This is good fun. First paragraphs:

Hello, and welcome to Mars South-West Tonight. I have with me in the studio one of the planet's most distinguished nerds, Groink, and I'm going to be asking him all about Earth. Groink, just how close is Earth to us at the moment?"

"Good evening, Kerpow. Lovely to be with you. Earth is currently a mere 26 million eeks away, which is the closest it has been for 60,000 Earth years – which is roughly 150 splatts, if you can imagine such a thing. That means the last time in our history it was so close was just after the Mildly Interesting Occurrences and shortly before the Third Anticlimax."

Read all of it, some of it or none of it, as you please.

I recently bought a copy of William Goldman's book of Essays entitled The Big Picture, and sub-entitled Who Killed Hollywood?, for 99p. All hail the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, even though the politics of that collapse was all wrong. (If a publisher wants won't sell any more books to a bookshop, on account the bookshop is selling them at a price the publisher doesn't like, that should be the publisher's right. As with everything that happens in British politics, this was a European Union thing.)

Anyway, Goldman. It has lots of good bits in it, of course it does. This is the guy who wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade. This paragraph, for example:

When I was nominated for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I watched the awards at home, in New York City, on the tube. Why didn't I go? Because I thought I'd lose, because I was obsessed with the Knicks' first championship run. But also this: The Oscars were not such a deal then. But they sure are now. When I was a kid, novels were important, theater was important, movies were our secret pleasure. Now, movies are the center of our culture. And the Oscars are the central awards.

I am fond of coining laws. Not laws you have to obey; laws you already do obey, and which I'm just pointing out. I'm especially proud of this one, which is two thirds of why I mention this. I still have fond hopes for this law. But the Micklethwait's law that is relevant here is the one that goes:

The quality of a twentieth century man-made object is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the word "art" was slung around during its creation.

Well, this sounds good, but I wonder if it is actually, er, true. I doubt if William Goldman would agree. Perhaps I need to refine the law and say that for the creators to be thinking of themselves as artists is good, but for critics to be agreeing is not good.

During the Old Days of Hollywood, the creators definitely thought they were artists. Why else would they call their enterprises such things as "United Artists"? But the wider culture was divided, if Goldman's observation above is right, into those who thought that what Hollywood did was silly candyfloss and those, like Goldman, who thought that it was profoundly pleasurable candyfloss. Any "art" being done in the cinema was, in the view of the critics, being done by Europeans.

Goldman has a couple more nice paragraphs about that syndrome:

In case anyone gets the idea I'm anti-Hollywood – the reverse, actually, but in any case all is not lost – the worst movie of the year was neither American nor new; it was Contempt, the revival of a Jean-Luc Godard films from the '60s. I would rather have root canal than sit through it again. (And remember I wrote Marathon Man – I'm not your calmest guy in the chair.) Contempt is endless pretentious garbage.

Of course, the critics thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The most disgraceful piece of writing I've come across this year appeared in the New York Times. An incoherent multicolumned rave by one Philip Lopate. I have never met him,. know nothing about him, but he's writing a book of film criticism.

So here's what I think. When an artist says it's art, to himself, this puts him on his metal. But when Philip Lopate agrees with him, that's when the trouble starts. That's when he starts to think: whatever I do is art, so I can do whatever I like, no matter how appalling.

(You get a similar syndrome in sport. When a sportsman believes himself capable of sporting genius and works like hell to achieve it, he sometimes does. But when they then tell him he's a genius, watch out. That's when he may decide he doesn't have to work at it any more. If I am any sort of blogging "artist", then my "art", such as it is, is rooted in my ability to get and keep your attention, and I must never forget this. If you think I'm an artist, keep it to yourself.)

But what Goldman says of Hollywood now (in the late nineties, that is to say) is that it has lost its artistic ambition. It's now run by people for whom money is the reason they do it, instead of just one of those things you need to do this particular art. The films are "product". Those Jewish ex-rag-trade eccentrics with their altered names and tyrannical habits who founded Hollywood and ran it until the nineteen fifties were true artists, in their own eyes, which kept them shooting for the heights, and often attaining them.

Then, in about nineteen seventy something happened. Those fancy critics, having trashed and at best patronised Hollywood throughout its early years, finally decided that it was Art after all. For eighteen months between nineteen seventy something and nineteen seventy something plus two, Hollywood creatives were given unlimited money to throw at whatever "art" it occurred to them to create. When those budgets were mostly lost, the accountants then decided that this art stuff had to stop. From then on: Jaws – which was the film that signalled (if not caused) all the recent damage that Goldman writes about.

Me, I'm not sure that I agree. I do agree that Hollywood does different stuff now, stuff that is crafted to appeal to teenagers all over the planet rather than to folks of all ages in America. All this talk about how "Americanisation" has conquered the world in the form of things like Spiderman 2 is the wrong way round. Spiderman 2 is as much the world conquering America as vice versa. Goldman describes all this, but gets in a bit of a muddle, because he confuses change with death.

Like Goldman, I personally don't care for such films as Spiderman 2 any more, and prefer quieter, more conversational and less blood-bespattered stuff. I also now find myself liking Brahms chamber music a lot more and Brahms orchestral music a little less. But this is because I'm getting older and quieter in my tastes, not because Brahms orchestral music is any less good than I thought it was when I was twenty. But this doesn't mean that Spiderman 2 is necessarily any less artistic than a Brahms string quartet or The English Patient. It's just a rather different art, is all. Not one that Goldman or I now care for.

Goldman points out that foreigners are now providing an increasing proportion of the profits of Hollywood blockbusters, and Americans less, and seems to think that this is bad news, from a business point of view. No, it's just business. And now that those fancy East Coast critics, prodded by Goldman, are back to despising Hollywood, the updated version of Micklethwait's law ought now to be kicking in and making those blockbusters really impressive, and I suspect that exactly that has been going on for some time now. While Oscars are handed out to foreigners making mediocre conversation movies for grown-ups, Hollywood is (if the law is right) cranking out Blockbusters that will last for ever.

A lot of it is politics. The blockbusters are all about fighting in very unrealistic ways, true. But they also embody lots of ideas. That these ideas are often communicated in half a line, after ten minutes of solid, wordless (and hence multi-national) mayhem, doesn't mean that they aren't ideas. But many of these ideas are unwelcome to those fancy critics, so they call these movies "mindless". A lot of them are anything but mindless.

I should stop now. Attention spans, and all that.

Just a final thought, which is that I think that this already probably-too-long posting does something to explain why I think that arguments about just what is and is not "art" can be so important. This is a word which has consequences. If something is thought of as art, that matters, and influences what is then done. Art, the word, causes the roofs of houses to leak. Art, the word, causes movies to be boring. Art, the word, causes paintings to be ugly and pointless, and plays to be boring and incomprehensible. It is a word worth arguing about.

In the piece I've just linked to, Aaron Haspel says:

The modern religion, as Tom Wolfe beat me to pointing out, is art, which has become the highest term of praise for anything at all. A well-played bridge hand, a well-placed insult, a nice-looking ashtray are all "works of art." Except they aren't, and neither is architecture. Art is art, and non-art is non-art, and never the twain shall meet.

I disagree rather severely with those last three sentences. But the question What Is Art? is one that I entirely agree with Haspel in taking seriously.

This kind of thing is interesting from the Art point of view, I think.

I found it by typing "Art" into google (which makes this a quota posting - well spotted), and then going here and then here and then to this and finally to this.

I do actually quite like this particular one, although I prefer the blue bits to the brown bits (which I think have a somewhat Monty Python feel to them) and unlike some of the other pictures in this set it has no appalling poem or ghastly music attached, which is a bonus.

Obviously, Art Critics hate pictures like this, and they presumably hate the internet for serving up such stuff as Art hit number three out of twenty zillion. Too many trailer trash people actually like them, and popular things need no critics to explain them and decide about them. Popular stuff may attract critics later, who reminisce about what fun it used to be and how great it still is, but no critics are needed to get it going in the first place.

But such critics do have a point about the idiocy of people who seriously like these kind of fractal pictures, as opposed to just, you know, liking them, because they're quite pretty. This "Hawk" person is obviously not someone you'd want to know personally.

The other thing that is wrong with these things is that they are too easy to do. Art-wise, they are cheating. I don't mean that I could do them myself. I wouldn't know where to begin. But there are thousands who can. And they do it not with months of devotion, but with half a page of equations, a personal computer and a few clicks of the keyboard. And easy isn't art. It can't be. They are more like mathematical discoveries, that happen to look nice and are best expressed in pictorial form.

Nevertheless, I do like these pictures. And this doesn't make me a mad hippy any more than liking the Rolling Stones makes me a philandering libertine or a Marianne Faithful clone.

But I do admit it. If I'd had more time to do this posting, I would have found something more cultural.

This interesting post of David Sucher's reminded me of a bridge that used to exist in London, a very long time ago, but which was badly burned in 1633, I've just discovered. Like the bridge over the freeway that David describes, London Bridge (no less) also had buildings on it.

I got this recreation of it, by Peter Jackson, from this site, where there are lots more pictures of this bridge, and of its successors, and of its proposed but unbuilt successors.

Adam Tinworth (whom I've already mentioned in this piece) links to the City Comforts piece, and also supplies this link, also to a thing about the old London Bridge.

Of course, there have to be shops next to the road in the middle of those buildings or for David it won't count. Without that, it's just starchitecture by some dead guys. Me, I love it either way.

Every time I have something here that they like, the 2 Blowhards link to me. Thank you 2 Blowhards. If I linked to 2 Blowhards every time they had something I liked, there'd be nothing here but links to 2 Blowhards.

But I did especially like this posting about Postmodernism. This is one of the cleverest bits of anti-Frenchness I have come across lately, and God knows, there's been a lot of competition in that department recently. The basic thesis is: Postmodernism doesn't make much sense of the world, but it sure as hell makes a lot of sense of France.

Final fraught-with-further-significance paragraph:

I guess the real question is not why the French see something of themselves and their situation in Postmodern thought, but rather what American academics see in it? Whatever our own issues are, America clearly lacks that peculiarly French culture-schizophrenia. Is it possible that our academics miss it, or do they perhaps actually long for it? Or have they simply not read enough history - either French or American?

No I think it's simpler than that Friedrich. I think that American academia (at any rate the bit of it that worships Postmodernism) is a little slice of La France in America. At any rate in the sense that France is described in the rest of Friedrich Blowhard's posting.

Postmodernism is what happens when you let appearances get way out of hand. It is one thing to say that you can manipulate reality by manipulating its appearance. (You definitely can.) It is quite another to say that it is only appearances, only the way things look, that matter, and that what things are is just a trick of the light.

My friend Alice is battling away to make her blog look nicer. Good luck to her. And I feel that this is a quite profound comment on how a lot of us feel about the role of aesthetics in everyday life:

Yes, this is drivel. As soon as I get my new look, everything will change.

She's talking about the blog, not herself. But something very similar could be said about the relationship between how well you you talk and how good you look. (Improve your speaking by getting a new suit.)

Things are a shambles. But as soon as we can make them look nice, they will be on the mend. Start with appearances, and reality will follow. There is much truth in this.

In armies, a classic way (see the movie Patton starring George C. Scott) of turning loser soldiers into Real Soldiers is to start by making them look like Real Soldiers. Start with the appearance of things. Next thing you know, they'll feel like Real Soldiers, and before you know it they'll be Real Soldiers, and fighting like Real Soldiers.

Many – including me, here, I'm sure, often – speak of beauty and good-lookingness as being entirely separate from everyday Real Life and its struggles. Not so.

I've had little time for culture today, but here's another of my little insights into the nature of the musical listening experience, to put alongside earlier postings of a similarly inconsequential sort such as this one.

My starting point is Solitaire (the electronic game that comes packaged with Windows), to which I am addicted. I'm not proud of this, nor am I desperately ashamed, and maybe "addicted" is a bit strong. I just find that from time to time I like to have a little session of Solitairing, and while doing this, I have made an interesting discovery. While playing Solitaire, I can actually listen, and listen properly, to classical music.

Contrast this with something like writing, even writing something as light in weight as this little piece. When I'm doing something like that, entire movements of volcanically wonderful music can go by without me paying any of it the smallest attention, and electrodes planted in my brain would, I am sure, prove this. But when I play Solitaire, the electrodes would be buzzing and swaying in time with even the gentlest and most unobtrusive music, such as the lesser little Beethoven piano sonata I listened to today, opus 14 no. 1.

Presumably this means that Solitaire has become automatic. I'm not getting any better at the game, not the way I play it, any more than some old man out jogging is getting any faster at long distance running. It's just that we like to do it, and from time to time I hear things from those who care for the elderly to the effect that my Solitaire inclinations are very probably good for me, rather than pointless. They keep the brain cells exercised, but without straining them too much. Solitairing means that my brain will last a little longer.

Nevertheless it is a very odd thing to watch myself placing a red ten on top of a black jack, while simultaneously appreciating the phrasing of the piano player in a piece of Beethoven. Asked to guess about such a thing, I would have said that the same part of the brain that plays Solitaire would be needed to listen to Beethoven. But, provided I play Solitaire in a suitably trancelike manner, it is not so. It is the Solitaire that "goes in one ear and out the other", rather than the music, even as my mouse hand continues to go through the proper Soliltaire motions. Odd.

UPDATE next day - August 27: I realise, thinking about it some more, that it goes further than this. Solitaire actually helps me to listen to classical music by being a substitute for concentration. One way to listen to classical music is ... to concentrate. This means preventing any other thoughts besides the music from entering your head. Solitaire does this automatically. It erects a mental barrier that stops me thinking about anything else, and thus I listen totally to the music. (That Solitaire puts me into a Solitaire trance obviously helps also.)

I noticed this just now. I had finished working on one of the postings above, and I decided to do a burst of Solitaire to recharge the batteries, or something, and immediately I started to listen to the music that I had on. Which previously I had been completely ignoring.

And what was that music? It was the final piece of the three Beethoven piano sonatas on the CD that I was also playing yesterday (Alfredo Perl on Arte Nova for those interested), and which I found on pause when I got up this morning. And whereas last night I had been paying close Solitaire-induced attention to Beethoven's Piano Sonatas No 9 in E major op. 14/1 and No. 10 in G major op. 14/2, this morning I had been ignoring Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major op. 106, known as the "Hammerklavier", and the biggest, grandest and one of the most demanding (to player and listener alike) of the thirty two Beethoven piano sonatas. !!!

This is the kind of thing you need to know. After all, what if someone came up to you in the street and asked you: "Do you know if they had ice cream in Victorian times?" – and you had to admit that you didn't?

You think that's far fetched? Exactly this experience happened to Michael Jennings only yesterday.

Normally I take pride in being able to answer questions like this, but in this instance I really couldn't.

The horror, the horror.

Afterwards, of course, Michael did some research, and it turns out they did. Too late, Michael, too late.

This posting too silly and inconsequential to put on Samizdata. But since (a) this is my ego blog, and (b) culture here means whatever I say it means which means that it can include Victorian ice cream and strange events in the twenty first century street if I say so and I do say so, here it is here.

I've always loved the Rolling Stones, who are being worshipped on BBC1 as I write.

This is because I have always loved classical music, and the Rolling Stones are classical music par excellence.

The Beatles were great, yes, but they were what I would call "imaginative". Their songs were composed, with all their la-di-da tunes that went wandering off all over the place, under the influence of all sorts of drugs, and with all manner of orchestral instruments in the background. The best Rolling Stones tracks are like discoveries. They weren't so much composed as dug up, revealed as always having been there. Their best tunes, by which I simply mean their great, popular rock and roll standards, have the same absolute rightness about them as have the cantatas of Bach, the string quartets of Haydn, the piano concertos of Mozart, the songs of Schubert, or the symphonies of Beethoven. Ah, they're playing Brown Sugar now. Everyone loves that, and count me in.

Lots of people loved the Rolling Stones because they were rebels. I loved them because they were musical … not conservatives exactly, but the originators of something which musical conservatives from then on would always want conserved. I never took to all that sex drugs rock and roll lifestyle stuff. It frightened me back then and it frightens me still. For many of my contemporaries it felt like a personal liberation. To me it looked like the alpha males on the rampage, and alpha males are always scary to all the gamma and delta males, and I was a timid little creature way down the Greek alphabet, plenty of brain but no hormones to speak of. Everyone has their ideal age, and nineteen was absolutely not mine. I think that those who said that all that stuff was a threat to social decency and social order were quite right. But then there was that beautiful music.

If you want to go all Music Professor about the Stones, I suggest you concentrate on the first few bars of those best tracks. The best Stones openings are sheer genius. How they work is: you put together your Stones track (this is if you are a Rolling Stone – I'm not suggesting you try to imitate this procedure with your stupid little band) with the words and the tune, the lead guitar part, the bass guitar part, and the regular drum beat. Then you introduce each bit separately with the least obvious and most rhythmically mysterious one coming in first. Often this would be a guest instrument, like that cowbell thing for Honky Tonk Women. Or it would be a regular instrument played in a really weird way, like the guitar playing at the start of Gimme Shelter. But sometimes it would just be the offbeat lead guitar riff (riff? is that the word?) as in Brown Sugar. Anyway, you add the various musical lines in ascending order of musical obviousness, and finally the machine is up and running. When it works, this kind of thing takes you to musical territory only previously inhabited by such things as the opening of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata or of things like Mozart's Dissonance String Quartet (where the key and the tune is kept a secret for about fifteen bars much as the Stones start a classic track by keeping the rhythm a secret). Now we've just had the opening bars of Start Me Up, and the game there is you can't for the first second or so work out what the rhythm is. Rhythmically, a parallel would be the opening bars of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, where you can't tell if it's in 3/2 or 2/3 or whatever it's called. DA di di DA di di, or DA di DA di DA di. Central to all this is Keith Richards, as already stated here: one of my all time favourite musicians.

This all may sound rather Pseud's Cornerish, but the point I want to make here is, it's the music. Not the drugs and the drug busts, Marianne bloody Faithful, the stupid funny voices and the imitations of them by their youngers and worsers on the telly. It's the music. The fact that this music used to emerge from Human Threats to Everything Decent didn't matter. It didn't matter when it became clear to everyone that the Rolling Stones were actually pillars of society and no more of a threat to the Establishment than Dame Thora Hird, and that it will soon come out of old men who wouldn't be out of place as characters in the Goon Show. All that is a good laugh and everything, but is of no consequence to me. It's the music.

As for going to Rolling Stones concerts, I think I would feel much the same about that as I find that I do about going to live football matches. I prefer it on CD.

Yes, more art as outrage. Read this (which I got to from here and then here):

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Polish artist has sparked controversy in the Netherlands by selling "Auschwitz souvenirs" -- from crematorium fridge magnets to "Arbeit Macht Frei" key rings -- to remind people of the horrors of the Nazi death camp.

T-shirts with the menacing skull-and-crossbones symbol from the camp's electric fences and key rings bearing the camp gate's infamous German inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) have been on sale at a Dutch art show since late July.

Agata Siwek, a 30-year-old fine arts graduate who grew up near Auschwitz, said Thursday the items she put on sale in the southern city of Den Bosch were intended to remind people of the Holocaust and the need to combat discrimination and war.

"Taking a souvenir and hanging it on your keys is a way to remember the evil inside all of us. It (Auschwitz) is the symbol of the ultimate evil," Siwek said.

Well, Ms. Siwek now has her flurry of publicity, this posting now being part of that.

Next, joke key rings with the face of Mohammed, an exact model of the Mosque at Mecca made out of camel dung, some Satanic Verses spelt out with Coca-Cola bottle tops, stuff like that.

Well, no, because that sort of thing would be too scandalous. The art of outrage art is to be just outrageous enough to get that publicity flurry, but not so outrageous that they come and put you in prison or murder you or decide that you can't be in the newspapers or on the telly, or some such disaster. The trick is to understand the shifting frontiers of respectability, the fluctuating battle lines of outrageousness, searching for that spot where the "outrageous" in the newspaper sense meets up with the truly outrageous, in the outrageous sense, and to place yourself in the exact spot that nobody else has spotted, which used to be beyond art but which has just recently come in rage, and then when they interview you, you say something emollient and completely politically correct as if you'd done nothing outrageous at all. Basically you say: "What's all the fuss about?" Which is bullshit because the capable outrage artists knows exactly what the fuss is about, and if there was no fuss, the project would have been a failure.

The cunning of Ms. Siwek's outrage art is that it makes use of the outrage opportunities made possible by the somewhat less extreme outrageousness of anti-Semitism in Europe these days. This means that it is now just about okay, arguably, to exploit Auschwitz for outrage art purposes. Unhappy Jews still matter, of course they do. But they don't matter quite as much as they used to. And that's the sort of opportunity that an outrage artist is looking for.

Ms Siwek has showed herself to be an expert outrage artist, who understands exactly how these things are done. There will be many more entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe in our midst in the next few years, mostly to our extreme benefit and doing mostly respectable and honourable things, but also things like this.

Yesterday I attended a funeral, and whenever I do that the conversation turns to clothing, because my clothes are so weirdly smart. "You're looking smart Brian", says everyone.

And here's what we said. We said that it is indeed remarkable how impressive ugly men can look in really good men's clothes. Is their a finer sight in the world than a hideous man, who is normally just one big explosion of visual pollution, decked out in a thousand pounds worth of state-of-the-art Men's Clothes. Ugly women, on the other hand, tend to look ugly whatever they are wearing.

Someone else (a woman, as it happens) claimed that this is because men's clothes don't ever change in basic design. They just get ever more perfect and magnificent. Women's clothes, on the other hand, what with women being so fatally fascinated by clothes, are constantly yanked this way and that by fashion, which doesn't apply to men, and thus women's clothes are in a perpetual state of confusion, and ugly women are in permanent danger of being made to look even more ugly in ways that aren't corrected by spending a thousand pounds but instead made to look even uglier.

I am enough of a man not just to be ignorant of such things and to have no strong opinions about them, but to be downright disapproving of any man who is not so ignorant. But I have weak opinions on this subject, and the above analysis makes sense to me.

This is really interesting, linked to by b3ta.com, of all people, in their latest newsletter. It's a collection of after/before photos. When you mouse over the immaculate image, you suddenly get to see all the maculacies, so to speak, that have been computered out.

We've all read about this kind of trickery. But I for one have never actually seen the details of what is involved before.

b3ta: never knowingly profound. But they slipped up this time, I reckon.

This scheme is not one that I have so far paid any attention to, which is odd, given that it combines my two most serious obsessions here, namely modern architecture and classical music. (I'm seldom serious about movies. I just like them.)

I'm talking about Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the financial history of which is told in a New York Times article today.

The Music Director is happy.

"What does this do for the city?" said Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish-born music director of the Philharmonic, a tousle-haired and still boyish figure at 45. "I'm quite amused by the fact that the hottest ticket in L.A. is a classical music/architectural event, not some Hollywood thing. I'm going to enjoy that. It won't happen again."

My last contact with Esa-Pekka Salonen was attending a prom last year in which he conducted a fascinating and spirited performance of Shostakovitch's 2nd Symphony, which has a chorus at the back of it singing maniacally about agricultural productivity, and which I loved, and in which he then conducted a dull and spiritless albeit note perfect performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which also has a chorus at the back, singing about joy.

This maniacal building, I'm guessing, is just the kind of maniacal place which Salonen most likes to perform in.

My question: What are the acoustics of the place like? About that, this particular New York Times article is silent. Frank Gehry is described triumphing over the scheme of one of the billionaires involved to domesticate Gehry, as it were. (Shades of this.) Did an acoustics expert have the right to veto this weird object until he was satisfied? I do hope so.

This at least suggests that some people are serious about getting such things right.

It's only a small thing, but a thing nevertheless. Last night I was watching a nothing movie with Charlie Sheen in it. Which is rather tautological, because Charlie Sheen is such a bad actor. I saw another Charlie Sheen movie (which was still great despite him because it had Denise Richards in it) where he spent the whole thing reminding me of something, and I only later worked out that it was that actor who played Loo-tenant Weinberg in A Few Good Men, who did a skit performance of a Really Slow and Portentous News Anchor Man who is famous (in America) for being really Slow and Portentous, in a movie called The Opposite Sex which also had the brunette skinny one from Friends in it who changed her name by adding her husband's surname to her own name when she got married which actresses should never do, I think. That's how bad Charlie Sheen is. He acts, for real, like someone else's send-up of a Slow and Portentous News Anchor Man.

(Denise Richards is a classic example of an under-rated actress. People confuse the fact that she plays bimbos so very cleverly and entertainingly with the notion that she, Denise Richards, is a real life bimbo. She is actually a terrific comic actress. But let that pass. This posting is about Linda Hamilton, and only about Denise Richards in passing.)

Anyway, acting opposite Charlie Sheen in this nothing movie was Linda Hamilton, no less. She who is the mother of the Saviour of Mankind in Terminator 2, and who then married the Director of it who then did Titanic (incidentally Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio (and what a piece of crap this is, don't you think?) only has to get a bit older and he'll look like Bill Clinton), but then they divorced for some reason. She who is hit by an earthquake in Earthquake (I think that was her) alongside the latest James Bond before he was James Bond. (Denise Richards on the other hand, acted alongside James Bond when he was James Bond. I had not forgotten about that.) No, it was a volcano, but it wasn't called Volcano.

I really like Linda Hamilton. Think how much less bad Dangerous Minds would have been if Linda Hamilton had played the ex-Marine school teacher, instead of Michelle (Grease 2) Pfeiffer – whom I also adore and who may for all I know actually be an ex-Marine, but to me she does not look like one. (The real person Michelle Pfeiffer enacted in Dangerous Minds actually looks a bit like Molly Ringwald. Strange. I never figured Molly Ringwald for a US Marine. Or maybe, she looks more like the actress who played the photographer in the much derided but I think quite interesting Perfect in which Jaime Lee Curtis played a swimmer/aerobics instructor. Anne De Salvo, that was her. But not so much in this photo.)

Anyway, the small thing. Linda Hamilton and Charlie Sheen were being chased around Washington and its surrounding areas by the US government. Incidentally, the assassin in this movie was also the assassin in another movie (a much better one) which was also on TV last night called The Hard Way, which is the one where Michael J. Fox plays a movie star and James Woods plays a hard-driven New York cop. More tautology. I mean, when do you ever have soft-driven New York cops in movies? Who is that guy? The assassin I mean. (His name is Stephen Lang. You can't ask rhetorical questions in blog postings. Blog postings have links. To do links, you have to find them. And if you can find links, you can find who played the assassin in some idiot movie, in about half a minute. I went to a site about the nothing movie, and I found the cast list.)

Anyway, the small thing. Linda Hamilton was being chased.

Most actresses being chased around in nothing movies just go where they're put and run where they're told to run and they say whatever nonsense they have to say. But, they insist on their make-up looking flawless throughout all this foolishness, as if out to dinner in a fifties Dean Martin movie or something, despite being attacked by dinosaurs or submarines or space aliens for about a solid week of mayhem. Which only makes everything look about five times sillier than it would have looked anyway which was pretty damn silly to start with.

Linda Hamilton, however, while being chased around Washington and surrounding areas, played a woman who was not, as you probably wouldn't be in such circumstances after about the first four hours of being chased around, wearing any make-up. And that is how she really looked. I've probably seen a female lead in a silly film played as un-made-up before, but for the life of me I can't remember when that would have been.

Of course, Linda Hamilton, the actress, was wearing make-up, on much the same basis that I presume Charlie Sheen, the (bad) actor, was also wearing make-up. But my point is, she genuinely and truly looked as if she wasn't. She looked like a woman who was simply too busy to doing with make-up, what with people firing rockets at her out of helicopters and such like. Which made everything look only about half as silly as such things usually do.

Good for Linda Hamilton, is my point. I don't know everything about how Hollywood operates, in fact I know hardly anything about how Hollywood operates, but it is my understanding that if a star actress doesn't like the way her make-up looks they redo it until she does. Star actresses have make-up approval. So Linda Hamilton let this happen. I was impressed. Smart woman. She would never make the mistake of suddenly calling herself Linda Hamilton Titanic Director's Surname. (I know: Linda Hamilton Cameron.)

Although, now I think about it, Charlie Sheen was quite amusing as Pheobe's submariner boyfriend in Friends, where they both got chicken pox.

A great way to edge your profile in the blogosphere in the upwards direction is to do one of those links to a Samizdata posting that turns the bit where it says "TrackBack [0]" to "TrackBack [1]". Noticing such a circumstance (and making it go now to "TrackBack [2]") at the top of Dale Amon's posting about SpaceShipOne (which I have a soft spot for simply because it photographs so prettily), I backtracked my way to a blog called The Speculist, which is about the onward march into the wild blue future yonder of technology. Whenever Samizdata gets too gloomy about the European Union, income tax, UK gun control, etc., this will be one of the places I go for optimistic refreshment about life's possibilities.

My favourite posting there at present, edging the one about DNA computing into second place, is this one about Chinese human-rabbit hybrids.

Hollywood must be told about this. The pitch: The Fly, only instead of a fly it's a bunny. The Bunny! Jeff Goldblum with fur and whiskers (which he has already practised doing in the outstanding Earth Girls Are Easy), winning an Olympic sprinting medal and then disappearing into a hole in the ground. Maybe not.

Jackie D of au currant has some art crit:

Modern artists the world over have spent the last couple of decades trying to push the envelope, coming up with ever more deliberately offensive works to the point where the world largely fails to notice anymore. Figure of Jesus Christ sculpted out of poo? Yawn. Two men and a donkey getting their freak on in an aquarium full of vomit and urine? Zzzz.

And then who should come along and produce works of art that result in honest to goodness controversy but Prince Harry. And with his art A-level submissions, no less. Aborigines are all pissed off, but as someone pointed out to me recently, Prince Harry's paintings aren't that different from the sort of prints one can easily buy at places in the mall like Pier One Imports.

One of Jackie D's commenters says read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, which I did a long time ago. It is the last word on the art/outrage syndrome, despite having been published nearly thirty years ago now.

Some culture from Dave Barry.

This Guardian has a story today about how the Internet, instead of wrecking the music industry, is reviving it, by forcing it to lower its CD prices.

But the economics of the Guardian piece is all over the place. Success is defined as total money spent, which, now that people are spending the same amounts of money on more and cheaper products, is holding up. Profits are falling, says the story, but that doesn't matter.

Oh yes it does. The record companies may be shifting their existing product at fire-sale prices, but these numbers won't encourage them to record new stuff.

For the time being, they can still make some money with their biggest selling pop artists. But the future of the music industry remains uncertain.

I've been noting the fall in classical CD prices for some time. I can't help noticing that sellers of CDs are now aware that one of my alternatives is to get hold of a copy of the CD in question by borrowing and copying it. The morals of this may be as wobbly as the Guardian's economics, but wobbly morals, unlike the grim certainties of economics, don't stop things happening. The basic, low-as-it-gets price for a quite decent but long available classical CD is just £. This compares very favourably with the bother of copying. That's what I paid, for example, for a very decent recording by Maria-Joao (sprinkle Spanish squiggles to taste) Pires, of Mozart's piano concertos 13, 14 and 23. Before ubiquitous CD burners, this would have set me back £3. at least.

It's the same with books. The price of books very exactly reflects the bother of photocopying from a legitimate copy, both in terms of how easy it is to get hold of a copy, and how easy it is to actually photocopy it. Not very, which is why remaindered books can still fetch several quid, despite their low tech nature – in fact because of it.

What's holding CD prices up, still, is that there are still plenty of listeners out there who can't be doing with this internet malarkey and still want to have an entirely separate system for music to the system they have for internet surfing or emailing or doing their homework. I'm one of these neanderthals. Soon we will all be dead. As we die, the Internet will gradually mutate into one vast, free, jukebox. For many it's that already. But not me. I like CDs. I like the idea of owning music, in the form of an object for each clutch of pieces. I feel about CDs what an earlier generation felt about LPs and what an even earlier one than that felt about 78s.

But I'm noticing that with movies my psychology is different. The knowledge that truly high definition movies for the home are yet to arrive, and the fact that a favourite movie does not immediately demand to be watched four more times (while a treasurable new CD demands exactly that), all make me less bothered about owning movies on DVD. If their purchase price resembles the cost of hiring, I'll buy. Over about twelve quid, forget it.

It doesn't help that DVDs come in ludicrously space-consuming boxes. At some point, I might seriously consider switching all the movies I do own on DVD into CD-type jewel cases. I mean, what nincompoop thought, after the electronics industry had sweated blood to get the info boiled down into a beer mat, that the way to package DVDs was to make them take up as much space as possible. I guess, what with VHS tapes, they were just addicted to big fat rectangles.

Plus, I suppose when they introduced DVDs they reckoned they'd charge forty quid for each one and that the average punter would own about twenty of them in his entire life.

But we punters are smarter than that. We know that the marginal cost of copying a movie is zero, near enough, no matter how many gazillions they may spend making the damn movies in the first place. We always knew, having watched the price of CDs drift downwards over the last two decades, that DVDs would soon move downwards too, and if they are still asking twenty quid for a favourite movie, to hell with them. We only buy a quarter as many of the damn thing. Ergo, DVD movie prices have plunged a lot more quickly than CD prices.

Soon there will be DVDs in the charity shops, just as there have long been quite decent CDs there.

The longer term future of both music making and movie making will become much more dispersed, and diverse. More will be done by people who just want to make music or make movies. Money will still be just as important, but in a different way. The typical customer of the new age will not be a passive listener or watcher, but an active creator.

A bit like blogging. We don't make money with our blogging. We are the customers – for bandwidth, for blogging software, for cameras and flash cards so we can decorate our blogs, for designers who can tart up the look of our blogs, for nicer screens, for nicer speakers to play each others' tunes.

The new age, in other words, will not be an age in which canned music and canned movies make the money. What will make the money will be the cans and the canning equipment. The instruments.

That's enough. Probably already too much. Sorry if it was all too boring and obvious.

Adam Tinworth commented on this Samizdata piece of mine about these buildings, and linked to it from his own blog. When I responded with another comment, Adam emailed me and offered me a copy of the magazine he edits, which is called Office Trends. He sent me the May edition, which has a picture of the Gherkin on the front.

It contains much of interest. This is my first posting reacting to this publication's contents, but it will not be my last.

Adam's editorial (p. 9) starts with this intriguing question:

Why do the really interesting buildings always start going up just as the market turns?

Which is an interesting question to ask about interesting buildings. The relationship between spectacularly fine buildings and spectacularly bad management decisionmaking has long attracted comment, esepecially when it comes to custom built headquarters, which have the knack of being built on the ruins of the enterprise that was supposedly about to occupy them, and at the very least of doing severe damage by diverting top management attention away from the job they are supposed to be doing, and towards their lovely new building.

In general, I feel that the economics of architecture is that it is rather like the economics of higher education. Like diamonds for the wives of rich people, flash buildings are more a symtom of econmic success than a cause of it. But like diamonds, they are very pretty.

Adam continues:

There is no doubt that 30 St Mary Axe, the infamous "erotic gherkin" is the most impressive and innovative addition to London's skyline in decades.

My sentiments exactly.

While Tower 42, once known as the NatWest tower, was a huge branding coup in its day, it lacks the aesthetic appeal of the newcomer.

Indeed.

Canary Wharf, for all its height and (eventual success has near duplicates in many cities worldwide.

Presumably Adam, being the editor of Office Trends, has to be polite about this boring great lump, because it is a major office building..

Adam then goes on to draw his readers' attention to the piece by Piers Wehner (p. 38), and about that I'll do a separate posting.

Also in the issue is mention of Renzo Piano's London Bridge Tower, already commented upon here, which is apparently going to get built. One of a number of Micklethwait's Laws states that with new architecture you can't tell whether it will look good until it's built. Meanwhile, according to the faked-up pictures of it that I've seen, the top of it makes it look like a paper dart that has had the pristine perfection of its pointed nose rumpled by a collision, but which still points upwards in a determined manner as if all was well. I see that in my previous post about this building I said I feared it would look unfinished. I should have said slightly damaged.

There's also a discussion (p. 2) of another new tower that is apparently going to be built in New York, on top of another famous older building:

Lord Foster's first project in New York will be a 42-storey tower extension to create a landmark headquarters for the Hearst Corporation.

Located at 959 Eighth Avenue at 57th Street, the new HQ will also fulfil William Randolph Hearst's vision of a world-class tower at the site. The extension will surmount the company's existing art deco building commissioned by the famous media magnate, and designed by the émigré Austrian architect Jospeh Urban.

The six-storey masonry block, completed in 1928, was always intended to be topped by a tower, althoguh no designs were ever recorded. Seventy years later, the tower addition, combined with a remodelling of the original base, will provide an extra 1m sq ft of space for one of America's largest communications companies.

Lord Foster said: "The new Hearst Tower will express its own time with distinction, yet respects the existing six-storey historical structure. The tower is lifted clear of its historic base, linked on the outside only by columns and glazing, which are set back from the edges of the site. The transparent connection floods the spaces below with natural light and encourages the impression of the new floating above the old."

Well, that's not what a lot of locals think. A lot of them apparently think that this is the new crushing the daylights out of the old, and pretty much destroying it.

The principle embodied in this scheme, of towers rising above the old city frontages rather than just smashing them and replacing them with empty windswept spaces with pointless sculptures in them strikes me as a good one. Similar things are being done in London, right near me, and they look rather good.

And here, I think, is a case where the computerised publicity photos may be giving a false impression of how bad the new building is going to end up looking. I suspect that when it is finally built, the old building will assert itself more firmly in the eyes of passers by, and that the new building will indeed look more like a polite aerial addition and less like an imposition than is now feared. I think that the pictures, being views from a distance, understate the impact that the old bulding will continue to make on passers by.

Office Trends has a much better picture of this tower than I could find with my brief googling. But Office Trends is, I think, a strictly paper enterprise. My apologies to Adam Tinworth if I'm wrong about this, but I could find no Office Trends website mentioned anywhere. This, mentioned by Adam in his original Samizdata comment is the nearest thing to that I could find.

Office Trends update. Adam's one blog piece, I've just noticed, contains the news that Office Trends is to be replaced by a new publication, called GRID. Maybe this will have a website. "GRID" sounds to me like it will.

After all those Art Deco interminabilities yesterday, just a short posting today to tell you that I recently did a piece on Ubersportingpundit about "When is a sport not a sport?"

My personal beef is against those alleged sports where they have a row of judges deciding who did best not only in such semi-sporting matters as "technical merit", but also, if you please, in "artistic impression". That's not sport. That's bloody art. I'm thinking of ice-skating and formation swimming and diving, but I'm sure there are others. Yeah, dancing. But at least they don't do dancing at the Olympics. Yet.

Not only is "artistic impression", sportswise, a crock of four lettered waste matter, so is "technical merit", if it is being indulged in for its own sake, rather than to knock over some stumps, plant a ball on a designated patch of grass, or kick a ball into a rectangle or H, or something along similar lines. There needs to be a place in sport for players who ooze technical merit and who make a huge artistic impression, but this is no fun unless they can come up against cloggers who can scarcely walk and who look like brick, er, waste-houses, but who do the business. There's no romance in sport, if the romance is just a matter of moves, and if non-romance automatically loses you points.

Culture blog material also, I hope you agree, even if expressed in somewhat locker room language.

Yesterday Alice Bachini posted the following:

Write me some encouraging comments

I'm feeling all alone here. Help.

I commented thus:

I thought your previous posting about Beethoven's Fifth was so good I stole the whole thing for my culture blog.

Which you already knew. And then I commented as follows:

And ...

... provoked by something you said about Art Deco equals Capitalism (when was that?) I watched a TV show last night about Art Deco, and guess what they said: Art Deco equals Capitalism.

I now understand twentieth century design an order of magnitude better than I did two days ago. And I owe it all to you.

This may not be right, about Alice having blogged that I mean. After posting that comment, I spoke with another woman friend who said that she had said something like this to me, in conversation. Maybe that was what I was remembering.

Next comment by me:

And ..

... during the Art Deco TV show they made a point that I think you would like a lot, which is that the sort of capitalism Art Deco was was women, for the first time in the history of the world, being able to go shopping, and buy pretty things.

Art Deco equals Capitalism equals Women – Modernism equals Totalitariansim equals Men. That was the message.

Interesting, I think you will agree. I'd never thought it through in exactly that way, but doesn't it make a lot of sense to see early twentieth century political nastiness as a pathological male reaction to rampant girlieness?

I think this is a good answer to all those male idiots who have started to say, on Samizdata, Why all this architecture? – as if architecture, had nothing to do with anything IMPORTANT, it's just a matter of taste, and taste doesn't matter. Wrong. Ditto all your stuff about shoes, Oxfam caste-offs etc.

Now I will copy and paste all these clever comments onto my Culture Blog.

Thanks for making me do this.

I had more to say. Next comment:

Later:

Just to emphasise the point about Woman/Man, Art Deco/Modernism.

The big difference between Art Deco and Modernism is in that "Deco" bit. Decoration. The Modernists loathed decoration. They believed in buildings, and chairs, and everything, having a ruggedly masculine what-you-see-is-what-you-get look to it.

The Modernists loathed decoration, in the way that many men loathe female make-up. It is deceitful. It conceals the true nature of things.

For culture vultures, see the scene where Hamlet confronts his mother in her boudoir. Quote:

Sorry can't find it. I have every other play the Big S wrote but not that one.

It goes something like:

"You bloody women, you slap on piles of make-up and prettify everything and lie about everything and "nickname god's creatures" instead of just calling them dogs and horses and "you there", and generally the earth should open up and swallow the damn lot of you. Fie upon you, fie, fie I say. I'll have none on't." Or something. And I may be muddling this up with what he later says to Ophelia. "Get thee to a nunnery!" – where they don't allow make-up, and you aren't allowed to go on shopping expeditions.

Women as decorators and prettyfiers and deceivers. It's not a new idea. But the Art Deco v. Modernism things is a recent round in the eternal boxing match of the sexes. And in the twentieth century it all got deeply mixed into politics.

All right, that's enough commenting for now.

I wasn't the end of my commenting, but I went off at various tangents that have no place here, now. I've cleaned up a bit of the spelling, but otherwise that was how I wrote it. My thoughts on Art Deco and all that are now very half baked, so I see no sense in fully re-baking the prose into which these thoughts were stuffed so messily.

But what a thing for a pro-capitalist culture blogger to have to admit to! A huge blind spot about one the twentieth century's most obviously pro-capitalist cultural trends. And me Mr Expert on Modernism.

There are two reasons why I never got Art Deco properly before. Neither are especially honourable. But I can't help that. They happen to be the truth.

First: For most of my life I simply haven't liked it. This is because al lot of the dreariest aesthetic experiences of my youth consisted of seeing fifth-rate fifth-hand after-echoes of Art Deco, in the form of grotesquely ugly furniture (twice my size don't forget) in places like cheap boarding houses or the home of my spendthrift grandparents, and even in some examples in our own home. Art Deco equals veneer equals seventeen shades of shit coloured horribleness. That was the aesthetic world I grew up in. Plus veneer frays at the edges in an especially ugly way, and sometimes peals off in great strips, revealing cheap and ghastly wood or even chipboard underneath. Urrgh!! On the other hand, furniture that simply consisted of blocks of wood that looked like what they were, big blocks of wood, was much better.

Ever since those experiences I have been a devotee, as far as interior decor and furniture is concerned, of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get school of aesthetics. My pathologically gigantic CD collection, for instance, is accommodated in shelving made of untreated timber. Modernist architects of my youthful acquaintance would use bricks of various kinds to support their shelves. My habit of propping up shelves with things like coffee jars or soup tins is a post-Warhol adaptation of the same as-it-comes aesthetic.

The problem with architectural modernism of the Modern Movement variety, i.e. the people that Art Deco was up against, is that this Modernist attitude (they insisted that it was not s style, because no surface covering was added) doesn't work out of doors. What can work beautifully for furniture does not work for buildings, and especially for buildings not basking in a warm Mediterranean climate.

In damp old Britain, you must think of the surface of a building as a distinct design problem from its structure. A building must have a "skin". You must separate the technology of architectural surfaces from all the other technologies that goes into a building; The emerging triumph of the refurbished modernist aesthetic represented by the likes of Foster and Rogers, who proclaim structure, but make sure that it looks the part, is based on accepting some of the tenets of the Modern Movement, such as the idea that buildings ought to look modern, but on rejecting many others, such as, most fundamentally, that beauty itself is suspect. (Shades of Hamlet, above.)

Second - and this is a notion I don't have either the time or the space to do justice to here, but I'll try to sketch the picture quickly: the ideological camp followers and fellow travellers of The Modern Movement managed, I believe, to misrepresent the basic conflict between the Art Deco attitude and the Modernist attitude as not a conflict at all, but as a first-one-then-the-other process. And if that reminds you of the way lefties have written about "late capitalism", well, it is intended to. I think these bastards pulled this trick on me. They didn't spell it out like that, or not so as I remember. They just bent the facts that way by nudging X into the foreground with big pictures, and shoving Y into the background with a few dismissive comments.

I have hardly done more than suspect what the trick was, so I can't give you names and dates, but I think they did this by emphasising the Art Nouveau antecedents of the Art Deco style, and calling that a rejection of High Victorian neo-classicism, and then down playing the Art Deco continuation and popularisation (which is surely what it was) of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was treated as "half way to Modernism" and given half a pat on the back, for getting a bit of the way towards the Modernist U- as they saw it –topia. Thus Charles Rennie Mackintosh gets huge attention, while the guys made much of in that TV show I saw the other night get no mention at all.

Again, this is exactly the kind of trick that Marxists used to damn the bits of capitalist progress which they couldn't ignore with faint praise, because of what they patronisingly claimed that it was blindly groping towards.

But Art Deco was not a step towards Modernism. It was a quite deliberate rejection of it. And the Modernists, at the time, knew this, and hated Art Deco, and said so. Or so I now believe and expect to discover for sure.

I have lots more reading and discussing and learning to do. A trip to the V&A Art Deco exhibition (damn – missed it) would be an obvious first step in the right direction. Because all the vibes I'm getting from that show are to the effect that this is all explained, rather than brushed under the Modernist carpet. It couldn't really be otherwise, really, could it? The very decision to hold the exhibition and make it work and make it successful and make it fun, was a decision to push Modernism aside and enjoy the contemporary alternative and opposition to it.

It took a slump and a war to unleash the temporary triumph of the Modern Movement. But now, we have just about shaken it off, taken the best bits of it, and generally learned to live with it.

I could go on, about the relentlessly dishonest manner in which anti-capitalist ideologues rage at all forms of truly popular popular culture while it is happening, but then, when it has proved its enduring validity beyond any doubt and despite all the muck they could chuck at it, have then turned around and claimed it as their own, twenty years later, while simultaneously entirely misrepresenting its true nature. And I guess I just did. But for now, I'll leave this at that.

I'm feeling all cultured out at the moment. So here's Friedrich Blowhard to take up the slack for me:

Glancing over the newspapers of the past six months or so I've noticed an almost complete disconnect between the "arts" page and the front page – that is, between the arts and the war in Iraq. (I understand many artists have expressed opinions about the war, but I don't see much difference in the art being produced.) This got me to thinking about the relationship between war and shifts in “dominant” visual styles. The historical record would suggest that it's more accurate to say that it’s not war, per se, that alters visual styles, but rather losing a war.

For example, there weren’t a lot of wars between 1815 and 1914 in Europe. By far the biggest was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Is it an accident that Modern Art first started to flourish in France (the loser country) during the era immediately following that defeat?

While Germany, the victor of that war, wasn’t exactly a hotbed of Modern Art until … after its defeat in World War I, when it took over from France as the leader of Modernity (think the Bauhaus, abstract painting, etc., etc.)

In the original posting there are pictures to illustrate these transformations. So far so good. However, I'm not quite so convinced by these examples.

And how about the “takeoff” of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S – which didn’t happen in a big way until the Korean War and its aftermath? (To say nothing of how AbEx had been “fertilized” by European refugees from countries already defeated in WWII.)

And the practitioners of Minimalism and Conceptualism would seem to owe a major debt to the Vietnam War – if the U.S. had been triumphant in that one, I suspect we'd still be looking at versions of Abstract Expressionism.

First, a quibble. Korea was not a loss for America, was it? More like a draw, I would have thought. Still, an unsettling collective experience, and not at all what Americans must have been hoping for, especially after those tiumphant Inchon Landings, which provoked the Chinese into joining in and snatching victory away from the USA. Vietnam was certainly a loss, whatever Kevin Kline may have said about it in A Fish Called Wanda – "It was a draw!!!!" Although John Cleese was also wrong that "They wupped your arse!" It was more a case of the USA winning, and then getting fed up and going home. But a loss, even so.

More seriously, I don't quite see the cause and effect processes at work so clearly. Maybe it's that the closer you are to a culture – and I'm a lot closer to the USA since WW2 than I am to 1880s France or 1920s Germany – the less these Grand Narratives of this causing that jump out at you. After all, the history of art, as the Blowhards themselves make a point of emphasising repeatedly, is a lot more complicated than those simple grand narratives. And that's especially true in America, where so much of the unofficial story remains invisible – or else is visible but unwelcome – to the official guardians of the Grand Narrative. America and the totality of its "culture" is just so much bigger than any "art" book is likely to tell you.

Still, Friedrich Blowhard is a deal closer to the USA than I am, and he sees it, and that must count for a lot.

Basically, I think he's right.

I wonder if anything similar applies to popular art, or whether we're only talking "official" or "high" art here. I have the feeling that popular art is more detached from the triumphs and tribulations of official and "national" policy, but that could be wrong. After all, they supply most of the dead bodies when a war goes wrong.

Anyway, a fascinating post, and a typical illustration of why I think the 2Bs are the business and I'm just a hanger onner, culture-blogging-wise. (And yes you're right. Another favourite movie of mine is Capra's The Apartment. "I guess that's the way it crumbles. Cookie-wise.")

I can't resist adding that Friedrich's title for his posting – "Art An Extension of War By Other Means?" – made me think that what the posting was actually going to be about was sculduggery at the Venice Biennale, or some such, with National Arts Bureaucrats bashing into each other with all manner of dirty tricks to make their guys come off best and to prove that the other fellows' artists are second-raters. Like all the shenanigans that goes into picking the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other time, maybe.

This is nice, from Alice B:

A brief culture blog

The beginning of Beethoven 5. It sounds exactly like someone going "uh-oh" (with a stammer).

Then they realise it's even worse than they thought, and drop in pitch slightly. "uh (uh-uh)- ohh..."

I noticed this because I heard kids singing it. Whether they got it off some smart-ass cable cartoon or made it up themselves, I don't know. Still, cool.

Indeed.

This picture (one of these) is here because it is beautiful, both the photography and the thing photographed.

For techical elucidation, go here:

Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne had a successful drop test yesterday. This demonstrated the ability to take off with the vehicles mated (which had already been demonstrated in previous captive-carry flights), to smoothly separate the mated vehicles, and for both vehicles to fly safely back to Mojave. A couple more tests, and they'll be ready to integrate propulsion into the vehicle, and go for altitude.

Beats anything in Tate Modern.

This blog's unwillingness to be very impressed by opera seems, according to the Guardian, to be having consequences:

You can't give tickets away for young people to watch opera, not even Wagner's rarely performed Ring, arguably the greatest event in the operatic canon. That appears to be the devastating conclusion of an embarrassing experiment at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Scottish Opera's ambitious complete Ring cycle sold out as long ago as October, but the organisers of the Festival held back one performance of Gotterdammerung for people under 27. Faced with frequent attacks that it was elitist, "out of touch", and aimed only at the "middle-aged upper middle class audience", the heavily subsidised Festival hoped that the free ticket offer would help to reverse its demographic.

But only 237 young people turned up for the performance on Friday, leaving a staggering 1,660 seats empty in the flagship Festival Theatre.

I've just been watching the Chereau Ring Cycle Gotterdamerung on DVD, and Hagen spent the whole of it dressed like a harassed librarian, i.e. in a crumpled suit and a tie, with his top shirt button undone. Yet despite his mundane costume, he spent the last act carrying a long spear, just like a real Hagen, which he used to stab Siegfried in the back. Very peculiar.

Then, by way of enlightenment, I listened to a CD of the English National Opera English language production of the last couple of acts of "The Twilight of the Gods" (i.e. Gotterdamerung in English), but because it was sung by opera singers instead of normal singers I couldn't make out a single word and it might as well have been in German for all the use it was.

Nevertheless, I would have attended that Edinburgh performance if I'd been within range of it. It was presumably in German, but without subtitles anywhere, but despite all that, I'd have got something from it. Nothing can dim the glory of this music. Wagner always wins in the end.

I still can't get my video recorder to record digital channels properly, but oddly enough I find I'm minding this less that I thought I would. There's something to be said for seeing TV when they show it or not at all. Now that there are so many channels, most of the good stuff will be back again.

Last night I watched a show about the great Chuck Berry – called Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll! The basis of it was a concert arranged in St Louis, featuring Chuck Berry and a lot of his songs of course, and organised by Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who is one of my favourite musicians in the whole world. Richards wanted posterity to have a record of what Chuck Berry sounded like with a crack collection of real state-of-the-art rock and roller musicians backing him, instead of the usual cheap as-founds he usually worked with. So, as well as Richards himself, there were Eric Clapton (who looks disturbingly like BBC trash TV "personality" Jeremy Beadle), and two other black guys whose names I don't quite now remember but should. Robert Cray? Anyway he's done Rolling Stones tours and obviously knows his Rock and Roll stuff. Plus there were walk ons from other celeb fans of Berry, like Julian Lennon and Linda Rondstadt.

I found the effect curiously disappointing. It was as if the confident we-know-how-to-really-do-this bunch of guys behind him managed to turn Chuck Berry's personal style into a more homogenised, all purpose rock and roll sound, less dominated by Chuck himself and more impersonal and industrialised. His normal method was to just show up on his own and whistle up three … in Britain we'd call them pub musicians, and then play, with the backing people just adding whatever they could manage, but with Chuck Berry making all the moves that mattered with his own voice and with his own guitar.

The impression given was that Berry lived and performed as he did because he had a chip on his shoulder about all other members of the human race about a yard deep, ever since he had some underage sex spat with the law and got sent to prison. I wonder. Maybe what he really wanted was to be musically on his own, and he tolerated the attentions of Richards and his swanky rock and roll aristocrat friends not because he really believed in what they were doing for him, but because one week of putting up with these annoying persons would guarantee such a ton of record sales, bioth now and for ever and ever ay-men. In addition to be being a musical and lyrical genius, Berry is also a canny businessman.

The good news was that you could hear Chuck Berry voice, which was still very good and strong, with absolute clarity, and therefore also his truly outstanding lyrics also.

Rock and roll lyrics are for many groups a mere excuse for the bloke at the front to yell incoherently and and for the rest of them to thrash away at their instruments and for the audience to wave their arms in the sky and go mad. Who cares what it says? Who cares what it means? The words are usually inaudible anyway, and thank god. Compared to that, last night was a breath of fresh air. Berry came through on this film as the true poet that he is, not just when singing his songs with their perfectly crafted words, with their rhythms exactly fitting the instrumental patterns, but when prefacing a song about a car dealer with a little impromptu piece to camera about his own little car collection, most of it litearally kept under wraps. Dealers won't now give him a decent price, so he's going to hang onto them and then sell them for fifty thousand dollars, with the "fifty thousand dollars" spoken as if it was the last half line of a Shakespeare sonnet, delivered with all the sophistication and poetic beauty of someone like Ian McKellen. It's a big mistake to see Chuck Berry merely as the man who invented headbanger electric rock and roll, even if he pretty much did.

The weather in London now is pretty much as I imagine it down there in the Southern United States, in "Delta Country", very hot and very humid, so it fitted all this perfectly.

The thing that was occupying my blogging time yesterday was this Samizdata piece about a couple of new London buildings, the relatively new MI6 HQ, and the brand new St George's Wharf which is just upstream from MI6.

The piece has pictures, and here are a couple more of these two buildings. This is St George's Wharf.

And this is a silly picture of the MI6 HQ, looking as if it is trying to hypnotise the building across the river from it. Actually of course, it was just a bus going by.

I am now engaged in an argument with Michael Jennings about this.

He says they're an example of something creative. I say it's bollocks and I say to hell with it.

Picture this: You're approaching the corner of Yonge and Dundas and suddenly, from out of nowhere, 100 men and women flood the pedestrian crosswalks, spinning and twirling as they cross and re-cross the street.

A few minutes later they've melted away, vanished without a trace.

Or you're at Chapters, absorbed in a leisurely examination of the latest bestseller when, without warning, scores of people come to a stop around you and start peppering the sales help with questions about non-existent books.

Within minutes they're gone and, but for the frazzled clerk, you'd be tempted to think you imagined it all.

Welcome to the flash mob, the urban phenomenon that's caught the fancy of cellphone users worldwide.

With a bit of planning and a few up-to-the-minute friends with text messaging, you, too, can create your very own flash mob.

"Everybody loves a mindless mob," said Merilyn Synder, who has participated in Manhattan's Mob Project, an e-mail driven experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly materialize in public places to do one or another weird thing, and then disappear as suddenly as they appeared.

"Everybody loves a mindless mob"!!! Speak for yourself you brainless moron bitch from hell.

What Michael is trying to say in his clumsy way is that these cretins are using a method of self organisation which will be increasingly common in the years to come, now that ultra-powerful personal communication plummets towards costing nothing, and rockets towards being able to say everything to everyone, everywhere, instantly. He has a point. But these flash mob idiots are actually proud of the fact that their flash mobs are to do nothing but spread bewilderment and confusion, and otherwise have no purpose whatsoever. Something tells me that they will be targetting innocent shopworkers in capitalist enterprises rather than making life difficult for the public sector, which is where they will all eventually be employed, although I personally hope that they do as little actual work as they can contrive, because all that they will do will be thoroughly bad. That's the kind if idiots they all are.

Michael's problem is that anything involving the word "spontaneous" sounds cool to him. Other things being equal. Which they aren't, is my point about these people.

Here's another idea for the use of similar techniques, but this time with a purpose. Every time a "flash mob" assembles, another purposive group self-assembles and pelts the original mobsters with giant cans of shaving foam, plasticated cake decoration, and if that doesn't do the trick, napalm.

Or maybe, infiltrate the flash mob and contrive to lead them over a cliff, the good guys stepping aside at the last moment while the Gadarene mob hurls itself to its well deserved destruction.

Have a nice weekend.

By the way, Michael does have his uses. I just lost this whole damn post, and he rescued it all with some "undo" magic which on my own I couldn't have imagined.

I remember once reading a great P. J. O'Rourke piece in, I think, Republican Party Reptile, about what sort of cars handle best. The best car, handling-wise, said P. J., is a hired car. Hired cars can be made to do things that your own car is simply not able to do, with you at the wheel.

And I'm here today to answer the question: what sort of DVDs are the best DVDs? And the answer is borrowed DVDs.

Number one: Borrowed DVDs don''t cost you anything.

Number two. They don't occupy any shelf space. When you've finished watching them, you take them back.

Number three. If you start watching a borrowed DVD and it is garbage, you paid nothing for it, so you have no obligation to yourself to watch it. You can just stop. If you hire a DVD or worse, buy a DVD, without realising that it is garbage, you then have the problem of how to get your money's worth. With a borrowed DVD that's not a problem. You can watch it anyway, and write a sneering blog posting about it (that's if you are a blogger), and take it upon yourself to tell all your friends of the DVD's demerits. Or you can stop.

Number four: You can watch it whenever you like. You borrowed it from a friend. He's already watched it, or he wouldn't have lent it to you. So, you can hang on to it for as long as you like. You don't have to take it back to Blockbuster by 11 pm tomorrow evening, or even 11 pm the day after tomorrow. You can keep if for days, weeks even. You can watch it whenever you feel like it. And if you really like it, you can wait a week, and watch it again. In particular, you avoid being in a position where you are watching what turns out to be a two hours ten minutes DVD (but you don't know this until it ends) when you have one hour and fifty minutes to get it back to the video shop. This is a really bad situation to be in. It spoils everything.

Number five: If you really love it, more than is really healthy, to the point where you want to be able to watch bits of a favourite DVD every day for the rest of your life, you can always go out and buy the DVD for yourself. Borrowing doesn't mean that this isn't allowed, later.

I'm sure if I thought about it some more, further advantages to watching borrowed DVDs would occur to me.

None of the above applies to classical music CDs. These it is necessary to own. Music is not like a movie. If you love a piece of music you want to listen to it seventeen times, and simultaneously live your life, while occasionally stopping your life and jumping about and waving your arms when the really good bit comes around. And you want to be able to do this at any time, day or night, for the rest of your life. There's nothing unhealthy about that. That's normal. Once you've decided you like a particular music CD, that means you want to own it.

Which explains, changing the subject somewhat, why movies, despite being massively more complicated and expensive to make, are nevertheless cheaper to buy than music. Music we have to have, and therefore they have us by the private parts with it. Movies, we can borrow, return, and meanwhile live without. They're always there, and obtainable somehow, by some means. So with movies, we have them by the private parts. They can only sell movies for twenty quid to people for whom twenty quid is nothing, or for whom instant ownership is essential. Most of us will only buy for a tenner or less. The economics supply/demand graphs are different for movies compared to music. Demand, I think I'm saying, is less intense, and in particular more "elastic", for movies. I knew you'd be excited.

Put it this way. If all my friends all agreed that Barenboim's Brahms First Piano Concerto is wonderful (which we don't of course – I'm the only one of all my friends who gives a toss about this recording), we would all have to have a copy of it. But if we all agree that Casablanca is wonderful, as maybe we do, one copy will do for all of us.

(Of course, whatever you think of the morals of the matter, the business of all of a group of friends each having a CD copy of something has recently got massively easier. See music industry, collapse of.)

Memo to self. Make list of all my DVDs and circulate to my friends. Or, I could blog the list, with helpful comments about the more obscure items, and then send an email to my friends, informing them of their special status.

Further memo to self. Do blog posting about how the definition of friendship changes as the things that friends are for change with changing trechnology. Now, friends are people to borrow DVDs from, and to lend them to. What have friends been in the past? What will they be in the future? Actually, that's pretty much it.

Via the latest newsletter from b3ta.com I got to the guy who did this:



I really like the look of his site, with its regular clutches of four sketch excerpts. The one above is got to via the left hand end picture on 5/07/2003. And check out also the link to coloured stuff, just above that date.

Says he ("Crap Juggler"), of the big picture above:

I did this at work abd I think its one of better sketches, in fact I'm going to colour this one up and use it in my portfolio.

Even robots are allowed to be couch potatoes.

Indeed. And that would be "and" and "it's".

Tragically, and like so many sites nowadays, it looks like a blog, but it ain't. You can't link to individual postings. Tragic. He should contact these people and get himself properly sorted.

I'm not sure if the actual stuff itself, if I saw it in the paper, so to speak, would thrill me so much. But I love the way it all looks on a computer screen, with the cream background.

I've just found a bit which says copyright Richard Tingley. I guess that's his regular name, and I hope he doesn't mind me copying his picture to here.

The New York Times comments approvingly on the fact that the man who designed this beautiful footbridge in Bilbao will also be doing some stuff at Ground Zero.

Perhaps the most important of these is the bold choice of Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, to design a new PATH terminal on the site of the World Trade Center. Mr. Calatrava is a master of transportation architecture, and his selection provides just the kind of commitment to serious architecture that this page has often hoped for. His open, organic structures are startlingly beautiful, often evoking the kind of uplifting spirituality that this site will need. The fact that Mr. Calatrava was chosen by the Port Authority suggests that even the most matter-of-fact participants in rebuilding ground zero can see the wonder of its possibilities.

This man would appear to be what David Sucher calls a starchitect. Clever word. Did you think of it David?

Personally I tend to like starchitecture these days, although not in the earlier decades of my life, but I'll leave that argument until later.

For now I just want to give the Internet a pat on the back. The Internet, I think, is very good, which I did not think of first, but which I am now thinking with particular thoughtfulness.

I was once a failing architecture student, and as regulars here now know, I remain a (st)architecture fan. But until recently, I despaired at the cost of keeping up with it all. Keeping up means you had to have pictures, and pictures on paper are just too expensive, and too bulky to share a flat with if you get at all serious.

Until today, I had no idea who Santiago Calatrava was, or about that beautiful footbridge in Bilbao. I am, in short, thanks to the Internet, catching up.

I dined with Michael Jennings last night, and he was likewise raving about how much sheer stuff the average bright fifteen-year-old now has at his finger tips, compared to the time when he was a bright fifteen-year-old, searching through inadequate libraries for dumbed down books about whatever it was, that as likely as not weren't there at all.

I am now going to do a posting on my Education Blog, linking to this one, because the real point of this posting here is not Hurrah For Calatrava. It is hurrah that I was able to learn about the guy, and so amazingly quickly.

About fifteen minutes ago, I knew nothing of him. Then, the daily New York Times email, and I'm straight to the op-ed piece linked to above. Google search: "Santiago Calatrava". Bingo. Now I've done about half an essay on him. Education or what? I am myself back to being a bright fifteen-year-old.

Next question: what is a "PATH terminal"?

Real photographers set up the shots they want and get them. I just snap away, and if I snap away enough, which is mostly to do with remembering to recharge the batteries a few hours before going wherever it is – that's the key variable, I sometimes get lucky. For some reason, if you recharge a rechargeable battery and then leave it for a few days, all the electricity dribbles out of it.

Anyway, I had another trawl through my personal pix, and found these snaps of my elder brother Peter, looking very weathered and Checkovian, on Christmas Day 2001 I think it was. He's a book dealer by trade. In fact it was he who got me my copy of this book.

That one, above, catches the kind of person I feel Peter to be, eccentric but not in any way hostile. I like that treescape in the background, which is also eccentric but not hostile. We were all indoors, but Pete was seated in front of one of those big suburban windows that stretches all across the room and backs onto a patio.

And that one is for if Pete ever decides to polish up his piano playing and make a CD of some piano sonatas. If that sells well, I have more pictures of Pete for the covers of follow-up issues of further piano pieces.

More seriously, what a profound difference all these family snaps make to our lives! I really treasure the old black and white relics from my nineteenth century ancestors, and I have let it be known that my family may do what they like with their furniture, but that if they die and let their photo albums get trashed, I'll kill them.

I also have a few good pictures of my mother. She was very coy about it. Maybe she thought that being willing to pose nicely for photos meant that she was a show-off or something. I had to put my camera down and give her a big speech about how posterity, at any rate the bit of it that we share, was really going to want to know what she really looked like. Now, assuming that my hard disc and back-up CDs don't let me down, it will. Assuming it cares. If not, the Internet probably has some communal ancestor dump where such unappreciated treasures may be deposited.

PS: I am about to have this blog transferred from wherever it is to wherever it's going. I'm being helped, as I think you can tell. I have clever friends and all should be well, but just in case this goes blank and unobtainable, or perhaps obtainable but with no additions, for three days or so, that will be what it is. I haven't been killed by someone taking exception to my views on Modern Art, or if I have, that was pure coincidence.

The discussion on my latest car parks piece here a couple of postings down has widened out, via the alleged boringness of talking about car parks, into the matter of being boring in general. David Sucher of City Comforts had this to say, a few hours ago:

As to your other point about the "boring" comment: I noticed it too and got the strangest sensation. I have seen such comments before in other fora. They puzzle me as the bandwidth on the web is essentially unlimited; don't like a post? Hit the "next" key. Why in the world would someone try to stop a conversation? When all they have to do is ignore it? I pondered making a response but as I feel very much a guest and newcomer on Samizdata, I decided to remain silent.

I read posts on Samizdata, Blowhards, Crooked, etc etc. – hey even "Brian's!" – and I pass many of them by as simply not of interest to me. In fact I would guess the majority of posts are – while most likely very intelligent and worthy – simply not something I have the energy on which to focus. In some caes I might even think them silly. I imagine that most of us feel the same way, except about different posts, of course. (Isn't there some expression about "free market of ideas"?)

But I would never even for a wild moment think of telling someone to cease a conversation. (Unless –maybe – I thought them offensive in racial, ethnic etc etc. sense.) So I was struck as a matter of "netiquette" by that remark. So the issue I suggest is broader than simply some people not being interested in parking.

Well, if I was Perry de Havilland, Lord High Everything of Samizdata, I just might think of telling one of us writers there something exactly like that. My niggle about that "boring" complaint about the car parks question wasn't me saying that being boring doesn't matter. Rather was it me saying, as David himself has also re-emphasised at CCB, that if you are interested in the way that cities and towns look and feel and work the matter of parking cars is most definitely not boring. But that doesn't mean that I don't worry about being boring, or think that being boring when blogging is not any kind of problem.

And David gets this too, as he proves with his reference to him being a "guest and a newcomer" to Samizdata, and as such, not someone who is entitled to barge in and yank the agenda this way or that, i.e. towards subjects that Samizdata's editors and core readership might reckon to be boring. Well, he may be entitled, but if he does this too obtrusively, he may not be liked.

In other words, there is another economics idea that affects blogs, besides the mere free market in ideas idea, beyond that is, the claim that you can post or comment whatever and however you damn well please. I refer to what the economists call transaction costs. If you go to a new blog, written by what seems to be a promising looking writer or clutch of writers, but after a week or so of reading everything they put there you decide that about four out of six of the posts you are reading there are (to you) boring, or maybe even more actively unpleasant in some way, this will definitely affect your willingness to hunt out those two (to you) better ones, and to keep on doing it. Life's too short and the blogosphere is too big. Blog bandwidth may be unlimited, but yours and mine isn't.

Perry chooses his Samizdata writers with care. If a new writer shows up there, you may be sure that much thought went into the matter of inviting him, and probably quite a few editorial guidance e-mails also.

I definitely feel a certain pressure, when composing stuff to put on Samizdata. That hit rate is not there to be abused for my merely private satisfaction, merely to get personal slices of beef off my nerdy little chest, however often it may seem that way. I post there with a conscious sense of duty – to inform, entertain, divert, and, let's face it, quite often to give that particular kind of reading pleasure that consists of a core readership having its prejudices confirmed.

All the above is part of why I believe in blogging in several different places, and in particular why I believe that some of these places should be mine to ruin, mine to bore in, places where what I'm interested in is what the readers are interested in and what the readers are interested in is what I'm interested in, by definition, because that's the deal. I want places where I can think aloud, drone on, repeat myself, contradict myself, worry away at bones of extremely specialised interest (I seem to be in meat metaphor mode today), and generally drone on and repeat myself. But, I don't want to do this where this is not the agenda.

Some writers are content to make the effort whenever they write (these two guys strike me as a perfect example of that), the way I do when I'm writing for Samizdata. But for me that wouldn't be enough. I love blogging. (Again, this is a sentiment that David echoes with a quote from another blogger who feels likewise.) There are things that I find myself saying, at my two Brian's blogs and at this one especially, which (a) I consider interesting, but which (b) I could only have found myself saying because the obligation to interest was suspended. This is my ego-blog. If my ego offends, stay away.

I wouldn’t dare put this posting on Samizdata. Maybe some of the readers there would like it. Maybe. (But if they like my ego that much, let them come here. They can do that, can't they?) But a lot of them would surely say to themselves, and very possibly to the now massive Samizdata comments subculture: puh-lease (not an Americanism that I care for but it's the kind of thing some of them like), not a(nother) boring blog posting about the potential or actual boringness of blog postings. Give me (see previous sentence) a break. And I do.

Maybe, because of the way that not having to be interesting can sometimes result in extreme interestingness, there are postings here that Perry and the Samizdata readers would have liked to be on Samizdata. But if I shovelled all this stuff onto Samizdata, and all my Brian's Education stuff, and all of my more occasional stuff here, or here, or (my most recently acquired blog outlet) here? … puh-lease.

Another fine image from Wired News Images Gallery. This picture was taken on July 17th, which was day one of the British Open Golf tournament, when the weather was particularly nasty.

There's something very photogenic about umbrellas. Also, looking at a photograph of a lot of umbrellas is so very much more agreeable than having to stand under one of them in circumstances such as these. Although even on the sunniest of days, golf leaves me cold.

It's the umbrella at left of centre of the picture, held up higher than the others, that makes the picture special.

More from July 2003