wifiwabbit.com: mix the internet with culture and technology ...

Purdah time for Wifiwabbit

2007-12-15T12:41:00.000Z

With so many other commitments I spend less and less time posting news and views here, so I have decided it's purdah time for this blog - for now at least.

In the meantime, there's plenty going on at http://www.egoboss.com/ and http://www.ensembli.com/ ... Happy Christmas/New Year (or Happy Holidays, if you prefer) to everyone!

The Daily Telegraph | Amazon Kindles the Flames for Books?

2007-11-24T13:32:00.000Z

"As the old saying goes: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'. It's an adage that could have been invented for the book. It's more than 500 years since Gutenberg first pioneered moveable type, yet the book is still to be bettered in terms of design and usability.

It's lightweight, portable, robust, inexpensive. Novel approach: The Kindle can store 200 books and access thousands of newspapers It's so ingeniously simple that the actual book itself - the pages, the glue, the binding, the sleeves - go unnoticed to the user. They are simply the raw materials that allow us to enjoy the most important part of the book - the story it tells."

But with our very modern desire to over-engineer even the most clever designs, it's little wonder that technology companies have been talking for years about the day that "traditional" books will die, and the day that "electronic books" (known as ebooks) will become our preferred reading format.

The death of the book has been mooted for the last decade, but still people stubbornly cling to their dog-eared classics. Amazon, the online retailer, this week launched an audacious bid to change the way we read, with the release of a new ebook reader, called Kindle. Ebook readers are nothing new - Sony's Reader and the iRex iLiad have both been available for a while - but it's the first time a big book seller has thrown its considerable weight behind an ebook project in this way.

Continues ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/11/22/dlkind22.xml

The Daily Telegraph | And the best war film of all time is...

2007-11-20T20:01:00.000Z

I agree with #1 ... not with the rest of the list, however ...

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Well, the results are in, and there’s been a surprise victory for the Germans: Das Boot has been voted the best war film ever made by Reel Life readers.

The film’s realism was commended above all: “You can almost smell the Diesel,” commented ‘retired’.

The subject of realism divided opinion in the case of Saving Private Ryan, with ‘aeiou’ saying it’s “the most reallistic war film that has ever been made” and ‘BlackArrow’ objecting that “those guys walking out in the open yakking away would have been cut down before the film was half over”.

Films from the World Wars featured heavily in general (though oddly very few people voted for popular classics such as The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai), but Vietnam only just made it into the top five.

There were also questions raised about what exactly constitutes a war film, with a couple of votes for films like Casablanca and Gone with the Wind thrown in. I counted these, as war certainly does play an important part in them, but there can be no disputing that the films that made it into the top five list are ‘war films’ through and through:

1. Das Boot
2. Zulu
3. Saving Private Ryan
4. The Dam Busters
5. All Quiet on the Western Front and Apocalypse Now

And the best war film of all time is... : November 2007 : Reel Life : Arts : Telegraph Blogs

The Economist | Banksy - NOT American Graffiti

2007-11-17T12:16:00.000Z

THE phenomenon of Banksy, an English graffiti artist, seems to have got out of hand. Banksy, who trades heavily on his anonymity, began drawing on walls alongside streets in north London and Bristol, his hometown.

But his stencils—often of rats making mordant political jokes—have come in from the cold streets to the prosperous warmth of London galleries and auction houses. Record prices for Banksies have been repeatedly set and exceeded over the past nine months.

The rush began in February, when Sotheby's sold seven of Banksy's works in oil, enamel, acrylic and spray-paint. Bonhams took up the baton, and set the pace in April, selling Banksy's “Space Girl and Bird” for £288,000. This autumn, Bonhams has auctioned another 11 Banksies, and Bloomsbury no fewer than 21.

Continues ...

Art.view Quick fix Economist.com

The Daily Telegraph | Look to Tesco to see the real Britain

2007-11-04T13:45:00.000Z

Think of "Tesco Towns" and you tend to think of places like Truro, Twickenham, Cambridge or Perth: postcodes where, infamously, more than half the local housekeeping money passes through Tesco's tills.

But the real Tesco Town is not decked out in vine-ripened tomatoes and cocktail beetroots. There is a windswept office park outside Cheshunt in Hertfordshire which looks like the land that hummus forgot. It is here, in deliberately drab company headquarters, that a small clique of capitalists holds up a mirror to modern Britain.

The reflection we see is not pretty. Our fear of Tesco is almost as endemic as its blue and red signage. Barely a day goes by without a fresh delivery of accusations: that this rapacious retailer is pillaging our farms; homogenising our diet and ethnically cleansing the high street.

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Look to Tesco to see the real Britain - Telegraph

The Economist | Twentieth-century music - Music, war and politics intertwined

2007-10-26T18:04:00.000Z

WHEN Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” had its première in 1924, at a concert in New York that was billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music”, the audience included Rachmaninov and other big names from the classical world. By all accounts, the experiment was a success. It established that jazz could be worthy of the concert hall. Four years later in Europe, Gershwin met more of his new admirers, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and two composers of the revolutionary Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Berg. Awed by Berg, Gershwin hesitated at the piano one night, nervous about playing his catchy songs before one of the deconstructors of conventional harmony. Berg sternly encouraged him: “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.”

Continues ...

Twentieth-century music Music, war and politics intertwined Economist.com

The New Yorker | NYCs $$$ via Wall St or SoHo/Chelsea ...?

2007-10-20T14:45:00.000Z

Any discussion about New York City’s economic well-being tends to start and end with one phrase: Wall Street. As the Street goes, we assume, so goes the city, which is why politicians will do almost anything to keep the brokerages and investment banks happy. But in a new book called “The Warhol Economy” the social scientist Elizabeth Currid argues that this fixation is misdirected, and that it has led us to neglect the city’s most vital and distinctive economic sector: the culture industry, which, in Currid’s definition, includes everything from fashion, art, and music to night clubs. In other words, it’s SoHo and Chelsea, not Wall Street, that the politicians should really be thinking about.

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If You Can Make It Here: Financial Page: The New Yorker

BBC NEWS | An interview with Alan Coren (RIP) ...

2007-10-19T10:59:00.000Z

Just heard on BBC Radio 5 news that Alan Coren has died ... very sad news indeed; a wonderfully erudite, witty and charming man.

Punch magazine was hugely influential on my life, and it introduced me to the theatre, art, satire, cartoons, and anarchic thnking in general.

RIP.

"The pen isn't actually mightier than the sword - the sword will destroy all pens in time - we don't lie in our beds trembling in case Iran gets hold of a bottle of ink." - Alan Coren.

No obituary as yet, so linking to this recent past profile of the great man ...

--

Alan Coren - that affable raconteur was born in London in 1938 and has been a part of that institution of laughter and satire for many years.

After an education that spanned Wadham College, Oxford, Yale and the University of California he became a firm part of the BBC's News Quiz and Call my Bluff.

But it is with his editor's hat of Punch (from 1978 - 1987) that he spoke to the Politics Show...

"The first thing to say is that political cartoons aren't important and are important, David low says, wonderfully, 'I never drew a line that made a difference.'

Continues ...

BBC NEWS Programmes Politics Show An interview with Alan Coren

The New Yorker | Dept. of 9 to 5: Stressbuster ...

2007-10-13T13:04:00.000Z

When an American businessman calls upon a guru of the Eastern persuasion, he is generally seeking to be abused for his attachment to success and worldly goods while also learning how to acquire more of both. Swami Parthasarathy, eighty years old, a native of Chennai, India, having renounced a lucrative career in the family shipping business and the Rolls-Royce that came with it, and founded the Vedanta Corporate Academy two hours southeast of Mumbai, has a deep understanding of this delicate role.

In the past, he has harangued and soothed supplicants at Microsoft, Ford, and Lehman Brothers, and has been invited by the deans of Kellogg and Wharton to instruct M.B.A. students in the use of the Sanskrit Vedas for purposes of serenity and profit. On a recent visit to New York, he appeared at “21” to instruct members of the Young Presidents’ Organization (to join, you must be younger than forty-five and run a business) in the management of self and stress.

Dept. of 9 to 5: Stressbuster: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

Official Shoot 'Em Up New Movie Trailers: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci Upcoming New Movie Releases

2007-09-29T10:04:00.000Z

I advocate radical, strict gun control laws but can't deny this was an innovative, thrilling, and visceral film ... hypocrisy? I guess so ...

Official Shoot 'Em Up New Movie Trailers: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci Upcoming New Movie Releases

The New Yorker | The Art World: Turner and Extremes ...

2007-09-22T13:31:00.000Z

Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on.

The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.”

Continued ...

The Patriot: The Art World: The New Yorker

Rock reunions | Turning rebellion into money | Economist.com

2007-09-16T11:08:00.000Z

DINOSAURS might be revived in one of two ways. Fiction suggests applying the techniques of genetic engineering to DNA extracted from bloodsucking prehistoric insects trapped in amber. To resurrect the dinosaurs of rock, however, all you need is a fat cheque and a block booking at a vast stadium. The biggest bands in the history of rock‘n’roll now reform with the metronomic dependability of their own rhythm sections. The latest rock legend (and one of the greatest) to announce a return to the stage is Led Zeppelin. The band said this week it would stage a one-off gig later this year, nearly three decades after its last one.

Continued ...

Rock reunions Turning rebellion into money Economist.com:

GigaOM | Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech

2007-09-15T12:35:00.000Z

You know things are getting downright frothy when Vanity Fair rediscovers technology and starts giving way too much attention to technology titans by including them in its annual New Establishment list. The bible of frivolous has out done itself this time; it has also included a new micro-list, The Next Establishment. Perhaps it couldn’t fit in more tech types in the big list.

Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech « GigaOM:

Daily Telegraph | Why the Gambling Act is such a Loser

2007-09-08T11:59:00.000Z

Last Sunday, the Blair Government's Gambling Act 2005 came into operation and by Monday lunchtime I received my first email from an online casino site.

"Join today and we'll give you a 300 per cent bonus on your first deposit, worth up to 300 euros!" it said. "We have a huge range of games, including the biggest progressive jackpots online, giving you the chance to win millions of euros in a single spin!"

I didn't fancy my chances. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I got more, and by Friday, I was shouting: BLOODY Gordon Brown! This is your fault!

Since I keep a very tidy email inbox, which is assiduously reinforced by my friend the IT geek, I was rather cross about being invaded by casino emails and rang him up. "Do they look like legit sites?"

No. Nobody has yet sent me an email from William Hill, Ladbrokes, Stan James or any other recognisably British name. Nor have I had one from PokerStars (which is not a British company, but is, I happen to know, run by Mohawk Indians from a reservation in Canada. Still - perfectly legit.) Anyway, he cleaned up the inbox.

Now, I don't blame Big Gordo for my inbox invasion. But I do blame him for his pompous spin about whether or not Gambling is Good for You. Since he was Chancellor of Exchequer for the past 10 years, he shared equal responsibility for the not-very-good Gambling Act with that yesterday's man who went to live in Jerusalem. And he now has sole responsibility for it.

When Tessa Jowell first dressed up as Blackjack Lil and lay across a roulette table to place her poker chips for the cameras, the Gambling Act was spun (by Blairites) as all about freedom. The Blair Government wanted to license super-casinos all over Britain and allow online gambling sites to be registered in the United Kingdom. (Unlike puritanical America, where gambling sites are illegal.)

The support for the Bill came from libertarian types who think gamblers are grown-ups: they should be free to choose how, when, where and how much they gamble.

The opposition was from kindly shepherds who think gamblers are the poor, halt and lame: they should be removed from temptation, lest they get addicted to losing their wherewithal - and won't someone think of the children?

The funny thing was that the Parliamentary Labour Party is somewhat short on libertarian toughies and long on kindly Methody preachers - and loads of them hated Blackjack Lil's Bill. Obviously including Gordon, who is becoming more holier-than-thou with every passing day.
The fact that he suddenly said he wasn't going to let Manchester have its super-casino didn't worry me: I've lived in Manchester. Its unique quality of life is not going to be improved any by having a super-casino, and, anyway, I was more of a Blackpool girl.

What does fret me is the muddled thinking over the e-casinos. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (no longer run by the witless Jowell, who can't even cope with her own mortgage forms, let alone the billions wasted by the department) has spent a shedload of my money on a website explaining how it will regulate online casino and betting sites.

The website offers operators based in the European Economic Association the opportunity to apply for a British licence. This licence will prove to the punter that the site is legitimate, lawful and effectively regulated. It will make sure that he is over 18. It will tell him (should he find himself becoming worryingly addicted to online gambling) how he can obtain caring and non-judgmental help, via links to Gamcare, the online helpline.

It will also mean that the e-casino operators can run television advertisements for the first time actually showing grown-ups playing poker. (However, the actors must all be over 25 and the ads must not link gambling to sexual success.)

The point of the British licence is to encourage the world's casino websites to base themselves here, where they can be diligently regulated night and day by 50 compliance managers newly recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. But of the thousands of online casino operators worldwide, only a handful - 14 the last time I looked - have applied for one.
Why? Because Brown decided to tax all British-based betting and casino sites at 15 per cent of gross profits. Not surprisingly, they have chosen to be based in much lower-taxed places, eg Malta, which taxes at a very acceptable 2.5 per cent.

Ladbrokes has not signed up for a British licence, nor has William Hill, which used to be based in Curacao, but now has moved to Malta. Oh - and since Malta is in the European Economic Association, it will be allowed to advertise on television.

So now we have the most caringly protective online betting regulatory system in the world, hurrah. But none of the big boys will sign up to it. Boo. (The Isle of Man is laughing its head off.)
Of course, the companies that do sign up will be taxed at 15 per cent gross. But there aren't enough of them even to pay the salaries of the 50 new compliance managers recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Funnily enough, anyone who looks up the department's website to get help for his addiction to online gambling will find that the United Kingdom's only (free) residential treatment centre for addicted gamblers is called Gordon House. Piquant, eh?

Why the Gambling Act is such a loser - Telegraph

Wired | Best of Burning Man: Fire Dancers, Steampunk Tree House and More ...

2007-09-08T10:22:00.000Z

Giant steampunk installations, fire dancers and an assortment of crazy characters make Burning Man a one-of-a-kind event each year. These images offer a glimpse of the artistic activities that unfolded at the gathering Aug. 27 to Sept. 3 - "Best of Burning Man: Flames, Art Cars and Discos."

Kinetic Steam Works' Case traction engine Hortense (above) glows on the playa. The art vehicle was named in honor of the artist and mother of Cal Tinkham, the steam enthusiast and railroad engineer who originally restored the engine.

Best of Burning Man: Fire Dancers, 'Steampunk Tree House' and More

The Daily Telegraph | Arts | Shanghai: Art Deco capital - for now

2007-09-01T11:26:00.000Z

Say Art Deco and everyone knows what you mean: sharp geometry, cool curves, an effortless marriage of style and function. Where to find it, though, is a different matter.

Shanghai sprawl: Greg Girard's Shanghai Falling #1, Neighbourhood Demolition:

Dotted around London and New York are palaces of 1920s and 1930s modernism - such as Senate House in Bloomsbury and the Chrysler building on Lexington Avenue - their straight lines and sweeping curves dominating their historic sites or looking almost quaint amid the higher, newer skyscrapers now surrounding them.

But London and New York are not Art Deco cities. The 1930s, the movement's peak decade, were not great years for the West, and while apartment blocks from the period still punctuate the suburbs, they suffered from the Second World War and post-industrial decay. Too often, they look shabby and forgotten beside the sturdier homes of previous eras and the bright convenience of the present.

Continued ...

Shanghai: Art Deco capital - for now - Telegraph:

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Founder of US punk club CBGB dies

2007-09-01T11:20:00.000Z

Hilly Kristal, founder of the New York punk club CBGB which is credited with discovering Patti Smith and The Ramones, has died at the age of 75.

His daughter, Lisa, said he died from complications arising from lung cancer.

Kristal founded the club in 1973. The venue lost its lease last year after a dispute over rising rents.
In a statement, Marky Ramone of The Ramones, said Kristal was an "integral part" of the punk scene, and was always "supportive" of the genre.

"In an era when disco was the mainstream, Hilly took a chance and gambled. The gamble paid off for both him and for us. We are all grateful to him and will miss him," he added.

Born in 1932, Kristal became a concert violinist at the age of nine. He went on to manage New York jazz club, the Village Vanguard, before opening CBGB in a derelict bar in East Village in 1973.

The venue, whose full title CBGB OMFUG stood for 'country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandisers', was originally launched to showcase country music.

Instead the club became a breeding ground for punk rock.

Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls, who first played CBGB in the late 1980s, said: "So many bands would have never have made records unless they came to CBGB."

The club's final shows, in October last year, featured Patti Smith and Blondie's Debbie Harry.

Lenny Kaye, a longtime member of the Patti Smith Group said: "He created a club that started on a small, out-of-the-way skid row, and saw it go around the world."

"Everywhere you travel around the world, you saw somebody wearing a CBGB T-shirt," he said.
"He wanted the club to survive him," his daughter Lisa Kristal Burgman said. "He is survived by the fans and bands that played there."

A private memorial service is planned, with a public memorial service expected sometime in the future.

BBC NEWS Entertainment Founder of US punk club CBGB dies

YouTube - Dancin Dubya

2007-08-11T09:55:00.000Z

YouTube - Dancin Dubya

NME | Arctic Monkeys frontman to record surprise album this month

2007-08-02T12:13:00.000Z

Alex Turner teams up with old friend for new project

Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and The Rascals' Miles Kane are set to record an album together later this month.

The pair became friends when Kane's first band The Little Flames supported Arctic Monkeys on their early tour.Kane contributed guitar to Arctic Monkeys' second album 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' and has joined the Sheffield band live frequently this summer to play '505' with them, including at the weekend's Old Trafford gigs (July 28-29).

Now the pair are set to head to France to record an album together in mid-August."We're there for two weeks and we're going to try to get the majority of it done," Kane told NME.COM. "James Ford is producing it and is going to play drums, he's a really boss drummer.

Me and Al will do all the bass and guitar and vocals, and try to the get the bulk of it done in two weeks. We're going to record it quite live to tape I think. Then whenever we've got weekends off at the same time we'd like to get some strings on it and probably do all that back home.

That's the plan anyway."The singer added that the pair were still trying to work out what their project will be called. "We were thinking Turner & Kane but everyone says it doesn't sound too serious," he explained. Kane is currently recording The Rascals debut EP in London - due out in October - with Blur and Elbow producer Ben Hiller.

He expects the pair's album to come out in the first half of 2008, after The Rascals have released their debut album."We want to have a bit of everything on there," said Kane of his own band's forthcoming album. "Some of the tunes do the same job, if you know what I mean, so we'll only have a couple of them on. So when we do it we will have everything."

Arctic Monkeys frontman to record surprise album this month News NME.COM

“The Simpsons Movie” | Dysfunctional family on the move | Economist.com

2007-07-28T10:04:00.000Z

AFTER 18 years on prime-time television, “The Simpsons Movie” brings to the big screen all the qualities that have made the Simpson family superstars. That should reassure pundits who have been fretting over the question Homer Simpson poses at the beginning of the film, after viewing an especially Aesopian episode of “The Itchy & Scratchy Show”, Bart Simpson's favourite ultraviolent cartoon-within-a-cartoon: “Who's going to pay for something they've been getting for free?”

The answer is another question: how many smart, satirical, uproariously witty comedies did Hollywood make this year? “The Simpsons Movie” fills a niche in the major studios' release schedules that has lately become a void.

Critics were shown the film just before it opened to keep the audience's enjoyment of the rococo plot twists from being spiked by internet killjoys, a policy deserving of support. Briefly, an ecological disaster befalls the town of Springfield, brought about by Homer's involvement with a new love and his weakness for doughnuts.

The dysfunctional cohesion of the Simpson family is put to the test. Bart starts wishing he had a father like Ned Flanders next door, who practises family values with a wise serenity that is horribly off-putting. Marge doubts her love for Homer. Lisa meets a musician named Colin whose green politics is matched by his lilting brogue. And baby Maggie breaks 18 years of silence by speaking her first word, which audiences will have to stay through the final credits to hear.

But it is Homer who really evolves, after an Inuit medicine woman teaches him his “throat-song” and sends him on a spirit journey to an epiphany about human interconnectedness based on enlightened self-interest. Strangely, we come to care deeply about all of them.

“The Simpsons Movie” Dysfunctional family on the move Economist.com

The Hair - Disco/Retro | Single | Record Box

2007-07-20T02:20:00.000Z

The Hair have been making big waves in Leeds for well over a year now building a strong following and wowing crowds with a number of brilliant support slots, before recently stepping out at The Faversham as headliners themselves for the launch of debut single Ghosts.

As with Ghosts their follow up single Disco / Retro is an ultra limited edition 7” release and download only, so you’d be advised to move quickly to get hold of one as these four Yorkshiremen are likley to be hot property over the coming months.

Disco / Retro is a a four minute salvo of electro dance hooks mixed with indie guitar and vocals that remind you of why you fell in love with The Rapture when they released House Of Jealous Lovers. Also worth checking out is Sidney Betts on the b-side, again it’s another punk funker, which is if anything even more raucous than the a-side.

The single is out on the 23rd July through Louder Than Bombs Records.

The Hair - Disco/Retro Single Record Box

http://www.hairmusic.co.uk/pressCuts/

This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph

2007-07-19T17:51:00.000Z

The 12 acts on the shortlist for this year's Mercury Prize were revealed this week. Neil McCormick assesses their chances ...

A leading contender of course being these lads:

Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare - Melody, wit and rhythm again prove an unstoppable force. Last year's winners, the acerbically cynical Sheffield quartet consolidated their position as band of a generation with this more muscular, energetically syncopated and passionate follow-up. Even music-biz prizes, multi-million sales and Gordon Brown's endorsement can't dent their counter-cultural cachet.

Watch interviews with the nominated artists

This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph

Business.view | A Tiger in the boardroom | Economist.com

2007-07-15T12:26:00.000Z

HIS firm may have been flirting with disaster, but that did not stop James Cayne from playing his usual round of golf. Last month, as the boss of Bear Stearns pondered launching the biggest-ever hedge-fund rescue, which ultimately cost the investment bank $1.6 billion, he did so from the fairways and greens of the Hollywood Golf Club in Ocean Township, New Jersey. According to the New York Times, during the summer he regularly flies there from New York in a helicopter that has permission to land at the club.

At key moments during the crisis—during which Bear Stearns says he remained in “constant contact” with his office—Mr Cayne shot rounds of 96, 98 and 97, reports the newspaper, citing scores posted on an online database, GHIN.com. That is impressively consistent, although given his handicap of 15.9, “his scores during that stressful time certainly ballooned a bit higher than normal”, says law and golf blogger, Tom Kirkendall. “But think how bad this could have gotten for Bear Stearns if Cayne had not been able to get his golf therapy.”

Indeed. Golf Digest has published a 200-strong list of the top golfing chief executives in the Fortune 1000. Perhaps, to add value to this, every chief executive should be required to post his or her golf scores, for unusual volatility could be a useful indicator of trouble at work. On the other hand, a relatively calm performance like Mr Cayne’s might reassure investors that though things are worse than usual, they are not getting out of hand.

The central role played by golf in business life is under-reported—except maybe in Japan—perhaps because journalists can’t afford the green fees let alone the membership dues of the swanky clubs to which chief executives belong. Nor are bosses exactly rushing to draw attention to yet another perk.

Yet, “no matter how sophisticated business becomes, nothing can replace the golf course as a communications hub”, argues a new book, “Deals on the Green”, by David Rynecki. “It’s where up-and-comers can impress the boss and where CEOs can seal multibillion-dollar deals. Its no coincidence that many of the most admired people in business—Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Sandy Weill—always carved out time in their busy schedules for golf.”

“Golf brings out a person’s true character”, argues Mr Rynecki, who then provides various business lessons illustrated with examples of famous bosses “at work”. Messrs Gates and Buffett deepened their friendship by playing golf, not least because (perhaps in contrast to when they play bridge) “they don’t take themselves seriously when they are on the course”.

Stan O’Neal, now the boss of Merrill Lynch, got noticed because “some of the more influential Merrill people got to spend time with [him] on the course and saw a different side of him”, enabling him to go on to be the first African-American to lead the firm.

Mr Welch, arguably the best golfing chief executive ever, is the “patron saint of corporate golf”, argues Mr Rynecki, stripping the traditional holder of the title, John D. Rockefeller, of his halo. Rockefeller took up golf when he was nearly 60, and played nearly every day for the next 33 years, even claiming (wrongly) that his quest to shoot par would enable him to live past 100. But although he played with such corporate titans as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, he banned all talk of business from the course.

Mr Welch, by contrast, regarded golf as a key part of his managerial armoury, which he deployed with great success during his long, glorious reign at General Electric (GE). The firm was already known as a “golf company” when he took charge. But under Mr Welch, “golf became an essential tool for any manager looking to move up”. Golf “was a litmus test for character. It showed whether a person had the guts to work in Welch’s GE.”

Not everyone is convinced. The other week, reports DealBreaker, two veteran Wall Street tycoons railed against the game. Hank Greenberg, the former boss of AIG, complained that golf was a distraction from business: “A lot of people like to get away from their work. You have to wonder about whether they like what they’re doing.” Carl Icahn, the legendary corporate raider, sees golf as a symbol of all that is wrong with the clubby higher echelons of American business: “These guys would rather play golf, slap each other on the back. I want a guy running a company who sits in his tub at night thinking about the challenges he faces. The guy who can’t let it go. The focused guy.”

But enough about guys.

The most troubling aspect of “Deals on the Green” is that women are almost entirely absent from it—except as wives, girlfriends or even groupies—until chapter 16, which is all about how corporate golf may hold back female executives. The chapter makes a strong case that the biggest obstacle to women getting to the top in business is less a glass ceiling than a “grass ceiling”. On the rare occasions when women get to golf with their male counterparts, they play off a different tee. Augusta, Pine Valley and most of the other prestigious male-only clubs, says Mr Rynecki, are “like majestic, genteel proving grounds for business deals”.

John Mack, the boss of Morgan Stanley, “has made a habit of appointing golf friends to the board”, says Mr Rynecki. Apparently more open-minded than most bosses, Mr Mack, then boss of CSFB, organised a series of events to introduce female executives to golf as a tool for business. Yet his enlightenment proved quite limited. When they arrived, the women found themselves confined to the driving range and the short course “while the men played the real course”.

There are currently only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 firms, and, tragically, nobody thinks that number will increase much any time soon. Could the male monopolisation of corporate golf be to blame? Mark Twain famously dismissed golf as a “good walk spoiled”, but sadly for many promising female executives a more apt definition of the game may be “a good career spoiled”.

Business.view A Tiger in the boardroom Economist.com

Cinquecento reborn | Test Drives | Motoring | Telegraph

2007-07-07T10:17:00.000Z

I. WANT. ONE.

--

All that drinking and dancing celebrated one little car. Dante Giacosa's new Fiat 500, or Cinquecento Nuova, was first presented to the Italian premier 50 years ago on July 4, 1957. Like Britain's Mini, Germany's Beetle and France's 2CV, the Cinquecento was the Italian "People's Car".

But the celebration must be a uniquely Italian thing, because I don't recall reading about an all-night party in Birmingham to celebrate the original Mini in 1959, or a 24-hour Mardi Gras in Oxford to wassail BMW's new MINI in 2001. Perhaps Italians celebrate their industry more than we Brits do - go on, tell me something I don't know. Anyway, happy birthday, Cinquecento.

Fiat might be almost back in the black these days, but it doesn't just throw massive parties out of teary-eyed nostalgia for a much-loved car that provided most people of a certain age with some sort of amazing adventure - mine involved a blonde, a bottle of Haig whisky, a sunny afternoon on Dartmoor and a pig… (That's enough - Ed)

In fact, Fiat has another nuova Cinquecento to sell. With the possible exception of the first Audi TT, the new 500 is the most successful transmogrification from retro-styled concept car (the Trepiúuno, shown at Geneva in 2004) to production model. Just look at it - from its wide-eyed headlamps to its pert bottom, doesn't it just remind you of whisky and a pig?

(Full review via link, below)

Cinquecento reborn Test Drives Motoring Telegraph

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin | Music | Arts | Telegraph

2007-06-23T11:13:00.000Z

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin

Tom Horan is washed away by the music
Video: Fun in the mud at Glastonbury
Audio: Christopher Howse on the magic of Glastonbury
In pictures: Glastonbury 2007
Glastonbury videos, reports, reviews and blogs

Christopher Howse reports from the Glastonbury Festival

Christopher Howse: The only man in a tie among 144,000 revellers

Zac, 11, was pulling Josh, nine, in a sledge, with sloppy Glastonbury mud in place of snow. "Again! Again!" Josh shouted. Then the thunderstorm started.

Away from the mud, with teepees at £1,600 and ridiculously bulky, shiny white camper vans filling the fields, the three-day festival has never been so comfort-seeking.

"In the past eight years I've been here," said the gate steward to the family camping field, "there's more money, less drugs, less crime and no fear of it."

In the first 24 hours, among 144,000 visitors there were only 33 arrests, mostly for drugs.

"And there's less of the hippy thing. Not so much naturism," says a woman volunteer, delicately. "It's the wall that's made the difference," says the steward. The wall is prefabricated, solid and high, disturbingly like Israel's wall.

Michael Eavis, the founder of the festival, is proud of it. "Apparently you can see it from the Moon," he says.

The festival is not at Glastonbury at all, though the cone of the tor breaks the horizon. It is held at Pilton. Perhaps the mystical number of 144,000 here make up a new breed, Pilton Man, which never grows out of a youthful urge to unite ritually each year.

But Clare and David from York, who have "just got our bus passes", are not veterans from the first festival 36 years ago. "We got interested after our children left home," she says. "Dave likes world music, but it's more than that. I like the performance art. It's amazing."

Among the 30,000 cars in the car parks, there are plenty of Audis, Volvos and BMWs. Ten thousand, almost all young, came greenly by train and then chugged the last miles on dirty old buses.

"We're doing a dance degree at Greenwich," says my 20-year-old neighbour, pointing to her fair-haired friend. But now they're spending the weekend working in a vegan cafe, hoping to slip out to see Bjork. Bjork has been here before, she just can't remember.

If for some Glastonbury is joining the social season with Ascot and Henley, its style is still young and grungy. At Henley gentlemen must still wear ties. Here I spent 24 hours without seeing anyone else with one on. Ascot cocktail dresses and feather hats can look vulgar. Here the middle class come in muddy disguise.

The mud was shaping up nicely yesterday - slopping under reckless reinforcements of rain. Nearly 2,000 years ago, an Iron Age tribe built a lake-village near here with huts raised on a solid pile of brushwood clay. This skill has been lost.

Tents in the rain cover the slopes like a swarm of crabs in a nature documentary - their carapaces jostling. The maddest camp next to the giant speakers. Hayley Evans, with her 20-month-old boy, found a quieter family field, behind the open-air cinema. "My baby slept through. But they had Ghostbusters on, and every time there was a scream, I woke up with a jump."

By night the noise and stalls turn the site into an endless funfair. A neon red dragon spews real fire. Chewing on burgers or Mexican veggie wraps, "newgers" or neo-punks mill past Blendavenda (juices and smoothies), Magic Shoes (For Happy Feet), Fairylove (The Place Where the Fairies Get Their Wings). A child cries for a fake tattoo - three scorpions for a pound. "The kids love it," says Miriam Kandis, of north London, as her six-year-old daughter, Bea, grizzles against her sleeve. Well, it was 10.45pm.

The site is so big and the crowds so sluggish that it seems many arrive at the Jazz World stage just in time to miss Toumani Diabate and then slug back to the Dance stage in time to miss Courtney Orange.

The place has its own smell - firelighter smoke, fat from burgers, bacon, Thai food, beer-tent swill, rubbish bins, rubber boots, chemical lavatories. It is not true that Glastonbury is unfashionable dress-wise. Everyone is dressed in a way that would turn heads in the street. Leopardskin wellingtons, a leather kilt and tattoos make a man stand out at home. Not here. Some of the G8 protest tendency can even look frightening in a pixie hat.

A festival-goer dives into the ubiquitous Glastonbury mud, encouraged by a crowd of revellers
A field is given over to disabled camping. A woman in a tricycle wheelchair whizzes downhill towards the Pyramid stage, where Kasabian were to play last night. As a first-timer to Glastonbury, I found it more friendly and more disorientating than I expected. In a way it is an immense babysitting venture. The 144,000 are fed and kept safe. Security men swap radio messages through the night.

Just after dawn at 4am the music abates and a thrush sings. Otherwise nature does not get much of a look-in. Outside the site, honeysuckle smothers a hawthorn, and bramble blossom chokes the ditches. Inside, the grass is trodden into mud. For the locals with houses in the lanes around, this weekend is like August bank holiday for Notting Hillers - noisy and crowded. But at Glastonbury only 13 thefts from tents were reported in the first full day.

"Come back when Mr Eavis's cows are in sole occupancy," says an earnest young man with an interest in the National Youth Orchestra, who perform tomorrow. "You'll be able to see the Four Evangelists carved on the old tithe barn."

Thanks, George, I might just.

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin Music Arts Telegraph

Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker

2007-06-09T17:20:00.000Z

Went to the Hopper retrospective at Tate Modern, London, a couple of years ago. Stunning.

Go see ...

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Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator.

While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.

There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.

A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.

Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”

Art: COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

“Ordinary People” continues

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Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker

Detroit spinners | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph

2007-06-09T12:52:00.000Z

An electrifying stage act coupled with a teasing behind-the-scenes relationship has made the White Stripes the most thrilling and intriguing rock band of the past 10 years - Ben Thompson separates the art from the artifice

Son House was one of the greatest of all blues singers. Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1902, he died 86 years later - a long way north of his birthplace, amid the urban decay of Detroit, Michigan. The White Stripes: 'We know that making the kind of music we make is inherently ridiculous because we were born in the 1970s, we’re white and we’re from Detroit'

Just across that blighted city, in the predominantly Hispanic district of Mexicantown, a 13-year-old high school student called John Gillis (later to be known as Jack White) was wholly unaware of the old man's passing. Yet White's subsequent attempts to cross the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the ancient black blues singer and the young white rock fan (he once stated his artistic goal as being 'to trick 15-year-old girls into singing Son House's lyrics') would prove astoundingly successful.

The White Stripes, the band he formed to spread the electric pulse of excitement he felt on first hearing House's song Grinning In Your Face in his late teens, would introduce a whole new generation to the dusty delights of the blues, and establish them as the most consistently thrilling rock group of the 21st century. How these things came to pass is a story with as many twists and turns as a grizzled bluesman's biography.

But the central thread of the narrative is the relationship between Jack and his hard-drumming namesake - and lone bandmate - Meg White. Although she is invariably referred to within the clearly defined borders of the White Stripes' world as his 'little sister', Meg is actually Jack's ex-wife. And while this fact is now firmly in the public domain, it is very much off limits in on-the-record situations.

Absurd as the White Stripes' ritualised avowal of a demonstrable non-fact might appear in an era of remorseless accessibility, there is something intensely refreshing about Jack and Meg White's conviction that there are some questions that should not (or at least will not) be answered. And their unfashionable commitment to the preservation of their own mystery has certainly paid dividends.

As the White Stripes pull up beside Nashville's Blackbird recording studios (in which they recently completed work on their new album) it is hard to think of any pairing in pop who could make a more instantaneous and dramatic visual impact.

As brightly coloured songbirds flit and swivel in the magnolia-scented southern spring air, Jack, 31, is at the wheel of his immaculate cream 1960 Ford Thunderbird, with Meg, 32, seated demurely by his side.

Both are dressed in their habitual black and red - a routinised garb which the latter sees as being 'like a school uniform: it means you can just focus on what you're doing, because everyone's always wearing the same thing'. Yet this improbably glamorous duo could not be more fastidiously styled if they were Johnny Depp and Parker Posey starring in a Tim Burton remake of American Graffiti.

The marked contrast between the White Stripes' aura of old-school Hollywood glamour and the earthy spontaneity of their music is in no way accidental. 'Probably my favourite thing that's ever been written about us,' Jack White avers genially, having sat down in a sumptuous cerise-flock-wallpapered reception room, 'was that the White Stripes are "simultaneously the most real and the most fake band in the world".' He breaks into a Woody Woodpecker cackle. 'That's a high compliment - to be top of both those charts...'

Continued

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Detroit spinners Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph

Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey

2007-06-03T16:16:00.000Z

Dylan Thomas: Return Journey has enjoyed international success and worldwide acclaim and played both London and New York seasons. Blending beauty, humour and passion, Dylan Thomas' electrifying presence is brought to life by award-winning Welsh actor Bob Kingdom.

This is an incredible tour-de-force performance for the 21st anniversary farewell UK tour of this revisited legendary production that has been internationally acclaimed around the world. ‘I could have listened to his spell-binding, word wizardry for hours’ The Times ‘Thomas' intense love affair with language transmitted with hypnotic-beauty’ New York Times ‘He creates an actor/author partnership to match the very greatest’ - London Evening Standard

Presented by Richard Jordan Original Direction by Anthony Hopkins with Bob Kingdom as Dylan Thomas.

Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey

To die for | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph

2007-06-02T12:34:00.000Z

Damien Hirst may have mellowed since his hellraising days, but his capacity for the sensational has not waned. As the artist unleashes a new exhibition, crowned by a diamond-encrusted skull worth £50 million, Will Self is granted a very high-security preview ...

In pictures: For the Love of God

In pictures: Selected works

Richard Dorment's review

Thursday, May 10, 2007. We are in Newport Street, London SE11. To one side is a non-descript row of light-industrial units, to the other the railway viaduct along which the Eurostar trains slow-sway their way through the somnolent southern suburbs bound for Paris. This bit of Lambeth seems like a scrag-end of the metropolis: implausibly close to the Neo-Gothic power station of Westminster and the Brutalist cultural blockhouses of the South Bank, yet a world apart.

Damien Hirst: 'We can't be humping about steel and glass when we're old; we'll have to make little wooden things'

Still, cities have long memories, bred in the brick. Within yards of here the Lambeth Pleasure Gardens once spread, with their contrived grottoes and pseudo-sylvan groves, their lightshows, water features and hidden string ensembles - a 17thcentury exercise in special effects. Near here, too, was Tradescant's Ark, London's first museum, where the eponymous antiquarian amassed a great wealth of animal bones, stuffed birds and exotica from far-flung cultures.

We are also in purlieus of Elias Ashmole, the alchemist - and collector - who's buried under a black slab in South Lambeth Church that proclaims his name will endure as long as his Oxford museum. And, of course, Lambeth is William Blake's London: the garden nudist, the visionary who drew the angels he saw doing synchronised swimming in time-goo. Blake, of whom it was once said, 'His work shows what a bad artist would be like, if he happened to be a genius.'

There, walking beside the railway arches in a knitted helmet - complete with earflaps - wearing a leather jacket with an iridescent skull across its shoulders, an off-white T-shirt with a dove motif on its breast, and half-arsed black bondage trousers (they look capable of confining only the seriously febrile), is the lineal descendant of Ashmole, Blake and Tradescant: Damien Hirst, the curator of his own museum, the artificer of pleasurable torture gardens, whose self-professed alchemical aim is to cheat death through the sheer chutzpah of his creations and his collecting. He's on the phone.

And stays on and off it for the remainder of the six hours we spend together. Interviewers remark on Hirst's phenomenal energy: his gourmand's attempt to ingest the world, quite as much as he vomits his art into it. Others who've met him have been bamboozled by his bewildering shifts of persona: from mechant Machiavellian, to ingenue, to idiot savant, to - in their purview - surprisingly well-educated discourser on the history of art and his place within it.

But I greet none of these, only Damien, whom I first met in 1994, then knocked about with a bit during what his friend - and art dealer - Jay Jopling describes, not a little ironically, as 'the glory years'; that heady period in the mid to late 1990s when, so far as Hirst and his peers were concerned, the kaleidoscope had been shaken and the pieces were in flux. Before they settled, Hirst et al made to re-order the London art world. And they succeeded.

If I'm paraphrasing Tony Blair's notorious sound-burp, eructated after 9/11, it's for a reason. Blair and Hirst were the polarities of this era: nodal points around which the energies of our very metropolitan society have flowed for a decade. If Blair had the hubris to seize upon the destruction of the World Trade Centre as an opportunity for a Nietzschean re-evaluation of all values, then Hirst had already got there, with his call for the perpetrators of the atrocity to be viewed as artists. This statement he later apologised for - although never retracted.

Now, May 10, 2007, Blair is on his way out. As Hirst and I sit drinking tea made by the artist himself in the studenty kitchenette of his London atelier, his nemesis is fighting back the tears in front of his constituency party in County Durham: 'Sometimes expectations were too high,' Blair moans, 'but at least I had a go.' It's a mea culpa we can never conceive of Hirst making; nor can we imagine him committing the moral solecism of describing the bloody flux of Iraq as 'blowback'.

No. Blair is on his way out, off to the US lecture circuit to pay his mortgage, taking his religious belief with him. Meanwhile, Hirst is on his way up, with his first show at Jopling's White Cube since 2003's Romance in the Age of Uncertainty; a show that may have received a critical excoriation but garnered prices that made him the highest-paid living artist in the world.
Blair and his apparatchiks may have come to power in 1997 saying that they were seriously comfortable with the seriously rich - but they were never comfortable with Hirst; and the very cynosure of the Great Wheel of Spin they tried to rev up around 'Cool Britannia' was a dark and numinous hole, for the artist's work exposes that which underpins all capitalism, including Blairism, namely - to quote the anthropologist Mary Douglas - that 'Money is only an extreme and specialised form of ritual.' Or, as Hirst himself sums up the Antihirst's premiership: 'The lying c***. I hated all that spin. I just looked at him and thought, you're a fraud.'

Continued

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To die for Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph

Lisa Lindley Jones - Road To Nowhere | Single | Record Box

2007-05-27T14:39:00.000Z

A very interesting approach to a classic song ... love it.

--

This is the first thing i’ve heard from Lisa Lindley Jones so I don’t really have anything to compare this track to as far as knowing if this is her usual style or not. Road To Nowhere is another one of the Audi TT Remastered series that can be downloaded from the site.

It is comfortably one of the best tracks in the series, it’s got a breezy effortless cool to it, turned from the quirky pop of Talking Heads into this chilled out version. I’ve done a search online to try and find an album by her but alas no success. Shame as I do like her voice on this track, so i’ll be keeping an eye out for any future releases.

Official web site: http://www.lisalindleyjones.com/

Lisa Lindley Jones - Road To Nowhere Single Record Box

A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

2007-05-26T15:28:00.000Z

Must be nice to be perfect, Mr Farber ...

--

David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That's true, but it's not because I didn't see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don't. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn't particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.

And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can't manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."
That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It's exhausting frankly.

My problem isn't that I don't spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.

Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.

A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery

2007-05-26T14:23:00.000Z

November seems an awful long time away ...

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The Saatchi Gallery is moving to Chelsea, and will open again in November 2007. The Duke of York's HQ, Sloane Square, offers an ideal environment to view contemporary art, with very large well-proportioned rooms and high ceilings. The Gallery will occupy the entire 50,000 sq ft building giving the gallery scope for a book shop, educational facilities and a café/bar. It is ideally located in a central London location on Kings Road, Chelsea. The Triumph of Painting will be on hold until the new Gallery opens.

Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery

Wiki Altruism | Wallstrip

2007-05-26T13:31:00.000Z

I can't work out why I cannot embed the video frame here - increasingly I find this a very poor blogging tool - anyway, have a look at the link below ... good old URLs, they never let you down ...

A very interesting - and funny - interview:

5-18-07 Jimmy Wales Wallstrip

The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com

2007-05-26T13:20:00.000Z

The YouTube Election

The "Vote Different" anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich's Spanish apology, Mitt Romney's trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2008 campaign, in which anyone can join. It's the end of the old-fashioned, literary presidential epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.

The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga.

Consider the gargantuan gulp of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-plus-paged, tunnel-visioned account of the 1988 campaign, a rollicking Tom Wolfe–ish probe of the political right stuff with a cast of characters (Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Robert Dole) that in lesser hands might have come across as painted dummies; the spewing, drug-lashed delirium of Hunter S. Thompson's influential Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72; Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, with its high-definition portraits of Richard Nixon as a jerky robot out of rhythm with himself, Eugene McCarthy's Jesuitical face ("hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery at five in the morning"), and the brute force of Mayor Richard Daley's jowly constituency; and the one that started it all, the granddaddy of the tarmac chronicles, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960.

Consider, too, those classic tributaries to the presidential epic, instructive treats such as Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President: 1968, and Joe Klein's bacon-flavored roman à clef, Primary Colors. If the old-fashioned, bookish presidential epic depended upon intimate access or hovering proximity to the candidates as they work an endless series of rooms and stages, the newfangled campaign narrative is a peep-show collage—a weedy pastiche of slick ads, outtakes, bloopers, prankster spoofs, unguarded moments captured on amateur video, C-span excerpts, grainy flashbacks retrieved from the vaults, and choice baroque passages of Chris Matthews venting. YouTube, the free video-sharing bulletin board founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, is where it all happens. Mouse clicks and video clips, they go together like a nervous twitch. Where the presidential epic entails reams of psychological interpretation, novelistic scene setting, and historical placement, YouTube puts politics literally at one's fingertips in the active present, making it a narrative any mutant can join.

The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability.

After a speculative tizzy in the political chatsphere as to the secret identity of the "Vote Different" auteur, Phil de Vellis surfaced at the Huffington Post to take credit and have his personal say. A supporter of Barack Obama's and a staffer at Blue State Digital (a pro-Democratic technology firm, from which he departed after the ad was sprung), de Vellis laid out his rationale for the mashup, insisting that he intended Hillary Clinton no disrespect. With a Nixonian clearing of the throat, he wrote, "Let me be clear: I am a proud Democrat, and I always have been. I support Senator Obama. I hope he wins the primary. (I recognize that this ad is not his style of politics.) I also believe that Senator Clinton is a great public servant, and if she should win the nomination, I would support her and wish her all the best."

What's less clear is how you can portray Clinton as totalitarianism's dour answer to Miss Jean Brodie, plugging into the right wing's witchiest caricature of her, and insist there's no ill will. It'd be like depicting Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini on the balcony, a malevolent bullfrog exhorting the masses, then disavowing it by saying, "Hey, don't get me wrong, I dig the guy." The most salient point in de Vellis's fess-up was not why he did what he did but how easily it was done: "I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs." No muss, no fuss, no brainstorming sessions with the creative team, no sending out for coffee and Danish, just a little quality time on the computer and voilà. Given the editing tools available to even a modest laptop and the ultra-low point of entry into the YouTube marina, de Vellis is no doubt correct when he signs off, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.

More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis."

Not only do we (especially Me) face the dismal prospect of being bombarded by professional spot ads every time we turn on the radio or TV until the '08 election, but now, for fear of not being in the loop, we're compelled to keep up with an inundation of personal commentaries, fake ads, newsclips set to music, and homemade amateur guerrilla sorties from the Tarantinos of tomorrow.

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The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com

RED HERRING | The $6M Buzz on Buzznet

2007-05-26T13:14:00.000Z

Just about every web site loves buzz, but perhaps none so blatantly as Buzznet, a social networking site built around music and other pop culture brands, which on Thursday announced a $6 million round of funding.

The two-year-old site lets users post blog entries, videos, and photos revolving around specific musical artists and other popular personalities. The site has seen some buzz of its own of late, growing its users from 2 million to 6 million in the span of six months.

Redpoint Ventures joined the site’s original investors, Anthem Venture Partners, in the second round. Buzznet’s founders plan to spend some of that money to establish a separate social networking site focused on other topics, breaking away from the more music-oriented site.

“All these venture guys, they’re looking at what gets organic traffic, looking at the real DNA of things that are growing,” said Buzznet chairman Tyler Goldman. “We were getting inbound calls from all the top venture capital firms. We thought that since Redpoint had also been a big investor in MySpace that they understood the next evolution of the model.”

Mr. Goldman went to great pains to distinguish his site from MySpace, the social networking behemoth that also attracts plenty of attention from the music community. Mr. Goldman asserts that Buzznet provides more of a “programming” eye towards its content.

It culls from user-generated additions, expert blogger contributions, and professional contributions from popular personalities, such as the popular Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, to create what it hopes comes across as an authentic, engaging, controlled environment for users.

Mr. Goldman said that model offers a safe, lucrative space for advertisers to create their own mini-social networks for targeted demographics, as Honda recently did on Buzznet for its Civic campaign.

But a lot of folks are attempting to build branded media sites right now. Yahoo, for example, recently introduced its branded universe initiative that brings together content around specific, popular themes, such as the television show “The Office.” Traditional media companies themselves, meanwhile, are trying to hang on to some of their own buzz with social networking sites they run themselves, as NBC recently began doing.

Bill Woodward of Anthem Venture Partners, who was on the board of MySpace and the now-Yahoo-owned Launch Media, believes branded media networks are only in the “second inning”, poised for rapid growth.

“Making brands the key part of driving demographic traffic, there’s a lot more that can be done there,” said Mr. Woodward.

RED HERRING The $6M Buzz on Buzznet

A rule that isn't set in stone | Visual Arts | Arts | Telegraph

2007-05-12T18:16:00.000Z

A controversial new building has the denizens of Bath in a lather, writes Ellis Woodman
Prior to settling in Bath in 1815, where he amassed one of the great private art collections of the 19th century, Sir William Holburne led a less sedentary life.

He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11, fought at Trafalgar before the year was out and then in Brazil, the West Indies and the Mediterranean.

One likes to think that on the darker days during their five-year campaign to extend the museum that today houses Holburne's collection, the trustees have been able to draw strength from their founder's fondness for a battle.

For a battle it has certainly been. The idea of extending one of the country's best-loved small museums was always going to be contentious.

Given that the building is Grade I listed and occupies one of the most prominent locations in a world heritage site, for many Bath residents - the most vociferous of whom have instigated a "Halt the Holburne" campaign - it is little short of criminal.

So why have the trustees committed themselves to this thankless venture? In short, because the museum's future depends on its success. At present, space is so tight that 70 per cent of the Holburne's holdings (predominantly Old Masters, bronzes and decorative artworks) have to be kept in storage at any time.

Still more frustratingly, there is room to host only the smallest of temporary exhibitions - a situation that has stymied all attempts to increase annual visitor numbers above the current 33,000.
Eric Parry Architects' scheme, which has recently been submitted for planning permission, promises an 80 per cent increase in display area. If built, it is anticipated that attendance figures will more than double.

The Holburne stands at the end of the ramrod-straight Great Pulteney Street - arguably the grandest street in a city where there is plenty of competition for that title.

Dating from 1796, it was originally built as a hotel and gaming house, but doubled as a gateway to Sydney Gardens, the pleasure ground that lies behind. Passing under the building, visitors would emerge beneath a raised bandstand to discover a bucolic landscape dotted by freestanding "supper boxes" (dining huts).

Having bought the building in 1910, the trustees of the museum commissioned Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect of London's Regent Street, to remodel it. The two grand galleries that he created on the upper floors are magnificent.

However, if Blomfield's scheme has a failing, it is the poor relationship that it establishes to the park. His recast garden elevation is dominated by a central bay, accommodating a new staircase, which carves the building into two. More problematically still, this staircase blocks the passage from the street into Sydney Gardens.

Parry's project will correct this, re-establishing the building's significance as a gateway between city and park. His plan is to take Blomfield's staircase and move it a couple of metres off the central axis, enabling visitors to pass directly through the café that occupies the ground floor of the extension and into the garden beyond.

Supported above the fully glazed café are three floors of largely windowless exhibition space, giving the building something of the appearance of a casket. The external walls will be faced in large ceramic elements, glazed to a colour that the architect describes as "cobalt over olive".

This choice is designed to reflect the colour of both trees and sky: it is with the natural environment of Sydney Gardens rather than Bath's Georgian architecture that the building seeks its alignment. The play of shadow and reflection where the ceramic fins weave into the lower level glazing should be particularly rich, giving the building an ephemeral quality that resonates with its verdant setting.

Nevertheless, the fact that the scheme contravenes the one sine qua non of building in Bath - all projects have to be in Bath stone - has proved a particular source of outrage to its opponents. The material homogeneity of Bath's architecture is undoubtedly one of the city's great glories, and should not be sacrificed lightly.

However, on this site if nowhere else, one can make a powerful case that the normal rules should be suspended. The experience of passing into Sydney Gardens via the Holburne stands to be a charmed "through the looking glass" moment, in which Parry's building will seem the gateway to a new world.

A rule that isn't set in stone Visual Arts Arts Telegraph

Books: The New Yorker - Technology, Where Old meets New ....

2007-05-12T17:17:00.000Z

I’m writing in the kitchen, surrounded by technology. There is a cordless phone, a microwave oven, and a high-end refrigerator, and I’m working on a laptop. Nearby is a gas range, a French cast-iron enamelled casserole, and a ceramic teapot. Drawers to my left hold cutlery—some modern Chinese-made stainless steel, some Georgian sterling silver. In front of me is a wooden bookstand, made for me by a talented friend and festooned with Post-it reminders of things to do (a method I prefer to my digital calendar). I’m sitting on a semi-antique wooden chair, though when my back is hurting I tend to switch to a new, expensive ergonomic contraption.
Perhaps you think I should have said that I’m surrounded by things, only some of which really count as technology. It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are.

The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.
The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being.

In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology.

The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives.

Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

Consider the Second World War. When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany’s V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky.” Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the things that capture the imagination, and yet Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project “economically and militarily irrational.” One historian wrote that “more people died producing it than died from being hit by it.” Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, “the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF.” Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, “it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.”

So what forms of technology really pulled their weight in the war? Horse-powered transport, for one. Long past the age of steam—and well into the age of automobiles and aviation—the power of horseflesh remained critical. In the Italian campaign alone, the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division used more than ten thousand horses and mules, and the great tank general George S. Patton wished he’d had many more: In almost any conceivable theater of operations, situations arise where the presence of horse cavalry, in a ratio of a division to an army, will be of vital moment. . . . Had we possessed an American cavalry division with pack artillery in Tunisia and in Sicily, not a German would have escaped, because horse cavalry possesses the additional gear ratio which permits it to attain sufficient speed through mountainous country to get behind and hold the enemy until the more powerful infantry and tanks can come up and destroy him.
The Germans were better supplied: at the beginning of 1945, the Wehrmacht had 1.2 million horses in its ranks, and, altogether, the Germans lost some 1.5 million horses during the war.

Even today, horses aren’t quite history. In Afghanistan, the American Special Forces have had to rediscover how to use them. “Horses are actually an ideal way to get around there,” one correspondent embedded with the Green Berets has said. “No manual has ever been written on how to coordinate horse attacks with B-52s, so the Green Berets had to do OJT”—on-the-job training. “Early on, there was a cavalry charge with about three hundred horses where they had cut it so fine that as soon as the bombs hit the ridge the horses were riding through the gray smoke; it was quite an impressive sight.”

What Else Is New?: Books: The New Yorker

Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One | Tv And Radio | Arts | Telegraph

2007-05-06T13:36:00.000Z

Talking of Great British comedians ...

--

Peter Kay is excited. He has watched the first four episodes of Roary the Racing Car, his sunny new preschool animation series, with a group of small children and is very hopeful that the show will have genuine staying power. “I love the idea that it may have longevity. When those children were so clearly loving the show, I started getting all emotional, thinking that their children could be watching it in thirty years’ time.”

Roary the Racing Car drove up at exactly the right time for Kay. “I’d always wanted to do a children’s series. I love the idea that if something is a success, your voice is preserved for decades.

“Think of Arthur Lowe doing Mr Men or Michael Hordren doing Paddington Bear or Bernard Cribbins doing The Wombles or Neil Morrissey doing Bob the Builder or Ringo Starr doing Thomas the Tank Engine. Those performances are all classics and have already lasted for several decades.

“Children don’t mind when something was made – they don’t discriminate in that way. I tape very early episodes of Rainbow and Trumpton for my son and watch them with him. He loves them. Trumpton was made in 1967, but he still watches it like it’s brand new. Children love the innocence of those fables, and it’s great to see the excitement and wonder in a child’s eyes as he listens to Brian Cant’s voice. I was exactly the same when I was his age in 1977. If something really works, it can last forever.”

To talk to, Peter Kay is engaging, effervescent and entertaining. It’s qualities such as these that have helped make him the most popular comedian at work in Britain today. His last live tour, Mum Wants a Bungalow, was seen by more than half a million people. His book, The Sound of Laughter, has shifted a million copies, making it the biggest-selling British autobiography ever. He’s also had two No1 singles for Comic Relief: (Is This the Way to) Amarillo and (I am Gonna Be) 500 Miles.

The 33-year-old, who is currently starring in The Producers at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, voices the character of Big Chris in the series, while racing legend Sir Stirling Moss narrates. Kay says he has been bowled over by the standard of the series, which is produced by Chapman Entertainment, the producers of Fifi and the Flowertots, and animated by Cosgrove Hall Films, responsible for Danger Mouse and Chorlton and the Wheelies.

Roary the Racing Car, which will be launched on Five on Monday and Nick Jr in June, was originated almost a decade ago by David Jenkins, who spent four years working in senior management at Brand Hatch and Goodwood Race Circuits. He had the idea of making the series whilst watching the Grand Prix on TV with his son, Tom, who at the time was 18 months old.

Set among the big personalities and highly-tuned egos at the Silver Hatch race track, the programme centres on Roary, a novice, bright-red, single-seater racing car whose enthusiasm and curiosity often lead him into trouble. Underneath his bonnet, however, beats a heart of chrome.

Kay almost whistles in admiration at the care with which Roary the Racing Car has been assembled. “Watching the series, I’ve been blown away. They’ve combined CGI with stop-animation and it’s so well done, you can’t see the join. The attention to detail is extraordinary. For the last four years, people have been working on this round the clock, producing just a few seconds of footage a day. The animators work through the night in a converted mill, playing Canadian thrash metal. They’re really intense as they move these figures around.

“But all that effort is absolutely worth it. Chapman Entertainment and Cosgrove Hall have a great track record in animation. Their costume department is amazing. You can see the tiny ironing-board Postman Pat uses to iron his shirt. It’s like The Borrowers!”

Kay plays the chief mechanic and father figure to all the cars. “It’s basically me,” he chuckles. “I’ve done a lot of ad libbing because that makes the character more three-dimensional. Ad libbing is sometimes seen as forbidden fruit in animation, but the producers are delighted because it brings a freshness to the series and gives them more to play with.”

The comedian, who has written and starred in such acclaimed, multi-award-winning C4 sitcoms as Phoenix Nights, Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and That Peter Kay Thing, says he is motivated by an almost childlike desire to bring pleasure. “If you can be involved with something like Roary the Racing Car, it’s just bliss,” he enthuses. “It may sound like a cliché, but you’re bringing happiness to people when you do a project like that. That innocence of Trumpton from 1967 – maybe that’s something I’ve taken from my own childhood into my work.”

That urge to spread fun has characterised Kay’s entire career. His humour has always traded in warmth rather than cynicism. “No one gets slagged off in my comedy,” reflects the comic, who was born and bred in Bolton. “It’s not the comedy of hate. I hope it’s a breath of fresh air for audiences.”

Kay thinks that his gentler comic style has come back into fashion. “Comedy has swung away from those panel games where the comedians are vicious about everybody,” he says.

“Audiences want comedy that has no venom. They want to have a laugh without it becoming twee. There are not many things that people can watch these days with both their children and their grandchildren, but maybe that’s what I offer. I’m not the sort of comedian who wants to make audiences think about politics. I’m not clever in that way. But maybe I’m clever in a different way because I can bring up things that make people think, ‘oh, we do that, too’. The best comedy – like The Royle Family – holds a mirror up to its audience.”

Unlike many of today’s comics, Kay keeps his comedy clean. “When I do stand-up, I never swear because if I did, my mum would batter me! That’s how I ended up with this style. Comics like Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks were estranged from their families and could talk about anything they liked., but I’ve got to think about my nan, my mum and my sister. My act is about my life, and my life is my family. I have to treat them with respect.”

Kay is not immediately planning to hit the road again. However, he says that he has not stopped collecting material. “I’ve continued writing down funny things that I hear from day to day – I must never lose them!

“You need to live life in order to build up a new act. All the best material comes from real life. Last week, for instance, I was trying to persuade my nan to get Sky Plus. I was telling her that if you want to go and make a cup of tea, you can pause the telly. She looked baffled: ‘But what about everyone else?’ ‘You’re not controlling TV throughout Britain,’ I explained. ‘You’re not going to prevent someone in Devon from watching the end of Midsomer Murders just because you’ve paused your Sky Plus!’”

Now Kay is considering an offer from his publisher to write another book. For the time being, he still seems overwhelmed by the success of his first one. “When you’re told something like you’ve written the best-selling autobiography ever in this country, how can you possibly, possibly comprehend it? The British way is not to gloat. You don’t whoop or jump off lamp posts. You just say, ‘Oh, OK. Right then, what shall we have for lunch?’”

'Roary the Racing Car' launches on Five’s Milkshake! on Monday 7 May at 7.15am, airing every weekday, and on Nick Jr from Saturday 2 June at 4.00pm, airing every weekend. Nick Jr Video will premiere the series online from Monday 21 May, when episodes will be available on www.nickjr.co.uk

Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One Tv And Radio Arts Telegraph

A Welcome Return to The Peep Show

2007-05-06T12:17:00.000Z

"Christ, when I said 'Take your time', I didn't mean take your time!"

Combine an innovative, detached approach to portraying life, our inner thoughts about others, and our angsts, along with facing the challenges to the ego presented by love, lust, ambition, neuroses and office politics ... when 'The Peep Show' first appeared on our screens a couple of years ago it was something of a slow-burner, taking a while to get people to understand the simple fact that it was fundamentally very funny and also very different to anything else we had seen before with regards to comedy on TV.

The British are rightly very proud of their ability to produce excellent comedy - from the surreal legacy left to us by 'Monty Python' - which spwaned a host of imitators, some more successful than others - to the more conservative and pragmatic yet still highly amusing genres typified by 'The Office' - this in partular has translated incredibly successfully to the American audience.

What? I am saying 'The Office' is nothing more than pragmatic? Well, yes - I must admit to being somewhat puzzled why Ricky Gervais has been so lauded. It's good, solid comedy, for sure - but nowhere as near as innovative as, for example, 'The Peep Show'.

OK, 'The Peep Show' may be somwhat more uncomfortable viewing for more genteel audiences; in its darker moments it's more akin to 'The League of Gentlemen' whilst 'The Office' has always struck me as being more inspired by 'Are you Being Served?' ... that's not a criticism, just an observation - Benny Hill meets Basil Fawlty?

Anyway, have a look for yourself at 'The Peep Show'- you can watch past episodes via C4s excellent online 40D TV service on your PC, but as indicated earlier, please note that some of the content is a little risque; a bit like 'Are you Being Served?' ...

Peep Show

This Is (Was) England ...

2007-04-28T14:06:00.000Z

This Is England, is the story of a summertime school holiday, those long weeks between terms where life changing events can take place.It’s 1983 and school is out. 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is an isolated lad growing up in a grim coastal town, whose father has died fighting in the Falklands war. Over the course of the summer holiday he finds fresh male role models when those in the local skinhead scene take him in. With his new friends Shaun discovers a world of parties, first love and the joys of Dr Martin boots. Here he meets Combo (Stephen Graham), an older, racist skinhead who has recently got out of prison. As Combo’s gang harass the local ethnic minorities, the course is set for a rite of passage that will hurl Shaun from innocence to experience.

shanemeadows.co.uk

The Virginia Tech Shootings: The New Yorker

2007-04-28T12:09:00.000Z

A very disturbing and challenging subject, discussed in a very sensitive, poignant and intelligent manner, as one would expect of The New Yorker.

I can't even begin to ask the questions that this tragedy provokes.

But, America, please review your gun laws - and for the rest of us, please let's urgently re-assess just what the potential impact is of ever-increasing levels of violence in the media, and its portrayal as 'entertainment'.

I remember studying - in much more innocent times - the cathartic nature of violence in the media (and this was long before CGI-gore and psychotic shoot-'em up games) - even back then I very much doubted there were any 'cathartic' justifications for such mindless violence being presented as 'entertainment' - some 30yrs on from those teenage musings, tens of teenagers muse no more.

R.I.P.

--

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”

If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it’s now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.

So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.

Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don’t get lung cancer, while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer is not to smoke.)

It’s true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we can’t guarantee that someone won’t shoot people with a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can’t reduce the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho’s weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it’s not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.)

Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we’ll live with the risk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why. ♦

Shootings: Comment: The New Yorker

Arctic Monkeys - welcome back, lads ...

2007-04-22T12:15:00.000Z

A painful air of discomfort has surrounded Arctic Monkeys in the 18 months since they made it big. The earliest sign of their unease under public scrutiny arrived when their first official single, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, went to number one, and they duly called their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.

Since then, interviews have been rare and stony-faced. Their bassist lost the plot, and was substituted. Headlining Reading Festival, singer Alex Turner appeared poleaxed by the sheer magnitude of the crowd.

Events beyond their control seemed to have robbed the four Sheffield lads, barely in their twenties, of the innocent joys of rocking out.

It's something of a miracle, then, that this second album has arrived so quickly. Even less foreseeably, Favourite Worst Nightmare is totally the equal of its predecessor, full of exhilarating twisty-turny structures, shout-along choruses, dashes of sublime melody and observational lyrics which unswervingly nail their subject.

Brianstorm, the opener, surfs in on a militantly tough riff, as Turner offers a withering portrait of an American schmoozer the band met in Japan. "We can't keep our eyes off your T-shirt and ties combination," he notes, drily.

Arctic Monkeys, in their anoraks and straight-leg jeans, are fiercely anti-trendy. So it's surprising that they recorded this in fashionable East London.

Perhaps Turner pitched himself into the midst of everything he despises to keep his lyrical fire burning. On Balaclava, he acerbically satirises the callous womanisers who bar-hop around Shoreditch, leaving conquests "with salty cheeks".

That caustic wit is often levelled at male malignancy. On The Bad Thing, a confused woman justifies her fiancé's beatings. Mercifully, the music recalls the Smiths at their jaunty best - indeed, throughout the album, there's melodic light to offset the narrative shade.

Only Ones Who Know is just beautiful, a ballad of desperate dreams and echoing twangs worthy of the young Elvis Costello.

At the last, on 505, we find the singer emotionally adrift on the road, his longing for home set to a simmering organ which builds to a furious guitar crescendo - a magnificent end to a brilliantly paced record.

Favourite Worst Nightmare cannot fail to sustain Arctic Monkeys' tenure at the top. Following second-album triumphs by Franz Ferdinand and Razorlight, could it be that a new strain of post-Britpop bands has emerged, equipped to survive the pressures of fame? Andrew Perry

Pop CDs of the week Cd Reviews Music Arts Telegraph

Sex and the internet | Devices and desires | Economist.com

2007-04-21T12:33:00.000Z

WHEN the internet took off in the 1990s, it was demonised as a steaming cauldron of porn. It has certainly made pornography more widely and easily available than ever before. The online porn industry is difficult to measure, but was valued at $1 billion in 2002 by America's National Research Council. Google, which publishes its “zeitgeist” list of top search queries, redacts sex-related terms from the rankings for fear of causing offence. But the popularity of pornography is clear from figures compiled by companies that track user “clickstreams”. Last year about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature, according to Hitwise, a market-research firm. For comparison, search engines account for about 7% of site visits.

Yet the Hitwise data suggest that sex sites are now being dethroned. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

Does this mean the internet has matured as a medium? After all, pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. “Sex is a virus that infects new technology first,” as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn. Although this may soon be true for the web, however, it is not true for the internet as a whole. Much pornographic content may simply have shifted from the web to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, for example.

Or consider Second Life, the booming virtual world. It is regularly feted as a flourishing platform for virtual commerce, yet a large portion of its economic activity relates to sex. Exactly how much is unknown, but an employee of Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, once ventured that 30% of transactions related to sex or gambling. Edward Castronova of Indiana University estimates that sex is “a substantial portion, perhaps even the majority” of economic transactions in Second Life. (Users must first buy genitalia for their avatars, who otherwise resemble Barbie and Ken dolls when unclothed.)

The growing popularity of social-networking sites is not entirely unrelated to sex, either. Such sites are often used to find and attract potential mates. Porn sites may have reached a climax, but sex remains as potent online as ever.

Sex and the internet Devices and desires Economist.com

Greetings from the White Stripes

2007-04-15T14:40:00.000Z

So, The White Stripes are back and as bohemian-enigmatic-eccentric (and no doubt as talented) as ever, with a new album entitled 'Icky Thump' ... if you are familiar with the folklore of Northern English accents then this may be familiar (albeit slightly bastardised) expression to you; rarely used in parlance nowadays but parodied in a gentle, affectionate way by many as representing being 'Northern' - and especially Yorkshire, where we live - dialect.

So far, so good and appropriately quirky for Jack and Meg - but, quite why Jack and Meg are pictured in quintessential Cockney Pearly King and Queen style outfits on the album cover is quite another matter. Still, makes a nice change from the uber-cool-art-house-dandy-look, Jack! Or maybe they are just trying to appease the soft, Southern fans in their homage to the much superior Northern fan-base? (Joke).

No doubt it will be as unique a sound as ever. Whilst we have a few weeks to wait yet for its release, at least the recently released new album from The Kings of Leon will help us to psyche up for more musical wizadry from Jack and Meg.

We're going to see The Kings of Leon this week, so listening to the excellent 'Because of the Times' a great deal since its recent release, so we know the new tracks as well as the older stuff.

All of this excellent new music is in danger of somewhat stealing the thunder from the much-anticipated new Arctic Monkeys album, 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' ... again of course a product of Yorkshire (and my beloved Sheffield) ... but, somehow, I think they'll cope. It's a great time for innovative, non-conformist pop music at the moment.

PS, Jack - don't forget we all need a follow-up album from The Raconteurs, please.

Greetings from the White Stripes

Tech.view | Apple pipped | Economist.com

2007-04-15T14:20:00.000Z

THE mobile-phone industry’s recent jamboree in Florida was a brutal reminder of how fast innovations come and go these days. A bare three months ago we were drooling over Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, with its ingenious touch screen that responds to pinches, pokes and other pawings. But though not available until June, the $500 iPhone is as mouth-watering today as yesterday’s cold pizza. The phone that stole the show at CTIA Wireless 2007 was the “Ocean” from Helio, a youth-oriented newcomer to the cellular business.

In many ways Helio has out-Appled Apple. The start-up—launched less than a year ago as a joint venture between SK Telecom of South Korea and Earthlink, an American internet-service provider—caters to young trendsetters who appreciate ease of use and cutting-edge design.

Whereas the iPhone encapsulated a ho-hum smart phone in an exquisite package, the $295 Helio Ocean has been winning plaudits for its ingenious user interface that neatly integrates all the disparate functions of a modern multi-media mobile, such as dialling phone calls, texting messages, listening to music, taking pictures, recording videos, playing games and surfing the web.

To make a call, the Helio Ocean’s screen slides vertically to reveal a phone keypad. To type an e-mail, do some texting or send an instant message, turning the device horizontally and sliding the screen upwards reveals a full keyboard. With a separate microprocessor to run the media player, the Helio Ocean gets 15 hours of playing time from a single charge. Little wonder it was hailed as the rock star of the industry’s show.

But it is the Helio Ocean’s EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimised) wireless technology that renders Apple’s iPhone an also-ran. Mobile experts have been mystified by Apple’s decision to use Cingular’s EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) network when far better wireless communications methods abound. EDGE is a marginally enhanced version of the old GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular technology introduced in Europe in the early 1990s. Cingular’s version of it provides data speeds of between 75 kilobits per second (kbps) and 135 kbps—not that much better than a dial-up internet connection, and often much worse.

By contrast, the EV-DO networks used by Helio (as well as Verizon and Sprint in America and KDDI in Japan) offer 450 kbps to 800 kbps, rates similar to those of DSL broadband connections. EDGE’s slower data speeds mean that iPhone users must rely on Wi-Fi to do anything more than make phone calls or send the odd e-mail: the iPhone has a Wi-Fi radio embedded in its circuitry so users can access internet “hotspots” using the popular 802.11 form of wireless broadband.

Wi-Fi may be handy for networking wirelessly around the home or in hotel lobbies, coffee shops or airports. But it is hardly the most efficient way to download videos or play multi-user games—tricks that multi-media mobile phones are supposed to perform flawlessly.

Mobile-phone companies have their own ideas about how to meet these new demands. Most are working feverishly on upgrades for their existing 3G (third-generation) networks. Qualcomm, the company behind the CDMA family of cellular technologies, has shown in trials that its EV-DO enhancements can deliver data rates of over three megabits per second (mbps). Cingular and other GSM-based networks are pushing a rival technology called High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) in a bid to close the performance gap. In real-world trials HSDPA has clocked speeds of up to 1 mbps.

But even EV-DO, let alone the slower HSDPA, might prove too little too late. The mobile-phone companies are about to be overwhelmed by a tsunami called WiMAX, a souped-up successor of Wi-Fi with a range of 30 miles or more instead of 100 yards or less.

Whereas 3G cellular networks might get 3 mbps and Wi-Fi around 30 mbps, mobile WiMAX is a 4G technology promising speeds of up to 100 mbps. Comparable 4G networks from the cellular industry, such as the proposed Ultra Mobile Broadband from the CDMA camp or the Long-Term Evolution effort among GSM’s descendants, are still in the laboratory. And that’s where they might well remain.

WiMAX (or 802.16, its technical name) was conceived as a way to deliver broadband to remote areas beyond the reach of DSL or cable TV. The mobile version of this form of wireless networking was supposed to be a more advanced sibling called 802.20. But with Intel, Sprint and the European Union throwing their weight behind the interim 802.16 mobile solution, the WiMAX bandwagon has become unstoppable.

In addition to being able to transfer at least twice the amount of data per second achieved by the best technologies of the cellular industry, mobile WiMAX is relatively cheap. During the spectrum auctions of the heady dotcom era, cell-phone companies scrambled to outbid one another for 3G frequency allocations, paying typically $5 per megahertz for every member of the population covered. In today’s more chastened times, mobile WiMAX licences can be had for less than one cent per megahertz per person—a whopping 500 times less.

This has tipped the tables in mobile WiMAX’s favour. And with it, the writing on the wall is looming ever larger for most of the 3G phone operators. Why Apple should have hitched its wagon to so fading a star shows how quickly even the most talented of companies can be blinded by today’s blistering pace of wireless innovation.

Tech.view Apple pipped Economist.com

Sleaze City: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

2007-04-15T14:08:00.000Z

With the three-hour-and-eleven-minute “Grindhouse,” the writer-directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have put together an entire evening’s entertainment devoted to the violent schlock movies and decrepit theatres that they loved as kids and never stopped loving. “Grindhouse” is a single film with no intermission, but it includes two new features and such divertissements as trailers for ridiculous imaginary pictures (“Werewolf Women of the S.S.”), ads for revolting food at local restaurants, and artifacts of down-at-the-heels moviegoing from decades ago. At climactic moments in the two features—say, just as the hero and the heroine are about to get it on—the scene sometimes comes to an abrupt halt, and the words “Missing reel” flash on the screen. Now and then, the movie develops hiccups, as if frames had been chopped out—a tribute to needy projectionists of old who kept the images they liked best. And deep scratches, as lovingly inscribed as the speckled antiquing on a blanket chest, run through long stretches of film. The general intent here is to louse up the surface of the movie as much as possible and make that degraded surface, in a kind of high-tech punk conceit, a central part of the experience. Tarantino and Rodriguez are trying to re-create their memories of moviegoing as a blissfully sullied urban folk ritual in which sprawling teens squandered their time in seedy picture palaces.

Why would such technically sophisticated filmmakers, who have the power to do whatever they want, make a movie like this? Because it amuses them, and because the movie just might irritate the squares—the schoolteacherish elements in the audience who still believe that movies should be nice. And also, perhaps, to free themselves. Embracing trash is a way of not giving a damn about feelings or art or anything else except craft. Down there on the sticky floor of the theatre, you can be as crazily violent or as sleazily erotic as you want. What surprises me, I suppose, is not the impulse itself—who hasn’t, in a foul mood, felt something like it?—but the widespread notion in the press that Tarantino and Rodriguez have become moviemaking radicals. They haven’t: genteel, middlebrow culture lost its sway years ago, and plenty of other filmmakers are doing hyper-violence and sleaze. Tarantino and Rodriguez aren’t going against the flow; they’re trying to get ahead of the flow. What they’d like, of course, is to bring to their version of trash that extra touch of madness which turns exploitation into wit.

In the first of the two features, “Planet Terror,” Rodriguez, the co-director of “Sin City,” unleashes a plague on a small town in Texas. People who are infected become zombies that prey on the living. Or something like that. In any case, this dawn-of-the-dead fantasia is gleefully disgusting: flesh melts, bodies explode like packages of liquid squeezed too hard, testicles roll around on the ground like spilled Brussels sprouts. The slaughterhouse outrages, combined with a complete absence of meaning, are what’s supposed to be cool about “Planet Terror,” and the audience (largely young men) whoops and hollers on cue. I closed my eyes here and there, and then opened them again, looking for signs of irony. I found a few.

Rodriguez did the cinematography himself, and the camera occasionally loses interest in what’s going on, pausing to leer at an actress’s cleavage. Continuity is intentionally spotty, focus intermittent. Rose McGowan, as the heroine, Cherry, a retired pole-dancer, seems as entranced by her own sexual splendor as a ruby-lipped tomato on the cover of a Mickey Spillane novel. (Yes, I know, wrong period—but that’s what she looks like.) When Cherry loses a leg to the ghouls, her old lover (Freddy Rodriguez, who’s a pocket-size dynamo) outfits her with a machine gun for a stump; she raises it like a dog taking a pee and blows away anyone within fifty yards. Some of this flaming luridness is exciting, but Rodriguez quickly becomes desperate.

The movie is as repetitive as hell and, despite his continual attempts to raise the ante, quite boring. At a certain point, of course, a loving re-creation of something tawdry isn’t all that different from the original. Even a postmodernist bloodbath is wet, sticky, and red.

Tarantino’s feature, “Death Proof,” though it’s based on seventies car-chase movies like “White Line Fever,” isn’t as flagrantly imitative as “Planet Terror”; nor are its images as rigorously defaced. The movie begins with a chummy girl posse (Sydney Poitier, Jordan Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito) riding around Austin in a red Honda Civic hatchback, and then settling into a comfortable bar for the night. The talk is intimate, detailed, funny. Tarantino demonstrates his usual insistence on sociability: everyone gets a chance to elaborately explain herself, curse up a storm, and wrangle with friends. Then Kurt Russell enters the bar; he’s the legendary Stuntman Mike, a veteran stunt-car driver, and, as he sweet-talks Ferlito in his soft voice, his weathered ease is enormously charming. Something like normality appears to be taking over the screen.

But Mike, it turns out, has a mysterious grudge against young women. His stunt car has been reinforced against crashes—made deathproof—and he rams into the three women on the highway in the dark. Homicide by vehicular assault is a gooney teen fantasy, and Tarantino goes all the way with the extreme violence of it, showing us the women’s bodies being pulled apart over and over.

Tarantino obviously likes his characters a great deal, but he’s caught in the contradictions of making an hommage à schlock: he has to kill the women in order to set up the rest of the movie. It’s as if he couldn’t decide whether to be a humanist or a nihilist, so he opportunistically becomes both. Immediately, he brings on another group of chattering girls, two of whom (Zoë Bell and the fast-talking Tracie Thoms) are movie stuntwomen themselves. Just for fun, Bell straps herself to the hood of a roaring 1970 Dodge Challenger, with nothing more than two belts tied to the window posts. When Stuntman Mike shows up and starts banging his death car into the Dodge, the women refuse to give in, and a classic battle follows. As the cars try to force each other off the road, the struggle rages across backcountry Texas terrain, in (as far as we can tell) real space, at good speed, and without digital enhancement.

Nothing quite this exciting has been seen since Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film “Duel.”

Illustration: YUKO SHIMIZU

“Sleaze City” continues

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Sleaze City: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

Tarantino - Death Proof vs. Vanishing Point

2007-04-08T19:04:00.000Z

Table of Malcontents - Wired News: "In this clip from the half-hour chase scene in 1971 indie movie Vanishing Point, you can see the origins of Tarantino's obsession with the white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T, with a 440 cubic-inch V-8. This is the very same make and model that the car-crazy gearheads take for an almost fatal spin in Grindhouse. The characters in Grindhouse talk a lot about Vanishing Point, and their fantastic car chase is clearly a tip of the hat to the 70s film, but there's a huge difference in tone between the two movies. While Vanishing Point is slow-paced and its hero unperturbable, the Grindhouse film Death Proof is action-packed and full of crazed beatings, car crashes, and beheadings.

Plus, the hero of Vanishing Point checks to make sure the guy he ran off the road is unhurt before he drives off, while the women of Death Proof are on a killin' rampage. The difference between the two films is like the difference between a disco beat and a techno beat -- you can hear the former in the latter, but it's utterly transformed. Note: you can see the rest of this incredible car chase on YouTube (it's in 4 parts, plus a flaming finale)."

BBC SPORT | Football | Championship | Cardiff 1-2 Sheff Wed

2007-04-08T17:42:00.000Z

Who'd have thought it ... a few games away from the end of the season and we (Sheffield Wednesday) are just a few points away from a play-off position and the lure of the Premiership.

Deon Burton (above) celebrates his goal at Cardiff this weekend. One of the most holistic players you will see at our level. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_div_1/6513485.stm
Makes one wonder about motivation, desire and man-management; just a few months ago we were lamentable and right by the relegation zone - the prospect of a return to League One was rather unappetising to one and all - especially the chairman (the somewhat controversial Dave Allen) - so, he sacked yet another manager (the popular Paul Sturrock) and brought in a relative unknown from the lower leagues, Brian Laws - who had until that time been one of the longest-serving single-team managers in the country; albeit at the rather provincial Scunthorpe.

The fans - me amongst them - were generally very unhappy with the sacking of Sturrock; he was (is) a noble and personable man and his woes at the club were more related to injuries, a lack of funds for new players and an increasingly poor relationship with our somewhat obtuse (allegedly) chairman. So, Laws came in to a pretty unreceptive environment and after an initially positive start (mainly due to a feeling of guilt from our players, seeing that their under-performing had cost Sturrock his job) we then slipped into a dire run of defeats at the start of 2007. But, in recent weeks a new, cohesive and positive aura seems to be within the squad - aided by the signing of an excellent loan keeper, Ian Turner from Everton. The parallels between football and business often intrigue me - what is the difference between success and failure? Is it as simple as the personalities involved (and how they gel?) - this is an enormously influential aspect to success or failure, I believe - more and more so in fact, as I get older. Anyway, "Up the Owls!" (Our rallying cry).

http://www.swfc.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Home/0,,10304,00.html

ps, I am heartly sick and tired of this blogging tool - it's rubbish.

Lewis Hamilton - 3rd, 2nd .... next?

2007-04-08T17:33:00.000Z

Well, what a freshman season in F1 this young man is having: 3rd on his debut in Australia a couple of weeks ago and now today in Malaysia, he comes 2nd. OK, he's clearly in a pretty good car - the McLaren - but he's clearly made of 'the right stuff'.

So, as Button and Coulthard's respective stars wane, we Brits have at long last an inspirational role-model sportsman to take over the mantle of David Beckham - transcending F1, and possibly as globally marketable (maybe more so) as one T. Woods. Roll on Bahrain next week ... let's see you on top of that podium, Lewis.

Lewis Hamilton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dubya gets Animated ....

2007-04-08T14:20:00.000Z

I really wish I'd pursued my teenage dream of becoming a full-time cartoonist; with the animation tools now available, the ability to make an impact via cartoons/animation has never been more compelling.

For some reason the animation frame won't embed into my blog (I have several blogs, each uses a different tool, and I must say this is probably the worse).

So, in time-honoured tradtion, please follow the link:

http://www.economist.com/daily/kallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8857324

Nice one, KAL.

Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Startup Entrepreneur?

2007-03-31T10:57:00.000Z

If you’ve applied for a job before, you’ve probably fretted over how to answer questions like “are you inclined to rely more on improvisation than on careful planning?” or “do you like to create challenges for yourself when you take on a new project?”. Companies commonly use personality tests filled with questions like these to assess the fit of a potential employees with the company.

There’s a whole laundry list of these personality tests here. Some companies, like Google, have even developed their own.

All of these tests are sets of written questions meant to poke and prod at a candidates mind to get a real sense of their ability and personality. However, the meaning behind these questions is relatively transparent, motivating candidates to give the answers they think their employer wants to hear.

Startup Pairwise is taking a different approach to personality tests.

Instead of words, Pairwise will use images to test a candidates mentality using data gleaned from their LikeBetter picture game. LikeBetter is a flash based game that shows you a series of pairs of images uploaded by users. For each pair, you pick which image you prefer. Based on the choices you make, LikeBetter makes a guess about your personal traits, which you then confirm or correct. As more people use the system, LikeBetter discovers the strong correlations between the choices people make and the attributes they express.

Based on this data, Pairwise creates a quiz using some of the most highly discriminating pairs, chosen to have the strongest and most confident predictive power across the broadest spectrum of personality traits. They can then track a candidate’s behavior through the test and make an educated guess about their personality based on the correlations they made in LikeBetter. Pairwise does their best to make the test harder to read into by being a completely image based test and using non-obvious pairs (no GI Joe vs. Barbie).

Under the hood, LikeBetter is using an iterative application of Bayes rule called Naive Bayesian inference. The method uses a lot of dense statistics involving proposing hypotheses and dependent probabilities. If you really want to learn about it, check out the Wikipedia entry. On the other hand, the employment quiz is not making and testing hypotheses, but comparing the user’s behavior with the statistics they collected through LikeBetter and determining the the applicants tendency toward either extreme of an attribute (i.e cleanliness vs. messiness).

Pairwise’s first customer is Y Combinator, for whom they crafted this little Y Combinator founder quiz based on personality tests done on all their current founders. Y Combinator will be using the test in their application drive ending April 2nd. We’ve included the test for you to take below. Here’s how I fared.

Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Startup Entrepreneur?

New fiction ... Ian McEwan, Beach music - back to the top of his game?

2007-03-30T12:04:00.000Z

IAN McEWAN is back on form. Following “Saturday”, his enjoyable but overly safe previous novel, this master of fiction has written a poignant new book that in terms of its diminutive size—though not its emotional range—is reminiscent of his Man Booker-prize-winning “Amsterdam”.

It is July 1962. Edward and Florence, both 22 years old, educated yet innocent, have been married for just eight hours after a courtship bound by unspoken protocols. In their honeymoon suite overlooking Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast they are served a formal dinner of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft-boiled vegetables and white wine: “It would not have crossed Edward's mind to order a red.” Neither has any appetite. There is a starched, stilted feeling in the tepid evening air as, almost strangers, they stand, “strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence”.

They believe their marriage will bring them happiness and the freedom to realise the plans “heaped up before them in the misty future”. Yet, despite this joyful promise neither is able to suppress fully the anxieties about the moment when, after dinner, they must “reveal themselves fully to one another” on the narrow four-poster bed with pure white covers.

For Edward, who is suffering first-night nerves, this moment will be the resolution of a prospect that has mesmerised him for more than a year. But for Florence a “visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness” is overwhelming her. Here is a woman who knows that sex will never be the “summation of her joy” but the price she must pay for love—an emotion she sees as “a comforting broth...a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust”.

Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, “On Chesil Beach” becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed—by doing nothing.

New fiction Beach music Economist.com

The Onion - America's Finest News Source (ahem) - Now available via Online Video

2007-03-28T10:45:00.000Z

Where do you get your news? CNN, ABC, FOX, Comedy Central? As American maintain loyalty to these mainstream news outlets, there is a growing audience (19% online political news consumers) of younger audience that seek their news from humor sites like The Daily Show and The Onion.

Not missing a step, The Onion is responding to its surge in print and online readers and advertisers by committing major investment into its soon to be launched Onion News Networka 24-hour fake news net marketing itself as, "faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing."

Nicely executed ad-supported video and site will lean heavily on the popularity of its iTunes podcasts and the power of viral. Unlike it's Viacom backed, Comedy Central, ONN will encourage video embedding and fan distribution on YouTube, My Space and others like Helio Mobile, iTunes or TiVo. More news to come - appropriately timed to launch - April 1!

Immigration: The Human Cost

Immigration: The Human Cost The Onion - America's Finest News Source

The new Wembley stadium - hosts its first real football match, at last ...

2007-03-24T14:26:00.000Z

At last, the new Wembley is hosting a real football match*, so one can safely (famous last words?!) assume that the FA Cup final will be hosted at the new Wembley in just a few weeks time?

I have happy memories of the Cardiff Millennium stadium (ie, Sheffield Wednesday securing promotion to the Championship in the play-off final) which was as an excellent substitute national stadium, but I suppose for all the delays and outrageous amount of money it has cost, the new Wembley looks set to be a stadium worthy of our national game. Personally, I find its design somewhat anonymous and rather too conservative. Aesthetically, the Cardiff Millennium is more inspiring.

Roll on the FA Cup final, and hopefully Manchester United will win it - inevitably it will be a big money clash between Man U and Chelsea, and not many neutral fans want to see the $$$$ over-indulged 'Chelski' win - the prospect of seeing Ronaldo's sublime talents at the new Wembley is certainly an appealing one. Don't miss it.

*ps, the England vs Italy under-21's match has just finished - a rather exciting 3-3 draw. Italy's Pazzini scoring a hat-trick; there's one for the new stadium's record-books. Match that, Man Utd, Chelsea or England seniors, eh?

Still, let's beat Israel tonight first .....

BBC SPORT Football Wembley pictures

The Fall, The Picturedome and Holmfirth ....

2007-03-23T11:23:00.000Z

Well, my ears are still ringing today after seeing The Fall at the Picturedome in Holmfirth last night; an enigmatic venue for a very enigmatic band.

It's the fourth time I have seen The Fall (twice in New York and now twice in the UK) and each time it is fascinating, challenging and rewarding - sure, their music is an assault on the senses - if you don't know them they do not produce happygolucky-singalongs, that's for sure - but they are a very skilled, powerful and cohesive band and produce incredibly visceral sounds.

It's very rewarding to see a concert where you're not waiting for the next singalong tune with an easily accessible chorus, etc - The Fall makes you think about music, what it means to you and what it does to your senses. For that alone I shall continue to go and see The Fall for many more years, I hope.

And as for the venue, the Picturedome at Holmfirth - well, it's had a turbulent time recently, falling into a bit of a state of disrepair along with a ubiquitous pub chain trying to take control of it - thankfully that has fallen-through and the Picturedome remains independent and will stay as a unique venue for concerts such as this.

It's awash with lovely architectural details and in a lovely setting; the stage is never more than a few feet away, there's a bar, cinema-style seats (if you need to sit down as a result of excessive bopping and/or drinking) and just outside there's the river/weir - all in the tranquil setting of sleepy Holmfirth (where much of 'Last of the Summer Wine' was filmed, if you're familiar with that show).

The Fall

Wired News: Apple of Our Eye: Macs Save Money

2007-03-21T14:17:00.000Z

Well, well ... who'd have anticipated this?

--

There's been a distinct sea change in the way people think about Apple in the last few weeks.
Recently, people have been saying the strangest things about Apple and the Mac. Everything is topsy-turvy. Pundits aren't trotting out the old conventional wisdoms any more. They're saying odd stuff, like Macs are good for business; Macs can save money; and that Apple's stock -- at $90 a share -- is a bargain.

In fact, there seems to be a widespread re-evaluation of Apple going on, a cultural shift that's changing the way people think about the company. It's been building for a while but it has reached a tipping point in the last couple of months.

Here's what people are saying now:

Macs will save you money

Macs have always been derided as more expensive than PCs, but now Wilkes University in Pennsylvania is dumping its Windows machines for Macs -- to save money! A few years ago, universities like Dartmouth College, one of the biggest Mac-centric colleges, couldn't dump their Macs fast enough.

Macs are good for business

Macs in the workplace used to be just for the artsy types in the design department. But now they're appropriate for regular desk jockeys of every stripe. In Computerworld, consultant Seth Weintraub recommends Macs for the enterprise because they're easy to learn, easy to administer and not as prone to viruses and other nasties. Weintraub says IT managers who bought Macs for home use are increasingly looking to deploy them at work.

Less is more

At one time, loading on more features was the mantra. When the iPod came out, critics said it didn't match rival devices, which boasted FM radios and bigger hard drives. But users wanted fewer features, and better ease of use. "That's why the iPod succeeded where its predecessor products bombed," writes Chris Taylor, Business 2.0's senior editor, in a recent piece titled "The Trouble With Gee-Whiz Gadgets."

Closed is good

Apple's traditional closed system -- proprietary hardware, software and online services -- is now a selling point. A couple of years ago, many confidently predicted Apple would fail if it didn't open up the iPod/iTunes system to rivals, who would "hybridize" the platform with interoperable hardware and software from multiple companies. "It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 (percent) to 5 percent of the player market,'' Rob Glaser, CEO of Apple rival RealNetworks, told The New York Times in 2003. "The history of the world is that hybridization yields better results."

But consumers seem to want the opposite -- products and services from one company that are guaranteed to work well together.

Look at Microsoft's attempt to copy the iPod's top-to-bottom integration with the Zune. And customers are embracing that "closed" system. "I just switched from a Dell to an Apple laptop and love the Mac lifestyle," student Priya Sanghvi told USA Today.

Story continued on Page 2 »

Wired News: Apple of Our Eye: Macs Save Money

Squeeze - they're back ....!

2007-03-19T10:31:00.000Z

Much as I love new music and am of the belief one should not overtly spend too much time wallowing in past favourite music (it's too comfortable, too easy), it's great to see that Squeeze are back - a very significant band, with cleverly crafted classic pop song ballads; I put them on a par with The Kinks.

The Enlightened Bracketologist reveals the best ad slogan of all time, the greatest film death, and more. - By Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir - Slate Magazine

2007-03-13T18:01:00.000Z

What is enlightenment?

Better question: What is Bracketology?

Let's bring it down to a real-world level. Has this ever happened to you? Someone asks, "What's your favorite movie?" Not a deep question, but a probing one, something that comes up occasionally among reasonably curious folk—or men and women on their second date. Your favorite movie is a classic single-question personality profile that "reveals" you. Your answer signals your worldliness and sophistication, your sense of humor, and, most particularly, your individuality.

If you're like most people, you have a default response that is The Godfather, The Godfather II, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, or The Wizard of Oz. But have you ever methodically listed all the movies that have charmed you or that you've seen more than a dozen times—and pitted them against each other in an intellectual knockout tournament to determine, once and for all, your definitive personal champion? If you haven't, how can you say you truly know yourself? If you haven't systematically eliminated all the other worthy contenders for favorite movie, how can you blithely pick, say, My Cousin Vinny and hope to achieve enlightenment?

Bracketology—the practice of parsing people, places, and things into discrete one-on-one matchups to determine which of the two is superior or preferable—works because it is simple. It is a system that helps us make clearer and cleaner decisions about what is good, better, best in our world. What could be simpler than breaking down a choice into either/or, black or white, this one or that one?

The Enlightened Bracketologist reveals the best ad slogan of all time, the greatest film death, and more. - By Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir - Slate Magazine

: : : : : : : THE CAUTESE NATIONÁL POSTAL DISSERVICE : : : : : : :

2007-03-10T14:03:00.000Z

"Operation Magic Kingdom" - powerful, emotive artwork appearing on London's streets ... what does it make you think?

: : : : : : : THE CAUTESE NATIONÁL POSTAL DISSERVICE : : : : : : :

The New Yorker

2007-03-08T20:01:00.000Z

At last, the splendid New Yorker magazine has had a web make-over - long overdue.

It now has - shock! - animated cartoons (see above - you will need to go to their web site to play the video, though).

Still, The New Yorker is more about substance than style, really, anyway - and long may it continue ...

The New Yorker

Wired 15.03: Bright Stuff

2007-03-06T13:37:00.000Z

With three buildings under construction this year, Thomas Heatherwick is one of the UK’s most closely watched young architects. Just don’t call him an architect — he’s also responsible for a 55-ton staircase of undulating steel in New York City, a hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats, and the tallest sculpture in England.

The eclectic assortment of projects makes it impossible to pin a label on Heatherwick: The Tate Modern lists him with other artists, but the UK Design Council sees him as an engineer. “He often achieves his projects by defying gravity, and there’s an enormous amount of engineering wizardry involved,” says David Kester, chief executive of the council, which recently awarded Heatherwick the coveted Prince Philip Prize. Flummoxed, the BBC referred to him simply as “the new Leonardo da Vinci” in a recent documentary. No matter what the title — and Heatherwick, for the record, prefers designer — he has taken aim at the intersection of art, engineering, design, and architecture.

When he was 6, Heatherwick would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor. He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension — and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato. “I was excited about thinking up things that didn’t exist,” he says. “But as I got older, I found that inventors were considered mad.

They were recluses — weird, disheveled hermits.” To avoid such a fate, Heatherwick studied 3-D design at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art. But school wasn’t a perfect fit: “You get all these boxes to choose from, and none of them are right. I tried to make my own line through the middle.”

Today, Heatherwick, 37, works out of a London studio on a quiet residential street just around the corner from the urban crush of King’s Cross station. Scattered around the two-story space are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls. “I think of this studio as one big research project,” he says. The results of this research are on display across the UK and in New York, and in the next year or so, he’ll complete a curvaceous Buddhist temple in Japan and revamp a sprawling sports and recreational facility in Hong Kong.

Heatherwick tests his most outrageous ideas in a workshop crammed with racks of tools and equipment on the ground floor of his studio. As a project takes off, he often moves it offsite, sometimes to warehouses and factories, sometimes to the public space where the work will eventually be installed. On a cold winter morning, he showed me a photo of one such installation, a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College. In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.

One recent Heatherwick project is a long, narrow building of rippling corroded steel that appears to have washed up on the pebbled shore of Littlehampton, England, like some storm-twisted tanker. Plunked on a plateau between the community’s beach and its ivory Georgian town houses, the structure is actually a restaurant — the East Beach Café — that serves greasy comfort food in a dining room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and dishes up Mr. Whippy soft-serve ice cream at a take-out bar. Looking more like the hull of a ship than a conventional building, the interior has the feel of an underwater cave. “It’s a test piece,” Heatherwick says. “Every project is an experiment.”

Wired 15.03: Bright Stuff

FastCompany.com - Video, Audio and Podcasts

2007-03-06T13:13:00.000Z

FastCompany.com - Video, Audio and Podcasts

The eight pillars of enjoyment as applied to workflow - Lifehacker

2007-03-05T08:35:00.000Z

We all experience happiness through various methods, but how about work? What can you do to make that part of your life more pleasurable? Try asking yourself questions based on the eight pillars of enjoyment.

Basically, these are premises based on the optimum productivity workflow: you enjoy the task set before you, you are focused, you have clear goals, etc. The point of this is that we need to try to cut the work that does not result in a good flow (if possible), and jump headlong into the work that does. Yep, it sounds a bit Zen, but if it works, why not? How about you - do you have tried and true methods that make your work more of a joy and less of a drag? Thoughts in the comments

The eight pillars of enjoyment as applied to workflow - Lifehacker

Why the Treasury loves a gambler | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

2007-03-03T13:07:00.000Z

If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, I admire you inordinately. Despite myself, I love a heroic gambler. (Except the ones who are running my country, or the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.) So I much enjoyed the story of the "Fat Man", the Syrian businessman Fouad al-Zayat, who has lost £23 million on London's ritzier gambling tables.

I loved his grandstanding sound bite ("This is the only sin I have"), though on further reading, I didn't believe it: Mr al-Zayat has other sins. Having lost £2 million to Aspinall's in a single night, he paid by cheque and then rang up his bank afterwards to tell them to cancel it. Aspinall's had to take him to court to get its £2 million (plus costs), in a case that was finally settled last month.

Tut-tut. From the little I know about high-stakes gambling (from Victorian novels, mostly), welshing on one's gaming debts is unheroic. Still, you have to admire the weight of numbers.

The only time I ever gambled heroically was in a town called Robinsonville in Tunica County, Mississippi. I went with a Mississippi native, who'd never been to Las-Vegas-on-the-Delta and wanted to go.

The Horseshoe is a neon-lit building the size of Terminal 4 rising up from the vast flatlands; we picked it from a dozen others. We picked a blackjack table (from around 400) and a man said: "Hi, my name's Alvin, I'll be your croupier for this evening." It was 11 o'clock. As soon as we sat down, a woman asked what we wanted to drink. We said Tennessee whiskey sours; she brought them; they were free. As soon as we drank them, she brought more, also free. She kept coming till four in the morning.

Alvin doled out two cards to everyone on the table and we put down $10 each. After a minute, Alvin said: "Bank wins". We did it again. He said: "Bank wins again, ma'am." After 10 minutes, Alvin became gloomier and gloomier. By 4am, our wallets were empty. I asked Alvin, somewhat unsoberly, why he was being so sour-faced when he kept winning and we kept losing. He said: "Because I'm on the minimum wage and tips, ma'am. People tip me when they win. When you lose money, I lose money." We reeled away.

The thing is that Tunica County chose to gamble. Once the poorest county in America, it's now the US's richest per capita. In Mississippi, gambling was legal so long as you did it "on the water" (hence the river boat casinos). Tunica, being well inland, didn't have much to float on, but a couple of entrepreneurs put a small boat-casino on an irrigation channel off the Mississippi.

The locals noticed that "people from Memphis" were driving down in hordes to chuck money at it, so the whole county upped and voted for gambling. The huge Las Vegas casino chains paid the cotton farmers a lot of money for their land but megabucks for drainage ditches on which to "float" the casinos. You'd never know you were "on the water", but your croupier will point out a small well-like arrangement, with black water gleaming at the bottom.

What became Las-Vegas-on-the-Delta was not a decision thrust on Tunica County by the federal government. They didn't get gambling because President Reagan thought a supercasino was a good idea, but because some locals thought was a good idea.

In Blackpool, some locals thought it was a good idea as well. In the very early 1990s the billionaire Trevor Hemmings, who owns Leisure Parcs, floated the idea of Blackpool becoming a casino resort. He thought it would regenerate the place (and something had to). All sorts of people got behind him and the Blackpool bidders lobbied Parliament for a "resort casino". They provided MPs with much documentation about regeneration.

Meanwhile, Mr Hemmings spent £74 million on a big chunk of the Golden Mile, where he thought a resort casino would sit nicely.

What happened next is so depressing it hardly bears recalling. The Government, in the person of Tessa Jowell, seized on the Blackpool bid and ran off to Tony with it. She was just loving the whole idea of "regeneration", frankly. Regenerating depressed parts of Britain was a fabulous idea. Doing it at no cost to the Chancellor's purse was too fantastic for words. In minutes, there was a government plan for "resort casinos". Why stop at one?

Blackpool should have noticed that the Government's documentation immediately dropped "resort" from its documents and changed it to "regional" casinos. Perhaps they did notice. "Regional", like "regeneration", is one of New Labour's keywords.

Once "Blackjack-Lil" Jowell had highjacked the Blackpool bid and turned it into the baffling and bothersome Gambling Bill 2005, there was no stopping the lunacy that followed: the cowboy boots, the croupier poses, the ranch, the Dome, the snapping in Parliament about "not bringing Las Vegas style tricks of the trade into Britain". (Some hope. Those guys know what they're doing, even if she doesn't.)
I don't care what Fat Men do with their squillions at Aspinall's: good luck to them. I don't believe that a supercasino will "regenerate" an already regenerated Manchester, or pay for the Olympics, or provide jobs for thousands in depressed parts of Britain. (British casinos don't allow tipping.)

What I hate is when every aspect of British life becomes an arm of government and a Treasury resource, to be fleeced at will (the Chancellor is looking forward to the many £££s he will make from online gambling). Jowell famously said her Bill was "100 per cent regulation and 99 per cent protection". Makes the flesh creep, that sort of remark.

Why the Treasury loves a gambler Dt Opinion Opinion Telegraph

Achievement - Forbes.com

2007-03-02T18:51:00.000Z

We all have our own measure of success. For a high-powered Wall Street trader, a $10 million payday might not be enough--although most of us would be satisfied with a fraction of that. Mozart composed more than 600 works, while novelist Harper Lee wrote just one great book.

Great people judge themselves failures, and those who accomplish nothing swell with pride. What, then, is the measure of a life well led? Our special report on achievement offers context but no simple answers. Why do some succeed while others don't? Are we all failures? Perhaps ultimately the greatest achievement is simply a sense of dissatisfaction that makes us strive to do great things.

Read on ...

Achievement - Forbes.com

T r A C e Y t H o R n | o U T o f T h E W o O d S

2007-03-02T18:15:00.000Z

Remember Everything But The Girl? Well, they're still much-missed for their unique fusion of electro-pop-dance-soul-mixes, etc, but the rather lovely Tracey Thorn is back with a new album. Ben Watt, her long-standing partner in music as well as life, has continued to create (Lazy Dog, etc) ever since the demise of their EBTG persona, but it's great to hear Tracey's beautiful voice once again. Enjoy ...

T r A C e Y t H o R n o U T o f T h E W o O d S

BBC Signs Content Deal With YouTube - WSJ.com

2007-03-02T13:48:00.000Z

Interesting development ... YouTube may at last start to have some quality content - I mean, there's only so many times you can watch a cat falling over, or a teeenager running into a fence. If YouTube hearlded a brand new world of creativity/media, then I am a banana ...

--

LONDON -- British Broadcasting Corp. said Friday it has signed a deal with YouTube, a unit of Google Inc., which will make clips of its programs available on the video-sharing Web site.

The publicly funded United Kingdom broadcaster said it will offer branded "channels" on YouTube, some of which will be funded by advertising.

The BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, said YouTube was "a key gateway through which to engage new audiences in the U.K. and abroad."

The deal will create a channel called "BBC Worldwide" on YouTube which will show hit shows, including Top Gear, Spooks and nature documentaries presented by David Attenborough.

It also will create a channel to be called "BBC World," that will show news clips from the BBC's commercially operated international news channel. The corporation will make available clips from some current popular series such as Doctor Who and Life On Mars.

The BBC said in a statement that the partnership "reflects YouTube's commitment to work with content owners to make compelling video accessible online, and the BBC's commitment to increase reach through the partnership."

Some large media and entertainment companies have objected to YouTube's use of their material on an unauthorized basis. YouTube's Web site features video clips, both made by private individuals and from corporations. Viacom Inc. recently forced the company to take down more than 100,000 video clips from the YouTube site.

The plan is likely to be controversial in the U.K., where the BBC has been criticized by rivals for extending its footprint too far into commercial territory. The deal comes as the BBC Trust, the corporation's new governance body, considers whether to allow the corporation to advertise on its international Web sites. The BBC is funded through a universal license fee in the U.K. and advertising isn't permitted on its domestic broadcast platforms or Web site.

BBC Signs Content Deal With YouTube - WSJ.com

The World According to John K.

2007-03-01T18:15:00.000Z

John Kricfalusi, the mind that gave us The Ren and Stimpy Show, The Ripping Friends and The Goddamn George Liquor Program has a plan to make you watch the ads you see online. In fact, his goal is to make it so you won't even realize you're watching a commercial.

Kricfalusi -- better known as John K. -- isn't exactly known for bending to the will of studios or censors. This is, after all, the guy who was dismissed from Ren and Stimpy after producing an episode that ended with a character being savagely beaten with a boat oar. Now, he's devised a series of Flash-animated advertisements for VOIP provider Raketu. But this isn't the typical case of selling out. Kricfalusi genuinely wants to bring creativity back to advertising while promoting his animation. Plus, he gets to be way naughtier online than on the TV.

It all started a few years ago when he produced a series of web shorts for Tower Records -- for free.

This led to animation deals with Old Navy and then Raketu. The one-minute shorts hawking the virtues of Raketu feature some of Kricfalusi's most bombastic characters (including the hilarious George Liquor) and are punctuated by Kricfalusi's signature style of bright, entertaining and somewhat retro animation.

This form of advertising has been around for decades. Remember when Fred Flintstone peddled Winston cigarettes? But Kricfalusi thinks that his online offering, which carries his distinctive storytelling, will change attitudes toward advertising on the web, kind of like what HBO did for TV. Starting Thursday, you can be the judge.

That's when Kricfalusi's ads go live on , as well as his blog, all kinds of stuff.

Wired News sat down with John K. and chatted about the future of online advertisement, his new project with Raketu and, of course, the fate of Ren and Stimpy. (To check out John K.'s Raketu shorts, click here and here.)

Wired News: You make the cartoons for the love of it. Any guilt about making ads?

John K.: Guilt? This is America. I'm a capitalist. I would feel guilty if I didn't sell the product well and if I bored the audience. I have a duty to the sponsor and the audience. Making those two people happy is a lot easier than making a hundred TV execs happy while making the audience and sponsor unhappy. That makes me feel really guilty.

Wired News: The World According to John K.

The Evolution of the Web and Web2.0+ Implications ....

2007-02-28T10:40:00.000Z

Very nicely explained in a beautifully simple 5minute video. Recommended viewing ...

--

Via The Long Tail: This is what I'm talking about

Or via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=

And the Oscar for navel-gazing goes to... | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

2007-02-27T19:17:00.000Z

Surely it is time that this 'ceremony' was realised to be a somewhat pointless anachronism, and duly canned? Come on, it's not even lightweight entertainment/glamour, is it? If so, to whom?

Well done to Helen Mirren for at least bringing a bit of grace and humility to proceedings (in an excellent film, by the way), but this is beginning to look an increasingly tasteless, disingenuous and utterly irrelevant 'event'. In this era of perspective, humility, accountability and transparency this is the last bastion of crassness and hubris.

--

I stayed up all night to watch the Oscars, then immediately wished I had spent those precious hours making Easter cards with the mentally ill. The whole thing was hyped in advance as a British invasion - lock up your Oscars, the ultra-talented Brits are coming to sweep the town! In the end, we won two, while a conga-line of statuettes was last seen making its way from the Kodak Theatre to the upper reaches of Beverly Hills.

Why do we buy into this nonsense every year? Is it because each nation nowadays experiences a cultural cringe when faced with the great power of the American entertainment industry? Hollywood recognition, it would appear, not only trounces any other kind of plaudit, but fills actors, directors and like-minded individuals with the feeling that only through the Oscars can they address the world.

This might be good news for the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but it's not good news for America. The Oscars, more perhaps than any other US institution, is a powerhouse of strictly American feelings, and the world as a whole is not always crazy to have that kind of feeling stuffed down its throat. Hollywood is a very small community of wealthy and successful people, devoted to the high-gloss business of congratulating itself. And despite its gestures towards "respecting" and "recognising" foreign excellence, the Academy Awards ceremony only knows how to celebrate foreignness in purely American terms. That's to say - patronisingly.

More than 80 per cent of Americans do not own a passport. Hardly any young people speak a second language. Though a majority of the population are said to favour military intervention in the Middle East, fewer than one in 50 can name the countries that border Iraq. (This might explain why the British movie Borat, which satirises this situation, won nothing at the Oscars.)

Further to that, the criminalisation of economic migrants in the US is rife, but was nowhere mentioned in the six hours of Oscar telecast, despite one of the main nominated films, Babel, dealing with the subject.

The difficulty is that Hollywood sees itself as a community of sophisticated kingmakers. It was more embarrassing than funny to see leading actor Leonardo DiCaprio, during the ceremony, trying to convince former vice president and 2000 presidential nominee Al Gore to announce his plans to run in 2008. The Academy was celebrating Gore's hard-hitting and enjoyable global warming film, The Inconvenient Truth (it won Best Documentary), but none of these so-called politicos was willing to use the Oscars to criticise American policy in that area. No - it was joy, joy, fun, fun, all the way, and everybody got to look like a grinning idiot about those matters that really matter.

Meanwhile, just before they unrolled the red carpet for the 79th Oscars, the co-chairman of DreamWorks, David Geffen - who is also a leading organiser in this week's Hollywood fundraiser for presidential candidate Barack Obama - unleashed a powerful public onslaught on Hillary Clinton. "Everybody in politics lies," said Geffen, "but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it's troubling." Geffen was a serial guest at the White House during the Clinton Administration - after raising $19 million for Bill's campaign - but has gone sour on the Arkansas couple since Hillary refused to renounce the Iraq war.

Was there a sign of any of this disputation at the Oscars? Not a bit of it. Amid the backslapping and the "celebration" of foreign cultures, there wasn't a single word about how America's standing in the world may have been damaged by recent events and by the country's failure to face the facts about its ailing reputation abroad.

Into this farrago of glitzy evasion came the British nominees, Helen Mirren picking up a Union flag from a television reporter and waving it for the world's cameras, as if to beg for some small, green and pleasant recognition in the midst of this great heatwave of American arrogance. And it seems the whole civilised world is a sucker for that heat, including those Americans who have spent their careers railing against complacency and falsity in national affairs.

Martin Scorsese wanted his Oscar so bad, he looked like he might murder somebody if he didn't get it. And when he did, what an obsequious, fawning performance he gave: no culture has a people so ready to invoke the name of God as soon as they get exactly what they want. After countless nominations, Scorsese received his award from a triumvirate of 1970s so-called mavericks - Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas - and looked like he might faint with gratitude that the Establishment had finally given him the nod. It might have been more stylish if he had thrown it back in their faces.

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul," said Marilyn Monroe. I've always loved the movies, but hated the way the American industry lords it over the globe, practising prejudices and enforcing stereotypes while claiming to be the last bastion of liberal progress.

This year's ceremony featured a self-congratulatory montage of movies that were thought to have dealt in a decisive way with difficult human issues; but it was all nostalgia and showbusiness, the hallmark of the Academy Awards.

No one wanted to use the platform to grapple with the difficult topics of our day, unless they could prove immediately "inspiring". The 2007 Oscars might have been the most expensive exercise in not rocking the boat ever mounted.

The advertised British invasion was a piece of nonsense, of course, and the best of the international talent left the auditorium empty-headed, if not empty-handed, after their spell under the klieg lights and the falling tinsel.

Perhaps next year's British contenders will prove less deferentially inclined to believe the Hollywood hype, and will bring a more characterful dose of scepticism to the proceedings.

And the Oscar for navel-gazing goes to... Dt Opinion Opinion Telegraph

GigaOM » Hollywood Disrupted

2007-02-26T13:43:00.000Z

Reading through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year, I came across a fantastic Op-Ed written by a respected Hollywood author by the name of Neal Gabler. The opinion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the “barometers of the American psyche”.
And what is culprit? You guessed it… the rise of social media! As Gabler elaborates:

“All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment. The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism. It is certainly no secret that so much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive. Already, video games generate more income than movies by centralizing the user and turning him into the protagonist. Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. ”

What Gabler calls “narcissism,” I prefer to use the term “digital self expression”. And as I wrote almost a year ago in a piece titled “Social Networks are the New Media”…

“To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks.

So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”. In the past century, the creation of cultural products was centered in Hollywood. Now, social networks are broadening the scope of cultural media to include “identity production” (a very appropriate term coined by danah boyd), all the while decentralizing the ecosystem out to the edges.

For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space (e.g. MTV, Martha Stewart, etc.), it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression. ”

What Gabler and I both seem to be focusing on is the very real possibility that what is truly disrupting Hollywood is not technology per se, but what the technology is enabling the audience to do and how it’s affecting the public’s “consciousness”. In other words, the future of Hollywood may not ultimately rest on issues like how well the studios transition their business models to adapt to digital distribution schemes or how they handle massive copyright infringement.

Instead, what Hollywood might look like in the year 2020 could have more to do with how studios develop new “products”… much like they did with the advent of television (when they created sitcoms, game shows, movies of the week, etc.). But this time, future Hollywood products will probably have to integrate and leverage the virtually unlimited digital resource of self-expression and social media.
At the end of the day, what we’re talking about is the emergence of a new medium with its own art form. And whether Hollywood will remain at the epicenter of future cultural production is the big question. For the first time, Hollywood should be concerned like never before simply by virtue of the fact that, this time, the means of production are now in the hands of the audience itself. What this implies, at the very least, is that the studios will have to increasingly democratize their business model. What does that mean exactly? Go ask the CEO of Veoh.

GigaOM » Hollywood Disrupted

How Hitler gained power. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

2007-02-22T16:51:00.000Z

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Over the coming weeks, Slate will run an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z, abbreviated for these pages.

You have everything that I lack. You are forging the spiritual tools for the renewal of Germany. I am nothing but a drum and a master of ceremonies. Let's cooperate!—Adolf Hitler at the Juni-Klub, spring 1922, as quoted in Jean Pierre Faye's Langages totalitaires.
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler (1889–1945) should need no introduction. Statistics suggest, however, that a large proportion of young people now emerging from the educational systems of the Western democracies either don't know who he was or have only a shaky idea of what he did. One of the drawbacks of liberal democracy is thus revealed: Included among its freedoms is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence. Granted the uncontested opportunity to do so, Hitler would have devoted himself to eliminating every trace of free expression that came within his reach. The awkward question remains of whether, on his part, this propensity precluded any real interest in the humanities. The awkward answer must be that it didn't.

Though it is tempting to think of him as illiterate, Hitler could quote Schopenhauer from memory. His love of music was passionate, to the point where some believed that his admiration for Wagner was a sufficient reason in itself for dismissing that composer from musical history. Hitler the would-be painter never lost interest in the plastic arts. His projected art gallery in his home town of Linz was one of his most dearly cherished dreams for Nazi Europe after the inevitable victory. Above all, Hitler was moved by architecture, which brings us to the central point, because he wasn't just moved by it, he was mad about it. He had no sense of proportion in any of his ostensibly civilized enthusiasms. His interests lacked the human element, so they could never have amounted to a true humanism. But though his connection with the civilized traditions was parodic at best and neurotic always, there was still a connection: In that respect, he stands above Stalin and Mao and should therefore, by the scholar, be handled with even greater caution, because he is far more poisonous.

Many of his more cultivated victims used their learned resources to deny that Hitler had a mental existence. Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever. The finest minds in Europe devoted their best efforts to proving that their mortal enemy had no mind at all. But nothing they said was of any avail. Hitler could be defeated only by armed might: i.e., on his own terms. Whole libraries written to his detriment didn't add up to the effect of a single Russian artillery shell. This ugly fact should be kept in view when we catch ourselves nursing the comforting illusion that there is a natural order to which politics would revert if all contests of belief could be eliminated. There is such a natural order, but it is not benevolent.

Books about Hitler are without number, but after more than 60 years, the first one to read is still Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Familiarity with the events that it recounts should be regarded as an essential prerequisite to the study not just of modern politics but of the whole history of the arts, since its hideously gifted subject first demonstrated that a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture no matter how widely diffused. It is not possible to be serious about the humanities unless it is admitted that the pacifism widely favored among educated people before World War II very nearly handed a single man, himself something other than a simple Philistine, the means to bring civilization to an end.

Respectably situated in Berlin's Motzstrasse, to the south of the Tiergarten, the Juni-Klub, or June Club (the name breathed defiance at the Treaty of Versailles), was a '20s talking shop for right-wing intellectuals concerned with revolutionary conservatism. The consciously oxymoronic idea of revolutionary conservatism had almost as many forms as it had advocates, who found it easy to mistake their dialectical hubbub for the clanging forge of a new order. Of the 150 members, 30 were present on the afternoon Hitler dropped in. They thought he had come to hear what they had to say, and they found out that he had no intention of listening to any voice but his own. Their scholarly qualifications counted for nothing. Best qualified of all was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Before World War I, Moeller had been a translator of Baudelaire, Defoe, De Quincey, and the complete poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and had written essays on Nietzsche, Strindberg, and others. He knew Paris well and spent time also in London, Sicily, Venice, the Baltic countries, and Russia. For cultivation he was up there with Ernst Jünger, one of Germany's most gifted modern prose writers and likewise a revolutionary conservative.

PAGE: 12 NEXT »

How Hitler gained power. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

I've signed up to the wonder of e-petitions | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

2007-02-19T16:29:00.000Z

A Digital Democracy ....? Digital Dementia, more like.

--

I am in thrall to a new internet obsession. Since I found it, YouTube, which used to dominate much of my so-called working day, no longer holds sway (well, there are only so many videos of Britney Spears shaving her head that one can take).

Sneezing pandas, plummeting sky-divers, Tony Blair proclaiming to George Bush his "Endless Love": none of the highlights of the online orbit can detain me any longer. Not now that I have embraced the world of the e-petition.

The Government's e-petitioning website has only been in operation since November, but already there is nowhere that holds a better mirror up to the national psyche. In 50 years' time, all historians need do to find out precisely what kind of Britain their forebears inhabited is study the weekly top 10 e-petitions.
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What more could they learn of our society, for instance, than that 3,626 people have signed up to demand that the Prime Minister stand on his head and juggle ice cream?

Another 3,868 citizens felt moved enough to insist that our elected representatives "replace the national anthem with Gold by Spandau Ballet". And those are the ones that made it to the approved list. Not that the historian should ignore those that get rejected.

Some, such as the several dozen which request that the Prime Minister "resign", "resign now" or "resign forthwith", are disallowed for plain rudeness.

Others, though, are turned down because they plead for legislation rather more specific than general. Such as the one which asked the PM to "end the rules of male primogeniture with regard to succession to the Earldom of Stirling via a Resettlement-by-Letters Patent to the current Lord Stirling". And the name of the person who submitted it? The Earl of Stirling.

Of course, there are petitions up there of rather more pertinence to those outside the earl's immediate family. The one that aims to keep the British Library free of charge, with no budget cuts, is something every civilised citizen should sign.

As is the one that insists the PM "recognise that music and dance should not be restricted by burdensome licensing regulations". I have also added my name to the demand that the Government "provide a reliable train service with adequate capacity at times that travellers wish to make journeys from Swindon to Westbury, Bristol to Severn Beach...".

Not of much immediate geographical relevance to many users of the site, I admit, but its intentions are commended.

Dominating the site right now, however, sitting there like a juggernaut stuck in the Hanger Lane gyratory system, is the petition that asks the Government to shelve its plans for road pricing. At the time of writing, 1,578,405 people had added their names. If you want to join them, you will have to hurry: the petition closes tomorrow.

Even before it does, the Prime Minister has welcomed it as "an opportunity... to have a full debate". He has promised that he will give his answer to it forthwith. If it is anything like those already posted on the site, this will say something like: "Thanks for your petition, which we very much appreciate. However, you are wrong and we will be pressing ahead with our policy, no matter how many people actively publicise their opposition." The petition will then be quietly removed from the list.

And maybe that's the most valuable lesson for us e-petitioning obsessives: we may have the technological wherewithal, but that doesn't mean anyone will pay us any heed.

The e-petition is designed to give the impression of openness and accountability - it "shows that my government is listening" says Mr Blair. But it is entirely illusionary - no more legislative common sense will come out of the site than from those shoeboxes filled with signatures clogging up the bowels of No 10.
Not that a mere detail like total powerlessness is going to stop the determined e-petitioner. After all, where else can a concerned citizen demand that the PM stick his head in a bucket of custard and gargle the national anthem? Just signing feels like therapy.

I've signed up to the wonder of e-petitions Dt Opinion Opinion Telegraph

News - Arctic Monkeys

2007-02-18T15:00:00.000Z

The Arctic Monkeys are undertaking a series of short-notice/no pre-show-publicity small-venue gigs lately (we just missed their hometown - ie, Sheffield, if you didn't already know - gig at the great Leadmill venue, drat - especially 'drat' as we're only 20miles from Sheffield) - this being the classically difficult sophomore album it's good to hear that those who have seen them preview their new material (below) at recent gigs are saying it sounds excellent - a bit heavier than the 1st album, but that's no bad thing.

Very much looking forward to seeing them live this summer - I may be one of the oldest in the audience but what the hell!

Along with the much more obscure (at present) 'The Hair' the Arctic Monkeys really re-kindled my love of contemporary music. Just hope they get around to doing a gig at our mutually favourite football team's ground, Sheffield Wednesday @ Hillsborough.

The place needs some good karma after years of decline on and off the pitch; massive debts, an absurd turnover of managers (10 in 10 years), let alone the haunting memories of the tragic deaths of 96 Liverpool fans (which seems just like yesterday).

We shouldn't forget the tragedy of that day and the incompetence that lead to the needless deaths of so many, but I do believe our ground needs a cathartic cleansing to redress the balance/karma. Anyway, I digress ...

One day, maybe - when we're in the Premiership? If so, I won't hold my breath ...

--

Arctic Monkeys are pleased to announce that their new album entitled ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’, will be released on Monday 23rd April.

The track listing will be:
01. Brianstorm
02. Teddy Picker
03. D is for Dangerous
04. Balaclava
05. Fluorescent Adolescent
06. Only Ones Who Know
07. Do Me a Favour
08. This House Is a Circus
09. If You Were There, Beware
10. The Bad Thing
11. Old Yellow Bricks
12. 505

The first single, 'Brianstorm' will be released on Monday 16th April.

News - Arctic Monkeys

BBC Radio 4 - Factual - Desert Island Discs -Grayson Perry

2007-02-18T11:39:00.000Z

This week's guest is on as I type - the one that prompted me to gush so much in an earlier entry re: Desert Island Discs ... if and when I have a ridiculously large amount of surplus money I shall be in the queue for one of his works.

He's even a fan of The Fall and a 'biker. What more is necessary?

--

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the artist Grayson Perry. For more than 20 years his work was broadly unknown outside the narrow confines of the art world.

But in 2003 he became a household name after a collection of his exquisitely ornate pots won him art's most prestigious award, the Turner Prize.

He's described as 'the hottest potter in the world' but newspaper headlines describing his success focused at least as much on his clothes as his art - when he collected the prize he wore a lilac party dress with a bow in his hair.He started dressing in his sister's clothes when he was a child - initially as part of his imaginative games and then for an erotic thrill.

In part, women's clothes represented the tender emotions he was too scared to show in his repressive and sometimes frightening family home. Now, they're a way of controlling how people see him, what kind of attention he attracts and, if nothing else, they're a unique selling point. He acknowledges the debt he owes to his profession; only the arts would tolerate, he says, a transvestite potter from Essex.

His choices include:

Record: Prophecies (Philip Glass)
Book: An art book on Gothic and Renaissance Altar pieces
Luxury: Loads of really good pens and paper

BBC Radio 4 - Factual - Desert Island Discs -Grayson Perry

AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN: 20 steps to build your own video-sharing network - Valleywag

2007-02-17T12:19:00.000Z

Scarily, it's true ...

--

So you want to build a video sharing network? Of course you do.

Fortunately, it's really easy to launch an awesome and successful video-sharing site these days. A highly placed but necessarily anonymous Internet superstar shares with us the ultimate plan for video fortune.

Just follow these 20 simple steps, and you'll be kitting out your own fleet of Gulfstreams in no time.

Step 1. Never forget: If Xeni Jardin uploads videos of herself to Boing Boing with the logo of your company next to the "play" button, you're going to be rich.

Step 2. Ensure that company founders have cocaine problems or eating disorders. You want them to look like they're going to drop dead at any moment. This will help you sign up advertisers.

Step 3. If and when Xeni Jardin videos are only downloaded 300+ times despite being put on a website that claims 2.2 million subscribers, start promoting your open source policies. This is deeply compelling information for the average watcher of web videos.

Step 4. Mention that you run Ubuntu on a Mac. That way everyone will understand up front that you have no idea what the hell you're doing with technology. It will also prepare your "partners" for massive difficulty in opening your email attachments.

Step 5. If your license agreement is incompatible with Creative Commons and potentially puts the entire movement at risk, make sure you do nothing about it.

Step 6. CONNECT! Hire a skanky, 29-year-old ex-raver chick to be the face of your company. This will help you sign up advertisers.

Step 7. Rush your product out of beta in order to raise additional venture cap funding. Spend the money on booze, blow, and a party.

Step 8. Have the ship party first, then ship your product late -- preferably while the face of your company is partying at Burning Man. Bonus points if she accidentally uploads Burning Man pictures to the company blog.

Step 9. Ensure that your 1.0 product has fewer publisher features than the beta.

Step 10. Keep your beta product up; that way you get stuck maintaining both.

Step 11. Now rewrite your beta product and release it as open source. This will, uh, help draw attention to your, uh, completely different 1.0 product.

Step 12. Widgets, widgets, widgets.

Step 13. Make sure your website and video player are as ugly and invasive as possible.

Step 14. Get rid of two out of three company founders.

Step 15. Ensure that the remaining company founder retains an email address promoting a previously-failed venture.

Step 16. Manipulate someone in Hollywood into getting you an Emmy nomination despite the fact that you cannot serve a 30-second video without a noticeable glitch at the end.

Step 17. Fail to win the Emmy.

Step 18. Manipulate SXSW into having company employees moderate seminars without disclosing their company affiliation.

Step 19. Never forget: accurate metrics are of no value to advertisers or show producers. "Approximately 400,000" gets you into BusinessWeek every time; pesky facts only screw that up.

Step 20. If Ze Frank is using your service to host his program, make sure he does not appear anywhere on your home page. That space is much better used to promote upskirt videos or your deep belief in open source.

AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN: 20 steps to build your own video-sharing network - Valleywag

Reconstructing Woody: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com

2007-02-16T18:14:00.000Z

For bringing us Annie Hall, let alone Manhattan, Allen is well worth reflecting upon ...

--

Through scandal, legal battles, and critical censure, Woody Allen keeps adding to an extraordinary film legacy. In his first exhaustive interview in years, Allen talks about his love life, chasing the money to London while protecting his independence, and Match Point, the movie that has brought both box-office redemption and an Oscar nomination.

It's been a long time since Alvy Singer wooed Annie Hall: on December 1, Woody Allen will be 70. But while that may make his boomer audience feel old, he himself isn't giving much ground to the Grim Reaper. You can still set your watch by his production schedule: almost every year for nearly four decades he has written and directed a new picture—the Joyce Carol Oates of the movies—and this year has been no different. He is set to release his latest in December, the excellent Match Point, a moral thriller, featuring Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, which he shot in London during the summer of 2004.

Reconstructing Woody: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com

How to Change the World: The World Map of Happiness

2007-02-16T17:38:00.000Z

Eh? Having worked in/spent a lot of time in many of those counturies - in both a professional and personal context - i very much beg to differ! As ever, there are "lies, damn lies and statistics" ...
how can one apply binary metrics to subjective happiness? This listing clearly reflects the oxymoron therein. Nonsense.

See some comments adjacent to each relevant country where I think a comment is warranted; apologies to the academic who earnestly produced this list(!).

--

The World Map of Happiness

Adrian G. White, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, produced a “world map of happiness.” The study reflects data from UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR.

The twenty happiest countries are:

Denmark A jolly lot in general, yes, but with a maudlin side also.
Switzerland No way - fine people but 'happy'?
Austria Ditto.
Iceland
The Bahamas
Finland See Denmark.
Sweden See Austria.
Bhutan
Brunei
Canada Maybe.
Ireland Maybe.
Luxembourg Nope.
Costa Rica
Malta Yes.
The Netherlands Yes.
Antigua and Barbuda
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway See Denmark.
The Seychelles

Other rankings: USA (23), France (62), China (82) Japan (90), India (125). Fortunately, I am married to a Danish woman.

How to Change the World: The World Map of Happiness

Sting, re-assessed. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

2007-02-16T13:14:00.000Z

Once an angry punk, always an angry punk ...

--

"Fucking horrible man," Paul Weller, late of the Jam and the Style Council, once fulminated about him. "No edge, no attitude, no nothing." Bob Geldof, ostensibly a friend, has labeled him a "Geordie twat." Unkindness accrues easily to Gordon Matthew Sumner, the musician, actor, activist, and memoirist better known as Sting. Unfairly? Let's say not wholly uninvited. Why, for instance, would someone who came of musical age in the punk era, alongside acts that aspired to take the piss out of absolutely everything, work so tirelessly to put the piss back in? "At this moment," Sting mooned in his autobiography, Broken Music (2003), about a flower he espied on the Amazon floor, "I am led to an understanding that not only must such tiny, beautiful and delicate living things be charged with love, but also the inanimate stones that surround them, everything giving and receiving, reflecting and absorbing, resisting and yielding." Sermons in stones, ghosts in machines, Lite FM in a burgundy turtleneck—it commands a kind of silent awe. And it raises anew the ancient riddle: How could a Geordie twat like Sting have fronted a band as great as the Police?

Sting, re-assessed. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

The BRIT Awards 2007 • Features

2007-02-16T11:49:00.000Z

The Brits does not have quite as much glamour and gravitas as the Grammys but I rather like its somewhat chaotic, amateur and anarchistic tone - and lack of reverence to the music industry that spawned it. In the case of the Brits this year, the host, Russell Brand (below), is perfectly suited to the occasion. Typing this makes me recall a very cold night in New York when I decided to wander down to Madison Sq Gardens to watch the Limos arrive and decant the 'stars' for that year's Grammys - the place was awash with screaming girls; I felt rather out of place ... for me, the Brits encapsulates what music should be about.

Music and glamour? Not for me - leave that to Hollywood.

ps, if you never saw the last live airing of the Brits that Russell is referring to - well, you missed a landmark in broadcasting incompetence. It was splendidly hysterical in its utter rubbishness.

In fact it was Very British! Don't get too professional, guys ...

--

“The last time the BRIT Awards was transmitted live,” says Russell Brand, “was in 1989, when Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood presented. If I can capture half of the professionalism of that night, I’ll be happy!” He grins, “I just don’t know which one of them to call for tips first…”

Of course, 1989 was a bit of a blip in BRITs history, when it definitely did NOT go alright on the night. There’s a lot of pressure, therefore, riding on this year’s BRITs host - the tousle-haired Essex cad, Russell Brand.

A veteran of live talk shows, such as Big Brother’s Big Mouth and The Russell Brand Show, the controversial stand-up relishes the opportunity to take the reigns on the big show. “And I love that it’s live,” he grins. “I do live. In fact, trust me. I’m even doing this interview live right now…”

The BRIT Awards 2007 • Features

WIRED Blogs: Table of Malcontents

2007-02-16T11:43:00.000Z

Well, if it's a patch on the wonderful 'Brazil' it will be well worth watching ...

ps, apologies for the excessive use of 'fascinating' in my earlier posting re: Desert Island Discs. I was clearly rather excited ...

--

The newest Terry Gilliam movie is best described as nightmarish. With no particular point, the end of the film evokes relief and embarrassment, as if you have just finished witnessing Gilliam pass an enormous kidney stone. One feels the urge to let go his clammy hand, pat him gently and ask him if he feels better.

The film stars young Jodelle Ferland (Silent Hill) as Jeliza-Rose, daughter of an aging, dysfunctional, but still affectionate smack addict, Noah. Jeff Bridges, reprising the Dude with harder drugs, plays Noah with an intense sympathy--the most engaging and intriguing member of the cast. Jeliza's unnamed (and ambiguously fat/pregnant) mother (Jennifer Tilly), spends the eight minutes prior to her heroin overdose alternately deprecating and cuddling Jeliza, and cramming handfuls of chocolate into her smeared, sad mouth. Then she dies in a grotesque splay, and it is all Jeliza can do to keep Noah from setting the horrible woman on fire.

The girl's life consists of playing nursemaid to her junkie parents and maintaining a shrill, running narration by her variously-personified disembodied doll heads. Ferland does all the voice acting for the dolls, which take on greater independence as the film goes on. Each of them possesses uncomfortably differentiated accents, and eventually Jeliza's mouth ceases to move at all when the dolls speak.

WIRED Blogs: Table of Malcontents

BBC Radio 4 - Factual - Desert Island Discs -Paul Abbott

2007-02-15T19:37:00.000Z

If you don't already know about "Desert Island Discs", you should try and catch it - even a seemingly dull, academic guest is more often than not a fascinating voyage around the human soul ... last week's guest was fascinating (see below), even though I don't care for his work. It's that kind of show.

Next week's guest is the transvestite potter, Grayson Perry - should be fascinating - I love his work and admire his chutzpah as much as his talent ...

--

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the screen writer Paul Abbott. He has written some of the most controversial and successful television programmes of the past decade. Shameless, Clocking Off and State of Play all flowed from his pen and have won him bags of awards.

But he was driven to write as a response to the chaotic and traumatic childhood he’d suffered. One of eight children, both parents had left the family home by the time he was eleven, leaving his older sister to bring them up. They had a near feral existence, and lived, says Paul, like rats.

At fifteen he attempted suicide and ended up in a psychiatric ward. After that, without wanting to or really being aware it was happening, he wrote as a way of letting out the rage he felt inside him. He quickly was able to turn this writing into short stories, radio plays and film scripts and to sell them. Now he is credited with making television the 'new National Theatre'. But it's not his greatest achievement - he is proudest of his successful marriage to Saskia, his wife of eighteen years, and of their two children.

Record: Town Called Malice
Book: Complete works of Arthur Miller
Luxury: Writing pad and pencils

Full list of his selected records and a great overview of past guests at: BBC Radio 4 - Factual - Desert Island Discs -Paul Abbott

Boost your self-esteem - Lifehacker

2007-02-15T12:51:00.000Z

Life-balance blog The Ririan Project offers 22 tips on improving your self-esteem. For example, make a list of your accomplishments:

Think of times when you did something that you thought that never could do but managed to pull off successfully. Read this list often. While reviewing it, close your eyes and recreate the feelings of satisfaction and joy you experienced when you first attained each success.

You've probably heard most of these chestnuts before, but overall this is an excellent list with plenty of sound wisdom. I dare you not to feel better about yourself after trying just a few of the tips. — Rick Broida

Wake Up Feeling Great With These 22 Tips for High Self-Esteem [The Ririan Project via Dumb Little Man]

Boost your self-esteem - Lifehacker

BBC - Top Gear - Episode Archive - Series 9 - Episode 3

2007-02-14T12:03:00.000Z

The erstwhile amusing "Top Gear" does still have its moments; last week's episode (detailed below) was a stark contrast in the different perceptions in irony/humour between rather upper-middle-class, overgrown middle-aged British motoring journalists/entertainers and some parts of America's Deep South - namely, Alabama.

This was actually pretty depressing/scary watching - for that, congratulations to Top Gear (it made a change to yet another inane review of a $200k supercar) - to witness such brain-dead bigotry and aggression when faced with ironic (alebit juvenile) humour was thought-provoking. I have never experienced it on any of my countless business/personal trips to America - still, I can't recall ever visiting Alabama.

And no, from my perspective at least, this isn't a bigoted and patronising lampooning of Americans - there are as many such humour-less bigots in good old England; not that the Top Gear crew (especially Clarkson) would acknowledge that ... in fact, Borat would make a fine addition to the Top Gear team, thinking about it.

--

On land-of-the-free Top Gear, we spent the whole show in the good ole US of A, as we sent Jeremy, Richard and James across the pond on a massive interstate road-trip.

Our presenters touched down in sunny Miami amid a heady cocktail of bikini-clad beach babes, colourful art deco buildings and drug-related gangland violence. They were each given an extremely tight budget of $1000 and told to go off and buy themselves a car in which to embark on an epic road trip, stopping along the way to compete in a series of challenges.

It turned out that finding a car for that sort of money is pretty tricky. Especially if your picky about such things as bullet holes in the windscreen or shrubs growing through the radiator grille. Eventually, though, Jeremy managed to lay hands on a Chevrolet Camaro, Richard landed himself a very utilitarian Dodge Ram pick-up, and James turned up in a Cadillac as large and wobbly as Liberace's waterbed. The target destination was revealed to be New Orleans, which was over 700 extremely hot, red neck-strewn miles away.

The first stop along the way was the Moroso Motorsports Park, which is unusual in the US because it's a racetrack that has both left and right hand turns. Each car was put through its paces by none other than the Stig's super-sized US cousin.

The next challenge was simply to camp out for the evening. There was, however, a small catch - they were only allowed to eat road kill. After several hours of foraging, all they managed to turn up was one slightly mouldy squirrel.

The next morning the presenters faced their final challenge: to drive their cars across Alabama without getting shot. This might sound relatively easy, but before they set off they were allowed to paint slogans on each other's cars. James ended up with 'Hilary for president' scrawled along the side of his Caddy, Jeremy's Camaro had the words 'Country and western is rubbish', and Richard's pick-up bore the legend 'Man love rules OK'. These sentiments didn't go down too well with some of the locals and, to cut a long story short, we were lucky to make it to New Orleans with our lives.

BBC - Top Gear - Episode Archive - Series 9 - Episode 3

Women's Intuition at Work

2007-02-14T11:02:00.000Z

Lots has been written lately about the difference between men and women in business -- from their leadership styles to the amount of VC financing they attract (less than 10% of all venture capital funding.)

Margaret Heffernan’s new book, “How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules of Business Success” adds an interesting observation to the conversation.

Women, she says, are increasingly successful in business because they’re hard-wired to capture the zeitgeist. Speaking at a breakfast meeting at the Cornell Club in Manhattan last week, Heffernan, who has been the CEO of five different businesses in the US and the UK, said that women have a unique ability “to connect the dots,” to see patterns in masses of information.

“Women’s brains are like street sweepers,” she says. Every day, women are out there canvassing their environment, from the office to the school to the mall to the kitchen to the church to the supermarket, and on and on, taking in information, often in a commercial context. The extent of women’s purchasing power has been well documented, of course: 88% of all retail purchases, 89% of bank accounts, more than 50% of credit card use, etc. While they're shopping, they're also sucking up dust balls of data, like some crazed Roomba of the marketplace.

That makes women “deeply and often chaotically informed,” Heffernan says. It also enables them to understand the market on a visceral level, as they notice new products, trends, tastes, and failures. And, it enables the savvy ones to see market opportunities.

Eileen Fisher did just that when she noticed that women’s lives were getting more complex, and they wanted clothes that would work well for the different parts of their lives.

Carol Latham, a physical chemist, noticed many years ago that the thing that prevented computers from getting smaller was the problem of heat build-up. Her bosses pooh poohed her insight. So she left to form her own company, Thermagon, to make polymer semiconductors. Soon, Intel was on the phone, asking if they could use some of her company’s products to help with the heat issue on the Pentium chip.

Calling this ability ‘women’s intuition’ degrades how important it can be in a business context. Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, analyzed research on hundreds of top executives at fifteen global companies. The one cognitive ability that distinguished star performers from their less accomplished peers was their knack for pattern recognition, he says. That’s women’s intuition in a Hugo Boss suit.

“It’s the ‘big picture’ thinking that allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from the welter of information around them, and to think far into the future,” he says.

This should not be confused with market research, Heffernan says, which is always historical. Capturing the zeitgeist is about the future, an inexact – but invaluable – ability to sense where the world is going before it gets there.

No woman business owner would tell you that intuition trumps discipline, focus, and hard work. But leaven those business necessities with a dash of old fashioned intuition, and you’ve got a potentially powerful engine for innovation.

Women's Intuition at Work

Is Radio Still Radio if There’s Video? - New York Times

2007-02-14T10:45:00.000Z

Ted Stryker, a D.J. at KROQ in Los Angeles, considers it a perk of the job to wear shorts and T-shirts to work. But last Sunday as he dressed for the Grammy Awards, he pulled out his best blazer and a flashy belt buckle, knowing three video cameras would stream live coverage of his show to the Web sites of 147 CBS radio stations.

“What’s great about radio is no one knows what you’re wearing,” Mr. Stryker said by telephone as he made his way through the throng at the Grammys. “I wanted to make myself a little bit more presentable.”

Mr. Stryker, who has done some TV work in the past, said that to create his best radio voice, he often must contort his face in embarrassing ways.

“It’s so different doing radio compared to TV,” he said. “Who knows what faces I make when I’m talking on the radio? I hope I’m not making the same faces today.”

The nation’s commercial radio stations have seen the future, and it is in, of all things, video. As a result, the stereotype of a silken-voiced jockey like Mr. Stryker, slumped and disheveled in the studio chair, may never be the same.

Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances.

“This is no longer the age of ‘having a face for radio,’ ” said Dianna Jason, the senior director of marketing and promotions at Power 106, a Los Angeles hip-hop radio station. “This is a visual medium now.”

Audiences in Los Angeles, for example, will be able to tune in today to Power 106 for an annual Valentine’s Day event called “Trash Your Ex,” in which jilted listeners are invited to put mementos from past loves in a giant wood chipper — and to let it whir while the disc jockey, Big Boy, urges them on. And for the first time, audiences everywhere will be able to watch streamed video of the event, to be held in a parking lot in Pasadena, on the Web site power106.com.

Whereas video was once said to have killed the radio star — according to the pop song by the Buggles that was the first video shown on MTV in 1981 — it is now emerging as an unlikely savior for an industry facing an array of challenges.

In the age of YouTube and the radio talk show hosts Howard Stern and Don Imus as television stalwarts, this might not seem all that remarkable, except that the radio industry has been singularly tardy in embracing the interactive age.

But now many of the largest radio companies are scrambling to stay relevant as their listeners’ attention is drawn in many directions — iPods, cellphones, satellite radio and various streaming and downloading musical offerings from companies like Yahoo and AOL. “A lot of our stations are starting to embrace video and generate new revenue streams,” said Joel Hollander, the chief executive of CBS Radio, the nation’s second-largest radio company, after Clear Channel Communications. “I hope video helps the radio star. Maybe radio will save the video star?”

More than 90 percent of Americans still listen to traditional radio. But the amount of time they tune in over the course of a week has fallen by 14 percent over the last decade, according to Arbitron ratings.

Industry revenues are flat, and the Bloomberg index of radio stocks is down some 40 percent over the last three years.

Reflecting the investor malaise, a group of private equity companies has proposed buying Clear Channel Communications and taking it private.

Video now makes up only a tiny fraction of the $20 billion a year that radio generates in advertising sales. But it could represent a much-needed new source of growth in a rapidly expanding online video market that everyone from Google to newspapers to broadcast television wants to be in.

Radio executives and personalities say their video efforts will be different because they capitalize on radio’s traditional strength in using on-air personalities and local events to draw in listeners.

Taking a cue from YouTube and the rise of user-generated video, a polished, TV-quality product is often not the objective. Another Power 106 video effort featured a staff member, dressed like a shrub, jumping out of a planter to surprise visitors to the station’s office on Halloween.

An alternative rock station, 94.7 FM in Portland, Ore., last fall began a “Bootleg Video” series in which a listener is lent a video camera to record a clip of a local performance by a hot band like the Killers for the Web site. “Sometimes it’s a little shaky, but we want that,” said Mark Hamilton, manager at the station, which is owned by Entercom Communications. “We don’t want it to be perfect.”

The Web site for the radio station WFLZ in Tampa, Fla., features a video series called “Naked,” on the lives of its hosts away from the microphone. “I’m not very pretty today,” one of the station’s disc jockeys, Ashlee Reid, says sheepishly on the latest installment as she arrives at work and realizes the cameras are rolling before bantering with a colleague about chest hair.

Ms. Reid, who is 26, said being videotaped was odd, but in the year that the radio station has been producing monthly installments of the show for downloading, it has not yet caused her and her colleagues to alter their hair or wardrobe. “Maybe we should, but we don’t,” she said.

Similarly, producers for Adam Carolla, the Los Angeles morning host whose program is carried on many CBS Radio stations, regularly record vérité clips featuring Mr. Carolla and a co-host, Danny Bonaduce, for posting on the Web.

The nation’s biggest radio companies are also doing slicker productions, like Mr. Stryker’s Grammy show, that try to capitalize on their size and reach.

Clear Channel, whose Internet efforts are led by Evan Harrison, an executive vice president, has elaborate video programming available on the Web sites of its 1,200 stations, including Tampa’s 933FLZ.com, where “Naked” is featured. Clear Channel has made some 6,000 music videos available for downloading online, but has also been producing original video content that individual stations can feature on their Web sites and disc jockeys can promote on the air.

These programs include “Stripped,” a series of taped performances by artists like Young Jeezy and Nelly Furtado that are often acoustic or done in small clubs. The company has also been producing “Video 6 Pack” in which bands like Fall Out Boy appear as hosts of their own program and play videos they like.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Clear Channel sites ranked sixth in December among music Web sites, behind MTV, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace and Artistdirect.

Radio industry executives stressed that, so far, their video efforts could be considered experimental and only one facet — along with blogs and audio podcasts and a nascent service called HD Radio — of how the industry is adapting for the Internet age.

2 Next Page »

Is Radio Still Radio if There’s Video? - New York Times

How do we keep up? « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

2007-02-14T10:35:00.000Z

Aggregation of same-news feed-items of course compounds the problem (and I am guilty of that in my own blog/s and subsequent feeds generated) so one has to filter one's feeds accordingly to ensure minimal overlap; also, this is just the start - imagine what it will be like when more and more of our interests are delivered to us via RSS. However, by that time the readers will have improved accordingly, to be heuristic for example, I am sure. Still, it's a hell of a lot better than mindless web-surfing and ploughing through yet another HTML email, inbetween all the spam email and viruses, lame jokes forwarded on to you, etc, etc.

I haven't had more than a few days break since I really started using RSS in earnest, and as I receive an average of 350 feed items per 24hrs, it'll be interesting when I do take an extended break - I might miss that major bit of news I was looking for. Still, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

As an aside, of that 350 feed items average per 24hrs (from some 50 feeds) I am getting an average of 5% of items of interest to me per 24hrs. So, there's lots of room for improvement, yet .... ;-)

What's the ratio for other people here? Will give us a good indicator of how much room for improvement we have.

--

I got up early to read feeds and do email. I started at 5:45 a.m. and it’s now 7:26 a.m. and I still didn’t get through all my feeds. But, worse, is what I did find: dozens of new products, new companies, new phones (Gizmodo and Engadget are going crazy posting phone news, I’ve kept most of that off of my link blog). And even a couple of fun cat photos. Heheh.

Anyway, how do we keep up with this flow that is coming through the blogs? It’s much easier to build a company now than it was in the 1990s, plus access to capital is there again, so that leads to tons of new companies and a LOT of news. What does this lead to? Risk for new companies because the chances that a new company will be able to get adoption/build audience and community is very small. There’s simply too much out there to pay attention to

How do we keep up? « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

ODDPODZ

2007-02-13T01:28:00.000Z

10 Steps for Boosting Creativity

1. Listen to music by Johann Sebastian Bach. If Bach doesn't make you more creative, you should probably see your doctor - or your brain surgeon if you are also troubled by headaches, hallucinations or strange urges in the middle of the night.

2. Brainstorm. If properly carried out, brainstorming can help you not only come up with sacks full of new ideas, but can help you decide which is best. Click here for more information on brainstorming.

3. Always carry a small notebook and a pen or pencil around with you. That way, if you are struck by an idea, you can quickly note it down. Upon rereading your notes, you may discover about 90% of your ideas are daft. Don't worry, that's normal. What's important are the 10% that are brilliant.

4. If you're stuck for an idea, open a dictionary, randomly select a word and then try to formulate ideas incorporating this word. You'd be surprised how well this works. The concept is based on a simple but little known truth: freedom inhibits creativity. There are nothing like restrictions to get you thinking.

5. Define your problem. Grab a sheet of paper, electronic notebook, computer or whatever you use to make notes, and define your problem in detail. You'll probably find ideas positively spewing out once you've done this.

6. If you can't think, go for a walk. A change of atmosphere is good for you and gentle exercise helps shake up the brain cells.

7. Don't watch TV. Experiments performed by the JPB Creative Laboratory show that watching TV causes your brain to slowly trickle out your ears and/or nose. It's not pretty, but it happens.

8. Don't do drugs. People on drugs think they are creative. To everyone else, they seem like people on drugs.

9. Read as much as you can about everything possible. Books exercise your brain, provide inspiration and fill you with information that allows you to make creative connections easily.

10. Exercise your brain. Brains, like bodies, need exercise to keep fit. If you don't exercise your brain, it will get flabby and useless. Exercise your brain by reading a lot (see above), talking to clever people and disagreeing with people - arguing can be a terrific way to give your brain cells a workout. But note, arguing about politics or film directors is good for you; bickering over who should clean the dishes is not.

ODDPODZ

BBC - BBC Four - Screenwipe

2007-02-12T22:40:00.000Z

Highly recommended viewing - a rare enough event nowadays - Charlie Brooker delivers an acerbic, vitriolic, intelligent swipe at the inane nature of much of the media world that we are increasingly consumed by ...

--

CHARLIE BROOKER'S SCREENWIPE Monday 5 February 2007 10pm-10.30pm; rpt 12.30am-1am; rpt Thursday 8 February 11.25pm-11.55pm; rpt 1.25am-1.55am

Brace yourself for the new series of Screenwipe, as the caustic critic returns to vent his spleen about TV 'culture'. If you need an introduction to (or a reminder of) what to expect, watch a specially recorded message from Charlie:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/broadband/mediawrapper/consoles/bbcfour?redirect=console.shtml&nbram=1&bbram=1?pack5-screenwipe_trail_120207_16x9

BBC - BBC Four - Screenwipe

Also see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/bbcfour/features/screen-wipe.shtml/ext/_auto/-/http://www.tvgohome.com/

The New Yorker : fact : content

2007-02-12T11:51:00.000Z

Michael Lewis, a journalist and the author of “Liar’s Poker” and “Moneyball,” appeared in the magazine Poetry for the first time in the summer of 2005, with a satirical piece called “How to Make a Killing from Poetry: A Six Point Plan of Attack.” It offered its advice in bullet-point businessese: “1) Think Positive. Nobody likes a whiner. And poets always seem to be harping on the negative. . . . 2) Take Your New Positive Attitude and Direct It Towards the Paying Customer. The customer is your friend. Your typical poem really doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the living retail customer. . . . 3) Think About Your Core Message. Your average reader might like a bit of fancy writing, but at the end of the day he will always ask himself: what’s my takeaway?” So it was slightly odd, and unintentionally comical, when, last September, Poetry published a manifesto, “American Poetry in the New Century,” recapitulating Lewis’s lampoon as a serious position.

The author was John Barr, a former Wall Street executive and the president of the Poetry Foundation, an entity created after the Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly gave some two hundred million dollars to Poetry, in 2002. The foundation, which “exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience,” also publishes the magazine.

In the essay, Barr declared, “American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today.” Poetry, largely absent from public life—from classrooms, bookstores, newspapers, mainstream media—“has a morale problem,” he said; it is in “a bad mood.” Poems are written only with other poets in mind, and therefore do not sell. (Two thousand copies is the industry standard.) He argued that the effect of M.F.A. programs, increasingly prevalent since the nineteen-seventies, has been “to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety.

The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining.” In a section titled “Live Broadly, Write Boldly,” he urged poets to do as Hemingway did, and seek experience outside the academy—take a safari, go marlin fishing, run with the bulls. “The human mind is a marketplace, especially when it comes to selecting one’s entertainment,” he wrote. “If you look at drama in Shakespeare’s day, or the novel in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time.”

The New Yorker : fact : content

How Factory Girl insults Andy Warhol. - By Jim Lewis - Slate Magazine

2007-02-10T13:01:00.000Z

Apologies for the rubbish formatting in the article below - it's still a good read.

Re: rubbish formatting, I am trying several blogging tools for my different blog themes - see wifiwabbit.com for all the links - to establish which one has the most potential as a platform; Google (this) isn't doing very well at the moment - Yahoo's looks simplistic but in fact is proving to be the most robust in many respects - shame it's not very customisable, however - but maybe that's why it's more robust? Discuss.

Anyway, I digress ... onto the great man himself ...

--

There's a moment about midway through Factory Girl, the latest rehashing of Edie Sedgwick's life and Andy Warhol's career, when the movie suddenly goes from being merely very bad to being truly revolting. The setup is this: Sedgwick, a lovely but very unhappy girl from a wealthy but very unhappy family, comes down to New York from Boston in search of attention and the excitement of art. She finds both in Warhol's studio: Andy has started making films; Edie is both photogenic and game. He turns her into an underground star, and she, in turn, finds a place in Warhol's coterie of drag queens, drug addicts, gay men, hustlers, fashion mavens, socialites, and assorted hangers-on. So far, so good: All of this is true enough, as Hollywood movies go, anyway.

Then she meets … well, it's a little hard to say who, exactly, she meets. The character is obviously meant to be Bob Dylan, with whom Sedgwick apparently did have some kind of brief affair, but Dylan threatened to sue the filmmakers, and the character is given a ludicrous pseudonym: "the Musician."

In the movie, the Musician is everything that Warhol is not: a good, red-blooded American boy, heterosexual, motorcycle-riding, and what's more, a poet—no, a prophet—and a paragon of anti-materialism and truth-telling. In short, he's an insufferable prig, a smug and arrogant philistine, and it's no wonder Dylan disavowed him vehemently.

Edie, on the other hand, seems to fall in love with him and so, alas, do the filmmakers, who concoct a brief and improbable moment of wholesomeness for the two of them. They ride the Musician's motorcycle upstate; he ditches it in a lake to show how little he cares for the toys his wealth has brought him; they talk about her childhood; they make love, in front of a fireplace, no less; and then Edie goes horseback riding.

All of this would be silly enough; what makes it disgusting is a brief cutaway, lasting about nine seconds, showing Warhol sitting all alone in his vast, cold studio, rapturously watching a film of Sedgwick that he's projecting on the wall. The movie cuts back to Sedgwick and the Musician romping, and I realized at once that I wasn't watching a film about Andy and Edie at all; I was watching an allegory of the Evil Fag, who battles with the Good Man for the soul of the Lost Girl. The Evil Fag, you see, is simply a failed heterosexual, frustrated and rancorous; the Lost Girl is well-meaning but confused; and the Good Man does his best to set her straight.

In Factory Girl, it all comes to a showdown. The Musician shows up at Warhol's factory for a screen test. Warhol coos and does his best to be accommodating; the Musician says things like, "No, man, don't sweat it," and then makes fun of Warhol's work. And so on: It all goes very badly. At one point, the Musician tries to pass a joint to Warhol, who didn't do drugs and who therefore demurs. "Do you smoke, man, or do just that faggy speed shit?" he asks, managing in one short sentence to sum up the film's loathsome combination of sanctimoniousness, hypocrisy, and bigotry. Luckily, one of Warhol's cronies immediately replies, "Just the faggy speed shit"—the only line in the movie that made me smile. As Dave Hickey once said, in a not dissimilar context, I'll take the real fake over the fake real any day.

Finally, the Musician walks out, with Edie following in tears. "What the hell was that?" she asks. "He's my friend."

"Baby, your friend is a bloodsucker," the Musician answers, though I suspect "cocksucker" was the word he was looking for.

It's all downhill from there. Edie makes the mistake of going back to Andy, but soon she's been passed over for the next Factory Superstar, and then she does a lot of drugs, moves to California, gets clean, and then suddenly ODs and dies, and let that be a lesson to you: The Evil Fag destroys women. The last we hear from the Musician, he's instructing his manager to help Edie out with some cash. The last thing Warhol says is "I never really knew her," and if you think that makes him sound like Judas, you're getting the idea.

Watching Factory Girl is like sitting through some risible remake of Laura, the great '40s noir that brought Clifton Webb, in the role of Waldo Lydecker, hissing and drawling opposite Gene Tierney, until she's rescued by Dana Andrews. The difference, of course, is that 1944 is not 2007; that Webb attacks his role with such energy and élan that one can't help but root for him; and that Lydecker is not, after all, a real person.

PAGE: 12 NEXT »

How Factory Girl insults Andy Warhol. - By Jim Lewis - Slate Magazine

Radio 4 loses its voice | Dt Leaders | Opinion | Telegraph

2007-02-10T10:35:00.000Z

The reason that listeners mind so much about the changed tone of Radio 4 is that they love the network so. As Gillian Reynolds notes, nothing else on radio or television manages so often to please, surprise and enlighten.

Of course we are annoyed when news programmes turn into promotions for other BBC products, and those of us who follow The Archers are perfectly capable of detecting when our suspension of disbelief is being manipulated to introduce sensationalism intended to boost ratings.

Pet hates, readers tell us by letter and online via Your Voice, may be Fi Glover's archness, the painful assumed matiness of Veg Talk or the sagging facetiousness of Broadcasting House, but if an overall factor is to be found for the decline of Radio 4, it might be called its change of voice.

If, as many loyal listeners do, you like to listen to Radio 4 as you go about your daily life at home or in the car, then it is fatal to your happiness to be talked at by someone who seems not to share your interests. The unpopularity of Radio 4 under a previous controller, James Boyle, may be traced to his making listeners feel the network was his, not their, property.

Radio might seem like one-way communication. But to find a response in the hearts of listeners it must aspire to conversation, an art proper to civilisation. If interviewing guests, on Desert Island Discs or PM, should entail listening as well as questioning, so communicating with listeners requires a voice that connects – not that of a brash sports reporter, a tinny disc jockey or a self-obsessed chat-show host.
Voice means more than the noise coming out of the radio. It includes the habit of thought in the group culture of the broadcasters. Attitudes that alienate are brilliantly parodied in Radio 4's own satire, Down the Line. For listeners who do not want to leave the network they love, a more welcome voice must be found.

Radio 4 loses its voice Dt Leaders Opinion Telegraph

Hillary the Pol ...

2007-02-09T10:59:00.000Z

Hillary Rodham Clinton has navigated difficult territory as Bill Clinton’s full partner, and throughout her career she has shown a remarkable resiliency and a willingness to reposition herself as many times as necessary to get the job done—her way.

During the early months of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s activities on behalf of health-care reform, she took Capitol Hill by storm. Describing a meeting she held with the Senate Finance Committee—a group that will be critical to the passage of any health-care legislation—Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., the committee’s chief of staff, told me, “Mrs. Clinton came into that room, and she opened the discussion at about four-twenty-five in the afternoon. We were about eighteen minutes into it when she stopped—I remember, I looked at the clock. And what I had just heard were the most perfectly composed, perfectly punctuated sentences, growing into paragraphs, in the most perfect, fluid presentation about what our problems in this field were and what we could do about them.” He added, “And then she held her position in the face of questioning by these senators around the table, many of whom know a great deal about the subject. And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair.”

There were some people, as there had been in Arkansas over the years, who found her presence so compelling that her husband’s seemed to pale by comparison. Senator Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, who became one of her most ardent advocates on health-care legislation, has described an issues conference for Democratic senators held in Jamestown, Virginia, in April, 1993, at which Hillary Clinton; Ira Magaziner, the director of the health-care task force; and Judith Feder, a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services and the head of the task force’s working groups, were to address the senators during the day. “We thought that Ira and Judy would be the primary speakers, and the First Lady would be there to fill the stature gap and impress the senators with the importance of the proposal,” Daschle recalled. “Well, Ira and Judy got lost coming down. And the First Lady said, ‘I don’t know that we have to wait. Let’s get started.’ She had no notes—Ira and Judy had all the materials. And she spoke with such eloquence and conviction and knowledge of the subject. That night, the President spoke. But at least half the senators who were there indicated that it was that morning, when Mrs. Clinton spoke, that was the highlight of the weekend.”

Bedazzled as many in Congress were by the force of her intellect, so evident in these presentations, it was hardly an unknown quantity: her reputation as a formidable lawyer with a first-rate analytical mind had preceded her. What was unexpected, in those early months of her tenure as First Lady, was her sallying forth with the instincts and tactics of a seasoned politician. A person who observed her relations with Congress has since said, “There was a skepticism on the Hill about her role”—as head of the health-care initiative. “Was she a dilettante, not really willing to dirty her hands? But, as it turned out, she was willing to travel to people’s districts, willing to call their favorite radio reporters. She is substantively driven—but she was also engaged in courting, incessantly. . . . A lot of people were surprised that she was working this issue the way someone would who was not the First Lady.” This person added, “The First Lady is a pol.”

Her courtship of members of Congress was no less successful for being so overtly orchestrated. She called on many members in their offices, frequently bringing along a photographer, who would snap pictures of her not only with the senator or representative but with the receptionist and other staff people; several days later, autographed photographs would arrive. (After I attended an event where I shook hands with Hillary, in the course of researching this article, I, too, was sent an autographed photograph.) A member of one representative’s staff remarked to me, “All these egomaniacs—the notion that the First Lady would come to their office! And these were more than courtesy calls. They were so scripted and focussed she could have been working for the C.I.A. These were intelligence-gathering meetings, not chitchat. When she visited my boss, the visit was scheduled for a half hour and she spent an hour and a half. They talked about health care, his home state, kids—everything. She was trying to figure out what these people were about.” And by September, when she went to the Hill to testify at hearings of five different Senate and House committees, this aide added, “she basically had a dossier on everyone, so she could incorporate into her responses something about a member’s personal background.”

When J. J. (Jake) Pickle, a representative from Texas who sits on the House Ways and Means and Joint Taxation Committees, announced that he was going to retire, Hillary was one of the first people in Washington to call him, “thanking him for his service, telling him how much she was looking forward to working with him through ’94,” one person said. Representative John Dingell, of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revered his father, a representative who had introduced health-care legislation in 1943 and then fought to keep it alive for more than a decade; Dingell himself has introduced similar legislation in every Congress since 1955, when he succeeded his father in the House. In early June of 1993, as Dingell was taking call-in questions on a Detroit radio station, he suddenly found Hillary on the line. “She was calling in to say, ‘Happy Anniversary on your dad’s bill—it’s taken fifty years and we are going to try to pass it,’ ” an aide to Dingell recalled. “And after her father died she wrote him a letter—something very personal, about how she thought of him and his father. He was very touched by it.” Then, when she testified before Dingell’s committee during her public congressional début, in September, she began by invoking the memory of Dingell’s father and the legislation he had urged so tenaciously.

That début—a marathon of back-to-back appearances before five committees—was widely perceived as virtuoso. Referring in general to her appearances to promote health care, of which her congressional testimony was the most sustained and dramatic, Representative Pat Williams, of Montana, said, “We were embarrassed by our surprise, but we were surprised—that in a city that relies on staff and note cards she could travel alone and speak with no notes.”

To those who knew her well, however, the feat seemed characteristic. Always the industrious student, she had immersed herself in the arcana of health care for nine months; she knew her subject cold. And she knew all her questioners. In a speech earlier in September she had noted that as of that date she had met more than a hundred and thirty times with members of Congress to talk about health care, and with more than eleven hundred assorted groups.

The risk that Hillary Clinton faced in her performance was not that she would stumble on her facts or be caught short. It was, rather, a risk that she had been mindful of during her past decade of public life: that her acumen and high competence, unadorned, would narrow her public appeal, and alienate the more retrograde; and also that her steeliness, if it were to show through, would alienate many more. As an antidote, she chose to strike a warmer, softer chord in her opening. It was a chord that she had struck very deliberately during the Presidential campaign, and, for that matter, a chord that President Clinton himself struck, in the first of two recent interviews with me, when, after saying that people mistake her for “this sort of superstrong, brilliant person who seems to be almost mechanical in her power and strength and all that,” he declared, “There’s that whole other more vulnerable, more human side of her.” At the first congressional committee before which she testified, the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Hillary began by saying, “The official reason I am here today is because I have had that responsibility”—for health-care reform. “But more importantly for me, I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.”

Several months ago, before the Whitewater investigation and revelations about Hillary Clinton’s commodities trading had begun to dog her, Betsey Wright, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff for many years when he was governor, and remains close to the Clintons, told me, “Hillary is happier now than she’s ever been. She liked practicing corporate law, but she was doing it because she, as the breadwinner, had to do it. Now she gets to do her first love, full time.”

The detour from that “first love”—effecting public policy—which Hillary Rodham took when she moved to Arkansas and subsequently married Bill Clinton surprised some people who knew her and had believed that her aim was to achieve political power on her own, for Hillary Rodham was a strikingly intelligent, notably self-confident and self-contained young woman, about whom there was no suggestion of an adjunct, and her political ambition was plain. Her directedness is what fellow-students recall as having been her most distinguishing characteristic at Wellesley (where she was president of the student government) and, later, at Yale Law School. A classmate of Hillary’s at Wellesley told me, “She was so ambitious. She already knew the value of networking, of starting a Rolodex, even back then. She cultivated relationships with teachers and administrators even more than with students. While she was respected across the board, and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular. She was a little too intimidating for that.” She was marked then, too, by the political pragmatism that has since become famous. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students on campus were threatening a hunger strike if the Wellesley administration did not address their demands. It was the kind of situation in which, as a classmate recalled, “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus. She coöpted the real protest by creating the academic one—which, looking back on it, I think was a mature thing to do. In any event, she was never truly left. Very much a moderate, very much a facilitator.”

At Yale, Hillary Rodham’s progression toward a political career seemed to be continuing apace. One of her women classmates told me, “Most of my friends and I were always agonizing, filled with self-doubt—you know, ‘Why are we here? What are we doing?’ Hillary had no self-doubt. She knew she wanted to be politically influential and prominent. She wanted recognition. And she was there because Yale was the kind of law school where you would think about social policy. That year showed her to be a natural politician. She had a natural charismatic quality—people loved to be around her. She liked studying in groups, organizing social events—and the people around her felt that that was where the action was.” She was also unmoved by much of what was eddying about her, in that tumultuous period of the early seventies. “She did nothing to excess,” this classmate told me. “She didn’t do drugs. She was too cautious, and would never take such a risk. She took no joy in the illicit. The forbidden held no fascination for her—she lacked any self-damaging impulse.” That Hillary Rodham conducted herself in such a no-nonsense—even exemplary—way may have been due mainly to an innate conservatism; but this woman believed at the time that Hillary was also conducting herself as she did with an eye to her political future. “In the years since, she has dissembled about her own ambition,” this woman continued, “but at Yale Law School she did not dissemble about her desire to be an important political figure.”

It was at Yale, of course, that she met Bill Clinton. Classmates recall him as refreshingly candid about his national political ambitions. While he may not have discussed, specifically, a desire to be President, it was not an idea that would have seemed outlandish to his closest friends in Arkansas; a high-school classmate said that whenever she sent Clinton a card she tried to find one bearing a picture of the White House. A friend of Hillary’s commented, “The fact that Bill knew he was going to run for political office was very attractive to Hillary.”

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton made a powerful combination. People who knew both of them at that time say that the two were plainly crazy about each other, and each saw in the other a partner for the political future. Betsey Wright says, “They both passionately share the sense that they’re supposed to make a difference in this world—and they had that before they met each other.” Some of their friends, however, have commented that Hillary (for all her pragmatism) seemed more messianic than Bill; a friend who knew them in law school says, “With Bill, you felt he just wanted to be President, whereas Hillary was really animated by her sense of what was right. She had this religious zeal.”

Over the years, such an exceptional pair inevitably evoked comparisons between them, and debate about which of them was the brighter. “They both have an extra computer in their brains,” Betsey Wright declared. While it became the fashion later for those who knew the two only casually to say that Hillary was smarter, that was not the prevailing view among their closer associates. Ellen Brantley, who knew Hillary slightly at Wellesley and later as a fellow faculty member at the University of Arkansas School of Law, in Fayetteville, and then in Little Rock as a fellow-attorney, and who was appointed a state judge by Bill Clinton, said of Hillary, “She is clearly highly intelligent, and has succeeded, in part, through the practical application of her intelligence. She is very articulate, very good at communicating her intelligence. I don’t think she is smarter than Bill, though some people will say that. If they were in the same class, she would attend all the classes, read all the assignments, outline her notes, study hard for the exam. Bill would stop by some of the classes, read a couple of the assignments while also reading other, related things, and then write an exam that brought in some ideas that had been introduced in class, some outside—linking them in a very original way. And they’d both get an A.”

In choosing to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham was surrendering, at least for the time being, any autonomous route to political power. It was a decision about which she may have retained some ambivalence; one friend recalled her commenting, in the eighties, “Someone from my youth group called and said, ‘It’s great that you’re a governor’s wife—but we thought you would be governor.’ ” And at the time, Betsey Wright told me, she was disappointed at what she viewed as Hillary’s abdication of her own political calling. Wright, who met Hillary and Bill when they came to Texas to work on the McGovern campaign, in 1972, founded an organization to recruit and train women to run for political office and to fund their candidacies, and she was mightily impressed by Hillary. “I’m almost a student of strong women leaders. And she was so unusual, even in that cadre,” Wright said. But what Hillary saw, Wright continued, was that Bill Clinton could be President—she “saw that in him when I first met them.” She added, “I’m not saying that’s why she married him—but it was something she saw. And she’s always seen she could have political power with him—just not elected. It was my shortsightedness that I felt when she married him that she was giving up her chance for political power.”

Hillary Rodham worked for about eight months on the impeachment-inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee investigating President Richard Nixon—an extraordinary assignment for a young lawyer—before the move to Arkansas. She was just in time to help Clinton in his ultimately futile campaign for a congressional seat, challenging a popular incumbent. Political campaigns seem to have always been a natural medium for her. In 1972, when she and Clinton went to Texas to campaign for McGovern, she had made a powerful impression on Sara Ehrman, now at the Democratic National Committee. “I remember her as this skinny kid from Yale, wearing brown corduroys and a brown shirt, very earnest and very tough,” Ehrman told me. “In the ambience of San Antonio, nobody got to the point for the first three hours, and she got to the point in the first two minutes. . . ‘Where’s the Anglo vote? Where’s the Hispanic vote? Where’s the liberal vote?’ She was no novice in any respect.”

Many of Bill Clinton’s friends at that time have recalled that their expectations of Hillary were very high, because Clinton had talked about her volubly, with great intensity and deep admiration, for some time before her arrival. Those friends say that they were not disappointed. Rudy Moore, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff in his first term as governor, says of his first impression of Hillary Rodham, “She had done interesting things at an early age—especially, working for the House Judiciary Committee. And she was very confident. She never projected herself as anything other than your equal—male or female.”
Carolyn Staley, who had become a friend of Clinton’s in high school, told me that Hillary represented a break with Clinton’s past as far as women were concerned. “He was everybody’s flame. He had girls everywhere he went—a new girl every weekend.” Staley has remained close to Clinton, and today she considers him her best friend. “I think he fell in love with her mind, and her confidence,” she said of Hillary. “All the other girls fawned on him. But Hillary’s attitude was: I don’t need you. She was going to lead her life. She never drew her identity from him. I remember Virginia”—Virginia Kelley, Clinton’s mother—“saying about Hillary, after she met her, ‘Bill, she’s so different.’ You know, Bill had always had beauty queens. And he said, ‘Look, Ma, I have work to do. I don’t need to be married to a sex goddess.’ ”
During my first conversation with President Clinton, in the Oval Office, the President—a man whose ruddiness and startlingly blue eyes make for a vivid physical presence—disputed the notion that girls had “fawned” on him, and stressed that he had had girlfriends before Hillary who were also bright, independent young women. About Hillary, however, he said, “I just liked— I liked being around her, because I thought I’d never be bored being with her. In the beginning, I used to tell her that I would like being old with her. That I thought that was an important thing—to be with someone you thought you’d always love being old with.”

Hillary the Pol by Connie Bruck continues >>
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The New Yorker : archive : content

The future of television | What's on next | Economist.com

2007-02-08T19:11:00.000Z

BOSSES in the television industry have been keeping a nervous eye on two Scandinavians with a reputation for causing trouble. In recent years Niklas Zennström, a Swede, and Janus Friis, a Dane, have frightened the music industry by inventing KaZaA, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it. Then they horrified the mighty telecoms industry by inventing Skype, another P2P program, which lets internet users make free telephone calls between computers, and very cheap calls to ordinary phones. (The duo sold Skype to eBay, an internet-auction giant, for $2.6 billion in 2005.) Their next move was to found yet another start-up—this time, one that threatened to devastate the television industry.

It may do the opposite, as it turns out. The new service, called Joost and now in advanced testing, is based on P2P software that runs on people's computers, just like Skype and KaZaA. And it does indeed promise to transform the experience of watching television by combining what people like about old-fashioned TV with the exciting possibilities of the internet. But unlike KaZaA and Skype, says Fredrik de Wahl, a Swede whom Messrs Zennström and Friis have hired as Joost's boss, Joost does not “disrupt” the industry that it is entering. Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, he says, Joost might, as it were, give them new juice.

Joost is also ignoring the two business models seen as the most respectable alternatives to advertising. One is to make users pay for each television show or film they download, but then to let them keep it. This is the tack chosen by Apple, an electronics firm that sells videos on iTunes, its popular online store; by Amazon, the largest online retailer; and by Wal-Mart, the largest traditional retailer, which launched a video-download service this week. The other approach is to let users subscribe to what is, in effect, an all-you-can-eat buffet of videos, and then to “stream” video to their computers without leaving a permanent copy. This is the approach taken by, for instance, Netflix, a Californian firm that mostly delivers DVDs to its subscribers by post, but now also streams films.

The reason that Joost is ignoring all of these methods, says Mr de Wahl, is that none has much to do with the experience of simply watching TV, which most people enjoy. Unlike the download or streaming approaches, he says, “TV is not about buying today what you want to watch tomorrow, it's about turning it on and watching.” And in contrast to the “lean-forward” context of “snacking” on a YouTube clip in one's cubicle while the boss has stepped out, TV is a longer and more relaxed “lean-backward” experience.

Hence Joost's most shocking innovation, which is not to change the practices that TV adopted decades ago. It will be free, with advertising breaks—no more than three minutes per hour—either before, during or after a show, depending on the market. Americans, says Mr de Wahl, are more tolerant of interruptions.

Joost has “channels”, like ordinary TV, but these are now playlists of videos that start whenever it is convenient to the viewer. Viewers can import their instant-messaging buddy lists and chat online with friends while watching the same programme. For advertisers, such engagement is worth something, because the activity proves that somebody is watching, rather than being asleep or out of the room. Combined with other information, such as the computer's IP address and hence its location, advertisers will be able to target their spots much more accurately—all “Desperate Housewives” fans in a particular neighbourhood, for example—and thus ought to pay a premium.

The thing that is missing in this new vision of television, however, is the set itself. Beaming video from a computer to a television is possible: Apple and other firms are starting to sell the necessary gadgets. But until it becomes much easier to connect televisions to the internet, big media companies are likely to “wait and see” before committing to Joost, says Jeremy Allaire, the boss of Brightcove, a rival internet-video firm based in Massachusetts. In the meantime, thinks Mr Allaire, media firms are mainly interested in building their own brands, so Brightcove provides content owners with technology to show television on their own websites, syndicate their shows to other websites, track audiences and collect advertising revenue.

There is, in short, no consensus about the best way to combine television with the internet. Instead, there are a variety of experiments, of which Joost is the latest example and YouTube the best-known. But as with telephony, the internet is unpicking service delivery from network ownership. Joost, YouTube, iTunes and Netflix do not need their own networks to supply their video services: they can piggyback on fast internet links provided by others.

According to iSuppli, a market-research firm, internet downloads will claim more than one-third of the market for on-demand video by 2010 (see chart). So just as internet telephony has been bad for traditional phone companies, this “internet bypass” could be bad for the “on demand” video services being offered by cable-TV and telecoms firms over their networks. But by bringing television to more screens in more social contexts, all this could provide new models for programme-makers to finance their productions and offer advertisers new ways to reach consumers. And so Joost and rival services could end up rejuvenating the 75-year-old medium.

The future of television What's on next Economist.com

Astronaut Charged With Attempted Murder - New York Times

2007-02-07T10:48:00.000Z

If you ever doubted the potentially corrosive, disruptive and ultimately destructive nature of love when it becomes an obsession, read on ...

--

The police in Orlando, Fla., filed attempted murder charges today against Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, a NASA astronaut who the authorities say attacked a rival for another astronaut’s affection at Orlando International Airport on Monday after driving more than 900 miles from Houston to meet her flight.

Lisa Nowak, 43, drove hundreds of miles to confront a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut, Bill Oefelein, according to police.

Captain Nowak, a Navy captain who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, was originally arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges, and a judge initially set a $15,500 bond at a court session this morning.

But this afternoon, the police filed the new charges against her, saying they had evidence that Captain Nowak intended ”to do serious bodily injury or death” to Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force, because she considered Captain Shipman to be a rival in her romance with a fellow NASA astronaut, Cmdr. Bill Oefelein.

When the police arrested Captain Nowak, they found in her possession a steel mallet, a buck knife with a four-inch blade, a BB gun and a map to Captain Shipman’s house, they said.

Captain Nowak’s lawyer argued this afternoon that prosecutors and the police did not have enough evidence to back up the more severe charges, but were only trying to persuade the judge to order Captain Nowak to remain in custody.

The judge increased the bond for Captain Nowak by an additional $10,000, which would still allow her to go free pending her trial. But the judge said Captain Nowak would have to wear an electronic tracking device and ordered her to stay away from the woman she is accused of trying to harm, Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force.

According to the police, Captain Nowak drove more than 950 miles from Houston to Orlando to meet with Captain Shipman, who was flying from Houston to her home in the Orlando area at the same time — because she wanted to confront Captain Shipman after discovering that she too was involved with Commander Oefelein.

Captain Nowak, 43, was wearing a trench coat and wig when she was arrested early Monday morning. She told the police she had worn diapers on the journey so that she would not have to stop to use the restroom so she could arrive in time to meet Captain Shipman’s flight at the airport. The police also found a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, a police affidavit said.
In the morning court session, Captain Nowak mostly kept her head down during her preliminary appearance. But she nodded and said “yes” a few times when the judge explained that she was not to have any contact with Captain Shipman. Captain Nowak and Commander Oefelein are listed on the NASA Web site among the 97 active duty astronauts.

A NASA official told the court today that before the incident, the two women did not know each other. A biography of Captain Nowak on the NASA Web site says that she is married with three children. Captain Shipman is an engineer assigned to the 45th Launch Support Squadron at Patrick Air Force base near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, base officials said.

Captain Nowak’s superior at NASA, Steve Lindsey, and a fellow astronaut, Chris Ferguson, both appeared on in court this morning on her behalf. The men flew to Orlando, they told reporters, to support Captain Nowak and as representatives of NASA.

"We’re here supporting Lisa,” said Colonel Lindsey, who said he has known her for 11 years. “Our primary focus is her health and well-being and taking care of her and keeping her safe and getting her with her family so they can deal with this very private and difficult matter.”

Television stations juxtaposed Captain Nowak’s official NASA photo, showing her smiling broadly in an orange flight suit, with a mug shot showing her looking wan and disheveled, with a furrowed brow and her hair splayed in all directions.

Captain Nowak, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy who also had a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, operated a robotic arm during the shuttle mission last July. She had been scheduled to work at the Johnson Space Center on the planned Atlantis mission next month, relaying messages to the shuttle crew.

Stephanie Schierholz, a NASA spokeswoman, said today that Captain Nowak’s status at NASA was placed under review following her arrest.

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Astronaut Charged With Attempted Murder - New York Times

The Hair - first single out soon and latest tour news ...

2007-02-06T19:24:00.000Z

Yes, I am unashamedly once again plugging these lads because they're great - their music is a combination of XTC, Kaiser Chiefs, The Cure with a bit of Andy Warhol and Depeche Mode for good measure - and no, I am not at all bitter that this is what I should have been doing at their ages(!). Good luck, lads! See you at a gig soon - I'll be the old bugger in the corner ;-)

http://www.hairmusic.co.uk/
www.myspace.com/thehair

SEE THE GIG ABOVE? GO!!! IT'S OUR SINGLE LAUNCH IN LEEDS!!!!

http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_northeast&query=detail&event=191524
THAT BE THE TICKET LINK, BUY ONE...GO ON! IT'S BACKED BY MUSIC WEEK (BIG MUSIC INDUSTRY MAG) SO THEY HAD TO PICK THE BEST UNSIGNED BANDS...EVER!!!! For £3.50!!! CHEAP!

Like... www.myspace.com/middlemanpop, www.myspace.com/mothervulpine, www.myspace.com/thefeeliesuk ...oh and us????

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Listening to Aretha Franklin while writing this makes my feminine side feal empowered. It's mint! That's right sister!

Anyway, we've got a video!!! We've done a couple and the 1st is finished. It was filmed for the sounds of leeds documentary soon to be released across the nation...check it out, we had a pool room, 2 hrs, a drummer working away, but lots of fun...and a camera man with a mint laugh (listen to the end).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVvmkDxRHpo

Share that link around if you like it, and if you're on you tube don't forget to rate us. Cause we have massive egos that need boosting, and I get tired of conventional methods like looking at my guns in the mirror all day. Though Billy bicep has never let me down so far...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We're coming to London again next week! Club Fandango at Dublin castle. And there is a special homecoming gig in York...hope you got your grills ready...some real ham and eggs for ya...
Fibbers, York on 23rd Feb... The:Hair + Dead Rebellion (former black night crash - remember them? aaace) + Royal Vendetta (former Xenith Sound). PLUS!!! Up the rackets club night till 2am! All for around £4???? TOO RIGHT! No tickets so be there early.

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We're touring a little in Feb, already did a gig in Sheffield, I Djed...note to self: Rock the Casbah = Popular on dance floor, F.E.A.R by Ian Brown = not popular. Idiot.
We got reviewed by artrocker...check out the website/myspace.
Below are the gigs...and remember the single is out soon, so save up your hmv vouchers.

GIGS:
Tues 13th Feb: Club Fandango at Dublin Castle, Camden, London. On around 8:45-9pm.
Fri 16th Feb: The Whip + The Hair + Jakobarina, Club NME @ the Independent, Sunderland.
Sat 17th Feb: The Hair + The Early Years + more @ New Levels, Night and Day Cafe Manchester. SUNSHINE UNDERGROUND DJing as part of NME NEW RAVE TOUR AFTERPARTY.
Fri 23rd Feb: The Hair + Dead Rebellion + Royal Vendetta, Fibbers, York. Onstage 9ish-pm!!! Club night after!
Sun 25th Feb: The Luminaire, Kilburn, London. Supporting Thunderbirds are Now. On early doors!
Tues 6th Mar: Single Launch at the Faversham! With Middleman, Mother Vulpine + The Feelies.
Tues 13th Mar: Single Launch at the Old Blue Last, Great Eastern Street, E2, London. FREE ENTRY. With Lupen Crook.

IF YOU DON'T WANT ANYMORE MAILOUTS REPLY TO THIS WITH THE MESSAGE - "FEMININE SIDE? YOU'RE FOOLING YOURSELF MATE, THOSE ARE JUST MAN BREASTS. LAY OFF THE NACHOS AND START ACTING LIKE A BLOKE....OH AND UNSUBSCRIBE ME PLEASE."

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

2007-02-06T14:38:00.000Z

It stands to reason that distance is dead. Electronic communication is better and cheaper than it's ever been. Sitting on the sofa just now, I used a cheap laptop computer and my neighbor's wireless network and ordered a free quad-band mobile phone that—I am told—will let me make calls and send e-mails from almost anywhere in the world.

More to the point, nobody would be remotely impressed with my phone's features. Virtual worlds, BlackBerrys, video-conferencing from the local Starbucks—it has all become so easy—and so commonplace—so quickly.

Intuitively, that should mean that geography has become less important. E-mail and video-conferencing mean fewer flights. No more business conferences or meetings at Davos. Telecommuters don't need to clog up the roads, and property prices in London and New York should slide as people carry out their investment-banking responsibilities from Yorkshire or Iowa.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's something wrong with this argument. Despite the ease of communication and the drop in the cost of transporting goods, geography seems to be as important as ever for most of us. People haven't stopped flying to meetings and conferences. The World Economic Forum meetings are now a round-the-calendar circus in more than 10 countries. New York is one of the few places in the United States where the real-estate market isn't stuttering.

So, what is happening? To some extent, the same thing that happened to the paperless office. It turned out that all these computers made it easy and cheap to produce a lot more documents. Yes, the documents could in principle have been viewed on-screen, but why not print them out?

Similarly, e-mail, Internet networking, and cheap phone calls have made it easy to maintain a lot of relationships. In principle, some of the relationships could be restricted to cyberspace, but how much fun is that? The same e-mail that allows you to maintain long-distance business relationships also creates demand for more travel and more conferences as people try to establish those relationships in the first place. Mobile phones, Web mail, and BlackBerrys also make travel less costly because it is easier to keep working on the move.

Closer to home, communication technology makes it easier than ever to arrange a drink with friends. Just send a quick e-mail to a distribution list or post the invitation on your online journal. This sudden spontaneity isn't much use if your friends are hundreds of miles away. Mobile phones, far from fueling a flight to the countryside, make big cities more attractive and more manageable. E-mail and mobile phones aren't substitutes for face-to-face contact at all. As economists Jess Gaspar and Ed Glaeser have pointed out, they are complements to it.

Other technological changes have also strengthened the importance of place. If you can buy cars or films or insurance from anywhere in the world, why not buy from the place that is host to the best or cheapest producer? Cities that were once nationally dominant can now become international champions. It suddenly becomes more valuable, not less valuable, to locate in New York or London.

The modern economy demands ever more complicated, fast-moving, innovative, and creative projects. Formal contracts just aren't up to the task of keeping us honest in these circumstances, which means you need to be able to trust your colleagues—something that still requires you to look them in the eyes. Face-to-face meetings have always fostered trust and clearer communication, and they still do. So, the conference circuit is likely to be with us for a while.

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

Wired News: IPod Will Be the New CD

2007-02-06T11:35:00.000Z

Big changes are afoot for the iPod in the wake of the Beatles settlement -- the iPod is about to become the new CD.

On Monday, Apple Inc. and the Beatles' Apple Corps announced that a 15-year legal spat over the "Apple" trademark had been settled in Steve Jobs' favor.

But the biggest news wasn't mentioned at all in the joint press release: The new contract clears the way for Jobs to sell iPods loaded with music.

Who cares?

Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists' catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40 -- the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Apple was prevented from doing this until now by the 15-year-old contract between Apple Corps, the Beatles' music company, and Apple Computer. This contract precluded Jobs' Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or "physical media delivering prerecorded content ... (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones' music)."

Apple has been selling music as downloads for years, of course, but thanks to this clause, the company couldn't sell an iPod with music already loaded onto it.

That's why the U2 special-edition iPod ships with a voucher for downloading the band's catalog online. The Beatles contract prevents Apple from pre-loading the U2 iPod with U2's music.

That is undoubtedly going to change. Apple will soon offer a range of iPods pre-loaded with tunes.
First up will likely be the widely rumored Beatles special-edition Yellow Submarine iPod, tipped to be released in just over a week on Valentine's Day.

Beatles fans are hoping that the Fab Four's entire catalog, currently being remastered, will be available in uncompressed format. What better way to deliver it than preloaded onto an iPod, instead of forcing fans to download gigabytes of data from iTunes?

Apple will also start loading sample tunes onto all new iPods, just like Microsoft's Zune currently does. This will be extra cash for Apple, and possibly quite lucrative -- the labels will pay to play. Getting a band's new single loaded onto a hot-selling iPod could prove so desirable that a new type of payola is born.

Then there will be all kinds of new limited-edition iPods, branded by artist, band or genre. Boxed sets are a natural: the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers iPod, the Motown iPod, the British Invasion iPod.
But most exciting, there may be a whole range of dirt-cheap iPod shuffles branded by artist, containing their new albums or portions of their catalogs. The biggest risk for Apple is excess inventory. What if the new Kevin Federline special edition bombs? But that's easily solved: Make the skin a peel-off and overdub leftovers when the next hot band comes along.

These cheap album iPods could be sold at bus stations and airports: instant music, no computer required. Bands could sell pre-loaded iPods at concerts, maybe containing the concert they just played. There could be Broadway show iPods, movie soundtrack iPods and iPods burned at retail stores with custom play lists.

It's going to be the biggest change to the iPod since the iTunes online store debuted in 2002.

Wired News: IPod Will Be the New CD

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | I hate Macs

2007-02-06T00:23:00.000Z

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I'm promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says Webb.

"And I'm a PC," adds Mitchell.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a "nasty virus" that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better". Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with "work stuff" (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at "fun stuff". How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at "fun stuff", my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course, that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like - unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

Guardian Unlimited Comment is free I hate Macs

Art.view | Auerbach’s hour | Economist.com

2007-02-05T15:39:00.000Z

“I HATE leaving my studio. I hate leaving Camden Town. I hate leaving London”. So speaks Frank Auerbach, a German-born artist who came to London from Berlin as a boy on the eve of the second world war, and whose parents died in the Holocaust. Mr Auerbach reckons he hasn’t spent more than four weeks away from his adopted home since he was seven.

So powerful is his attachment as a born-again Londoner that, not only does he hardly ever leave the capital, but for years he has restricted his painting to portraits of his wife and a handful of other sitters he knows well, and his landscapes to an area around his studio, a small triangle of north London framed by Camden Town, Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill.

Mr Auerbach's landscapes are rarer than his portraits. By coincidence, two of his finest, both the same size, and both painted in the same year, come up for sale next week―one at Sotheby’s and the other at Christie’s.

He creates the landscapes in his studio. “My first consideration on getting up in the morning, every day of my life, has always been about painting,” he has said. But he begins outside, making extensive drawings and studies as a prelude, less as an aide-memoire and more as a way of conducting an archaeology that is at once urban and physical as well as emotional.

In a 1986 Venice Biennale catalogue he said that embarking on a large painting “simply to make a record of … a decayed memory isn't sufficient. There has to be a conflict between what one wants and what actually exists.”

The process of putting down this conflict in paint can take many months. There is a constant cycle of scraping away and building up oils. The painting has to remain liquid to the end, which means repainting it entirely every session.

The London focus of Mr Auerbach's work meant that, for a long time, he had a reputation for being a British painter bought mainly by British collectors. In fact, his paintings were bought by more than 20 public collections as far afield as Mexico, America and Israel, as well as by countless private buyers. But his prices remained well below those of artists of similar stature but with more international reputations, such as Gerhard Richter, a fellow German.

The past year has seen a considerable change. In February 2006 Christie’s sold a collection of contemporary paintings belonging to Valerie Beston. “Miss Beston”, as she was always known, worked all her life for Marlborough Fine Art, a London gallery, where she befriended a number of leading post-war artists including Francis Bacon and Mr Auerbach, and even delivered fresh paints to their studios when they couldn’t afford to buy them. Her “Tree on Primrose Hill”, a small landscape barely 40 centimetres square, sold for £400,000, a world record for an Auerbach by a large factor.

That outcome persuaded another pair of collectors to sell. Two Americans approached Christie’s and Sotheby’s with “To The Studios II”, a large landscape painted in 1977-78, which their father had bought from Marlborough Fine Art in 1981. The two auction houses proposed remarkably similar marketing campaigns: a slot in a prestigious evening sale during the February high season; reproduction in the inside back cover of the auction catalogue; a tour of the painting to New York during the November 2006 sales season and later to Palm Beach; and advertising in Art & Auction magazine.

It was the financing that decided the contest in the end. Christie’s won the mandate by putting an estimate of £800,000-£1.2m on the painting, and offering the vendors a guarantee reportedly of £1m whether the picture sold or not.

Sotheby’s felt it could not compete. Then, quite by coincidence, a European collector living in London, a Sotheby’s client of long standing, offered the auction house another large Auerbach landscape from the same period, “Camden Theatre in the Rain” (shown left). Sotheby’s agreed a far more conservative estimate of £500,000-£700,000, with no guarantee.

In the catalogue, the two pictures look very similar in quality. But on the wall they are quite different. In “To The Studios II”, the viewer’s eye concentrates entirely on the left side of the painting, where a figure, visibly female, though made so with only three or four brushstrokes, is walking down some steps. The sky above is thin, and the right side of the painting hasn’t the same visual draw at all.

Of the two, “Camden Theatre in the Rain”, which will be sold first, is the masterpiece. The Ionic columns of the theatre and its large copper dome, filling the left side, are finely balanced by the crimson circle of the Tube sign on the right. Across the intervening sky Mr Auerbach has painted sheets of diagonal rain, the winter kind that hits you right on the ankle, fills your shoes and makes you long, unlike this artist, to flee the city in search of sun.

Mr Auerbach is likely to see another world record struck next week for his work. But even a price of £1m will one day seem a bargain.

“Camden Theatre in the Rain” will be auctioned in Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in London on February 7th; “To The Studios II” is in Christie’s sale the following evening.

Art.view Auerbach’s hour Economist.com