Discuss 9

'That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the state of nature, the state of art of an organised polity.'

T.H.Huxley

Spam Attack

I was hit by a Spam attack last night - 250 comments, mainly about Ugg boots and Nike trainers. I felt dirty all over. I have now set comment moderation for all posts older than 14 days.

Discuss 8

'For all of which, the complexity of our minds, or of our behaviour, is simply irrelevant to the question of whether our cognitive architecture evolved under selection pressure. I do think it's remarkable that nobody seems to have noticed this.'

Jerry Fodor

Discuss 7

'One of the most annoying things about the modern world is that it is so much less simple than it used to be.'

Bertrand Russell

In Treatment

I just heard a 14-year-old Pakistani boy on the radio. His entire family had been killed by a bomb. It made me think of In Treatment. I know people who are addicted to this TV series which consists solely of (fictional) psychotherapy sessions conducted by Dr Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne). We see successive sessions involving the same patients. Only one of these - the young gymnast - seems to me to be ill by any imaginable definition. The rest are just screwed up within normal parameters. They turn up just to talk. This makes it hard to see what good Weston is doing. How would he/they know they'd been cured? And why expend so much time and intellect on people who seem to be functioning as well as anybody else? I am not addicted to In Treatment, but I keep watching in a state of sick fascination.

That Pakistani boy will probably need therapy but he won't get it. Weston costs $150 an hour. This point is, I know, pretty dodgy. The boy may suffer Sudden Hearing Loss and he probably won't get much help with that either. I am as spoilt as Dr Weston's patients. Except that I was definably ill. To be confused, angry, mildly paranoid, delusional or depressed is not to be ill, it is to be conscious. To treat these states as illness is to believe in some other, ideal mental state in which they vanish. Unconsciousness would seem to be the only such state. This is delusional and absurdly self-indulgent. I suspect this is why I found the perpetually psycho-analysed Woody Allen so objectionable.

I'm not being fair to therapists, of course. In Treatment is just a TV show and, doubtless, my suspicions of the process probably say something nasty about me (Adam Phillips, a brilliant man, once nearly trapped me with that one but I veered swiftly away). Furthermore, the idea of psychotherapy is fascinating. I see it as medicalised Henry James. He, also, would be no help to that boy.

Citizen Kane

Yesterday I saw Citizen Kane at the BFI. It was the first time I had seen it on the big screen. My previous view of the film was that it was amazing, technically superb and, as an American myth, tremendously potent. Yet, for the most part, I found it unmoving, even meretricious. On the big screen, my reservations were refuted and, immensely moved, I kept tearing up. The point is, I realise, the theatricality of the piece. On the small screen this is lost or it strikes a false note; on the big screen it makes perfect sense and the characters, previously a touch de trop, were seen as florid creatures trapped within the confines of the medium, like the caged animals in the newsreel shots of Xanadu. The central drama of the film is not Kane, of course, it is the reporter's progress through the story. He is the audience's surrogate and guide and it is he who, just before the glorious final tracking shot, drops his professional mask and, having attained wisdom beyond yellow journalism, undermines the payoff by saying whatever Rosebud was it would tell us nothing about the real man, it was just a piece of a jigsaw. Thus the burning sledge becomes everything and nothing. Kane is still not the greatest ever film, but it is up there.

I note, incidentally, that Spielberg bought the sledge for $60,500. To which news, Welles responded, 'I thought we burned it.'

The X Factor

'You should see it,' said my wife, '15 million people watch it.'

'But,' I protested, 'they are 15 million bad people.'

I watched it. Here are my observations.

1)The oiky estate agent presenter should take out a restraining order against his tailor.

2)The instrumentation was sluggish and horribly arranged and the miking was so bad that the sound stage was utterly flat making it an effort to hear the singers at all.

3)'Cheryl Cole' wore a dress from the wardrobe department of the original series of either Doctor Who or Star Trek. Simon Cowell's haircut was redolent of the Mercedes G-Wagen, very flat-sided. The function of the latter was to pass through narrow gorges; I cannot imagine the function of the former. His cleavage was unwise.

4)The other judges presented as severely bi-polar.

5)All the singers I could hear were flat.

6)Amusingly, the twins John and Edward were accused by Cowell of being flat. As they were performing Queen's monotonous chant We Will Rock You, the charge of being 'flat' seemed beside the point. They were the only act that managed to overcome the sound stage problem.

7)None of the singers understood phrasing. Or melody. Or rhythm.

8)The conceptual problem of the show is that it makes the performers pathetic supplicants - before the judges, the voters and the coaches. It is impossible to be a supplicant and command the stage. The twins pulled it off.

9)All the dramas involving the judges were patently rigged. The whole thing was cynically manipulative to a degree I would not have believed possible.

10)The 15 million viewers are not bad. They are cattle.

Discuss 6

'I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.'

Isaac Newton after losing £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble.

Gordon the Beijing Duck

So Blair is stuffed. I presume Brown has been running around Europe telling people not to have anything to do with the man in his final act of revenge for the Granita Betrayal. In spite of his public support, a Blair presidency would be a Brown nightmare. Anyway, Blair's saving of Brown last June has turned out to be pointless. Brown couldn't or wouldn't deliver on his side of the bargain, the presidential cap with flames and eagles. More to the point, one reason for Mandelson's June support of Brown - the Blair elevation - has gone. What with that and the dismal performance of our economy, Brown is no longer a lame duck, he is ready to be eaten with spring onions, cucumber, Hoisin sauce and pancakes.

Bernie Madoff

I've been reading about Bernie Madoff. This has made me wonder why people who have a lot of money always seem to want more. I want more money. I think £10 million would suffice. But then, I suppose, I would, indeed, want more. I probably couldn't afford a decent yacht, for example. So, say, I have £100 million. I think that would be enough. But, reading about Madoff, I see that there is no limit to the amount of money people want. This is obviously competitive. With £100 million on hand, you will almost certainly find yourself surrounded by people who have more. More would buy you a bigger yacht, perhaps one with an attached submarine. This is pathetic, of course, but, at this level, I don't think the possessions are anything more than signals. The real point is the pursuit of the abstraction of numbers on a bank statement. This is also pathetic. There used to be a joke about rich people phoning their money every morning. This feels psychologically accurate, the abstraction of money has become more real than what it buys. One of the reasons for the values in the art market - and, indeed, the amount of art - is the intuition of some rich people that there's something a bit thin about the money abstraction. They could read poetry, but that's a dangerous step too far away from money as it costs nothing, or a bit if you actually buy the books. So they buy art which is a dream team - it offers non-monetary values and it is very expensive. Anyway, that said, I still don't really know why people with a lot of money always want more.