In Memoriam: Charlie Gillett

 

Charlie Gillett, a great musicologist, DJ and evangelist for grown-up popular music has died at the age of 68 of a rare auto-immune disorder. I knew Charlie briefly in the early 1970s when we both wrote for Bob Houston's short-lived but excellent music magazine Cream - we shared a taste for obscure rockabilly, free jazz and US soul music of the "golden age" (before the accursed Philly Sound).  His book on rhythm and blues, The Sound of The City is still the definitive explanation of the roots of the post-war revolution in popular music. 
But Charlie meant more still to me for his radio show "Honky Tonk" which ran every Sunday from 1972 through 1978 on  BBC Radio London. I looked forward to that show throughout the week, and the sheer quality and originality of his choices helped to keep me sane during the depressing and disillusioned days of the early '70s. I first heard Elvis Costello and Ian Dury thanks to Charlie, whose role as a pre-punk prophet has yet to be fully acknowledged. As we plunge into another of those cyclic infantilisations of the popular music scene, his absence will be hard to bear. Even in these days of instant access to all the music through Spotify or iTunes, we still need people of taste to dig up the gems, and Charlie was one of the best.

Photo Shopping

By chance I caught a BBC Radio 4 programme that I'd never heard of called "You and Yours" yesterday (listen here) and it covered the most extraordinary story. The seaside town of Whitley Bay, Northumbria, has a blighted town-centre typical of the area in which 49 shops are currently derelict. However an enterprising estate agent there had the brilliant idea of pasting a life-sized photograph of a luxury delicatessen over one of the shop windows, and it's been so well received that others will soon follow. People say it makes the place less depressing, and it may even slow the crumbling of property prices.

You could hardly make this story up - the "Society of the Spectacle" reveals its actuality, and completely without embarassment. Perhaps we should carry on further down this road, pasting photographs of palaces and hospitals onto derelict warehouse, and all of us going around in smiling Johnny Depp masks. Modern digital photo technologies should keep such a scheme within even the tight public expenditure budgets hinted at by Cameron and Osborne.

Facing Up to the Falklands

In today's Observer Nick Cohen offers a lucid and dignified confession (here) that most of the British Left, himself included, were wrong in 1982 to oppose Thatcher's military expedition to liberate the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion. He goes on to discuss the US neocons' support for Argentina in that conflict, and explains clearly how the Left bamboozled itself with an anti-imperialist rhetoric that had more to do with visceral hatred of Thatcher than with common sense (what was the Argentine junta doing if not imperialism?) The Left has never recovered from the political damage it suffered then.

The main point of his article is that the current spat over Falklands oil is unlikely to lead to war, but that if it does the Left should support Britain, and that he believes that this time the Obama administration would too. I applaud this display of realism but must confess to one nagging suspicion. His entirely-correct line of reasoning vis a vis the Falklands campaign could by extension be brought to bear to justify support for the Iraq War, which Cohen has never renounced. It's at this point one needs to bring up the vital distinction between idealism and pragmatism. The same moral argument does indeed apply to removing Saddam Hussein as did to removing Galtieri's troops from the Falklands. However the pragmatic realities on the ground were entirely different, namely:

1) The level of military force involved was orders of magnitude less: Britain could and did achieve a rapid victory on its own using a small taskforce (which is not to diminish the courage and effort of those who had to fight there). 

2) The territory was tiny, homogeneously British, there were no adversary national groups present who needed to be kept apart, and no new nation needed to be constructed after victory.

3)  They didn't completely demolish the infrastructure of the Falklands during the fighting because there barely was any in that thinly-populated, bleak moorland sheep-rearing community. 

4) It wasn't necessary to lie to Parliament or to the British public to justify launching the Falklands campaign because they both supported it already.

In fact this comparison might make an excellent textbook example of the limits of idealism in real politics.

Predator: the Next Installment

In a previous post here I expressed my admiration for James K Galbraith's 2008 book "The Predator State", in which the US economist describes the way a cabal of politicians, bankers, businessmen, bent union officials and downright gangsters hijacked the social democratic state institutions created in the aftermath of World War II. The levers that Roosevelt's New Deal invented with which to regulate the economy, in these corrupt hands became shovels with with to loot the public purse.


When I reviewed this book for Political Quarterly (Volume 80 Issue 3, pp443-5, July 2009), for an instant I wondered whether its argument represents some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory, perhaps because I'd just been reading James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. However Galbraith's sober and lucid arguments, illustrated with impeccably sourced statistics, soon convinced me otherwise. Events since then (only a year ago) have further reinforced that conviction, that Galbraith is the only commentator who comes close to grasping what is actually going.


First we had our own little scandal here in the UK - over MPs fiddling their expenses - which as I opined in that same earlier post is pretty small beer as these affairs go. Then this January came the "devastating" ruling of the US Supreme Court which threw out all limits on corporate and union political spending, enabling those with unlimited funds to buy political influence with impunity (see Ronald Dworkin's summary of this affair in the New York Review).


In the aftermath of the bank collapses, credit crunch and recession that many sensible people believed must lead to more regulation and responsible government, it's becoming clear that nothing of the sort is going to happen: the predators are still firmly entrenched, still cocky, still confident that nothing that Obama (still less New Labour) is going to do will hurt them.


In the latest London Review of Books there's a thought-provoking review by Peter Mair of Martin Bell's book on the MPs expenses scandal, "A Very British Revolution". Mair uses Bell's book as a launching pad for an extended essay on the moral degeneration of the political classes, a topic which he's well placed to observe living as he does in Berlusconi's Italy and being of Irish descent. He quotes plenty of examples of outright corruption from around the world, with figures, to which public opinion has become more or less blind - he deploys the corruption rankings compiled by Transparency International to amusing effect throughout (New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt, the UK squats at number 17, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are the bottom-feeders at 71). Charles Haughey's Fianna Fail rule in Ireland was in effect the rule of the Irish building industry; Gerhard Schröder passed straight from Germany's chancellor to the board of a Gazprom subsidiary, three months after signing a deal with Putin for a gas pipeline; the whole Russian Gazprom/Yukos business might provide a juicy future plot for Ellroy, were he not so provincially American.  


Mair draws attention to some of the more familiar factors - the steep decline in prestige of the political profession in recent decades, and the *relative* underpayment of MPs, not relative to the rest of us but to the super-rich financiers and businessmen with whom they eat, drink and negotiate every day. He points up the growth of populist parties throughout Europe, as citizens recoil from the political process altogether. But he is more interested in structural factors, like the cost of running a political party which is no longer a mass party, and hence no longer commands an army of unpaid canvassers and organizers. All those pollsters, marketing gurus and consultants charge predatory fees for their advice, and the advice typically costs millions more to implement (eg. TV advert time).


He claims that wealthy individuals and corporations have tired of corrupting existing political parties and seek to "cut out the middle-man" by setting up parties of their own. Berlusconi is the paradigm case: he set up Forza Italia as an extension of his media empire having tired of suborning Craxi's socialist party throughout the 1980s. Organised crime sponsors political parties throughout the former-soviet republics and, particularly the cocaine syndicates, in Latin America.


The lesson to be learned from all this is that our political classes have almost seceded from society at large to become a parasitic caste, but the solution is not to be found in preaching anarchism or anti-state libertarianism. Technology makes modern industrial economies extremely productive but also extremely fragile: we constantly live barely 72 hours away from the chaos of a Haiti, should our electricity, water and food distribution systems be disrupted in any significant way (we saw an inkling of this during the tanker driver's strike, when submerged panic was visible in Tony Blair's eyes on the evening news). Not only can we not do without the state, but the state is the only institution that can defend us against unfettered predation by the hard men - assuming, that is, we can wake up and wrest it back from the predators who are eating it from within.


The fact that Gordon Brown has recently started to remember some of the vocabulary of social democracy forces me to say, against all previous experience and my better judgment, that the next election matters a lot and that a Labour/Lib Dem coalition might be the least disastrous result... In the meantime, please, please read "The Predator State".

meshes

This is my favourite among the photographs I've taken so far this year. As always it was the light - strong winter sun, low in the sky - that made it happen, rather than anything that I or the camera did.

It appears here only to test the blog-posting feature of Flickr, not because I propose to use this blog as a gallery

meshes, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

Dirac and Beauty

Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, has been a hero of mine ever since my teens. He was one of a mere handful of scientists whose grasp of theory was so strong he could predict the existence of something unknown in Nature (anti-matter) that was subsequently found exactly as he'd predicted. Recently Freeman Dyson offered a favourable review of a new Dirac biography by Graham Farmelo, in the latest New York Review of books, which contains some very thought-provoking ideas. Toward the end of this review Dyson claims that Dirac left a three-fold legacy to physics: the astounding discoveries of his fertile period 1920-33; a doctrine of mathematical beauty expounded over the remaining 50 years of his career; and a profound distaste for philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics (which I vigorously share).

Here is Dyson on the second phase: "The second legacy is summarized in a statement that Dirac wrote at the end of his life: 'If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand.' ... The doctrine of mathematical beauty is itself beautiful, and there is no doubt that Dirac believed it to be true. But it does not agree well with the historical facts. During the wonder years when he was making his great discoveries, his thinking was more concerned with practical details and less with abstract beauty. And during the long second half of Dirac's life, when he was preaching the doctrine of mathematical beauty, it did not lead him to important new discoveries."

This touches on an interesting question to which there's no sign of an answer yet, and may never be. Perhaps Dirac's faith in mathematical beauty is actually justified, but science also proceeds in fits and starts as described by Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". A simple and beautiful principle is discovered which triggers many more discoveries that complicate and muddy the picture; then a deeper simple, beautiful principle emerges that clears the board once more; and so ad infinitum. Modern complexity theory shows clearly that very complex behaviours can arise from applying very simple rules (a beautiful illustration is the computer simulation Conway's Game of Life). So the really big question is this: is the reverse true, that every complex behaviour arises from the application of simple underlying rules that we haven't yet discovered. This is the modern form of an old dispute between rationalism and pragmatism, and therefore one of those philosophical disputes that Dirac so hated. Dyson is clearly on the pragmatist side, namely that Nature is at root complex and messy. I veer to the other pole.

Whichever is right, it's a far more interesting problem than those fashionable fairy-tales that purport to be interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the many-worlds hypothesis. Such pretentious cosmological speculations always end up in the same place, namely that there's another copy of you somewhere else in this universe (perhaps infinitely many). The whiff of incense is overpowering - this is just Heaven by another name, the egoists' inability to face the fact that their personal identity will cease upon death. 


originally posted 11 Feb 2010 12:43 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 11 Feb 2010 13:40 ]

Going Cold on Warming

Ian Katz, in a thoughtful Guardian article (Case for climate-change science) suggests today that climate activists will need to start again and make the case for climate change from from scratch, thanks to recent scandals involving the IPCC and East Anglia University, the unusually cold winter and the failure of Copenhagen talks. I'm sure he's right, but I wish him lots of luck in the attempt, as I don't believe a significant political movement will be mobilised around climate change any time soon.

That isn't because I deny the reality of the Greenhouse Effect - on the contrary I've been a "believer" in it (that's to say one who's aware of and accepts the scientific evidence) for 20 years or more. The problem is that climatic systems are so complex that no current (or foreseeable) climate models are good enough to produce the kind of cast-iron predictions needed in politics to convince people. The adoption of the term "global warming" was the environmentalists first and probably fatal error, linking the effect in the public's mind with things getting warmer soon, and where they live, a sore hostage to fortune. Also the industrial revolution isn't yet completed globally, and the fact that China and India won't abandon it on the strength of current evidence is hardly surprising.

What we can say for sure about the Greenhouse Effect is that we have unquestionably raised levels of atmospheric  carbon dioxide to levels not seen for many thousands of years, and have thereby caused more solar energy to be retained in the atmosphere. That makes all climatic processes operate faster, more extremely and more unpredictably, but doesn't leave us with any single politically-exploitable prediction. Drought and flood patterns will shift with dramatic social effects, perhaps triggering mass migrations and wars, but we can't say where and when.

After another 50 years or so of increasing global turmoil a generation will arise who do accept the connection and set about dismantling the growth-based industrial economy, if there's anything left to dismantle among the chaos. We're clearly not that generation, though perhaps my grandchildren are. There's irony in this situation (as always), namely that those who own the most desirable bits of the world, hence with the most to lose, are the strongest climate-change deniers. Their dismay once the penny drops should be a sight to see.

originally posted 9 Feb 2010 11:25 by Dick Pountain