Apparently.

Look in the first three comments.

Perry de Havilland reports on the ruffled feathers of the art critics in connection with the Lloyd Webber collection now on display at the Royal Academy, quoting from an Ian Hislop piece from yesterday's Sunday Telegraph (paper only):

What appears to really annoy a lot of the critics is the literalism of the paintings: the idea that there is a story or a message, or even something as vulgar as a moral in the artwork, rather than just an impression or a mood or an emotion. Brian Sewell says that Webber has "a literal eye" and that this "has nothing to do with Art". Nothing at all? This seems rather harsh.

Indeed. Perry comments:

… Most art critics hate literal art because literal art can be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn a bit about the context within which the art was created. … much of what passes for art these days is so obscure that it requires an ArtCrit, such as Sewell or Saatchi, to give it some meaning. I guess what I am really saying is that much of what the likes of Tracey Emin does is so devoid of intrinsic meaning that only a professional arbiter of artistic values and taste can tell us poor muggles what the hell it means. …

Perry himself supplies that link to The Bed. (The Bed has now replaced The Pile of Bricks as the popular British definition of the silliness of Modern Art.)

I'd go further. Literal art can often be understood without any extra learning at all, especially if it is literal art of the here and now, like the movies or television or pop music. Yes, there may be plenty more to enjoy if one learns some more, but the enjoyment can start straight away, without any critic being involved at all.

A central skill for all culture vultures is that of keeping critics in their place, at the back, explaining why the punters seem to enjoy this rather than that, and adding humbly that they might also enjoy this, and maybe that, and that they personally rather like this, and also that. But what many critics seem to want to do is to decide that people must enjoy this rather than that. And sometimes they even announce that the punters do actually enjoy this rather than that, and that if the punters say otherwise, they are mistaken.

Perry supplies a link to a piece by Brian Sewell, who I think probably knows a thing or two about oil paintings, but who knows very little indeed about art in general. As I report at the end of this Samizdata piece, he proved this to me in just the one fatuously wrong-headed syllable with the answer he gave to a question I asked him about popular art. Basically I asked him if popular art can ever be to art of the higher sort, artistic type art. His reply was: "No." Idiot.

So, The Goddaughter sent me an email about a week or two ago:

i just decided to look on your culture blog to see woh you were gettin on. Do u pay to make your wbsite?

I told her the bad news about what it costs to have a website, and her next email suggested that she write stuff for my blogs, presumably because that's cheaper for her, and maybe also less of a bother:

want me to tell you anyfink 2 put on u r web? if u do, justr tell me wat ya wanna know

Fair enough. So my reply included the following:

Here are some questions that you could answer, if you feel like it:

What are your favourite books, and why?

What is your favourite music, and why? Do you like classical at all, or do you really like only pop? How's that awful cello playing coming along? And the singing?

What schools have you been too? Which were the best and which were the worst? Who was your best teacher, and what made that teacher so good?

I'm interested by the way you write emails. No capital letters. "2" instead of "to". "u r" for "your", "u" instead of "you", wanna instead of want to. I think I know why this is fun. It's creative, it saves screen space on small screens, and it annoys stupid adults. Is that it? Or are there other reasons for it?

As you can see, I was looking for stuff for my education blog, as well as for here, but I'll give the whole answer here, because what interests me most about what The Goddaughter had put is beyond mere education. It is, of course, the way in which she puts it. Is the word for it "Txt"? I'll call it that here from now on.

Mi fav books R Nancy Drew books cos i like detectiv books. She's 18 and shes the daughter of a lawyer called Carson Drew. She has a b/f called Ned (Nickers)on

I dont necesarly like POP, its just mor modern music dat i like. I like da new singer Avril lavigne. Shee's OK. I like classical as well, but it depends wat it is.Im gettin a bit betta on da cello. I had a lesson 2day wiv my "teacher". I also had a singin lesson 2day. I like singin but id like 2 do mor.

At skewl we R startin da choir. I hope dey R gonna chose me as a solo. Its an english song.

I've bin 2 loads of skewls and the best 1 was Wimbledon House skewl cos i was best of da clas. I was alwayz da best of da class in england!!!!

My fav teach was Mrs. Whales cos she was loads like me. I dont know y, but i just like her.

And this was the answer I was most eager to hear about. What's wiv all the Txting? Y, oh Goddaughter, do u, best of da clas at Wimbledon House skewl, rite like dis?

I rite like dis cos its easier. U make a mistake and u hav an excuse! But this is also easier cos instead of havin 2 think about da word be4 ritin it u just rite it as it is pronounzd!

The Goddaughter is no under-educated underclasser. She was, just as she said, best of the class at Wimbledon House School. Yet here she is riting like dis. Her answer, about why she likes doing this Txt stuff is, I'm sure, all true, and I thank her for it. Very interesting, and most informative. Alice Bachini, who visited me this afternoon and who read all this, commented that when kids write like this, they always seem to be happier, and I bet they are, for all the reasons The Goddaugher itemises, plus they are having creative fun. I bet they have permanent grin on their faces, because of the last little bit of phonetic inventiveness they did. They are playing, rather than working. Doing what they want, rather than following someone else's rules. When you play, there is no wrong answer. Txt turns writing from science into art.

But having lived for almost half a century longer than The Goddaughter, I can assure her that hers is not the first generation of children who would have liked to rite somewhat like dis. The big story here is that modern electronic communication has finally created a world in which The Goddaughter and her millions of contemporaries are writing Txt rather than Standard English because they can. Who can stop them?

Email, and text messaging, and – I'm sure – lots and lots of blogs, have made a world in which Grammarians no longer rule the language. So what if Most People disapprove? Most People aren't reading your Txt messages. In the case of the Goddaughter emailing The Godfather, Most People aren't The Godfather, and if The Godfather is willing to read decypher this stuff (I am), then where's the problem?

This style of writing used to be confined to isolated school subcultures. A billion notes handed around at the back of the class have no doubt been written in a million local variants ofTxt, although even school subcultures were surely heavily infected with Standard English. But Modern Electronics has joined all these subcultures together, and turned them into a vast linguistic arena which is no longer divided and soon if not already conquered by Standard English, but rather one that is an imperial linguistic force in its own right.

Old Guys like me write producer prose about what we want to write. In my case that means doing it in educated English, with the odd spelling error or grammatical carelessness but with no major language games. True, I like the occasional sentence without a verb, and I quite often resort to Not Strictly Correct capital letters, but mostly, I play no games with the language code itself. My games are all in what I write about. But the same freedom I have to put what I want here, in my educated prose, enables The Goddaughter to tell her story her way, in her particular version of Txt. And if Txt doesn't include much in the way of Standard English spelling or punctuation, then that's just 2 bad 4 Standard English.

I can already hear the grumbles when the Fogey tendency over at my education blog comes here and reads the thoughts of The Goddaughter, if they do come here and can stomach the stuff. "Tell your Goddaughter she'll have to spell correctly if she wants to get a Decent Job." Well, no worries. The Goddaughter is tri-lingual in English, French and Roumanian. And she is, to my certain knowledge, bilingual also in Standard English and Txt-ing, or whatever we call it. She'll get a Decent Job.

But more to the point, such Fogeys are missing the point here. The Txt sub-culture is rapidly becoming simply a culture. Who says that people won't ever be able to get jobs if all they can write is Txt? What happens when the Txt-ers are the ones doing the hiring? My guess this process is already well under way, in computer games emporia, pop group management companies, and the like. For many jobs, I should guess that an inability or unwillingness to converse in Txt rules you out of consideration.

The printing press standardised spelling and grammar. (Remember all those jokes about there being fifteen different ways to spell Shakespeare.) It looks to me as if Electronics could be un-standardising it. That's a huge event in the history of language.

Or maybe, the spellcheckers will still function, but with greatly expanded vocabularies L8 will be included by the software writers just after Late. Y, u, 2 and 4 – for why, you, too and for – are already there of course. But, I suspect that a sprinkling of red and green underlinings will be considered de rigeur for your real Txt-er, in other words that for all practical purposes the spellcheckers and grammar hecklers will be switched off.

And yes, you're right if you seem to remember me having written about this Txt thing before. It was in connection with this Samizdata piece.

But this is the first time I've had a real Txter feeding Txt into the postings herself, and what's more she's one I know well. That, for me anyway, gives the whole issue an extra punch.

This is a picture I should have added to the earlier posting about Michelangelo's David. It's … well, you know exactly what it is. It's Frodo from The Lord of the Rings, as enacted by Elijah Wood.

Alice Bachini has dropped by, and she says that what these faces both communicate is that courage is not not feeling fear, but rather feeling intense fear but nevertheless dealing with it, courageously. We all expect that of little teenage Frodo, but that's what I also saw in David. Plus, they have extremely similar faces, I think.

To begin with, this posting will only have the one picture, of Frodo. When someone has taught me how to put two pictures next to each other, there'll be Frodo and David.

Today I wandered around near where I live, taking photos with my new little camera. Some things I had in mind to photograph, like the new half finished Sainsbury's that is open on the ground floor but still under wraps from the third floor and upwards. Other pictures were serendipitous. A Rolls Royce decked out for a wedding, and eventually also the bride. An entirely accidental but very successful picture of the friend I was with, in the bottom right hand corner of one of the Sainsbury's photos.

And there was this, which is a Philippino Travel Agency:

The tile of this photograph is: Heaven on Earth.

My friend observed that one day I will photograph a violent crime being committed, but that I will only realise that I did this when I see the picture 100 percent size on my computer screen and see the evil deed being done. In my friend's version of this story, it's American college students here on holiday who take the picture, and Foul Play is only Suspected when they get back to the USA and show their holiday snaps on a big screen.

Here's the right hand upstairs window, original size:

I know, nothing untoward there. No Philippinos doing bad things there. But there could be. Ah, the secrets of the big city.

Was there not a very arty film made in the sixties starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave where this was the plot? Yes. Blow Up, it was called. And there are those scenes in Blade Runner where Harrison Ford subjects a photograph to successive enlargements and enhancements.

Enhancements I can't do. But my pictures are pretty huge and quite detailed to start with. (The camera says "3.2 megapixels" in proud red paint on the front.)

Now I'm watching TV, and its Law and Order. They're analysing a video recording of a gay party. Go here, enlarge, enhance, just like in Blade Runner.

It's in the culture, I tell you. How long before I too can do enhancement? I probably already can, did I but know it.

STOP PRESS: I could have seen this first, but I didn't, I truly didn't. Radio Times, tonight again, BBC1, Blow Out starring John Travolta:

Movie sound man Jack Terry records a car accident while working on a horror film, but suspects foul play. Widescreen.

Ah, "suspects foul play" again. It never loses its charm.

I just love this. I got it from Capitalist Magazine, but I'm sure I could have got it from 12,482 different places. Now here it is at number 12,483:

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth ..." (September 18, 2003, Gray Davis, talking about why he should remain as Governor of California, )

On the strength of this, I think he should remain Governor of California.

This is my favourite internet meme just by now.

Blatant quota posting. Great art. If it's great art, all is excused.

Of course I've heard of this sculpture, Michelangelo's David, although I did have to check with a friend that this was it. I've never really looked at David's face before. He looks so young, and so anxious. As you would if you were squaring up to Goliath. His body, which is all that you mostly register from the pictures of this famous piece, is casual confident. But this face, close to, with its creased up forehead, is downright scared.

I like it. Well done, Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564).

And did you know that the year Michelangelo died was the year Shakespeare was born. How about that?

Natalie Solent doesn't have a commenting system, so I will (rather ungratefully) correct her here. She very kindly refers in passing to a piece I did about "half listening" (her phrase) to music. She goes on to talk about how I and Steven Den Beste (Natalie offers no link to a particular posting by him) "try to tease out why exactly people can half-listen to some music but not other music". This may have been what Den Beste was writing about, but I was writing about what activities can be combined with listening to any music, not "half" but almost completely, and what can't. Solitaire can be combined with listening to music perfectly, was my central point.

In my earlier post I did an afterthought update, but I still didn't get it right. I said that Solitaire has the psychological effect of causing you to listen to the music, and that it creates a kind of psychological barrier to any distractions. The Solitaire blocks out Third Party notions that might take your mind off the music. I now realise from alert introspection that this is wrong. It is perfectly possible (a) to be doing Solitaire, (b) to have music on but not to be listening to it, at all, because (c) one is thinking about something else. What Solitaire does is physically, in the external world, reduce the chances of such distraction from the music. You can't play Solitaire and simultaneously get wrapped up in a book, because your hands cannot physically pick up the book and open it if they are occupied with Solitaire. Your eyes can't look away from the screen. So you don't read, because you can't. The internal workings of the brain have nothing to do with it. But it is perfectly possible to just think of something else, and go awandering mentally. After a spell of doing exactly this I realised that the Solitaire thing had to be clarified yet again.

So: to sum up. Solitaire combines extraordinarily well with listening to music. You go into an automatic Solitaire trance, just like an automatic driving a car on a dull motorway trance, which enables another part of your brain, the more conscious part, to give full conscious attention to something like music, which is not competing with the same bits of your nervous system. But Solitaire doesn't guarantee concentration. It merely alters the odds in its favour.

As for the type of music my whole point was that while Solitairing I was able to listen carefully to a rather trivial Beethoven piano sonata, but while doing a blog posting, I completely ignored the Hammerklavier Sonata. That's not the music making the difference. It's what else I was doing.

Nevertheless, I am genuinely grateful and flattered by Natalie's reference to this stuff about Solitaire. It obviously, pun intended, struck a chord. It was a good piece. Too bad it has been so chaotically presented, in what amounts now to three separate postings.

There's another Micklethwait's law: the better the idea, the more chaotic will be the manner in which you present it. This sounds like merely a particular application of Murphy's law. But Murphy's (otherwise known as Sod's) laws are about how purely random events will go against you. This inverse ratio between quality of concept and clarity of expression has a cause, namely that when you get hold of an interesting and new idea (a) you haven't lived with it long enough to get it throughly organised in your head, and (b) if you know it's an interesting idea you are liable to get excited, and that deranges your presentation even more. My Solitaire stuff was not afflicted by (b) because frankly I didn't think anyone would give it a second thought. But it was affected by (a). I hadn't ever said it before, so my first attempt to say it was a muddle. And perhaps I should add (c) I was still thinking it through, even after I had started to express the idea.

End of posting sign-off joke: the second half of the above paragraph was also afflicted by the very law which it attempts to describe. Hah!

See here for what's due here. And see here for what Alex Singleton thinks about it all.

I have just replaced my digital camera with a cheaper, cheerfuller sort of beast. I did this not because my previous camera was badly designed or badly specified. It was just that it didn't work properly. If it had worked I'd have been happy to carry on with it more or less indefinitely. But once you start trying to mend discontinued electronic kit, there's no knowing what it will cost or when the grief will end, so I cut my losses.

My old camera, a Minolta Dimage blah blah see above, still works after a fashion, in its own clunky and unsatisfactory way, and it still has its uses. But for wandering round London taking open-air shots of London's buildings, old and new, it won't do.

Basically, ever since it conked out and I had it "mended", it has turned any seriously bright light it sees into strawberry icecream. Like this:

You can't do culture blogging with every other sky you ever show looking like that. Photoshop? Well, it can work, but washing out the strawberry can also wash out a lot of other things. No,that won't do. And it has other problems too, which rule it even further out for serious outdoor snapping.

But I will miss this old Minolta. If it had only worked properly, it would have been wonderful.

Almost all digital cameras are built in one piece. (My new one is, for example.) Everything is combined into one small, or not so small, case. But if you want to do clever things with flash, this creates a problem. If the flash is built into your camera, then you are stuck with light that only comes at your subject from the same direction that you and the lense of your camera do. If you want faces side lit, or if you want to prevent those little linear shadows that crop up in flash photos, you have to get a digital camera with a gizmo on it which allows "external" flash, which means a flash gun at the end of a wire. These cameras are much more expensive than regular ones. And the flash guns and the wire to connect them to the camera aren't cheap either. If you want external flash, you end up having to pay anything up to a grand or more.

The Minolta Dimage EX Zoom 1500 was different. It looks like this.

It wasn't cheap, but the ability to separate the flash gun from the lens, if you get my meaning, was built into the design. Instead of separating the flash from the rest of the camera, the Dimage EX 1500 separates … well, the camera, from the rest of the camera. By the "camera", I mean the lens and the little box within which (I suppose) the picture is assembled. Then an optional wire intervenes, which you can either attach or not as you please, to the rest of the camera, where there's the little TV screen, the place where you stick the wafer thin mint that stores your pictures, the batteries, and all the nobs that control everything.

There are several advantages to this beyond being able to vary the direction of the flash light. First, if you have the wire in place, when you push the button to take a photo, you don't simultaneously push the bit of the camera that actually does the photography – a big plus for avoiding camera wobble just when you don't want it to. Second, this strange set-up confuses people about where the photography is coming from, and even about whether it's happening. Impromptu shots are a lot easier to contrive. Manipulating the direction of the lens without moving the picture that tells you what your picture is also makes things easier.

I just wish the damn thing worked properly. In addition to the strawberry icecream syndrome, there's also the fact that when I have that wire installed, I have to smack the camera to get it to receive any pictures at all. Some kind of missing connection. This doesn't happen when the wire is cut out of things, but with the wire, trouble trouble trouble.

But the thing still has its uses. If you own a new digital camera, it's funny how much easier it is to make your old camera behave itself. I can now afford to risk destroying the old camera for the chance of making it do the one thing I still want, which is take indoor shots with the wire attached. And I think it realises this, and is suddenly desperate to please. Now, what with my new camera ready to take over everything, I can smack the old one like I was Harrison Ford smacking the controls of his spaceship in the original Star Wars movie. And it can work.

Today for example, I damn near set fire to the camera, by poking around with the connections on the off chance that this might improve matters. There was evil smelling smoke, and frankly I expected a very bad sort of flash at any moment, of the sort that liquifies things. So I quickly switched it off, and removed the batteries and the wafer thin mint, and let it blow off its steam and cool down. Then I reassembled everything, and hey presto, it still worked, provided I smacked it in the right place. And I took a stack of photos, of myself, to get one to put at the top of this blog when it gets its new makeover which it will Real Soon Now.

This is the kind of thing I have in mind, although maybe my design team will overrule me and want it all to be posher and uglier, more significant and less cheerful:

What you see here is me looking at the picture of myself on the main body of the camera, which is on the right as you survey the scene. The wire hanging down leads to the little lens bit surveying the whole scene. Those are classical CDs in the background. And I wasn't faking how pleased I was about all this. Basically, anything good I get out of the old camera is a bonus.

The strawberry icecream thing is not a problem for this photo session, because the colours will be yanked around all over the place by Photoshop or whatever anyway, to fit the blog colour scheme.

And now I also have a cheap, cheerful, and touch wood fully functioning camera, trailing rave reviews in all the magazines, much lighter than the old one and light enough to take with me everywhere in my pocket to grab all photo-opportunities as they present themselves. It also uses the exact same brand of wafer thin mints and batteries as the old Minolta, which greatly simplifies things. The new one also uses much less power. I went photo-ing across the river yesterday, and the wafer thin mint ran out of puff before the batteries did, which was a big surprise after the old Minolta, I can tell you.

Best of all, the new camera is cheap. Dropping it in the Thames would be painful, but not nearly as painful as totalling a serious piece of heavyweight kit, such as the Minolta once was.

So I'll end with one of the photos I took with the new camera:

I know. Nothing special. Just a curvy new building I happen to like a lot more than I would have if it had been straight and dull. Not arty. But that was how it emerged, straight from the camera. And the only pink on show is the pink tower, which is pink. No strawberry icecream to be seen anywhere.

It's late, I've just had a pint of lager, and I have a phone call I want to make really soon. So, just to say, by way of meeting my daily quota (one), that Stephen Pollard has up at his recently revamped blog one of his typically argumentative and in-your-face pieces to the effect that Beethoven is just plain better than the Beatles, so there. Which is a lot more true than false, I would say, if you are only allowed those two boxes to put your response in. Sample paragraphs:

We’ve been here before. Christopher Ricks came at it from the opposite perspective in the 1970s, arguing that Bob Dylan’s lyrics were great poetry. A couple of years ago he argued that Dylan’s song Not Dark Yet ranked alongside Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Others have made similar comparisons, such as Eric Griffiths’ consideration of Talking Heads alongside William Empson in his Cambridge lectures during the late 1980s.

I look at what they say, at their specific, detailed, academic attempts to equate the two, and my reaction is simply to laugh. To me, it’s self-evidently preposterous – about as convincing as arguing that a finger beating time on a desk is as musically rich an experience as an Angela Hewitt performance of a Bach Partita.

Okay. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale outscores Bob Dylan's Not Dark Yet in the Pollard great-ometer.

But what about Salieri compared to Benny Goodman at the height of his considerable powers? How about the (numerous) wind quintets of Reicha, compared to … Jimmy Hendrix? Which wins between the Concerto for Two Clarinets in E Flat Major op. 91 by Franz Krommer (1759-1831) – a work of which I am very fond, especially when it is played as well as Kalman Berkes (sprinkle central European squiggles to taste) and Tomoko Takashima play it, on the Naxos CD of this piece, together with the two Krommer solo clarinet concertos op. 35 and op. 36 – and, say, Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins (also terrific in my opinion)? I'm just trying to establish a principle here, the principle being that Pollard is not making nearly as much sense as he seems to think he is.

Of course a great orange is better than a bad apple, and a great Ferrari is better than a clapped-out Ford Fiesta. But how does a clapped out Ferrari compared to a brand new Ford Whatever-eo, fresh off the Ford assembly line?

What I'm really saying here is: category error! Maybe Christopher Ricks and Eric Griffiths were indeed trying to "equate" this thing with that thing, although personally I doubt that they were doing any such thing. But I don't "equate" the Rolling Stones with Haydn merely because the two of them have some musical virtues in common, which they do.

If I can also find it in five minutes I'll link to the 2 Blowhards piece which says that marking works of art out of a hundred and arranging them in order of merit is a mug's game. Otherwise I'll just mention that one of them did say this, somewhere, somewhen. (Couldn't find it quickly. Maybe part of the previous sentence will turn purple at a later hour.)

However, although as a music critic Pollard doesn't do it for me, as a provocateur journalist he certainly knows his business. He is bating the likes of me with this piece, and I have risen to the bate by responding in the required manner. I hope he's happy. Seriously, I hope he's happy. I mean that. We have many friends in common.

No time for profundity (i.e. excessive length). Just time for a quick rumination on the strange places that human instinct takes the solitary but connected human in these electrical times.

Do you often watch movies on television or listen to music from the radio, at times of their choosing, not your own, which you already own in a form that you could play to yourself at a time of your own choosing?

I first noticed this odd syndrome when I caught myself listening on Radio Three to a recording of Elgar's First Symphony which I already owned on CD. And not only was I doing this, but a fact to add is that my CD player makes far better sound than does my radio.

Last night, which was what reminded me of this, I watched large chunks of one of my favourite movies, The Right Stuff, which I already own on DVD, on television.

It occurs to me that these two works, Elgar One and The Right Stuff, are rather similar. Both embody the confidence of a Great Power at the height of its power, and with an undercurrent of nervous laughter caused by the uneasy feeling that maybe it won't last. Both are very public pieces, especially the Elgar. And I've chosen a picture from The Right Stuff to illustrate this post which also captures the public importance of those First Seven astronauts. The Right Stuff is at least as much about the supreme social niche that those men briefly occupied in American society, down there on the ground, and about the earthly society they inhabited, as it is about their astronautical achievement. As Dennis Quaid's grinning Gordo Cooper says, he's got all manner of deals going, and a "free lunch from one end of America to the other", and all this before he ever ventured into space. And who could forget the scene where John Glenn, played so beautifully by Ed Harris, proves that, at least for that brief shining moment, he and the other astronauts between them outranked the Vice-President of the United States?

And of course those rocket expeditions were immense public events.

So both the Elgar and The Right Stuff, being public pieces, are the sort of things you want to witness at a public event. So is that why I wanted to witness them on the radio and the TV? At least I join a virtual "event", instead of it being a private event of my own, as the next best thing to a real public occasion.

Or is it that if there is a major terrorist incident in some big western city with huge loss of life, I want an emergency news bulletin to interrupt the proceedings and tell me about this straight away? This can't happen when you listen to a CD or watch a DVD, and in this respect the public media are an improvement. Do I want the potential connection with History, should a slice of it erupt while I'm watching or listening? Closer, maybe.

Is it simply that I'm human, and as such, am a social animal? I simply like to huddle together with my fellow humans. But actually huddling together with fellow humans brings me slap up against their imperfections, and mine in their eyes. In the sort of audiences I am usually a member of, they aren't the people I'd really like them to be. And I'm very rarely the person I'd like myself to be. But if I listen to the radio or watch it on the telly, I can imagine my ideal audience, and be an ideal member of it. I think it's more like that. Sociability without all the bother and sweat and annoyance of actual socialising. The idea of other people, as opposed to the actual fact of them. Mankind, rather than other people.

Forgive me. I profounded on rather more than I intended to.

I saw this rather startling faked-up photo of an egghead, in the June 2003 issue of Digital Camera Magazine, which I was reading because I'm about to buy a new digital camera myself.

This picture is the work of Roy Oldershaw, who emailed Digital Camera Magazine as follows:

I am a small time photographer (I say small time because it's not my main source of income). My reason for this email to you is to hope you will publish some of my photos in your magazine. I followed the egghead tutorial from your mag and I personally feel that the results turned out quite well. If anyone would like to see any more of my photos, I have galleries at www.photography-roy.co.uk.

The Digital Camera people were impressed. As am I by this entire situation.

The picture reminds me of the scene in one of the Hannibal Lector books where HL carves open someone's head and eats their brains.

This chap (I don't known if it is Oldershaw himself or someone else) also reminds me, both in appearance and in demeanour, of my good friend and fellow Samizdatista Paul Marks.

I don't promise any imagery as arresting as this with my new camera.

I wrote my reaction to Schindler's List here immediately after seeing it and while still heavily under its immediate influence, and it knocked me for six. So I'm pleased and somewhat relieved to learn that another writer, Mark Steyn, far heavier in weight and more experienced in writing about movies than I, when he saw Schindler's List way back in 1994 when it first came out, was also much impressed. I thought there might be some joking around from him about what I soon learned was a made-up ending, and generally some ironic distancing. But not a bit of it.

Steyn made a particularly good point about the exact nature of the evil that was the Holocaust. I possess one of those little snippet books, which has the bit about the Holocaust in Paul Johnson's History of the Jews, in which Johnson makes the same point. It was the combination of bestiality and bureaucracy, of savagery and system, which made the Holocaust so uniquely hideous.

Gradually, you understand the film’s decision to adjust Thomas Keneally's original title, Schindler's Ark. What separates the Germans from trigger-happy goons in a hundred banana republics is the system: the bureaucracy, 'the paperwork', as a dozen Nazi officials sigh wearily in the course of the film; the grotesque thoroughness of District B and Department W and the Business Compensation Fund regulations. Schindler and his Jewish accountant fight Nazi paperwork with their own list, the names of their factory workers.

I think it was this doggedly official way in which Nazi Germany set about murdering people, making use of all the techniques of civilisation to be barbaric, that goes a long way towards justifying the now conventional Western view that the Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jews was uniquely barbaric, and in particular more barbaric than the slaughters of Stalin and Mao. Those Russians and Chinese were, you know, not quite in control of themselves. They weren't quite human, more like wild beasts. They, like their victims, were swept up in an ideological frenzy. But Germans! How could they do such a thing? How could they be so cold-blooded, so thorough, so detached and so organised about it all? They used the very same stuff – paperwork – that they used to create their greatest achievements (music, literature, science) to commit their greatest crime. In this respect, the Holocaust really was unique.

There is of course a big slice of racism in this attitude, and also a big slice of anti-anti-Communism. Murdering millions of people is not so bad if it's in a good cause, blah blah. But let's just say that this time the anti-anti-Communists, scum though they undoubtedly are, have had some genuine truths to work with here, along with all their lies about how uncool it is to keep banging on about Communist holocausts.

Steyn also picks up on another detail from Schindler's List that I'd forgotten – likewise a use of something you normally associate with civilisation at its best – to murder people.

The real face of evil is the German soldiers, after the Cracow massacre, combing the ghetto with the remorseless doggedness of petty officialdom, their stethoscopes pressed to the ceilings just in case there's anyone still breathing up there. A system which transforms the stethoscope into an instrument of death and issues it to its infantrymen: in denying the Jews’ humanity, the Germans killed their own.

I've been brooding lately on anti-Semitism, Hollywood, Christianity, Christianity (apparent collapse of in Britain), and such matters, and it seems to me that one of the Big Events of our time is the replacement of Christ's Crucifixion by The Holocaust as the Central Act of Cruelty and Suffering of our – now post-Christian – civilisation.

Is this act of cultural transformation, like Hollywood, the Crucifixion (Gospel version), etc., some kind of Jewish Plot? If so, well done the Jews, I say.

And I'll repeat that with links. James Lileks agrees with me about the music for Where Eagles Dare:

Okay: red meat: "When Eagles Dare" is out on DVD! It’s notable for many reasons – Clint Eastwood appears to reduce the German army by 8 percent, for example. The fight on the cable car is still a nail-biter. Dick Burton cashes his paycheck with particular pleasure. But what I really love about this movie is the theme, which is perhaps the best 60s WW2 theme, period. I bought it for 99 cents at the downtown Fargo Woolworth in the cutout bin. Haven't heard it for years. I could sing every note.

Jawohl (sp).

However, as a wise commenter at the Barnes and Noble site linked to above reminds us, and in particular reminds anyone who is thinking of having another war against Germany, killing Germans is not actually as easy as this film makes it appear.

This is another "I love the blogosphere" postings, but I do, I do.

I started, as I often do, here, and scrolled down to this, and from there I went here, and then I clicked on "MAIN" on the page of that posting and got to this piece and that mentioned some Mexican painter friends.

I'm interested in how much you can learn about painting from the Internet. Okay, how much I am learning about painting from the Internet. For me, it's the ideal medium. For me, actually seeing all the paintings is too costly in time and travel, and anyway I'm not that interested. Picture books are too expensive in money and library muddle and space occupied, and too unwieldy to look at. I also find it impossible to keep track of where everything is to be found, again, on paper. However, flinging a semi-decent photographic reproduction of some paintings up on my computer screen is an ideal way to at least see what the paintings people are talking about.

Architecture and movies and classical music, in fact music of any kind, I completely see the point of. I don't have to try to get interested in those, because I already am. Painting, however, for me, is a foreign country, and requires a bit of effort. It's intriguing and beautiful, but I don't live there. However, I do want to see travellers' snaps and to read travellers' tales about the land of painting. This is one of the reasons I so like the 2Blowhards site. I can read pieces like this there, about a key Picasso painting, with all the pertinent illustrations, without deranging my day or having to borrow or buy anything.

So I clicked on "my Mexican painter friends", and I got to a collection of wild and wonderful images from Mexico, like the man says. Some of them remind me of the Bayeux Tapestry, others of sixties rock album covers, others of all kinds of things, including David Hockney.

The only really good way to see these Mexican pictures is to click on the wiggly shaped thumbnails and look at what you then get full size. Most of them have lots and lots of detail, which you just can't see if you want the whole picture on your screen at once. For me, with my primitive understanding of computerised pictures, that means downloading and then looking at them in something like Photoshop.

Here's my favourite one, by Eusebio Diez Alejandro:

Says Tyler Cohen of this man:

Eusebio is best known for his scenes of apocalypses and for his very forceful and highly detailed work. He works only in black and white, and spends most of the year working in the fields. I bought this harvest scene from him last year. I think he is one of the best.

On the basis of the pictures we can see, I agree.

I should add that many of the pictures Tyler Cohen shows are in the most vivid of colours. For instance, I also like the look of this one a lot, by the apparently much admired Marcial Camilo Ayala, although the photography is somewhat hasty:

Says Cohen:

Right now Marcial is at work on some larger projects for me, including a 16-amate history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, plus the largest amate ever drawn, eight foot by four foot.

Which sounds impressive. If you want to know exactly what "amate" means, I can't help you there. You'll have to follow the link.

As usual, I hope that reproducing these pictures here isn't any sort of copyright infringement.

Today the new Adam Smith Institute blog is officially launched. Most of it is political, to the effect that there should be a lot less politics. Strongly agreed.

The nearest thing to a culture-related posting is one by Dr Madsen Pirie entitled Laughing all the way to the market:

Is a sense of humour right-wing? I think it is. I know the BBC uses right-wing to mean simply bad, but I use it to indicate support for a spontaneous society made by the free economic and personal decisions of its members. Left-wing implies support for a more centrally planned society which seeks to reproduce in the world a vision of what some people think society ought to be like.

Left-wingers see how far the world falls short of their ideal, and are impatient to put it right. They are very political, for they see problems to be solved by collective effort. Right-wingers see opportunities for enjoyment and fulfilment by people of all stations, through social interaction and enjoyment of art or nature. They have time for wry comment, irony, and an appreciation of the funny side of things.

I think this is wrong. The claim "humour = right wing" reminds me of the many philosophical reductions of ideology which say things like "moral relativism = leftism" or "natural rights = non-leftism" or "utilitarianism = leftism". The ones that particularly annoy me are the ones that say "libertarianism is based on this philosophy blah blah blah", implying that all libertarians agree about this philosophy (when libertarian me doesn't) and that all who agree about this philosophy are libertarians (which they aren't). That's all rubbish and so is this attempt to create imaginary correspondences between one ideological camp and being humorous.

All ideological camps contain their jokers and their humourless dorks, their open-hearted team players and their bitter and twisted failures and maniacs. Look at all the lunatics who oppose the European Union to see just how crazed "right wingers" can be. (Many of these maniacs are also doctrinaire libertarians. I agree with quite a lot of what these people say, but luckily the triumph of the anti-European cause won't mean us being in any way ruled by these lunatics, the way that the triumph of the pro-European cause does mean us being ruled by those lunatics.)

Part of the problem is that we have here two different definitions of "right-wing" here, to mean (a) relaxed about things having to change and actually being rather happy if they don't change, and (b) a belief that things should change for the better, and that this better should be in a free market direction. Relaxed or even opposed to change versus free market change. Not the same thing.

If right wing means opposed to change, then where does that leave a New Labour supporting grandee like Stephen Fry? He is both (depending on your definitions) left wing in that he supports Labour and despises the Conservatives, and right wing in doing this in a lordly and snobbish and humorous and self-deprecating and self-sending-up way and in wanting left wing rule to continue for ever and not ever to be changed back into Conservative rule. Does Stephen Fry have no sense of humour? The Alternative Comedians were left wing, and funny. And extremely numerous. And also they're getting rather "right wing" and relaxed and content with how things are as they get older.

I have friends who insist that Alternative Comedians are not funny. But if you have a guy at the front of a room telling jokes, and a room full of people listening to those jokes and laughing, you definitely have humour there, even if you don't share it. And by this definition (a behavioural one) there's plenty of left wing humour.

In fact, you could probably lash together a better case than Madsen makes for his thesis to the effect that these days the left has bugger all going for it except humour.

Similar thoughts must have occurred to Madsen while he was writing his first two paragraphs, because the third and final one starts with a U-turn:

Left-wing humour is heavily loaded to satire, and is but another weapon in the unending fight to make the world conform to their ideal. They see too many problems and injustices to allow time out for light-hearted observation on human follies and absurdities. Most right-wingers also want a better life, but even in the world's present, imperfect state, they find space enough for laughter.

The claim that the "right wing" contains no unrelaxed ideologues stressing and straining to make the world conform to their ideal has already been distrousered above. But now we learn that, yes, there is "left wing humour" after all. It's just a bit different. It's humour for ideological fanatics.

But is humour that is bitter and an ideological weapon not humour? Another definition hop. Humour as relaxation from the battle is humour, but "humour" that is part of the battle isn't humour. It's … "satire".

But does the "right wing" have no satirists of left wing folly, no writers who use humour as a weapon in the ideological struggle? No writers who are anxious about the future, deadly serious about trying to improve things, and screemingly funny with all that? Richard "you couldn't make it up" Littlejohn? P. J. O'Rourke?

In my opinion a lot of P. J. O'Rourke's imperfections as a humorist happen when he tries to be too relaxed, too deliberately "homorous". When he says to hell with the jokes, I've actually got something I want to say about this – in other words when he gets serious – that's when his real jokes happen. But when he pulls back from serious and tells a "joke" instead, you cringe at the unfunniness of it. He lacks confidence. I'm not joking. P. J. O'Rourke lacks confidence in his own opinions, and he is frightened of not being as funny, now, as everyone says he is. So he tells a lame joke instead of saying the next satirical, bitter, serious thing he really wants to say that might if taken seriously change the world for the better. And get a huge, huge laugh on account of being so seriously funny.

This posting of Madsen's is a muddle, but it has at least provoked me into some worthwhile ruminations. On balance, therefore, it was a good thing.

Ah, I think I get it. It was a joke.

Like so many things involving computers, the internet, etc., I knew it could be done, and one day I would do it. I just never got around to it. But this guy knows how to do it, or has friends who do. I'm talking about putting snippets of music in a piece of blog text which you can play just by clicking, same as you can click here to get to the article I'm referring to.

What is more, these musical snippets are used in a way that make genuine sense. You can't communicate the full grandeur of the St Matthew Passion or the joyous genius of the Pastoral Symphony in a few mere seconds, but you most definitely can communicate a lot about the different tempos that different conductors adopt when conducting them:

We're seeing the Vivaldi-ization of Bach: gloom banished, minimal variety, implacably crisp, bouncy. And the slim 'n' speedy virus has infected good conductors. When the well-reviewed 1989 John Eliot Gardiner recording of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" appeared, as a Gardiner fan I ran to get it. This time the great chorus of lamentation that begins the "Passion" was indeed an occasion of mourning: I'd blown 20 bucks. Gardiner takes the chorus of lamentation at near-gigue tempo. Jesus is crucified, his performance cries. Let's dance!

To see what I mean with the piece's mournful opening movement, compare the early '70s recording by the distinguished Bachian Helmuth Rilling with Gardiner's. Gardiner's is nearly 20 percent faster – and Rilling's was faster than Herbert von Karajan's and Otto Klemperer's recordings of a few years earlier.

What it amounts to is that the influence of the early-music movement is turning everything into dance music. And the virus is spreading in the repertoire. Compare the tempos of Beethoven symphonies in the classic '60s Karajan set with a recent "authentic" set by David Zinman: Nearly every movement of every symphony is several notches faster in the newer one. In addition, the musical phrasings, the commas and colons and semicolons, are glossed over in favor of momentum.

Let's compare beginnings of Beethoven's "Sixth Symphony," the "Pastoral," whose first movement is titled "Awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country." Here's Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1960s. Now here's the beginning from a late-'80s original-instrument set by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. I admire that band, that conductor, and much of this set, but I don't know what planet Hogwood's "Pastoral" is on. Our traveler is jogging too fast for happy feelings – he's anaerobic. Hogwood's tempo is nearly three metronome clicks faster than Karajan's, whose tempo is on the brisk side for his time. But Karajan wouldn't even rate on today's dog track.

It cheers me up no end to find someone else on this planet besides me who prefers Helmut Rilling's Bach to John Elliot Gardiner's, and especially Rilling's wondrous seventies Matthew Passion, which I've been searching for complete for years ever since I got a highlights CD, and which I finally found in a bargain basement set a few weeks ago.

Fashion is a peculiar thing, and the seventies aren't now, fashionwise, most people's favourite decade. But when it comes to performing Bach, the nineteen seventies were definitely my favourite decade of all. Recording had got as good as it was going to get, so no worries on that front. The lugubrious speeds adopted by Klemperer and Karajan in Bach (I find Karajan's set of the Brandenbergs to be intermittently absurd) had been speeded up enough to give Bach back his bounce, in the bouncy bits. On the other hand, speeds were not yet as absurdly speedy as they later became.

My particular problem with authenticity is not so much tempo (I like those Zinman Beethoven symphonies) as with that "bounce" thing, in particular the tendency of many authenticists to land like a ton of bricks on the first beat of every bar and to treat legato as some sort of crime. Once again, I feel that they may have slightly overdone the legato in the fifties and sixties, got dead right in the seventies, and then later they went berserk with the bounciness. (See this Samizdata rant.)

Blah blah blah. My more important point here is that now you can, if you wish, touch wood, and thanks to Jan Swafford, actually hear something of the things I am – okay, and he is – talking about.

As he says in a comment on this, Michael Jennings has a new posting up at his blog about both (a) the Libeskind design for Ground Zero, and (b) about the Libeskind Berlin Jewish museum. He's not that optimistic about (a), because he's not that impressed by (b).

Is it my imagination, or is that Blogspot nonsense, where if you linked to the most recent item it didn't work, now fixed?

Stephen Pollard has a new blog, which really is a blog.

Go to the category archives, and you find music about which he has a lot to say.

About Prommers:

The real problem about the Promenaders is that they are not there for the music, but to be part of a rather sad club that meets nightly at 7.30 and is defined by a series of inane rituals. So the highlight of their evening is not Martha Argerich playing Ravel, but the chance to chant "heave" when the piano is shifted onto the stage, or their asinine mock applause when the orchestra leader plays a note on the piano for the orchestra to tune up to.

About Simon Rattle:

Last week's concert had two works: Asyla, by the young British composer, Thomas Ades; and Mahler"s Fifth Symphony. Beginning his tenure with Asyla was a neat piece of programming, as it was the final piece he conducted as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony, the orchestra with whom he earned the reputation which led to his Berlin appointment. Mahler's Fifth, however, is typical BPO fare; typical in the sense that the orchestra has played it so often they must know it by heart. Yet nothing Rattle ever does is typical. As the conductor John Carewe, Rattle's teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and still his mentor, put it after the applause had died down last week: "Tonight we heard the first authentic performance of this symphony. We were brought up on Bruno Walter"s recording with the New York Philharmonic, but Walter could never have dreamed of a performance like that. It has taken 100 years to come this far". If you think that is simply the hype of a teacher talking about his star pupil, you could not be more wrong. As one of the orchestra members put it: "I have never worked so hard since Bernstein."

Janacek:

Leos Janacek was the greatest opera composer of the twentieth century, and arguably the greatest composer, period. Leave aside all other considerations, his operas pass one key test: they are performer proof. Just as a poor performance of Don Giovanni or the Marriage of Figaro can nonetheless still give much pleasure, it's also true that, whilst a great performance of Katya Kabanova or Jenufa is emotionally shattering, a poor performance can also be transcendental, such is the power of Janacek's ability to blend story and music. His gift was to be able to take a powerful story and make it better by honing in on the most powerful and truthful elements. Shakespeare's Othello may be a masterpiece, but Verdi's Otello, the essence of that masterpiece, is if anything a still greater work. So Janacek's From the House of the Dead takes Dostoyevsky's silver and turns it into gold.

Barenboim and Wagner:

Barenboim's Judaism and Israeli citizenship are at the core of his personality and have prompted many of the ventures which have taken him beyond the musical world and into a form of politics. So it is all the more remarkable that it is Wagner with whom he is now associated above all other composers. The German, who died in 1883, was, of course, Hitler's favourite; his music sometimes accompanied Jews as they were sent to the gas chambers. But the current Wagnerthon in Berlin is merely Barenboim's latest attempt to rehabilitate Wagner, especially in the eyes of his fellow Jews. As he puts it: "Wagner was not responsible for Auschwitz". Barenboim is now the main conductor at Bayreuth, the annual festival in deepest Bavaria devoted to Wagner's operas. Last July, conducting his Staatskapelle Berlin Orchestra at a concert in Tel Aviv, he prompted calls (which were not acted upon) from Israeli politicians from all main parties that he be banned from future public performance in Israel when he conducted the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde as an unprogrammed encore. Not a note of Wagner's music had ever before been played in concert in Israel.

In short, a lot of interesting stuff. He's an ignorant grump about pop music, as befits a man of his age and attitude, and is particularly angry about crossover. But when he writes about what he likes, it is interesting stuff.

I haven't read much of it until now, because if I read it I'd want to link to it, and linking to Pollard used to be a mess. But it isn't any more, because now he has a real blog going.

They're still fiddling around with details, but it looks good too.

A few days ago, I did a scornful Transport Blog posting about this:

But the more I look at it, the more I like the look of it, especially from a helicopter. So here it is, viewed from a helicopter, at a culture blog where it surely belongs.

Here's what I think. The photograph could be a lot better, but the thing itself is a work of genius. It has proportion, uniformity, consistency, economy.

Ergo, the motorists will just have to get used to driving on it. Genius is immune to petty considerations like whether the damn thing works. Art has its own reasons.

The central skill for liking culture is not to let others bully you into pretending to like what you do not like, or into pretending to dislike what you do like. To live a happy life, in other words, try to avoid cultural false consciousness.

And if one of the skills of excellent writing is to confess to a sin that lots of others know they are guilty of too, but hadn't yet got around to admitting to themselves until the excellent writer confessed it out for them, then this Spectator article by Tom Utley is truly excellent.

It is by no means a bad thing that so many of us (if I am right) go around pretending to enjoy the finer things in life, when they don’t really do all that much for us. We do far less harm than the unashamedly philistine, beating each other up on the terraces at Millwall. But one can push a pretence too far. If Buccleuch gets his 'Madonna of the Yarnwinder' back, as I earnestly hope he will, the Dumfriesshire and Galloway fire brigade should be given new instructions: in the event of a fire at Drumlanrig, save the Duke, who seems a nice old buffer, and let the Leonardo burn.

The sad thing is that Tom Utley still seems to confuse the aesthetic and the moral. There is no necessary connection between deciding that you don't much like Leonardo's paintings and assaulting people at football matches. If you don't like Leonardo, don't bother with him, and don't fill the newly empty hours by assaulting people. Is that really such a hard rule to follow? Most "philistines" are not bad people. I don't much like sitting through concerts, staring at paintings except in attractive female company, the operas of Rossini in any circumstances or on any medium, Baroque music played in an excessively authentic style ditto, so I don't endure these things. Nor do I beat people up. Nor do I write Spectator articles recommending that Leonardo paintings be left to burn just because I don't personally care for them.

The same kinds of things can be said of Patrick Crozier, who also picked up on this piece.

It is a bad thing that Tom Utley has wasted so much of his life making himself unhappy with what others consider to be great art but which he didn't like. Unhappiness is bad.

However, the news for Utley is not all bad. His time wasn't completely wasted. What Utley and I clearly both enjoy is writing cleverly. He even gets paid to write cleverly, but he does it cleverly enough to suggest that he would do it for nothing if no one paid him, and probably he does in such things as clever letters and emails to friends and family. And now that Utley has trudged through all those art galleries and castles and sat through all those concerts, he has all kinds of things to write about cleverly, as this article of his proves. He will have learned things. Even so, it's a bit sad that he had to wait until he's middle aged (and thus qualified to write for the Spectator) before learning one of the basic rules for how to enjoy yourself.

I have a category of experience which I label something like: didn't make me very happy but happy to have done it. When David Carr took me to a Premier League football match at Stamford Bridge, frankly, my mind did wander a bit, Utley style. And of course there was lots of annoying travelling involved, as always when you actually go to things. But the recollection of that event is pure pleasure, and I would hate now to be without that memory. It was Roman Abramovich's first home game as the owner of Chelsea. Fascinating. I was entertained only on and off at the time, but afterwards I loved it.

At the risk of going on far too long, I do want to add one more thing here, which is that I do truly love to listen to classical music CDs. There's no false consciousness there. I love them. If you're happy to take that on trust, if you already see the point of this point, if you don't give a toss about Richard Strauss, and if you have other things to do now, fine. Stop reading this now.

A long time ago, I once, for those of you still with me, had a little spell of worrying that perhaps I didn't really love classical music and that I only pretended to myself that I loved so as to feel superior to all the people who didn't love it. And then I went to the cinema and saw a frankly rather dreary (I later decided - Utley style) film called 2001 A Space Odyssey. But the start wasn't dreary. And it had this fabulous music. At the time I had no idea about Richard Strauss tone poems, and the habit of stitching unaltered classical music (or for that matter unaltered pop music) into movies was not nearly as common then as it is now. So I just thought that some Hollywood hack had had, so to speak, a rare on day. Most of Hollywood made-for-the-movies music strikes me as dull, dull, dull – whether orchestral, jazzified, poppified, or, now, I suppose, danceified or hiphoppified. But this 2001 music struck me as genuinely arresting. I thought: Wow, can I buy it?

Well, of course, it turned out that I could. It was one of my team, and I've loved all those grandiose Richard Strauss tone poems ever since, not just the opening of Also Sprach Zarathusthra (the now famous 2001 music), but also the Alpine Symphony and Heldenleben. Even the much despised Sinfonia Domestica.

And there's another taste you aren't supposed to have, according to some snobs who like to make subtle distinctions between kosher classical music and the rest. And if you do like Richard Strauss, you are supposed to like the strident and decadent and often rather discordant early stuff like Elektra and Salomé, but you aren't allowed to like the mushy stuff like Rosenkavalier or the somewhat ridiculous stuff (in the sense that the programmes are ridiculous) like Heldenleben and Sinfonia Domestica. The sublime Metamorphosen and the equally sublime Four Last Songs are also verboten because by the time Strauss wrote them the style he used was way out of style, so you can't love those either.

Oh yes I can. As Alice Bachini might put it: Our Hero now waves his wooden sword at a gang of gibbering Culture Snobs who withdraw from the stage in disarray.

I apologise if this posting has been rather long and a bit grandiose and self-centred, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway.

The sheerly brilliant most winning defender of humankind, Alice Bachini, can now be found at a new address without underlinings in it. Which means that more people will be able to read her.

Which is nice.

The Dave Barry blog is an endless source of cultural stimulation. Here's a link from him to this article, about a subject of zero interest to me, namely DJs frigging about with CDs and gramophone records in order to entertained the zonked out raving masses. Zero interest until now:

PARIS (AFP) – Want to listen to something really different? Smear yoghurt on your favourite CD. Let it dry. Slide the disc into the player. Crank up the volume. And hear that music in a completely fresh, possibly spine-chilling way.

A joke right? Of course a joke. Otherwise Dave Barry's emailer fan club wouldn't have picked it up and sent it in. But serious also:

Jones' pet area of research is how signals can be transmitted through biological cells, which grow in a so-called "fractal" way, like tree branches.

He became intrigued by experimental musicians and DJs who, from the mid-1980s, sanded, varnished or even slapped paint onto CDs to create new sounds to sample.

Yes, that would explain quite a lot.

Music on CDs comes from tiny etched pits in the tracks that represent binary digits, the "0" or "1" that make up a computer code. The code, reflected back by the laser in the CD player, is then processed back into an electronic signal and converted to sound.

Mutilating the surface, so that some of the pits are missed, thus changes the sound.

You don't say. But this is where it gets more interesting.

But Jones found that much subtler sounds could be achieved using fungal or bacterial growth, rather than scraping or coating the disc's surface.

This is because these life forms introduce tiny errors, on a micron on nanoscale level rather than the far bigger millimetric scale.

In addition, the way fungus and bacteria can shape the sound in weird ways.

My guess is that various members of the slacker generation have already discovered this phenomenon, but didn't grasp its scientific significance.

Bacteria grow by cell division, while fungi grow by branching. Both processes can be controlled by adding malt extract to the disc as food.

Jones told New Scientist that he came across the discovery quite by accident, when he was DJing in his bar.

"I often change CDs when my hands are wet with beer," he told the British weekly. "One night I must have changed the CDs, touched the data surface, then left them for use on another night."

The following week, he put on a CD by Nine Inch Nails and found that it would not play properly because fungus had grown on it.

Don't you just hate it when that happens? Besides which, when did a CD by "Nine Inch Nails" ever "play properly"? But now I'm showing my culture.

But the fungus had not ruined the disc. …

Of course not. How could noises made by some nine inch nails be ruined? All they could ever be is different.

… The original audio sequence was there, but it would sometimes change in pitch and there were small staccato noises in the background.

And now the eureka moment.

He asked himself: "What would happen if I purposely grew fungi, yeast or bacteria in direct contact with the media, and manipulated their fractal dimensions?"

That's my question of the year so far.

Yoghurt-on-a-disc was born.

Jones says that he has yet to damage any of his discs or players with his pioneering work, but warns that the technique does crash CD players on computers because the software cannot cope.

Ah, the grand tradition of scientists pissing about and calling it research. "Head ache Jones?" "Yes sir. Rather too much fractal fungoid sonic analysis last night, sir." "Take it easy Jones, you're a valuable man." "Will do sir."

The internet will soon be awash with these noises, I think. Fungoid fractal sonics. I hate it already.

I just checked that the date is not April 1st. Unsurprisingly, it is not April 1st. It is September 13th. I mean, how could you make this story up?

Waffle warning. In my opinion the only reader who is likely to really enjoy this will be me in about ten years time. It's a ramble over pretty well trodden ground. (It is also, and not coincidentally, the first time I've done one of those "MORE" things at this blog, I think.) But it's done now and might as well go up.

Yesterday I was in HMV Oxford Street trawling for more classical bargains. The default price for good recordings that have been around for a while is now about £3, yet they are still trying to sell new stuff for around £16 or even £17. Presumably they'll get some buyers, but not enough to count for enough.

(See what I mean about well trodden ground.)

Two new things struck me, the first something I have been tracking for several years, and the second rather new.

First, the new formats like SACD etc. are still not taking off. You can see what taking off means if you visit the DVD movies section of the shop, or the nearby computer games section. That's take-off! Well, SACD ain't. Certainly not in the classical department. Maybe somewhere else they are selling SACD etc. power ballads. Maybe. Meanwhile, things like the Barenboim Beethoven symphonies in the new format are stuck away in a poky little corner, just beyond that huge spread of Naxos CDs. If they thought they were going to be able to re-record the entire core repertoire like they did when the CD first exploded … well we punters aren't damn well having it. The plain fact is that recording quality reached its peak in about 1955, with those fantastic RCA recordings, and all else has merely been getting all recordings to be as good as those ones were. Good enough is good enough, in fact it is excellent. CDs were the big leap, because they don't get scratched and clicked, which was brilliant. A tiny bit better recording is nice, maybe, but frankly superfluous. We all know that the next big leap forward is getting the music from the Internet and making computers into Hi-Fi kits, a process that is well under way. Another kind of shiny disc in a case is entirely beside the point. It reminds me of digital tape, which always struck me as like lighting a fire with more sophisticated and hi-tech stick-running.

The other thing I have started to notice is that opera on DVD, much to my disappointment, would also not seem to be selling very well. My guess would be price. If you can get classic movies for £9.99 and falling fast on another floor of the same shop, who will pay £30 for an opera? It looked a reasonable bet a few years back, especially when you consider the ridiculous price of live opera. But, we punters are (I'm guessing) guessing that there are big price falls to come, and we are waiting. For a tenner a go, I'd kit myself up with all my opera favorites, such as they are. For thirty a go, forget it.

Of course there is another possible explanation. These new things are selling, but not in shops, and certainly not in shops like HMV Oxford Street. They're selling in specialist shops, but above all they're selling on the internet. You can't yet legally and easily download all this stuff for a quid a go. But meanwhile you can buy it without sweating your way through crowds of tourists or faffing around with car parking. That would make sense.

So, a posting that started out being about classical music ends up being a rumination upon retail selling. Speculation: as genuinely new products come on the market, depending on high-tech, the shops that try to stock such stuff often fail to make a go of it. The punters resort to the internet, and the business is gone. The big shops will never see the thing again, no matter how big the business eventually gets. Internet shopping is a habit - one I've yet to catch, incidentally - and once you have the habit, you don't need shops for the stuff.

Here's a useful piece of computer graphics to show what Libeskind wants to do with the WTC site. Probably lots of you have seen this or something very like it before, but I hadn't until yesterday.

There was a TV show about the WTC competition here a few days back. I must say that the Libeskind design is now starting to make more sense to me. The sunken garden is a very good idea, I think. The office blocks look broken and half finished to me, but maybe that will be effective.

Anyway, Micklethwait's law on the matter says that you can never really tell how good it will look until it's built. Although, there's a long way to go before this one is even started.

More generally, I continue to be intrigued at how the internet makes it so much easier for the public to haggle about mere architectural plans. That TV show made it very clear how much public involvement there had been in the WTC process. I didn't follow it at the time, but the original plans for a bunch of boring, "undesigned" lumps were just shouted down by the populus, apparently. Libeskind got it because he at least attempted a little … how can I put this? … spiritual showmanship? And the skyscraper 1776 feet high. A shameless play to the gallery, and isn't that just New York, New York, all over?

Now here's a thought, without any links. And sometimes those postings are the best because for once, the damn blogger is doing is own thinking, instead of just bouncing a few thoughts off someone else – someone else who did the real work.

I've just realised something about the designs of Frank Gehry. I quite like them and I think they're interesting. Yet, the same kind of assemblage of randomised shapes when only twenty foot high and stuck on a plinth in a square is something I utterly despise.

It's architecture, of course. A big lump which people can live in and work in is a whole lot better than a plain old lump, even a relatively small one, just for the sake of having a lump. Sculpture has to be of something. Architecture can just be. Architecture can be abstract, like music, and still make sense, because, again like music, it makes a different sort of sense.

But now what if buildings also start to be of something?

How is it possible for architects to do gherkins now, when a generation ago they could only do rectangloid ugliness, or the occasional tubular edifice? Answer: computers. Computers enable the architects to keep track of everything. Computers enable all those damnably difficult calculations about what size every separate pain of glass or stick of steel has to be, and at what angle. Computers keep track of all the loading complexities. Computers make modern starchitecture possible. And hurrah for computers, say I.

In short, with computers, you can make a building any shape you like.

So, what's to stop the architects making gigantic office blocks or apartment blocks that are … of something?

I predict that any decade now, someone is going to say: to hell with all these abstract geometrical shapes and spikes and pyramids and tubes and lightbulbs. Let's make it look like a giant bloke.

I have in mind that huge Soviet statue, which I really like, of the two hundred foot (guess) woman waving a sickle. (Anyone know where I can find a picture of that woman?) I've got an old Russian recording of Shostakovitch's tenth symphony with that on the front, but inevitably, the titles muck it up.

Maybe someone will do something spectacularly heroic like win a major war or stop a major plague in its tracks, and they'll make a huge building into an individual likeness of said hero, dominating a city as surely as gothic cathedrals dominated their cities.

Obviously there could be lots of links to other people saying something similar, or shooting films with similar buildings in them. I just don't know of them.

Hang on, I'll just try some googling. "Buildings shaped like people" – how many hits?

Your search – "Buildings shaped like people" – did not match any documents.

Sometimes the internet can be very humbling. You have a brilliant idea that you thought of all on your own, and you type it into google and you get three thousand hits. Not this time though.

Hah! I changed it to "Building shaped like a person", and I got the Statue of Liberty. Crushed.

In my defence though, I have in mind a lot bigger, and with lots and lots of windows in it.

There's a obituary article about Leni Riefenstahl by Jonathan Petropoulos for the WSJ.

Her involvement, however involved it was exactly, in various Nazi atrocities, and her complicity in the horrors she observed and navigated around, is dealt with in this article, but the last two paragraphs present a surprisingly positive picture of this woman:

Ms. Riefenstahl had such charisma, intelligence, and talent that she won over many who were anything but Nazis. She was honored by a retrospective of her work at the Film Museum in Potsdam in 1999. When she turned 100, those attending her birthday party in Feldafing on Lake Starnberg included renowned mountain climber Reinhold Messner and Las Vegas animal trainers Siegfried and Roy.

The woman who charmed Hitler, danced with the Nuba, took up scuba diving in her 70s, and was rescued from a helicopter crash in the Sudan at age 97, possessed bedazzling qualities. No wonder Jodie Foster is working on a film about her. It's unlikely to be the last. Leni Riefenstahl, with her strength, talent, complexities, and problems, will continue to fascinate in the years to come – probably for longer than her 101 years.

That's a slightly odd way to end an article about one of the most important and influential propagandists of the Third Reich.

Nazi Germany was, among other things, a detestably criminal regime, but it wouldn't have been remotely as evil as it was had it not succeeded in making use of so many of the brightest and best Germans of its time – best in the sense of most effective and most attractive and glamorous. Making use, that is to say, of people like Leni Riefenstahl. And she, like so many other talented contemporaries, let it happen. That's the most important thing about this woman, and that should have been there in the concluding paragraph, it seems to me. She did a great deal more for Hitler besides charming him. Next to the word "fascinate", I'd like to have seen another word like "appal".

Here's another link, to a site with some photos of Riefenstahl, including some of her with Mick Jagger and his then wife, whom she'd been photographing. Well well, I never knew that. It figures. Master of stadium impact, Neuremberg Rally equals rock concert, etc. etc. I guess she was always more concerned about appearances than about morals.

I'm watching one of the dying episodes of Sex in the City on Channel 4, and the following item of wisdom dominates the episode. It's the rule being followed by the slutty one played by Kim Cattrall, in her efforts to boost the career of her hunk-actor-bonkfriend with the long blond hair in the stupid off-Broadway play. She arranges for him to lounge nakedly in a vodka advert. He's not happy. His friends despise it. His family is embarrassed. Says the slutty one played by Kim Cattrall:

First come the gays, then the girls, then the industry.

And it works too. By the end of the episode, bonk-hunk has a part in a Gus Van Sant movie.

Well, I've had a busy blogging day, but not here. There must be a few people who read me here but nowhere else, but actually I've had quite a bit of a loosely cultural sort to say on Samizdata today, it just so happens. This posting, and this one, are both about the way that communications technology intersects with the way we live our lives.

The first is about the mismatch between written hand-outs from the minders of politicians about what their masters are about to do, and the mismatch that sometimes happens between this written account – often printed as accomplished fact by the newspapers – and what actually transpires. The fact that it is now getting ever easier to collect up and distribute (i.e. spill) the private beans and compare them with the clunky old printed record version of events all adds to the drama.

The second is about the relatively recent pestilence of phone calls from "direct marketers", to use the most polite phrase available.

And then I did a brief posting referring to the Saudi Arabian Barbie ban, and another one about oriental efforts to challenge Microsoft Windows.

All loosely describable as cultural. But then, most things are, if you are short of a culture posting.

If I was a stylish blogger like Michael Blowhard instead of the egomaniac that I am, this posting would link to other people's stuff, the way this posting does, for instance.

In among it, my music of choice (when the damn telephoners weren't interrupting me) included a fine disc of Mendelssohn string quartets by the Sorrell Quartet on Chandos. (£3 from Neil and his trolley in Lower Marsh, just the other side of Waterloo Station. Open from mid-morning until early afternoon. (Around half past two seems to be soon enough.)

I found it here, after he'd linked to a Samizdata piece of mine which was based on this posting

He apparently got it from here.

I love the blogosphere.

I've already linked to this Guardian item from my Education Blog because the main events take place in a school. It is very short but it tells a huge story, which on could easily imagine being the basis of a novel or a movie or something. So, a mention here too.

(There are times when the education-here-culture-there thing doesn't work.)

There's an interesting culture story in today's New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — An organization for American museums is initiating a central registry of art objects on Monday, created to help speed the return to their rightful owners of paintings, drawings and sculpture seized during the Nazi era.

The Internet registry, which lists information on nearly 6,000 artworks in 66 of the largest American art museums, opens a new chapter in a controversy that erupted in the mid-1990's over the restitution of assets the Nazis plundered from Holocaust victims and others.

Recovering artworks, thousands of them seized by the Nazis from public museums and private collectors in Europe during the 1930's and 40's, has been a lingering goal, partly because of the difficulties in tracking the provenance, or trail of ownership, of many pieces.

Here is the website. Unsurprisingly, it is being said that this effort is not as much of an effort as it might be, and about that I have no informed comment to offer.

I wonder how long it will be before the world of art resounds to cries that it needs this stuff as well, i.e. little tiny hidden chippy thingies attached to everything that enables the Art World Government to track them wherever they go. Well, I don't really, because I don't know what I'm talking about. They've probably been using this sort of technology for years. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were among the earliest customers for it and that they helped pioneer it.

The Nazis haven't been the only art criminals.

Here is a very interesting exhibition of paintings:

Unfortunately, this exhibition can only take place in a virtual form. Its very principle of selection prevents us from offering physical access to the works on show. There are benefits, however, as well as frustrations. There are no queues. The actual works remain, by definition, out of reach, and only their reproduced image – which might be an old, faded, black-and-white photograph, or a copy done by another artist, perhaps merely on the basis of a written description – circulate.

I'm sticking up this particular picture from it here because it looks like a pretty good one to me, because it looks great on my screen and with luck therefore will also look good on yours, because I was able to copy it (often you can't), and because it is the right shape to make a big impact in a blog entry.

Here's the blurb from the guardian site:

Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, The Just Judges, 1432

The most amazing thing is not how many masterpieces go missing or get destroyed but that something so fragile as art survives for any length of time at all. The vicissitudes of an early, wonderful work by Jan van Eyck and his brother are incredible. The Ghent altarpiece finished in 1432, was rescued from rioting Reformation iconoclasts in the 16th-century, only to be dismembered and carted off to Paris by Napoleon. After Waterloo, panels were sold, then finally reassembled after the first world war. Today it is once more, and hopefully for a long time to come, the masterpiece admired by Albrecht Dürer 500 years ago. Well, nearly. In 1934 one panel, depicting The Just Judges, was stolen. It has never come to light, and has been replaced by a copy.

Not bad for a copy.

I owe someone a link for putting me in touch with this, but for the life of me I cannot recall how I found this essay first thing this morning. Oh yes I do. The New York Times sent me their daily email, and I clicked on the piece. Oh well. Anyway, it's Clive James defending nasty reviews in his usual (i.e. highly readable) way.

Adverse book reviews there have always been, and always should be, lest a tide of good intentions rise to drown us all in worthy sludge.

Indeed.

In my own experience, dishing out grief has been a lot more fun than taking it. As a trainee critic, I was sometimes careless of the personal feelings of authors whose books I reviewed, and I simultaneously found, when I myself published a book, that my adverse reviewers were invariably careless of mine. Though I never grew thick skin (thin skin, after all, is what a writer is in business to have), I gradually got better at taking punishment. By no coincidence, I also grew more reluctant to inflict it. Anyway, personal attacks rarely work. They tend to arouse sympathy for the victim, and might even help sell the book. Legitimately destructive reviews, however, I both continued to write and grew resigned to receiving. They are part of the game.

Quite so.

But there's a catch. Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?

As the man says in the current Foster's advert, of the bungy jumper whose head gets bitten off by a crocodile: "That's gotta hurt son."

But there must be nasty reviews if we are not all going to have our brains chewed off by that rising tide of worthy sludge. So to speak.

Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him.

Exactly. When you encounter a river meandering level with its fount, you have to put the boot in, and just so as there's no misunderstanding, I well realise that I mixed that metaphor, not Clive James. He merely put the components next to each other on his literary pallet, as he is quite entitled to do. I was the one who put them in the blender and knitted them together into a new display of verbal fireworks.

I love mixed metaphors, and I quite agree that mixed or muddled metaphors are a sign of bad writing. Deliberately blending a mixed metaphor is different.

Prodded by a couple of comments, I took a(nother) look at NancyButtons.com. The last time I looked, I vaguely recall thinking: any pretty buttons from this hippy bird which I could feature on my Culture Blog? Can't see any. And I was away, or distracted, or something, and that was that. The internet is a cruel space to operate in. Fail to make a connection with the net wanderer in three quarters of a second, and he's gone. It isn't right, but it is reality.

Anyway, this time I gave it several more seconds, and the point is that NancyButtons.com is not about buttons. It's about badges. Here in England, which as everyone knows is the centre of the world (look at the maps), buttons keep your coat on. It's only badges that are merely attached to the outside of the coat and have propaganda messages on them. So these are badges.

What I did was I browsed the catalogue and then picked THE ARTS. Then I copied and pasted the entire list of Arts slogans and culled it, leaving my favourites. Which are:

Americans love tragedy as long as it has a happy ending

Being a pain in the ass is a prerogative of the creative mind

The cow ate bluegrass and mooed indigo

Fear no art

Go not to the surrealists for counsel, for they will say both blue and hippopotamus

God created music so people could pray without words

Imagine Escher drawing his own bath

The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me

No one ever built a statue to a critic

Opening night – the night before the play is ready to open

Scottish country dancers are reel people

Those who dance are thought mad by those who hear not the music

Welcome to heaven. Here's your harp and your tuning key. Welcome to hell. Here's your harp.

What do you get if you play New Age music backwards? New Age music

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture

Music is my drug of choice

People complain about "soundbites" nowadays. What do they think a book of ancient quotations or aphorisms is full of? This is the jealousy of the waffler, of one who can write entire bad book, but who can't turn a single memorable phrase.

Today's New York Times has a review of Taking Sides, which is about the interrogation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, just after World War 2.

… Unlike Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, conductors who fled Germany during the Nazi era, Furtwängler chose to remain. Wooed by Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, the man thought by many to be the world's greatest conductor allowed himself to be lionized by the Nazis and lived a privileged existence. Such was Furtwängler's status and importance to the Nazis as a high-minded trophy that he wasn't even pressured to join the Nazi party.

Furtwängler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic at Hitler's 53rd birthday, but ingeniously devised a way to avoid saluting the Führer. The radio announcement of Hitler's death was accompanied by Furtwängler's recording of Bruckner's majestic Seventh Symphony.

I haven't seen this film myself, but this review got me thinking once again about the love affair between Nazi Germany and classical music. A few months back I did a Samizdata posting about this. It started as a relatively light-hearted observation to the effect that an amazing number of film villains (most notably the ultimate recent film villain Hannibal Lector) love classical music. But by the end of the posting I was saying, much more seriously: it was the Nazis. They were the ones who connected classical music to villainy.

The movie pointedly compares the solemnity of German high culture with the boisterousness of American popular culture in back-to-back scenes of a German concert audience listening silently to Beethoven in a soaking rain that pours through a bombed-out roof, and American soldiers jitterbugging to a swing band playing "Route 66." The implication seems to be that the Germans' silent reverence for Beethoven is similar to their acceptance of the Nazis' agenda, which warped elements of the same mystical romanticism into national hero-worship of a tyrant and his symbols.

"Classical" music is now pretty much a living corpse. Lots of people still love it, but we love it on the same basis that earlier generations would read and love Greek plays or Latin poetry. And I'm thinking, would classical music be in such an advanced state of museum-itis, so to speak, if the Nazis hadn't been doing their worst while worshipping the stuff.

It wasn't that everyone suddenly decided that this music was wicked. It was just that it was no longer possible to say that it was definitely morally uplifting. Before Hitler, classical music was moral. After Hitler, it merely sounded moral. After Hitler, music like this couldn’t be composed to say the deepest and greatest things any more. It no longer rang true. Not to potential composers, anyway. When Hitler dies and they play Bruckner's Seventh (which is magnificent music, by the way, truly magnificent), Bruckner's music can't ever have quite the moral stature that it had before. From then on, if you're a composer, you're going to say to yourself, whatever else I do, I mustn't try to write Bruckner's Tenth. Deep feeling. Massed strings. Long, grand, slow movements. Tempestuous finales. Urrgh. You can almost smell the Zyklon B.

As I say, I don't think the audiences saw things like this, in fact we know they didn't. But the composers just couldn't keep on as if nothing bad had happened to classical music. It was as if there was a fifty-year-long, partial strike. And now the message – the non-message, that is to say – is finally making its way through to the audiences. In Germany in particular, the "classical" story has been especially arid and desiccated. How could it possibly have been otherwise? And without Germany going full tilt, classical music could only be a shadow of its former glory.

Meanwhile, the classical music equals villainy equation swept unchallengeably through the popular culture. Many of us might have wanted to challenge this stereotype. But how could we? It was too close to being true.

Okay there were lots of other things going on. Electronic guitars, microphones for singers, shortening attention spans, the emancipation of the electronic media, teenagers with serious pocket money, the Baby Boom. Little things of that sort. But it really didn't help that Hitler loved this music. It really didn't.

Says BuzzMachine:

Hugh Macleod, the cartoonist whose canvas is the back of business cards, has turned his site into a cartoon blog: a cartoon a day, with comments. Love it.

Ditto. I got there by following Instapundit to BuzzMachine about something else.

Good stuff often appears that way, I find.

Capitalism can be brutal. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the fact is that people are downloading-free-from-the-internet-stroke-stealing-whichever lots of music, and Big Music has yet to invent a version of electronic barbed wire which doesn't threaten to reach out and wound the innocent, for instance by wrecking the PC of a listener whose only crime is to want to listen to a CD on it, or else simply by snooping on absolutely everyone in a way which threatens to undermine western civilisation and all that it stands for. So, Big Music is cutting its prices:

Battered by online piracy, the Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, said yesterday that it would cut prices on compact discs by as much as 30 percent in an aggressive attempt to lure consumers back into record stores.

The deep price cut — the only one to apply to new CD's since the format was introduced in the early 1980's — represents a gamble by Universal that more consumers will buy more CD's once the price dips below $13. It also reflects the profound degree to which Internet file-trading has managed to undermine the music business, Universal executives said.

"We are in the middle of a terrible situation where our music is being stolen," said Doug Morris, chairman of Universal, which includes labels like A&M and Island Def Jam and artists like Eminem, Elton John and U2. "We need to invigorate the market, and as an industry leader we felt we had to be bold and make a move."

Under the new pricing scheme, Universal would lower its wholesale price on a CD to $9.09 from $12.02. The company said it expected retail stores to lower CD prices to $12.98, from the $16.98 to $18.98 they now charge, and perhaps to as low as $10. When CD's first arrived on the market they cost $15.98, and have climbed from there.

The usual what-do-I-know? caveats apply with more than usual strength here, but I can't see this working. These lowered prices are still way high enough to keep the thieves thieving, but could do terrible damage to Big Music profits. It's one hell of a gamble. "Bold", like the man says. ("Courageous" is the Yes Minister version of that adjective, as in "stupid".)

I've also noticed another Big-Music-threatening syndrome that rattles about inside my head in circumstances like these. While DVD prices have been falling, I've caught myself saying, when confronted with a price of £7.99 down from £9.99 down from £12.99 down from £19.99: "Wait! There's more to come." A lowered price which I guess may actually only be a lowering price causes me to hold off until they make it an official fire sale.

We'll see.

Michael Blowhard links to this, and I'm going to as well, if only to see how long the link lasts.

It's Geoffrey Wheatcroft, discussing the response of the literary left to 9/11, in the September 2003 issue of Prospect, a favourite paper read of mine. What does he think of said literary leftists. The title – Two years of gibberish – provides a clue.

Concluding paragraphs:

A clue to this sorry performance may be found in the relationship between the literary-academic left in the west—or "what’s left of the left"—and militant Islam. On the face of it they should be opposite magnetic poles. So they once were. The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: "Écrasez l’infame!" In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition.

Today, credulous doting on Islam is not just an expression of western self-hatred. On the face of it, Islam and the western left have nothing in common at all. But they do, in fact, something profoundly important. They share the common experience of defeat. Islamic terrorism is not a function of success but of failure. As a culture and society, Islam enjoyed a glorious golden age between the 8th and 12th centuries, but it has been in decline for many centuries past, some would say since the first fall of Baghdad.

As the 20th century ended, it saw another great defeat. Marxism-Leninism long predeceased Soviet Russia; even democratic socialism has conceded victory to the competitive free market. There was, and is, a distinction between the practical and intellectual left. In the 1930s, the "practical" left on either side of the Atlantic weren’t much interested in communism, but got on with making the New Deal, or preparing the Labour party to win a decisive election. It was the intellectual left, or part of it, which lost its heart to Stalin. But if those Stalinoids were nasty enough when they explained away the Moscow trials, they weren’t silly, and they could plausibly believe that history was on their side. To re-read that catalogue of nonsense from two years ago is to realise that their descendants simply aren’t serious any longer. If the old Leninist left was buried politically in the rubble of the Berlin wall, the literary-academic intelligentsia disappeared morally in the ashes of ground zero.

Sadly, anti-communism as forthright as this is still somewhat rare. Being a talented writer is no excuse for supporting Stalin, although as Wheatcroft argues that both have their origins in the same fact. Talented literary writers, he says, just like other pro-Stalinists who didn't have to be, tend to be somewhat unhinged.

A great comment has just appeared at my Education Blog, on a piece about how schooling cranks out socialists. Classrooms are centrally planned, and the people who thrive in them spend the rest of their lives believing that that's how it should always be. That kind of thing. And then I flew off at a tangent about the alleged bullying nature of sports jocks.

Here's what Stephanie Herman added:

Well, I don't have any comment on the bullying by sports participants (although I did write an article on bullying and economic incentives on my website), but I do agree that the centrally-regulated classroom could lead the intellectual toward socialism. The same is true in centrally-directed symphony orchestras. I used to play in one, and have yet to meet a capitalist II violin player. :)

:) indeed, but also, given how I adore symphonic music but abhore socialism, :(

Seriously, this makes me want to write a long but good essay speculating profoundly about the relationship between the work of (and remuneration of)classical musicians and the beliefs of classical musicians. But these are the small hours. I'm tired. The choices are (as they usually are when I'm wide awake come to think of it): short and sweet, or long and ugly. No contest.

Michael Blowhard has a piece about, could it be?, yes … car parks! (Loud guffaws break out in the Samizdata inner circle. Brian's on about car parks again. Fools, I tell you, fools.)

Michael focuses on Santa Barbara, because there, he notes (with photos to prove it) they've been doing car parks well just lately. Here's what he reckons is the overall lesson:

Overall lesson: despite our reputation as suburbia-lovin' city-avoiders, many Americans in fact clearly like the walking-around-downtown experience, and are willing to go to some (if not too much) trouble to find a downtown and have themselves a good time there, provided only that it's been made convenient, attractive and safe. Making car parks pleasant and attractive – and, as Santa Barbara does, cheap to use – can play a role in this. Cities hoping to score big revitalization points by investing tens of millions in a showpiece from a celeb-ritect such as Calatrava or Koolhaas might do well to give the state of their car parks some attention instead.

And who was the architect behind these Santa Barbara car parks anyway? Funny that he/she doesn't get anything like the kind of press a Calatrava or Koolhaas does ...

Many thanks to Brian and David for kicking this discussion off.

Which is me, and David Sucher of City Comforts Blog.

Although, I'm pretty sure that one of the things that got me pointed in this direction in the first place was the general attitude (certainly) and quite possible some particular thing they said that I don't now recall, of the 2 Blowhards themselves. To spell it out, I seem to recal being pretty sure that if I did some stuff about car park aesthetics, the 2 Blowhards would notice and approve, which would make me world famous in 2Blowhardshire, which I'm guessing is a pretty big place.

Here's a link to the posting I did here on Calatrava.

There is a big piece about how Hollywood did over the summer by Michael Jennings, for Samizdata. And how did Hollywood do? Well, put it this way, the piece is called Thoughts on Hollywood's lousy summer. So: lousy.

First paragraph:

It is the end of August, and the Labor Day holiday weekend is here. This is considered by the film industry to be the end of the summer movie season. Since Steven Spielberg invented the modern blockbuster when he made Jaws in 1975 (and due to the near-coincidental arrival of air-conditioning in most movie theatres), this has been the most important season for the Hollywood film studios. I am going to be mildly self-indulgent and give the readers of Samizdata a lengthy overview of what I think happened to Hollywood this summer, largely from a business point of view, but also from a creative point of view. This is going to be much longer than a normal Samizdata article, but I am assuming that my editors will indulge me just this once. Or maybe I shall receive what is known in Samizdata speak as an "editorial spanking". We shall see. However, I think most of the following is quite interesting.

As do I. The rule with Jennings is simple: if the subject interests you, you'll probably learn a lot that you didn't know, and you are recommended to read it. I am interested in the doings of Hollywood, and I did learn things. For example, I didn't know that Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was a flop until now. I also learned more about the economic significance to Hollywood of DVDs.

If Jennings is right, and Jennings is always right about factual matters, then things don't seem to have changed much since the late nineties, when William Goldman wrote The Big Picture.

Or to put it another way, 9/11, for Hollywood, seems to have been a dog that didn't bark. When it happened, there was much talk about how it might change how Hollywood did things, and also that it might change what people wanted to see. But so far, apart from a bit of furniture shifting for Spiderman, no change. Jennings doesn't, unless my memory is fooling me, mention the phrase "9/11" even once. Before 9/11, people liked movies they liked, and disliked movies they disliked, and it's been the same since.

The only drearily factual thing I can sometimes do better than Jennings is spelling. He had Jim Carrey as Jim Carey, until I used my Samizdata editing super-powers to correct that.

Such blemishes aside, and speaking as a Samizdata regular myself, I thought this was a very classy piece of writing. Occasional long pieces of this sort, I think, only add to Samizdata's weight, punch, clout, significance, presence, and general formidableness.

I also agree with Jennings about the lovely Claire Danes – Juliette to DiCaprio's Romeo, and before that the star of the excellent My So-Called Life.

More from August 2003