Very quick one here
Just to let you know that my wife Holly has started her own blog, Helium Flash, which will probably be good even though she links to Ben Goldacre in the sidebar…
Sorry for my own lack of posting – between trying to fix Holly’s laptop, being ill, working, leafletting for a council by-election, and rewriting a paper on Human Adaptive Mechatronics, I’ve been busy this week. Proper post tonight.
Linkblogging for 06/01/09
I’d hoped to do another proper post today, but exhaustion is getting the better of me (for some reason I didn’t sleep last night, and I’ve done a couple of longer-than-normal days at work this week). I also owe p(il)lo(c)k at least two comments and an email, which will have to wait until I’m coherent…
From the Grauniad – Vicar has ‘horrifying’ statue of crucifixion removed from church:
“We’re all about hope, encouragement and the joy of the Christian faith. We want to communicate good news, not bad news, so we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross.”
I’m sure I’ve heard that before…
Amypoodle at the Mindless Ones has an absolutely astounding extrapolation of one panel from Batman #666, detailing the Joker of the future. Which reminds me, I must get back to my own thoughts on Batman – it’s been a little while again…
The great Rick Veitch has been posting drawings over at his blog. Here’s one of his dream comics (and I *must* write about those, too, at some point) involving Alan Moore, while here is Dave Sim’s cubist period.
The blogging platform Livejournal has just sacked half its staff. This is a shame, as LJ is in many ways the blogging platform/social network with the most possibilities, but it’s been consistently mismanaged for years – there’s a reason I’ve stopped using it, and rarely even look at my friends list any more (a shame as there are actually some great people on there, some of whom I’ve linked on my blogroll).
Kevin Church has an excerpt from ‘Marvels 3
And finally, there’s the Convention On Modern Liberty, which I would be promoting even were my mate Dave not organising the Manchester branch of the event (although watch out for the page if you’re on a slow machine – there’s a ton of embedded Youtube videos that slowed my old laptop down so much I had to drop to terminal mode to kill the browser). This looks like the biggest conference on human rights and liberty issues in the broadest sense for decades, bringing together every major group and publication from the liberal left and libertarian right. The main partners are NO2ID, Amnesty International, Liberal Conspiracy and Unlock Democracy, but everyone from the TUC to the sodding Countryside Alliance of all people is involved, by way of the Grauniad, the Fabian Society, Private Eye and the Campaign For An English Parliament. I may even go down to That London for this rather than go to the Manchester event – it looks like it could be a major, major event.
Why the Liberal Democrats? Part 1 in an occasional series
Several of my political posts may seem like they’re attacking the party I belong to, the Liberal Democrats (especially those posts that have been reposted and ‘improved’ over on Labour ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy). This is the prerogative of members in the Lib Dems – get two Lib Dems into a room together and you’ll have three opinions, and unlike the other parties, who put great stock in the appearance of unity and in the ‘party line’, Lib Dem policy is created by the membership, in public, and public debate is part of the culture of the party.
But having said that, since I started this blog a few months ago I’ve never explained in any sort of coherent way exactly why I support the Lib Dems, and why I think you should.
As this may be an election year (it would probably be suicidal for Brown to call one, but he’s done enough bizarre things in the last couple of years that it wouldn’t surprise me) I’m going to do a series of short posts whenever the mood takes me on why you should vote Liberal Democrat. I’m assuming when writing these that the ‘you’ reading this are eligible to vote in the UK, an undecided voter open to persuasion, and with political views at least within eyesight of the mainstream. If you believe that elections can change nothing and we need a violent proletarian revolution, or conversely if you believe that the main thing wrong with the country is that there are too many brown-skinned people in it, then the Lib Dems probably aren’t for you (and if you’re in the latter of those groups, please stop reading my blog now, thanks). Given that, each of these posts will be an ‘assuming all else is equal’ argument
The first of these arguments is that Liberal Democrat elected representatives work harder. There are very few Lib Dem ‘safe seats’, and Liberal Democrats, unlike members of the Big Two parties, can only keep their positions by working hard. There’s also the fact that no-one goes into Liberal Democrat politics to seek power – it would be an absolutely insane thing to do – with very few exceptions Lib Dem elected representatives went into politics out of a desire to help people or to advance a political philosophy, not for personal gain.
A couple of examples (out of many) of Lib Dem representatives going further to help me than I would have expected. These both involve my MP, but I could tell similar stories about my local councillors and MEP:
When I first moved here, I was not a member of the party, but had voted for them in every election since I was eligible to vote (except one council election where I voted Green). I had, however, never had a Liberal Democrat representing me.
I have opinions, as you may have noticed, and one of the things I do on a regular basis is to write to my MP expressing outrage at whatever outrageous thing has outraged me that week. My previous MP (Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Manchester Blackley) had never bothered to respond to anything I’d written to him. I’d thought that this was because of my intemperate writing style, til I saw on writetothem that he had a 0% response rate to constituents at the time (this has now improved to around 50%, a few years later).
So when I wrote to John Leech, the MP for the area I moved to after I got married, a little under three years ago, about some abhorrent bill that was going through Parliament, I didn’t expect any reply from him, either. In fact, I didn’t even need one – I’d looked at his voting record (on the excellent website theyworkforyou and knew he was almost certain to vote the way I wanted him to, and the letter was as much as anything a way of letting him know the issue was important to at least one constituent. So I was pleasantly surprised to get back a form letter along the lines of “Dear Mr Hickey, I agree with you that the Widows and Orphans (Torture and Murder) Bill currently going through Parliament is very wrong, and wish to reiterate that I am in full agreement with Liberal Democrat policy, which says that torture of widows and orphans is something to be avoided wherever possible, and murdering them very naughty indeed. As such, I shall be voting against the bill”.
That basic acknowledgement was more than I’d expected, and I was satisfied with that, but then two weeks later an envelope came through the door containing a huge wodge of documents – it was copies of a set of correspondence between Leech and the minister responsible, chasing him up on all sorts of fine points about the bill in question. Having an MP who was putting that level of attention both into the policies he was voting on and into keeping constituents who had expressed an interest informed was what changed me from being a passive voter to joining the party and becoming active in the local party – he has a slim majority and I want to do all I can to keep him in.
A couple of years later, I wrote to him again (having written to him, of course, several times in the interim – although not that often, because I was fairly sure he was doing his job properly). A Lib Dem front bench spokesperson had made what I considered to be an astoundingly moronic and illiberal statement about a possible future policy. This is nothing new – every party has at least one front bencher per week say something stupid (it may even be that I have said stupid things myself upon occasion) but this statement hit a couple of my buttons, and I fired off an angry email – “Absolute disgrace, as a representative of the same party how can you stand by and listen to this nonsense, rhubarb rhubarb” – just because that’s the kind of thing I do. I got an email back asking for my phone number.
He then ‘phoned me up a few days later, and spent an hour talking over the policy position that was being spoken about (and which he’d helped come up with) in great detail, explaining how the spokesperson had misspoken (a relatively trivial error of the kind we all make when speaking extemporaneously, but which had changed the meaning of the sentence quite significantly), talking about the nuances of the policy in question, and persuading me that what was actually being proposed was, while imperfect (and he acknowledged the imperfections as well, as political necessities), a reasonable response to the situation in question, and one I could accept, if not wholeheartedly support.
Remember, for the first of these stories I was someone who Mr Leech had never heard of, and who wasn’t even yet a registered voter in his constituency. The second time, I was someone who’d met him for two minutes a couple of times who he might be vaguely aware of as a Focus-deliverer and person who sent stroppy emails. Neither time was I anyone ‘important’.
And I don’t think John Leech is exceptional as a Lib Dem MP in this regard – Lib Dem representatives at every level go out of their way to work for their constituents, in a way that members of the other two parties don’t. If you want to be sure that when you actually need your MP to take up a case for you, or when you need the council to sort out the pavement in front of your house, or any of the other myriad reasons you could have for needing your local representative to do something for you, they’ll actually bother to help, then consider voting Lib Dem. Because Lib Dems work harder.
Albums You Should Own: Hard Workin’ Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story Vol 2
Normally when I write these ‘albums you should own’, I’m writing about an album by a performer. Today is rather different – I’m discussing a compilation album featuring performers as diverse as Bobby Vee, Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis and the Monkees. Nonetheless, there is an overall artistic voice to the album, but it’s not a performer, or even a songwriter or producer (although he does take on all those roles at various points during the album) – it’s the arranger, Jack Nitzsche.
The job of the arranger, like that of the professional songwriter, is very much a dying art in these days of the self-contained band, and many people reading this will have no idea what an arranger does, so a brief explanation is in order. An arranger is someone who takes a song and works out what instrument will play what part. This may sound like a trivial job, but in fact it’s the single most important step in the progression from a song to a finished record. Every time you have heard an instrument playing something other than the simple vocal melody or strummed chords to a song, what you’ve heard is the work of an arranger – either a formal arranger, or (more usually these days) a producer or band member taking on that role. An arranger will come up with a bass-line, string parts, decide when the music should build and when it should fall off, decide when there should be a solitary flugelhorn and when there should be a barrage of electric guitars.
Many of the best arrangers in the last few decades have doubled as producers – like George Martin or Brian Wilson or Quincy Jones – and the job of arranger as a separate job is mostly a historical one, with most of the most accomplished arrangers (like, say, Nelson Riddle or Fletcher Henderson) having their success in the big band era. Jack Nitzsche is one of the few arrangers who made a very successful career in the rock era. While he did other work, both as a performer (having a hit with the instrumental The Lonely Surfer ) and as a composer of film scores (he wrote the music for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest among others) as well as being an occasional member of Crazy Horse, Nitzsche’s main claim to fame was as an arranger, working with artists such as Neil Young, The Tubes, the Neville Brothers and others.
But he’s best known for, in essence, being Phil Spector. Nitzsche arranged almost every hit record Spector produced (with the exception of the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, which was done in a deliberate imitation of NItzsche’s style when Nitzsche couldn’t fit it into his schedule) and he, not Spector, was responsible for the ‘Spector sound’. While Spector produced some fine records after stopping working with Nitzsche (such as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man) none of them had the ‘Spector sound’. Nitzsche, by contrast, was able to make ‘Phil Spector’ records with or without Spector, as well as having the ability to create great records in other styles.
This stylistic variation is evident in the first two songs in this compilation. The opener, Hard Workin’ Man, is a song written by Nitzsche and Ry Cooder and performed by Captain Beefheart for a film soundtrack. Essentially a rewrite of Mannish Boy but in the style of Howlin’ Wolf rather than Muddy Waters, it’s a metrically distended driving blues driven by percussion like hammers on metal, and shows that even the slickest LA session musicians can make ‘authentic’ Chess-style Chicago blues if directed by an arranger who understands the genre. This is then followed by Nitzsche’s own Surf Finger, an instrumental that is very much in the style that Brian Wilson would use a few years later for the Pet Sounds instrumentals, all reverbed guitar and echoing percussion.
Much of the rest of the album is in the ‘Spector’ style, some of it (such as the Righteous Brothers’ magnificent Just Once In My Life, a good contender for most powerful single of all time) actually made with Spector, but much done in collaboration with others. Some of these tracks will be familiar, like Merry Clayton’s It’s In His Kiss or Frankie Laine’s I’m Gonna Be Strong, both oldies staples to this day. But others are revelatory. Baby I’m So Glad It’s Raining by the Satisfactions (a song so rare it had to be mastered for this release from a crackly acetate) is a magnificent over-the-top grandiose ballad of the type the Ronettes were known for , building from a quiet arpeggiated guitar/harpsichord in the verses through the bridge to a chorus which sounds like every instrument in the world is there. As Long As You’re Here by Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful sounds like the Spoonful turned up to eleven, with jew’s harp solos and gigantic overblown arrangements reminiscent of The Modern Folk Quartet (Spector’s attempt to create his own Lovin’ Spoonful soundalike band). And Don’t Touch Me There by art-punk band The Tubes is just magnificent, Nitzsche pastiching himself absolutely deadpan while the band sing:
The smell of burning leather as we hold each other tight
As our rivets rub together crashing sparks into the night
This moment of forever, darling if you really care
Don’t touch me there
There are also a couple of examples of the country-rock that Nitzsche became known for in the 70s, including the original of I Don’t Wanna Talk About It by Crazy Horse (later a hit in a soundalike version by Rod Stewart). The best of these is a version of Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield song Mr Soul by the Everly Brothers, arranged in the style that Nitzsche would later use for Young’s first solo album. Slowed right down, with wailing soulful female backing vocals, steel guitar, wood block percussion and picked mandolins, it’s a magnificent example of the arranger’s art.
On top of that there are a few songs, like the Monkees’ Porpoise Song and the Turtles’ You Know What I Mean that are classics of sixties bubblegum pop, and a few oddball tracks like a collaboration between John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis.
Not everything on the album works, but the highlights are so stunningly good that this compilation is one of my all-time favourite albums. On top of that, anyone listening to it will be able to hear the common threads that run throughout Nitzsche’s work, no matter what the genre and no matter who the performer or ostensible producer, and will get a better idea of what an arranger does, and the importance of good arrangements to a good record, and may get an idea of what is missing from a lot of substandard records.
A Big Finish A Week 18: Omega
Well, it’s actually more than a fortnight since the last one, but given the circumstances, I hope you can forgive me.
(There are a *lot* of people searching for Doctor Who today, aren’t there? And I appear, when I look at the WordPress tag ‘doctor who’ to be the ‘featured blog’, whatever that means. So for those of you who are coming here for the first time, hello. My name’s Andrew Hickey, and I like the old series of Doctor Who very much, and don’t like the new series very much at all. I hope you won’t hold that against me…)
Omega is rather unusual among Big Finish audios, in that it directly follows, and is a sequel to, an episode of the TV series – but if you’ve seen the episode in question the big twist of the story is spoiled for you.
Nev Fountain’s story is part of a thematic trilogy, along with Master and Davros, that was leading up to Big Finish’s fiftieth story, Zagreus. Each of these featured the Doctor without a companion going up against a single ‘classic’ villain who hadn’t appeared much or at all in the Big Finish stories previously. Each revealed ‘new, shocking facts’ about the origin of that villain, and each in some way showed that the Doctor and the villain were two sides of the same coin. I’ve reviewed those two audios earlier, but suffice to say that Davros is one of the three or four best things Big Finish have ever done (and is among my top ten Doctor Who stories in any medium) while Master is three-quarters of a decent little horror/murder mystery topped with half an hour of the most egregious fanwank ever conceived.
Omega, as you might expect from one of Peter Davison’s audios, which are always solidly entertaining but rarely (with a few exceptions like The Kingmaker) groundbreaking and different, is somewhere in between, never reaching the highs of Davros, but never plumbing the depths of “The Master was created by Death in a deal with the Doctor when the Doctor was a kid because the Doctor was a murderer and gave up his best friend rather than face the guilt”.
We do, unfortunately, get the revelation that the Doctor has committed yet another genocide in the past, which must be at least the fifth and does tend to suggest that the Doctor is some kind of cosmic Hitler, even though most of these have been by accident, but taking this as a story on its own, rather than trying to make connections with all the other stories, it’s actually quite effective.
The story itself is quite simple – the Doctor turns up on a spaceship running a ‘jolly Chronolidays’ tour to the site of Omega’s experiments with time travel, where some of the actors who take part in the reconstructions are going mad and believing they are the real people who they are playing. Meanwhile, Omega is on the loose on the ship, and the Doctor has not got his TARDIS, and Omega is trying to get back to his own universe, even if this means taking the entire ship with him.
The problem is that understanding this means having seen two old Doctor Who stories. Omega isn’t as ‘iconic’ a villain as the Master or Davros, both of whom are names that would be recognised by, if not necessarily the non-fan public, at least the sort of casual fan who might be tempted to pick up a CD in the shops based on having liked the show as a kid. Omega, by contrast, is tied to two specific stories – The Three Doctors and Arc Of Infinity – both of which are themselves very much mired in Gallifreyan lore. This means that the only people who are ever going to listen to this story are those who have seen those two stories. And anyone who have seen those two stories will know that in Arc Of Infinity, which comes directly before this story, Omega had inhabited a body which was an exact replica of the Doctor’s.
Knowing this, the big twist in the middle of the story – that we haven’t in fact been following the story of the Doctor battling Omega, but instead a sort of sub-Fight Club story in which both minds are in one body, a copy of the Doctor’s – is entirely obvious to anyone who gives the story some thought, and without that much of the impact is lost.
The story has other flaws as well – the attempts at humour stick out like a sore thumb, with in-jokes aimed at particular groups of fans, and bathetic ‘humorous’ stings in the music whenever something ‘funny’ happens, and with a reference to Zagreus that includes a ‘hilarious’ Scouse accent (regional accents are obviously the funniest thing in the entire universe). Also, the big ‘revelation’ about Omega is so ridiculous one is almost tempted to regard it as a joke at the expense of the other two stories in the ‘trilogy’. Despite these flaws, the audio succeeds on its own terms, thanks to a particularly good central performance by Davison (and having watched a few of Davison’s TV shows recently, I’m even more impressed with his audio performances – when listening to the audios one feels the character is exactly the same one he played on TV, but when watching the TV show it is very obvious how much more subtle a performance he’s giving now. Which is not to disparage his performance in the 80s, but just to say how much better an actor he is twenty-plus years on). The plotting is also very tight – a necessity when every single character in the story, without exception, either gets possessed by another character, is pretending to be someone who they’re not, or in some other way has some very confused identity problems.
Omega is, despite my criticisms, definitely in the top 50% of Big Finish stories – the story itself is enjoyable enough to reward repeated listenings, it’s never dull, and the flaws, though real, never pull you out of the story the way they do in the worst of the audios. But this is one for the fans, rather than for the casual listener, in a way that the very best Big Finish stories aren’t.
Doctor Who should not be four years younger than me.
This is just a fact. Young Doctors don’t work. Davison was OK, but far better in the audios, when he’d got some gravitas. Tennant has been awful. The Doctor should be, *at a minimum* in his mid-forties, and ideally in his sixties.
I’ve not seen this Matt Smith in anything, but it’s a shame the job didn’t go to Paterson Joseph, as rumoured. If it had been him, I’d have been cautiously optimistic about the new series once the awful combination of Davies and Tennant had gone. Now I’ll probably give one or two episodes a chance just out of curiousity, but very much doubt I’ll watch more than that.
BFAW in a little while.
Linkblogging for 02/01/09
I had to leave work early today with an ear infection that’s left me (temporarily, I sincerely hope) almost deaf, so whether there’s a Big Finish A Week today depends on my hearing….
Tom Spurgeon’s been doing a great series of interviews with comics people, whether creators like Eddie Campbell or bloggers like Tucker Stone. All are worth reading, but the best one so far is the interview with Abhay, who shows again why the rest of us regard him with slack-jawed awe. I kept changing my mind about which paragraph was worth quoting here, because they *all* are, but this gives a flavour:
I don’t know, though. The biggest comic company in the country’s highest profile series of the year was about religious fanatics blowing themselves up because their religion tells them they’re entitled to a specific parcel of occupied property, where the heroes tell the religious people that the heroes’ white-skinned God will lead them to victory, where the happy ending was that the Marvel heroes kill all of the religious people and that a religious woman has her head blown off mid-prayer. What were they even trying to do?? What did I even read, Comics Reporter? How was that the ending? It’s such a weird comic book. And comic fans make it stranger because most of them seem to think a one-panel Obama cameo is the only politically charged material in the book. People don’t think mainstream comics might mean things! People think mainstream comic creators are brainless fanboys just because mainstream comic fans are brainless fanboys. It’s a bizarre culture.
This post on crossover events is pretty interesting, but worth reading more because every Big Clever Comics Name Blogger shows up in the comments, which get very interesting…
James Graham has a good post on the need for a ‘new new atheism‘ – something more than just Richard Dawkins’ “If you believe in god, you’re a bastard”. I don’t agree with all of this, but there’s a lot of sense in there.
Cosmic Variance, inspired by the new film Benjamin Button, explains why you can’t have part of the universe where time goes backwards.
And there’s a petition here to decriminalise prostitution. I think that prostitution is undoubtedly a bad thing, both for the individuals involved and society as a whole, in the vast majority of cases. But I also think that criminalisation causes far more problems than it cures, and as long as people are going to turn to prostitution as a source of income, the priority should not be punishing them but ensuring they are safe and healthy.
Posting Returns Tomorrow
I had to write some non-blog stuff yesterday, and today I’ve got a killer migraine, so this week’s Big Finish A Week will be tomorrow after work.
In the meantime, a Happy New Year to all of you on the Gregorian, Discordian or ISO calendars, which I suspect is most of you, and apologies for my Eurocentrism to anyone reading this who uses any other calendar.
8 comments