Video Reasons for Loving America in Spite of Hillary

Here is the great Marilynne talking about the psalms. And here are the sublime videos at The Onion. I've said enough about Marilynne. But what is striking about The Onion vids is how much better they are as satire than anything on the strangely unfunny Daily Show. The reason is The Onion material is fully written, the characters stay in their parts. But Jon Stewart can't stop himself being Jon Stewart and ponderously drawing attention to the gags. Apparent seriousness is what is funny - check out the regulator with a deranged but perfectly straight-faced obsession with Alyson Hannigan - because it inspires a kind of comic wonder. Stewart can't do serious because he needs to tell you he's funny. Anyway, this morning focus on Marilynne and The Onion, not on the eccentric voters of Ohio and Texas.

The Nixon Mad Manoeuvre

So, it seems, Nixon and Kissinger tried to scare the Soviets into helping the US win Vietnam by flying B52s loaded with nukes around Soviet airspace for a few days back in 1969. This was based on game theory. The idea was to convince the Soviets that Nixon was just crazy enough to drop the bombs. They seem to have got the crazy message but not the ending the war thing. Of course, they could have just retaliated on the basis that the proximity of the planes gave them little choice. It seems to be another example of civilisation surviving by the skin of its teeth. We appear to be pushing our luck with alarming regularity. Perhaps we ought to stop doing this.... or just get it over with.  

Psycho Killer, Qu'Est-Ce Que C'Est?

There's been quite a run of psycho killers getting convicted and jailed lately - the Suffolk Strangler, the Hammer Killer, the Croydon Necrophile, and now this creep. This is a good thing, but why, in covering such cases, do the media - especially the broadcast media - insist on ferreting out a 'motive'. A motive is the kind of thing murderers in whodunits have; in the real world most killing is done either in some form ot temporary rage or , more calculatedly and more rarely, by psychopaths. The 'motive' is a matter of pathology, not of intention or calculation. They kill, basically, because they like killing - a taste that's not all that unusual, but in times of peace has no outlet or usefulness and therefore only rarely comes to the surface. As Johnny Cash put it, 'I shot a man in Reno, Just to watch him die.' Nuff said.

What happened to the Seebackwascope?

Looking at the stuff on this site, I found myself wondering, 'What happened to the Seebackwascope?' It was a wonderfully useful device that allowed you to look backwards as you walked along the street. I suppose it must have gone the way of X-ray specs. Both will have been hounded out of existence by the bureaucrats of advertising standards purely because they didn't work. How petty can you get? And, besides, I see lots of ads for banks and slimming products and they definitely don't work.

Heathrow

The pictures of the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow are disturbing. This is not an architectural judgment. It's something to do with the feeling that such a thing is already outdated. Simon Jenkins explained the cock-ups that led to Heathrow becoming the dump that it is today. And it really is a dump. Dropping somebody off at Terminal 3 the other day, I felt I had stumbled into the gateway of some corrupt, poverty-stricken dictatorship that had, somehow, established itself just to the west of London without anybody noticing. It shouldn't be there at all and T5 only draws attention to that fact. But, as Jenkins says, in this as in so many other areas, New Labour likes nothing more than caving in to any and every demand of big business. On top of that, flying itself is beginning to feel outdated. Once it had an air of exclusivity and excitement, now it has an air of cramped misery. Security means that hours have to be spent in a tacky shopping mall prior to getting on a plane with bad air and no space for your legs. Then there's the environment...No doubt about it, flying is over. What we need are transoceanic maglevs in low pressure tunnels. T5 can become a 'venue', West London's answer to the Dome.

Modern Painters

At the risk of sounding like that indefatigable man about town Jeffrey Archer, I have been to see this exhibition, which has been sniffily, if not witheringly, received by the critics, who seem to be embarrassed by the whole Camden Town Group phenomenon. Well, they have a point, in as much as the Group does ultimately boil down to Sickert (a great English painter) and the rest (fitfully brilliant, but mostly playing with a Continental modernism they couldn't make their own).
One of the things that occurred to me, looking around what is actually a fascinating exhibition (for all its shortage of really really good paintings by anyone other than Sickert), was that London is peculiarly resistant to being painted. Whereas Paris virtually throws herself onto the canvas crying 'Paint Me!', London is an odd, rebarbative prospect, driving painters out to the suburbs and into edgy, marginal situations to find a subject that will really work. Even the best of painters have generally been unconvincing when it comes to London itself - the centre, the capital. Perhaps this is because London really doesn't have a centre or a single identity - as has often been remarked, it has the nature more of a string of villages than a city.
In the grimy, sooty, wanly lit suburbs of north London, the Camden Town Group certainly found their subject(s) - more convincingly than in their city centre paintings, which seem to be exercises in style. Continental modernism and London never made for a convincing fit - the various modernist tropes seem applied, not assimilated. What the Tate Britain exhibition does demonstrate though (even if the exposition makes heavy weather of it) is that Edwardian England was a darker, edgier and nervier place than might have been expected. It is another light on what seems to me (and, I'm pretty sure, to Bryan) an endlessly fascinating period, in which, in so many ways, we achieved some kind of optimal (if, of course, hugely flawed and socially unjust) model of what high civilisation could be. And then, of course, lost it all.

New Meanings

'I care passionately about....': I wish to be seen as the sort of person who is thought by the inattentive to care passionately.

'I am a free spirit': I suffer from crippling, infantile narcissism. Best to count your forks after I leave. 

'I go with the flow': I am a free spirit (see above) and my pathological selfishness prevents me from observing elementary social niceties.

'I read Gertrude Himmelfarb': I am, like all neocons, an unreconstructed Trotskyist and, anyway, I am Prime Minister.

'I work for the BBC': I am terrified of any challenge to my comfortably conventional views and I must, therefore, pretend to be impartial. (Thanks to Nick Cohen.)

For Martin Carthy

And, speaking of England, last night a friend invited me to join him at a concert in Blakeney. Martin Carthy was playing. Of course, I knew who he was, but British folk, even at the height of the late sixties revival, has always passed me by. Carthy is the great hero of folkies. Dylan picked up the idiom from him and Paul Simon spotted him at once.  Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair is pure Carthy. But, as I say, it had all passed me by. Carthy was playing with his partner, Norma Waterson, their daughter Eliza Carthy and Tim van Eyken. There was a capacity crowd of about two hundred. It was a characterless hall that looked as though it would be better used for a protest meeting about the installation of new benches on the quay. It should have been the Albert Hall if not Wembley Arena. Carthy and his band were sensational, breathtaking. Carthy's guitar style is unique. He had the distracted air of a man looking at himself and the tradition as if in a dream. He was selling CDs at the interval. I asked him why we don't make music as freely and easily as they do in America or Ireland. He spoke of places in Sheffield where they sing their own carols every Christmas and where everybody is expected to contribute new elements to the tradition. English folk - not just as a hobby but as a living tradition of informal music making - is. like England, not quite dead. The concert ended with a piercing a cappella blessing and valedictory - 'I love you well, but Jesus loves you best'. There were no dry eyes.

Obama's Dance/Bill's Sax

Barack Obama's dance on Ellen is of some historical significance. The point is, of course, that he can do it. The hips are loose, the sway is jerk-free. I notice these things because I can't do it. I need planning permission and an extensively fenced perimeter if I am to dance. The Obama moment reminded me of those occasions when Bill Clinton appeared wearing shades and playing saxophone. This worked for Bill - who, as everybody knows, thinks he was the first black president - but not because anybody expected him to be any good on the sax. Rather, it was a gesture like dad-dancing, a sort of eagerness to take part, to be a good sport. But Obama dances like a pro. He's not trying to take part, he dances because it comes naturally. I am beginning to wonder what doesn't come naturally to this man. I know - fatness, he's hopeless at that. 

On Nothing

Commenting on my article on physics, halibut etc., the ineffable Gordon McCabe points out that, strictly speaking, the issue was not why there should be something rather than nothing but whether there should be something rather than a 'sea of photons', which is what you would get if all stuff was cancelled out by anti-stuff. Fair enough, but I think calling a sea of photons nothing was justified in the context. Anyway, it now seems that physicists have trapped nothing in a bottle. And Julian Barnes is terrified of nothing. Strictly speaking, both to the physicist and the individual there is no such thing as nothing. The physicist has his photon sea and the individual does not live through death, he simply ceases to be a self. He cannot, therefore, be afraid of nothing since there is nothing to be afraid of. The self cannot possibly have any relation - of fear, love or anything else - with its non-existence. What the human self can have is an awareness that it will, in time, cease to exist. Existence itself will continue which makes the prospect of our own death seem either an injustice or, because we all suffer from a touch of solipsism, illogical. As a result, we long for deliverance from nothing. Modern physics has always sounded a bit like theology. (I seem to remember Dawkins attacking theology as a discipline about nothing; he did not realise that this was, in fact, high praise.) Now the physicists have got a handle on nothing and are hoping to get a Theory of Everything from the Large Hadron Collider, I suspect physics and theology are going to start sounding even more like the same thing. 'Nothing will come of nothing,' said Lear. How wrong he was.