A SMOKING GLUM January 28, 2010
Posted by markswill in Navel Gazing, Politics, Schmolitics.15 comments
Suppering with a friend not seen since she moved abroad over a decade ago found me in Shepherds Bush last week with four other acquaintances not seen for even longer, and an evening of bawdy gossip and cheerful reminiscing. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the evening was that everyone at the table was unselfconsciously smoking and had I brought a cigar with me, I’d have joined them. Just like the old days in fact, before social smoking confirmed pariah status on anyone who inhaled. We’d all put on a few pounds since we’d met, but there we all were in our early sixties in pretty good health and indeed looking it, and whilst I have also lost friends to cancer and have a couple more currently battling it – smokers both – I am not a nicotine nazi when it comes to what others inhale.
As I swayed uncertainly back to Goldhawk Road tube station I got to thinking that if the anti-smoking lobby had their way, and that nominally includes a government primarily concerned with the cost of smoking-related diseases, then how would the social landscape look? Would there be a black market in Silk Cut? Would drug dealers turn to Chinese-made Camel Lights to keep them in tinted-windowed Range Rovers? And would hardened nicotinies furtively puff away behind the blacked out windows of tobacco shebeens?
Well since New Zeeland is about to impose such a ban on its citizenry, we shall soon undoubtedly see, but what we already know is that the pub and club trade has suffered enormously since the ban on smoking in public places came into being. This has had a clear effect on drink sales and helped augured the supermarkets’ cheap booze promotions which in turn fuelled so much anti-social behaviour. It also means fewer people socialising in pubs – a bad thing in my view – which in turn accelerated if not directly caused the closure of many of them and ergo, reduced the tax revenues on booze.
And this is where it gets interesting. Irrespective of that specific loss to the exchequer, according to the Tobacco Manufacturers Assoc. if tobacco sales were banned outright, the exchequer would’ve lost £10billion in tax revenues last year. And yet according to the NHS, the annual cost of treating smoking related ailments is £2.7b. Do the math and you realise that if smoking were banned outright the economy would suffer tremendously, and never mind the cost of providing benefits to all those unemployed tobacco industry and NHS staff. Get the picture?
SEXY CIGGIES?
When I started blogging early last year I determined not to make it too personal but having since scanned a few other people’s digital efforts, such social rectitude might seem unduly high minded. So without wishing to drag my reader too deeply into my personal hell, and a’propos the wider benefits of gaspers, I should say that with one exception during this past thirty years every one of my girlfriends, or ‘partners’ as those of us of a certain age must now describe them, has been a smoker. I used to observe that the way most women held and smoked their ciggies was part of their allure, but since some of my female friends have succumbed to cancer in recent years and I began encouraging at least my last two ex-, erm, partners to cut down on their habit, it’s become prudent not to articulate such views.
By a similar token in recent months I’ve found myself defending my inability to hold down a relationship for more than three years, usually to women who for some absurd reason had ‘taken a shine’ to me (I do love the quaint sophistry of that phrase). Hardly considering myself an emotional cripple or commitment-phobe – although of course I may be both – I’ve put it down to self-preservation under private duress that led my then partners to cut things off at the pass, or maybe I’m just a lousy lover and a selfish old sod. But I think the truth of it is that having lived on my own for so long I have become, to quote Richard Ford, “so absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed (yet) can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing”.
ENDLESS LONGING
But longing for what, my friendly female interrogators might (and do) ask? Well fairly obviously there’s the next vocational goal, the next rendezvous with (possibly smoking) friends, the next trip on a balmy summer’s day in the Lancia (now that really is a longshot), the next gobsmacking show at Tate Modern and on and on it goes, this litany of small pleasures. But the easy and hopefully unfettered shared intimacy which is of course a major virtue of a relationship is pretty much possible with friends of long standing who you’re not sharing a bed with, and it’s these relationships which I realise I cherished more than those that left the rails after some barely articulated loss of trust, lust or whatever it is that love actually is.
Heavy going is not what I intended when I began this latest scribble, but having seen a trio of films up in town which sorely questioned whether loving partnerships can ever be permanent (The Road, A Serious Man, It’s Complicated), and had my battered old Yamaha stolen and vandalised outside my temporary digs, I am momentarily feeling a tad dubious about the innate goodness of the human condition. So much so, I rather feel like remedial Marlboro Light.
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RIDING OUT THE NOUGHTIES January 11, 2010
Posted by markswill in Cars and Bikes, Politics, Schmolitics.20 comments
That journalists are second only to estate agents in the untrustworthiness dept. is evidenced by my pre-Xmas claims that I would take advantage the festive hiatus to pen a quickfire stream of blogs, whereas in fact I only managed three of the blighters. And now that normal service has been resumed, I’m trying to catch up – a process hampered by events, dear boy, events… including of course the extreme weather you’re heartily sick of. However this morning’s planned tirade on the cultural importance of the motorcycle was thrown off-kilter during my hungover breakfast by some half-heard R4 pundit reflecting on the impact of eBooks on the reading public, much as I myself had done in a blog ten days ago.
Not that I wished to reprise this so soon afterwards, but it brought home the rapid pace of cultural change which, coincidentally, was also the unspoken theme of a brace of BBC2 retrospectives I’d just watched on the Noughties. The two major conclusions drawn from these well judged documentaries, at least by me, was that western society’s cultural values were increasingly dumbed down by the proliferation of communications technologies, this in itself fueled by a nation’s economic imperatives driven by demands for instant gratification regardless of whether it is earnt or merited, demands that could in fact be met by the availability of cheap credit.
THE VICIOUS VIRTUOUS CIRCLE In particular I was impressed by the Guardian’s Economics Editor (and Paul Foot lookalike) Larry Elliott, who noted that by running down our manufacturing base we and America had allowed China to build up theirs. The consequence of this enabled Western consumers to buy increasing quantities of cheap Chinese exports, thus allowing our interest rates to plummet so that we could borrow more which then pushed up the value of our houses so that we could borrow more money to buy more cheap Chinese exports!
Raising this subject with a friend this afternoon he averred that in due course this could backfire on China whose mushrooming affluence would put them where Britain and America were 10-15 years ago, i.e. looking around for cheap manufacturing elsewhere as its citizens would no longer accept dirty, boring factory jobs so that in the third world country we’d then become opportunities for an industrial revival would soon emerge. It’s a nice and not unfamiliar argument, but although we thankfully wouldn’t be around to witness it I rather doubt this scenario, not least because as a nation we’d have long lost the skills to staff and manage large-scale manufacturing, but also the speed and scale of technological development makes it impossible to predict what the industrial landscape will look like in ten, let alone thirty years’ time.
WHEELS FALLING OFF Which brings me back to where I’d intended to start, namely motorcycles. We once had a thriving motorcycle industry which, as we now all know, was ultimately hobbled by greed, under-investment and a myopic inability to note what was happening in the far east, or at least to take it seriously. However just as it had when post-WW2 workers sought cheap transport to get to their factories and shipyards, and their sons were motivated to become ton-up boys by iconic images of Marlon Brando, the motorcycle remained an essential if unexceptional presence in British culture. And although the British bike industry was in its death throes by the 1970s, I was lucky enough to launch a couple of magazines during a golden decade of motorcycling fuelled by a bewildering choice of efficient and exciting Japanese machinery that was affordable to all.
But as motorcycles became faster and more complex, and therefore more dangerous and expensive, they increasingly became toys for the affluent and also the subject of public and political opprobrium in a risk-averse world. As we exit the Noughties the omnipresent motorcycle we’ve taken for granted for sixty odd years looks set to disappear, replaced by a few bespoke machines owned but rarely ridden by rich old collectors. And why is this? Well worldwide sales of the primarily Japanese-built bikes have plummeted this past couple of years with the consequence that the ‘Big Four’ marques are cutting back their ranges, sharing production and if some darker rumours are correct, in some cases planning to give up motorcycle production altogether. Even America’s Harley-Davidson, whose costly but technically antediluvian machines until 2008 enjoyed booming sales to wannabe outlaw bikers in the media and banking, have slashed staff and closed factories.
But this isn’t all due to the ongoing recession because in Western countries bereft of their own indigenous manufacturers, trade associations and user interest groups are riven by factionalism and too weak to turn the tide of onerous legislation – particularly with regard to the obstacles aspiring bikers now face in getting a licence to ride… even assuming they can afford the vast sums required to insure and buy the bikes that tempt them. Which of course increasingly they can’t, and why would they want to when a Nintendo Wii costs under £200? After all, politicians know there are few votes and even fewer jobs in what has long been merely a dangerous recreational pursuit with anti-social overtones. Even the despatch riding trade which provided employment for a few thousand die-hards in our larger cities and steady sales of bikes and spares for their importers is, thanks to the digital highway, dying on its wheels.
So along with paperback books, CDs, newspapers and all the other trappings of society my generation took for granted, it looks like the mass-produced motorcycle will have disappeared by the time we enter the next decade. But as fresh new and undemanding gee-gaws emerge to obsess us, will we as a society regret it? Probably not, but I will personally.
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Year Endings December 30, 2009
Posted by markswill in Cars and Bikes, Media, Navel Gazing.11 comments
It’s that time of year when lazy columnists look back on the past twelve months and try and reach some kind of conclusion about what it all added up to. Resisting the “hill of beans” summation, I’m not even going to get into moisty-eyed backward glances or, more likely, shrill rants about everything that’s ailed mankind and more selfishly, yrs. trly. this past year, I’ll instead stick to more recent stuff.
Actually the end of the year can be, and in my case was one of the best bits of it. Ten days hiatus from the business of, well, business allowed time to catch up on socialising – much of it happily accidental – a whole slew of films downloaded onto my increasingly indispensable Freeview box and of course, reading. Downing far too much food’n’drink smug in the knowledge that the gym doesn’t open again ‘til next week only adds to the delightfulness of the dying days of 2009 and it looks like being snowed in will further excuse this sloth.
Getting Booked
But the subject of reading does prompt a bit of a grumble, and on two counts. Lunching with a friend in Hereford the Saturday before the red mist of Christmas finally descended elicited the recommendation that before I made my intended tramp round Waterstone’s for the usual 3-for-2 fest I should visit the city’s Oxfam bookshop. And this I duly did, finding two tomes I’d missed first time around and for les than a fiver the pair. Hurrah, then.
Two days later over tea and buns with Ian Marchant, Presteigne’s premier novelist, raconteur and the thinking man’s George Formby, (www.ianmarchant.com) I found myself berated for stealing the bread from his table by patronising the Oxfam outlet which of course doesn’t pay the business rates or staff wages that Waterstone’s and other proper bookshops do. The point being that Oxfam can afford to entice bookworms to buy secondhand and remaindered volumes at prices and in quantities that deny him and other struggling authors their just rewards. And my only defence was that I bought the bloody buns.
But this brings me once again to bookshops and their imminent extinction, a reprise prompted by last night’s Front Row on Radio 4 which spent its entire half hour debating the virtues or otherwise of e-books. With mounting fury I only just resisted hurling my Horlicks at the radio as Mark ‘I’m-so-damn-clever’ Lawson ignored the impact that Kindle, e-Reader and the rest would likely have on retailers. Happy enough to indulge the man from Sony who predicted that e-books might replace 60% of ink’n’paper books sales within five years (well he would say that, wouldn’t he?), and a woman from Pan-Macmillan who blithely dismissed the prospect of vast layoffs in the printing industry (“They’ll have to adapt”. Yes they will: to unemployment), Lawson never mentioned randomly dipping between the covers, scanning dust jackets, discovering new authors or lesser known works by familiar ones and all the other pleasures of bookshop browsing. In London a fortnight ago I witnessed the ugly consequences of bookshop closures, albeit as a result of bad management rather than electronic storage devices, as I passed two boarded-up branches of Borders flyposted and forlorn then spent a feverish twenty minutes rummaging round their one remaining West End store which was having its closing down sale. (Needless to say I found nothing amongst the Archers, Cartlands and third rate sleb memoirs that took my fancy). Okay, it’s only an unreconstituted luddite that ignores the march of technological progress and I am, after all, writing and publishing this on my Apple laptop, but no-one seems concerned about the cultural and social consequences of more unemployment, deserted high streets and the isolation that yet another digital convenience fosters.
Letting The Buyer Do The R & D
This all reads suspiciously if not pathetically like another grumpy old man bemoaning the winds of change, which of course it is. And it also explains, if further explanation were required, my affectation with classic cars and the excuse I need to update my Lancia Gamma woes. (Actually this is in response to at least three, count ‘em, three, queries as to its health). As I write Mr Barratt and his boys are enjoying the festive break before returning, suitably rejuvenated I hope, to the piles of rusting, seized and bent bits that sit disconsolately on pallets in his workshop. But turning two buggered engines – one apparently rescued from a ditch, the other driven perhaps a tad too enthusiastically by yrs. trly. – into one robust runner is a task riven with pitfalls. For example, the full compliment of gaskets and seals it took several weeks and many phone calls and e-mails to assemble may or may not be all present and correct and with this particular engine there is a serious risk that the cylinder liners can ‘drop’ if the paper-thin gaskets twixt block and barrels are damaged. In which case starting all over again (with virtually unobtainable gaskets) is mandatory.
It begs the questions why don’t you forgot all this nonsense and get yourself a nice Mazda MX-5 or, more importantly, what were Lancia’s engineers thinking when they designed and didn’t properly develop this big boxer engine? Brilliant though the basic design was and remains, i.e. smooth, relatively compact and immensely torquey, did they really think it was acceptable to let the first few thousand owners discover its weaknesses? Lancia actually has quite a record in this department, most notably in the use of substandard steel for their early ‘70s Beta saloons which were often rusty before they left the showrooms and the suicide brakes on their otherwise divine Montecarlo coupe, which they pulled from production for two years whilst they (crudely) sorted the problem.
Like the race to compel us all to adopt the e-book, they didn’t consider the price that might be paid which in their case was the relegation of a once proud and innovative marque to nothing more than a badge-engineered Fiat. And yet, and yet I shall stick with my sexy old girl and my heaving shelves of dusty dead trees.
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Not Fade Away December 25, 2009
Posted by markswill in That's Entertainment.8 comments
Sitting here on Xmas Day morning, sun streaming over snow-clad roofs, I had, as trailed, intended to pen a few pithy observations about pantomimes. Topical of course, and especially since I was recently involved in the theatrical triumph that was the Presteigne Players’ An American in Powys.
Ironically typecast as Det. Insp. Slipper of the Yard, mine was a relatively small role amongst a cast of 30 locals ranging in age from under 10 to, well old enough to know better and peppered with a few of the professional thesps who live hereabouts. It was, as ever, good fun and after a few, arguably too few, nerve-wracking rehearsals, all right on the nights. But these annual PP productions are not really trad pantos, for they are custom-written and directed by the modestly brilliant Mary Compton who deftly weaves sharply observed local and national politics into plots that also embrace some of the conventionally hokey boy-gets-girl, good-vs-evil themes and throws in a whole bunch of fun-poking at local characters, mostly just on the right side of benign.
LUMPY THROATING
It is testimony to Mary’s skill that each year’s plot is very different and includes a whole raft of rather good songs mostly co-written by her. But she knows her audience (and indeed, cast) well enough to reprise the finale, ‘Presteigne – Home of the Free’ every year. This latter is a quietly remarkable work which fondly takes the piss out of local retail institutions, schools and incomers (which she and most of us are) whilst simultaneously thrusting a lump of pride into the throats of the assembled cast and, certainly by the last chorus, a large chunk of the audience.
Anyway, I was planning to segue from this into a broader treatise on these knockabout theatrics, both community and professional, but when it comes down to it, I haven’t seen a commercial panto since I was a tot and the only community versions I’ve experienced are those I’ve made a fool of myself in here in Presteigne. But the thing of it is, whilst pantos may be have a useful role in bringing disparate elements of society and culture together – albeit fleetingly – what’s far more important is Captain Beefheart, certainly in the lump-in-throat department. Or that’s how it seemed last night.
Don’t know why it is but at this time of year I find myself re-visiting the nooks and crannies of my record collection and PLAYING THEM VERY LOUD and thus it was that I came upon Clear Spot, probably the most commercial of Don Van Vliet’s oeuvre. This has much to do with its producer, Ted Templeman who, in between profitably twiddling the knobs for the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen (!), was charged by Warner Bros. to try and recoup some of their investment in the gloriously unpredictable Captain and his Magic Band. And whilst 1969’s, Frank Zappa produced Trout Mask Replica is generally regarded as the good Captain’s mightiest work, Clear Spot is the best entry point. Reason being that Templeman, whilst he might not’ve always understood what the hell was going on musically, separates and lifts the individual instruments sufficiently from the dense rhythms favoured, nay, mandated by Van Vliet to the point where the listener can fully marvel at the mastery of those involved.
THOSE CRAZY RHYTHMS
Students and fans of the Beefheart legend, of which I am unashamedly one, will know that the clearly but brilliantly half-mad Van Vliet would lock his band members into rehearsals until he’d schooled them into performing each crazed, highly complex composition to his satisfaction, which occasionally took weeks and accounted for a rather high staff turnover, especially in the rhythm sections. Clear Spot therefore sees ex-Mothers on Invention Roy Estrada take over from Rockette Morton on bass (though Morton moves to rhythm guitar) and newcomer Artie Tripp on drums, and it’s an ensemble that elevates ‘cooking’ to a new level. In particular there’s Tripp’s 5/4 intro to ‘Nowadays a Woman’s Gotta Hit a Man’ which is overlaid with Morton’s 7/8 (I think) riff before Don comes in with his acid harmonica and an anonymous horn section lazily prefacing (in 4/4 time) the utterly wonderful Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkeload) cutting a swathe through it all with his typically vicious lead guitar. My favourite track – and it’s hard to pick just one – has to be ‘Circumstances’ which whilst Don’s lyrics and harmonica clearly reflect his blue’s roots, are simply a feint for a rocking opus that belies the numerous and almost impossible contrapuntal rhythms he throws into the pot.
And talking of impossible, this same trawl through my vinyl back catalogue inevitably lit on the Grateful Dead and specifically, the double Live Dead album (although the title appears nowhere on the sleeve or labels). In my view rockist scribblers too easily forget their unparalleled ability to create an intoxicating musical weft from apparently incongruent elements. Certainly they share this with Capt. Beefheart’s Magic Band but the difference is that the Dead did it best live and usually when they were out of their heads on acid. If you need evidence of their enduring might, check side two on disc two where ‘Not Fade Away’ merges effortlessly into ‘Going Down the Road Feeling Bad’.
INSUFFICIENT FINGERS?
It’s here that the late, much lamented Garcia galvanises the troops into another throat lumping jag and if you’re not bobbing and swaying like a fool by the time he rips out his second solo in ‘Road’, then you clearly need therapy. But 34 seconds into this magisterial 61 second opus (I know, I’ve timed it, I’m a saddo), something truly extraordinary happens: Phil Lesh a great but perhaps not seminal rhythm player begins doing something which I can’t see that between them he and Garcia had enough fingers to execute. It’s rhythm guitar but not as we know it, and combined with Garcia’s soaring, million-miles-a-minute yet note perfect solo, it’s simply transformative… as is the entire track. I must’ve played it fifteen times last night and I still don’t know how they did it, but it makes the likes of Beck and Clapton and even more modern plank-spankers such as Sonny Landreth and Buddy Whittington, whilst technically exceptional, sound undernourished and soulless. (Sorry Frank).
One thing is clear however, with Van Vliet retired to painting in the Californian desert and Garcia long, er, dead, we will not hear their musical like again.
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Antidisestablishmentarianism Re-defined December 21, 2009
Posted by markswill in About me, Media, Navel Gazing.6 comments
To London last week for a spot of commerce, socialising and what passes for Xmas shopping, an enterprise characterised primarily by its cheery hecticness. Okay, that’s a noun that doesn’t really exist, but then so many words commonly parlayed in these digitally dominated times, don’t. On Radio 4 this week I heard a ‘top businessman’ refer to his services having “topicalism” and a politician who’s name I sadly missed and thus can’t ridicule claimed to have the “supportiveness” of his constituency association. Technically ‘supportiveness’ is almost a transitive verb, formed from the adjective (‘supportive’) that stems from the original transitive verb (‘support’), but what was happening here was the increasingly common tendency to distort vernacular, or simply use more syllables than is necessary, in order to exalt the mundane. Either that or shite command of the English language.
Mentioning this at an increasingly well-lubricated supper I overcooked on Friday spawned all manner of appalling, or appallingist, examples of such grammatical excesses whose nadir was yrs. trly. trying unsuccessfully to pronounce “familiarisationism”. And next morning a postcard in my letterbox from one of my guests thanked me for an evening of such “cordiality, discussionality and jovialism”, which despite being so hungoverish had me falling off my chair with mirthfulism.
If only we scribblers were paid by the character rather than the word (if we’re paid at all, that is) then this all might – literally, or literatively – have some value but more generally I suppose it at least supports the joke maxim I coined in the ‘80s, “Why use three syllables when five will do?” However the evening itself served to illustrate how much fun heightened, if perhaps inebriated discussionality can be and how rarely we have the chance to engage in it as we spend more and more time huddled, iPods akimbo, over our laptops and smartphones. So as such isolationism (and that is a real word) becomes the norm and local pubs, clubs and other venues for social intercourse disappear and we have less money and time to spend in them anyway, it was encouraging to read in today’s Observer that the salon is making a comeback.
Which is kind of spooky since three of my supper guests and I had agreed to start exactly such a series of soirees (run for the hills, it’s an alliteration attack) in the New Year. It’s actually an idea I’d been harboring for some years but the problem was finding a site which didn’t involve rent, expensive drinks or upsetting a friend whose house was big enough to house 15 – 20 alleged free thinkers involved in animated intellectual discourse… a/k/a getting shouty about stuff they think matters. Happening to mention this when we four bumped into each other one Saturday morning elicited unexpected enthusiasm from all concerned and a venue and a list of like-minded culture vulturists and socio-political opinionaters quickly materialised. I just hope that our little salon will live up to what novelist Giles Foden defined in the Observer as being a cross between “a well stocked library, a bordello and a boxing ring”.
Now of course much of what ails our language and fuels social disinteraction (or disinteractionalism) is the omnipotence of Google in all its tentacular guises, so I was pleased to hear last week that a French publisher had won its case against the company who, in their campaign to digitise and freely distribute all the world’s literature had posted many of their authors’ works online without permission or payment. This landmark case will hopefully encourage other publishers to take on the info-giant and may well bolster Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for content that his and other newspapers have hitherto given away for nowt in the mistaken assumption that it would boost ad. revenues (see previous blog, Paper Tiggers, April 20th). I was less pleased to read, unsurprisingly in Murdoch’s Sunday Times, that ‘Google pays no tax on £1.6bn’, that figure being its 2008 UK earnings which, were it not for some frankly shabby avoidance schemes, would’ve generated £450m for our beleaguered exchequer. I was further incensed to learn that the average salary of Google staff here was circa £90,000. (But if the job application I’ve just mailed off to them – via the interweb, natch – is successful, please put everything I’ve just written down to mental aberrationism).
Finally whilst I’m in media rant mode, during lunch with a friend in London we were bemoaning the infantalism (another real word) of much of what appears in the ‘quality press’ which willfully refuses if not to acknowledge that most of its loyal readers are over 45, then at least fails to adequately cater for them… albeit with the exception of other otherwise egregious Mail titles. My regular reader will recognise this as a familiar hobby horse but our discussion concluded that the reasons for the disconnect between reader requirements and editorial imperatives are twofold: the people who run the shows think that by relentlessly focusing on celebs, style and cultural ephemera (a/k/a vacuous nonsense) aimed at twenty- and thirty-somethings, they will brainwash their older, core readership (which, incidently, is not generally being replaced by a younger one) into lapping it up and this is because advertisers, or those that haven’t already migrated to the web, are apparently only interested in the young adult markets and not very interested in the ‘grey pound’. The fools.
And then when I saw page 2 of Saturday’s Guardian I realised that this was not perhaps just the cynical if ineffectual* manipulation of reader demographics, but the naive evangelism of those still lucky enough to have jobs in the press. For there at the top of the page were the mugshots of the paper’s top 28 scribblers and editors, only five or six of whom could be over 40 and mostly looked to be fresh out of uni. And what would they really understand of what us eldsters empirically like, love and value?
I rest my case. Or case-ism.
*(as circulations continue to decline)
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Focus on the Hocus Pocus December 2, 2009
Posted by markswill in Media, That's Entertainment.7 comments
Occasionally I write film reviews for our local listings magazine, occasionally I proof-read it, and occasionally I deliver the finished product to the various hostelries, libraries etc., where it’s picked up gratis by a public thirsting for knowledge of where they might shake a tailfeather of a Saturday night in the soggy hinterlands of the Welsh (Squelch?) Marches.
But unlike that grand-daddy of listings magazines, Time Out (for which I have also worked, in this case for real money), Broad Sheep – for such is it wittily titled – contains several pages of ‘Complimentary Therapies’ which I occasionally skim through and having done so, seethe over. Broad Sheep’s editor, a dear friend of some forty years standing, wisely caveats these pages by taking “no responsibility for their content”, but I wish to go a bit further and point out, with customary understatement, that generally speaking they’re a load of hokum.
I know I risk opprobrium and possibly having a rat nailed to my front door by saying this in a part of the country where employment opportunities are limited but Crystal and Shamanic Healing (?!), Starlight Essences (!?!) and Ear Candling (!?!?!) are simply ways of separating the vulnerable and gullible from their money. Ditto Authentic Movement (surely something we all do when we fall out of bed hungover in the morning?) and Colour Therapy (oh, a yellow wall, I feel better now) are pure hocus-pocus masquerading as cures for the human condition which, as we all know, is fundamentally flawed.
Not that I completely eschew complimentary medicine, for I once had my sciatica permanently banished by a nice lady who stuck needles in me, albeit at a cost of several hundred pounds over 18 months, and a post-motorcycle accident back problem cured by a fellow biker who also happened to be a hot-shot osteopath. But these are both proven techniques recognised by the NHS as effective in certain circumstances and not phony panaceas relying entirely on the questionable convictions of the person signing the cheques. I must also admit that this ire was fired by a report in last week’s Sunday Times that Boots the High Street Comedians continue to stock homeopathic ‘remedies’ despite there being “no evidence to suggest that they are efficacious”, (i.e. they don’t work) because “a large number of our customers believe they are efficacious”.
This somewhat accords with my own attempts, prompted by a well-meaning ex-girlfriend, that I try and stem my rising blood pressure a few years ago by any means possible… except drugs. This I duly did with (expensive) visits to a homeopath, cranial osteopath, medical herbalist, acupuncturist and shiatsu-ist (there weren’t any snake-oil salesmen around at the time), none of which had the slightest effect and if that was because I simply didn’t buy into their various schticks, then so be it. But I certainly wanted a cure and got one within two days of visiting my GP, the medication he prescribed coming free on the Welsh NHS (see, there are some benefits to living here).
And talking embracing mumbo-jumbo, I mentioned in my last blog a nightmare drive through rain-lashed Shropshire for an evening of “druid chanting, finger cymballing and other new-age nonsense” which I might enlarge on later, and that later is now. Not wishing to be (too) cruel, I should say that the event in Shrewsbury’s cathedral-like St. Mary’s Church was a source of wonder and not-inconsiderable-although-necessarily- stifled mirth. It was hosted by a camp middle-aged gent with a massive white bouffant and a gray lurex (yes, lurex) cape called Mystic Ed who my companion immediately re-christened Mystic Egg. Mr Egg eulogised the considerable virtues of the various performers and organisers all of whom is seemed were capable of transforming the mundane treacheries and disappointments of our modest lives into well-springs of shimmering wonderment and eternal wisdom (that’s almost verbatim, but not quite).
With the exception of my friend’s friends who’d traveled up from London as a favour to the lady who Mr Egg endlessly lauded prior to her 15 minutes of fame at the finger cymbals (and here I’m not exaggerating at all), the performers almost universally wore that look of beatific smugness which so often translates into disdain for anyone who questions their dippy philosophies, the music itself being largely Chris de Burgh for the hippie set, i.e. aimless, tuneless and completely unmemorable.
We were thus relieved to leave early for the Yorkshire House pub, conveniently located –in a ying’n’yang kinda way – alongside the church and home to Shrewsbury’s goths, heavy-metallists and biker hordes who were having much more fun than any of the sackcloth- or home knit-clad miserablists lapping up Mystic Egg and his chums next door. But I should say that we weren’t the only refugees from the hallowed portals who slunk into the rowdy Yorkshire House for a restorative tincture, and it was also telling to see a few flowing robed figures huddling in the porch cupping a furtive roll-up.
Not that I wish to condone cigarette-smoking of course, indeed in the absence of any paid proof-reading or film reviewing this month, I might just develop my own complimentary therapy designed to kick the evil weed with a spot of Transformative Gesture Hands-on Healing™ using empty vodka bottles and bent Lancia con-rods.
Talking of which, if perchance you watched last Sunday’s Top Gear you might’ve glimpsed my lovely Gamma Coupe shortly before it lunched in engine (blogs passim) during Clarkson’s peculiar love/hate item on classic Lancias. More on which anon. Perhaps.
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Floods of Tears November 24, 2009
Posted by markswill in Navel Gazing.8 comments
As befits a burgh voted by Country Life as the eighth most desirable small town in Britain, here in Presteigne we’ve become quite alarmed by a recent outbreak of street crime which threatens house prices that have remained more resilient than elsewhere in the county. So last week the local cops were invited to attend a town council meeting to explain what they’d be doing about a posse of ne’erdowells who have been threatening elderly residents, damaging private property and physically attacking anyone who tries to stop them.
The gist of their response at a meeting also attended by several irate members of the public, including one recent immigrant from leafy Sussex who’d obviously bought into Country Life’s bucolic spin, was that there wasn’t much they could do because the perpetrators are essentially children. Banging them up overnight only to be released after a full-English (or perhaps Welsh) to return emboldened by their lack of punishment didn’t cool anyone’s indignation, and the imminent enforced absence from the family council house of a known drug dealer who is the father of one of the ruffians will probably do little to quell his son’s malfeasance.
The police, whose part-time presence in the town has inevitably been further diminished by funding cuts, could only rather sheepishly beg public spirited residents to consider becoming special constables and hope that locals will “report incidents and present themselves as witnesses”… despite the risk of being beaten up for their troubles.
Indeed it occurred to me as the 17-stone, 6’ 4” landlord of my local blithely suggested getting together a few mates to resolve the matter in a decidely extra-curricular manner that all of this was a consequence of the recession. There are no jobs and precious few recreational facilities here for any teenagers who don’t do sports and those responsible for what is an unusually vibrant arts and music scene in such a small community are all over forty – and then some – fundamentally lack appeal to the drum’n’bass brigade. So come Friday night it’s now a rite of teenage passage, if not a badge of honour, for them to hang round the town centre, quaffing Red Bull, smoking roll-ups and throwing garbage all over the place, aping the attitude if not the antics of the four or five hard-core troublemakers who’ll be along later to show ‘em how it’s done.
As indicated by someone getting thrown through the chemist’s window after a fight outside the aforementioned pub last Saturday night, this isn’t going to end prettily. Bored kids excited by the lazy violence of dead-enders who’ve got little to lose but are losing it with impunity can only lead to copycat thuggery, and if vigilantism is the seen as the only practical response then we’ll all be the poorer for it. But whilst arguably a sociologically sound solution, approaching those concerned without getting a smack in the face, let along winning their confidence and channeling their angry energies elsewhere would be a hard call in a town where most of us are busy enough maintaining the area’s creative culture and/or earning an increasingly elusive crust as the economy drifts towards double-dip.
And talking of dips, I nearly took one of the watery variety as I drove, or rather surfed towards Shrewsbury for a weird evening of druid chanting, finger cymballing and other new-age nonsense (I may be obliged to blog about this in a few days). An ill-advised shortcut meant crossing a bridge over the swollen River Lugg, which was in fact technically not a bridge but a platform a few feet below a raging torrent. And once I was halfway across with water spurting from the edges of the bonnet, there was obviously no going back. Fortunately, being a diesel, i.e. bereft of spark plugs, the Citruin made it without conking out and I like to think that was partly due to the alloy patches I’d just riveted over its rotten front bulkheads in a desperate effort to make the bugger saleable in this week’s local press so’s to part-finance its successor. But it was probably merely luck.
I mention this to remind my city-dwelling readers that the sorry residents of Cockermouth are not the only ones suffering a hammering from the heavens. The Lugg, which skirts Presteigne, has already burst its banks at a couple of points and like several other rivers hereabouts threatens to disrupt day-to-day life in the Welsh Marches, albeit with less fanfare and hopefully less damage than in Cumbria… and there’s more heavy rain forecast tomorrow. So some of us, well me anyway, are beginning to wonder which would be worst, losing our living room carpets and the heaving shelves of books and vinyl which sit on them to the flood waters, or our noble middle-class features to some spotty teenager who, having been drunkenly challenged to stop littering the street with his post-chipshop debris decides to show exactly what he thinks of civic responsibility.
But for now I think I’ll trot down to the pub for a consoling gin-o-cide and ponder exactly how immune we who’ve fled the cities for a rural life of Riley really are from what ails society in general in these wretched, globally warmed times.
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Car Trouble November 11, 2009
Posted by markswill in Cars and Bikes.7 comments
As keen trivia vultures will well be aware, the above title refers to a crap track on an Adam Ant album (ringtone downloads are available) and an equally forgettable 1985 movie somewhat improbably starring Julie Walters as a romantic ingénue smitten by an E-type Jag. Not that I am either romantic or, god forbid, an ingénue, but we do have something in common, namely problems with motors.
Indeed I’ve already lightly chronicled the saga of my Lancia’s knackered engine in these postings and it continues with ever increasing complication and the expense that is its inevitable bedfellow. (If you are not even remotely a petrolhead, you may wish to stop here and turn to the more infinitely more edifying Heat or Waterways World websites). And last week I borrowed a van and collected a ‘spare’ Gamma engine from a barn in Oxfordshire which also housed a brace of jaw-droppingly pristine Bitter Coupes (rare German supercars). This engine looked as if it had been stored in a ditch for ten years but did – just – turn over when a 23mm spanner was sternly applied to its crankshaft end, however shortly after depositing it at Tanc Barratt’s classic Lancia emporium outside Kidderminster I got the call saying that it, too, was basically knackered. So that’s another few hundred quid down the toilet.
Or not quite. After further investigation at nice Mr Barratt’s not unreasonable hourly rate, it might prove possible that the undamaged crankshaft and con-rod(s) from the spare can replace the shot ones in my original. And whilst in the process, as the spare is a Series One engine with higher-lift camshafts, I’d quite like to stick them in my Series Two motor: even in the often genteel world of dodgie aulde motorcars, speed is all. Then the ancillaries will have to be stuck back on, a very large cheque handed over and I can get on with the business of halting a worrying vein of rust that I noticed creeping into a front wheel-arch as the car sat forlornly outside Casa Barratt.
At that point it’s usual for the impoverished classic car owner to decide to cut his or her losses, flog the damn thing and take up ornithology (or a subscription to Heat magazine). And vexatiously, this is the situation I’ve already arrived at with my daily driver, namely an utterly undistinguished but cheekily fast and hitherto reliable Citroen ZX Turbo Diesel estate.
Now some 15 years-old and as such almost approaching classic-dom itself, in the last year the ZX has exhibited a steady appetite for new components including a new clutch, timing belt and, most recently, rear brake cylinders. The recent discovery of rust (look away now if you’re of a sensitive disposition) in a suspension turret suggests that it won’t pass its next MoT without serious remedial welding using custom-fabricated parts (in its inevitable quest to build in obsolescence, Citroen neither rust-proofed nor offered appropriate spare mounts for this model), all of which would cost more than the car’s probable worth, i.e. about 300 quid.
And so the madness begins, namely the search to replace it. This involves an unduly obsessive trawl through classified ads in local papers and nowadays of course, myriad websites devoted to used car sales. Infuriatingly, the latter all seem to steal ads from one another, but re-drawn in different formats so just when you think you’ve spotted a really super 1998 Citroen Xsara TD Estate at just the right money on Yakaz.com, you realise that it’s the one you ruled out yesterday on Fish4Cars… because it’s 190 miles away in Hull.
So yes, primarily because it’s the ZX’s replacement with the same powerful, unburstable engine, I’m keen to get another mid-size Citroen estate, albeit at well under a grand. Certain iterations of the Xsara also offer the joy of air-con for our typically long, hot summers and of course I want one with a tow-bar for the ‘bike trailer I rarely use, but my lofty aesthetic standards mean that I can’t entertain a silver-coloured example which inevitably rules out most of them. This makes the search endless, time-consuming and leads to enticing little diversions such as a Peugeot 406 estate (same engine, same aircon, slightly bigger and thus heavier body so better find one with the uprated engine option), or a Fiat Marea Weekend (powerful turbo diesel, all the toys but ugly, patchily reliable and thus rare).
It will, of course, end in tears but possibly not before I’ve spent yet another wet afternoon trudging through that mélange of mud’n’sump oil common to all UK scrapyards in search of bits that could be cut out from a wrecked ZX and manouevred into place on mine. The sadness of it is that with neither the Citroen nor the Lancia have I the kit, skill or space to do the work myself, but the worrying thing is that I’ve just rented a second lock-up to house all the other bits that came with the latter’s useless spare engine, so it looks as though the madness may be with me for a while yet whether I like it or not.
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Told You So October 24, 2009
Posted by markswill in Navel Gazing.6 comments
Nothing satisfies the frail ego like a dash of smug reassurance – just ask failed Lib-Dem leadership hopeful Vince Cable (or skinned-teeth F1 champ, Jenson Button). But journalists have to move swiftly to capitalise on something they scrawled in yesterday’s papers/today’s fishwrap, bloggers even less so. Except for Arianna Huffington of course.
Nevertheless it’s with a certain sang froid that I look back on some recent postings and mutter if not ‘I told you so’, then at least ‘pass me my clever clogs, I wanna go dancing’.
Take my last epistle on declining standards in what’s left of the national press. I sat down with this morning’s Guardian – well somebody has to – and without really trying (i.e. I was skimming) found several howling typos within a few minutes. These included two missing possessive apostrophes and ‘heroin’ suffixed with a rogue ‘e’. So has the Guardian entirely dispensed with sub-editors, or just succumbed to the fancy-pants phonetics espoused by whacko educationalists who’ve spent too much time hanging around deprived housing estates?
Then we have my September 28th thoughts on the disappearance of local abattoirs due to EU legislation, a phenomenon accelerated by the growth of major supermarket chains. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the few remaining slaughterhouses in these parts has just gone (pork?) belly-up, partly blaming Hereford councillors for allowing a huge new Asda to open in the city alongside two existing Tescos superstores, a Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl and a Sainsburys. By the way, empty premises now constitute some 40% of what was the city’s main shopping centre. And my butcher, who now has to use an abattoir thirty miles further afield, has just put his prices up… again).
Meanwhile I see that Barnes & Noble has just driven its own nail into the coffin of the booktrade I wrung my hands over in ‘Aging Disgracefully’ in mid-September. Yep, the world’s largest bookseller has followed Amazon (with the Kindle) and Waterstones (Sony’s eReader) with the launch of their ‘Nook’ which will if taken to its apparently intended conclusion result in the end of all those pesky books, bookshops and the staff who work in them. It’s a businessplan I’d love to pore over at my leisure, but meanwhile…
My final bout of slapping my own back came after partaking in a Webinar (that’s like a seminar but via the comfort of your home computer using technology that turned out to be rather rickety) on ‘Electric Drive: can we really meet the challenges and embrace the electric car?’ Following my May 8th posting which, whilst wholeheartedly accepting the need for a lower-carbon transport system, cast some doubt on the future of electric vehicles, I was impressed to hear someone from the virtual floor, as it were, pipe up with the claim that China controlled a finite and fast-dwindling supply (mainly in Tibet) of the lithium from which they make the lion’s share of the batteries that power most electric and hybrid vehicles. (There’s a terrible pun in there if you winkle it out). None of the learned panel which, with varying degrees of clarity and conviction had proselytised on the glorious future of the electric car, could satisfactorily address this dilemma.
This by the way, came just 24 hours after the news that each of the few hundred FCX hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars Honda plans to lease in the USA cost around a million dollars each to produce. This smacks of the diminishing returns fiasco orchestrated by General Motors in the 1990s who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on every one of the EVI electric cars they would only lease for one year, eventually recalled and then quietly crushed.
So much for the sustainability of alternative transport for which better solutions than limited energy sources or hugely expensive hydrogen-fueled engines must still be found.
Sadly though, it’s not actually unalloyed self-aggrandisement this week, for in that self-same blog on the dubious prospects for electric cars, I lauded the almost spiritual virtues of my ancient and oil-hungry Lancia Gamma Coupe. And as some of you may recall from my Sept 6th scrawl, the Gamma unceremoniously exploded its guts somewhere on the M5, the upshot of which means a replacement or engine (assuming one can be found) or an expensively re-built one (assuming the parts to do so can be found). Which may well be seen by green transport addicts as a case of divine retribution, but find me an electric car that gets me to Asda and back with a freezer full of meat slaughtered somewhere the other side of the M25 and which costs less than a 30 year-old Italian classic and I’ll buy the bugger like a shot.
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Cheap and Cheerless October 19, 2009
Posted by markswill in Media.3 comments
Of course it was a lie to claim, as I did in my penultimate blog, that I was turning my back on a glittering career in ink-on-paper. But whilst a magazine and newspaper industry that has little to offer anyone over, ooh, 45 who isn’t already a proprietor, senior executive or celebrity columnist is clearly best abandoned, I’m still scrabbling around to find some form of work which doesn’t involve tortured syntax or juggling ad/ed ratios.
In the meantime the prospect of a bit of scribbling or some management consultancy occasionally emerges from left field, faintly rebutting what was recently and bitterly described to me as “the end of freelance hackery.” Depressingly however, all such opportunities command rates far lower than they might’ve been even just a year ago, and in some cases not at all. The validation for this being either that one is lucky to be paid something rather than nothing or, in the case where it actually is nothing, at least one’s getting one’s name about and/or gaining experience which might aid future job prospects.
According to a depressing little segment on R4’s You and Yours, thousands of graduates are settling for cleaning jobs or McDonalds’ shiftwork, so working for nowt in the trade they’ve been expensively educated to excel in might make a miserable sort of sense, but not in my kitchen. However as an old friend and colleague likes to remind me whenever the moaning begins, back in the mid-eighties when I had my own publishing company for which he was then a contractor, I used the same argument for paying pittance rates to novice moguls. (Naturally my memory is rather patchy on this).
Peer group banter aside, there is a more serious consequence of the steep reduction in rates paid to publishing freelancers and its inevitable bedfellow, staff overload, and that is the equally sharp decline in the quality of content. And thus despite their ever rising cover prices, to obviate the cost of commissioning original content even national newspapers are syndicating major features from foreign media which is of questionable interest to UK readers – the Observer being a notable culprit – and many specialist magazines that routinely ran distinctive, well-crafted consumerist features now merely regurgitate press releases illustrated with images provided gratis to all and sundry.
Of course this is partly if not largely a consequence of a web publishing culture where minimal revenues demand cheap content and so print media managers, at last mindful that the web may be their economic enemy rather than a value-adding ally, feel obliged to follow suit. They may also be convinced that attention spans diminished by prolonged and reductive web viewership will be happy with shorter, relatively insubstantial content on the printed page. And they may be right.
This conveniently sanctions editorial staff reductions and the employment of cheap inexperience masquerading as career opportunity (or self-aggrandisement ) which, quite apart from raising stress levels of the remaining incumbents, results in poor writing and poorer subbing. In many cases the ability to churn out endless punnery is valued more highly than crafting a good editorial argument or painting an evocative pen portrait and even major players these days are minefields of typos and senseless sentences. Which as I implied above, seems not to matter to those who master our universe and at this stage of the game it is frankly not for me to know definitively whether cheaper and cheaper content is indeed the cause of lower and lower circulations – or vice versa.
But this stage of the game is not its conclusion and my cynical belief is that if the print media capitulates to reduced attention spans and the consequent diminution in content quality that this fosters if not actually demands, then sooner or later the jig will be up for all but highly specialised journals, media aimed at an older market (which is, quite literally, dying off), and a monosyballic sleb press interested only in Victoria Beckham’s bra-buying hell.
Which perhaps matters not. Perhaps future generations won’t use media as we understand it. Perhaps everything that shapes human destinies and culture will be provided by squinting at and grunting into mobile devices which, if dystopian visions of the future are your cup of conspiracy theorising, will delight the fewer and fewer giant corporations and legislative regimes which govern our lives.
And as I vexatiously attempt to reduce my entirely irrelevant free-to-view blog down to a size that can be conveniently consumed via two scrolls of an iPhone, all I can say is ‘bring it on’.
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