Linkblogging for 27/02/09
Sorry for the lack of posts this week – I’ve ended up working late most days, and been too tired to write when I got in, and Holly and I have been flathunting. With some luck I’ll have a post up tomorrow about the Convention on Modern Liberty, and a Cerebus post on Sunday. Meanwhile, have some links.
Bobsy has another pair of underpants.
Several people are infuriated by the racism of the Mail this week, including Laurie, Anton Vowl and Jennie. Meanwhile Andrew Rilstone is pointing out a similar lovely piece from the Express.
James at Quaequam blog has a post which manages to be about British politics, comics and (tangentially at least) Doctor Who.
Calamity Jon Morris has been tagged for a meme
And a very interesting article in SciAm where, if you can get past the misrepresentations in the text itself and look at the research it’s talking about, it seems to be suggested that hereditary mechanisms other than purely genetic ones operate, allowing the selection of acquired characteristics. I’ve not looked at the actual papers themselves yet though, but this seems… unusual, to say the least.
A quick Cerebus link
I’ll be continuing my Cerebus posts sometime soon (tonight or tomorrow) but before I do, I thought everyone should go and read/re-read Andrew Rilstone’s look at the last issue ,which says a lot of things I want to say myself. Especially this bit:
And by the way, Dave. Damn right I am a liberal. I read your comic precisely because I am a liberal. Where ‘liberal’ is defined as ‘one who believes in freedom, and in particular, the freedom of expression.’ One who believes in pluralism, different viewpoints, and listening to opinions other than one’s own. One who has contempt for what you say, but will not only defend to the death your right to say it, but will actually read it, and recommend that other people do the same.
Hail, Dave Sim. Greatest living comic book creator, and total asshole.
Linkblogging for 22/02/09
A few quick links here…
Found via Douglas Wolk on Twitter – WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog have 11 CDs worth of rockabilly, garage rock and exotica, as chosen by Lux and Ivy of the Cramps, for download. Everything from Ersel Hickey to Jack Nitzsche to the Stooges to Jan & Arnie. I’m fairly up on this kind of music, but even I’d only heard of half the stuff there. Well worth getting hold of (but remember, kids, home taping is killing music…)
A great article on how the new Dalek War boxset was colourised – using BBC BASIC!
The Mindless Ones have moved on from pants, and are now discussing Spider-Man socks
It’s not often I have much in common with jet pilots, but for once I do – they’re refusing to take part in the next step of the stealth rollout of ID cards. Notice how yet again Manchester is the first place to suffer under a Labour regulation, yet we keep electing the bastards…
And in case I haven’t mentioned it, though I’m sure I have, we have a government that colludes in slicing men’s genitals with scalpels (and of course the US government actually *did* it, rather than just helping with the coverup). Even had this been the only thing that had been done wrong, it would still make the British government accessories to war crimes after the fact. If anyone reading this actually voted for this gang of torturers and murderers, how do you continue to live with yourselves? There are things that can be a matter of respectful disagreement between people of goodwill – you can argue for tougher or more lenient sentencing in prisons, higher or lower rates of income tax and so on and mean well. But *slashing at a bloke’s cock with a scalpel*?
Why An Aardvark?
I would really appreciate feedback, especially from my politically-aware female readers, for this and the next few Cerebus posts, even if you don’t know anything about Cerebus. I am very aware of my white male privilege, and I am talking about works that are incredibly problematic in every conceivable way, but for which I have an absolute adoring love. I could *very* easily fall here into being That Bloke, and I don’t want to…
This is part one of what will, I think, be a three- or four-part series on Cerebus. I’ve noticed a number of comic bloggers recently start talking, rather cautiously, about Cerebus as one of the great comics again. For a long time very, very few people have publicly stated a liking for Dave Sim’s 300-issue story about an aardvark, and it’s gratifying to see that, now the series has been over for a few years, people are slowly starting to put it in its proper perspective.
For those of you who don’t know about comics, the problem with Cerebus is that its creator, Dave Sim, is incredibly, unbelievably misogynist. His widely-publicised views are so repellent that many people absolutely refuse to even consider reading his comic work, because they don’t want to give money to anyone who espouses those views (a stance I can absolutely understand – I boycott Nestle, try to boycott Coke, and where possible given their near-monopoly on public transport in this city I refuse to give money to Stagecoach (whose CEO has donated money to groups teaching creationism and trying to get rid of homosexual rights) so I quite agree that this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take). Others, less reasonably, refuse to admit that there could possibly be anything good in the work of someone with such repellent views.
For many comics fans, this misogyny is the defining feature of Sim’s views and work – a view not helped by the vocal coterie of online fans he has who seem to think that making public claims that women should be denied the vote, or going on to Gail Simone’s message board and calling her a fat cunt, are ways to increase public respect for Sim’s work.
But Sim presents a more interesting case than most for discussing whether it’s possible to separate the artist and the art. In the first place – and it’s a minor point – he’s not the only creator of the Cerebus comics. Gerhard, the background artist, has never supported Sim’s views (though he did, until relatively recently, tacitly support Sim-the-person) and did a huge amount of work which does deserve reward. In fact at the moment I think he’s getting all of the money from current Cerebus sales, as Sim is buying out his share of Aardvark-Vanaheim, their publishing company.
Also, Sim apparently lives a spartan life with little or nothing in the way of luxuries, and gives very large amounts of money to charity, so your money is very unlikely to be of any benefit to him anyway.
But these are minor points. The main question, in my view, is to what extent Sim is responsible for his own views. This is a trickier question than it might seem. Most comic fans just know of SIm as a misogynist, but this is primarily because the vast majority of people reading the comic dropped it after issue 186, where Sim first advanced his then ‘thesis’ that women were soul-sucking voids destroying the ‘inner male light’ that was the basis for all creative work and all civilisation.
And reading that essay, or some of the others he published around that time, it is quite possible to see Sim as just a misogynist arsehole, and even to see how he might have come by his views ‘rationally’. He was an intelligent man, but not particularly educated, and very interested in Big Ideas. Almost all his social life was based around comics fans and creators, who are a self-selecting group that is overwhelmingly male and (at least in the circles Sim was moving in, people like Rick Veitch, Chester Brown, Neil Gaiman and so on) more intelligent than average, while most of the women he socialised with were his girlfriends, chosen primarily for their physical attractiveness. You can see how someone in that situation could come to the conclusion that women are just less capable of thought than men. (This is not – NOT – to say it’s a defensible conclusion. Just that it appears to be one that one could come to while still remaining more-or-less rational, given Sim’s circumstances).
But having dropped the comic, most people didn’t see the evidence of Sim’s increasing mental deterioration. Sim had had a spell in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1970s, and later claimed that he spent most of the 80s ‘faking’ ‘normalcy’ – acting normal to fit in, while secretly holding many of the opinions for which he was later ostracised. He also, for the whole of the 80s and much of the early 90s, smoked *huge* amounts of cannabis.
Even without knowing these facts, though, it’s apparent in retrospect that SIm’s views on women are not the aberrant and abhorrent views of an otherwise rational man, as they appeared when he first went public with them. Since that time, he has announced that he has found a secret hidden meaning in the King James version of the Bible (and also in the Koran) which ‘proves’ that all of history is a conflict between God and a transsexual demiurge who is the YHWH of the Bible and lives in the middle of the Earth. This demiurge also caused the 2004 tsunami as a result of Sim revealing the ‘truth’ in his comic, as well as possessing many people around him and making them think he was mad. Sim also gave up masturbation because he believes YHWH gives psychic powers to women, which they use to read men’s minds while they are masturbating.
A typical example of Sim’s ‘reasoning’, from Collected Letters 2004, Vol 1:
I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early 60s was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity; seeing Peter, Paul and Mary as the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary, what do you need Jesus for? I think this amused God a great deal – to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul, of course,was actually James: James Paul McCartney. So John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder[...] So it was a good joke that on the cusp of becoming famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle[...] Now, having ditched Peter, that meant that you had three kings or a Ring of Stars (Ringo Starr)[...]The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’[...]
Both bands, by the way, noticed the James and John connection and were led to wonder: in that case, who was Jesus? The conclusion was Brian Epstein. Which conclusion, I think, led to the premature demise of the Beatles manager and the exiled member of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones. And, of course, later on Monty Python with the financing of George Harrison incarnated the viewpoint[... etc ad infinitum]
Now, I have no formal psychiatric qualifications so wouldn’t want to speculate publicly on what diagnosis, if any, someone would give Sim based on this kind of thing, but I’ve had a lot of experience working with people with mental illnesses (I worked as a nursing assistant on a psychiatric ward for a couple of years fairly recently) and I’ll just say that this stuff sounds awfully familiar.
So how responsible is Sim for his views on women, and to what extent are they even ‘his’ views, as opposed to ‘his illness” views? Does that question even make sense? Should one boycott his work for his views, or would that be punishing someone for their mental illness?
This wouldn’t matter were Sim’s work the kind of ‘outsider art’ one normally associates with this kind of statement – reading Sim’s writings, one would get the impression that his work would be the comic equivalent of Wesley Willis or Wild Man Fischer or at best Charles Manson’s music – interesting far more for what it says about the mental state of the creator than for any quality of the work. But the fact is, Sim is the single most talented comic creator I’ve ever known of. I would take Sim’s work over the complete work of *any two* of, say, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Chris Ware, Eddie Campbell, Darwyn Cooke, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, J.H. Williams and George Herriman. No exaggeration.
So, can I possibly justify promoting work by someone who considers many – most – of the people I know, love and admire to be literally Satanic and subhuman? Or can I justify *NOT* promoting work that would significantly enrich the lives of those same people to a great extent?
I’m very torn about this… but I’m going to go ahead and look at Cerebus as a whole work over the next few days…
This Week I Are Be Mostly Listening To
Yesterday, I decided it’d be an interesting idea if every week I created a playlist of 45 songs I’ve been listening to that week. Unfortunately, after I created the first one, I discovered last.fm no longer allows embedding, so if you want to hear it you’ll have to visit http://www.last.fm/listen/playlist/4404981/shuffle. Let me know if you think it’s worthwhile me bothering with this in future. This week’s playlist includes the Beach Boys, my own band, Jonathan Richman, Bartok, Elvis Presley, XTC, Don & Dewey, Stew, Martin Newell, Don Preston, Norma Waterson, The Carter Family, Cab Calloway, Captain Beefheart, Belle & Sebastian and more…
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 21 – The StagePlays
Well, I know it’s been a little more than a week… in fact some pedants might say it’s been closer to a month… since I did one of these (just as some might say that I still owe a proper Final Crisis summing up) but to make up for that I am going to review (albeit in less detail than usual) three newish Big Finish adventures.
Last year, Big Finish decided to produce audio adaptations of the three official Dalek stage plays that had been produced over the years, sticking as closely to the original scripts as possible and, where possible, using original cast members. As two of these were by Terrance DIcks, and the third by Terry Nation and David Whittaker, you would be forgiven for not going in with the highest expectations. But as you can currently download all three for twenty pounds, I thought I’d give them a go.
The first to be released, and by far the worst, is Dicks’ The Ultimate Adventure from 1989. This was originally staged with Jon Pertwee in the lead, with Colin Baker taking over in the later versions, and here Baker reprises the part, along with a companion with a rrreedeeculuz Frrrainch eczent. Unfortunately, the part doesn’t seem to sit right with him here – possibly because the show was originally written for Pertwee’s very different Doctor, or possibly because Dicks had never written for Baker (the sixth Doctor was the first one never to have a TV story written by Dicks (he never wrote for Hartnell, either, but did write the First Doctor in The Five Doctors)).
The story itself is a pantomime rather than a serious story, with several terrible songs (“Business Is Business” being the least-worst, but it should have been cut to roughly a fifth of its present length), a plot involving Daleks and Cybermen teaming up with mercenaries to take over the earth for what I’m sure must be good and adequate reasons, and the Doctor working for Mrs Thatcher. I imagine it must have been great fun for any young children in the audience at the time, but it’s inessential at best. Baker does his best, but this is quite weak stuff.
Doctor Who And The Daleks In Seven Keys To Doomsday, another DIcks story, this time from 1974, is much better. Written at a time when Dicks was the script editor for the show, it very much has the feel of late Pertwee about it (the original stage show was on during the gap between Pertwee’s last episode and Tom Baker’s first, and starts with a regeneration sequence), though both stage show and audio release starred Trevor Martin as the Doctor. If you listen to this and The Ultimate Adventure back-to-back you may get a sense of deja vu, as a couple of plot points (notably a companion getting into a Dalek travel-machine and using a handy ‘make your voice sound Dalekky’ machine that the Doctor just happens to have on him) are reused. But the difference is that here there *is* a plot. Not a hugely interesting or original one – the Doctor and his companions turn up on an alien world where they have to recover the Seven MacGuffins Of Doom before the Daleks can, aided by some locals (one of whom is a traitor!) and hindered by some spiderlike creatures called Clawrentulars.
It’s a thin plot, and its not helped by one of the companions (Jimmy, the other being called Jenny) being absolutely insufferable. Some of this is intentional – the Doctor gets exasperated at him on a regular basis – but some of it is down to actor Joe Thompson’s utterly horrible Mockney (it may be his real accent, in which case I feel sorry for the poor man, but I doubt it…). However, the plot suffices, and the play is made enjoyable by Trevor Martin’s frankly wonderful performance. At times he sounds scarily like Patrick Troughton, and while his Doctor is written like Pertwee’s, Martin plays it much more like the first two Doctors. He inhabits the role in a way that few others have (I’d put him behind Hartnell, Troughton and the Bakers, but ahead of Pertwee, Davison, McCoy and McGann). I’d be very interested in hearing more of Martin as the Doctor – maybe in Big Finish’s Unbound series?
The final one, though the first to be staged, is 1965′s Curse Of The Daleks by Terry Nation and David Whittaker. As you would expect from those writers at that date, the science is wrong, it’s laughably sexist, it makes no sense if you examine it for a moment – and it’s absolutely great. Even though this story doesn’t feature the Doctor at all, being the first of Nation’s increasingly desperate attempts to cash in on Dalekmania separately from the show, it has much of the feeling of the early series.
This is possibly explainable by the fact that while Terrance Dicks said he had to learn to write for the stage after having written for the TV, early-60s Doctor Who was essentially done as live, at a time when the medium was essentially broadcast theatre rather than the miniature cinema it later attempted to be (and Dicks’ vision of the Doctor was always more cinematic than his predecessors and successors on the original series). Nation in particular had started out as a writer of stage shows, and the character of Rocket Smith (a name which now makes me think of Computer Jones or Synthesiser Patel) has a lot of the speech rhythms of Tony Hancock, for whose stage show Nation was a writer before writing The Daleks.
Curse of the Daleks is also helped by the fact that, due to its writers’ deaths, it has not been updated for the audio release, so Nicholas Briggs reads the stage directions for purely visual events. This gives it the feel of a partly-dramatised audiobook of a Target novelisation, which again makes it feel more like ‘proper Doctor Who’ to me than the other stories which actually have the Doctor in them. As a return trip to Skaro, it’s well worth a listen, even though it’s just good pulpy adventure in an early-60′s Eagle manner.
None of these are up to even Big Finish’s slightly diminished recent standards, let alone their best work, but given that you can download all three for not much more than the cost of a single download of one of their other audios, they’re definitely worth a shot – even the worst has fun moments in it.
Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow…
When hopefully there will be some bits of my head that don’t hurt. In the meantime, I’d just like to say thanks to those of you who said such nice things about the proposal below (especially Hayden Childs, whose book on Richard & Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time). I wasn’t posting it, though, to say “Look how foolish those editors are – I’ll show them!” but just because I thought some of you might be interested. I’ll be sure to submit again next time they’re after proposals.
Incidentally, the comments thread on the blog post where they announce their shortlist is truly horrendous – tons of barely-literate rants about how only music journalists would possibly be interested in the book on Britney Spears and so on. As a comic fan, I know a *lot* of people (myself included) wish the big comics companies would open up their submissions process for new writers more. Well, those of you who wonder why they don’t, have a look here. Why anyone would voluntarily put themselves through that, I have no idea.
With a bit of luck, over the next few days I should have posts on Neil Gaiman’s Batman, the Doctor Who stageplays collection from Big Finish, and a couple of other bits. Thanks for bearing with me while I can’t think straight…
Smile, Though Your Nose Is Running
Not able to write a new post today, as I’m not very well. However, my proposal for a book in the 33 1/3 series just got rejected today, and so I thought I’d post the proposal for anyone else to read. This is just C&P’d from the RTF file, so it might not be particularly well-formatted. Let me know what you think anyway:
The Beach Boys’ Smile has had a great deal written about it over the years, but most of this writing has told essentially the same story in a variety of ways : a young genius at the height of his powers tries to aim for something just beyond his reach, crashes and burns, and loses all his talent forever. The metaphor of Icarus is used, usually with some reference to the ‘bright California sun’. The only difference in these writings is who the scapegoat is for Smile’s non-release – is it Evil Drugs or is it Evil Mike Love?
I think there are far more interesting things to write about. I intend to try to track down the Platonic ideal of the Smile album, using three of the shadows it has cast in the real world as my map. I shall probably ask Van Dyke Parks, the primary lyricist on the album (with whom I am casually acquainted via email and who has been very forthcoming with information and advice in the past) and Darian Sahanaja, who helped put the completed 2004 version together (and with whom I share a number of acquaintances, though I don’t know him personally) to verify or clarify a few things, but this is going to be more a critical study than an examination of the process by which the album was made.
Smile as Brian Wilson intended it was never actually recorded, and has only ever existed in his head, but he made three separate attempts to get it out of there and into the real world, each with a different collaborator or collaborators. The first was in 1966, when he wrote and recorded the bulk of the material that was scrapped, with Van Dyke Parks. The second was in 1967, when he recorded a new album, Smiley Smile, as a full collaboration with the Beach Boys, with other band members contributing to the production and to the re-written songs, and the third was in 2004, when he returned to the material with Parks and with Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens of his new band, and finally released something that was close to his original conception.
Each of these is an attempt to work in collaboration with others to realise the same vision, and each is overlaid with the collaborators’ own worldview and artistic preoccupations. Parks added the wordplay and fascination with Americana that has been the hallmark of his work ever since. Smiley Smile added songs about Hawaii, emphasised the vocal harmonies, and simplified the instrumental arrangements to the point where they could be reproduced on stage by people who were great singers but barely competent instrumentalists, as the Beach Boys were at that point.
These collaborations can all be used to throw light on what Wilson’s true intention for the album was, but the most interesting one, and the one on which I will spend most time, is the 2004 album, as that’s a collaboration with himself, nearly forty years on; a collaboration across time that has never been tried before. Whole sections of the album take on a whole new meaning when sung by a man in his sixties, and great chunks of it now sound like he’s singing them to the young man he was in 1966, the young man with whom he’s co-written the new version.
But all three albums have a great deal of artistic merit, and I plan also to examine in detail the underrated Smiley Smile, which does after all contain two of the great singles of all time (Good Vibrations and Heroes And Villains) along with a gorgeous, minimalist version of Wonderful which I consider one of the greatest things in the history of recorded sound and Wind Chimes, which in its Smiley Smile version reminds me of some of Scott Walker’s most recent work, an atonal twisted nursery rhyme. Smiley Smile has been described as ‘space age acid casualty doo-wop’, and the description is an apt one. It is a stripped-down minimal masterpiece that’s always lived in the shadow of its unfinished predecessor but may be the most overlooked album of the sixties
So, taking these three attempts separately, we have three images of an ideal. The first image we have (the 1966 recordings) is a kaleidoscope – lots of tiny little fragments that can be mixed up into many beautiful forms, but which never cohere into something permanently. The second (Smiley Smile) is like looking at it in a funhouse mirror – you can recognise the shape, but some of it’s so distorted you have to laugh, and isn’t that a bit of something else entirely that’s somehow entered the picture? And the third is a painting from memory by a great artist of something he glimpsed once, decades earlier.
But what is it he glimpsed? Most people who’ve written about the album have spoken about themes like ‘Americana’ and ‘the Elements’. But while they’re there, and I will discuss them in the book to an extent, I believe they are extraneous to Wilson’s original conception. Neither have appeared in Wilson’s work to any great extent either before or since, and he has never spoken about either as being important to him. The ‘Americana’ theme almost certainly came from Parks (though Wilson willingly added this to the stew), as this is something that has obsessed Parks throughout his career (from albums like Discover America to the rewritten Bre’er Rabbit stories in Jump! to his most recent album of new material, Orange Crate Art, about a lost California of the past). The elements theme, on the other hand, seems to me to have been something imposed on the music afterward, possibly due to Wilson’s desire to impress his new ‘hip’ friends, and while the Americana theme is quite clearly present in songs such as Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence, the ‘elements’ songs like Barnyard and In Blue Hawaii have only the most notional connection to the classical elements.
So what is the theme of Smile? A clue comes from Wilson’s famous quote that Smile was intended as a ‘teenage symphony to God’. But a better description would be ‘teenage symphony to Goddess’. Throughout his career, Wilson has written about goddess figures. The women in his songs (and this is something that runs through no matter who his lyrical collaborators are, suggesting it’s something that’s very important to his work) are almost all perfect and loving, all-knowing and all-forgiving, taking pity on the male protagonists, who are all deeply flawed. There are only two really consistent themes that recur throughout Wilson’s work – this feeling of being an unworthy man being given unconditional love by a perfect woman, and a search for transcendence – a search to become more than the sinful man he knows himself to be.
This need for transcendence has shown up in different ways throughout Wilson’s career. In the early songs, it’s all about proving yourself, being a real man, and pushing yourself to the utmost (“You gotta be a little nuts/but show ‘em you got guts/Don’t back down from that wave”), with a constant restlessness, a need to move on (“I’m gettin’ bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”). In later songs, such as Break Away, it becomes fighting against his mental illness, using “the part of me that cries to be free” to “break away to that better life/where no shackles ever hold me down”.
But in all these songs, hope for transcendence, for ‘that better life’, comes from effort from within – pushing yourself, transcending your own limits. For all that Wilson’s music is often melancholy, the only time he ever sounds truly despairing is in Til I Die, and in that song the lyrics (“I’m a cork in the ocean”, “I’m a rock in a landslide”, “I’m a leaf on a windy day”) suggest a resignation to fate, an inability (and even a lack of desire) to strive for something better.
So with these facts, and the phrase ‘teenage symphony to God’, we have the key to unlock the album that Wilson intended. In this interpretation, the journey from East Coast to West Coast that the album takes us on is an expression of Manifest Destiny – settlers had to move West the same way Wilson has to search for something greater than himself, because we must keep moving forward or die. And while things collapse and fall, hope is always in the young, because they have more of this pioneer spirit, having not been ground down by life – but that youth is something that can be regained. “At three score and five I’m very much alive/I’ve still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains”.
Over and over again through this album, things die and are reborn – the civilisation in Surf’s Up collapses (“Columnated ruins domino”) but there’s a rebirth at the end (“Come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave”), but this falling and rising happens most often to a young woman – Wilson’s goddess figure. In Heroes & Villains it’s the dancer, Margarita, who’s shot down (“she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually cut her down”) but who somehow still lives (“But she’s still dancing in the night”). In Wonderful, the death is metaphorical – a spiritual death (“all fall down and lost with her liberty, lost it all to an unbeliever”) that comes with loss of virginity/innocence/youth , but even this can be regained (“She’ll return in love with her liberty, just away from the non-believer, she’ll smile and thank God for wonderful”). This is the dying and rising Sun God (and what better band for Sun God worshippers than the Beach Boys, after all?) – but in the form of a young woman (there’s more than a hint here of the stories of Ishtar or Persephone).
This interpretation also makes sense of the inclusion of a snatch of I Wanna Be Around, the Johnny Mercer song, which sometimes bemuses fans. While the song’s original intent was cynical, in this context “I want to be around to pick up the pieces when someone breaks your heart” means just that – the emphasis not on the heartbreak, but on picking up the pieces, carrying on.
So in essence, the story of Smile is not the story of Icarus, but of Ishtar – the story of a goddess descending into the underworld and being stripped of everything, but then rising again and getting everything back.
In the book I will go into far more detail about the actual music, which is of course the most important thing, analysing the way Wilson recontextualises snippets of music from his childhood and teenage years (elements of Bach and Gershwin jostling with Marty Robbins, The Crows and You Are My Sunshine) and the way that most of the songs on the album are based around variations of a tiny number of musical themes, as well as talking more about Parks’ contribution. But the essence of the book will be to try to combine the pictures from the three versions of the album, and to see if I can get a clear picture of the masterpiece Brian Wilson saw for a moment back in 1966. If I can, I suspect the centre of the picture is a young girl – let’s call her Liberty – she’s singing to herself, and she knows that even though the sun will soon go down in the West, it will rise again in the East.
I Despair…
This is, I’m afraid, another political post. There’ll be both comics and Doctor Who ones tomorrow, all being well – I’m acutely aware that whenever I write a long stream of posts on one subject, a whole chunk of my ‘audience’ (such as it is) switches off (my only consolation here being that comparatively few of you are *only* interested in my opinions on one of the things I write about to the exclusion of the others. I am lucky to belong to a political party where if you say “Be pure, be vigilant, behave!” or “Your ideas are too narrow, too crippled. I am a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot!” people will be able to join in…) and I do try to balance what I post here, but sometimes one thing is in my head more than other things.
My pet peeve today is Liberal Democrat communication skills.
The Lib Dems include some extraordinarily talented writers, experienced designers, and intelligent thinkers, so why is it never them who are put in charge of communicating messages both from the party and from groups within the party to the public? Individual Lib Dems can produce blog posts that could serve as manifestos for change that could inspire the world. Put two or more of them in a room together though and they turn into the Committee For Equitable Plebiscite Administration and start producing badly-photocopied pamphlets full of misspellings, exclamation marks and clip art.
Now, as anyone reading this can see, I’m all for content over form, but there comes a point where the form is so bad that the content can’t be understood, and this happens all too often.
As an example, I decided today I’d like to find out more about Land Value Tax. This is one of those ideas that seem to preoccupy Liberal Democrats (roughly speaking you can split the party three ways into those obsessed with Land Value Tax, those obsessed with decriminalising or legalising all drugs, and those obsessed with electoral reform) but it’s not something I know a great deal about – I understand the basic concept (the name Land Value Tax is fairly self-explanatory) and something of the history of the idea (at least to the extent I associate the concept with the name Henry George and so on) but I certainly don’t know what the answers are to the immediate intuitive objections (I presume they do have answers – immediate intuitive objections almost always do).
So I decided to visit the website for Liberal Democrats ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform – an unwieldy title but one that is at least a reasonable acronym), the pressure group within the party for Land Value Tax. Now this is an ‘independent’ pressure group, but one that has as its President Chris Huhne (our Home Affairs spokesman) and as two of the Vice Presidents Nick Clegg (the party leader) and Vince Cable (our economics spokesman and deputy leader), so it would be reasonable to expect this to be a strong effort to persuade the party (and the general public) of the ideas of Land Value Taxation.
Go and have a look at the website. I’ll wait.
Now, there are a myriad small problems with the site, but a few major ones – so major, I decided to take the very unusual step (for me) of emailing info@libdemsalter.org.uk , the address given on the front page of the site. This is the email I sent:
Just thought I’d pass on a small (well, actually, rather large) criticism of your site. I’ve been a member of the Lib Dems for a few
years, but have never been hugely interested in economic ideas (I joined primarily because of civil liberties concerns, with
environmental causes a close second). However, I’ve heard a number of people talk about the idea of Land Value Taxation, and I was interested enough to look at your site to try to find out about it. I couldn’t. The front page has news that is only of interest to people who already agree with you, while the FAQs are split into several sections with no indication as to which section should be read by someone who wants to discover the basics of your ideas. Not only that, but they’re apparently in PDF format – a much more cumbersome format than plain HTML. However, that doesn’t matter, as they’re not actually
there – I get file not found errors when I try to look at them.Please understand, this is not meant as an attack in any way – I am genuinely interested in finding out about your ideas, but your site as it is provides me with no way of finding out what they are. It appears designed for those who already agree with you, and who already know they agree with you, rather than being aimed towards informing people of your ideas (which may well be good ones – I am an admirer of several of the politicians you list as supporting your cause). If you actually want to increase support for your views, perhaps you could replace your home page with a simple summary of what they are, and
keep the news about Lib Dem policy motions on a separate news page?
And here is the reply I got:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at www.r-hosts.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.info@libdemsalter.org.uk:
This address no longer accepts mail.
Sometimes only this post by Jennie can really sum things up…
(ETA Not *all* Lib Dem communication efforts are at that level – the Social Liberal forum I linked to the other day is pretty much exemplary in that it has a single paragraph explanation at the top of every page, and links to “Who we are” and “what we stand for” prominently displayed on every page, as well as some other useful navigation features without appearing overly cluttered. But it’s definitely in the minority, sadly…)
leave a comment