Saturday 30 June 2012

A Sad Canticle

A Sad Canticle is a computer-generated tune I created using Ableton Live with a vocoder filter that gives a no-language/all-languages or Esperanto effect. Its punning title is deliberate, alluding to the horrors being perpetrated in Syria. Readers new to this blog might form the impression that I'm only interested in politics, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In particular I've been passionately interested in music for most of my life. I started listened to, then playing, black American music - blues, R&B and soul - in the early 1960s, progressed to jazz, particularly bop, post-bop and '60s free jazz, which lead me onto modern composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok . From there I explored backwards in time to absorb the classics from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Richard Strauss. I've spent many, many nights at the opera and concert hall and am a regular patron of the Wigmore. My tastes in popular music are highly eclectic and highly selective, stretching from rock, bluegrass and country to reggae, as a glance at my Spotify playlists will confirm.

I haven't bought many records or seen live performances of popular music for decades - I was once keen on new wave bands like Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, as well as dub reggae, but as for many people of my generation the era of hip-hop and dance music became a big turn-off: too old for raves and clubbing but the music not sufficiently interesting for me to just listen. However the last few years have seen a change in my attitude. Though popular music is now fragmented as never before and the extraordinary animus between fans of the myriad different genres is pretty off-putting, I recently find myself attracted to a lot of the experimental music being produced - it feels as though, bored with the blandness of commercial pop, young musicians are rediscovering for themselves the fascination with pure sound that was there in free jazz and other '60s modernisms. The technology of music production has also advanced enormously, so that they can now create on a laptop computer extraordinary sounds that once were the exclusive domain of the avant-gardists of Paris's IRCAM. Some of the sounds coming out of the dubstep scene and its million descendents, or from musicians like Beck, Jack White and Saint Vincent, are really very exciting indeed, recalling the spirit of Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, Shepp and Albert Ayler.

As a keen practitioner of obscure computer programming languages I've also, since the early 1990s, been interested in computer composition (more about my efforts in algorithmic composition on my website here) it was pretty well inevitable then that I'd eventually buy myself a copy of Ableton Live (the tool of choice for much dance music) and start to produce electronic music of my own. I'm all too acutely aware of the potential for ridicule in the spectacle of old codgers getting "down wiv da kidz", and so I deliberately steer clear of attempting house, techno, dubstep and other beats-oriented genres. In any case I'm not really interested in getting people to dance as there's a surfeit of people doing that already.

I'm more interested in playing with sound and rhythm for their own sakes and to disturb various musical conventions. I've recently been experimenting with synthesised nonsense vocals that nevertheless, because they so resemble real human voices, have an emotional effect that's devoid of overt meaning: I suppose if a label is needed it would have to be "expressionist", because I constantly find myself creating tunes that remind me of my outrage at certain current political events. This music is rather a long way from easy-listening, but I do hope that people might at least be upset by it. (I have to warn that if you don't like either modernist music or free jazz, you're unlikely to enjoy this at all). I post my most successful compositions on the popular SoundCloud website, which is mostly frequented by young dance music composers, and here's a widget through which you can hear some of my pieces:    




Tuesday 8 May 2012

Hemmed in by Language

Charles Rosen is one of a handful of living writers whose work I always look forward to reading, which for me mostly means articles on music that he writes for the New York review of Books. Rosen is a first-class pianist who had a professional career on the concert platform (his recording of the Goldberg variations is one of my favourite interpretations). He writes marvellous articles on the appreciation of composers like Chopin, Ravel and Liszt: since the arrival of Spotify I may sometimes spend a whole evening reading one of these pieces while concurrently listening to each of the performances he mentions (I hope music schools have discovered what a great resource Spotify is).

Rosen also has broader interests beyond music, and occasionally writes about philosophical matters and art theory, with a special interest in Romanticism. For example in the latest NYRB (May 10th 2012) he has a piece called "Freedom and Art" in which he typically digs far deeper than the guff one normally reads on this subject (Dada against the bourgeoisie, Constructivism for the revolution, Abstract Expressionism as Cold War weapon, Pop against elitism etc etc ad naus). In this article Rosen starts by discussing the constraints on freedom posed by fixed meanings and having to learn language, and comes out with this extraordinary sentence:

"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know."

It struck me that in this single sentence he summarises, in an arresting and comprehensible way, everything post-modern theorists have been banging on about in such deliberately exclusive jargon for the last 40 years.

PS As a postscript to this thought, my partner Marion's grandmother often professed a belief that monkeys could actually talk, but they didn't because they knew that if we found out we would make them work...

Sunday 1 April 2012

Thought Prompted by the Petrol Strike Debacle

"We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to  imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones."
Tony Judt
In a week where cabinet ministers appear to be urging voters toward Buddhist-style self immolation, I thought that perhaps an automobile metaphor might be apposite. If you imagine society as a motor vehicle then the capitalist market is its engine and social democracy is its braking system. Hands up everyone who wants a car without brakes. OK, just Osborne and Clarkson then...

Saturday 3 March 2012

A Very British Coup?




 






In 100 years time the last week of February 2012 will be remembered as a turning point in UK history, for three events that don't seem all that remarkable at first sight.

The first event was the appearance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sue Akers at the Leveson inquiry, where she claimed that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper, in which police officers and other civil servants were not merely paid for specific information but were in effect kept on retainer to leak regularly. Akers testimony coincided with James Murdoch finally resigning the chairmanship of News International, the Sun's holding company. 

The second event was the announcement that the West Midlands and Surrey police authorities have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. A West Midlands spokesman said that "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public". Needless to say Home Secretary Teresa May is an enthusiastic promoter of this scheme, which she hopes to have in place by next spring.

The third event was Prime Minister David Cameron's admission that he had indeed repeatedly ridden a horse loaned to former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Now to anyone with a modicum of political nous it should come as no surprise to learn that the so-called "ruling class" is nothing of the sort - it is not a class, nor is it singular, nor does it "rule" in any straightforward way. Complex social democracies like that of the UK are ruled by a collection of powerful institutions that pass around power and funds between them, not with much sense of solidarity but more like a Darwinian struggle for dominance. These three events shine a spotlight on three of the most powerful of the institutions, two public (the Tory government and the Metropolitan police) and one private (News International), but other equally powerful ones like parliament and the judiciary are currently involved in a titanic struggle that almost amounts to coup and counter-coup.

That News International has had a baleful influence on British politics for the last 30 years is scarcely news to any but a blinkered few. During its 18 wilderness years the Labour party developed such a debilitating fear of the Sun's power over its natural voter base that NI in effect controlled the mainfesto of New Labour, dictating a continuance of Thatcherite economics and a hands-off policy on the media regulation that might have set them free. However it is somewhat newsworthy to learn that Cameron's "detoxified" Tory party too is almost completely integrated with News International, socially as well as politically.

It appeared for a while that News International's hubris had actually brought it down - the flagrancy of its illegal and anti-democratic behaviour over phone hacking lead to public revulsion and a revolt by parliament and the judiciary: to the Leveson inquiry, the closing of News of the World and the downfall of both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. Last week Sue Akers testimony suggested that the Metropolitan Police, feeling the strength of the gale that's blowing, had changed sides in this struggle and decided to clean out the corruption, sever links with News International and start doing its job again. And then, POW!, we learn that the power of the police nationwide is to be dissipated by hiving off many of its activites to private sector security firms already known to be rapacious, inefficient and mired in corruption. What a coincidence.

I had a foretaste of what's to come when my motorbike was stolen a couple of years ago. The police found it, damaged and immobile, just outside London, but the officer who came to my door explained they could no longer return it themselves: instead it was being held by a private recovery company in Stevenage who charged £150 storage for every day I didn't reclaim it. On contacting my insurance company they were unfazed by this and having assessed my claim eventually paid some £900 storage fees (though of course I and everyone else ultimately pay in increased premiums). The bike was written-off rather than repaired as a result. This is the thoroughly British way of corruption, an insurance claim (whiplash, a "burned hearthrug", a privately-stored motorbike) rather than a handful of banknotes as in India or Latin America, or a newspaper parcel of home-grown cucumbers in the old Soviet Union.

This campaign poses the biggest threat to rule of law since Robert Peel first established a public police force. Combined with the concurrent assault on the NHS, it threatens to change entirely the nature of British society, driving it in the same dysfunctional and collapsing direction as the USA. Business interests will ensure News International eventually wriggles off the hook. Corruption will dominate everyday life as people strive to pay for their health-care and protection from crime. Private security firms will effectively become warlords in the poorer parts of the country. And all this is from the Detoxified Party of Law and Order. I think I preferred the toxic version, at least you knew where you were.

Saturday 14 January 2012

New Year message?


New Year message?, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.
These spent fireworks boxes seem to contain a not-so-subliminal message about the prospects for the world economy this year. I've devoted many posts on this blog to proclaiming my belief that social democracy is the only possible civilised form of government, and the one which most of the so-called 99% of the world's people would aspire to given the chance. It appears they are not to be given that chance - the workings of the neo-liberal economy and its hard-line ideologues conspire to bankrupt all the world's states and return us to a Hobbesian state of nature, while supine politicians are powerless to stop them.

Social democracy is in essence an armistice in the class war - labour agrees not to rise up and expropriate the owners of capital if those owners reciprocate with fair wages, good working conditions and paying taxes to support a welfare state. The benefit to both sides is that it minimises the need for coercion and makes possible the continuance of democratic freedoms. It's becoming hard to escape the conclusion that the 1% have broken that armistice and have no intention of renewing it. Reviving the world economy requires putting money back into the pockets of working people whose wages have been falling in real terms for several decades, but are now plummeting under the deficit-reducing policies of governments. It seems less and less likely that this can be achieved by democratic means, and after a century of social democratic experiment it might still come to a repudiation of all debt and the expropriation of private property. It didn't have to end this way: regulation of the sort devised by Keynes and Roosevelt might have been modernised and extended given the will, but that will is conspicuously lacking. This neat little video by David Harvey offers a reminder of those Marxist facts of life that never went away under social democracy.

There are crackpots on the extreme right who seem to believe that some kind of fascist/neo-feudal regime - under which the rich retire into gated communities and buy the protection of private armies and high-tech surveillance equipment - offers a possible resolution of the crisis. A moment's reflection will tell you that the extraordinary technological achievements of recent decades have only been made possible by mass-consumption and could never be supported solely as luxury goods (the economies of scale of silicon chip manufacture or lithium batteries are prime examples). The unfolding environmental crisis means that such mass-production is already problematic and requires regulation in the same way as finance capital, but that can never happen under "free market" conditions. The only alternative to a restoration of social democracy is slow decline into chaos as systems we've come to depend upon, like transport and the internet, begin to collapse. Meanwhile Ed Balls tells us that Labour will not reverse Osborne's cuts. Happy 2012!   

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Now Cool really Rules - in Russia!

Back in 1999 when the late David Robins and I were writing Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude we reluctantly accepted that due to both space constraints and our intended popular audience, we wouldn't be offering an adequate definition of what sort of a thing "Cool" is. Instead, as the subtitle confirms, we confined ourselves to calling it an "attitude" - basically a collection of psychological characteristics - and suggested that we (and you) would recognise it when we saw it. We did go so far as to identify the major personality-forming components of this attitude, which we proposed are narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment. In the last chapter of our book we discussed the geographical distribution and spread of the Cool phenomenon, and in particular we mentioned the prospect of the Cool attitude invading the ex-Soviet Union. After jokingly raising the question "Is Russia perhaps too cold (or too broke) to enjoy being Cool?" we went on to say:

        Cool even flourished as a dissident force under Soviet Communism, where western popular culture was prohibited and could only be seen via the black market; throughout Eastern Europe a Cool pose was recognised as a mark of passive resistance to communism. It is at least arguable that Cool helped eventually to bring down Communism, as it represents precisely those ‘decadent western values’ that the regime sought to exclude - the black market in Beatles albums and Levi jeans is what lost the hearts and minds of the whole post-war generation for Communism. In 1989 East German youths hoisted the MTV flag over the Berlin Wall as it was being pulled down. 

So is Cool destined to rule the world then? To ask that is the same as to ask whether consumer capitalism and parliamentary democracy are destined to rule the world, because if they do then Cool will surely follow."

Now fast forward to 2011. Two recently published articles have set me to thinking further about this question of what sort of thing Cool is, and also to realise that an actual Rule of Cool is coming about before our eyes, and in Russia of all places.


One of the most intelligent and stimulating political blogs around is OpenDemocracy, and one of its great strengths is its Russian section, oD Russia, which often contains articles that are penetrating and strikingly different in tone from the mainstream of UK commentary. (I remember in particular "Switch on, switch off: how law sustains the Russian system" by Kirill Rogov which details how Putin's regime, rather than merely flouting the law, has subverted and commercialised the law to maintain its own legitimacy). On 24th October 2011 oD Russia published a fascinating piece by the Russian artist Maxim Kantor called "Rise of the lumpen elite: is this really what we fought for?" in which he observes that:
     
          The first result of the policy of globalisation is the creation of an elite which belongs to no particular country and is dependent on no government or regime. It rises above history, culture and tradition. The lumpen proletariat represented danger from below, from the lower strata of society. The lumpen elite is isolated from society and is twice as dangerous. 

The lumpen upper class has come into being during the present crisis, which can be seen as a contemporary version of the classic 'collectivisation.' It bears all the hallmarks of the collectivisation of the 1930s. Both resulted in financial redistribution. Both involved the suppression of the the middle class, the very stratum that is the engine and culture medium of democracy. The rich have grown richer, the poor poorer, and common history and a common goal have ceased to exist. We keep on thinking we live in the same society as before. But we don't: the middle class has lost its rights and the ruling class has been lumpenized. The lumpenized class is the elite.

Around the same time the London Review of Books published a gripping article by Russian TV Producer Peter Pomerantsev called Putin's Rasputin. It's about one of president-to-be-again Vladimir Putin's most important eminences gris, the PR guru Vladislav Surkov, who is described as "the puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system". Pomerantsev summarises Surkov's achievements so far thus:

         He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square.


However Pomerantsev goes on to say:

       But this is only half the story. In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero. ‘Alleged’ because the novel was published (in 2009) under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky – Surkov’s wife is called Natalya Dubovitskaya. Officially Surkov is the author of the preface, where he denies being the author of the novel, then makes a point of contradicting himself: ‘The author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it.

and later on:

       In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead... This is the world Surkov has created, a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.

This account of Surkov's character and achievements chimes perfectly with our conception of ironic, apolitical Cool, and if I were to write a sequel to Cool Rules today it would have to take off from the present situation in Russia, where it appears that Cool finally has come to rule in the literal political sense. And if one accepts this then other examples - Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" parties, Sarkozy marrying Mick Jagger's ex - will crop up everywhere you look. What does this imply for defining the sort of a thing Cool is? Clearly a mere "attitude" will no longer do, unless we're also prepared to say that the Protestant Work Ethic "ruled" capitalist societies for the last 200+ years, which doesn't offer insight into anything much.

A more useful concept is that of a "justification". All human societies must continually justify themselves to their members, lest those members secede from the society to merely pursue their own selfish interests. I recently wrote a review for The Political Quarterly of Jim McGuigan's book "Cool Capitalism", which takes off from where we left things in Cool Rules and extends it into the domain of political economy. McGuigan's book offers a useful summary of recent developments in the sociology of labour, including the important work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello on justification. I don't have space here to fully explain Boltanski and Chiapello's ideas about "The New Spirit of Capitalism", but I will just offer this extract from my PQ review:

       The original spirit of capitalism as described by Max Weber was ascetic, entrepreneurial, politically liberal and organised by family dynasties, until this model fell into crisis during the first half of the 20th century under pressure from world war, economic crisis and socialism. It gradually gave way to what Boltanski and Chiapello call "organised capitalism" based on large corporations, strong trade unions and welfare benefits, a complex easily confused with social democracy (and still branded as such in neoliberal rhetoric). Its justificatory theme became security rather than moral probity, and it was this reformed capitalism that the '60s revolt undermined, the earlier laisser faire form surviving more in conservative fantasies than the real economy.

McGuigan then sketches the history of 'The Great Refusal', those oppositional art movements that rejected bourgeois mores, from the German Romantics through the French Realists, up to 20th-century Modernism, Dada and Surrealism. He traces the rise of the bohemian way of life, clearly distinguishing its romantic alienation from the social alienation described by Marx. Romantic refusal manifested itself in sexual liberty, unconventional personal appearance and a distaste for work, while on the aesthetic plane it created an ever-widening gulf between alienated elite taste and conformist popular taste. The 1960s witnessed the pinnacle of this romantic refusal with the French Marxists Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International (major influences on the student revolt of May 1968) who called for revolution in everyday life and an end to alienated labour. But the 1960s also witnessed a revitalised advertising industry grasping that such extreme individualism, far from threatening capitalism, could be broken, harnessed and saddled to become its trusty steed – as analysed by Thomas Frank and dramatised in the excellent TV series 'Mad Men'. In place of political revolution arose a new cultural populism that ushered in the third epoch of "cool capitalism".

So in a nutshell, in answer to that question about what sort of a thing Cool is, I would now prefer to say that it's society's latest means of justifying itself to itself, which basically involves looking good, having fun and not getting entangled in uncool party politics (let the nerds deal with stuff like famines or global financial crises). The UK conservative media have not quite come out and accused Ed Milliband of being uncool, though they continually flirt with such an accusation. Let's hope that their jeers are on target, because it appears to me that the future of social democracy lies in combating rather than abetting the Rule of Cool, and that we'll need a non-ironic, Uncool Party with which to do that.

Saturday 13 August 2011

Tightening the Web

David Cameron has promised to “do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities”, which may include a law to permit removal of face masks and plans to block access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry messaging. He said in Parliament:
    "Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
Facebook has already replied to Cameron by announcing that it has "already actively removed several 'credible threats of violence' related to the riots across England" but the major social networks are unlikely to comply fully until Cameron can introduce new legislation, which will expose him to widespread opposition on grounds of freedom of speech. At the time of the Wikileaks affair last year I wrote a PC Pro column predicting the imminence of such regulation, and I'm publishing an edited extract of its argument here, since I know that many of my political friends don't read that nerdy-but-excellent journal.

Adapted from the Idealog column in PC Pro issue 197 March 2011:
At the Web '10 conference in Paris this April, we heard European telecom companies demanding a levy on vendors of bandwidth-guzzling hardware and services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple. These firms currently make mega-profits without contributing anything to the massive infrastructure upgrades needed to support the demand they create. Content providers at the conference responded "sure, as soon as you telcos start sharing your subscription revenues with us". It's shaping up to be an historic conflict of interest between giant industries, on a par with cattle versus sheep farmers or the pro and anti-Corn Law lobbies.

But of course there are more parties involved than just telcos versus web vendors. We users, for a start. Then there are the world's governments, and the content-providing media industries. In today's earnest debates about Whither The Webbed-Up Society, no two journalists seem to agree how many parties need to be considered, so I'll put in my own bid, which is five. 

My five categories of player are Users, Web Vendors, Governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom Companies (Telcos), each of whose interests conflict with every other, thus connecting them in a "pentacle of conflict" so complex it defies easy predictions. The distinction is basically this: users own or create content and consume bandwidth; web vendors own storage (think Amazon servers and warehouses, Google datacenters) and consume bandwidth; telcos own wired and wireless fabrics and sell bandwidth; and poor old ISPs are the middle-men, brokering deals between the other four. 

Note that I lump in content providers, even huge ones like Murdoch's News International, among users, because they own no infrastructure and merely consume bandwidth. And they're already girded for war, for example in the various trademark law-suits against Google's AdWords. What will actually happen, as always in politics, depends on how these players team up against each other, and that's where it starts to look ominous. 

At exactly the same time as these arguments are surfacing, the Wikileaks affair has horrified all the world's governments and almost certainly tipped them over into seriously considering regulating the internet. Now it's one of the great clichés of net journalism that the net can't be regulated: it's self-organising, re-routes around obstacles etc, etc, blah, blah. However the fact is that governments can do more or less anything, up to and including dropping a hydrogen bomb on you (except where the Rule of Law has failed, where they can do nothing). For example they can impose taxes that completely alter the viability of business models, or else stringent licensing conditions, especially on vulnerable middle-men like the ISPs.

Before Wikileaks the US government saw a free Web as one more choice fruit in its basket of "goodies of democracy" to be flaunted in the face of authoritarian regimes like China. After Wikileaks, my bet is that there are plenty of folk in the US government who'd like to find out more about how China keeps the lid on. The EU is more concerned about monopolistic business practices and has a track record of wielding swingeing fines and taxes to adjust business models to its own moral perspective. 

All these factors point towards rapidly increasing pressure for effective regulation of the net over the next few years, and an end to the favourable conditions we presently enjoy where you can get most content for free if you know where to look, and can get free or non-volume-related net access too. The coming trade war could very well see telcos side with governments (they were after all best buddies for almost a century) against users and web vendors, extracting more money from both through some sort of two-tier Web that offers lots of bandwidth to good payers but a mere trickle to free riders. And ISPs are likely to get it in the neck from both sides, God help 'em. 

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...