today : An orange lily in the rain

photos by me ©2007

' beauty will save the world '

today : Free at last! Free at last!

You gotta admire the sheer cojones of the Bush White House. In the same way that on a scale of terrorist atrocities, 9-11 was number one in the charts, they are number one in the charts of constitution-ignoring amoral bastards.

Commuting Scooter Libby's gaol sentence is The White House saying: nobody likes us, we don't care. They know they've been found out as craven, corrupt, lying, cheating self-interested, morally bankrupt and rather stupid and have simply given up trying to convince everybody otherwise. Perversely, this means that, even by supposition, this makes them that rare thing amongst politicians. Kind of honest. They are saying: we did inhale, we did have sexual relations with that woman, we know the 45 minutes was made up. And we don't care.

Perhaps they will now admit that they got into this whole thing by fixing the 2000 election and that they started a war as part of an ongoing money grabbing coup by the oil industry.

today : Me & Gordon agree

Terrorism won't change us. Apart from 15 billion spent on pointless iD cards, doubling the intelligence budget, restricting our ability to travel, being watched all day and night by CCTV, having to endlessly watch news bulletins where nothing happens apart from a parade of experts on every topic from bomb-making to Islamic theology.

Then there's the spasm of 'I'm not a racist' racists wheeling out their Islamophobia, the paranoid political statements, the stop and search, the alienation of good Asian folk, the prosecution of dodgy foreign wars and the narrowing of the news agenda.

As me and Gordon both said: Terrorism won't change us.

today : Rummaging through

Watching the TV coverage of the Arctic Monkeys performing at the Glastonbury Festival last Friday I was struck by the difference between this performance and the one they did at Reading last year. At the time they were overpromoted off the back of massive record sales and looked out of place, nervous and rather amateurish. The Glastonbury performance proved that they even though they are not a natural stadium kind of band, they can hold a headline spot and own a large stage and crowd.

The thing is: I hope they don't get drunk on it and change too much. Editors showed with their set and with their latest record that they are trying to make music for stadium gigs and creating a pointless unfocussed mess in the process. Coldplay took this route and ended up as an overblown pompous proposition creating music to accompany lightshows - The Simple Minds of the New Century. When I first heard 'Fix You' I knew it was over between me and Coldplay. A blatant attempt at writing a cod-religious stadium-filling U2 song it was the organ on the intro that gave it away - indicative of that kind of cynical 'inspirational' sludge that fills stadiums worldwide and bores the pants off anyone with any taste.

Onstage at Glastonbury Alex Turner played and sang with confidence. It appeared as if the Monkeys had taken their headline spot with responsibility and worked hard at providing a show that didn't fall short of the headline billing. The set had ebb and flow (which is especially hard for a band like the Monkeys, whose songs can be a little samey). But still the Monkeys managed to come across as a little band with a big audience. There were no lasers, video screens, customised lightshows and massive racks of guitars to change between songs. No swathes of cabassa players and thin, beautiful black backing singers.

They just played hard and let the songs speak for themselves. It gives me faith that the British public has enduringly great taste in music, and that every few years Britain unfailingly throws up literate, intelligent songwriters who have an individual voice. In Turner's case he has managed to introduce Yorkshire dialect into the mainstream - especially the word mardy. Everyone's using it nowadays.

The suburbs of Britain are still the cradle of the greatest pop music on earth. America can keep its Linkin Parks and its Killers and its Dave Matthews Bands. We Brits are the ones that come up with The Smiths, Suede, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, The Arctic Monkeys - and Depeche Mode, ABC, Wham, The Manics amongst others. That isn't to say that many American bands aren't great. It's the fact that in England these bands are the most popular in the nation. When was the last time that happened in the USA? Nirvana, I guess. And even then The Pixies (who were pretty much the biggest band in Britain for a while) should have been the ones to sell megamillions.

today's very old fashioned thing is...

The Antimacassar

it's also a really cool word, given that it survives still and the thing it was anti i.e. 'Macassar' is long forgotten, apart from a tangential mention in Canto 1 of Byron's Don Juan

today: The Sirtanic Verses

Salman offers hope for balding rectangular faced men everywhere

Since its publication in 1989, The Satanic Verses has sold about 800,000 copies worldwide. The world population is roughly 6,725,000,000.

A bit of maths and I guess that maybe half a million people have read it all the way through. Statistically that ratio is closer to zero than it is to an actual number. Even if it upset every single person who read it (minus two - it didn't personally offend me and a friend of mine was also a fan of the book) then it's resonance as a focus of continuing upset must surely be little to do with the actual book itself.

Personally, its not difficult to imagine that a religion of 1.2 billion people that is also the fastest growing on earth has proven itself to be pretty resilient over the years. Maybe the people who are jumping on their high horses over Rushdie's knighthood could use their energies more wisely. I imagine there are many more threats to the worldwide status of Islam than some ink-marks on paper.

today: Doctor! It's my eyes!

This photograph of my retinae is how they found out about me having a cataract. I think it would be more entertaining if I actually had a catamaran in my left eye, but it couldn't be arranged

today : Some thoughts on Banaz and John

Murder is always horrid and what I am writing here is in no way meant to trivialise it.

Yesterday the News contained information about two high profile murders. PC John Henry was stabbed to death in Luton and the murderers of Banaz Mahmod were convicted and sentenced.

It was interesting that the Banaz Mahmod story - one of 'honour killing' in the Muslim immigrant community appeared first on the BBC evening news bulletins. The PC Henry story was secondary.

Both murders should be highlighted and both people should be mourned equally.

My point is that it is highly unusual in this country for the murder of a policeman to not be the lead item on the news. I wonder why it wasn't in this case.

My conclusion is profoundly depressing. The story of Banaz Mahmod was simply a 'sexier' story. It has lots of elements of controversy - the kind of stuff that can elicit opinions and drive viewer emails and phone in shows. It is about Muslims, who are the default pariahs of our society. It encompasses immigration and touches on the fashionable ideas about Britishness. Never mind the fact that there was home-made phone-shot video of Banaz herself, expressing her fears.

More worryingly, little was done to disassociate 'Honour Killing' from Islam. When did you ever hear someone referred to as a member of the Christian community?

'Honour killing' is not a Muslim activity, but a cultural practice borne of extremist Patriarchy. All the context pieces surrounding the case have been about Islam, none that I saw mentioned the dangers of patriarchal social models. Any men who kill their own daughters and relatives are clearly brutal, evil people. Sadly there are plenty of men like this, and plenty of children with white rather than brown faces who end up dead without ever making the six o clock news.

today : Coursework help

http://mediumselfesteem.blogspot.com/2006_03_26_archive.html

today : spoiled

The big cultural news in the US, as usual, is based around criminal activity. Firstly Paris Hilton gets sent to gaol and then HBO airs the final episode of the Sopranos.

For some reason I kinda like Paris. Don't know why, I just don't hate her like so many people seem to.

Anyway, I just finished watching the penultimate 12 episodes last week and was settling down to the wait for the final batch to arrive. Its been like that ever since I missed Season 1 Episode 1, and, after hearing such glowing reports, decided to waitr for the DVDs. In fact, for me, The Sopranos was my real initiation into watching entire seasons of TV on DVD. For years after I avoided reviews of the Sopranos and went out to buy each new Season with a palpable sense of excitement. I would put aside special chunks of time to watch them back to back. It's a different kind way of viewing episodic drama. YOu consume it as if it;s a big long film with lots of intermissions. I think it's probably responsible for the increasing quality in TV drama. Producers and writers are thinkning in terms of the box set as the main medium of delivery.

But on Saturday, I was listening to the generally superb Five Live show Up All Night. Between 1-30 and 2-30 am they have The New York Hour. As with much of Up All Night's content the NY Hour is fascinating radio. Peter Franklin aka The Gabby Cabby (who I guess is probably and NPR guy a bit like Click and Clack or someone) talks about what's happening in New York each week. It is a great example of global media. Why should I care what happened in New York this week? Well, I don't really, but y'know, it's New York. It has an innate kind of glamour and film forged mythicism. I went there once and even though I didn't stay long it is all still very familiar. This week the Gabby Cabbie's co-presenter was some TV critic. Perhaps from the Post (I forget). She talked excitedly about the fact that Sunday's final eposode of the Sopranos was all anyone was looking forward to. Bets were being taken on whether Tony would die. And then she casually threw in the fact that another VERY IMPORTANT character had met their demise in episode 83. Spoiler alert! At least when Terry and Bob spent all day trying not to find out the score, it turned out the match was postponed.

And then last night I again was listening to Up All Night. During the week they have a little piece each night with the night editor of USA today - the exceptionally affable and pleasant Bill Nicholson. Bill talks about what's going in tomorrow's paper, which, much like USA today itself, gives a broad overview of what's making the news in America. Of course, in cultural news, there was much discussion about the final episode of The Sops. Apparently people were wondering what the fact that ____________________________really meant and whether the__________________________ was a good idea or not.

So now, after six long seasons of waiting and watching. Seven years of not knowing, an essential element of my watching experience has been scuppered by ignorant parochial know it all media-types.

...Fade to Black.

today : The Grammar School question

The problem : how do I talk about Tory strategy and give my considered comments without accidentally helping a party which I do not ever want to be elected. I am no Bruno Gianelli.

So I am taking quite a risk, although perhaps not. Thus far, the Tory party hasn't looked like doing anything close to what I might suggest for them and neither has anything else I've said made its way to Tory HQ to be read and considered by the haw-haw PR troupe.

The fact is that I must consider that after 10 years of Labour, some of the electorate and press might want a change. In the real world power swaps between Tories and Labour and historically the Tories have the upper hand. What I would like to see is a Tory party that is as close to the centre as possible. In fact, I kind of think that a kind of European Social Democracy is the only political model that has a credible chance of being a useful government at the moment. To have a right wing Tory mob running the place would be a disaster - they would start playing neocon with foreign policy, flat-tax with the economy and wall-building with immigration.

Cameron's climbdown on the Grammar School Question is fascinating. On this most symbolic of questions, he chose to pick a fight, and then when it started to get nasty, he ran back to his corner, issuing 'clarifications' that diluted the argument and handed the complainers an easy victory.

In political terms this was entirely predictable but also pretty stupid. I must say I was surprised. It seemed as if Cameron might be smarter than this.

If the Tories are to be sure of being elected they have an easy template to follow. This is the way that Labour dragged themselves towards electability. The difference is that Labour has managed to only make one real screw up - Iraq mainly - as well as some small stuff like The Dome, Casinos and cashpoint fines. And even then they have a very solid argument that the Tories would have done exactly the same: the same could not be said of Labour closing the mines or introducing a poll tax.

To this end, Cameron's job is to place his party in the centre ground and wait for a jaded electorate to decide that a change is what's needed. And the Labour template could provide a useful one to follow. Under Kinnockspectre of its extreme left wing and dragged the party towards the centre. When Blair came along he continued the process. What occurred was a make-over. Labour became cuddly. The 'modernisers' chose the anachronistic clause 4 as a point of attack. Deleting it from the party constitution made no substantive difference to real policy making. A commitment to nationalisation was like one of those laws that bans people from holding hands with their wives whilst wearing a blue hat on a Tuesday within fifty yards of the town well. It was meaningless but extremely symbolic. But by changing it, they swept away the old fashioned lefties who also believed in all sorts of other trouble-causing stuff.

The Grammar School issue could have been the Tories Clause 4. The Grammar school is symbolic of an ageing, backward looking Tory party - the wasn't-like-that-in-my-day brigade. Even if people believe in it, a return to a Grammar School model will never happen. How can you be a low-tax party and promise to reconstitute an entire nation's education system? Like the NHS, education is too big to tackle in anything but degrees, and the cost would be unthinkable.

That is what makes this issue the one to pick on. Because in one fell swoop Cameron would, by alienating the Grammar School lobby, also alienate the racist right wing - who are the real reason the Tories can never move to the middle. Now we know that the Eurosceptics or the anti-immigration bods would claim that they aren't racist and we could talk for a long time about this. But lets face it they are.

I did have some hope that Hague would do this, but he didn't. Then Howard looked like he might do it, but he didn't. I wonder if Cameron has the guts to grasp the nettle and not end up as a Kinnock-style nearly man? and Smith Labour expunged the

today : hands up if you're an idiot

I'm wondering what Allen Johnston's game is. As Education secretary, he has hijacked two news cycles this week with bizarre attacks on teachers. You would think that it might be time to sit back and watch the Tories get their knickers in a twist over 'the Grammar School question' and allow the press to focus on Tory splits rather than yet more befuddling Labour initiatives. But the Dfes apparently isn't aware that saying nothing is sometimes the best option.

So, last weekend Johnston suggested that one way that Private Schools could fulfil their public commitments by kindly and and charitably donating their teaching expertise to the public sector. Then, on Friday, he made a case for teachers not using a hands-up approach to classroom questioning because some children are shy.

Maybe he wants to lose the confidence of the people whom he ultimately manages. If he is, this Woodheadian (or block-headed) approach seems a pretty good way to go about it.

The underlying assumption behind the first announcement is that the teachers in private schools actually have something to offer to the public sector. Hmm, lets see. Clearly people who need only a degree, the right school names on their CVs and whose teacher development occurs in classes of nine or ten pupils with resources falling out of cupboards and students whose parents have a direct financial stake in them behaving and achieving are the real experts. Those who spend a year of their lives training both in classrooms and on the job in often challenging circumstances with under-resourced schools and often disaffected pupils are obviously LESS schooled in pedagogy and LESS expert than their untrained private counterparts. Yes, private schools get better results on the whole than public, but to use the headline pass rates as indicators of professionalism and expertise, is like saying that Jose Mourinho is better at playing the transfer market than Sam Allardyce or Harry Redknapp.

I was kind of joking above. I am sure that many private school teachers are superb at their jobs, but I resent the simplistic assumption that they are naturally better. The implication, of course, is that public sector teachers are not good at their jobs and need help. How about trying it the other way around? How about taking inner city school teachers who have to sweat and battle to achieve every piece of learning, every exam mark and every percentage point and taking them into an environment where the students are well behaved, motivated and educationally minded and the establishment is rich with resources?

And then there are questioning strategies. Someone does one of those pieces of research that is useful but not necessarily ground-breaking. Turns out that a hands up to answer strategy can be unsuitable for kids who are shy, or for kids who aren't so quick at finding answers. Well, knock me down with a feather.

I actually, from experience, have an awful lot to say about how certain students can go through the whole of the system without having their problems picked up on, being stereotyped and their issues ignored. But this is a complex and multifaceted issue about social inclusion, special needs, class sizes, staff training, resourcing, parental empowerment, subject specific knowledge, linguistics etc etc.

But this announcement contains yet another simplistic assumption i.e. that professional teachers only use one strategy for questioning and what's more their use of it is not sophisticated, intellectual, knowledgeable and appropriate but a one-size-fits-all process that is wheeled out again and again despite its problems. This vision of teachers as people who trot out processes is taking over the DfEs. Actually it is taking over everywhere. Junior doctors aren't sophisticated individuals with a unique set of skills, talents and interests but can be employed from tick-box questionnaires, GPs just sit and write scripts for Valium and Prozac all day, whoever comes through the door, judges cannot judge but are ordered to simply hand down pre-determined sentences. We are being managed by people who despise sophistication, because it defies their blind necessity to label, box and control everything as a measurable process.

To even imply that teachers can use only one failing strategy to question their pupils is simply idiotic, and insulting to teachers. Why would a secretary of Education do this? Perhaps, like much of the media and the public, he sees the world of education with the analytical skills and insight of the average child.

today : guitar week part three. The Love Affair

The fact is I love my guitars. Especially the flat top acoustic. It has an interesting story. It was bought by a friend of a friend of mine who has a habit of buying expensive things that he never uses. He decided to take up guitar playing and so bought an expensive guitar that he never really used (I think he really likes the act of buying stuff rather than actually using it). In order to fund another faddish purchase he sold it to my friend G at a knock down price. G is a keyboard player and roped me in to co-write and produce some demo songs for him. During recording I used the guitar and fell in love with it. It was the chime of the open G string that bewitched me. We put it through an Alessis bloom reverb and straight into the desk. The sound was perfect.

G lent me the guitar and I kept and played it for nearly two years. Despite my many offers to buy it from him he refused each time - mainly, I think churlishly just to wind me up. I gave it back.

But I didn't give up hope. I held a torch for the instrument for the next six or seven years, periodically asking if it was for sale only to be further rebuffed. G was pretty well off by now and there was no chance he needed the cash. It was a long dance, a story of love and loss. In fact if 'Our Tune' still existed then I'd send it in. I always thought of the guitar as mine, in the same way that feted lovers may hook up and maybe even marry other people, but retain a significant corner of their heart for the one they really love.

But quite suddenly, tired of the rat race, G gave up his wealth and went to work unpaid for charity. At some point, perhaps through genuine need of cash and perhaps through magnanimity, he called me up and offered to sell the guitar. I had to borrow the cash, but the deal was done. She was finally mine.

What I love about the guitar as an instrument is that it is so direct. The combination of sounds is directly made by the way someone's fingers address the strings and fretboard. Once you reach a level of skill, you cannot help but reflect yourself in the way you play. I guess this is true for most instruments. They become an extension of your mind and body.

today : guitar week pt2 "The gaps"

The second category of amateur guitarists are a completely different bunch. Of course, as I am placing myself in this group I am going to use words like maturity, subtlety and taste.

But don't get me wrong. As I have got older, I am still slightly possessed by an inner rock-star. The leather trousered groupie-ravishing, coke-shovelling, foot on the monitor, big haired finger tapping plank spanker lives inside my balding middle aged, semi-acoustic soul. I still want a guitar shaped like a spaceship, an infinite horizon of Marshall stacks behind me and a basketball arena of baying leather-jacketed, bandana- wearing tit-flashing sign-of-the-devil waving fans in front.

But these days the guitarists that trip off my thoughts are Amos Garrett, Barney Kessel, Ray Herndon, JJ Cale and any number of the people who appear on Steely Dan records. Basically I am not interested in speed as much as I used to be. Subtlety is the key - the beautifully placed chord inversion, the lovely caress of a well placed string bend, a clean tone rather than a raucous noise, tasteful use of counterpoint. There is a saying amongst guitarists "It's not about the notes; it's about the gaps between the notes" - a saying I'm not so sure that Yngwie Malmstein has ever heard.

Many guitarists of taste cite Amos Garret's solo in Maria Muldaur's Midnight at The Oasis as their favourite solo. It glides around the chords and Garrett almost nochanantly constructs, over a mere sixteen bars, a thing of natural beauty. It even includes what some would call bum notes, or at least misplayed notes. But that is the point.

Me, I can agree. Garrett's solo (serious mature guitarists actually refer to these things as work, as in 'the guitar work in this piece is subtle and sublime') is laid back and lovely. These days I prefer guitar moments, rather than half-hour wigouts. The solo in Good Intentions by Lyle Lovett is another great example. This time over eight bars Ray Herndon constructs a melodic solo that is nothing short of unimprovable - accelerating the song from a quiet section into an upbeat one by his sheer and simple choice of notes.

I could go on for hours like this: The slide guitar bit at the end of Torn by Natalie Imbruglia - 5 different notes in total - is perfection in the context of the record; the interlocking tones and parts woven by Johnny Marr in Some Girls are bigger than Others by The Smiths, the 'work of the late Robert Quine on Half of Everything by Lloyd Cole, in fact the greatest one-note solo by Neal Clarke on Perfect Skin all reflect tone and melody over sheer speed and technical panache.

But I won't, as I won't get to my main point, which time means I will discuss in my next installment.

today : guitar week pt1 - KERRRAANNGG!

My nephew walks around these days with his electric guitar practiacly glued to his front. He's sixteen. The thing is, he plays it upside down. When he got it it was a right handed instrument and strung for a right hander. It just felt natural for him to play it left handed- and so he did. An adult guitarist that he met was horrified that he wasn't playing 'properly'. As a guitar player myself, I am less bothered.

Us guitarists can be pretty nerdy creatures. Like trainspotters and, actually, anyone else who has that peculiar nerd gene that seems to belong mainly to men in their thirties, we can witter on for hours over the nuances of different makes of guitars, technique and all the variables of being a guitarist - never mind the qualities of other guitar players. With all our talk about vintages and hammer-ons we talk in a language that is somewhere between engineering and wine-buffery.

But the real pleasure of being a guitar player is..well...playing the guitar. The other day I was thinking about this topic and it prompted me to pick up my acoustic guitar and spend a couple of hours simply playing along to myself. It was a sublime couple of hours. I kind of got lost. Some people take drugs to get a similar effect.

One thing I do notice is that there are two types of amateur guitar players. The first I will call the guitar shop loiterer. These type of people are not really musicians as such, but have guitars and guitarists as their hobby in the same way as other male 'collectors' have trains, scale models or toy soldiers as their hobby. They are rarely technically gifted - or even competent and idolise those million mile an hour rock guitarists like Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen. If I were to be cruel I would categorise these folks as 'adolescent' in their view of the guitar, rather like people who fantasise about fast cars and never really think about the journeys they may take in them

The second are the people I will write about in my next part.

today : I endure a trial

It's nostalgia that made me buy a DVD of Murder One. In 1996, when it was broadcast it was considered ground-breaking. The first time that an American Law or Police show had followed a single case throughout a whole season.

I enjoyed watching it again, not least because of the parade of recognisable actors. There was Mary McCormack - Kate Harper in her previous incarnation as Justine Appleton. There was Gregory Itzin as the slimy DA, before he ran for governor and then ended up the slimy President in 24 season 4. There was Toby Ziegler as a suicidal outed professor. There was Stanley Tucci before he made Big Night and joined the ranks of the fascinating and reliable supporting actor in any number of films and TV shows.

I also enjoyed the plinky-plonky Korg M1 faux baroque music and the computer graphics in the titles.

Before Murder One the idea that people could concentrate throughout a whole season was unheard of. In this way it was a landmark in that it paved the way for the fantastic longform drama that we see today. It even, arguably, changed the landscape in that it took risks and shattered previously orthodox formulae sacred to TV. The idea of taking risks became an orthodoxy.

Yet all the way through you can see Bochco and Milch tweaking, making mistakes and sometimes making it up as they went along. I don't think, for example, that they knew the ending when they started. There is also a really noticeable shift from a long-form tale that still encapsulated the parallel one-hour case in the early episodes. Around Chapter 10 the focus zoomed in on the Avedon case alone, leaving some loose ends from previous chapters. It was like a decision had been made to go with it and see what happened. Hey! the show was popular and feted let's see what it can really do. Even the voiceover changed to a recap of the whole case thus far and from then on each episode starts with a recap that allows people to join up late and still have some idea of what was going on.

Dramatically there are aspects to the show that are wooden and repetitive. The action is too often confined to Ted's office, with people parading in and out to enact exchanges with our tonsorially challenged hero. It is pretty hard to set a talky law based plot anywhere other than lawyers' offices and courtrooms, but later series took on the challenge of mixing up locations and moving the action at a much quikcer pace. It's also fairly quaint how the recaps of the plot get longer and longer as the series goes on. I guess at the time it was thought that people needed help to follow a convoluted plot. What the people behind 24 have learned is that the more complexity the better, and that people positively enjoy the knottiness. But I guess they learned that, in part, from Murder One.

today's special is...

Very Meaty Meat in the shape of Lamb Chops

today : seconds before the climax, I am denied

Complaining about other drivers is easy. Lazy even. Like shooting large fish (like a pike) in a very small barrel (like those worn by St Bernard dogs on Swiss postcards). Anyway, I'm tired, have a cold (a proper old-fashioned cold with itchy eyes, headaches, runny nose and everyfink. As I said to several people today who looked at me and rolled their eyes, there is nothing more annoying than a cold when the weather outside is quite warm, perhaps it should be renamed a 'quite warm' (yes, this was the level of my comic imagination when, late on this afternoon, I began to suffer that particular kind of total brain death that you get when you'e gone to work with a cold and simply run out of useful functionality) and stoically (Marcus Aurelius didn't write his Meditations by not putting quill to papyrus every time he had a little sniffle) and defiantly determined to keep to the discipline of posting on my 'umble blog regularly. After all , I cannot let down my (as of writing) 1188 listeners, even though today they will be left feeling they have wasted a few seconds of their precious lives and learned almost nothing. So here goes.

The turn off to my house is close to a very busy traffic island, located at the confluence of two main roads and four minor roads. The upshot of this is that almost every time I am returning home from anywhere I have to queue, sitting in the car crawling at 2 MPH. Which I don't mind per se.

But I turn off about 100 yards before the main junction onto a side street that leads to my house. And the thing that I do mind is that moment when I am almost at my turn off. Invariably the driver in front sits over the junction, ignoring the fact that I am about to exit the main roadway and denying me the joy of the final moments of my journey towards the sanctuary of my 'umble but cosy abode. Tonight I crawled for minutes towards my turn off and, as I approached it, I sat behind someone who, rather than move forward about 6 feet, allowing me space to turn off behind their car, proceeded to make a call on their phone. The other evening I sat behind someone who pulled down their sun visor and proceeded to put make up on, using the vanity mirror.

I guess this happens because people only have a kind of blinkered forward-only vision, unable to envisage that anyone else using the roads might be going a different way to themselves, or living their lives by the political rhetoric that dominates the times (the constant declaration of forward movement, never looking back, like sharks moving ahead instead of dying).

It is often only a few extra seconds on a 20 minute bumper to bumper rush-hour journey, but it is defiantly disproportionately frustrating. It feels like being the guy who flies all the way to the moon only to stay in the orbiter as more famous and historic colleagues get into the landing craft and drop those few crucial miles onto the dusty, cheese coated surface.

I am daily tempted by this cruel moment of denial, into buying a very large Bull-Barred Vehicle (one of those with a name like VIking or Invader or Rhinoceros) and gently nudging them forward to give me the room I need.

today : whatever happened to...

1980s ahead of it's time German eco-friendly cartoon series

Dr Snuggles?

today : I hang back from declaring a judgement

When Tony Blair finally retires as PM this week there will be lots of talk about legacy. In fact, there been lots of talk about it already: since he announced his intentions a couple of years ago the journalistas and commentatistas have seen almost everything in the light of it.

In fact, the documentaries have already been made and the satirical dramas will have already been written and pre-produced. We'll have the documentary about Blair's move from bright eyed Bambi to Bush's poodle. We'll have examinations of just how tough on the causes of crime he has actually been.There will be a fantasy satire on the lead up to Iraq, reruns of the David Kelly thing, a serious thing about The Good Friday Agreement like the thing about Bosnia with all the important players apearing in highly appointed Leo-style offices, and a 'frothy' pieces about the baby, the drunken son, the life-coach and the Blairs' house-buying habits. I even hope they'll replay my favourite bit of Blair footage which happened at his first EU summit in 97. Remember? Blair beating Chancellor Kohl in a bicycle race. Sheer hilarity and much better than beating the Germans 5-1 away.

But the fact is that legacy is a pretty vaporous concept. If we look a certain way (awry, perhaps), The Autobahns are a legacy of Nazism, The Cold War a legacy of Churchill, Droughts in California a legacy of FDR's New Deal.

Blair's legacy is unknown, as yet. People are too keen to interpret and conclude from history before it has happened and declare their interpretations and conclusions. It's as if they think their interpretations and conclusions matter. Even commentators have an eye on their own legacy.

Politicians are transient beings, connected to the past and the future. The best ones do the best job they can at the time - making decisions day to day in the hope that they are correct. Good leaders tend to make more good decisions than bad. Bad leaders are often focussed on their legacy rather than their day to day responsibilities; with an inflated sense of their own importance in the drift of history. All those prime ministers and presidents whose names we forget, I suspect did something right.

Whether Blair was one or the other - we'll have to wait.

today: professional week part three (the final)

Credit where it is due. These last three entries were inspired by a converstion with my colleague Ibrar over at Holistic Educator. We were bemoaning the fact that our work seems to be more and more based on targets and how it was eating up our time to develop areas of expertise. It got me thinking. I keep telling Ibrar that he should be more disciplined with his blog and write more. But he's a busy man with fingers in many pies. His comments on the topic of deprofessionalisation should appear sometime soon (or are already there - depending on when you read this, and them).

The last thing I wasnted to say about professionals is that they should stick together. Through blogs like the much-missed Michael Berube and other, mainly American, academic sources I have followed various arguments made between the intelligent people of the world.

Although it pretty much occurs anywhere, even in the most routine discussions there are those who wish to be aggressive towards people they more or less agree with, finding slivers of disagreement and often ending up pouring bile and hatred on each other. I have heard many tales of rampant politicking and confrontation within academic departments which would make WWE storylines appear like a gentle roll on some fluffy overstuffed cushions.

In the more low-falutin' world of the school teacher, the most annoying thing I heard thoughout my time was the constant use of the world unprofessional to describe the behaviour and appraoch of others. Much of the backstabbing and undermining I put down sheer stress. When people are overworked, underpaid and appreciated, harangued and daily face physical threat and verbal abuse, they are bound to get stressed out. Which is when people lash out at others. I count myself amongst the people who sometimes indulged in this, although in my defence I must say that when I recognised that stress was making me act this way I tried hard to change my rhetoric and become more understanding and supportive of others.

However, under attack from outside forces, it is pretty crucial that professional people (whom I am assuming are intelligent, pretty studious and above all reflective) reflect on how their behaviour towards each other impacts their profession as a whole. Here is an example of this.

In my last school I had a colleague who happened to be my boss. She was clearly a driven and 'complex' individual but her professional skills were admirable. In fact she worked hard enough in a very difficult environment that she became ill, suffering a stress breakdown. Whilst she was away we discovered that in the months leading up to the breakdown, she'd dropped the ball in many areas. Things were incomplete, judgements had clearly been made under duress and with a skewed sense of perspective. As colleagues we felt sympathy and fixed as many of the errors as we could whilst covering the rest up. Presenting a united front against possible criticism when she was in no state to defend herself. When she returned to work the support continued in more subtle ways. We shouldered some of the resposibilities, taking on work and commitments so that she didn't have to.

For me, the effort of this was the start of a road that would lead, a couple of years later, to my own stress breakdown. In the final year before I hit the wall I struggled. The extra I'd taken on was not passed back over. Warning signs of my impending implosion were ignored. I made a mess of lots of things. Work was incompleted, judgements were made under the duress of illness and clearly without a decent sense of perspective.

After I crashed and burned, my boss took about half a day to get the knives out. Rather than sticking by me, as I'd done with her, she skewered me in my absence, weaving a story around my illness-affected work that abdicated her (as my boss) of any oversight and responsibility. Rather than made incompetent by illness I was painted as connivingly and wilfully unprofessional.

It led to me leaving my chosen profession, disillusioned with my treatment on all sides. I was a competent creative and committed professional yet I have now gladly left the frontline where my skills and energy were able to make a real difference. I am one of the huge number of school teachers who quit out after less than ten years.

What does it do to my proud profession when we turn on and force each other away from it? We are replaced with 'cover supervisors' and other cheap robotic devices.

today : professionalism week part two

What I loved about The Trap was that it helped me crystallise the negative effect that target based cultures have on individuals within society. The issue is who decides the targets? Or more importantly, what are the things we target?

I don't object to improvement. For example, in my field - literacy teaching, there are clearly areas where institutions and individuals can improve. But what is 'improvement'? The fact is that pure statistical measurement in so many areas is a blunt and crude tool, and not the incisive analytical scalpel that it is portrayed to be by the Targetting Champions. If I am to measure the success of my teaching, then surely we must sit back and wait awhile. How far has my literacy teaching impacted on the students of mine who go on to become academics? Do some of them get a 2:1 instead of a first because I slightly failed to teach them to write succinctly and with clarity? Did some of them fail to get a crucial research grant that stopped them curing global warming and world hunger because their written arguments weren't put strongly enough?

What about those who go on to become dictators? Did my skillful coaching of them in the art of oratory contribute to their despotic rise? Was I Annabeth to their Toby: teaching them to address the podium, prescribing powder on their ever-expanding foreheads and thereby feeding their tyrrany?

The fact is that we don't know. The range and effect of my influence could be close to nil, or endlessly mutliplying logorhythmically even as we speak.

Yet as a school teacher I was measured by two pretty narrow and poorly framed sets of exams. Life success or my contribution to my students' over-all education didn't come into it. In a world where we are yet to explore and understand much of the infinite range of subtle influence on the development of people, how can we measure it?

As a professional, qualified and by implication, reflective worker I find that I am judged at every turn. The fundamental here is trust. My qualifications, experience and achievements are designed to inculcate this trust. We trust doctors on the basis that they need to be high achievers to even get into medical school and then study for years and years. Even then they go through a series of checks and finishing touches before we allow them to cut us open.

As a teacher, I imagined that my employers, students and other interested parties trust me to know my stuff and to deal with the education of my students in the way that I, having studied and qualified and reflected, am able to judge. Yet in my final couple of years in school teaching it became increasingly difficult to make choices, because my lessons were subject to pressures from all sides. The exam boards abolished my choice of appropriate exams because they've corporatised the matriculation process to the point where it is almost solely a profit making exercise for the boards themselves and a decreasing array of large publishers, whose books were invariably set for study. The DfES have reached a point where they pretty much send out detailed lesson plans, support materials and bullet-pointed lists of things that must be taught. This is the ultimate conclusion to the process whereby in order to set and measure the targets, everything must be inspected and checked and rechecked against lists of things to check. Then the checking is checked off against a list, and the checking of checking is checked. Oh what the hell, rather than give professionals professional freedom, why don't we just tell them what to do? It's simpler and cheaper and easier to check (which is why I now operate in the ever-expanding private sector of checking and moderating). Lessons were turned into government issued power-point presentations (and the most boring species of these - the ones where you are expected to simply read out what is up on screen). All these things robotised the process, replacing the broad and organic notion of education with the narrow 'learning'; and the broad and human concept of thinking with the robotic and narrow idea of 'skills'.

So where does that leave the 'professionals' - micromanaged and ordered exactly what to do from above by, often, non-professional people, working at the fear of their jobs, to targets that are so closely defined that they restrict choice, imagination and the risk-taking advancement of practice?

This robotisation of professional vocations is partly a way of depressing professional pay levels. An example of this is the way that the bottom has dropped out of the supply teacher trade. Unqualifed staff are now emplyed as classroom supervisors at a fraction of the traditional costs of qualified replacement teachers. It is an idea that, in some ways I support - if used wisely and with the best interests of the students at heart. However, many schools are consistently using unqualified supervisors for long periods of time, focussing the advantages on the saving of cash rather than the education of their students. Which is always the case with targets. They are sloppy, inexact things, and when they cross over with other priorities it is the shortcuts to budget cutting that always win out.

We may as well not have studied, sacrificed and specialised in the first place: a path that led away from excessive scrutiny and suspicion into areas of freedom and trust. Now the path leads the other way and the deprofessionalisation of professional vocations continues apace.

today : professionalism week part one

I could be a doctor y'know. All you have to do is stand around in A&E and when a patient comes in you rush around a bit and ask for a CBC, Chem7, Blood GAs, Tox Screen, Psych Consult, Echo or whatever, and when the patient goes into 'defib', you get the paddles, shout 'charge', followed by 'clear' and then zap them back to life. Easy. In fact, if they don't come back to life it's an even simpler job. You look at your watch and solemnly say: "Time of death - eleven twenty four".

I could also be a policeman, especially a detective or a scenes of crime officer. Profiling - a doddle. Psychologist, Lawyer: no problem. Prosecution or defence, just tell me which. In fact I could run for D.A., even though I live nowhere near America. Goddamit I could even be a Presidential advisor or even the Prez.

Perhaps I am overstating just a little, but the fact is that TV and film is jam packed full of professional people whose jobs seem quite easy and repetitive. We also have access to the internet and can find out information about pretty much anything. Surely being a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher of a criminal profiler can't be that hard?

The effect of all these professionals on telly is that they make people feel that being professional is pretty easy. Which is a good thing in some ways. Why not demystify these previous closed areas and open them up as possibilities for everyone? But the downside is that it has become easy, even derigeur, to question professionals at every turn (which up to a point is okay - even required in many ways).

Yet what the TV shows don't show is the years of slog and study, the time spent keeping up with professional development, the sheer lonely hours of reading journals and books, the years of debt and the fact that many professionals ARE their jobs rather than do their jobs. We rarely go home, put our feet up and watch portrayals of professionals on TV all night

Which means that a couple of stroppy parents can question the entire basis of a national vaccination programme (like the MMR) without any understanding of the nature of medical studies, and cause a wave of panic. The payback for the mass avoidance of MMR is that the fight to eradicate measles, mumps and rubella has been thrown back decades. The price of people forever questioning whatever doctors say to them, which at the very least drains resources from the collective medical budget and at the most causes the very basis of a doctor's professionalism to be questioned and attacked.

As a teacher I found that a small coterie of parents were only too delighted to question me and my colleagues at every turn. Whenever their children failed to do their homework, it was turned on the teachers. When their children broke the rules and misbehaved, it was blamed on the teachers. When their children failed exams because they didn't bother to listen or revise or were just not capable, it was the fault of the teachers, who were not working hard enough in their easy overpaid jobs.

Because teaching is easy. Any idiot can do it.

today : from Motty to Totty

It's quite fantastic to witness the hoo-ha surrounding Jacqui Oatley's appearance as the first ever female footie commentator on Match of The Day. The headlines are fantastic when women get involved in football. The best was when Karran Brady took over as Chief Exec of Birmingham City. The headline : "It's Bummingham Titty!"

The fact is that I called it several years ago when Oatley was beginning her career at my local radio station. In those days she would commentate on local non league matches and, as far as I can remember, on or two minor Rugby League games. Nobody flinched and Western Civilisation remained intact, and she was a good commentator.

I thought to myself that Oatley should be signed by Five Live. It was about time women were given the opportunity. Unfortunately I wasn't (and still am not) the head of commentator recruitment for the BBC, so had little influence on her appointment. Later, they saw the light and employed her. Now she's made the step into TV and it is a delight to see dinosaurs like Mike Newell and Dave Bassett get their quotes in a twist about it.

In case you forgot, football is a sport that is peopled exclusively by Men, who roll around in mud, kiss each other a lot, spend thousands on haircuts and personal grooming products, massage each other and bathe together, but aren't gay at all. All they know is that women don't understand it and can't even explain the off-side rule, never mind commentate.

today : hungry like the wolf

Personally, I think it's quite cute that Paul Wolfowitz and Shaha Ali Riza are apparently in love. Good for them - especially good for a neocon for not shying away from hooking up with someone with a Muslim name. One wonders if Ms Riza has the problems at Newark arrivals that many other people whose names contain the word Ali seem to suffer? I don't frankly care who he spends his evenings with, or what he does with them. In fact I am happy if they have found some kind of personal happiness. However, if you are the political appointee of the leader of the free world, sent in to head up and spread ideology through an important international institution, then perhaps it's not a good idea to get your girlfriend (in whatever roundabout way) a fifty thousand dollar pay rise and a surprise promotion.

In itself, PW's actions are not the worst crime in the world. They are not half as bad as, say, urging, planning and cheerleading a stupid, bloody and unwinnable war based on invented evidence, pre-school level strategy and a quite crazy ideolgical stance. There is quite a valid argument that Mr Wolfowitz pulled some strings for his 'bird' at State in order to avoid a conflict of interests at the World Bank. After all, they were both quite open about their relationship and if they were to be seen working together in the same NGOrganisation people would inevitably leap to conclusions that may very well be false. A little nepotism (or, if we are being kind, the softer charge of cronyism) was, in this case, the lesser of two evils.

But the fact is that Wolfowitz and his ilk don't give a shit. What we are seeing is a government - and perhaps an entire class of Americans - down to the last red reminder of its moral bankruptcy. Their entire system is peopled by politicians and their cronies who believe that propriety and fair play is for the little folks. The American dream is now a dream of knowing the right people. Cronyism is the lifeblood of these people. That's how the pony club captain became Head of Fema (one wonders if that was through 'ponyism'?). In fact it's how Bush became President at all.

Wolfowitz's pronouncements sound just like the ones made by any selfish and corrupt person who believes their position of power places them above everyone else. "Let's move on, draw a line under this, get past this," are the PR bon mots I am hearing more and more. They are the mantra of politicians when they are desperate to get their negative stories out of the news cycle. The belief is that if a story lasts less than a week then people will forget about it and it will go away.

As I said. I don't care what PW or anyone does in their private life. But sometimes that private life crosses over into the public arena. This is one of those cases. Ms Riza should find have found herself a job somewhere else by using her talents and experience like the rest of us mere mortals.

today : The bikini 'line'

My pal Ibrar sent me this link the other day, suggesting that I would like to comment on it. The thing is, I have no real comment. The story speaks for itself. Attacks on 'Muslim' dress are another way for people to be racist and generally anti-other-cultures and its time we all grew up. The very people who go on about freedom are very quick to curtail the freedom of others, even to the point of attacking their choice of clothes.

If this woman was, for example, a burns victim, with a body covered with scars, some people would clamour for her to wear a 'Muslim' style swimming costume because they were offended by her scars. Others would get upset if her bikini was too revealing, offended as much by an unclothed human body as they are by a clothed one.

Their world view and response is just childish. In fact, they don't know what they want and their opinions are a porridge made of the fickleness of appetite and self-seeking aggrandisement.

today : whilst eating chocolate, I watch a bad film

It's become tradition recently at Easter on British TV for someone to show 'The Passion of the Christ', which is a shame because it has unfortunately thrown all previous TV and film versions of the Easter story into the vaults with an echoey thud, and turned the key: becoming the popular 'Passion' of choice.

It's also a shame because TPoTC is just not very good.

This seems to be because when it came out it took masses at the box office, but then again so did The Nutty Professor 2 - The Klumps. We also know that even films that are deigned to be 'quality' and win loads of prizes are also often not very good, such as that snore-fest 'Babble'. The reason TPoTC took so much money was that it played directly to an easy audience. Let's face it, plenty of the Western world consider themselves Christians and plenty of people in the USA are more or less vocational Christians. Show these people a Hollywood film that tells a Bible story without crtiticising and questioning and they will rush to it, even as they rush away from Hollywood's usual ungodly, morally corrupting and liberal, commie-homo-lovin' fare.

The problem I have is that TPoTC is just too much of a film, too tricksy and, whilst trying so hard to show the depth of suffering of Jesus in his last hours, is suffused with a gloss of unreality that ultimately puts it on a par with any high budget brutal horror film of recent times. SAW and SAW 2 have gory and 'realistic' torture sequences that are as thrilling and scary as the flailing sequence in TPoTC. I am reminded of the so-called 'powerful' moment in Schindler's list when the girl in the red coat is singled out in a black and white world - forcing us to feel sentimental emotion when it's just not needed (and an example of a Hollywood film-maker using technology because he can, and a bad error of judgement on Spielberg's part). So Christ is hanging on the cross and about to die. From above we see Calvary from a cloud's eye view, through a distorted lens. The camera then watches, spinning slightly as the 'lens' is shown to be a single raindrop, that falls away from the camera and plunges to the earth, where we are gven a close up of it hitting rock and exploding in the finest detail. Christ is still about to die, we have a softly lit flashback of the last supper. Jesus, luxuriant of hair and beard, saying all those last supper things that have led to centuries of arguments about transubstantiation and then we are put back into the 'real' world of his bloody and torn body, dangling on the cross again with the two Marys emoting wildly. All of this 'reality' is backgrounded with an endless loop of 'atmospheric' middle eastern music in lovely 5.1.

In the last shot of the film, a resurrected Jesus climbs out of his shroud and walks to the tomb entrance. He passes through shot and with the use of digital matting, the camera sees through the hole in his hand. It reminds me of the scene in the porn cinema in American Werewolf where Griffin Dunne turns and talks, despite the fact that half his face has rotted away and we can see through it. Fercrissakes Mel, unplug the damned computer. Make a film goddamit, and, by our lady, not a cartoon!

There is a reason why Passion plays, even for a determined unbeliever like me, have a power and genuine mystery that TPoTC completely lacks. By playing off the traditions of theatre and setting themselves within each culture where they are performed, they behave as art should, seeing past literal reality and telling a story of imagination and reflective humanity. In a play Jesus is played by a human being. Jim Cavaziel nailed to a cross with viscous trickles of blood pouring from his wounds and his flailed ribs exposed is merely another special effect, and this actually de-humanises the character of Christ. The film replaces imagery and imagination with simple and literal screen violence and the obvious use of cinematic tricks and cliche. Pilate the fat corrupt gold dripped baddie. The Pharisees almost comical stone faced cartoon clones of Archbishop Mikarios. Mary Magdalen, smouldering and sexy-sad. Gibson could have learned a thing from Spielberg and the most perfect horrifying moment in Schindler's List: when the women are herded into the showers and we literally hold our breaths as we wait in terror for taps to go on. People gasped with relief and real emotion when the shower heads brought forth merely water and went away feeling real, resonant, sympathetic emotion..

TPoTC has nothing of the true power and passion of, for example, the Manchester Christ turning to his tormentors, and to the acoustic backing of a rag bag band of buskers, singing "How does it feel, to treat me like you do-oo?"

today : my Easter message to the world

bless you and bless me,
bless the bees,
and the birds

today's slightly unhinged and crackers people are...

Ron & Russell Mael

Today : Ten things that annoyed me this week.*

1. Parking. Why can't people park their cars? The worst crime - pulling in and parking eight feet away from the end of a painted parking bay. What is that about?
2. Parking. The person who noticed I was exiting a parking spot and stopped just in front of me, waiting for me to exit, but actually blocking my way out. This person then saw fit to shout and swear at me out of their window for not exiting as fast as they wanted. They then abandoned the spot and drove off because they couldn't parallel park into it even though it was plenty big enough.
3. Parking. The person who consistently abandons their car on my street in such a way as to actually block the street.
4. Parking. The idiot who abandoned his van in the middle of the service road to the post office whilst he sat in a cafe window eating and watching people unable to get past.
5. Parking. People in giant SUVs who park six inches away and then open their doors onto your car making great dents in the bodywork (often while they are leaning in loading shopping and children). I watched someone do this yesterday in a car park (not, thankfully to my car) and when I mentioned it to them, they became very aggressive. I was surprised she swore in front of her baby.
6. Drivers, the idiot who killed a motorcyclist near my house by crossing two lanes of traffic without looking at what was coming up the inside lane - a now ex-biker.
7. People who have no manners and will not say, for example, 'excuse me please,' allowing you to get out of their way before they barge into you. Prime culprits : not teenagers but old ladies.
8. The crossing warden, whom, when I was in a rush, stopped the traffic with a lollipop until the children finished crossing, and then continued standing there with the lollipop holding up the increasingly frustrated traffic until the children had walked about a hundred yards along the pavement. Newsflash. None of the children are going to suddenly turn and around sprint back out into the road, as they are holding their parents' hands. I though this was a one-off, but the next day I wasn't running late and the same thing happened.
9. Virgin media. Okay, I think they are probably right in their argument with Murdoch, but please stop spending my money sending me expensively produced letters explaining why you are right and what a valued customer I am. Just give me a damned price cut and sort out that picture freeeze.
10. Almost everything else.


*okay, so this is a pretty lazy entry, but I haven't been so well and couldn't be bothered with anything too heavy today.