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
Saturday, 12 May 2007
Sunday, 6 May 2007
Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One | Tv And Radio | Arts | Telegraph
Talking of Great British comedians ...
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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
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
"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
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
Saturday, 28 April 2007
This Is (Was) England ...
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
shanemeadows.co.uk
The Virginia Tech Shootings: The New Yorker
A very disturbing and challenging subject, discussed in a very sensitive, poignant and intelligent manner, as one would expect of The New Yorker.
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
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
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Arctic Monkeys - welcome back, lads ...
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
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
Saturday, 21 April 2007
Sex and the internet | Devices and desires | Economist.com
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).
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
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
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