are young you are pushed around by forces that are nothing to do with you. You’re lost, most of the time you don't understand what’s going on with yourself, with anything.
Wire: I’ve read you say that you think it’s Ok for women to like your music, that people shouldn’t be frightened of making tunes that women will like.
Burial: But girls love the dark tunes too. I understand that moody thing, but some dance music is too male. It's dry, Some jungle tunes had a balance, the glow, the moodiness that comes from the presence of both girls and boys in the same tune, there's tension because it’s close, but sometimes perfect together. Men sometimes exist in this place where they don’t have a fucking clue what girls go through and vice versa. I was brought up most by my mum, I’m my mum’s son. I look like her. I am her. I own female dogs. I don't know what I'm trying to say, but with my new album – blokes might be, like, ‘what the fuck is this?’ But hopefully their girlfriends will like it.
[page break]
Wire: But I think a lot of men want more than blokey music is giving them.
Yeah? They should listen to some Todd Edwards, his tunes melt anyone. People are different, but the media, the world has made them afraid to create their own space around themselves, when they should just close their eyes and trust in themselves. Sometimes a man needs a break from the darkness, and just needs a dose of chirpy, buzzing tunes.
Wire: Your music is very visual. I suppose that’s partly the influence of films? You’ve talked about that sound from ‘Alien’ being one of your favourite sounds.
Burial: The motion tracker, yeah, and the dropship, the sentry guns. My big brother would play that sound to me when I was little, and tell me the stories from the film. He recorded it on a tape. He would tell me about that motion tracker sound, and ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ are some of the scariest films. But he would only show me the bit where they were loading up the weapons, but he’d say, ‘you’re too young, I won’t show you the rest, but I’ll tell you about it’. I love the sound of the motion tracker, you can feel the fear of the empty spaces ahead, it's like sonar. I like Blade Runner but I’m only obsessed with one scene in it, the bit where he’s sitting at those cafes in the rain. I love rain, like being out in it. Sometimes you just go out in the cold, there’s a light in the rain, and you’ve got this little haven, and you’re hanging round like a moth – I love moths too and that’s why I love that scene.
Wire: Is there a connection between crackle and rain?
Burial: Yeah. But I partly use the rain to cover up the lameness of my tunes.
Wire: It’s a bit like when they put on the mist on [the PlayStation game] Silent Hill because they didn’t have the memory power to render a fully-realised environment.
Burial: Oh, really? Dark. I like Silent Hill. If you hide sounds in the mist. It’s like a veil across the far wall of the tune.
Wire: That’s really important. It’s like the euphoric things are all the more euphoric because they are hidden by a veil, rather than being directly heard.
Burial: Yeah, euphoria trapped in a vial. Or a silencer. Volume's like a proximity to something. Everyone in their life has heard a muffled conversation from next door where you can’t hear the words, but you know that people are shouting. Or you’re on stairs, and you hear people downstairs, and you're aware of something not being right, just by the tone of someone’s voice. Even when you don't understand, when you’re younger, that kind of meaning in the sound, it makes you hold your breath. It’s like when dogs go quiet when there's a storm coming.
Wire: There’s a lot of pain in the records. Is that personal?
(pause) .... Yeah, maybe.
I don’t know anything about this kind of music, but I love Sam Cooke. I don’t know what it was about his songs, but he’d have some songs, and things on the surface were normal or happy, he’d be singing about having a party, there’s cokes in the iceboxes or whatever, and everything’s glowy, but underneath, it’s like he’s talking about something else, the last party on earth. Something in his voice. I’d rather do something like that than some icy cold electronic music, to try and get a bit of that in it. Because when something’s glowing, if something’s nice, it doesn’t mean that it’s not surrounded by cold things, bad things.
Wire: The glow would only show up if there’s darkness around it. Relentless dark, what I call ‘Dark TM’, doesn’t sound dark in the end.
The faceless thing. Is it just a personal thing?
Burial: Yeah, I'm just a well low key person. I want to be unknown, because I'd rather be around my mates and family than other things, but there's no need to focus on it. Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who made them looked like anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it more. I like it if it’s more secret, people can get into the tunes more. I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune. It’s not like it's a new thing. It’s one of the old underground ways and it’s easier.
.
Everyone goes on about themselves, they reveal everything and give it away. It’s an obsession in London, people and the media are too blatant, trying to project this image, prove themselves and trying to be something. They should just hold back a bit, it's sexier.
Burial: I wanna be out of here. I respect working hard but I dread a day job. Or a job interview. I’ve got a truant heart, I just want to be gone. I’d be in the kitchens, the corridors at work, and I’d be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts.
Wire: Looking for a space away from other people?
Burial: Kind of. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I'm in a black plastic bag outside a building, and hearing the rain against it, but feeling alright, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away. It's stupid,
Wire: Did you have a sense of what it was like on the other side?
Burial: yeah. We all dream about it. I wish something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see anything. Because you know when you have a dream, and in your dream you have the weight of the decisions in you, but it has that kind of dream-like ease of everything, like the dream city. You're walking round London in your dreams, everything is alright, but you wake back in real life and it’s not like that. You don't have a choice. You’d be on the way to a job, but you’re longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk past it. No force on earth could make you go down there, because you’ve got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are on your case, you can't go down old Thames side and throw your mobile in.
Wire: This sounds like H G Wells’ short story ‘The Door in the Wall’. In it, a child discovers an enchanted garden hidden in mundane London streets. But whenever he sees the door that leads to the garden again, he can’t make himself go through it. He’s always dragged away by the pull of the worldly.
Your first album sounded so definitive, I wondered what you would do with the second one.
Burial: Kode9 chose the Ghost Hardware 12", because that was before I’d made the album so we wanted to put out something that sounded like it came off the first album, but hinted at something else.
Wire: I’m glad you moved in the direction you have. There’s lots of emotion in the culture at the moment, but it’s very sentimental and cheap. The real pain doesn’t get articulated.
[page break]
Burial: When you’re young, things seem much more serious in a way. The most trivial thing you treat like the biggest deal in the world, you get kids doing dark, sad things, being way too upset about something because they can’t get perspective on it. And younger as well. Some people get suicidal because they’ve been bullied by someone at school, but if they waited one more week it’s the end of term. To a kid you can’t explain that very well. I’ve been in situations and there’s no rule book of what you’re meant to do. But then you might listen to some song, some pop song, that gets it just right. Like I love EastEnders and I’ll be watching that, and someone in that, Stacey Slater, will just say it perfectly.
Wire: Depression is increasingly common amongst teenagers…
Burial: They seem to have people all around them, but that’s actually not true. Sometimes you’re surrounded by mates but you’re not surrounded by friends. You feel protective of people, because no matter who we are, we all return to quite a vulnerable place, a flat, mates, a family, a room or whatever. You can see through all that stuff, a lot of young people artificially take on adult issues, that have maybe been pushed at them, or maybe they’re living out an adult relationship, proper life issues, maybe their family isn't looking out for them anymore, other serious stuff that you can't take lightly. I've seen that if you take on that stuff early on, it fucks you up. My new tunes are about that, wanting an angel watching over you, when there's nowhere to go and all you can do is sit in McDonalds late at night, not answering your phone.
Wire: Your tunes connect this time with a different era, one that’s gone.
Burial: I hear tunes, I seek out tunes that used to be everything to someone but they probably can’t listen to them now. I know there are tunes I’ve put on, I’ve seen people cry, Moving Shadow tunes, old tunes, because this music is old enough now for it to mean that. Even a single sound, they’ll hear a sound and it’ll just slay them. And you’re right, culture doesn’t seem to notice this. Where I’m from you're more likely to be sitting around talking about a Rufige Kru or 4hero tune, how much it meant to you, than some other kind of music. I like normal life. It’s weird now, people die and they’re still on Facebook or whatever the fuck else.
Wire: What other influences do you have outside music?
Burial: PlayStation games. A lot of my drums are just people picking up new ammo and weapons in games. I love shells falling to the floor, power-ups, like when you get extra life. It would be good if you could do that in real life: pick up extra lives, fight end-of-level-guardians down by the shops, use cheat-modes. I spent all my pocket money trying to complete Silent Scope at the arcade. I was brought up on that stuff. My Dad when I was really little, sometimes he used to read me M R James stories. On the South Bank last year, I was walking along, and I found a book of M R James ghost stories. I bunked that day off from my day job and I got this book, and now I’m well into M R James ghost stories.
Wire: You’re joking, really?
Burial: There’s a few ghost stories, the one that fucked me up when I was little. 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad'. Something can betray how sinister it is even at a distance. Something weird happens with M R James, because they’re short - and I don’t read much – and even though it’s in writing, there’ll be a moment, when the person meets the ghost, where you can’t quite believe what you’ve read, you go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It's like you’re not reading any more. In that moment it burns a memory into you that isn't yours. He says something like, ‘there’s nothing worse for a human being than to see a face where it doesn’t belong’. But if you’re little, and you’ve got an imagination which is always messing you up and darking you out, things like that are almost comforting to read. Also, there is nothing worse than not recognizing someone you know, someone close, family, seeing a look in them that just isn't them. I was once in a lock-in in a pub and the regulars there and some mates started telling these fucked up ghost stories from real life, maybe that had happened to them, and I swear if you heard them. One girl told me the scariest thing I ever heard. Some of these stories would stop a few words earlier than seemed right, they don't play out like a film, they're too simple, too everyday, slight, those stories ring true and I never forgot them. Sometimes maybe you see ghosts on the underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go. They are smaller, about 70% smaller than a normal person, smaller than they were in life.
Wire: Where I live now, in Suffolk, was where James set many of his stories. Some of the names of the places in the stories are thinly coded names of Suffolk towns.
Burial: I love that, like old churchyards, factories, places out of the way. I used to get taken away to the middle of nowhere, by the sea, I love it out there, because when it’s dark, it’s totally dark, there’s none of this ambient light London thing. We used to have to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where you were and then you’d walk on, and the image of where you’ve just were would still be on your retina. You couldn’t see anything, but you’d see stars. Loads of the drums on the new album are just a lighter. I love lighters and Swan Vesta matches, the drums on every tune are the same, this little noise.
The thing I love about M R James, it’s almost like you learn a lesson off the stories, which is to be obsessed with a similar kind of effect until you get it right, because you’re basically circling similar ideas. It’s not about things sounding the same, they’re just, I don’t know what the word would be, singular. Like Photek used to be. The techniques hit you between the eyes because they are so fucking focused, obsessed by the same devices. With M R James, it’s that ghost story thing, someone told me this story, or I knew this person – it’s a device to deliver the story into your world. Urban legends get woven so you're unable to be sure it's untrue. A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true. The new tunes are a tiny misdirection, so I can steal away unseen to the next place.
© The Wire 2009
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05:49 pm - Aah, the coffee shop dream
Read the comments after this article (at the WSJ site) and had to wonder why some Americans are so resistant to America becoming more European? Or more anything else? What are they so in love with anyway -- Oprah, sprawl, and 1/3lb McAngus burgers?
Bringing the Buzz Back to the Café
Once they plotted revolutions, now they're typing blogs. Today's cafe society is a weak decaf.
By MICHAEL IDOV
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529943328514078.html
The coffeehouse may just be mankind's greatest invention. It certainly is the most collective one: In the classic, which is to say Viennese, form, the coffeehouse is perhaps the finest collaboration between Europe, Asia and Africa. It is almost as if every great civilization in the world had taken a brief time-out from trying to kill one another to brainstorm what a perfect public space should look like. The result was equal parts Athenian agora, Saharan oasis and Continental court, with pastries. Modernity in its bloody splendor has tumbled out of the coffeehouse: In January of 1913 alone, as Frederic Morton describes in his Vienna history "Thunder at Twilight," Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Freud and Josip Broz Tito were using the same cups at Vienna's Café Central. (Stalin was in town, too, but he was too much of a country bumpkin for espresso.)
And yet it seems that we're losing the coffeehouse—less to the usual suspects like the Internet and Dunkin' Donuts than to our own politeness. We've brought the noise level down to a whisper and are in the process of losing even the whisper: Enter the modern café and the loudest sound you'll hear will be someone typing, in ALL CAPS, an angry blog comment. We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates—to the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance of an espresso program—but we're still rubes when it comes to the real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain does on it.
Five Favorite Cafes
It's telling that the people credited with the invention of the coffeehouse tend to be rogues with tangled multinational roots. There's George Franz (or Jerzy Franciszek, or Yuri-Frants—his very name holds at least three passports) Kolschitzky. A kind of Austrian-Polish-Ukrainian-Cossack cross between Paul Revere and Ray Kroc, he is said to have slipped out of the Turk-beseiged Vienna in 1683, disguised in a fez, to call up reinforcements. When invited before the emperor to collect his reward, he asked for the sacks of "camel fodder" left behind by the retreating enemy, and opened Vienna's first café shortly afterward. This whole coffee caper whiffs mightily of folklore—it's even reminiscent of one Arabic fable—and sure enough, no historical record of it exists. Kolschitzky's real-life counterpart, however, is hardly less exotic: an Armenian named Johannes Diodato, who's been given a royal monopoly on coffee for his services as a spy.
It's no wonder, then, that the coffeehouse became a hotbed of a proudly rootless culture. Psychoanalysis and socialism sprang partly from the espresso cup. In 17th-century London, coffeehouses were derided, in a fantastic turn of phrase, as "seminaries of sedition." By the end of that century, they numbered over 2,000. Poet John Dryden held court at Will's; the so-called "Learned Club" gathered at the Grecian, where a sword fight once erupted over the correct pronunciation of a Greek word; and the London Stock Exchange itself began with a newsletter John Castaing distributed in 1698 at Jonathan's. A bit later, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Samuel Johnson—with Boswell in tow, naturally—enjoyed interdisciplinary shouting matches with actors and painters at the Turk's Head. And then the East India Trading Company buried the kingdom in affordable tea, private clubs closed their doors to the rabble, and the age of the coffeehouse in the British Isles was over.
In the late 19th century, the global nexus of café culture returned to Vienna for arguably the greatest stretch of coffee-fueled creativity known to man. This is when every convention of the modern coffeehouse—the many-antlered coat rack, the marble tabletop, the day's newspaper spread Torah-like on bamboo holders—fell into place, and its role as the intellectual sparring ring was cemented. Turn-of-the-century Vienna gave rise to a generation of close-knit "Jung Wien" writers, including Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, most of whom practically lived in cafés. This is not an exaggeration. Peter Altenberg had his mail delivered to Café Central.
The arrangement was hardly idyllic. The Jung Wieners steadily went through a limited pool of girlfriends and came to blows with each other over reviews. Yet out of the friction came the kind of humanist thought that still reverberates throughout literature, design, philosophy, even architecture. And once again, a cosmopolitan, slightly alienated attitude permeated the room: Most of the writers were, after all, Jewish, including Schnitzler.
It was Vienna's postwar generation that grew tired of what they now saw as an irredeemably quaint antebellum lifestyle. In the early 1950s, dozens of famous coffeehouses—some of them centuries in operation—shuttered one by one. The Viennese had a special word for this phenomenon, as the Viennese tend to: kaffeehaussterben, coffeehouse death. Some placed the blame on the more casual "espresso bar," with its new and blasphemous practice of selling coffee to go, but many suspected a deeper malaise. Critic Clive James, in his collection "Cultural Amnesia," logically blames it on the decimation and scattering of the Jewish civil society and the lost art of Jewish conversation. An even likelier culprit, I think, is the Germanic postwar self-loathing jag. "The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouse," Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard wrote in his memoir, "because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself."
Compared to the passions that roiled London and Vienna, the American coffeehouse was always genteel and, dare I say it, elitist; the only surviving art genre our café society has birthed is coffeehouse folk music—sensitive-guy or –gal tunes that fade almost eagerly into the background. Sure, we love the idea of the coffeehouse because it dovetails with our idea of urbanity in general: That's why a coffeehouse is the first harbinger of a gentrifying area, and the last stand of a neighborhood in decline. As with a hospital or a bookstore, we may not even go there but feel better knowing one is near.
We've also used it to balkanize ourselves. The Viennese coffeehouse is a communal exercise in individuality: As an Austrian friend noted recently, his compatriots don't go to cafés to socialize—everyone goes to watch everyone else. This phenomenon doesn't quite work in America because cafés here tend to draw specific crowds: a hipster café, a mom café, a student café. With the exception of the ubiquitous Starbucks, where slumming and aspiration meet, we use our coffeehouses to separate ourselves into tribes.
Don't get me wrong—any coffeehouse is better than none at all, and their second, post-Starbucks, wave of proliferation is a fantastic phenomenon, bringing jobs and the pleasure of good espresso to communities across the country. The only trouble with the new, proudly bean-centric places that keep popping up is that they tend to be austere obsessives. There's barely anything to eat other than a perfunctory pastry, and never, ever any alcohol. You're supposed to contemplate your coffee, top notes to finish, in worshipful silence, a notion as wrongheaded as a caramel frappucchino.
The coffeehouse experience is inextricably linked with newsprint: Coffee and a paper are an even more powerful pair than coffee and a cigarette. Early London coffeehouses used to have "runners"—people who would go from café to café to announce the latest news; there's just something about the intake of data tidbits from many sources that goes well with coffee. Same goes for writing in cafés. Hemingway nails it down within the very first pages of "A Moveable Feast": the author alone with his café au lait, shavings from his pencil curling into the saucer, and, of course, a girl with "hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek" at the next table.
Which brings us to the laptop. At any given moment, a typical New York coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing center. Recently, there's been a movement afoot to limit the use of laptops. The laptoppers hog the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it's a different kind of solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You're not just alone—you're in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not directly behind you.
Perhaps the economic downturn will untie our tongues and restart the conversation. With rents going down, the next Café Abraco or Café Regular may be able to afford a larger space and have some money left for tables and chairs. And the new Lost Generation of creative strivers is already here to fill these chairs. In Los Angeles, friends report, where the lavish business lunch is no longer the industry standard, the café society is in unexpectedly full swing. Somewhere in the caffeinated ether, the ghost of Schnitzler is smiling.
—Latvian-born Michael Idov is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and author of the novel "Ground Up."
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November 17th, 2009
10:04 pm - Read 'Blood-Dark Track: A Family History' by Joseph O'Neill
I don't have any confidence that ... a descendant of mine, looking back with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight and a comfortable chair, won't be able to point to defects in my apprehension of the world and make a case that I culpably failed to notice, or act or speak about, something that is perfectly clear to him; and no doubt my ghost will exclaim 'No! You don't understand! That's not how it was at all!' -- p. 336
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October 26th, 2009
12:53 pm - Read 'Netherland' by Joseph O'Neill
Perhaps the relevant truth... is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble. - p 64
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love? - p 98
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October 19th, 2009
October 17th, 2009
05:52 pm - Is it art?
A good article, for me, as it articulates some of the things I wonder about when viewing art, and it also highlights something I've noticed -- without the little descriptive plaque next to some pieces I'd have no idea what to get out of what I'm experiencing.
Tate Modern's journey into artistic nothingness
Giggling crowds mistake Miroslaw Balka's new exhibition for a fairground, and who can blame them?
o Ian Jack
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009
o http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/16/tate-modern-artistic-nothingness
EM Forster wrote of the Marabar caves that the visitor returned from them "uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all." Twenty-five years ago, when I made the journey to see where Miss Quested took a turn for the worse in A Passage to India, I found this to be largely true. The novel changes only a consonant. They are in fact the Barabar caves, carved out of the granite hills of south Bihar more than 2,000 years ago, probably as retreats for Hindu ascetics. Their shape reminded me of tube stations: round, smooth, undecorated, as functional as any piece of modernist architecture. Nobody (in 1984, at least) made a fuss of these caves. A friend and I took a slow train, changed at a country halt to a slower cycle rickshaw, and then scrambled up a dusty slope to the several entrances. Nobody else was about. "There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match," Forster wrote; and yet out of this nothingness ("nothing, nothing attaches to them") he confected one of the most celebrated mysteries in modern literature.
The Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is trying something similar in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. His exhibit opened to the public this week and featured on the Ten O'Clock News, where, thanks to the BBC's infrared cameras, visitors to the work could be seen stumbling about in the darkness. Darkness is the whole point. Balka has constructed a large steel box, or more accurately has had others construct one for him: 13 metres high, 10 metres wide, 30 metres long, it looks like a giant shipping container, with the difference that one of its ends is open so that the public can walk up a ramp and into the dark, which Balka has intensified by lining the box's interior walls with black felt. To quote the Tate's leaflet: "In choosing how to move ahead … you create your own journey [into the unknown]." Balka himself says that the darkness has the same function as purgatory: "It will create the question mark, 'How far can I go?'"
I expected queues; other big things in the Turbine Hall have been tremendously popular. Instead I walked straight up the ramp and into the thickening night. Disorientation lasted about 30 seconds. I bumped into one of the side walls (though not so abruptly as a visitor the day before, who was led away bleeding at the nose). But that was my only real moment of dislocation and far smaller an intimation of purgatory than, say, waking up in a strange hotel bedroom with the curtains closed at three in the morning and wondering where you are. My eyesight adjusted. I could easily answer the question "How far can I go?" because the young crowd with their backs to wall at the far end were wearing white T-shirts and taking pictures of one another with their flashing phones.
Other visitors were furious. At the foot of the ramp I saw three of them separately plead with an attendant that the gallery take action. "I've come up from the West Country and those mobiles completely destroyed my experience," one man said. An American added that they needed signs banning flash photography. The attendant went off to fetch a more senior figure, who promised he would try to "verbalise" their complaints to officials even more senior. The problem was the artist. "It's difficult," he said. "The artist insists that he doesn't want to be a dictator telling people how they should experience the artwork. He doesn't want to be a fascist about it."
Noises came from inside the box: "woooo-woooo", followed by laughter.
It's hard to think Balka intended these reactions to what the Tate describes as a "monumental and poetic work" by one of "the most significant contemporary artists of his generation". In a side-room, I watched a video of him talking of Auschwitz and visiting Treblinka, and in general looking rather stark and melancholy. Elsewhere, he's stressed that his big box has no particular connection to the Holocaust; on the other hand, he certainly wants to stir up in the visitor some of the dread of going into the unknown that we inadequately imagine its victims must have felt. How can he do this? A big box is just a big box (other than black felt, nothing, nothing attaches to it) and destabilising darkness is something most of us have experienced or can create for ourselves if we try. The solution, to use the Tate official's word, is to "verbalise" – to steal some solemnity and grandeur by naming the box after a Samuel Beckett novel, How It Is, and by mentioning Plato's cave in the caption stuck to the Turbine Hall's wall. Words tell us how to react to the object. The difficulty comes, as with the mobile phoners, when the crowd ignores the instruction and mistakes a gallery of contemporary art for a fairground, which is easily done.
Mainly, however, the art-going public is remarkably obedient. Respect tends to grow when money changes hands. The Tate's box is free, whereas earlier in the day I handed over £12 to see the Anish Kapoor show at the Royal Academy and found far more reverence. The exhibition's centrepiece takes up five galleries: a 30-ton block of red wax moves silently and terribly slowly down a straight track through arches which are fractionally too small to take its bulk. With each slow passage, a little of the red wax is scraped off and sticks to the plasterwork. There is nothing else to see. Words again: Kapoor gives his piece a Sanskrit name and the catalogue explains that this is a kind of self-generating sculpture, "its body flayed by the building, in an endless tragedy."
A few people watched. "It's amazing how long people can look at it," said a man next to me. A silver-haired woman spoke to her grandchild: "Look, it's moving very, very slowly. Now let's go and see the big cannon that's about to fire!"
A crowd had gathered behind the gun. It fires every 20 minutes, and each time – I watched it twice – the same things happen. An unsmiling young man in overalls loads a cylinder of red wax into the barrel and stokes the breech with compressed air. A few spectators put their fingers in their ears. The gun fires – thud – and the red wax hits – a softer thud – a white wall through a doorway. The crowd drifts away, smiling or laughing as if to say, "Well, well!" or "Is that all there is then?" The catalogue notes, opaquely, that Kapoor's gun first performed earlier this year in Vienna "the city in which Freud established psychoanalysis".
This has been a big week for contemporary art in London, with the opening of the Balka at the Tate, the Frieze art fair in Regent's Park and Damien Hirst's paintings at the Wallace Collection; and the finale, which I also witnessed, of the 2,400 human performances on Trafalgar Square's empty plinth. The question "Is it Art?" still arises, though it was answered long ago by Duchamp's urinal: art is anything that can be transformed by placing it inside an art gallery, which is everything. But is it an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all? To me at least, after a day among the new and conceptual, even the plain and dark Barabar/Marabar caves are like Blackpool illuminations in comparison.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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October 16th, 2009
11:24 am - The Obama Effect
Obama isn't helping. At least the world argued with Bush
For all the global love-in, the new president has led rich nations to neglect principled action and row back from climate deals
o Naomi Klein
o The Guardian, Friday 16 October 2009
o http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/16/obama-isnt-helping
Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel peace prize, the one that rang truest came from Nicolas Sarkozy. "It sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples." In other words, this was Europe's way of saying to America, "We love you again", like those weird renewal-of-vows ceremonies couples have after a rough patch.
Now Europe and the US are officially reunited, it seems appropriate to consider whether this is necessarily a good thing. The Nobel committee, which awarded the prize for Obama's embrace of "multilateral diplomacy", is evidently convinced that US engagement on the world stage is a triumph for peace and justice. I'm not so sure. After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.
Let's start where the stakes are highest: climate change. During the Bush years, European politicians distinguished themselves from the US by expressing their unshakable commitment to the Kyoto protocol. So while the US increased its carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels, European Union countries reduced theirs by 2%. Not stellar, but clearly a case where the EU's break-up with America carried tangible benefits for the planet.
Flash forward to the high-stakes climate negotiations that have just wrapped up in Bangkok. The talks were supposed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen this December that significantly strengthens Kyoto. Instead, the developed countries formed a bloc calling for Kyoto to be replaced. Where Kyoto set clear and binding targets for emission reductions, the US plan would have each country decide how much to cut, then submit its plans to international monitoring – with nothing but wishful thinking to ensure this all keeps the planet's temperature below catastrophic levels. And where Kyoto put the burden of responsibility squarely on the rich countries that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same.
These kinds of weak proposals were not altogether surprising coming from the US; what was shocking was the sudden unity of the rich world around the plan – including many countries that had previously sung the praises of Kyoto. And there were more betrayals: the EU, which had indicated it would spend between $19bn and $35bn a year to help developing countries adapt to climate change, came to Bangkok with a much lower offer, one more in line with the US pledge of … nothing. Oxfam's Antonio Hill summed up the talks like this: "When the starting gun fired, it became a race to the bottom, with rich countries weakening existing commitments under the international framework."
This isn't the first time a much-celebrated return to the negotiating table has resulted in overturned tables, with hard-won international laws and conventions scattered on the floor. The US played a similar role at the United Nations conference on racism in April. After extracting all sorts of deletions from the negotiating text – no references to Israel or the Palestinians, nothing on slavery reparations – the Obama administration decided to boycott anyway, pointing to the fact that the new text reaffirmed the document adopted in 2001 in Durban.
It was a flimsy excuse, but there was some kind of logic to it, since the US had never signed the 2001 agreement. What made no sense was the wave of copycat withdrawals from the rich world. Within 48 hours of the US announcement, Italy, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Poland had pulled out. Unlike the US, these governments had all signed the 2001 declaration, so they had no reason to object to a document that reaffirmed it.
It didn't matter. As with the climate change talks, lining up behind Obama – with his impeccable reputation – was an easy way to avoid burdensome obligations and look progressive at the same time: a service the US was never able to provide during the Bush years.
The US has had a similarly corrupting influence as a new member of the UN human rights council. Its first big test was Judge Richard Goldstone's courageous report on Israel's Gaza onslaught, which found that war crimes had been committed by both the Israeli army and Hamas. Rather than prove its commitment to international law, the US used its clout to smear the report as "deeply flawed" and to strong-arm the Palestinian Authority into withdrawing a supportive resolution. The PA, which faced a furious backlash at home for caving in to US pressure, may introduce a new version.
And then there are the G20 summits, Obama's highest profile multilateral engagements. At the April meeting in London, it seemed for a moment there might be some kind of co-ordinated attempt to rein in transnational financial speculators and tax dodgers. Sarkozy even pledged to walk out of the summit if it failed to produce serious regulatory commitments. But the Obama administration had no interest in genuine multilateralism, advocating instead that countries should come up with their own plans (or not) and hope for the best – much like its reckless climate-change plan. Sarkozy, needless to say, did not walk anywhere but to the photo session, to have his picture taken with Obama.
Of course, Obama has made some good moves on the world stage – like not siding with the Honduras coup government, or supporting a UN women's agency. But a clear pattern has emerged: in areas where other rich nations were teetering between principled action and negligence, US interventions have tilted them toward negligence. If this is the new era of multilateralism, it is no prize.
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October 11th, 2009
08:41 pm - There is no weight limit
Why emotional baggage is your life
As we get older we get weighed down by baggage. But aren't books, CDs, in-jokes, kids the whole point of life?
* Miranda Sawyer
* The Observer, Sunday 11 October 2009
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/oct/11/miranda-sawyer-emotional-baggage-children
Notoriously, there is no direct English translation for Schadenfreude, but I imagine it's something along these lines: "I didn't think it would last because they are both so alike, both high-profile, narcissistic people. But even I am shocked that it ended so quickly." Our kind translator is Laura Andrassy, ex-wife of golfer Greg Norman, and the reason she is schadenfreuding to bust a gut is the end of Norman's marriage to Chris Evert. Fifteen months, they lasted. That's less than Pete 'n' Jordan. To an unhappy ex-wife, that's barely time to refresh the pin arrangement on the voodoo dolls.
Both Greg and Chris's previous marriages were long-haul affairs: Norman and Andrassy were together for 26 years, Evert and her ex-husband, Andy Mill, for 18. (There are strange photos of the two couples double-dating before the split: Norman and Evert looking like very blond, leathery, twinkle-toothed twins; Andrassy and Mill, dark haired, softer featured, more relaxed, also appearing as though they could be brother and sister. It's as if two cute moles wandered, blinking, into the crocodile pen.)
Anyway, supposedly, the reason why Greg 'n' Chrissie, both 54, just couldn't work things out was that they were both too "set in their ways". He wanted her to move into his Florida mansion; she wanted to stay at her own, an hour away. Things were complicated by his kids, Morgan (26) and Greg (23), reportedly not liking Evert.
What Evert's own three teenage sons thought of their mum's new man is not recorded. But I imagine, even if they thought he was cool, and not the ego-driven macho divot he's always appeared to be, they wanted to stay at the home they were used to, attending the same schools, hanging out with the same friends they'd been used to before their mum remarried. They, no doubt, were equally set in their ways.
Being set in your ways sounds ridiculously ancient, the mockable province of the elderly, the conservative, the rigid and dull. But it can happen to us all. It's easy to get loaded down with stuff: not just clothes and books and CDs, but friends and habits and in-jokes and kids – and all that is what holds you where you are. You don't get set in your ways, your ways wrap themselves around you like a vine, holding you fast as you run on the spot.
It's the classic reason for the mid-life crisis: the dragging weight of all that you've accumulated without meaning to, without wanting to, really. So why not change everything? Run away in a sports car accompanied by nothing more than a holdall of your poshest pants? I used to do that a lot, when I was younger. A relationship would hit the dust or I'd have a work crisis and off I'd drive in a rubbish motor, away from the scary responsibility of dealing with other people, family, or boyfriends, or editors. Oh, and other grown-up things like paying bills and changing light bulbs and remembering to eat, which seemed just as tricky at the time.
Though I'm still flummoxed by much domestic activity (how do people get their houses so neat? How can you tell a good plumber from a bad one?), I don't run away now, because being set in your ways doesn't matter if those ways suit you. I like meeting new people, but I don't want to change my best friends: I've known some of them for 30 years. I only want to move house in my head, when my head says, "Imagine if you won the lottery…" There's a leather jacket that I've had for 15 years that still seems to go with most outfits.
I sometimes wonder what I'd do if my marriage were to break down (usually at snore o'clock). It's not the physical upheaval that would be difficult, though it would be. It's all the other stuff. I can't imagine being with anyone else simply because I can't imagine being arsed to make the appalling, excruciating effort of introducing a new lover to mates who can remember your haircut at 16, to the stupid voice you make when you've had too much coffee, to how you like to sleep (not all curled up in a romantic tangle, urgh urgh, get lost). Let alone introducing them to your children.
All that. Baggage is the current, derogatory term for it. But, the older I get, the more that baggage just seems like life.
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September 28th, 2009
09:22 am - "Football is an arms race, not a business"
Nicely puts things in perspective
Football abandons the fantasy that it is a business
By Simon Kuper
Published: September 25 2009 23:21
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd77a01c-aa07-11de-a3ce-00144feabdc0.html
“The debt comes from players’ salaries. Nothing else. It doesn’t come from soccer balls,” Francisco Roca, who runs the Spanish league, told the men who run football.
We all have fantasies about discovering the roomful of people who control everything. In football, that is the International Football Arena. The conference’s yearly meeting in Zurich looks like the headquarters of a global conspiracy. Agents, club bosses and lobbyists gather in Swiss suburbia to chart the future of the football business. Earlier this month, sports economists gathered in a dingy Parisian office block. The two gatherings brought one stark realisation: hardly any football clubs will ever make profits. Football is abandoning the fantasy that it is a business.
The game’s losses pre-dated the recession. Egon Franck, economics professor at Zurich university, said in Paris: “In the top-flight leagues there is a financial crisis but it has nothing to do with the financial crisis. It’s an inbuilt, permanent financial crisis.” Premier League clubs owed a combined £3bn ($4.9bn, €3.3bn) even before recession hit. Spanish clubs owe perhaps €4bn. Each country has its own sorry tally.
“We must be sustainable,” clubs say, parroting the new global cliché. In fact they are fantastically sustainable. Mr Roca noted Spanish clubs were always going bankrupt, but added that they never disappeared. It is similar in England, where dozens of professional clubs have entered insolvency proceedings since 1992 yet only Aldershot folded, and then returned under practically the same name. Football clubs survive even when they go bust. You cannot get more sustainable than that.
Clubs are immortal chiefly because creditors dare not pull the plug. The clubs’ brands are strong enough to cow banks and taxmen. And so clubs can incur debts without fear.
The recession simply clarified how hopeless the football business is. It suddenly became obvious that most clubs would never make profits. Of course, few even aspired to profits: any euro they could borrow they immediately blew on players to satisfy their media, fans and personal fantasies. Football is an arms race, not a business.
Debt is fine if you can repay it from future profits. However, few football clubs have future profits. Much of football’s debt will never be repaid. So it will be written off.
Large chunks will be nationalised. In many countries football lives off state support. The prime example is Argentina, whose government last month bailed out the clubs by “buying” football’s television rights for almost triple their previous price. In Italy and England, governments have quietly accepted that many clubs will never pay their back taxes. Even Dutch city councils bail out profligate clubs. Taxpayers are therefore funding footballers’ Porsches. Thankfully, saving football is cheap. This is a piddling industry. Total European professional football revenues for the 2007-08 season were €14.6bn, a quarter of Tesco’s.
As for the banks that lent to football, they will take not a haircut but a number-one shave. That is their punishment for having imagined this was a business. It is remarkable that Britain’s Co-operative Bank handed over millions to Sheffield Wednesday.
Clubs’ debts have been forgiven in certain countries before. The clubs soon run up debts again, having learnt that they cannot go bust. But next time, at least the debts will not be fed by fantasies of future profits.
Only two financing models now remain. The first works for about six clubs, chiefly Manchester United and Barcelona: Have such a big global brand that you can generate money to pay great players. The second and rising model is the sugar daddy. Find an Arab sheikh to buy your club as a toy.
All this means the end of football as a pretend business. The executives in Zurich are finally realising that they do not run Shell or even Lehman. At best, their clubs will one day be like local museums: community institutions whose sole financial ambition is solvency.
simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com
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September 23rd, 2009
September 12th, 2009
September 9th, 2009
03:35 pm - read 'Zeitoun' by Dave Eggers
Brilliant, and good Ramadan reading
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September 4th, 2009
09:40 am - Oasis 1994
Oasis from the archives: Noel in 1994
Just before the release of Definitely Maybe, Caspar Llewellyn Smith caught up with Noel Gallagher to find out about scraps with Liam, spats with Suede and why people would still be listening to his band's debut album in 20 years' time. Here, for the first time, we publish the whole interview
o Caspar Llewellyn Smith
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 September 2009 12.58 BST
o http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/04/oasis-noel-gallagher
It was the second week of August 1994 and Oasis were at the Top of the Pops studio in Elstree to perform Live Forever. The band were on a short tour, including a festival date in Sweden (on the same bill as Primal Scream) and a gig the night before at the Astoria in London, where Paul Weller had gatecrashed the aftershow party. The Tories were still in power; no one had heard the term Britpop yet; the band's debut album Definitely
Maybe would be released at the end of the month. The others – bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan, guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, drummer Tony McCarroll and singer, Liam Gallagher – left the dressing room while I spoke to 27-year old Noel Gallagher. I think I'm right in saying it was his first broadsheet interview and during the course of it he'd show why he wasn't just the best songwriter in the UK: for the next 15 years, he'd be the best interview in rock music, too.
Caspar Llewellyn Smith: How's this last tour been?
Noel Gallagher: Where do I start? Started last Tuesday – so that's a week and one day. So we've had a fucking riot: a broken ankle; we've been barred from two hotels; been to Sweden and made the front page of the national newspaper. They called us "English scum" and told us we weren't allowed back in the country. Throb from Primal Scream's got a broken nose and had to have eight injections in his knee.
CLS: So that's pretty much everything you've ever wanted …
Noel: It's been all right. This has been the wildest tour. We thought it'd be boring 'cause this is about the fifth one and we thought it would be just like the others but somehow this one has just got a bit out of hand.
CLS: What's it like doing Top of the Pops?
Noel: You've got to do it, you know what I mean? You can be a fucking knob like Joe Strummer and say you're never going to do Top of the Pops. You've got to get on and do it and try and be as fucking big as you can. It's all about ambition, innit?
CLS: Is that your aim? To be the biggest band ever?
Noel: You've gotta. If somebody says: "Do you want to be put into how-many-ever fucking million homes on a Thursday night?" it's like, "Yeah." You've got a duty to the people that buy your records. The people that buy your records are going to be sat at home on a Thursday night, and saying to their mams and dads, "See, this is the band I'm into. This is what I like." We don't want to be an indie band from England who've had a couple of hits. We want to go on and be an important band and there's certain things you've got to do. You want to sell 5,000 limited-edition red vinyl seven-inches, that's fine. Make music for a closet full of people in Bradford somewhere ... but it doesn't mean anything to anyone. Phil Collins has got to be chased out of the charts, and Wet Wet Wet. It's the only way to do it, man, to fucking get in there among them and stamp the fuckers out.
CLS: It's a pretty dire time.
Noel: There's more bands about now than there has been for the last three or four years. A lot of them are mediocre. A lot of them get press coverage and they're not very good. The only bands I'm into are Paul Weller, the Verve, Primal Scream and that's it.
CLS: Was it weird having Weller at the show last night?
Noel: We've met him a couple of times. He's all right. He's older than us and set in his ways. It's like, I totally respect him but he does his thing and we do ours. He likes our band and we love his band. He's a fucking top guy.
CLS: What happens if it ends tomorrow? Do you carry on writing songs? Is that what it's really about?
Noel: The thing about all this fucking hype shit and press about our tours and drugs, although it's true, they write about it 'cos it sells papers. You've got to get your records out because your records last forever. Press stories last for a week until someone else is doing something else. The songs are what it's about and the albums, gigs, that's what sticks in people's memories – not being bundled off a ferry in Amsterdam. In 20 years' time our album Definitely Maybe will still be in the shops and that's what it's about. In 20 years' time people will buy the album and listen to it for what it is. They won't listen to it because we were rock'n'roll or something like that. That's what matters.
CLS: What's about the stories about rows with your brother?
Noel: The thing about brothers, the thing between me and him, is ... he can bullshit to other people and they believe him and I can bullshit to other people, but we can't bullshit to each other because we've known each other for too long. Brothers are always competitive anyway. Aren't they?
CLS: Is he happy with all your lyrics?
Noel: Yeah. If any of the band ever said, "I'm not singing that or not playing it ..." I'd say, "Right, we'll we're not changing it because that's the fucking song," you know what I mean? Of course he's happy. I mean, why would he not be?
CLS: The story is that he formed the band. It seemed that you needed that to get you off your arse...
Noel: Totally. I didn't know anybody else who I would desire to be in a band with, except these four guys. It's as simple as that. It's fate I suppose.
CLS: Is writing songs the most important thing in your life?
Noel: Totally. Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music. I write all the time. I've got the attention span of a fucking gnat so if I'm not doing something like writing or doing interviews I just sit there vegetating, fucking taking drugs.
CLS: How would you describe your sound to someone who's never heard you before?
Noel: I'd just say, all the best bits of every band that anyone's ever liked. We sound like all the important bands. People slag us off and say we sound like the Beatles, T-Rex, the Stones, Jam, Sex Pistols, but it's better than sounding like Spandau Ballet.
CLS: What's the best thing that you've written?
Noel: On the album I'd say Slide Away, personally. I remember the times when we recorded Supersonic and it was supposed to be a B-side and it ended up being the first single. That's my favourite for that reason. Married with Children, because it's funny. Sad Song, because I sing it. But Slide Away is probably the best song I've ever written. At the moment.
CLS: One of the things I love about your band is the sense of humour.
Noel: Most of the bands in England are just too inward looking. Bollocks! Music should be like TV. Turn it on, it entertains you. That's what we're about. The lyrics do mean certain things. I don't like talking about it 'cause it's too difficult for me. Each line in a song means something else. They mean what they mean to people. [But] we don't aspire to be deep like Suede or the Smiths. A lot of people want to go out and change people's lives and dictate to them what they should be doing and what they should be wearing and who they should be voting for. Our music has changed people's lives, I know it has, Live Forever has, but all the songs on that album were written when I was on the dole and I had fuck all going for me. I was writing about escaping. I wasn't writing about being on the dole and how shit it was. I was writing about how great it could be if we were in a band. That's what [people] – especially the people who come to the gigs – can relate to cause we're singing about them. If it takes you out of your surroundings, if you're listening to it at work or on the bus, then that's what it's all about.
CLS: Do you not find it weird with pop music … it's not like an advert. That entertains you but it's just so what. [Pop is] three minutes of ... a bit of magic.
Noel: Yeah. If you try too hard you're never going to get there. Most of the pop stars today ... Blur are trying to be entertaining but they're trying too hard. Their music just doesn't mean anything. They get people to gigs and sell out and that's fine. They're a working band and play live. Fucking great, I've got respect for them but it sounds like they're trying too hard. What we do is just completely natural. I sit there and just pick up a guitar and I wait and I wait and I wait and then something goes and it fucking comes out. I don't try to write songs about things. Like Girls and Boys about being on holiday in Spain. I ain't the voice of a generation for anyone and neither is anyone in the band. We're not figureheads of any movement and we don't aspire to be. People are saying we're the most important band since blah blah blah and that's their opinion. We're not going to say, "No we're not". If you say we're the most important band since the Smiths then fine. But I'm not going to go and say, "I'm the most important songwriter since John Lennon". It's not within me to say that.
CLS: What were you doing before [you joined the band]? Roadying?
Noel: Yeah. For a Manchester band. Fucking about. Before that? Fucking fish-tank maker. I worked in a bakery. As a signwriter. As a labourer. Worked in a dry cleaners. You fucking name it, I done it. I only done it because I had to. I only did it for the money, I only did it because that's what I had to do. Why the fuck would I aspire to be a fucking fish-tank maker? Beyond me. I was 16, 17. You do what you have to do, because your mam boots you out of bed at 11 o'clock in the morning and says, "Get down the fucking job centre!".
CLS: Do you think you are special in that you've got this ability?
Noel: If it was that easy every fucker would be doing it. If it was that easy, you'd be doing it. I believe people have got certain talents. Not everyone can write songs, that is special 'cause you're communicating with people. If it's for building walls or plastering or painting or something like that, then that's a fucking talent. You can't build a house yourself, you've got to get someone to build it for you. I believe everyone's got special talents, it's just a matter of finding it, realising what it is and then getting on with it and doing it. I was always told when I was young, there's no point in playing that guitar because you're just going to end up working in Maccy D's. It was like, no. Fuck that.
CLS: What was school like?
Noel: I wish somebody had actually taken the time to realise that I could actually play the guitar and could write songs and took me to one side and gave me a bit of fucking time. They always take the best footballers and put them in their own little class and they get treated better at school. There should be more emphasis put on music and the arts. The education system doesn't understand musicians ... doesn't understand music except classical music. Classical music means fucking diddle in this country to the kids.
CLS: What's this about you saying you'd like to move about a bit more on stage?
Noel: But I can't because I'm concentrating too much on playing guitar. Yeah. I'd hate to be like Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix who actually mastered the guitar. Then I'd just go, "Pfft, fucking hell, it's just not exciting anymore". I learn new chords everyday. I'll get dead excited and fucking be like, "here, check that out for a chord. Fucking ace!" Someone will be like, "Oh yeah, G minor flat suspended". "I just invented that chord! And it's called N!"
CLS: What about your brother on stage? He stands dead still.
Noel: Well, I mean, he shakes the tambourine, doesn't he? Sings the songs. Not that much else to do really. Unless you want to be Brett Anderson.
CLS: Is he never tempted to do a Jagger or Bobby Gillespie number?
Noel: Us lot would all laugh at him. That's him. He is his own man. It's as simple as that. He just doesn't do them sort of things. He doesn't talk to the crowd. That's him. If he started acting like Brett Anderson I'd fucking take my guitar off and I'd fucking smack him round the back of his head.
CLS: Has it all come naturally to him?
Noel: I'd imagine so.
CLS: Does he get nervous?
Noel: Him? Oh yeah, absolutely fucking terrified. But he'd never admit it to anyone. You see that look of fear in his eyes before he goes out on stage. The shitbag. But that's him. He doesn't scare me.
CLS: What if he wants to start writing songs himself?
Noel: Erm ... I suppose we cross that bridge when we come to it. If they're all right songs, then fine, but he won't be writing them for this band. It's taken us three years to get where we are today and I'm not going to hand over the reins ... You can keep your songs and stick 'em up your arse. When the band splits up or runs its course, then you can write your own songs, but it was me who got us where we are.
CLS: The music you seem to like, it's all white rock guitar bands, isn't it?
Noel: When it first kicked off in 88, 89, I was at the Hacienda every night, into dance music and hip-hop and all that. But I got bored of it 'cos it ran its course, and now it's just 2 Unlimited and the Prodigy and it's too fast and it's lost its groove. I'm not really a dance music fan. But people who are into it are into it ... and people who are into dance music can't understand people like us.
CLS: Does it bother you that it's not like the 60s, when everyone liked the Beatles and the Stones? Does it upset you that it's never going to be like that again?
Noel: Totally. It upsets me that Suede have to all intents and purposes split up. Blur are a musical joke. So really there's only us that are a new young band doing anything and there should be six or seven of us, but there ain't. People are trying to build up Shed Seven against us but Shed Seven couldn't tie my shoelaces. They go on in the press saying, "Oasis stole our thunder". But thunder belongs to no one ... it belongs to the kids. If it wasn't for us, fucking Echobelly and Shed Seven would be the most important bands in Britain and that would be a farce.
CLS: Can you ever see yourself settling down with a couple of kids?
Noel: No, fucking never.
CLS: A nice semi in the country? A big mansion in LA?
Noel: Well, that's the general plan! Buy an island ... build a big fence, keep the fuckers out. Maybe I'll wake up one day and think I'll want two kids and a wife but I can't see it, I'm too selfish. When I'm 50, am I going to be bankrupt and in rehab? I don't think about that. I just think about today and tomorrow. I don't believe in that ethic of live fast and die young – which is what the song Live Forever is about – I hope to live to be 390. But what will be will be. I believe everything is mapped out for you anyway. Nothing gets me down about life in general, nothing pisses me off. I'm ambidextrous, I write with my left hand and I play guitar with my right. I'm right-footed, I'm double-jointed in one elbow: I'm the most bizarre character ever. So nothing amazes me. If I see a spaceship land I won't get freaked out. I'll just say, "What kept ya?". As long as people keep buying the records and coming to the gigs, there's no point in being down about anything. We're not deep people, we don't worry about what's going to happen in five years' time. I might get up in the morning and inclination might take me to say, "Fuck it, I don't want to be in a band no more". You live and die by your decisions and I'll live and die by whatever decisions I make. But I'll still be laughing.
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August 31st, 2009
04:03 pm - Life is tests
The opposite of education
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: August 28 2009 20:28 | http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f6539326-9400-11de-9c57-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Stanley Kaplan, the self-taught educator who died at 90 this week, can lay a claim to having reshaped American society. He is a large part of the reason that the majority of American schoolchildren are back behind their desks this week and not running around on beaches and baseball fields until mid-September, as was traditional until quite recently. The school year starts earlier because the main project of much public education in the US is to prepare students for big standardised tests given each spring. The more time to prepare, the better. It was Kaplan who showed that huge standardised tests could be effectively studied for.
Historically, the most important of these have been the SATs, or Scholastic Aptitude Tests. The SATs are the motor of the top half of the US social system – or so they appear to nervous 18-year-olds on the verge of getting sorted into professional and social niches through the process of college admissions. Yet long after Kaplan began helping teenagers prepare for the SATs in 1946, the view persisted that cramming was pointless. The tests were supposed to measure innate aptitude rather than anything teachable. Practically everyone except Kaplan’s students believed this, even the Federal Trade Commission. After years of Kaplan’s boasting that he could raise scores significantly, the FTC decided in the late 1970s to investigate him. The implication was that Kaplan was engaged in false advertising. But the FTC’s report, published in 1979, turned into an advertisement beyond Kaplan’s wildest dreams. The body found that Kaplan’s system raised scores by about 25 points on both mathematical and verbal tests – a decisive margin in many college admissions decisions.
Kaplan launched his tutoring service as a young man in his Brooklyn bedroom. He built it through post-examination pizza parties, at which he listened in on students’ descriptions of questions on the top-secret exams. By the time he sold it to the Washington Post in 1984 for $45m, it was a vast enterprise. It now includes an online law school and a range of programmes for all kinds of scholastic and professional examinations. In recent years its revenues have been more than $1bn. It is a larger part of the Washington Post Company than the Washington Post.
Kaplan’s insight was to figure out that there was an idiom to multiple-choice tests. Choices tend to be offered in predictable ways. For instance, if a problem about ratios has the answers (a) 2/3, (b) 4/5, (c) 6/7, (d) 3/2, the right answer is probably A or D, with one of them meant to “catch” a test-taker who has reversed the terms. His study guides are full of wisdom about the prose styles of test-composers, such as: “If guessing, a good rule of thumb is: the longest choice is often the correct one.” Kaplan insisted he was a respecter of subject matter. But figuring out the “tricks” of testing would give you a leg up, whether you had mastered the subject matter or not.
This attitude towards testing plays into everything that – educationally speaking – makes Americans feel embarrassed about themselves. On first hearing Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, the usual response of a young American is not to swoon, weep or ponder whether beauty is really truth, and truth beauty. It is to ask: “Will that be on the test?” A lot of educators viewed Kaplan as the opposite of an educator, as one who taught not knowledge but a practical savvy that allowed students to do without it.
Americans are cynical enough to think they can find an “angle” to help them beat the odds on a standardised test. They are not cynical about testing itself. “Teaching to the test” was a widely voiced criticism of Kaplan more than a quarter-century ago, but his philosophy has won out. The assumption at the heart of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 – which imposed tests on public schools nationwide – is that scores and knowledge are the same thing. Now that not just children but school systems are rewarded and punished for their performance on tests, public education has been colonised by the Kaplan philosophy. Entire school systems have hired testing companies such as Kaplan to undertake the Monty Python-esque task of teaching teachers to teach students test-taking skills.
There is something radically democratic about Kaplan’s approach. He brought power to the people. Of course educators have always tested students, and the results have had consequences. But now students probe their teachers’ assessment systems for loopholes. Whether you think this is a good thing depends, in large part, on who you think the beneficiaries of Kaplanism are. Standardised tests were supposed to open higher education to the middle class (in a US sense) by removing subjective biases that favoured elites. Kaplan saw himself as a champion of lower-middle class strivers like himself, for whom the SAT was a means to level the playing field. But Kaplan’s methods were effective because they were intensive. They therefore cost a lot of money. The better-off still had a better chance at getting into the best schools, except they were paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to test-preparation courses rather than to elite prep schools. Taking SAT prep courses ceased to be optional for those who wanted a fair shot at getting into the school of their choice.
So everyone wound up back in the same place. SAT scores still tend to track parental income fairly faithfully. Except that educational advancement now goes not so much to those who know the periodic table or can translate an English passage into Latin, but to those who have learnt to outsmart an educational bureaucracy.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell
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August 23rd, 2009
12:16 am - read "What is the What" by Dave Eggers
Moses never wrote a letter, because boys don't write letters to boys... - p 378
In my life up to that point, everything moved in a single direction. Always I fled. - p 516
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