TV: from the sublime to the ridiculous, by JD

Over the weekend I watched two very contrasting TV programmes on BBC.

The first, on Saturday, was the City of Glasgow honouring Billy Connolly with three portraits for his 75th birthday. Paintings by John Byrne and Jack Vettriano plus a photograph taken by Rachel MacLean.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0535lq5/billy-connolly-portrait-of-a-lifetime

And here are the three portraits-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39947883

Byrne's painting is very good, as one would expect from him. The Vettriano is painted from a photograph (a still from a video in fact) as are all Vettriano's paintings which is why they are all superficial in appearance. MacLean's photograph was a wonderful tribute to the man. Connolly loved all three of them, the generous gentleman that he is.

It was a genuinely 'magical' hour especially when he was with his old friend the painter John Byrne. 

And then there was this programme about Silicon Valley last night:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0916ghz/secrets-of-silicon-valley-series-1-1-the-disruptors

These millionaire 'bright sparks' are seriously insane even the one who has run away to hide from the world in the Canadian wilderness. Biggest worry is they all think they are saving the world and building a better future, a phrase they trotted out quite regularly. 

The most seriously deranged, to me, was the one who allocated his time very precisely and allowed 35 minutes and no more for his interview with the man from the Beeb. I think I would have asked him rather more difficult questions. He said that work was what people did to earn enough to live and 'have fun'. Such shallow thinking is the opposite of what I tried to outline in my post "What is the purpose of work?" Or perhaps I am the one who is deranged?

The 'runaway' in the Canadian wilderness would have been funny if it were not so tragic. He is there only because our entire civilization created the means to allow him to escape: he didn't build his 4x4 vehicle, he didn't dig the ore nor smelt it nor build the machine tools which created the ammunition he was so proud of - "This will be the currency of the future" he declared. What happens when his 4x4 breaks down? Can he get it going again? What happens when he runs out of ammunition? You could think up countless examples of how other people's creativity and endeavours had given him the means by which he is able to run away from the world he has helped to create and of which he is so frightened.

The most significant thing, in my view, was they are all dodging their tax obligations there at home just as they do in the rest of the world. So it is really just good old-fashioned self-enrichment by lots of snake oil salesmen and some of their business models look suspiciously like 'Ponzi' schemes even better than the derivative trading scams or of Enron!!

Strange world we live in: the benign and the loonies all mixed in together.

The Cowley Dump, by Wiggia

I had the pleasure of visiting the Paul Nash exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich on the UEA campus. I have visited before for other exhibitions but this was a bit hurried as the exhibition closes on the 20^th of August and a couple of “promises” to go did not materialise.

Nash of course is renowned for his work in the First World War after he fought on the Western Front and the impact it had on him which he translated into his paintings.

Between the wars his work changed direction into the fantastical world and surrealism in many cases using the landscape as a backdrop to his visions.

At the start of the Second World War he was employed as the official artist attached to the RAF and produced a series of paintings of aircraft depicted as aerial creatures in animated positions ready for action, and then a series of crashed enemy aircraft.

But the interesting painting was his most famous Second World War work "Totes Meer" (German for “Dead Sea”), painted in 1941.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N05/N05717_10.jpg

The work was a version by Nash of the Cowley dump, not one of the most obvious by products of war but a necessary place for the disposal of crashed enemy aircraft. It also contained as much British material but Nash focused on the German. It's a place I had not heard of before and not the only one of its kind in the UK, but it is the one immortalised in the painting.

It was of course on the site of the motor works, much of which had been turned over for the manufacturing of aircraft, and the salvage yard was a valuable resource of materials for refurbishment cannibalisation and reuse of valuable metals at this time of shortage.

The painting was done shortly after the Battle of Britain and this is what Nash said of his work.

'The thing (the salvage dump) looked to me, suddenly, like a great inundating sea. You might feel – under certain circumstances – a moonlight night, for instance, this is a vast tide moving across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no, nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead. It is metal piled up, wreckage. It is hundreds and hundreds of flying creatures which invaded these shores (how many Nazi planes have been shot down or otherwise wrecked in this country since they first invaded?). Well, here they are, or some of them. By moonlight, the waning moon, one could swear they began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air. A sort of rigor mortis? No, they are quite dead and still. The only moving creature is the white owl flying low over the bodies of the other predatory creatures, raking the shadows for rats and voles. She isn’t there, of course, as a symbol quite so much as the form and colour essential just there to link up with the cloud fringe overhead.'

And here is Nash himself sketching at the dump:

https://bbm.org.uk/airmen/Nash-Cowley1-opt.jpg 

What also comes out of this story is that it could be multiplied many times world wide during the war, showing the incredible production during the war effort, most of which ended up in places like this or the bottom of the sea.

So a fascinating snippet emerged from my morning of culture, that I would not otherwise have learnt about, time well spent.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/TGA/TGA-7050PH/TGA-7050PH-54-1_10.jpg

Google fires Dilbert

Being right isn't enough, you have to be Left.

James Damore, an engineer working at Google, has been fired for circulating a memorandum questioning his company's biases in monitoring and effectively legislating the opinions of its employees:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo

The workforce analyses are calibrated using something I've never heard of: "Googlegeist scores":

https://qz.com/97731/inside-googles-culture-of-relentless-self-surveying/

Interestingly (if you're nerdish), a Google search for this term this morning yielded 690 results, whereas Bing (which usually is far less helpful to me) showed 74,400:

Damore's sin was to suggest that generally, men are different from women and that this affects their work and lifestyle choices.

The memo is reproduced in full here:

http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/googles-ideological-echo-chamber/

- and here, updated with a statement from Google's VP in charge of "Diversity, Integrity & Governance":

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

I liked Google when it was an Internet directory, not a spy-cum-censor.

Someone - Chadwick Gibson - has used the Googlegeist term as his site title, in a project to look at Google looking at us:

http://googlegeist.com/

"Gibson’s series Mirrors Behind the Curtain reveals the self-censored workings of this all-seeing, all-knowing medium. The screenshots in this series are rare glimpses of Google’s elusive Street View camera, busy at work, virtualizing the interiors of different museums, castles, and institutions of power around the world. Unlike normal street view though, in which Google’s car and camera have been easily masked out, the museums’ and castles’ plethora of mirrors present a situation where Google cannot cover its tracks. These images are ambivalent portraits of the often invisible, panoptic power of Google’s observation."

Language, evolution and social class

It’s interesting how social stratification encourages people lower down in the scale not only to mock the accents of their superiors but to adopt them, with the result that in some cases the ‘refined’ version has become the standard for all:

From W G Elliot’s “In My Anecdotage” (1925)

Page 233:

Let me confess, there is one sort of person who is about still - though there were more before 1914 - whom I cannot bear. We all know the Cockney accent is hideous, and the Glasgow accent still worse, but the accent of some of the swagger and fashionable people takes the cake. They speak thus - men and women alike : “Shall we lunch heah or theah, were they have some first-class beah ? Heah ? - good - heah, heah !” This horrible accent is supposed to be a sign of one who “goes the pace” and consists, as I have shown, in turning word such as “here” into much the same pronunciation as “dear” or “Leah.”

Page 242:

I wonder if any of my readers have ever noticed that when two common people meet and one of them recounts a conversation of his with a “toff” he always reproduces the “toff’s” tones thus: “Ai saye, old cheap,  can you tell me how Ai can get to Ba-aker Street?” I suppose that, to them, the voices of the upper classes all sound the same, full of false refinement and artificiality, like that of the “refined” lady at the Telephone Exchange who, if you ask for “549 Gerrard” almost invariably answers” “Gerard faive four naine.” I thought this disgusting pronunciation was quite modern, but on turning up an old book of Thackeray’s stories written in the ‘fifties, I found that that he makes a middle class lady say to one of her husband's old brother officers when he calls there: “I’ll ask my husband to put the ‘waine’ upon ‘aice.’” My idea is that in some remoter period Society people used to talk with these mannerisms of speech and that they are now the property of some of the middle and lower classes.

From Maurice Baring’s “The Puppet Show Of Memory” (1932)

Pages 58-59:

A picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, Lady Georgiana Grey, who came to Membland once in my childhood. She was old enough to have played the harp to Byron. She lived at Hampton Court and played whist every night of her life, and sometimes went up to London to the play when she was between eighty and ninety. She was not deaf, her sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people who were afraid of draughts. She had a fine aptitude for flat contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano for pianoforte, balcŏny for balcōni, cucumber for cowcumber, Montagu for Mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow.

My wife’s father (born in the early 1930s) would sometimes say “cowcumber” as a humorously self-conscious archaism. And her mother, as a child, would play “Chainies” with her friends, that is, dig up bits of old crockery and use them as imaginary Chinese tea-sets.

Samuel Pepys’s diary (25 September 1660) [http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/09/25/]:

“...afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before, and went away.”

I suspect ‘tee’ was then pronounced to rhyme with ‘say’, as in modern German, and among the Irish until recently in English as well as Gaelic [http://www.bitesize.irish/inirish/1259].

I wonder if some professor of old languages such as Anglo-Saxon, if sent back undercover in a time machine to the period of his study, would be instantly spotted as an interloper as soon as he opened his mouth.

"He's Got 'Em On": a literary ramble

In Jerome K Jerome's “Three Men In A Boat” (1889)^[1] there is a passage where the men get lost and are relieved when they hear someone playing a popular melody:

"I do not admire the tones of a concertina, as a rule; but, oh! how beautiful the music seemed to us both then — far, far more beautiful than the voice of Orpheus or the lute of Apollo, or anything of that sort could have sounded. Heavenly melody, in our then state of mind, would only have still further harrowed us. A soul-moving harmony, correctly performed, we should have taken as a spirit-warning, and have given up all hope. But about the strains of “He’s got ’em on,” jerked spasmodically, and with involuntary variations, out of a wheezy accordion, there was something singularly human and reassuring."

Intrigued by this, I attempted to find out more about the song. This proved more difficult than I had expected. Via Google and Google Images, I now know it's from the Beefsteak Club's 1878 "Forty Thieves" burlesque, originally performed at the Gaiety Theatre (see W G Elliot, "Amateur Clubs and Actors" [1898] Chap. 6)^[2] and (I think) re-staged there from 1880 onwards. An image of the front page of the song sheet is on the V&A website at 

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1274591/hes-got-em-on-sheet-music-spalding-william/ ...

- but I couldn't find the words or music.

However there is a reproduction of the same thing in "The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914" by Christopher Breward^[3], and there it says it's in the Bodleian's John Johnson collection under Entertainers and Music Hall Singers.

I emailed the Bodleian to ask for a copy/transcript of the lyrics and notation - and they replied the same day ! - but they only have the cover. I then use the V&A’s contact form and asked the same thing - silence, so far.

The  libretto of the Forty Thieves is still available^[4]. Written by Robert Reece,  W.S. Gilbert  (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and a couple of others, it was a highly successful production which raised a lot of money for charity.

Having some experience of amateur drama myself I looked up Elliot’s book and then came across another that he wrote later in life called “In My Anecdotage” (1925)^[5] I bought the latter and have just finished reading it. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of an upper class man from less than a century ago.  Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Elliot was writing in 1924, two years after the foundation of the British Broadcasting Company (radio) and five years before the first UK television broadcast and the first British talking feature film.^[6] Cinema was only just beginning to replace live theatre as a profitable form of mass entertainment and Elliot could still recall a time when a theatre could make money even when only half the seats were taken.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras upper-class gentlemen and ladies were expected to have amateur personal accomplishments such as acting and singing and many a grand house would entertain its guests with skits and parlour games such as “dumb crambo” (a kind of Charades with costumes and props). The head of the household would lead the family in prayers and the country was run by a relatively small and tightly-knit group educated at a handful of public schools and Oxbridge.

But the UK had just (1924) elected its first Labour Government. Of women, so far only householders had been granted the right to vote (1918); Liberal and feminist sympathisers like Elliott welcomed their new freedoms while at the same time being somewhat taken aback by how some of them exercised it. Not far ahead were the General Strike, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression and another world war.

A rapidly vanishing world.

---

^[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Men-Boat-Jerome-Klapka-ebook/dp/B004UJL1KK

^[2] Online text: https://archive.org/details/amateurclubsacto00ellirich

^[3] Page 224: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BjY0_hN-hOIC&q=forty+thieves#v=snippet&q=forty%20thieves&f=false

^[4] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1515113876/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=1501940736&sr=8-1

^[5] https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/in-my-anecdotage/author/elliot-w-g/

^[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_New_Pin_(1929_film)

Tom Marcus' "Soldier Spy": truth and narrative

At the airport I bought Tom Marcus’ “Soldier Spy” (Penguin edition, 2017)^[1]. This purports to be, and may be, an entirely true account of the life and work of an undercover MI5 officer. 

However, as a reader I have the lingering suspicion that I am being played. As with accounts by soldiers of the SAS, a work like this requires official permission to be published and the question arises, what reason would MI5 have to allow this into the public domain? 

I think it has to do with public reservations about MI5’s past and present behaviour. For example, there is the alleged role of MI5 in the case of Binyam Mohamed,^[2] who claims that they were complicit in his illegal “extraordinary rendition” to Morocco at the behest of the United States in 2001 and that they supplied information and lines of questioning for his torturers.

Then there is the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by undercover agents on the London Tube in 2005. The press release from the BBC's Panorama programme the following year^[3] says that the decision to pursue and kill him was a consequence of the implementation of operation Kratos, a policy approved at MI5 headquarters in 2003. The shooting of Menezes came 15 days after the 7th of July attacks on the London public transport and it has since been alleged that Menezes was armed with a pistol and far from being an innocent electrician was involved in preparing the explosive mechanisms used in those attacks.  However, these allegations by Michael Shrimpton in his 2014 book “Spyhunter” may have to be taken with a pinch of salt, firstly because they come so late after the event and secondly because the author himself appears to have crossed the line somehow or other - perhaps not relating to this case - and ended up in jail.^[4]

Generally there is growing public concern about the intrusion of the intelligence services into the daily activities of (so it seems) almost everybody in the country. Many will still recall former agent Peter Wright’s claim in his 1987 book “Spycatcher” that MI5 agents “bugged and burgled their way across London at the State’s behest while pompous, bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall looked the other way."^[5] Perhaps readers will also recall how hard the British State fought in court against the publication of Wright’s book. Since that time 30 years ago, we have seen massive growth of spying on personal electronic communication and social media via GCHQ and its foreign intelligence partners.

So true or not, Marcus' book comes to us in a social and political context and therefore has to be seen as playing a part in a “narrative”, to use a term favoured by such media spinners as Alastair Campbell. The postmodern approach to truth is that it does not exist and to me the implications open the road to madness, for what are we to make of the beliefs held by the spinners themselves? Further, at the same time as taking account of the public’s perceptions and attempting to mould them into a story favouring the powerful, other elements are carefully excluded and if an attempt is made to introduce them into the public discourse there are sustained attempt to discredit the objector. For example the admittedly colourful George Galloway’s opposition to the developing momentum for the second war on Iraq  was turned into insinuations of his having sympathy with terrorism, as indeed more recently have Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's remarks  past and present on similar subjects. The “military industrial complex” must be somewhat discomfited by the fact that Corbyn's views on Gulf War Two, which he consistently opposed, now appear to be held by the majority of people in Britain.

Either Marcus is a gifted writer or he has been expertly edited. He has certainly been professionally presented for a target audience. The cover of the paperback edition shows the lower half of a face with no visually distinguishing marks as per SAS requirements and half obscured by a hoodie which he also wears for TV interviews.^[6]  Perhaps the hoodie is a subliminal appeal to directionless youngsters, similar to the way in which Andy McNab appears to nod to boys and gang lads by featuring them in some of his stories. The lower cover also shows a lone figure standing in mid-road in a cityscape, rather as in a typical Jack Reacher tale.

Like McNab’s Nick Stone, the character of the protagonist in “Soldier Spy” starts out as a loser from a broken home, but is saved by his determination, intelligence and physical ability together with his courage, all qualities to be refined and used by the Army and subsequently the Intelligence Services. He almost forces his way into the Royal Engineers and soon makes his commanding officer retake the physical fitness test, as a result of which the CO pushes him in the direction of the SAS.  He is later handpicked by MI5, a rare honour. The descriptions of his undercover work with all its danger and privations are highly thrilling but also underscore the importance of what he does to protect the public.

At least as edited, Marcus is at pains to repeat that MI5 is the best in the world at what it does, which might be disputed by the Israeli intelligence services and perhaps former members of the RUC, to name a couple of alternative contenders for the crown. This is where a little bell rings:  I recently read “Soldier Five” by Mike Coburn,  one of the members  of the now famous 1991 Bravo Two Zero SAS patrol in the Iraqi desert. This account acts as a corrective, sometimes with embarrassing implications, to some of the earlier accounts by other members. At the end of his book Coburn recounts the difficulties he had in getting his book published against the wishes of the British Establishment.  It appears that an important motive of the latter was to preserve the reputation of the SAS for the purposes of saleability of their services. Part of the court transcript^[7] runs:

WT: In your view, this case is all about enforcing the [secrecy] contract to safeguard the employability of the Regiment, keeping ahead of its competition within the UK and to protect your customer base…

ST: Yes the reason I hesitate to answer it kind of is putting a market spin on this...

WT:  They are words in your cross brief document…

 ST:  Which words?

WT:  Employability, customer base, protecting the market, competition...

ST: Yes.

In line with what I take to be MI5’s preferred narrative, Marcus omits mention of the cockups and issues that might detract from the overall message of the State as guardian angel. Is there an element of brand protection and promotion here, also?

Even his motivation is slightly incoherent, for more than once he tells his superiors that he is not doing the job for Queen and Country but simply because he is good at it, yet he concludes his story with a theatrically jingoistic flourish, a message to the country’s enemies that “we are strong and united; that strength has been built on thousands of years of hardship and if you even think about trying to hurt us my friends will find you and f****** destroy you. Semper Vigilat.”

Just as with the latest interpretations of Batman and James Bond,  our hero is flawed and vulnerable, having his career cut short by post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a suffering to which Andy McNab also refers in his books,  noting that the support given to its Service victims in the UK compares unfavorably with that provided to American Special Forces. Again, Marcus's misfortune may be perfectly true but it fits into the way that modern hero narratives are told, appealing to our sense of shared personal weakness and confusion while at the same time increasing our admiration for the hero.

In all these tales of derring-do there is an element of deliberate presbyopia: we are encouraged to focus on the challenges immediately before us and allowed a certain blindness as to the conditions that gave rise to them. Our attention is diverted by fear and hatred from a consideration of how not to get into such situations in the first place. Undoubtedly there are enemies who now have to be dealt with, but there might not have been so many had we conducted ourselves in a fairer and juster manner. If I had to choose between the life of a secret agent fighting an endless succession of foes, and that of a public protester like Brian Haw^[8] trying to obviate the need for conflict (and see how the GLA and Parliament unsuccessfully tried various sledgehammers to crack his little egg^[9]), I hope I would follow the latter. We in the UK, who are the most CCTV-watched in the world, might then have greater privacy and personal freedom.

“Soldier Spy” is a skilfully packaged and well-sweetened coating for a pill that treats symptoms rather than causes, and has undesirable side-effects.

---

^[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/297921/soldier-spy/

^[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5061702/Binyam-Mohamed-MI5-torture-and-terrorism.html

^[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/03_march/08/panorama.shtml

^[4] http://terroronthetube.co.uk/2015/08/20/de-menezes-the-real-story/

^[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher

^[6] E.g. on 5 News, October 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13sacW50T34

^[7] Page 302 in the hardback edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soldier-Five-Truth-About-Mission/dp/184018907X

^[8] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005478/Brian-Haw-Anti-war-protester-camped-Parliament-Square-dies-aged-62.html

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Haw#Legal_action

FRIDAY MUSIC: Bryan Ferry, by JD

Not the finest of crooners but he does it with great style and having spent forty years in the business he must be doing something right. Behind all the glamour and glitz is, in fact, a very serious and professional exploration of musical genres from 'glam-rock' to jazz to avant-garde, all of which are reflected in the following videos. Like most artists at the top he can and does pick the best for his backing musicians (we can excuse a bit of nepotism with his son Tara Ferry on drums, although he is rather good) and some of those musicians are new to me; Jorja Chalmers on saxophone and a very, very good guitarist in Oliver Thompson.

A note on the avant-garde aspect of Roxy Music: In my view Roxy's work in this genre, as in the last video here, is far superior to the more famous names such as John Cage or Dane Rudhyar or Stockhausen to name a few. "For Your Pleasure" is a complex and mesmerising piece of work and ends, appropriately enough, with the voice of Judi Dench whispering "You don't ask. You don't ask why."