-
The Crowds at Abbey Road
24 January 2012
Every time I pass Abbey Road I see a crowd of tourists sitting around or posing like the Fab Four on this crossing. This very understated photograph has made the place sacred. It was shot on 8th August 1969 by Iain Macmillan standing on a ladder. He used a Hasselblad with a 50mm lens – ie wide in medium format – and he had time to take six shots, all based on sketches by Paul McCartney. The … More
-
Fox Talbot’s Dream Square
22 January 2012
This is William Henry Fox Talbot’s Nelson’s Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844. It is a photograph that has haunted me for some time. The Met’s commentary says it ‘marks the beginning of a new, photographic way of seeing’ which, I think, is right. The composition is strange and unbalanced, containing St Martin-in-the-Fields, the raffish Morley’s Hotel and the column itself, startlingly cropped, in an uneasy spatial relationship. This is not just about getting … More
-
Fred the Shred’s Head is not the Answer
21 January 2012
David Cameron was three, almost four, when a Milton Friedman essay appeared in the New York Times headlined ‘The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’. George Osborne was not yet born. That, in a nutshell, is why they still don’t get it and probably never will. They have spent their entire lives basking in and profiting from an economy defined by the legacy of that essay. Friedman was not wrong to say what he did. Like many … More
-
Smart Yeast Points to the Apocalypse
19 January 2012
Tyler Cowen leads me to this. Apparently it is not so hard for multicellular life forms to get started. It took only sixty days for single yeast cells ‘to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.’ Cowen correctly observes that, exciting as this may sound, it is bad news for humans. The reason … More
-
Borgen: The Snowstorm Paperweight
17 January 2012
Yesterday Stephen Pollard tweeted ‘Five more sleeps until #Borgen’ and Christine Burns confidently predicted ‘that, within five years, all British TV will be in Danish, with subtitles.’ The Killing seems to have started this Danemania and now we have Borgen, a political drama about Denmark’s first (fictional) woman Prime Minister, the character being, I discover, ‘inspired by Tony Blair’. (This must make her the first person, factual or fictional, ever to have been ‘inspired’ by … More
-
Debt is Gambling
13 January 2012
I basically despise gambling. I hate the sight of betting shops in the High Street, of Ray Winstone’s giant head goading the lads to have a flutter on the match, of fruit machines, casinos, lottery tickets, anything to do with making people lose their grip on the iron law of probability – that they are very unlikely to win anything and, in the long run, they are effectively certain to lose. Gambling makes everything tacky, even the supposedly glamorous casino … More
-
Dealing with the Dawks
10 January 2012
This morning I idly tweeted that ‘atheism gets more like the Tea Party every day’ and linked to the of The Reason Rally, ‘the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history’. Responses ranged from ‘bollocks’ and ‘what a load of cobblers’ to the slightly more reasonable ‘What? For holding an event?’ and Theists hold gatherings too, you know. Some attend them every Sunday.’ Perhaps the most relevant were the sarcasm of Steven … More
-
Littlejohn WAS Right
06 January 2012
Stories were swapped, gossip traded, but there were always boundaries, lines which were never crossed. We all knew the rules.
This is Richard Littlejohn in the Mail reacting to the Filkin report on relations between the police and the press. It’s a fine piece of writing and true; I have been there and done that, though not so often with the police. Littlejohn is right to want the good times back when ‘we all knew … More
-
Twittercide or What Exactly was Happening in Diane Abbott’s Head?
05 January 2012
One of the thousands of wonderful moments in Frasier, the greatest sitcom of all, is when our hero asks his brother, Niles, ‘Do you ever have an unexpressed thought?’ There is a moment’s pause before suddenly feline Niles responds, ‘I’m having one now.’
So, Diane Abbott, do you ever have an unexpressed thought? Or, more specifically, do you ever have an untweeted thought? Was it a lonely impulse of delight (Yeats, do pay attention) that … More
-
Unbundling Shirky
05 January 2012
Clay Shirky has many gifts, cogent prose is not one of them. Great Gapper tweeted plaintively about this piece, ‘Maybe I’m being slow but I don’t really understand what he’s saying’, a sentiment with which, at first reading, I wholeheartedly agreed (except for the ‘maybe I’m being slow’). On second reading, however, I did manage to detect a point which is, I think, as follows. News cannot finance itself on the … More
- Stephen Lawrence and the Likes of Us
- Best Lunch Ever
- Paul Wilmott’s Menu
- Drink: The Heroes of the Genre
- Bring Back the Long Lunch
- Thatcher in State
- Christmas Signs and Wonders
- Tourist Tips for 2012: Harrods
- The End of the Green Commissariat
- On Twitter or Internet Melancholia
- Daldry’s 9/11
- Richard Sennett’s Togetherness
- 4Chan and Anonymous
- Geoff Dyer: The Hatchet Man
- The Prince and the Canaletto
- Chad Harbach and the Yips
- Netflix’s Elephants
- Tools for Conviviality?
- Scruton: the Right Wing Green
- On the Great Clive James
