Daldry’s 9/11

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

At the Soho Hotel, Stephen Daldry is in a state. He can’t smoke in here, he has a bad cold and he’s edgy about his new film. His conversation is, er, hesitant. “No, er, I don’t think so, no,” he says, and “But I, yeah, no.” “I don’t know” comes up a lot, as do baffled silences. One silence ends with the mysterious words “paid in eggs, you know, chickens”. After a while, I realise he is talking about what will happen if the euro collapses. But there are also sudden flashes of insight — “I think grief has always been my subject, one way or another” — although even they seem hedged and uncertain.

The problem is, I think, that his new film, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, is a bit of a poser and has already divided the critics. “Kitsch,” says Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, “an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face”. “A classy, well-ordered production,” says Brent Simon in Screen Daily, though the review is largely negative.

“People will feel passionately about the film,” Daldry says. “Some will really like it, some will really hate it. I doubt there will be a middle ground… That’s the nature of the beast, you’ve just got to take it.” Given that Daldry’s three previous films — Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader — each won him a best director Oscar nomination, this is nervy stuff. But this was pre-Oscar nominations. He could have relaxed: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was duly nominated in the best picture category.

The film is based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel about 9/11. A boy’s beloved father dies in one of the Twin Towers. The boy, Oskar Schell, is difficult and obsessive. He may have some form of autism. “Inevitably, we went through our own diagnosis,” Daldry says. “We put him on a spectrum. Let’s assume it is some kind of Asperger’s — that would fit this.”

After the “worst day”, as he keeps calling 9/11, Oskar sets out across New York with a backpack and a tambourine in pursuit of a clue he is convinced his father left him. He has a key and he wants to find the right lock. To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy. The first big thing you have to say about this film is that the ­performance of Thomas Horn as Oskar is extraordinary, not least because he was plucked out of show-business nowhere; he comes from a family of San Francisco doctors, not actors, and his one previous claim to fame is that he won the kids’ version of the American television gameshow Jeopardy!

“I do think it is one of the more astonishing performances by a young actor in the canon of cinema,” says Daldry, evidently relieved to have got away from the subject of critical voices. “He has this ability to access his emotional life — how, I have no idea.”

To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy.

It was also a relief not to be directing a professional American actor in the lead part. “Sometimes it’s much harder to have a conversation with American adult actors. They have this thing called the method, so, in their tradition, the director is not involved in the creation of the character. But ­Thomas came without any baggage. It means you don’t have to undo anything or relearn the language.”

It took a year to find Thomas, and the deal with Warner Bros was that if they couldn’t cast the boy, they wouldn’t make the film. Scott Rudin, the producer, finally spotted him on Jeopardy! He was 12 when he won and is 14 now, although Oskar is played as an 11-year-old.

“It was hard to explain to the ­family, who don’t really go to the cinema, that I would be taking over. That’s what happened. One of the parents was there the whole time — he should go back to school and go to Yale. I kept saying to the parents, ‘Let’s try not getting him any offers.’ ”

Horn leads a spectacular cast: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman. Even Max von Sydow appears to play, well, Max von Sydow, although this time he is mute. (It was enough, apparently, to persuade the Academy to give him a best ­supporting actor nomination.)

“Isn’t Max great?” Daldry says. “He always delivers. He’s spent a long time ­getting away from priests of one kind or another.”

Over it all, however, looms the spectre of the Twin Towers, a tricky subject for any director and a sacred one for New Yorkers. I tell him something Steven Spielberg said to me — that it would be years before the great 9/11 movie came out. “I always knew I wanted to make this film to come out after the 10th anniversary, but, whether it is too soon or too late, everybody will have to make their own personal choice,” he replies. “Some people will still feel very close to 9/11. Some do not. But there are thousands of stories to be told and many films to be made about it.”

When the planes hit, Daldry was in a Soho editing suite, finishing The Hours with Rudin. “We both went down and watched the TV. The strange thing was, we could get through to people in New York on the phone, but nobody in New York could. I remember feeling it was an out-of-control situation, that the world had changed into a dangerous and strange place. Suddenly, this was chaos.”

What is striking to anybody over the age of, say, 15, however, is how quickly it has all been ­normalised, if not forgotten. We live in a post-9/11 world, but, for some, the event is all but ignored. Daldry lives in New York and his two daughters go to school there. “You know 9/11 is not taught in American schools? My kids only know about it ­properly because of this movie. Loads of kids in New York don’t really know what happened, and why and what the con­sequences were. I was shocked, and other people agree with me — there’s a campaign to have it taught.”

Perhaps the point is that nobody would yet know how to teach it. In some ways — in Afghanistan, most obviously — it is still happening, and the story has no ending. The film is about the beginnings of this feeling of incomprehension that the event engenders. Oskar idolises his father, almost cutting his mother out of the family and, therefore, turning himself into an orphan in the process. The father’s death is beyond anything the boy can imagine. He creates his search project to give ­meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

“Grief is messy and difficult,” Daldry says. “It’s one of the more complicated and distressing of emotions, so it didn’t feel like it was a ­useful exercise or truthful to make this into anything other than what it was — a mother locked in her grief, a kid locked in his. Yes, they fight, and actually they’re having a really hard time together.”

He creates his search project to give ­meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

There is a tension here between this “small” private grief and the larger public grief surrounding the event itself. It echoes the tension in Daldry’s previous film, The Reader, in which one man’s search for meaning in the Holocaust comes up against the big, public, brute fact of the thing itself. The seeker, played by Ralph Fiennes, is eventually told to seek his ­therapy in art and literature, because nothing comes out of the concentration camps. I won’t tell you how Oskar finds peace, but keep your eyes on the answering machine.

I can tell you that it involves something Oskar did not do, and that brings out two rare autobiographical asides from Daldry. He was 14, and his father was dying of ­cancer. One day, his mother said they really had to go to the hospital: “I decided I didn’t want to go, I wanted to watch TV, and he died. That stays with you, that mistake.”

Then there was the matter of the empty coffin. There is no body in Oskar’s father’s coffin — it had not been found — so, to the boy, the funeral service seems meaningless. Again, there is a parallel. “I remember my father having a massive autopsy. Somebody said at the funeral that there was only a bit of my dad in there, the rest was sandbags. So the empty coffin thing chimed with me.”

The film, you will gather, is played at a high emotional level. It has as many tear-jerking moments as plot twists. “I find the film quite upsetting. It sort of gets to its level, and it stays there in terms of its intensity. It has a long start, then it settles into its level. Perhaps there’s too much emotion, so some people will respond to that and some people won’t. That’s all you know.”

Both the emotion and Oskar’s way of seeing the world are further intensified by the way it is filmed. Daldry plays around with depth of field and extreme focus on certain things. Also, it is shot using a system Daldry calls “Alexa raw”. He says it is the first time this has been used in a movie. The result is very high definition and very sharp colours. When the film started, I thought the visual quality was an attempt to suggest a dream, but it is actually intended to capture something of Oskar’s autistic understanding of things. If Daldry has his way, it will also drive yet another nail into the coffin of 3-D.

“It’s a raw digital format that gives you a level of saturation that is so much more vibrant. I love it — it pulls me closer to the people. There was an ability to access the human face that felt new to me. It is so much more interesting than 3-D — that gives me a headache.”

Daldry, like the film, is a strange package. He always gives the impression of not quite knowing what he is doing or what he has done. At the same time, his appearance (tautly smart) and his voice (Jeremy Irons-ish) contradict the mental dishevelment he expresses. I felt the same discontinuity when I spoke to him about The Reader. This time, I guess it’s worse, because he really doesn’t know what he’s done with EL&IC.

It missed out at the Golden Globes, and the signs for the Oscars are not good. The problem is, as everybody says, the number of plot twists. If you know there is a twist round every corner — and there is — then you stop caring and, more to the point, your tears aren’t jerked. The moment we wrap, Daldry rushes outside to have a fag, still talking about the way some people will like it and some will hate it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”

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Richard Sennett’s Togetherness

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

By Richard Sennett

(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 324pp £25)

Human interactions are not necessarily well served by human inventions. Take the ‘call tree’, the telephone answering device that makes you choose a series of options so that the company ‘may better direct your calls’. People hate these because they detect the exploitation inherent in the transference of a company’s inefficiency to its customers. But there it is, almost daily, making us all miserable. What the machine is doing is simplifying you into a series of attributes which it has been programmed to understand; it is making you ‘machine readable’. Ideally, it would like you to be a machine. Humans are just too infuriatingly complex.

That is my example, but, in its own mundane, consumerist way, it illustrates the thesis of Richard Sennett’s book: that ‘our emotional and cognitive capacities are erratically realized in modern society’. Building on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, he argues that ‘people’s capacities for cooperation are far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be’.

The starting point for any such argument is a refutation of the highly individualistic or atomised view of human nature that dominated economic and social thinking until, approximately, the Eighties and still persists among a few economic fundamentalists. In this, the individual was considered as a snooker ball-like unit simply bouncing off other balls. This was always implausible and, for Sennett, was replaced by the much more coherent view advanced by, among others, the psychologist Erik Erikson, that it is only through interactions with others that individuality emerges. We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

Thus cooperation is the only way we can be human at all, and the suppression of cooperation – which is what the call tree does so ruthlessly – is the suppression of humanity. Together is a grand tour around the historical and cultural implications of this idea. Sennett starts at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900 and takes us, via evolutionary theory, religion, inequality, the quandaries of the Left and little oddities like his musical adventures with the editor of The Guardian, to his conclusion that ‘we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions’.

This is, you will gather, a somewhat rambling book and Sennett’s prose is far from focused. His conclusion is effectively the same as his introduction, though I don’t condemn him for this because the problem he is addressing is too fundamental to be solved by argument, advice or policy. It involves a reversal of the ‘age of brutal simplifiers’, as Jacob Burckhardt characterised the modern era.

We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

The problem is that we are being ‘de-skilled’ when it comes to cooperation. Such skills are embedded in rituals and forms of discourse. The standard radio or TV debate on a topical issue involves representatives of the two opposing points of view arguing with each other in terms that cannot possibly be resolved. The format pushes them to extremes. Radio phone-ins are worse as their sole purpose seems to be to push each new caller to say something more stupid than the last. This is all entertaining but it is predicated on the idea that cooperation is impossible and, as far as the broadcaster is concerned, undesirable.

For Sennett the way out of this impasse is ‘dialogic cooperation’ which ‘entails a special kind of openness, one which enlists empathy rather than sympathy in its service’. In this form of conversation, listening is as important as speaking, because only by listening can you understand and empathise with the opposing point of view and thereby gain perspective on your own position.

Sennett says ‘dialogic cooperation’ is the ‘Holy Grail’, implying that it is out of reach. This is understandable. Individualism within the context of the free market has, since the Seventies, been the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy with which the Left had to come to terms because, until the crash of 2008, it seemed to be making us richer and to have defeated competing systems. But the Left has failed to respond coherently to the crash and the Right has quietly arranged for the bankers to go back to business as usual, so even that cataclysm has failed to lead us back to the dialogic Grail.

The answer is, as Sennett rightly says, to relocate the concept of the competitive free market within the cooperative human world. Much neo-liberal rhetoric seemed to treat the market as some kind of natural system with which we tamper at our peril. This attitude seems to have been supported by some dubious Darwinian rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. In fact, all markets are very intricate human creations, products of cooperation rather than competition. It is this kind of insight that may inspire new thinking on the Left – though perhaps not in Ed Miliband.

On the Right, anxieties about the impact of unbridled capitalism have tended to circle around the concept of community, an idea which seems to have sprung from Robert Nisbet’s book of 1953, The Quest for Community, and to have filtered all the way down to David Cameron’s Big Society and, in a rather different way, to the Tea Party in America. These are rather specialised and fragile responses to the problems of urbanised and polyglot societies. Of course, we want communities – they are nice things – but, in a big city, a degree of what Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’ towards others may be safer.

It is hard to summarise the scope and erudition in these pages, or fully capture the seriousness of Sennett’s intent, which is, essentially, to find a way out of the quandaries – particularly for the Left – of the post-Cold War world. He does not in the end find a way but he does find an image, that of Montaigne’s cat. When the great thinker played with his pet, he wondered if it was not, in reality, playing with him. Others are opaque, cooperation is difficult. But the cat and the man do play because both of them want to and that, in the end, ought to be the benign order of things.

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4Chan and Anonymous

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Epic Win for Anonymous by Cole Stryker

On July 5, 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner showing a black dog sitting at a computer screen talking to a white dog with black spots sitting on the floor. “On the internet,” says the black dog, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms. Many find this alarming, even dangerous. Cole Stryker seems to disagree. “I wrote this book,” he states, “because I wanted to set the record straight. ­Namelessness matters. Freedom matters.”

The subject of Epic Win for Anonymous, the website 4Chan.org, is certainly nameless and, in one sense, free. Basically it is an image-upload site with comment threads. It has numerous categories ranging from Japanese manga to toys and fashion. It was founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole, a 15-year-old student hiding behind the pseudonym “moot”. His real identity was exposed by The Wall Street Journal in 2008; he has now gone on to launch a new website called Canvas.

Originally, 4Chan was all about Japanese anime. Now it is about everything and it has about 10.2m visitors a month and hundreds of thousands of new posts a day. It changes all the time but a quick check on the category known as “random” — usually the most hair-raising — reveals a boy asking for advice about what to do when his sister offers him cannabis, a lot of teenage girls in states of undress moaning about being dumped, speculation about why Stephen Hawking is confined to a wheelchair if he is so smart, assorted gay shots featuring freakish penises and…well, this is a family newspaper.

Anonymity is a defining feature of the internet; people routinely hide behind pseudonyms.

These things come and go because nothing is saved, the median life of a ­comment thread being just under four minutes. If you have a desperately short attention span, 4Chan is for you.

Why should this matter? In part, because it has become one of the most effective generators of internet “memes”, ideas that spread rapidly. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins, who speculated that memes could be cultural units that behaved somewhat like genes, sustaining and replicating themselves, using human minds as their medium. A typical internet meme has been “lolcats”, cute pictures of cats with speech bubbles that make them speak in a curious pidgin English.

Stryker’s first contact with the site was in 2006 when he was sent a link to an anime character “doing something unspeakable involving at least three bodily fluids”. Further study led him to conclude that this was “the most fascinating place on the internet”.

Actually, the most fascinating place on the internet is the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, but I can see what Stryker means, in the sense that 4Chan is the most direct expression of what is utterly novel about the internet. Never before have we been able to hide behind a mask of anonymity and expose our lowest, our most intimate concerns before an audience that may include the entire world.

Stylistically, this generates a kind of vast in-joke. Regulars on 4Chan seem to despise newcomers and anybody who is not in on the specialised language — “newfags”, they call them, as opposed to “oldfags”. “Fags” is a frequently used suffix which seems to have become detached from its American role as an offensive term for gays. Similarly “nigger” seems to be okay on the site. Indeed, the only thing that seems to be positively discouraged — and suppressed — is child pornography.

The in-joke is, of course, increasingly an out-joke because virtually everybody now gets the references. But things become much more serious when we consider one of 4Chan’s offspring — the hacker group Anonymous, which shares with WikiLeaks the determination to subvert and sabotage in the name of absolute freedom of information. It was born on 4Chan in 2003 as an attempt to become a global, anarchic network.

Anonymous has been spectacularly successful, notably in defending Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, by bringing down Mastercard and Visa when they refused to process payments to his site. Most recently they have hacked into the Nigerian government’s computers in support of the fuel-price protesters and this month they attacked the US Department of Justice in retaliation for the shutting down of the file-sharing site Megaupload.

A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information

In this form, internet anonymity becomes a global, political and economic force. You may sympathise with some of Anonymous’s goals, but do not forget they are entirely unaccountable. They subscribe to an extreme anarchic ideology, not to anything resembling democracy. They are cyber-utopians, a creed whose shortcomings became most vividly apparent in the character of Assange. A fabulously vain control freak, he seems to see himself as a lone hero whose privacies are uniquely excluded from the free flow of information. He can steal your privacy but you can’t steal his. As ever, utopianism crashes into the brick wall of human personality and ambition.

And that is the point. For all Stryker’s strained justifications, 4Chan is a prison that is only called free. Real freedom is a way of restraining the worst excesses of human nature so that we may, indeed, be free to live, love and die in as much peace as we can manage.

But, abominably written though it is, Epic Win for Anonymous has, nonetheless, a certain anthropological interest, which is a smart way of saying if you really want to know about this stuff, it’s all pretty much here. But be warned, there’s nothing pretty about unfettered human nature.

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Geoff Dyer: The Hatchet Man

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

In his occasional column in The New York Times, Geoff Dyer trashed Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. Having annihilated all the book’s claims on our attention, he concluded: “It isn’t terrible, it is just so… average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!”

Calling the work of one of our grandees of letters “average” is, of course, much more likely to get under the skin than calling him, for example, “crap”; it suggests the trashing is considered, rather than intemperate. And Dyer does seem to have thought about Barnes before. “It is not,” he admits, “the first time I have dissed him.”

Perhaps detecting a real spat, the judges of the new Hatchet Job of the Year award have shortlisted Dyer for the prize. So how does he feel about it now? He first emits a soft “Hmmmm…”. (He does that a lot.) “Well, since that thing came out, I’ve had so many emails from people saying, ‘God, I felt exactly the same.’ But I suspect Barnes is getting emails from ­people saying, ‘What an ignorant tosser that Dyer is.’”

Ignorant? No. Tosser? No. One of our most unusual and gifted writers? Yes. Dyer cannot be categorised, but here he is, sitting across from me in his immaculate flat off Ladbroke Grove, in west London, so I must try. Let’s start with that word “immaculate”.

“Nice socks,” he says to me as I enter his kitchen. They are nice — Richard James, last Christmas but one — but they are not often remarked on, because I am usually wearing shoes. Shoes are banned in the Dyer flat, which is, as a result, immaculate: flawless wooden floors, the right modern furniture, a book-lined study with just enough mess to suggest hard work. The only real mess is just by the front door, where there is a pile of shoes.

Dyer does seem to have thought about Barnes before. “It is not,” he admits, “the first time I have dissed him.”

Then there is the man himself, a walking rebuke to every man over 50. He is 53, tall, lean, fit and, as the writer Will Self has remarked, “elegant”. He could be cast in a television ad for Polo Ralph Lauren. The voice is warm and actorish, so the ad could also be on radio, and he even gives me camomile tea, as if I look in need of a detox, which, next to him, I do. That he is one of our finest essayists and funniest novelists is just the last straw.

Anyway, he plays tennis — wouldn’t you know it? — and started having a few games with Jamie Byng, the long-haired, ­excitable boss of his new publisher, Canongate. Dyer said he would like to write a book on ­tennis, and Byng became excited. “He said, ‘Oh, great, publisher’s dream, Andy Murray’s going to win Wimbledon’, and so on. Then I realised I didn’t want to do it. It was just awful, terrible.” Instead, unknown to the publisher, he wrote a book on the 1979 Russian film Stalker. “I ­happened to see Stalker again, and I wrote a tiny thing about it for The Guardian — and, frustratingly, realised I had a lot more to say. I started bunking off from the tennis book to summarise the film. Then I found a tone I really liked. It’s all about tone for me — having a tone, finding a tone. No tone, misery. After I get the tone, fun.”

At some point, he had to break this huge change of direction to Canongate. “They kept calling me to ask how it was going, and I kept saying it was going well. Then came the moment I had to say it was on Stalker, and they said, ‘Didn’t we say tennis? Well, we weren’t aware that our winter 2012 list was crying out for a book on this film that nobody will have seen, but now it seems there is a little space for it.’ ”

Stalker is by Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 — the Shakespeare of cinema, maker of three of the greatest films ever created, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror and Stalker. To describe these films as influential would be a wild understatement. Directors as different as Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick are soaked in Tarkovsky, and, since Malick’s most Tarkovskian film, The Tree of Life, more or less determined the style of a current television ad, you could say that Tarkovsky influenced Thomson Holidays. He invented a new way of seeing things — as a psycho­logically and spiritually intense meditation on time, every shot demanding the closest possible attention. Attending closely to the movie is exactly what Dyer does in Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.

Stalker is a religious film — Tarkovsky was a full-on Russian Orthodox believer — based on a sci-fi story about an enchanted zone where aliens may once have landed. But the movie strips out the sci-fi trappings to leave a tense, agonised and doubt-laden voyage through a wrecked industrial landscape to the Zone, a place of possible salvation, though it may only be the seeing eye of the camera that is saved. The Zone is in colour; the rest of the film is in black-and-white. But this is not ordinary monochrome. Tarkovsky shot the film in colour, then ­processed the film as black-and-white, giving it a hard, contrasty, dramatic look.

Dyer does not share the movie’s religiosity, but, as he says, “even Richard Dawkins” would be moved by the sensational and explicitly religious conclusion. His book is simply a record of watching the film; almost every shot is covered. It is not a critique or analysis so much as a reaction.

“I’d seen it so many times, and its power never seemed to diminish, so there is obviously something major going on in there. And it lent itself so well to summary, really, partly because I liked the absurdity of sum­ma­rising a film you could summarise so simply. But also, the literal journey lends itself to these semi­metaphysical digressions that I have a fondness for. I’m weak at plots — I can’t think of plots at all as a novelist. That’s always hampered me. I’ve always felt quite happy doing the little essayist things, and with this film, I could do both simultaneously because I had the plot.”

Dyer does not share the movie’s religiosity, but, as he says, “even Richard Dawkins” would be moved by the sensational and explicitly religious conclusion.

The book is also startlingly autobiographical. The Room in the movie is supposedly where you attain your deepest desire, which is, Dyer says, sort of the same as one’s greatest regret. “If so,” he writes, “then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once.”One of my great desires has been not to have children. There’s just no aspect of the package that appeals to me

If this seems an almost blasphemous reaction to one of the great works of art of our time, then that is the point. It is Dyer’s honest reaction, and that, in a way, becomes Everyman’s reaction. “Paradoxically, the contingencies of my experience and the vagaries of my own nature give that book a universal quality.”

He doesn’t treat Tarkovsky as a kind of “Tolstoyevskian” god, as many did, but he does regard the book as a fan letter: one, he admits, that the great man may not have liked.

This may sound odd, but then everything Dyer writes is a bit odd. He is a genre-jumper, pri­marily because he doesn’t believe in genres. He says, for example, that his ostensibly nonfiction book on photography, The Ongoing Moment (superb), “was much more of a novel than many of the books eligible for tthe Booker prize that year”. And he dislikes the typical nonfiction book that ­publishers love.

“The most successful non­fiction books tend to be those that can be reduced to a review-style summary or, ideally, just to the title — Blink or The Tipping Point. I like nonfiction books that are non-reducible to an argument, that can be experienced as some kind of work of art.”

This maverick was the only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady in Cheltenham. He acquired the knack of passing exams and won a scholarship to Oxford to read English. After that, his big ambition was to go on the dole. This was the late 1970s, a time when the dole financed bohemia.

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I left university — I wanted to sign on the dole. The dole supported a generation of writers, artists, dancers, whatever. If you had some sort of vague desire to be a writer, it wasn’t like now — now, if you want to be an artist, then it’s Tracey Emin, I want the money now and I’ve got my hustle. Then, if you had any artistic ambition, it tended to overlap with the idea of dropping out.”

His influences at the time were very much those of the dropout, rather than the bestseller. He mentions Raymond Williams, a rather fusty old leftie, and the French philosopher Michel Foucault, both men who, for me, had a talent for being wrong about everything — but then, Dyer had a Marxist phase, and I didn’t. More promisingly, his real hero, his true mentor, was the art critic and thinker John Berger: “What a great man! Easily the greatest ­person I have ever met.” The old theorists have dropped away, but Berger has stayed with him. Zona is, in fact, a Bergeresque exercise in the close study of a work of art.

Apart from the dole, Dyer has only ever made a living out of writing — fiction and nonfiction, as well as a steady stream of essays. He wins prizes, he is fêted — although not as much as he deserves — and he has left ­bohemia for this immaculate flat. He is married to Rebecca Wilson, director of the Saatchi Gallery. They have no children. Dyer is very much against the idea, but he can’t fully explain why. He emits one of his “hmmm”s.

“One of my great desires has been not to have children. There’s just no aspect of the package that appeals to me — perhaps it’s because I was an only child, but I don’t know exactly why. It’s as if you asked me why I have never had sex with a man. Well, I’ve never wanted to.”

Now he’s writing a short book about the two weeks he spent on an American aircraft carrier, but he is eager to get onto the next thing, a project he won’t reveal. Personally, I hope it’s a book on Where Eagles Dare, the daft second world war shoot-’em-up ­starring Richard Burton, and, weirdly, the only film Dyer says he would do in the way he did Stalker, again bringing the contingencies of his experience and the vagaries of his nature to bear on the world. But it’s time to go. My feet are freezing — he should ­provide slippers if he’s making people take off their shoes.

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The Prince and the Canaletto

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Having fled the unpleasantness known as the war of the Austrian succession, Ferdinand Philip, 6th Prince Lobkowicz, found himself in London in 1748. He was supposedly buying horses, but, being handsome, 24 years old and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, he also pursued various women, one of whom, the wife of the Venetian ambassador, happened to know a rather gifted painter. Impressed by a couple of giant views of the Thames, the prince bought both and shipped them from the painter’s studio back home to Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), where, bar a couple of brief interruptions, they have remained ever since. The artist’s name was Canaletto, and they are two of the greatest paintings of London ever made.

To mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, one of those paintings is to be seen in the capital for the first time, as the star of a show called Royal River, at the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich. You had better get used to this painting — you are going to see a lot of it in 2012.

We are looking eastward from the South Bank. St Paul’s floats serenely over the huddled red-brown roofscape that slopes down to the muddy banks of the river. Beyond, a sweep of church spires leads down to London Bridge. Beneath a benign sky, the river is packed with the barges of the lord mayor and the Livery Companies heading upstream towards Westminster. Celebratory guns are being fired and hundreds of small boats have joined the pageant. It is a party, a special day, but it is also timeless, one of the most perfect representations of both grand ceremonial and ordinary life in the mid-18th century.

For the moment, the painting hangs in a room in the Lobkowicz Palace, in Prague. On the opposing wall is the other London painting by Canaletto, a view of the Thames looking eastward from Lambeth Palace, showing the first Westminster Bridge. This has been to London as part of an exhibition in the 1990s, at the Royal Academy, but its partner has only ever been as far as a salt mine in Austria. Stolen by the Nazis, it was rediscovered by American soldiers and returned to Prague.

Then, in 1948, it being the 20th century, it was stolen by the communists, then, finally, returned to the hands of an unassuming American real-estate agent called William Lobkowicz. This is the man who now sits before me, beneath a stern portrait of his great-grandfather Ferdinand Zdenko, the ancient family’s 10th and last prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

“He was,” says Lobkowicz, gesturing at the dark and gory pictures that fill the rest of the room, “very fond of hunting.”

Lobkowicz is 50, tall, charming, beautifully dressed and elegantly balding: everything a central European prince should be, except that his accent is American, and his manner, as well as a certain nervousness in the eyes, betrays his modest upbringing in Massachusetts. His wife, Alexandra, is with us. She was expecting to be a teacher, but finds herself in charge of the art collection of one of the great families of Europe.

Lobkowicz, meanwhile, dreamt of the past, the paintings and the vast Bohemian estates, but never expected to reclaim them. “We were brought up on the fundamental principle,” he says, “that three things cannot be taken away from you — your family, your religion and your education. It was drilled into us that nobody could ever take those, so we didn’t have big ideas about restitution. It wasn’t the driving force.”

The Lobkowicz family line emerged in the 14th century, but did not come into its own until 1620, during the Thirty Years War. At the battle of White Mountain, just outside Prague, the Catholics defeated the Protestants and the family reaped the rewards in land and property. For the next three centuries, they remained one of the rich ruling families of central Europe.

Then, after the first world war, their aristocratic titles were abolished and the almost absurdly romantic figure of Max Lobkowicz, William’s grandfather, appeared on the scene. He was a politician, a diplomat and a believer in Czech democracy, to the point where he almost failed to see the threat from the Nazis. In the event, an overheard conversation among German soldiers on a train in March 1939 warned the family of the imminent invasion, and they fled Prague the night before the Panzer divisions rolled in. They were all on Hitler’s blacklist, and they left behind 13 castles, assorted palaces, several businesses — and their priceless archive and art collection.

In 1948, the communists took charge and, in that offhand way they had, executed the senior figures looking after the collection: two were tossed from a high building, something of a tradition in this city. Max was back in Prague, and found he could not get out. The apparatchiks may have let him live, but they didn’t want him making trouble abroad. In London, his wife, Gillian Somerville, feigned terminal illness and was visited by communist diplomats, who confirmed she was dying. Max was allowed out for a weekend to visit her. In a moment precisely reminiscent of the final scene in Casablanca, an order to stop him at the airport was deliberately ignored and, once again, romantic Max was free.

William Lobkowicz was born in 1961 and brought up modestly among the fragments of grand European families in Massachusetts. They received charitable assistance, but his father, Martin, also sold paintbrushes and knives door to door. He went to Harvard, feverishly studying European history and learning German, then into real estate, while nursing dreams of becoming an opera singer. Then, one day in 1989, he watched the television in wonder as East German refugees, suddenly freed, occupied the West German embassy in Prague, a former Lobkowicz palace.

“There were thousands of them there, and I thought, ‘This is it. The whole world’s watching this.’ My whole life had been a preparation for this, but I didn’t know what. It was one of those moments. I had no idea, no business plan, no clue. I was single, but I knew my way around.”

Communism had crumbled; the Bohemians in exile scented freedom and home. Lobkowicz was the youngest child, but he was the freest of family and work commitments, and the most enthusiastic about family history. So he became the returning “prince”, the face of the Lobkowicz restoration. He moved to Prague, engaged a lawyer, learnt Czech, married Alexandra in 1992 and embarked on a complicated and financially hair-raising scheme. He would, for example, buy one castle, mortgage it, then buy the next.

“We got 10 castles back out of 13. Three were basically ruins, with just two walls standing. The main castles were intact, in various states of disrepair — there was tens of millions of dollars of damage. There was the brewery, the winery, mineral water, some forests, land and tens of thousands of objects. The castles were filled with stuff.”

The process inspired death threats, hate mail and even a large image of a decomposing body, from people who felt he had no right, but Lobkowicz ploughed on. He financed the project by selling off 85% of what he reclaimed, leaving the family with three castles and the collection. The palace where we are sitting was returned in 2003 after 12 years of legal battles. Lobkowicz, Alexandra and their children live in a rented flat in Prague. “It’s not good to bring up children in a castle,” Alexandra says.

‘We got 10 castles back out of 13. Three were basically ruins, with just two walls standing.’

Also, cash is hard to find, the government gives almost nothing and, as a result, the Lobkowiczs are constantly fundraising to support the collections. One reason for this is that they cannot sell works of art. Though the collection includes the Canalettos, a superb Bruegel, a Cranach, a Rubens and so on, it is, in cash terms, valueless. The Czechs, having suffered one too many expropriations, will not allow works of art to be sold abroad, and there is no Czech market in old masters. They are even sticky about loans such as the current one to the National Maritime Museum. It was only through the bullish interventions of Lord Sterling, chairman of the museum, and the glamour of the diamond jubilee that the authorities were persuaded.

In anything other than cash terms, the collection’s value is literally inestimable, and not just because of the paintings. The family were great patrons of music and own original scores by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven — the ones on show provide the museum’s most shiver-inducing moments. But there is also 1.5km of shelving housing the unexplored archives. Lobkowicz has found unknown letters of Beethoven; nobody knows what else might be in there.

For us now, however, the whole story — a tale of coming home — is symbolised by the return of the Canaletto to London, 264 years after it was bought as a souvenir by the rakish Ferdinand Philip. The historian David Starkey, who is a guest curator of the Royal River exhibition, points out that this return is not just of the painting, but also of the artist, because, in painting London, he was painting his home city, Venice.

“Before the Victorians built the Embankment, the Thames was a working river. The reason the Canaletto is so wonderful is that London worked in exactly the same way that Venice does. The Thames was our Grand Canal.”

Starkey also points out that royal river processions in London have been associated with queens since 1487, when Henry VII decided to give his wife, Elizabeth of York, a river pageant. Henry VIII continued this tradition, notably with Anne Boleyn, and the Catholic wives of the Stuarts would not accept Protestant rites on land, so were awarded grand parades on water.

The real story, though, is that of Bohemia, of the fatal geography that placed it, in the 20th century, between the two bloodiest ideologies ever dreamt up by humans. Millions died in the “bloodlands” that lay west of Moscow and east of Berlin. Ancient families were expropriated and torn apart, but one is now reconstituting itself around the unlikely form of a diffident real-estate agent from Massachusetts.

“How many families,” Lobkowicz asks, “have made it through a couple of world wars and the communists, and are still alive and kicking, and are trying to tell a story?

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Chad Harbach and the Yips

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

In 1972, a baseball great, Steve Blass, pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, suffered a complete collapse of his game. Having, in 1971, destroyed the Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series, he suddenly became incapable of throwing a strike. He tried specialised training, meditation, hypnosis, even optometry; but there was, in the end, no cure for what was to become known in baseball circles as Steve Blass disease.

In golf, cricket, basketball and American football, it is called the yips; and in darts, with the literalism one would expect, it is called dartitis. But it is all the same thing — a sudden intrusion of paralysing self-consciousness into a process that years of training ought to have made as thoughtless, as automatic, as riding a bike. Thought destroys effective action: it’s a good subject for a novel.

And here it is: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach — the story of Henry Skrimshander, a kid on the way to being one of the great shortstops (specialised infielders) in baseball when he is struck down by a nasty case of Steve Blass. His perfect record becomes a distant memory while, all around him, his team, friends and teachers watch in dismay and struggle with the vicissitudes and sufferings of their own lives.

“The very first germ of the book,” says Harbach, “was the psychological crisis that befalls Henry, something that has happened to professional baseball players, and I just found it to be a really kind of terrifying and awe-inspiring thing.

“In America, we are incredibly devoted to our athletes, we watch them with great fervour, but we are not used to any actual emotion or vulnerability. I found this was a really rich topic for fiction.”

It was indeed. The Art of Fielding arrives in book shops and on ereaders in Britain bearing a weight of hype and expectation that would give Leo Tolstoy the yips. Sold in America for $650,000 (£420,000), it picked up good-to-rave reviews and, already, the Hollywood producer Scott Rudin is working on the HBO television series. Harbach has been the subject of a giant profile in Vanity Fair magazine, and VF’s editor, Graydon Carter, along with the profile writer — an old friend of Harbach — Keith Gessen, has produced an ebook, How a Book Is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding, about, well, the making of The Art of Fielding.

At which point, normal professional protocol demands that I should report that this is all a load of glossy, breathless nonsense. But it isn’t. The Art of Fielding is a fast — even at 512 pages — and fabulous tale of male bonding, the pursuit of perfection, gay and straight romance, campus life and, of course, baseball.

Strangely, this is a combination that, having worked on the book for 10 years, Harbach thought might make it unsaleable.

The novel arrives in this country bearing a weight of hype and expectation that would give Leo Tolstoy the yips

“You could point to a lot of reasons why people would not want to publish this book. On the one hand, it’s all about sports, and sports books don’t sell. On the other hand, it has this gay element and all the people who might read it as a sports book would not read it because of this gay thing. And it’s a campus novel, which is a totally burnt-out and dead form. I knew it was well written and not terribly difficult to read, but it was not clear that it would be commercially viable.”

The Art of Fielding is also a book within a book. It is the title of a work in which the fictional shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez delivers Zen-ish baseball wisdom: “The shortstop is a source of stillness at the centre of the defence. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.”

The book is Henry’s bible. Also fictional is Westish, the Midwestern college on the shore of Lake Michigan where Henry studies and over which broods a statue of Herman Melville. It is in tribute to Moby Dick, Melville’s masterpiece, that the Westish baseball team is called the Harpooners.

What is striking is the way Harbach both uses and avoids his own story. He is 35 and was born and brought up in the Midwest — Racine, Wisconsin, to be precise — but he went to college at Harvard. He says he simply “transported” the Harvard sports cult to Lake Michigan. He also played shortstop at school, but his enthusiasm waned as he sank back into his childhood habit of consuming large numbers of novels.

“I was a precocious reader as a kid: I read all sorts of things. In Wisconsin, there’s not much intellectual activity going on anywhere. There was something Jonathan Franzen said about being a kid growing up in the Midwest: there’s a particular feeling of companionship you get from reading novels that you don’t get anywhere else.”

The name of Franzen — fashionable and successful author of The Corrections and Freedom — rings out like a bell in the conversation. Harbach is the latest recruit to a literary movement that includes both Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace. It is a movement that owes more to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving than it does to the great presiding East Coast trio of Bellow, Updike and Roth. It even has a magazine, n+1, which, like all young literary magazines, is an attempt to overthrow the old guys. Keith Gessen summarised the programme as: “It is time to say what you mean.” Harbach was a co-founder and still works there.

“Partly, we were very exercised about some things in the political world at that time, particularly the war in Iraq. Many American liberals had come out in support of the invasion and we were very upset about that. And American party politics was written about in a very narrow way, which we found unspeakably boring. On the more literary side, everything was oddly conservative and backward-looking: people were writing appreciations of writers who had been dead for 75 years; they were sort of unattainable heroes. We wanted to write about the contemporary scene in a way we didn’t feel was happening.”

Harbach had moved back to Wisconsin after Harvard and took on a number of small jobs while trying to write. After that, it was back to Boston and then New York, by which time he had started The Art of Fielding. But it was to take him 10 years to complete. Why so long?

“I had a job the whole time and I was writing the book in odd hours; then we started n+1 in 2004. I needed to pay the rent, and the magazine did much better than we expected. I didn’t have time to write for months on end. I can only really write fiction when I am doing it every single day. It’s like getting into a sub­marine: you have to slowly, slowly sink down, then you can finally move forward a bit.”

(Actually, it is pretty obvious why it took so long. I have never interviewed anybody who so assiduously edited his own sentences as he spoke, then made matters worse by interjecting “you know” repeatedly into the finished products. Ten years was probably his idea of dashing it off.)

He didn’t want the book to be all about baseball but, to foreign readers, it will certainly be about the American education system’s bizarre obsession with sport. This is, to us, I explain to Harbach, deeply exotic.

“It is a huge industry and there is a humongus amount of resources devoted to it. I’m sure it’s totally insane. Of course, one of the reasons why I set the book at a little liberal-arts school is because I enjoy the fact that even though these players are very intensely engaged with what they are doing, the outside world doesn’t care much. This is not like big-time American college football — it’s a little bit strange how devoted to it they are, but also it’s an act of devotion on their part.”

From the beginning, he had his cast of characters circling around the primal event of Henry’s attack of Steve Blass. They — and, often, their very odd names — are what first strike you. Primarily, there is the very moving figure of the Westish president, Guert Affenlight, whose crush on the black student Owen, Henry’s roommate, is the second big story in the book. Some critics have objected to the fact that none of Harbach’s characters are actually bad — they all seem pretty nice people.

Actually, it is pretty obvious why it took so long. I have never interviewed anybody who so assiduously edited his own sentences as he spoke

“Well, that’s not how I see the world in its entirety, but I do think it’s how most people see their immediate surroundings most of the time. This group of people I constructed, they’re all really tightly engaged with one another; and oftentimes, you don’t think of the people closest to you as evil, but you and the people closest to you do manage to f*** one another up. I think I am reacting to the way these characters see one another. It’s oftentimes not a question of good and evil.”

Back in New York, all around him his contemporaries were being published while he still worked away at his big novel. Finally, in 2009, he started sending it to agents. Astoundingly, they all rejected it. Then it reached Chris Parris-Lamb, a young agent who had been on the verge of abandoning the business in despair. He read it quickly and wrote to Harbach: “Books like The Art of Fielding, and writers of your calibre, don’t come around very often; in the final reckoning, agents are ultimately only as good as the books they represent and you’re giving someone a shot here to be the best.” The ensuing auction climaxed with Little, Brown’s bid of $650,000 and also with, I imagine, agonies of self-loathing among the rejecting agents.

Anyway, now you are going to have to read it, both as a phenomenon and as a very good book. Also, if you have ever had the yips — and who hasn’t? — you will be pleased to discover it is curable. Sort of.

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Netflix’s Elephants

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

A nervously half-smiling, slightly nerdy-looking guy in an anorak is standing in front of some elephants at San Diego Zoo.

“The cool thing about these guys,” he says, “is that they have really, really, really long, er, trunks and that’s cool.”

This nineteen second video was uploaded to the internet on 23rd April, 2005. It has since been watched 6 million times. The guy in the anorak is Jawed Karim, one of the three co-founders of YouTube, and his masterpiece, Me at the Zoo, was the first video on a site which now contains uncountable billions of others, uploaded at the rate of 24 hours of footage every minute.

But ignore the big numbers. What matters about YouTube is that it works, it delivers smooth content almost immediately. You don’t have to wait for anything to download because the content ‘streams’ to your computer so you can watch the bits that make up the picture as they arrive. This has some implications – for example, the imminent death of the DVD and, soon afterwards, the precipitous decline of broadcast TV.

And so here I am sitting on a sofa in a bland, pseudo-Hispanic office block in Los Gatos – ‘The Cats’ – California, a Silicon Valley town where Bentleys. Aston Martins and Lamborghinis are readily available in showrooms on Main Street.  Sitting opposite me is a bouncy, bearded, very fit-looking 51-year-old with one of those reversible American names – Reed Hastings.

This has some implications – for example, the imminent death of the DVD and, soon afterwards, the precipitous decline of broadcast TV.

“The really big moment,” he is saying, “was the launch of YouTube, that was the first time you could click and watch and it was this magical experience even though the video quality was poor and the content was, you know, the cat on the skateboard… It was like a better version of television because you could click and watch and it was almost instant.”

Hastings is the Netflix CEO. He co-founded the company as a DVD by mail service – you choose the film you want and the disc is delivered, with luck, the next day. He was inspired to do this by a moment of old tech marital anxiety. He had rented some VHS cassettes – remember them? -  and forgotten to return them.

“I had gotten this bad late fee of $40 and I remember being too embarrassed to tell my wife.”

There were no late fees with Netflix, you only got a new disc when you returned the old one. But he didn’t expect DVDs to last much longer than VHS tapes. He knew home entertainment would soon switch to the internet – which is why he called his company Netflix and not DVDs by Mail. Now, thanks to that YouTube moment, Hastings sees a near future in which half of our TV viewing comes from the internet, none from hardware like DVDs and the remainder from broadcasting of various kinds – satellite, terrestrial etc..

Netflix had a rocky start. It didn’t turn profitable until 2002 by which time it had burned $100 million of venture capital. Then it fell into a bloody DVD by mail war with Blockbuster which, finally in 2007, it won. Ironically, it was also in 2007 that Netflix launched the technology that will toss DVDs by mail into the sepia-tinted memory hole occupied by typewriters and telephones with dials  – streaming.

Now the company has over 20 million subscribers in the US and has started to go international with launches in Canada and Latin America – or ‘Lat Am’ as they call it in Los Gatos. In a few weeks it will launch in Britain as an all streaming, no DVD by post, service. This means that for a flat, monthly fee – probably very low, it’s $8 in America – you will get unlimited access to the company’s film and TV library at any time on any device – computers phones, iPads, through game consoles and TVs. Television will have started to catch up with the demands of the internet generation.

“We are raising,” says Ted Sarandas, chief content officer, “a generation of kids who want everything totally on demand, who never really experienced the idea of having to wait until Saturday mornng to see a cartooon.”

At first, because of the brain-bleeding complications of territorial rights and licensing negotiations, the library will be much smaller than the US library, but it should grow, pretty rapidly if Canada and Lat Am are anything to go by.

In fact, it has to grow rapidly because the competition is stiff – Amazon’s Lovefilm, a DVD service with some streaming, Blinkbox, a streaming service 80 per cent owned by Tesco, and, of course, BSkyB which, though it has a limited on-demand service, is the overwhelmingly dominant player in film rights in Britain. ‘The Sky deal’ is spoken of with some awe and envy in Hollywood. But there are also on demand services like the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4OD which, in the long run, may prove more of a threat to Netflix than any of the others.

Netflix has been a winner so far, but only just. There was that costly battle with Blockbuster and a recent seriously ill-judged move that lost it 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter of 2011. The company had decided to split its DVD and streaming services, a move that would have meant many of its customers receiving a lesser service for the same money. It quickly abandoned the plan. The company has also run into problems with various site changes. But this seems to be just the way they do things.

“We don’t have Steve Jobs saying this is the way it is going to be and getting it right,” says Essex-born Neil Hunt, the chief product officer, “we have a lot of ideas and try them out and discard the ones that don’t work.”

Hunt and his department will be the key to success. Two-thirds of their work is backroom geek stuff like refining coding for the videos and adapting their site to different platforms. But the other third deals with the hottest technology in all areas of the internet – personalisation.

As it began to become everything, the internet was in danger of becoming nothing, an undifferentiated mass of material through which users had to navigate more or less at random. To the average surfer, almost everything that passed across their screen was useless. The answer was automatically to tune their surfing to their own interests. This means the machines had to find out who you are and what you want, the better to sell you stuff. Now they are all at it, even your Google searches are increasingly tuned ro your past surfing history.

For Netflix, personalisation is decisive. To stop customers cancelling their monthly subscriptions, it has to ensure they keep watching. The way to do this it not to offer them the whole library on the first screen they see, but, rather, a selection based their past choices.

As it began to become everything, the internet was in danger of becoming nothing, an undifferentiated mass of material through which users had to navigate more or less at random.

As you make more choices and the computer algorithm that watches what you do gets better, the selection should be ever more perfect. For Hunt there is a kind of theoretical cyber-utopia in which, when you launch, Netflix’s algorithm, known as the Taste Prediction Engine, will show you just the one film or TV show you happen to want to watch at that moment.

This is fiendishly difficult. In fact, in 2006 Netflix decided it was so difficult that they offered a $1 million prize to anybody who could improve on their algorithm.

“It worked really well,” says Hunt, “we paid much less than the minimum wage to get the best scientists in the world to work on our problem for three years.”

Via the algorithm, they don’t ask their customers what they want, they watch them. With streaming and an unlimited service, this surveillance rises to a whole new level. For example, you might choose a film and stop watching. This might be because you hate it or because you were interrupted.

“Either,” as Hunt puts it, “your wife called out, ‘Honey, it’s dinner time’ and you intend to finish it tomorrow or you have decided after five minutes that this just isn’t for you. We need to know how to differentiate those signals.”

Refining the algorithm is the primary way of cementing consumer loyalty. For the same reason, Netflix keeps the site as simple as possible, the screen is hardly even branded and is dominated by film posters segregated into a series of very definite genres. And there is absolutely no advertising.

“We actually did do advertising once back in the 2000s, we sold banner ads to the studios and what we found was that the distraction of putting ad on the site generated some ad revenue but cost us more in subscription revenue.”

There’s a further reason for keeping the service simple and cheap and ensuring the technology delivers the best video quality possible – piracy. Internet piracy brought the music industry to its knees and it has only been partially saved by the simplicity and relative cheapness of Apple’s iTunes.

“Piracy wrecks creative forces,” says Hastings, “if copyright doesn’t hold, there will be much less money for artists.”

But, if copyright does hold, everybody at Netflix insists that streaming will mean more money for movies and TV. Exactly how this – and all other aspects of financing – works is horribly complicated. But, basically, all films make money first in cinemas, then on DVDs, then on TV. If they survive as ‘cult’ or ‘classic’ movies, this revenue stream will, in theory, go on forever. Take out the DVD and TV phases and replace them with streaming and the revenue should be at least the same or better because competing streaming companies should get many more viewers and, therefore, pay more money for packages of films or TV shows from the producers.

Piracy wrecks creative forces, if copyright doesn’t hold, there will be much less money for artists

But the further twist is that that the streamers may also become producers. Netflix is now investing large sums in new productions that will appear first on its service.  Notably, late next year there will be House of Cards, a 26-episode political thriller based on the BBC series of the nineties. It is being directed by David Fincher and which stars Keven Spacey.

In fact, this development may signal the death of another recent institution, the box set of DVDs. Sarandos says House of Cards was specifically inspired by the way serials like Lost and Dexter had been so successful on US Netflix. Plainly people were watching them as they had previously watched box sets – in long, probably weekend binges that intensified their engagement with the show. Box sets may fill a few stockings this year, but, if Netflix works in the UK, Christmas gifts in 2012 will be that much harder. Also the company will no longer be restricted by rights deal that mean they are one season behind on TV shows and months behind on films.

So will it work? For Netflix the question is unanswerable. The company record is choppy and shareholders have been nervy since the sudden loss of subscribers last autumn. In addition, there already are many competitors and there will be many more. The company has also admitted that its international expansion will drive it into the red this year.

But for totally on-demand video via streaming, the deal is all but done. No other technology can currently compete, especially now that most new TVs are ‘smart’, meaning they can be connected to the internet.

Meanwhile, everybody at Los Gatos tactfully insists that they are ‘a supplement’ to existing broadcast systems like Sky and the BBC. Netflix, they say, will not do live sports, reality shows or news, the events that are the unique selling proposition of broadcast TV.

On the other hand, they say that internet TV is likely to account for fifty per cent of viewing time by around 2020. That figure suggests an impending revolution in the institutions of broadcasting – and in what ‘watching TV’ means -  that will render most of the current debates irrelevant. So those are Netflix elephants on the broadcasting horizon and they have really, really, really long,er, trunks. Is that cool? We shall see.

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Tools for Conviviality?

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

The seventies, a grim, strife-torn and now much derided decade, is in urgent need of reassessment. Once we get beyond the bloated trade union, bosses, the hyper-inflation, the ineffectual politicians, the violence, the bleakness, something much more interesting emerges – the first tentative sketches of the world in which we now live.

In September 1970 a 3000-word essay by Milton Friedman appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It was a very cleverly structured attack on the idea of the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system.” Business men who argue for such responsibilites are, says Friedman, preaching “pure and unadulterated socialism” and they are “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”

In 1973 Ivan Ilich published Tools for Conviviality, an attack on the way elite groups were creating economic growth at the expense of human flourishing. Also in 1973, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society which forecast – and advocated – a move to a service and information economy. And, finally, in 1975 Steve Jobs started going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park, California, or at the nearby Oasis Bar and Grill.

Friedman’s amoral company whose sole purpose was to use every possible legal means to reward its shareholders was the, in retrospect, surprisingly exotic and dangerous concept that was to dominate most of the next four decades. Bell’s thesis feels obvious if quaint now that everybody is yearning for a return to industrial productivity. Illich is due for a rebirth now that left wing philosophers like Jean-Claude Michea – as well as quite a few right-wing commentators like Charles Moore, Peter Oborne and Dominic Sandbrook – are questioning the validity of the Friedmanite settlement if not capitalism in general. But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why?

Of course, we now know the answers to the first of those questions – iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads – but his early death at the age of 56 has denied us an introspective old age that may have answered the second. If psychology is unavailable, however, context certainly is and it is that seventies context, in which what we make and why was being so intently discussed, from which sprang Jobs and the defining industries of our time.

But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why?

The social and political ncontext of the garage was hippie or, perhaps yippie. Hippie defines the lotus-eaters of Woodstock; yippie the more aggressive political types who emerged after the disruption of the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Yippies wanted to “stick it to the Man”, the Man being the government, the corporations, or simply “the System”, a term which embraced all manifestations of oppression. To a group of people wishing to bring computing to the masses, both the Man and the System were IBM, a monopoly that saw computers as big, expensive, few in number and all made and programmed by IBM.

(This is not to say that Jobs was a hippie, a yippie or any other denomination, only that his ambitions at the time – like all ambitions at all times – were defined by the rhetoric by which he was surrounded. Jobs was all about what might be described as narcissistic auto-marketing; he was the ultimate user of all he produced and, it was said, the only market research he ever did was in a mirror. It is this self-identification with his customers and his social and political climate that makes him such an important and effective figure.)

Sticking it to IBM involved making cheap(ish) personal computers which is what, in 1976, Apple, the company founded on April 1st by Jobs and Steve Wozniak, proceeded to do. As Microsoft, founded a year earlier, was also about to undermine the grip of IBM by seizing control of the operating system, ‘it’ was about to be well and truly stuck to The Man.

All of which is to say that many of the products which we now crave to connect, entertain and embrace us originated in a politically dissident, anti-establishment culture. That culture was one in which the nature of capitalism was being hotly debated, the twin poles of the debate being Friedman’s amoral company and Illich’s tools for conviviality.

Scroll forward forty-five years we can see that Friedman triumphed until 2008 when corporate amorality – particularly among the banks – was exposed as immorality. This has led to a revival of the seventies debate about the nature of capitalism.

Meanwhile, the Menlo Park garage has become Apple’s Cupertino campus, the home of a $300 billion company. Not far away is the ‘Googleplex’ of Google, a $200 billion company. Up in Seattle is Amazon, a $100 billion company and, back in Silicon Valley, there is Facebook worth perhaps $50 billion. The ‘alternative culture’ which aspired to a global communality of peace and love now rules corporate America. The yippies have become The Man.

Their products are now as seductive to us all as were those first personal computers to the geeks of the mid-seventies. They are, overwhelmingly, made in China and, especially in the case of Apple’s, they are designed with a breathtaking refinement so potent that they have created a new category of product porn. Videos on YouTube show Apple products being ‘unboxed’, a striptease show intended, I assume, to reconnect the viewer with the first dopamine rush of purchase. One of Jobs’s most brilliant auto-marketing coups was the creation of a product delirium which cause new devices to be reported on the TV news and inspired people to queue overnight outside Apple stores. Jobs, the ultimate user, partook of this delirium – he liked to describe Apple gadgets as “insanely great”.

The ‘alternative culture’ which aspired to a global communality of peace and love now rules corporate America. The yippies have become The Man.

This delirium – not just for Apple’s devices but also for all the other smartphones and computers as well as internet services like those provided by online retailers like Amazon and social network sites like Facebook – is more significant than it may at first seem. It is a symptom of the fact that these are truly unprecedented products. The buyers expect them to change their lives, all of their lives, and the sellers expect them freely to give them these lives so that they may profit from the information through advertising and marketing.

On the face of it, these gadgets of connectivity represent the ‘tools for conviviality’ of which Illich dreamed and the realisation of the yippie programme to put the highest possible technology in the hands of the masses. Idealistic, even utopian claims have been made for the efficacy.

Clay Shirky, perhaps the most prominent spokesman for the internet generation, speaks of the ‘epochal’ transfer of powers from ‘various professional classes to the general public’. What had once been an audience has become ‘a mass of pro- tagonists’. ‘We now have,’ he writes, ‘communication tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities’.

‘We are living,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.’

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki showed that the crowd could be cleverer than the experts so the assembled crowd of the internet should be capable of finding new solutions to old problems. The publisher Tim O’Reilly has spoken of the internet as providing “an architecture of participation”.  During the failed Green Revolution in Iran in 2009-2010, it was widely claimed that Twitter in particular and the internet in general had been decisive in undermining the regime by spreading information and images of its brutality around the world.

Then there is the ever quotable imperiousness of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google. Schmidt is the most provocative of the internet prophets in his insistence, first, on the inevitable ubiquity of the new machines – children in the future, he says, will have only two states “asleep or online” -  secondly, on their moral stature – “computers make us better humans” – and, finally, on their authority – “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Then there is the Arab Spring. After Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, was harassed and humiliated by the police, he set fire to himself in protest and, eighteen days later, he died. Thanks to the internet, Bouazizi’s self-immolation set the whole region on fire. The Tunisian and Egyptian governments both fell, Bahraini leaders clung on thanks to massive concessions to the protesters and Libya and Syria became the latest territory to be subjected to the human penchant for massacres. Young, technologically adept people were on the front line.

Thanks to satellite TV, they saw different ways of life in other countries, they imagined change in their own and, using the internet and mobile phones, they organised. Facebook and Twitter were the tools of revolution – grateful Egyptians started to name their children Facebook. A Google executive, Wael Ghonim, emerged from eleven days of police detention to become both a hero and a leader of the revolt. In Libya, an internet shutdown was subverted by protesters who crossed the border into Egypt bearing flash drives from which they uploaded videos of state brutality. This, surely, was dramatic evidence that the crowd, democratic and wise, had been empowered and these new gadgets were far more than toys or labour-saving devices.

This wave of cyber-boosterism – involving, as it does, prophecies of peace and, if not love, then at least absolute global connectivity – is, at one level, an echo of the hippie/yippie dreams of the sixties and seventies. That, after all, is the generation which has been in charge during the development of the internet and which has, as a result, constructed the new commanding heights of the world economy. But, in constructing those heights, the generation has been subjected to the new pressure of shareholder value. Much of the boosterism has to be seen as gadget advertising and a necessary adjunct to the system which combines American technology and design with Chinese productivity..

Over the last couple of years a counter-wave of scepticism has emerged. In his book The Net Delusion, for example, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born scholar, pours well-researched scorn on the political claims of the boosters. Tyrants, he points out, quickly learn how to use the internet and, a further twist, he suggests net revolutionaries had better make sure they win – internet and mobile communications are written in ink, not pencil, and the identities of their opponents will easily be traced by an oppressive regime.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has questioned the way the gadget makers feel justified in taking over the lives of our children. She provides chilling evidence of children for whom connectivity has become a new form of anomie and even, paradoxically, intense loneliness.

Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble has pointed out that the internet is no longer the window on the world we thought it was. it has become a mirror. Increased personalisation of searches means that we get Google results that are increasingly tuned to our known preoccupations. As a result, the more we search, the less we learn.

From writer Nicholas Carr – and many others – comes the anxiety that these machines are changing the way we think, shortening our attention spans and making us incapable of prolonged contemplation. This is accompanied by suggestions – notably from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield – that they are indeed altering the structure of the human brain.

But the most fundamental critique of the direction being taken by the new technologies comes from a Silicon Valley apostate. Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of artificial reality, but, in 2006, he lost his faith. Far from freeing the world by letting a billion flowers bloom, he said the internet was creating a “hive mind”, not a thoughtful mass of independent individuals but a blind collective driven by a desire to extirpate the human and hand all power to the internet. He accuses the internet prophets of “digital Maoism.”

Lanier identified this process in the increasing number of ‘meta’ sites – Google, Wikipedia, news and blog aggregators Digg and Reddit, which aggregate from other aggregators, and, most notably, popurls.com, the supreme meta- site. ‘We now are reading,’ writes Lanier with wry dismay, ‘what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algo rithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.’

In addition, says Lanier – in his 2010  book You Are Not a Gadget – the internet was destroying the creative middle class. By forcing down prices of music, books and newspapers, big cyber- suppliers like Apple and Amazon were throwing people out of work and, ultimately, casting a shadow of doubt over the future of the very things they were selling.

But the core of Lanier’s critique raises a much more profound question about our relationships with these new products. He evokes the Turing Test, a thought experiment developed by the mathematician Alan Turing. Put simply, if we cannot tell whether we are talking to a machine or a human, then we must credit the machine with intelligence. The assumption is that machines will eventually pass because they have become smarter. But, Lanier says, they might also pass because humans have become dumber -  after all, ‘People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.’

My own thought here coincides with Lanier’s. It first struck me while struggling with a ‘call tree’ – those corporate answering machines that keep offering you ‘options’ and assuring you that ‘your call is important to us’ – that the machine was actively engaged in a project to simplify me, to make me machine readable. If I had been talking to a human, a whole series of subtle signals would have been exchanged between us. But the machine only wanted a few signals, each carefully devised to fit me into one of its files. To play the game, I did indeed have to degrade myself to make the machine seem smart.

‘People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.’

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere – in banks, shops, airports and so on – and you also notice that it has changed the few humans you do encounter. They are no longer free agents, they are computer peripherals who are simply there to plug the gaps in the software.

Perhaps the most extreme way in which these gadgets are adapting us to their purposes is through the theft of our identities. Facebook is now famous for its ability to seduce users into disclosing  personal information and then making it extraordinarily difficult to prevent these intimate details being used and disseminated. Google does the same thing, though less noticeably, and the move to ‘cloud computing’ – the storage of information in remote server farms – will accelerate and intensify this process. These information stores are now worth billions, if not trillions. One company is now said to have 1500 data points on 97 per cent of the population of the United States. This is all being done in the name of selling through highly targeted advertising and marketing. But the information is also being used by political parties and, soon enough, it will be used for social control of one form or another.

The gadgets we now make and use are, in other words, far from being the innocent consumer ‘offers’ of the past. They are intended to be highly manipulative and to control as much of our attention and time as possible. They aim to be, in one of the buzz words of the new media industries, maximally ‘immersive’. Their ultimate commercial and potentially political purpose is the creation of a surveillance society on a scale that would have glazed over the eyes of George Orwell.

Do we – will we – care? Or should we? There is a perfectly respectable argument, put by Shirky and many others, that connectivity offers a higher form of human life, one that involves wider sympathies and fewer conflicts. In its most extreme form this becomes a utopian faith in The Singularity, the moment – which will, according to Ray Kurzweil, occur around 2045 – when our technologies converge and we build our last machine, a super-intelligent computer that will solve all our problems and take us into the post- or trans- human realm. In this version of the future what we are, in fact, manufacturing is our future selves.

The Singularity is, of course, an absurd sci-fi fantasy based on an excessive faith in the direction and pace of technological innovation and an ignorance of history. But the broad movement towards our deep involvement with our ever more intimate and demanding gadgets is well under way. How we engage with this is the problem. There has been some talk of ‘cyber-ethics’ and a few technologists have begun to express some doubts about the nature and impact of their designs. For example, Patti Maes, an MIT coimputer scientist, has called for gadget designers to take on the ethical issues of their devices.

‘As designers of tools and products,’ she says, ‘and technologies we should think more about these issues.’

But ethical concerns would not have stopped people smoking, only the threat of death did that and, dubious mobile phone stories apart, nobody has yet shown that these new devices cause cancer – though they are certainly at least as addictive as cigarettes. In the end the best hope is that we can, once again, stick it to The Man by deciding that it is in our best interests to live with machines as servants and not masters, to retain our sense of self and society in spite of the tidal wave of connectivity and information theft. Then we can indeed claim to have built tools of conviviality and the strife of the seventies will not have been entirely in vain.

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Scruton: the Right Wing Green

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

In global politics, the greens are dead. Nobody with any sense now seriously believes in an effective international response to climate change, especially after the chaos of the Durban summit last weekend. Meanwhile, in national politics the whole subject has been consigned to the graveyard of absolute ideological confrontation. Global warming sceptics — almost always on the right — dismiss the whole thing as a socialist plot to undermine capitalism; warming believers — usually on the left — demand that governments impose impossible costs and regulations on electorates already made restive by the financial crisis. Neither side talks sense, neither has any answers.

Yet global warming is happening and, even if humans are not the cause, it is still our problem. There are also many other ways in which we are damaging the environment — destroying biodiversity, choking the planet with plastic, plundering wildernesses — but with ever fewer people listening to the greens, how are these things to be tackled?

Enter an unlikely figure: Roger Scruton, lawyer, musician, scholar, philosopher and, for almost 40 years, the scourge of the academic left and hammer of the socialists. Intellectually he is not a rightwinger, he is the right wing, devoutly followed by believers in a dangerously beleaguered English conservative tradition. In spite of which here he is with a book — his 42nd — called Green Philosophy: How To Think Seriously About the Planet, a new kind of environmental manifesto.

Does this mean real right-wing greens can come out of the closet? The short answer is yes, because real conservatives were always green; it’s the left that screwed things up.

“Over the last 200 years,” says Scruton, “people have had enormous success in protecting their environment against government. If people are losing that habit it’s because of socialist ways of thinking which give them the idea that it’s not our responsibility, it’s theirs [the government’s] up there. Losing confidence in government is the most important thing we need now, but also wishing to take charge ourselves.”

Scruton lives, as greenly as he can, with his wife and two children on a farm in Wiltshire, but today we are sitting in a curious little hotel in Bloomsbury, central London. The room is gloomy not, as I first think, because Scruton is saving energy but because he has not realised there is a light switch.His speech is rapid and clear, although often tentative. Hammer of the left he may be, but he is always honest about what he doesn’t know. He has changed his mind in the past and his conclusions in this book are offered as discussion points rather than prescriptions. He suggests, for example, a flat-rate carbon tax.

“That was my tentative suggestion. All my modest proposals are tentative because they all involve tremendous issues which need to be negotiated and compromised over but I can’t see any other way of internalising the costs of our own behaviour.”

This is his first big point — the polluter pays. Others have said this but only Scruton has fully underpinned the idea with learning and logic. He believes in capitalism — he calls it the “free economy” — but it is an idea that needs constant vigilance to prevent capitalists transferring their costs and risks to others. “A free economy can be abused and it can only be justified on the assumption that costs are returned to the person that produces them.”

The banks very successfully ceased to become capitalists by externalising their risks — and, Scruton says, so do supermarkets and the aircraft and motor industries through a patchwork of hidden subsidies that mean the taxpayer takes up their costs. In the case of the environment, carbon emitters should pay for every gram; only then will they take their pollutions seriously. But wouldn’t a carbon tax require an international treaty of precisely the kind he says will not work?

It is up to the free, rich countries, therefore, to put money into research to find some way of, ideally, delivering clean energy from local sources.

“Not necessarily. If you take the example of plastic trash — China exports millions of tons of plastic to America in the form of toys. If America put a carbon tax on it, that would vastly increase the cost of those toys and that would make the Chinese make the toys out of wood, something biodegradable.”

Scruton has a special interest in plastic, having tried to get a campaign off the ground to get its use banned. It lasts for ever, killing wildlife and choking ecosystems. But the bureaucrats, not least those in Brussels, are against him. They, for example, impose health and safety rules that mean everything is wrapped in plastic packaging.

“I can’t see we can make much progress if the European Union exists in its present form,” he says. “Food safety regulations fill the world with plastics; that’s just an automatic machine the bureaucrats turn the handle of. In fact, in a properly ordered country, a politician could just say no, food must be sold as it always was in the past.”

His second big point is that neither capitalists nor big coal-burning polluters such as China have any real interest in developing clean energy. It is up to the free, rich countries, therefore, to put money into research to find some way of, ideally, delivering clean energy from local sources.

“It has got to be government financed, it is one of the areas where we do have a use for government intervention. Of course, we don’t know what the technology will be, that’s an old problem identified by Karl Popper [the philosopher of science]: you can’t predict a discovery because if you do, you have already made it.”

Meanwhile, he believes in nuclear as a stopgap and loathes wind turbines: “Nuclear power is, in my view, the best temporary solution to the emissions problem, since it has no carbon emissions. It is temporary, since the supply of uranium is temporary. Moreover, it is embedded in hazards that it would be wise to avoid in the long term.

“Wind turbines are of purely symbolic significance, since they cannot produce power at the crucial times, will always depend on other and more immediate sources and are there largely in order to destroy the landscape and to show to the middle classes that the future lies, as Lenin said, in ‘electrification and the soviets’. They are a blow struck against the love of home by people who hate it.”

Here lies Scruton’s true theme. It’s the same as it has always been, but now he has invented a name for it — oikophilia. The ancient Greek word oikos means, roughly, household or home and it is love of home that, for Scruton, inspires both his conservatism and his environmentalism. Love of home, he says, is close to a sense of the sacred which is, or should be, honoured by both the religious and the non-religious and observed by respecting and caring for the environment around the home. In the modern world this love of nature is constantly being crushed or abandoned by excessive faith in the state or in any big, top-down scheme. Milton Keynes is one of Scruton’s examples. Once a vision of a bright new future, now it is an environmental catastrophe, eating up land on a vast scale and making everybody drive everywhere. “That they should take a plan conceived in California by an American loony and plonk it in the middle of England where there is no space . . .” he says in disbelief.

Scruton’s primary faith lies with the “little platoons”, the activists and volunteers who, in a free society, emerge either to curtail the plans of the top-downers or just to clean up the place themselves. Only if people own the problem of the environment, rather than having it taken out of their hands by big government, will there be general popular assent to the sacrifices that may be necessary.

“There is in human nature and in the legacy of human society a motivation that would enable us to confront these huge questions, but it is a motivation that is being out of mind for ideological reasons — antipatriotism, antinationalism, all that, which I think is one of the major forces behind the Euro machine.”

On the outer fringes of the right it is perfectly possible this will make Scruton an outcast. Reflex rejection of global warming in particular and greenery in general has long been a precondition of membership in some right-wing circles. He shrugs: “There are two different responses. One is to say that this global panic about warming is all being manipulated for political purposes, which is slightly true. Then there is the view that caring about the environment is not necessary because this is something that will look after itself, which is not true.”

He acknowledges there are doubts but, in general, he accepts the scientific consensus that warming is certainly happening and humans are probably responsible. But, in fact, his core theme does not even require global warming to justify his deep green position. You only have to look at the vast circling mat of plastic junk spread across the Pacific, or the endless suburban sprawl of Chicago, or Milton Keynes, to know that contemporary society is the enemy of nature and such rapacious littering cannot have a good outcome for the planet.

Everything Scruton says involves a very careful and often intellectually demanding balancing act. Our attitudes to nature, for example, should neither be the ruthless exploitation of rigged capitalism nor the passive acceptance of the wilderness as a separate realm which is advocated by some greens. Rather, we should accept our role as stewards of nature because it is in human nature to look after home.

It all depends on whether we can get out from under the burden of the top-down impositions of unanswerable bureaucrats. Scruton repeatedly points out that in this area it is the left that are the worst offenders. In Russia and eastern Europe the communists left behind a moonscape of eco-destruction and even, he says, “the most mild-mannered parliamentary socialism of the post-war period” came up with grand schemes to steal power from the little platoons and lay the landscape to waste. He now fears that phase may have gone too far.

“My principal worry is what we saw in the communist bloc: the mass emigration of the educated class, the class that would have spontaneously tried to bring things back to the sophisticated patriotism that I think is necessary.”

But in a real emergency will the little platoons reappear? “That, I think, is what one must hope — that every now and then an emergency resuscitates those impulses. But if it’s a slow emergency we now face, a slow decline towards total entropy, then there isn’t any hope.”

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On the Great Clive James

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

Football’s offside rule, says Clive James, was “written by a Druid that the other Druids couldn’t understand”. One Druid is funny, two are very funny, lifting a sly aside into a fully fledged gag. Or there is the plastic surgeon who asks him to read a comedy script he has just written. “My face fell,” says James, “a sight he would normally have greeted as a business opportunity.” Each time he gives you more, with just the right number of words to topple the smile into an outright laugh.

Then there is a meditation on the mess in his study that progresses through the Nobel prize, Baron von Richtofen, Carl von Clausewitz, VHS tapes, Diogenes, the Hammerklavier sonata, Bruce Beresford and finally alights, triumphantly and entirely convincingly, on the T-34, a phenomenally effective second world war Russian tank. When the Germans captured one they were alarmed to discover how much of it was badly finished. “They realised to their horror that their own tanks were too well machined, and that the discrepancy could very well cost them the war.” Mess is good, it wins wars. The state of the James study is justified in the name of freedom and efficiency.

James left Australia to settle here in 1962. About a decade later, he became the Observer’s television critic and proceeded to change the way newspapers are written and culture is defined. In warm, witty, whiplash prose he celebrated popular culture with as much enthusiasm and erudition as he did the most highbrow and arcane. It was, for him, a cause, a version of Australian egalitarianism designed to upset and then inspire the old country. “Broadcasting is a popular art,” he writes in this collection, “even in its highbrow form. In fact, any highbrow broadcast that doesn’t know how to be popular probably doesn’t know how to be highbrow either.”

He then moved into broadcasting himself and produced a stream of books climaxing, though not ending, with Cultural Amnesia in 2007, a potent defence and justification of cultural continuity. He fears forgetting, the possibility that our children will not know the value of what they have been given and how hard it will be to sustain.

In 2007 he took on Radio 4’s A Point of View, a curious series of talks (“a weekly reflection on a topical issue”) that have now become this book. The talks read as well on the page as they sounded on the radio and, precisely because of the shortness of the pieces and the vague brief, the wanderings of James’s mighty magpie mind become, in book form, an accidental autobiography. You learn as much about James the man in these pages as you do in any of his other books.

In warm, witty, whiplash prose he celebrated popular culture

He cannot, for example, handle wheelie bins. This is important because his family makes him take out the rubbish and, unlike him, they are convinced that anthropogenic global warming is, indeed, happening so the recyclable rubbish must be conscientiously separated. The family, he says, also assume his mind has gone, so he is only good for grunt work such as lifting things and wrapping presents. The latter task floors him every time, in spite of the fact that he once worked in the wrapping department of a Sydney store. All his experience there came to nothing because of one terrible day when he was utterly traumatised by his attempt to wrap a tricycle. “After a couple of hours there was a crowd of other workers gathered around me laughing and laying bets.”

And, while we are on the subject of big-belly guffaws, there is his account of Elizabeth Hurley’s wedding. He starts out with an evocation of the town of Moose Tooth in Alaska, which, he claims, is one of the few parts of the globe where some part of the nuptials did not, in fact, take place.

But the core of this accidental autobiography is a deadly serious defence of liberal democracy. James is now 72, old enough and wise enough to look back at the 20th century as a period in which rival political systems massacred and plundered in the name of creating a new world, devoid of history and stripped of culture.

In this cause, he tells the story of the New Zealander Sir Keith Park who, with rare brilliance and courage, administered Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. His statue was on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for a while, and some young columnist moaned that she had never heard of him, as if “she really thought ignorance was a more honest form of knowledge”. James does not name her, and he controls his rage to end with the magnificently balanced clause — “the battlefield where he led his pilots to a victory that cost so much, and you could say cost too much, except that defeat would have cost everything”.

“Everything”, of course, includes the freedom of that columnist to be ignorant.

But that’s the point. In a talk about the television show 24, he points out that a society “wouldn’t be free if it weren’t full of things we didn’t like”. Freedom costs but it costs a lot less than any of the alternatives. It also nurtures great souls and free spirits such as James. As he keeps saying, in one form or another, remember and be grateful.

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