Category: Uncategorized

Not profound ones, mind, just things that have atruck me recently.

1. From the top floor of the number 59 on my way from work I witnessed a homeless guy grudgingly empty his can of superlager into a drain under the impassive eye of a policeman/community support officer.
Why?
Granted, I didn’t catch the whole scene – the guy might have been spraying the pinstriped backs of London’s great and good with frothy brew – but assuming he was doing what most people do with alcohol, drinking it, for whose purpose is he prevented from doing so? Mine? I’m definitely aware of the impact that large-scale vagrancy has on a local environment, living in King’s Cross, but I hardly think confiscating cans of lager gets us anywhere better. For the homeless fellow? Now, I’m under no illusion that life on the streets is fun and games and bonhomie, but surely we’re not in the position of making decisions about responsible drinking and leisure activities for someone with a bagfull of possessions and a dearth of options?

2. On another day, at the end of my route, I passed yet another London Lite/London paper vendor (for those who don’t know, these are free evening papers which are being agressively shifted off to punters in a war for control of the market). I almost didn’t realise that’s who it was, as they were almost exactly in the spot of the local big issue seller, who, sure enough, was standing plaintively opposite offering his charity paper you have to pay for to folk who were having free papers thrust upon them. Now, this comparison was particularly acute, but it’s got to symbolise a wider trend. I’m not a big fan of the Issue – it can have some pretty good content but I tend to pick up my magaziney info (reviews, news pieces) online – but I would make an impulse buy if I was in a good mood and I had a journey ahead of me to fill. I imagine I’m not alone. With the agressive hawking of free (if utterly banal) content, I neither need more reading material nor desire another street transaction. I imagine I’m not alone in that either. The Issue is going to be squeezed by this. This seems to point at a problem with market solutions to social problems – the market is intrinsically callous, and indifferent to whether innocent bystanders get shot in a turf war. And whereas a failed venture isn’t the end of the world for a larger company, pushing the disadvantaged beyond a viable honest living is going to see them make other choices right now, rather than waiting to voice their displeasure at a stakeholders’ meeting.

3. As an addendum (this post was sitting in blorgatory the last few days) today I got approached by a homeless guy who asked to speak to me and then said “don’t run away! Why is everyone scared of me!”
Which, in my opinion, is quite an affective way of getting someone to be a little scared of them.
I did immediately, and fluidly, say “I’m not scared of you, mate” with a incredulous chuckle in my voice… but after I chucked him some scrilla and walked off I did get the sense of a bit of a near miss.

Went to see Neko Case on Wednesday. Neko does what I hesitate to call alt.country – because I got a glimpse of her contract rider sitting on the sound stage, and it made it clear that under no circumstances should the words alt.country appear on any promotional material – but hey, that’s what it is, country/folk steeped music with a particularly modern compositional bent and idiosyncratic subject matter. Oh, she has a tremendous voice, and puts it to use. Check out Hold on Hold on, playing here, or Deep Red Bells, here; I highly rate both albums that birthed them. It was certainly a good show, although I think the set was stronger when I saw them back at the Shepherds Bush Empire.

M Ward supported, and I need to urgently recommend this guy. I got my hands on Transfiguration of Vincent recently but only allowed it to dent my consciousness, but seeing him live was an electric experience. Part eccentric showman, part troubadour, and part wounded artist, his songs are recklessly inventive but allow the music of ages to breathe through them. Tremendous stuff and I have indeed suscribed to his newsletter!

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AllMusic review of M Ward.
AllMusic review of Neko Case, and reviews of albums Fox Confessor…. and Blacklisted at trendier-than-thou music portal Pitchfork.

Whoops! Looks like National Write a Novel Month has begun, and I didn’t tell anyone! (Well, I didn’t know.)

It’s a nice idea, and although I have no intention of doing it myself, it’s spurred me to try and write a little more on this little blog. For this post, my purpose is simple – everyone who reads this should think about a creative aim that they’ve been putting off: knit that hat for little nephew, make that list of greatest songs, write that letter to the editors, redraft your story, write a story, update your blog, draw something.

Now do it.

Seriously, this coming week, starting with the heaps of free minutes the weekend offers, get it done. Then, if it’s done, do something else. In this little microcosm of the world, November is get something creative done month. I will keep you posted of my attempts; promise.

EDIT: Bloody Hell! So my decree goes double now. Get something creative done in the next 3 days, and then give the month a good going over.

Big evil threatening to ruin the world as we know it?
A trio of misfit schoolkids – wisacring girl leader, goofy guy spilling popculture references and a redhead – are the only ones who can stop em?
The crew helped out by a plummy-voiced school teacher, who takes off and on her specs at plot-significant moments, is flummoxed by their youthful decisions and carries an air of “I don’t know why I bother”?
The school- built on top of an older evil – as the focal point for bad things to happen?
Comic dialogue and outlandish schemes supporting a story about vigilance and personal responsibility?
Reoccuring bad-ass with bleach-blond hair?
The Chosen One?

Yup, it’s early 90’s CBBC show Dark Season , penned by Queer as Folk / Dr Who scribe Russell T Davies. What did you think I was talking about?

Spooky Buffy parallels aside (and DS predates even the Slayer movie by a year), this is a pretty cracking series. It’s incredibly pulpy, with Nazi plots and desperate professors, with science being both the problem and the answer. It foreshadows Davies’ Who work, as Marcie, the shows nicely paranoid voice of reason, is very much a Doctor. It really strips away the fluff and gets straight to the action – the first plot arc is resolved in 3 twenty-five minute episodes; shame there’s only 6 in all.

Neo-Liberal You scored 54% Personal Liberty and 27% Economic Liberty!

A neo-liberal believes in moderate government intervention on personal matters and moderate to high government intervention on economic matters. They believe in a social safety net or welfare state and try to balance personal liberty with safety or security. Some neo-liberals believe in more foreign intervention or war then most other leftists. Others are more like Centrist Democrats. More authoritarian- leaning Neo-liberals (such as personal 40/economic 30) are the result of a “fusion” between “old left” and “new right” tendencies.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 33% on Personal You scored higher than 1% on Economic

Take the test here (NB you will have to sign up to a random site at the end of the questionnaire).

I like the fact that they call it economic and personal liberty – that is, you’re maximum “for liberty” if you reject any societal obligations.

Weather. Weather. Weather. Blooming weather.

That weather.

The weather thing.

Everywhere I go, weather.

(Weather weather – watch the meaning bleed from the word as it becomes overused, weather, weather. It’s what Chris Moulin calls jamais vu, the subjective experience of lack of recognition for a familiar item, that resembles but may not be equivalent to semantic satiation, an objective decrease in the ability to judge as meaningful a repeatedly presented word.)

I’ve been to 3 countries on 3 continents in the last 3 weeks. On every one, weather.

China: Very hot. Very sticky. And lots of rain. Had to spend days ducking into and out of the heat into air conditioned shops + museums, or when desperate climb into icecream freezers or the path of a disapproving gaze from a distinguished posh lady. Freezes the blood that.
Australia: Damp. Very very wet, and damp and dank, and damp. Spent the time hiding from thunderstorms or tumbledrying my drenched trousers, shivering in an unheated bedroom and drinking to keep the heat in. Come back China, all is forgiven! Heat is great.
UK: Hot and sticky, close and windless. Stuck in the office feeding moisture into the padding of my chair via the conduit of my glistening shirt. How I long for the cool tempuratures of Sydney. That was idyllic, no?

In other news of my trip…gah, no, weather, phew, cor, weather, end.

PS Chris does a lot more stuff on deja vu/deja vecu, and there’s a nice article about it here.

Catchup. Some of you may have been watching the World Cup of Soccer (this is a sporting event quite popular in some parts of the world for an Aussie rules footie knock-off); just to say that
a) England aren’t in it any more – eject your ire in the comments below
b) The last 2 matches (Fra-Bra + Ger-Ita) were really rather good; disagree in comments below
c) The last of my rare gambling flutters flitted into an open flame and went poof, with Ukraine going out miserably. I blame Duncan; blame Duncan in comments below.

Also, I am going to be away for a few weeks in 3 top cities – Shanghai, Beijing and Sydney, so do throw me any advice/luck that occurs to you.

Finally, I (finally) got confirmation of my PhD this week. Old news really, but hey.

I stumbled across an old review of the book – DC Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – that shaped my college love affair with natural selection, and it does a damn good job of shaking some of Dennett’s grand edifices.

Dennett has long championed the notion that Darwinism might explain why some ideas and styles flourish while others perish.6 Darwinism thus explains not just the biological origin of consciousness and culture, but their changing contents…. why is he ineluctably drawn to the view that cultural change involves some brand of Darwinism? The reason is that he believes natural selection is an “algorithmic process,” a blind, formal procedure whose operation is guaranteed to return a certain kind of result. A defining property of an algorithmic process is its “substrate neutrality”: An algorithm does a job and returns a result whatever the input. Dennett concludes that natural selection, as an algorithm, is also substrate neutral. One can select between genes on chromosomes, codes in a computer, or ideas in a culture. As long as mutation, replication, and differential survival occur, any substrate can be selected. For instance, ideas can change (mutate), they can spread (replicate), and some can die out while others persist (differential survival), so we would seem to have a substrate suited for selection. Following Dawkins, Dennett claims that the substrate that gets selected in cultural evolution is the “meme,” any memorable idea, jingle, or fashion that lasts long enough to get copied by another person.

This substrate neutrality argument is supremely important to Dennett. It — and nothing else — explains why selection can be lifted from its historical base in biology. It is what makes Darwinism so dangerous. But Dennett slips here. While it is true that many different kinds of substrate can be selected, it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can’t even explain old-fashioned biological evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn’t behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-of-the-century biologists — all fans of blending inheritance — concluded that Darwinism just can’t work. Modern evolutionary genetics was born in 1930 when Sir Ronald Fisher cracked this problem: Population genetics shows that particulate Mendelian inheritance saves the day. It is just the kind of substrate needed for evolution by natural selection to work.

What, then, about Dennett’s memes — all those “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” Do they show particulate or blending inheritance? Do street fashion and high fashion segregate like good genes, or do they first mix before replicating in magazines or storefronts? Does postmodern architecture reflect a blending of the modernist and classical or the inheritance of distinct LeCorbusier and Vitruvius genes? I do not know the answers to these questions. And neither does Dennett. And neither does anyone else.

The whole review is here.

Do not waste your time doing this.