Light & Bitter in Kansas City

US mid-terms are coming.

2006-10-25T21:12:00.000+01:00

which means political ads...

The republican campaign is simple. They denigrate the democratic candidate bwfore telling the voters that if they don't vote Republican then they WILL be killed by terrorists.

This one is my favourite:

2006-10-23T21:29:00.000+01:00

Funny that the last post was about Angels in America. You see there is a character in the play called "Harper Pitt"

It was while watching this we decided we liked the name Harper Jean.

And on 28th September she arrived!

2006-09-14T15:55:00.000+01:00

Just watched the HBO version of Angels in America

It is very very good.

At the shows climax one of the characters discovers that his gay lover is mentored by Roy Cohn, an amoral right wing lawyer who led Mcarthy's communist investigations in the 1950's. He discovers that his lover has been ghost writing very conservative legal rulings.

The character, a left wing jewish intellectual, quotes this line at his lover (who is a Morman in denial about his sexuality) and demands to know if he knows who said it:

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Well I didn't know who said it either, but when I found out I agreed with the character that it is worth remembering.

So you can find an audio and transcript of it here.

What Matterazi said to Zidane. News from Italy.

2006-09-01T17:31:00.000+01:00

Finally got word on the definitive dialogue from the streets of Italy. From my friend in Siena:

ZZ: If you want my shirt so much I'll give it to you at the end of the game.
MM: What are you? A fag? I'd rather have your whore sister. Yes, your sister is a whore and you are a fag and I'm going to break your arse.

ZZ headbutts MM in the Chest. Is sent off. Italy win world cup.

My friend in Italy adds:

I think MM is quality. All the italians love him. He played the perfect game.

My friend also said ZZ's sister is a fashion model in Italy and is rumoured to have slept with half the Juventus team. Hence the whore bit.

Now we know.

2006-08-31T19:35:00.000+01:00

Oh I got tagged! But didn't notice as I am a dork! I even read the post, but missed my name off the bottom.

It was from Emaw.

Who got tagged in turn from Joel

Anyway as this is a first for me I figured it was better late than never...

1. One book that changed your life.

I expect the telephone directory has had the most meaningful impact. Now it is an e-book.

2. One book you have read more than once.

The Judge Dredd Mega Collection (a collection of Judge Dredd strips that appeared in the newspaper).

3. One book you would want on a desert island

Ray Mears: Bushcraft Survival

4. One book that made you laugh

Two scenes I loved recently; both true stories:

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia.

The bit where the Emir of Bhokara meets his first British agent. He tries to weigh up his interests and so asks the British agent: "how many guns has Queen Victoria got. I've got 200."

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolff.

The bit where super test pilot Pete Conrad runs out of patience with the psychological testing for the first US space mission. After days of silly tests a white coat holds up a totally blank piece of paper and asks Pete Conrad what he sees. Without missing a beat Conrad says "you've got it upside down". He so throws off the psychologist he turns his paper round to have a look...

5. One book that made you cry

None. Too English for that. I expect one day I will break down reading something like Eeyores Little Book of Gloom or something...

6. One book you wish you had written

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. One book you wish had never been written

The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein. A stupid stupid stupid book and a fraud that borders on pure evil. Hernstein can only have died from shame.

8. One book you are currently reading

Night Soldiers by Alan Furst.

9. One book you have been meaning to read

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by La Leche League

10. Tag five people.

No. But anyone who wants to do it should do. It was fun.

Ruth Kelly - politician of the moment

2006-08-30T20:58:00.000+01:00

I may have got my links mixed up here but hey:

Ruth Kelly on "faith schools"

I particularly like the bit about "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others"

Very rare for a politician to grasp the nettle like that.

Ruth Kelly on "integration" and "cohesion"

I thought she was a Catholic and an economist not an anthropologist...

2006-08-29T00:53:00.000+01:00

Two interesting maps:

one shows a map of the world with a dot for what the authors call "the primary location" of a living language.

two shows a colour coded map of the world reflecting ranking on the UNs Human Development Index - a widely used indicator of a nation's relative poverty.

The survival of internecine ethnic competition with a dazzling cauldron of differing languages, cultures and rituals rarely seems to be accompanied by peace and prosperity...

God knows what this means but I thought it was interesting. At least it tells you that students of language, power and ethnicity, both historical and current, probably have as much, if not more, to tell us about poverty than economists...

My pregnant wife: General Patton with heartburn and swollen feet

2006-08-25T23:50:00.000+01:00

She has taken some more photos and posted them here

Londonistan

2006-08-23T22:31:00.000+01:00

It is becoming an orthodoxy that the UK is especially vulnerable to terror attacks.

I often seem to absorb two main explanations for this, coming at it from different directions, broadly speaking from the left and the right I guess.

From the right we have the Londonistan version - we are 'soft' on extremists. This is represented by political writers such as Melanie Phillips. (Can't be bothered to link - if you don't know her you're probably lucky.)

From the left we have the Stop The War / Freedom for Palestine version, which is that British Muslims are so up in arms about British foreign policy we should not be surprised some are pushed into extremism. This is represented by the July 7th bombers themselves and, interestingly, writers on the politics of race such as Gary Younge and the Director of the institute of race relations

To a cynic like me both these explanations sounded a bit like they might have been pulled from the authors' assholes.

I wondered what people who actually know and had observed the British Muslim community (without their answers already running) might come up with.
I found this interesting viewpoint from the Scotsman:

Dr Sean McLoughlin, an Islam expert at Leeds University, who has visited all the mosques in the area, says: "An important point about mosques both in Leeds and elsewhere is that they were set up by first-generation Muslims, and although some of them are becoming a bit more dynamic and open to younger people, they are not that accessible to the young. Many are almost like old men's clubs."

The result is that many young people meet outside the confines of the mosque for more radical activities. "These radical groups exist on the fringes of the community," McLoughlin said. "They may be outside meetings of quite moderate speakers and be leafleting them. They're a bit like the Socialist Workers Party."

Sometimes the observable can be so banal. No wonder people ignore it.

Boundaries

2006-08-22T20:39:00.000+01:00

Baby dreams

2006-08-17T16:08:00.000+01:00

I am not usually a fan of other peoples dreams. As they are not bound by any rules they are boring. I dreamt I was a blancmange etc.

But when your wife is pregnant, due in 6 weeks, sometimes you just have to tell someone your baby dreams.

My Mum was there and my wife gave birth very quickly and easily standing up in the bath. My wife had bleeding gums when it was over. Then I played with the baby for a while and it was nice. Then suddenly the baby was a cassette tape. I kept it happy by playing it. It was a mix tape, but I cannot remember the songs. They were very MOR. But I was very worried someone would record over it. Or that I would forget the cassette was my baby. So I sat and watched it play. Then my wife came back and I ran away and drove very fast on the highway.

I just hope it goes this smoothly in real life...

2006-08-03T17:23:00.000+01:00

I LOVE this story from Daniel Davies at the guardian.

Only in Britain could this happen. It is from the business pages but it is poetry.

Big England

2006-08-03T14:41:00.000+01:00

Over at Dave Hill's site it is me. Part of a series of bloggers Mr Hill has invited to write about what they like about England.

Also Mr Hill has casually knocked out a rather fantastic short story. We are at Chapter Nine and things are shaping up beautifully. Read it here. You can buy his books there too, which judging by his story is a sensible investment!

Belly buttons

2006-08-03T03:28:00.000+01:00

One of the best things about my wife being pregnant is that at last we will solve the mystery of her belly button. In fact we will, quite literally, get to the bottom of it.

Before she got pregnant her belly button was the closest thing we had to a black hole, right here on earth. Nothing that went in ever came out. Stephen Hawking came and had a look. Before being pregnant the closest she got to solving the mystery was when she once put a cotton bud inside, but she got so scared about how far it was going in that she couldn't keep going and retreated. You don't need to know what the bud smelled like.

Now she is about 33 weeks gone and for the first time ever we have landed a probe on the belly button floor. Now I feel like those guys who hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench! I have named the cotton bud challenger III in their honor.

Amazingly, despite being 33 weeks pregnant, Lucy's belly button is still over 1.5 centimetres deep.

Is this a world record?

2006-08-02T15:23:00.000+01:00

I was reading a doctor's blog the other day. I am not going to comment on it as it was research for a film.

But the attitude of Dr Amy Tuteur reminded me of one of my favourite statues in London.

This is outside the British Library on Euston Road. The British Library is home to works in all disciplines - across all the sciences and all the arts. So how do you choose a statue outside to keep everyone happy? Well this one does, and it does so brilliantly.

It is a large bronze by Eduardo Paolozzi that depicts Sir Issac Newton in a pose borrowed from Sir William Blake's painting of the scientist.

At first this seems simple: Sir Isaac Newton is revered by the scientific community. So we can presume they are delighted to have him at the front of the library. Indeed it is appropriate in our technocratic age.

But it is a little more complicated than this. For William Blake's image of Newton was designed entirely as a critical reduction of the great scientist. A satire even.

Blakes image placed Newton at the bottom of an ocean, looking only down at the floor, at his measurements in a technical drawing. Blake wanted to depict the scientist as blinkered and lacking in imagination. Ignoring and ignored by all of nature around him for the sake of one measurement, Blake's Newton is a symbol of the profound limits of Scientific Materialism. His concentration is laser-like but his body is closed, hunched over and contained, and so too we can presume, is his mind.

So in effect it is a warning to scientists from a brillant mystic poet. Remember to look up from your measurements from time to time.

Big England

2006-07-28T15:34:00.000+01:00

English National Identity today is a popular subject.

For the would-be Alpha males of England it is like that scene in the Wizard of Oz: the curtain of Empire has been slowly rolled back to reveal England. English people have been at a bit of a loss to explain themselves ever since. Even the Scottish, Welsh and N. Irish have their own parliaments now, and look to Europe as much as Britain.

What does the wizard say? Bluff then humbug.

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

but then realises the game is up.

"I'm a humbug"
"You're a very bad man" says Dorothy
"Oh, no, my dear. I - I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad Wizard."

Obviously to the vast majority of English people, people previously excluded from defining the England of Empire, (that is all the women, all the non-white people, all the non-wealthy people, all the non-English people) it is a chance to finally have their say (although still only after the alphas have had their humbug).

Hence the cacophony of debate over Englishness. Sometimes it sounds like a focus group of colour blind people arguing over the colour red.

Anyway Dave Hill has decided to invite some bloggers to tell him what they like about England over at his blog Temperama.

I am number five in his series I think. Check it out y'all.

Let's hope we get this sorted once and for all, so we can get on with following the test match, and we can get that strange feeling that being English is this planet's innate default position. Anything else, anything foreign, is just an amusing experiment.

2006-07-26T23:11:00.000+01:00

And equally hilariously some people think it is for real since the AP reported the story with stoney seriousness.

"Seriously? You’re threatening Wilson with physical harm because of “You, Me and Dupree?”

Apparently Steely Dan thinks they’re Tony Soprano. How sad."

I'm buying the record. Cousin Dupree. I'm buying it.

2006-07-26T17:25:00.000+01:00

I went to see "You, me and Dupree" with Owen Wilson.

God knows why. I think I just love the name Dupree and have this stupid idea that one day Owen Wilson might make a good film.

It turns out Steely Dan wrote a song about someone called Cousin Dupree in 2000. The character in the song bares a striking resemblance to the character in the film.

In response to this the boys of Steely Dan decided to write to the stars brother, Luke Wilson, in the finest Groucho Marx tradition...

The full letter is posted on their website at www.steelydan.com/heyluke.html

What would be good for someone inexperienced with guns?

2006-07-24T17:04:00.000+01:00

We decided to go and explore American gun culture this Saturday.

I went with my wife and two anthropologists to participate and observe some target shooting at the (rather worryingly) named Crossfire Recreational Center, an indoor shooting range.

Truth be told I just wanted to feel the awesome power of a handgun, which are, for some insane reason, illegal in Britain. The use of the words "explore", "culture", "anthropologists", "participate" and "observe" are shameless attempts to disguise this. I apologise.

We drove across town out to Independence, which is a well known suburb of Kansas City's sprawl, and an appropriate place to blaze away with a nine I think.

Independence is the home town of President Harry S. Truman, who of course ordered the first and only use of Nuclear weapons in anger against two Japanese cities. It is also home to three conservative off-shoots of the Mormon church, which surround "Temple Lot", a patch of land which is to be the centre of the New Jerusalum that will come to America for the the second coming of Christ.

Naturally folks have been squabbling ever since over whose temple was to be the one that Christ visited. So irritating was this arguing that in 1838 the then governor, Lilburn Boggs, got so fed up with all the Mormon bullshit in his state that he declared open season on Mormons. His decree is worth quoting. Here is a man out of patience:

"...open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this State ... the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description."

Clearly Boggs was more of a second amendment dude, than a first, fourth or fifth kind of guy. Unfortunately for the many second amendment dudes in Independence today, Bogg's order was canceled after 138 years as being, well, unconstitutional. So todays gun toting militia (well regulated) have to make do with just shooting at targets and the occasional "home invader" (ie possum/squirrel/your teenage child and, very occasionally, burglar).

I asked Steve why we had to drive so far out of town to go shooting, thinking that maybe all sorts of regulations, zoning laws and licensing issues must be at play.

"Oh I have a coupon. 50% off." said Steve. Despite trying my hardest I still cannot think like a Missourian.

So we arrived at the centre. A box of a building in a bland, tatty, slightly rusty and windswept suburb.

While us boys lingered in the gun store, my wife marched to the counter only to be told that she couldn't shoot as she was pregnant. It seems the only thing that trumps the second amendment here was the rights of the unborn. Of course.

"I'll bring the kid back when it is old enough to shoot" joked my wife. This brought beaming smiles from behind the counter.
"Oh yes. Start them young." The Lady behind the counter turned and pointed to a man sitting behind her who was cleaning what looked like Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum,
"Hank", (I can't remember if this was his name but Hank is probably close enough)
"brought his daughter when she was only four. She loves to shoot don't she Hank?"

Anyway my wife could not shoot. Lead in the air (!) was dangerous for the baby or something. I didn't really listen. I just put it down to plain old fashioned common sense that pregnant women are not to be trusted with firearms as they are hormonal.
But I hid my relief that I wouldn't be in the same room as my pregnant wife with a loaded semi, as there were still plenty of guns within grabbing distance, and we got down to business.

It took a while to establish we had no ammo, no guns and no clue, but they appeared unfazed. Gavin, who is from Kansas and therefore has an innate knowledge of guns, had decided that me and Steve might want to shoot six shooters "as they are safer."

But the lady behind the counter, all rouge and wrinkles, was having none of it.

"What would be good for someone inexperienced with guns?" asked Steve
"9mm is good"
"Ok" said Steve meekly. I swear I heard him swallow.

We signed two forms. One was agreeing that I was who I said I was. One was agreeing that I wouldn't point the gun anywhere I shouldn't. No I.D. was needed. No computer database was checked. A gun was produced and a very quick demo of how to load it was provided. One last thing:

"How do you fire it?"
"Pull the trigger"
"oh ok"

Then, with ear protection and eye glasses on, and 100 slugs to use, we were free to let loose. We went for the normal paper targets, as Osama and Saddam cut outs cost extra and just seemed a bit, you now, cliched.

Now I missed most of the demo as I was talking to my wife about babies and lead poisoning. But I wasn't too worried as luckily the gun they gave me was just like the one Eddie Murphy used in Beverly Hills Cop. I felt confident I knew what I was doing. The only difference was this one, even with its "flush fit" magazine, could only hold 15 rounds, whereas Eddie's clearly held about 93 in that movie.

Steve went first. A shy and gentle man, there was something incongruous about watching this anthropologist blasting away with his Browning Hi Power 9mm Semi. He clearly didn't like the noise but blasted away remorselessly anyway. It was like watching a vicar snorting coke or something - it just didn't fit.

My turn came and basically I got Gavin to fiddle around with the gun until it was ready to fire. I figured no true English gentleman would load his own guns, so why bother to learn. I adopted my best SO19 stance, lined up the sights with where I thought the paper man's heart was and squeezed. The gun jumped up and made a pleasant bang. The recoil was not as bad as expected, jolting upwards more than backwards. Anyway I concentrated on hitting the target and did for the most part, so I put a few in the head to make sure.

Listen: I'm not going to pretend I felt my heart crying at the violent context of it all, at all the pain and suffering this weapon has caused throughout history. I felt nothing, apart from a slightly crazy feeling that I might accidently shoot myself. I just wanted to feel comfortable that I was shooting right. That left no room for any other response.

Until my last clip that is, which I decided to empty quickly into the target, like Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs. After that I felt profoundly satisfied.

Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. If Christ is choosing Independence, Missouri as the location for his second coming, maybe it is a good choice after all.

2006-07-20T19:54:00.000+01:00

I wasn't far wrong about FIFA's decision on Materazzi!

http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1825192,00.html

Now presumably the sister needs to be investigated to find out if she really is what Materazzi said...

Roldy and the bumwasp

2006-07-19T13:55:00.000+01:00

I was in the kitchen clearing up when I felt a sharp sting on the bum cheek. I screamed like a stuck pig and pulled off my underpants (my one item of clothing; its 101 F here ok?).

As I examined the pants a little green hornet flew at me. Battle commenced. Lucy had arrived and grabbed the fly swot. I had to make do with three rolled up lifestyle sections of the Kansas City Star.

At first the hornet hid. Then it came at us out of the night. It sat down by the washing up but Lucy hesitated. When she went to tickle it under the chin with the swot it flew off and came at me. I swung twice and it dissappeared. I asked Lucy "did I hit?" She said "no, nowhere near""

So we spent ages looking for him until I saw him. He was down. Lying prone on his back. I had hit him afterall! I went in for the kill but Lucy stopped me. She had the swot and wanted to look first. Again she tried to tickle it under the chin and it came back to life! It went after Lucy. She backed out the kitchen door swinging wildly. She tripped on our internet router in the hall and went down. She sustained injuries to her forearms and one ankle protecting her unborn child from the fall.

Meanwhile the hornet had come for me. Again I swung at it as it came for me, once, twice and on the third I made contact. After a quick search it was located on top of the dustbin. Bang! I finished it. I ran to assess the casualty. She was fine. She in turn took a look at my tuckus. There was an enormous red sting mark. But by then my tuckus had been avenged.

2006-07-17T16:31:00.000+01:00

This weeks temperature highs here in Kansas City:

Monday 101 F
Tuesday 100 F
Wednesday 103 F
Thursday 100 F
Friday 88 F

Roll on Friday...

The verdicts from the FIFA investigation is in...

2006-07-12T15:50:00.000+01:00

Here is the full text of their statement:

"We the representatives of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association special disciplinary committee, subsequent to meetings held on the 12th June 2006 regarding incidents during the 2006 World Cup final, wish to announce the decisions of the committee.

After studying video evidence of the incident, and having taken testimony from the players involved and all the officials present, it is our opinion that the number 23 for Italy, that Materazzi, is a dirty bastard who was asking for it. Of course Zidane gets to keep FIFA world cup golden ball. FIFA are now considering whether Materazzi should be allowed to retain his FIFA world cup winners medal as he is clearly a potty mouthed reprobate for whom nothing is sacred."

2006-07-10T18:47:00.000+01:00

Here is an example for FIFA of how it should deal with violent conduct in soccer from the National Hockey League.

Note how quickly the ref steps in

Note the quick condemnation of the players behaviour from the commentators

Note the shame heaped on the offenders by their teammates

Note the sadness of the fans at the way the players discredit the game

If only FIFA would clamp down like they do in Ice Hockey, soccer can once again be a game for gentlemen.

2006-07-10T18:31:00.000+01:00

American reaction to Zidane's head butt?

Mild shock but more amusement. But then again, violent conduct is not exactly unheard of in American sports....

If only Zidane had copied the example of Jamaal Tinsley of the Indiana Pacers and picked up a dust pan to use as a weapon he might have thought better of it...

I love the US commentaters totally failing to not relish every second of the melee...

Machiavelli 1 - 1 Camus (Machiavelli wins on penalties AET due to the Goalkeepers' fear of the penalty-kick)

2006-07-10T01:10:00.000+01:00

So what did Materazzi say? What insult could be so wounding, so well aimed, as to bring out the goat-butting devil in the great Zidane?

The greatest insult in Italian football history certainly. This world cup has been mostly about cheating. Diving, mostly (which again won France their goal). It ended with a sublime demonstration of the art of trash talk. Which isn't strictly cheating but is not exactly fair play either.

Did Materazzi ask Zizou what steroids he used to keep him going? And did he have a reference to Zidane's involvement in the drug scandal at Juventus? Or was it an old fashioned racial slur? Against just Zidane or his whole team? And what was the exact language used? Italian or French? Or was it something Materazzi picked up in Merseyside!?

Whatever it was, the last minutes of this game saw these men settle back into the arms of their philosophies - Materazzi the Prince whispering in Zidane's ear. And Zidane, L'etranger, the French Algerian, who decided at that time, at the end of his career, that after missing a classic header, the last act, the act to give his career its final meaning, should be to violently drive his famous pate into the chest of his sneering opponent.

2006-07-05T15:49:00.000+01:00

Italy played very beautifully. Like gentlemen as well.

Italy goals with Italian commentary. No translation required.

Grosso's celebration like a pheonix from the flames of this from 1982:

Still fancy France for the cup though.

2006-07-03T20:30:00.000+01:00

According to ESPN summarisers (Lalas and Balboa) Rooney is a thug who needs to learn to control himself.

According to BBC summariser (Shearer) "there is every chance Rooney could go back...and lay one on Ronaldo".

I think that's a consensus then.

I don't think it is a shortage of skill:

English footballers are just too stupid to win the world cup.

2006-07-03T15:40:00.000+01:00

I used to be bemused by the more 'mature' fan of the English football team. The ones who you knew wanted England to win as much as anyone, but could only watch in a cloud of negativity, phoney disinterest and wry cynicism.

Now I am in my thirties, I am having a baby and have now watched England take part in 7 penalty shoot-outs and lose 6.

Where do I sign up? Maybe a subscription to the football magazine When Saturday Comes is the most symbolic gesture. Their World Cup prediction (which was brought to my attention here) I will print out and keep in a draw ready to find in time for South Africa 2010 (which we won't win as it will be too hot). Here it is:

'...with Germany 2006 almost upon us, it's time to anticipate, even celebrate, some of the things about the World Cup that highlight the majestic pointlessness of much of football and its culture.

Many of the "star" players from the fancy sports gear adverts on 24-hour repeat from now until mid-July will fail to stay in the tournament long enough to do any of the slow-motion fancy flicks of backhells we've all become so attached to - look at France, goalless and on their way home after three games in 2002.

England, meanwhile, will often be unable to get the ball back off Paraguay - and when they do they will be unable to keep it for more than two passes. Despite somehow grinding out a deeply tedious 1-0 victory, they will eventually proceed to lose in fairly honourable fashion to the first decent team they come across, as in 1998, 2002 and Euro 2004.

The Group of Death is ostensibly so-called because of the difficulty of getting out of it; the reality is usually that the games between players terrified of making a mistake are so dull that you have to check people's pulses every few minutes just in case.'

2006-06-30T18:14:00.000+01:00

ESPN coverage of the US Paintball championships has been delayed due to continued coverage of the World Cup.

I imagine there are some irritated warpigs out there at the moment.

The Argentinians have done a Sven Goran Erikson: they have sat back on a one goal lead and swopped their best players for defensive plodders. Naturally, as it always does at this level, this 'tactic' has allowed Germany back into the game.

The Daddy

2006-06-30T14:33:00.000+01:00

I love this little bit of film of Maradona warming up.

It tells you more about the man than a book's worth of pontification.
Exhuberance, instinct, anarchy. What a player.

Very few players can get a standing ovation for just warming up!

It is important to glance at the other players when they come into shot to understand. They are robotically moving through their routine, going about their business, looking like they would rather be doing something else. Little Diego also looks like he is lost in thought, but he is floating above everyone else at the same time.

Not sure about that wobbly chest thing he does though.

2006-06-30T14:21:00.000+01:00

Thuram's response to Le Pen. As assured of the pitch as on it, it seems!

I'm not sure I would have trusted myself to respond at all.

EDITED FOR OLLI

2006-06-29T17:09:00.000+01:00

Buried in a Guardian report today was this:

The players also took part in a mock penalty shoot-out and David Beckham and Frank Lampard were the only two to beat Paul Robinson on three successive occasions.

As yoda might say:

this news deep, the foreboding I sense, is, from.

I thought players never miss in training? I mean it's the pressure of the moment that makes them miss isn't? That's what they say anyway.

This nugget suggests it might actually be because they are shit at kicking a ball quickly and accurately. Oh dear.

PLEASE START PRACTISING PROPERLY. Please. Please! They should stay behind until EACH PLAYER has scored TEN in a row. Miss one and they start again. Ten consecutive in a row. Like the lad who has to score a certain number in the back garden before he can have his tea.

Not lazily take three, score two, miss one and then trot in for a rub down and a chat on the mobile with the agent.

Still at least Robinson's saving them.

Write off the Germans. OK. They will lose.

2006-06-28T19:41:00.000+01:00

FIFA President Sepp Blatter said today it was the best world cup of all time. Which is a bit like picking the man of the match after 75 minutes. But they do that too on ESPN.
He went on to say:

"I'm beginning to ask myself: 'Who can stop these Germans?'"

Maybe the Argentinans? In the next game? The first decent team they will come up against after FIFA fixed the draw for them? Whaddyathink?

And Simon Hattenstone has the balls to say what a lot of us have been thinking for a while as to why Argentina are so good here.

For those short of time and long on common sense and having a life and all that stuff here is the money line:

"Twenty years ago Maradona was at his most prolific - in every sense...Yes, libellous though it undoubtedly is, I am suggesting that he fathered half the Argentinian team."

Unlike Maradona against Shilts, I wouldn't put it past him.

I will be celebrating...

2006-06-27T19:30:00.000+01:00

...if Henry scores today (and I don't mean I will put my hand up to my ear and pout like he does).

Because of this

Cheats charter

2006-06-26T20:56:00.000+01:00

Another TERRIBLE decision by a referee today saw Italy reduced to 10 men and completely ruin what was till then a good game. FIFA are determined their officials should decide this world cup rather than let the soccer players decide as they used to.

If you award a red card, which usually means deciding the match for the other team, you have to be certain it was for an incredibly violent foul, or one that unfairly stopped a certain goal. You also have to be certain you have not been duped. I cannot see what is so complicated about that, or why it should change.

And if you give cards out too easily, players will then spend the game trying to dupe you, to gain this advantage, rather than trying to score a goal. It is kind of obvious that more cards cannot make for better soccer.

No-one has ever fouled their way to a world cup. It is not a winning strategy. It is self defeating as you let the other team get lots of free kicks and set plays. And normally you might get a player sent off.

But now Referees are sending players off for normal tackles. I am surprised Beckham wasn't sent off for puking.

Everybody knows this. Apart from the Refs it seems.

That is why I was delight Italy won today, as they were cheated out of the last world cup by the ref too.

England vs Ecuador

2006-06-26T20:49:00.000+01:00

England: not playing as a team at but still with more match winning individuals than many other teams. Another ugly win over poor opponents.

Meanwhile over at the Guardian chief football writer Richard Williams has moved into full-blown schizophrenia: now he hears the whole world laughing

Why does being an England fan have to involve so much self-loathing?

Brilliant world cup match.

2006-06-22T23:03:00.000+01:00

After the USA's sad display this morning (which itself featured another TERRIBLE decision to award Ghana the winning penalty) I have just watched a brilliant match between Australia and Croatia. Australia sneeked through after Harry Kewell woke up and scored to make it a 2-2 result.

The players and passion and story of the game were tremendous. But what really stood out was Graham Poll (the one English ref) completely losing control of the game at the end.

I am sure he wanted to send off Simunic at the same time as Simic, but got all confused and bottled it after realising it would mean sending off two players at the same time. Simunic actually shoved him in dissent for the call against Simic and should have gone, but stayed on the pitch until he did it again about seven minutes later, by which time Poll finally sent him off with a second yellow... By which time the FIFA website already showed Simunic as being sent off!

But rather than try and describe the ending I will refer you to the Guardian's commentary, which is often too snide and nasty for my taste, but when that sarcastic nastiness is aimed at the ref it is, of course, not a problem... Here is an excerpt from the final minute:

90 min: Another red card! But... Graham Poll, who is a stupid bastard, is not getting the final, we can tell you that for nothing. After fouling Kennedy, Simunic is booked for a second time. He walks... then comes back when he realises Poll isn't going to show red. Ho ho hoh dear.

FULL TIME OF A FANTASTIC MATCH: Croatia 2 - 2 Australia Ha ha ha, Graham Poll is a complete clown. After a scramble in the box, Viduka sets about forcing the ball home for Australia... but Poll blows up for full time, Clive Thomas style, with the ball about to cross the line. He disallows the goal - not that it matters - but then he decides to book Simunic for a third time - and sends him off. He then blows up for full time AGAIN... before driving off the pitch in a car with square wheels.

Honk! Honk! The doors have just fallen off Poll's car, and there are jets of steam coming out of the engine. Let's hope nobody agrees to smell his funny flower!

Football and Shakespeare

2006-06-22T15:34:00.000+01:00

Some more happy old guff from the Guardian football writers.

It is clearly a ridiculous article, but again illuminating as to the schizophrenic (we hear voices and see things that are not there) and bi-polar (one minute we're up, the next we're down) nature of the English football follower.

One bemused commentator, called Goon, alledgedly posting from Bratislava, looked to the bard for illumination in his comment:

The English football team, and perhaps England as a whole, reminds me of Shakespeare's King Richard II, and the "mockery king of snow" speech:

I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!
Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good,
An if my word be sterling yet in England,
Let it command a mirror hither straight,
That it may show me what a face I have,
Since it is bankrupt of his majesty.

2006-06-21T19:11:00.000+01:00

In light of popular demand from some of my oldest readers (see comments on post below) I have decided to get into more details and start talking about the England team formation.

As an illustration of what a fickle bunch England fans and footie writers are the injury to someone who has always been one of our best players (Michael Owen) has been received with great pleasure as it allows us to play someone who England fans and writers have lambasted as one of our worst (Owen Hargreaves).

And now many people are saying we should play with just one striker, and leave Crouch and his robot on the bench until needed (which deep down we all know is where he belongs).

So we get this (Gary Neville's calf permitting):

Robinson

Neville(?) Ferdinand Terry A.Cole

Hargreaves

Beckham Lampard Gerrard J. Cole

Rooney

What do you think? Lucy? Marie? You still there?

England 2 - 2 Sweden

2006-06-20T21:55:00.000+01:00

Bizarre, bizarre.

I give up trying to understand this bunch.

England are capable of making the most comically awful errors, as for the last goal, yet at the same time can produce breathtaking moments of skill, like Cole's goal.

That last goal actually looked like the England players wanted Sweden to score...from conceding unnecessary corners and throws, to actually getting out of the way of the ball to allow Larsson to score.

England players in on a spread bet scam? There is more honor in this explanation than simple carelessness and arrogant laziness...

Actually this performance pissed me off. So as therapy here are my player ratings

Robinson: 4- looked shakey coming for what should have been easy balls. At fault for second goal. We need a wolf not a rabbit. Played too many long balls down field when he could have rolled it out to feet.

Carragher: 4 - looked ok in defense but NOTHING coming forward, so Sweden didn't bother to mark him, knowing attacking threat ends with a pass to his feet. Does not have footballing ability to clear lines while retaining possesion. Both faults unacceptable for a world cup full back.

Terry: 6 - solid in defense until last minute. Bare minimum on the ball although comfortable.

Rio Ferdinand: 6 - Again solid in defense. Has the bare minimum technique for playing the ball out of defense, but not the composure. Is either cocky or panicked in possession, nothing in between.

A. Cole: 5 - Good player out of form. Pace and good timing in tackles. Good positions going forward and played well with J Cole. But misplaced passes and crosses, and didn't show the confidence he has shown before in clearing lines while retaining possession - prefered to concede corners and throws. Occasionally out of position defensively.

Lampard: 4 - Did not link play or move the ball well. Wasted opportunities when in scoring positions. Pressured the opposition inconsistently.

Hargreaves: 6 neat and tidy in holding midfield. Good harrying tackles and simple distribution helped England tick.

Beckham: 4 - easily marked out of the game by the Swedish full back. No significant influence. No rapport with Carragher whatsoever. Should have been replaced with Aaron Lennon in second half.

J. Cole: 8 - looked very effective. Harried and tackled with discipline. Ran at players, passed well and scored superb goal. Made second goal.

Rooney: 7 - looked like a bull on occasions. Other occasions a little off the pace.

Owen: Injured after 4 minutes.

Subs:

Crouch: 6 - Actually linked quite well when getting the ball having dropped back. Never looked like scoring though and technique unreliable.

Sol Campbell: 3 - looked unsure everytime the ball came near.

Gerrard: 8 - a good cameo in a free role replacing Rooney. Cleared one off the line and scored with a great header.

"Government beseiged by police" reports the Guardian

2006-06-20T20:52:00.000+01:00

The Guardian reports an unexpected coup d'etat in my homeland. I guess whoever controls the army will end up being the new ruler of Britain.

AND the BBC are cancelling Top of the Pops - I wonder if this is what sparked the police to try and seize power?

CORRECTION!

On closer inspection the story is not reporting a coup d'etat but is about the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Association of Police Authorities (APA) making some suggestions as to amendments they would like to see to the Police and Justice bill currently working its way through parliament.

And the guardian is supposed to be for grown ups...

2006-06-17T00:20:00.000+01:00

Argentina wasted all that energy today scoring some of the best goals ever seen in a world cup against weak opponents. Silly billies. Imagine how tired they'll be now.

They should have strolled around looking bored for 83 minutes before punting it into the box to bounce it off the forehead of an impossibly enormous bean pole and into the goal.

They must be looking over at us and being SO jealous we have Crouchy. Well keep dreaming Argies - he's ours!

You'll just have to keep on messing about with all that fancy tip-tapping around.

2006-06-15T17:59:00.000+01:00

Over at the Guardian they are stoking the normal hysteria by asking if England are the worst team in the tournament.

Get a grip. They are just trying to get three points off Trinidad and Tobago, who are putting 10 men behind the ball, without breaking sweat. Why burn yourself out against weak opponents?

2006-06-15T17:52:00.000+01:00

OK. So it's only half-time and he'll probably get a hat-trick in the second half if I write this, but I think England fans, in their enthusiasm for his dancing and cheerful personality, have over-looked something about Peter Crouch: he's crap...

Germany

2006-06-15T15:54:00.000+01:00

Hmmm

Ecuador need only a tie with Germany in the last group game to win their group. Which means if England win their group....

it's Germany v England in Round two.

Get practising those penalties lads.

USA

2006-06-12T19:38:00.000+01:00

Few weeks back over here I said: "I actually think, as usual, the USA team are underrated by the rest of the world."

3-0 Ouch

You did know I was just being nice didn't you?

Being in the US gives me an excuse to give my thoughts about team USA:

Team USA looked intimidated, off the pace and unimaginative. Team USA played like true gentleman as always, and are perhaps the most honest team in the World Cup. But good play? Not much on offer.

And now it is Italy, three times World Cup winners, for the USA on Saturday.

I think the USA have to copy the Italian football style: bribery and cheating is the best option I think for the USA. So unless some rich yankee gets out his chequebook and Reyna learns how to dive it's mama mia goodbye USA...

The only positive: the Kansas City Wizard's Eddie Johnson looked keen and if Arena had any sense he would start him against Italy on Saturday.

Why did the USA suck? Landon Donovan should sit down and watch the video tape of the game against the Czechs. And watch Nedved. Now copy, Landon. Copy. Just do EXACTLY what Nedved does. Do: drop deep or run wide. Do: play intelligent through passes. Do: drop your shoulder, beat the man and lay the ball off.

Don't: mope around like you are waiting for your mum to come pick you up as you have got stuck playing with grown-ups.

At the moment Donovan has the ability but not the nous.
He had one run and pass when he dropped deeper and looked dangerous.

Harsh but fair I think. C'mon Eddie! It's all about Eddie. And to show I am not biased I will say I think Josh Wolff is a bag of shite.

Final verdict? Team USA - yet another argument for opening the border with Mexico. The Mexicans, unlike Dubya, know how to put Iran in its place.

Speaking of Bags of a very different kind, a blogger I read regularly, Happy in Bag, asked me if it was acceptable to watch England play in an Irish pub.

I think it is perfectly acceptable to watch England play in an Irish pub. In fact, in my experience, it is perfectly acceptable to do absolutely anything you like in an Irish pub, as long as you clean it up afterwards, don't hurt anyone and don't insult the landlord.

England

2006-06-12T15:24:00.000+01:00

This is interesting: What the other footballing powers thought of England

We are still addicted to 'direct' football. Turns out Sven, like many Swedes, is a student of the English game. However most English footie fans realise there are two kinds of English direct football. The good and the bad. Or the 1970's Liverpool kind, and the 1980's Wimbledon kind.

The 'good' British game is meant to be a relentless, pressurised game, played at the highest pace possible, where passes, crosses and shots are hit first time and for maximum effect - and that often means into teammate's feet over short distances. Possession is never kept for effect, only for attack, but it is still prized highly. And another team keeping possession is seen as an opportunity to harrass and push them back into their own half. It is a game of harrassment, skill and pace.

Liverpool perfected it in the 1970's and became the best team in the world. And this is what it should look like.

Arigo Sacchi took the style of play to Italy in the 1990's and proved it could work in the Mediterranean by making AC Milan world beaters playing a similar style...

Unfortunately Sven seems to have fallen for the common trap that this game can be mixed with the bad English game, the one that involves pumping long balls forward to a great big centre forward, who wins the ball and give layoffs to other chasing players. This is also an English style, but it is used by lesser teams to try to cause upsets against teams like Liverpool - eg Wimbledon.

We need to see the good English style, not the bad, and then we will do OK. That means my love affair with Peter Crouch is over. He is welcome to come on in the last five minutes if we our losing. Otherwise stay away Peter. Owen and Rooney are perfect for the good English game. As long as they are both match fit... Whoops.

England Football Team - finding an objective view.

2006-06-11T02:57:00.000+01:00

Due to a last minute flight-reservation-date-change-ambush in the travel agent by my wife about four months ago (I was caught world cup wallchartless and distracted by getting-out-of-the-travel-agent-and-getting-some-tea-and-maybe-a-beer syndrome) today I was flying back to Kansas City, while the rest of my countrymen and women were 'enjoying' En-ger-land's opener against Paraguay.

This meant not only did I miss it, but being in the US I had to work out how we did from t'interweb.

The English press has, for as long as I remember, been as unable to write about the England football team in anything other than the most cock-eyed, or caustic, or sentimental, or drunk, or romantic, or bilious (or a combination theorof) way.

Finding out what sort of day England has had from the English press is like asking a high court judge with extreme bipolar disorder to condense his life story into a series of football reports - it veers from self-loathing to hubris to sheer hysterical cheer - yet still retains the sombre style of someone who thinks they are making cold, objective pronouncements.

The lustiness of the tabloids is infuriating enough, until you get to the I-told-you-they-were-rubbish-and-aren't-I-some-wise-old-sage pomposity of the broadsheet sports writers.

The solution dawned on me in a flash of a google news search.

Fed up with this bitter old pill:

Too many unfit players and a lack of cutting edge up front

Paul Wilson believes injuries to key men and a lack of creativity are the familiar problems that could again catch up with Sven-Goran Eriksson

Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer

Let's get the good news out of the way first. England won, earned three points and might get to play Ecuador in the second round. Oh, and they could go on to win the World Cup, because any team who can celebrate victory after playing as poorly as this clearly has luck on its side.

England were certainly lucky to be playing Paraguay, because a better side would have beaten them. Time and again England got away with defensive hesitancy because their opponents needed a crash course in finishing. Despite being gifted their goal as early as the third minute, England never really looked like creating another and ended up protecting their lead with some desperate manoeuvres in their own penalty area. 'We suffered,' Sven-Goran Eriksson admitted. We all did.

http://football.guardian.co.uk/worldcup2006/story/0,,1795057,00.html

I turned to the Scotsman for salvation:

They had a few worrying seconds right at the end yesterday, as the ball zipped about madly close to their penalty area, but they held on comfortably enough. And they deserved to. Save for a few Frank Lampard blasts from distance they didn't play at all in the second half but nobody could argue legitimately that they were unworthy winners. They'll need to improve dramatically but it's a handy beginning.

Do you see the difference in style? One is self-loathing, the other is, I think, objective, with Scottish mock-loathing put aside.

London

2006-06-03T07:22:00.000+01:00

London. I know I am in London. We have to wait 50 minutes in the plane while we wait for some buses to take us to the terminal. That familar London accent "we apologise for the delay..." but the bus driver has to finish his fag and tea.

Eight quid (15 dollars) for my Father-in-Law to pay for his one hours parking at Heathrow. Traffic into London terrible. Father-in-law shouts at BMW driver.

Four pound fifty (7 dollars) for one tube ride to my friends house. Northern line station I want is closed so I detour through Finsbury Park. And there it is. People, so busy, so many people, buzzing around the shops and markets, the buses, taxis and cars that cram the old streets. People, all ages, shapes and sizes. All colours, creeds and business. The newspapers report a terrorist suspect shot, but the looks on faces are busy, busy and content. No mistrust, just a hive. There is too much humanity for fear. There is just no time for fear. Everyone is so too busy earning enough money for parking and the bus fare and living life, a life alive, in London.

Terror!

2006-06-01T14:04:00.000+01:00

Kansas City's war on terror

Kansas City gets $9.2 million counter-terrorism grant! No-ones packed lunches will be safe!

I have written about how they spend it: here.

Now I know how much money they get I am not as surprised. While it is easy to spend money on things like schools, hospitals and social programs, when you have to spend it on counterterrorism in, erm, Kansas City you need to get creative.

It is not just sandwiches that suffer. Local satirical writer Tony Botello is convinced that the War on Terror now looks more like a War on Mexicans. And he has a point. In 2003 the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was swallowed up by the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Money that was generated by a fear of terrorism still has to be spent. It can't all be spent on hassling Muslims, blowing up people's sandwiches and preventing Cat Stevens from playing a concert in America. So Mexican immigrants seem to have become yet another collateral casualty in this mighty war on 'terror'.

It is no coincidence that three years after the Department of Homeland Security took over immigration is suddenly in the spotlight.

And so we get stories like Myrna Dick's, a resident of Kansas City who came to the USA as a child, grew up here, married an American man, had one child and is now pregnant with another. She applied for permanent residency in 2001. When she went to renew her work permit in 2004 she was arrested, cuffed and told she was to be deported to Mexico and never be allowed back into the US. The authorities accused her of falsely claiming to be a US citizen after returning from a holiday to Mexico in 1998.

The only ray of light in this depressing story is Judge Scott O Wright who has invoked a law introduced to protect unborn fetus's to keep Myrna in the USA, at least until her child is born.

So we have the remarkable situation of a women's life being thrown into turmoil due to the collateral effects of the war on terror, only to end up being a collateral beneficiary of the war on abortions.

In light of this I think I have a suggestion for the people of America on how to end the war on terror: stop being terrorfied of everything.

HOME OF THE BRAVE! Americans sings that all the time. That is the last line of the national anthem's first verse! How can that be true if you need to spend all your time fighting a WAR ON TERROR! Some sort of backbone seems to be the solution to our problems, at least here in Kansas City.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Your President said that in 1933 at a time when life was bedwettingly frightening.

But now everything is hunky dory? War on Terror. For fucks sake...

It makes my head hurt. I'm going to watch that Peter Crouch video again.

Imagine you're a Paraguay centre half up against this robot dancing, gold-scoring, FA committee designed Rooney replacement. That's real terror.

2006-06-01T02:37:00.000+01:00

Crouching robot hidden superstar

2006-06-01T02:23:00.000+01:00

Essential viewing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8WSPnwGUnE&search=crouch

Essential reading:

http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1787348,00.html

We thought we'd be seeing Rooney, instead we'll be seeing a 6'7" man doing the robot. Badly. But he surely has an eye for goal eh? Football eh? You couldn't make it up.

The elephant in the room:

2006-05-31T17:49:00.000+01:00

ISN'T BLOGGING A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME?

Sabbatical my ass

I think I might be ready for my national service now.

England I am yours if you want me.

Local blogger reminds me of what a lucky sod I am

2006-05-31T17:33:00.000+01:00

This local blogger Happy in Bag posted a great photo of a local pool out here and it reminded me of how I spent my weekend as well (although at a different pool)

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7271/1244/1600/feetatpool.jpg

It is a tradition of English people abroad to make those left at home feel jealous about the weather.

This blogger does a better job than I could. Even when it rains here it is fantastic

The storms here are mighty works of art.

Marriage - huh - what is it good for...

2006-05-31T14:50:00.000+01:00

I think maybe the reason we struggle with these issues is that people are now free to define what Marriage means for themselves.

And with good reason right?. In the past the romantic interests of the couple in a marriage were something of an after-thought, at least for those who carried the most weight in defining marriage as a ritual and institution - ie the patriarchs of the families, the church and the government.

Nowadays people are less happy to have their culture defined by these big hitters from the past - and fair enough. But has this new freedom to define one's own interpretation of culture has seen us losing a collective understanding - and with it a collective culture - of marriage and it's benefits?

Now I am married I would say: when you dismiss tradition, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It is a simple truth that people behave differently when they are being observed, compared to when their actions remain private. And when it comes to family and children, biological reality dictates that us Men have more chance for their role to remain unobserved than women...

It is on this truism that marriage was partly based by those who framed it (although the Church had in mind the observance of God above all else.) You make a vow not only of romantic love to your wife, but AS IMPORTANTLY, you make a vow to your peers and to authority. In this respect it could be described as something of a sacrifice - (although enlightened self-interest is perhaps less cynical desciption of it, especially when your wife's such a looker as mine.)

But the fact is if a man stands up in front of all his peers, and in front of government (and if he is religious, his religious leader) and makes a public vow with all these people as witnesses, and then that vow is posted on a public noticeboard for all to see - then in most cases this will have an effect on the character of the man, and in most cases a positive effect. And in doing so he also contributes social capital that makes life easier for families - and so for all society.

Now some people maybe do not need this helping hand behind their character - and I am sure the love and committment of many cohabiting couples are not reduced by not being marriage. But personally I will take all the help I can get thanks.

And all partnerships can go wrong - but to simply blame marriage cannot be fair.

Now as for the rights of married couples verus non-married, it follows on from my understanding of marriage that those that take this vow, in the way I've described, should not ask for recognition for it, or seek any advantage from it.

To me that rather reduces the romance of it, as both a vow of love to your partner, and a committment to hold yourself up to certain standards of behaviour for the good of your peers. So of course unmarried couples should have the same rights of married couples. Surely if people like Melanie Phillips truly believed in marriage she would believe that they need these rights more than us married folks!

Instead of trying to take away from unmarried couples, the true defender of marriage should add another obligation to their marriage vows - an obligation to share your experiences of marriage in order to help people define what marriage means to them, for the best for them and us all.

(And I would include in this explaining to people that flying out to Barbados for a private wedding kind of misses out a lot of what marriage can be about - that marriage isn't just like a birthday present to yourselves.)

Is the man on the right the new Geoff Hurst?

2006-05-30T21:55:00.000+01:00

In 1966, England's campaign at the World Cup was going to be all about Jimmy Greaves, who at that time was more of a phenomenon than Rooney is today.

Until he got injured that is.

His replacement was the more modestly talented Geoff Hurst, who at that time had only won eight England caps. Greaves was fit for the final but Sir Alf Ramsey kept faith with Hurst and the rest is history.

Today we have Rooney out injured and his replacement, Peter Crouch scored today, and looked up for it.

Will history repeat itself?????

OF COURSE IT WON'T! But it will be fun to watch all the same!

Peter Crouch is 6 foot 7 inches tall and as thin as a rake, making him fun to watch and a great secret weapon with which to bewilder the opposition. He looks like a footballer who was designed by a computer programme based on the instructions of the FA committee circa 1991.

Wayne Rooney: the new Jimmy Greaves?

English conversations in the Midwest

2006-05-29T19:40:00.000+01:00

A tribute to this blog:

http://irishkc.com/2006/05/irish-conversation-in-american-midwest_27.htm

(By "tribute" obviously I mean that not content with my country, ahem, stealing six counties of his homeland I am also going to steal ideas from his blog. Pink Panties.)

-So you're from England huh?
-Yep
-I meet a lot of English people
-Oh yeah? Where?
-IHOP
-International House of Pancakes?!
-No International House of Prayer
-Oh
-Yeah a lot of people from England are coming over here because of what is going on over there
-What's going on over there?
-Lot's of people think there are too many Muslims. What do you think?
-Oh. No. I don't think so. Anyway it is a good thing to have Muslims in the community. We lived in a very multicultural area in London. In fact our local Member of Parliament is a Muslim. I voted for him.
-Oh. Ok.

Conversations in the American Mid-west

2006-05-29T13:55:00.000+01:00

Location: Union Station on the Day before Memorial Day

-That was great huh?
-Yeah. It is very different to remembrance Sunday events in England.
-Oh yeah
-Yeah in England it is very sombre. It is like a national day of mourning. Like a national funeral.
-Oh?
-In fact there's a real cultural difference here.
-Oh yeah. I guess here it's more of a celebration
- I can't help thinking that waving flags, firing Cannons, singing patriotic songs about war, concluded with a massive fireworks display might be considered the height of bad taste, given the true abject horror and suffering of warfare?
- Oh yeah? haha!
- I mean those cannon blasts would have reduced many real veterans to nervous wrecks wouldn't they? I mean they used to have to run towards those buggers and watch the hot metal chew up their friends? I'm not sure they'd find much to celebrate in that?
- Ha ha. That's funny. I guess everyone does things differently
- Yeah I agree. Not everyone would have the light aircraft circling overhead trailing a banner with an enormous colour photograph of a 10 week aborted fetus...
- Well tomorrow we have a wreath laying by President Bush...
- At least he'll have fresh graves as well as fresh flowers...
- Ha ha ha!...
- Do you think maybe I should forget the politics and just enjoy the show?
- I think so...
- Ok

2006-05-26T15:42:00.000+01:00

DaveHill said...

Hello Roldy. Such a nice thing to say about me! Thanks. And nice blog (Terrible match earlier though, what I saw of it). How come you're living in the middle of America? And how come you know so much about Hackney? Best Wishes!

Hello Dave Hill. Seeing as this is a man who once interviewed John Barnes for a book I take his questions seriously, and as an excuse to talk about myself at length...

I am living in the middle of America as we ran away here for three reasons:

1. My wife was offered a job by this rather great company

2. It was after trying to make a documentary about this which involved my wife's Father. After about two years developing and filming this project it was commissioned for this. But was then cancelled due to a conflict of interest with this.
This made us rather disillusioned about working for British TV, so we are now on a kind of sabbatical thinking about what to do next. I am trying not to waste all my time blogging and reading the damn Guardian website.

3. We have a fetish for middle America that saw us make three films broadly about middle American values. (We have taken this film off our website as we didn't want to start a race riot in Texas.) We are weirdly fascinated by Rodeo, Barbeque, Religion, US Military, and good old Kansas bigotry.

I don't know that much about Hackney, but I do know about Wandsworth, as I used to live in Tooting. I was just assuming they were as bad as each other. Although I had read a little about Hackney as I was interested in making a documentary about people (usually pensioners) who devote their life to complaining, haranging, and holding to account crappy councils. I wanted to find out if they would appear as true heros of democracy and compare favourably with people who spend their life fretting and complaining about HUGE political issues (Euston Manifesto) without actually ever doing anything worth a damn to no-one.

AFRICA

2006-05-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

When my wife and I went to see The Constant Gardener, which involves a drug company testing new drugs on the Africa poor without their knowledge and with the complicity of the UK government, we both wondered if it was really that bad. We wondered if we, through our institutions and companies, interacted with Africa in such a cynical way.

I thought I would see if I could find anything similar in real life on tinterweb.

What I found was this:

18 Million pounds of UK aid to Ghana gone walkabout

New Statesman story

DFID say nothing to investigate

Nothing to investigate?

Sounds fishy to me.

Here's the letter a civil servant from DFID wrote in response:

From New Statesman 26th September 2005

Rosie Waterhouse ("Aid to Africa: who's counting?", 12 September) questioned whether the Department for International Development (DfID) responded properly to concerns about financial management, raised by Howard Horsley's story. I assure you that we did.

Reviews by DfID and two cabinet secretaries concluded that DfID acted correctly over Horsley's dismissal, which related wholly to his performance. A further review by the National Audit Office found "no significant failings of control in financial management . . . and no evidence of misuse of funds".

The grant of £18m to the government of Ghana in 2000 paid for teachers' salaries. The NAO confirmed this money was spent as planned. DfID began supporting Ghana's education sector in 1998; figures for 2005 show Ghanaian gross primary school enrolment at 87.5 per cent, up from just under 80 per cent in 2000.

Gareth Thomas
International development minister
London SW1

So it's alright after all.

But how come Austin Mitchell told parliament:

Many people knew of this but the NAO went through the ledgers of payments overseas by the Treasury, the Overseas Development Administration and other agencies and could find no trace of the payment.

And quoted Sir John Bourn of the NAO as saying:

"has confirmed to my staff that he was present at the talks, and that the then Secretary of State (Ms Clare Short) lent a sympathetic ear to the Ghanaians regarding the fall in the gold price, and the price of agricultural commodities such as cocoa and coffee. He added, however, that he was 'absolutely sure' that there was no rapid disbursement of funds to Ghana following the talks."

That muddies the waters a bit doesn't it? Why are gold prices now being mentioned?

So to recap: we have a minor DFID employee who is told that £18 million is going to come to DFID to be spent on education. Now it appears that this decision is based on the fact that the Gold price has suddenly fallen due to Gordon Brown flogging Gold to buy Euros, which hurt Ghana's fragile economy. (If you increase the supply of something the price falls).

So this civil servant has already written a few emails and reports to London warning that he suspects that UK government money is not being spent properly. He gets Typhoid and returns home and then he is suddenly sacked, has his files wiped and is denied proper disciplinerary proceedings as he is told he is not actually a real civil servant, but employed under the royal prerogative - basically the same employment rights as being a spy. In short he is give the right royal fuck you mister and is not told why.

At the same time in Ghana:

Gold is Ghana's most important export so gold price changes have broad consequences, beyond 'development' concerns. One of the most important is the financial health of mines like Ashanti. When the price falls it does not effect Ashanti as it runs a hedge book against the price of Gold falling. Good thinking eh? Well no, as it did not fall as much as expected as demand for Gordon's Gold was extremely high and then 15 central EU banks announced they would be limiting Gold sales in the future. So the price goes up sharpish, instead of down, and Ashanti's hedge fund goes from being worth $290 million to being worth -$570 million. Ouch.

This means squeaky bum time for the company and its shareholders. And it means company's like Tiny Rowland's (who had died a year earlier - obits compared him to Cecil Rhodes for his business dealings in Africa) Lonmin company can come in and try to takeover Ashanti.

This Gold mine Ashanti is worth a cool $890 million. (To put this in perspective DFID spends 70 million in Ghana each year)

Well the Government of Ghana is not keen to sell its 20% stake in it's richest Gold mine. It quite likes that Ghana profits directly from its own Gold. So the President stands firm against Lonmin.

However suddenly, and unexpectedly, his Minister of Mines comes out in favour of the UK firms bid! Maybe the Brits will win! But no the minister for mines is sacked and Lonmin survives.

Until a few years later that is. Then AngloGold (51% owned by AngloAmerican) succeeds where Lonmin failed. They manage to beat off competition from RandGold - a South African company (despite RandGold bidding more...)

So one of Ghana's largest mining company - that used to be 20% owned by the government of Ghana, ends up being owned and operated by a British/American/South African company.

Now what has this got to do with the £18 million that DFID got so confused about? Well probably nothing. Or maybe it was behind the Minister of Mines sudden turnaround.

Whatever you want to believe the context is important. Ghana ranks 65th in Transparency Internationals Corruption Index, scoring 3.5 out of 10 (UK scores 8.6/10).

British interests in its mining go back to 1897 and even earlier.
I am a believer in using Occams razor when it comes to international trade and politics - and that razor tells me that DFID might well be, as Tony Blair says "the top performing UK government department", especially if you're a shareholder in AngloGold.

In fact I think this story tells you a lot about Africa. More than Bono does anyway.

The fact is that our government has a running policy to protect and promote British interests in Africa. That means helping British companies take over Gold mines in Ghana and keeping the revenues that could have otherwise gone to the government of Ghana.

Forget Aid and DFID and everything. That is the policy. And if we want to help Africa then maybe we should try and change it. But before writing to your MP remember that it is the share's of companies like AngloAmerican's that sit in our pension fund portfolios. Funds that allow our parents to retire in comfort.

It is multinational companies like AngloAmerican that have their headquarters in London so we can have well paid jobs with them, and that pay UK taxes to build our hospitals and roads and so forth.

The whole way the West and the Third World, particularly sub-saharan Africa, interact is wrong not because western money is somehow robbing them. It is not - it always pays the going rate. The wrong is because if Western interests are going to dominate African trade and resourses so completely (and they are because they are more powerful at present, and I honestly believe there is nothing anyone can do about this) then we have a moral obligation to make sure the countries where this business happens have functioning government departments, civil societies, property rights, rule of law and all the other things that make a country worth living in, so the country itself develops with its business interests. Which is what we used to do when Ghana was part of the British Empire.

Now we just do the heavy handed business bit, that looks like mugging to many people, without the positives of Colonnial rule - the civil society, the rule of law, the infrastructure and investment etc.

Complicated isn't it?

I went back to comment is free...

2006-05-25T19:07:00.000+01:00

I couldn't help myself. I've changed my mind.

I'm totally on Georgina Henry's and Polly Toynbee's side of the argument, I think, although I can't remember now what the argument actually was. Something like: X called Y this and A called B this then B said this and then all the letters of the alphabet joined in and someone got called a Nazi, someone a Bolshie - but anyway Georgina is so nice and reasonable and has the kindest face on the site.

But the problem I think is that the site is not really a blog - it is a forum and I'm sure the standard life cycle of chat rooms and forums (which often ends with them becoming dominated by a caucus of lonely belligerents, despite the efforts of the administraters to keep it in check) is documentated by someone, somewhere or other. One could start by checking out Tim Dowling's brilliant permachat.co.uk creation.

But it is a good way to spot writers you like. As well as the two mentioned below, I also like Julie Bindel, as she is an activist and a writer who I agree with 100%, (110% when talking with my wife) but whince at the way she puts her arguments across as I know she is alienating the very people who need influencing the most.

Blurring the line between amateur and professional is one thing - but surely the more important issue is NOT blurring the line between a spinning, spouting, comment writing type journalist and a fact checking, source checking, objectivity loving reporter who hold facts and thorough research as sacred.

There is room for both, but they should wear different uniforms, like the police and fire services. But there is never an excuse for rudeness. Bum.

That said....

2006-05-24T20:55:00.000+01:00

...I am never going back to Comment Is Free again apart from to read Dave Hill's articles. He is clever, polite and engaging. And more importantly he often writes about football.

Daniel Davies I will also read as he reminds me of the smart chaps who sat behind me in economics A-level class before they went off to Oxbridge. Thoroughly likeable assholes.

And they are both real bloggers.

Comment is Free

2006-05-24T19:20:00.000+01:00

I have mentioned this here and here

This latest post by Polly Toynbee is very entertaining.

It is hugely entertaining seeing such an established journalist reacting to the blogosphere. She is right of course. There is no excuse for rudeness. But her mistakes are interesting: like talking about Brighton Festival to a global audience, not understanding the income potential of web advertising for the Guardian, attacking people for their anonymity before going on to pick on "Tim Worstall", not realising that the established thing for blogs to do to counter anonymity is to let the comment writer link back to their own blog (which the Guardian site doesn't do), and criticising people for arguing with her while, well, arguing with them. Not to mention the fact that she doesn't realise most bloggers moderate their own comments - so our reaction is if you don't like it delete it - and the fact the guardian doesn't do more deleting may be the reason people write offensive stuff on there.

Anyway while there is never an excuse for rudeness, it can't do much harm to be called a "loathsome hypocrite" from time to time. Most of us are.

And what does she get for her pains?

This comment followed when someone suggested a blogging guide:

SeaLion: I support the creation of a guide for some of the muppets who get paid to write utter rubbish then get all upset when their arguments get shredded by the great unwashed. In fact, I think its a great idea. You go ahead and write one to tell us how we should behave, and in the spirit of democracy we can write one to tell you how you should behave.

I humbly propose an introduction:
Dear journalist, welcome to comment is free. Many people buy the guardian because it contains some excellent reporting and insightful commentary. This did not necessarily come from you. You did not realise this because nobody thought it was worth the price of a stamp to tell you. If you write anything on here be prepared to find out exactly how good your journalism is, because this is a direct line to thousands of people with intelligence, insight and google, and if you're wrong about something you'll probably find out fairly quickly.

Oh yeah, that abuse thing. Sooner or later somebody will call you an arsehole. While we understand that this may be upsetting, please do not lose sight of the fact that it happens to AC Grayling a hell of a lot less than it happens to Polly Toynbee. Draw your own conclusions.

God bless the internet and all who sale in her. The largest toilet wall in history.

David Cameron

2006-05-24T14:48:00.000+01:00

is the new(ish) leader of the UK Conservative Party.

He is doing a rebranding job on the Tory's. New Tory. Although I am sure we will still be able to get Classic Tory as well.

I was going to write something about him but this blogger has spared me the bother. It is only fun shooting fish in barrels when you get to go first.

What are Kansas City's Two great wonders?

2006-05-19T21:08:00.000+01:00

Not blog this time but another proper article:

The two great wonders of Kansas City: a Caravaggio and an empty street corner

Today I realise Kansas City has two great wonders that would grace any other city in the world; two world-class attractions that people would fly from London to see…

My parents are retired. But they are young and energetic and curious. In these early years of retirement almost half their time is spent travelling – seeing the wonders of the world. Last week they came to see my wife and I in Kansas City. They bought me photos of their previous holiday: a trip that saw them exploring the Mayan ruins of Guatemala. One photo showed my Mother swinging through the Rainforest canopy on a zip line 135 feet in the air.

But this time it was little old Kansas City, Missouri. Where I reside. They would stay for a week. I would show them round.
“I’ll try and fix something up but there’s nothing much to see” I warned them. I was not going to try and compete with the Mayan glory of “El Mirador” Temple or the natural beauty of the Guatemalan tropical rainforest.

But in the end I think I did. Only one of the wonders I showed my parents is celebrated in a museum. It is a painting and it hangs, brooding, dominant in its brilliance, in the solid, serious architecture of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.

The other wonder, at the present time, is just an anonymous place: an empty suburban street corner, important due to the legacy of two men who, more than anyone else, changed popular music forever.

For reasons that for the moment I can only fathom with a general sense of depression at the imagined details of the injustice, the spot remains unmarked and uncelebrated. More widely the men are relatively unchampioned, given their monumental contribution to popular culture. No statues, no birthplace museum. Down the road is a modest park that commemorates the general scene. But for some reason Kansas City and the world, caught in a semantic cultural trickery, hasn’t quite caught onto the scale of the importance of the Sunset Club, the small venue that used to sit just south of 12th Street in between Highland Ave and Woodland Ave, a few blocks east.
Akin to what happened to the artist whose painting dominates the Museum, the true celebrations of these two artists are on hold waiting for the world to catch up.

Raising Hell: the Borgias and Tom Pendergast

There was only one problem with Orson Welles: he was an even greater smartass than he was an artist. And he was one hell of an artist.

So when Welles filled the screen as the quintessential creation of the quintessential writer of the time – when he played Harry Lime in the Third Man – he casually upstaged the great writer Graham Greene by adding to Greene’s screenplay the most memorable line in the film:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

And of course it is true. Great art often springs from tumultuous times. It is a line that, here in Kansas City, we might imagine springing from the lips of “Boss Tom” Pendergast, who controlled the city in the 1930’s. The corruption, beatings and murder of Pendergast’s prohibition era Kansas City are now insignificant compared to the musical explosion that was cooked up in a gaggle of eastside good time bars between 12th and 18th Streets. Swop Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci for Charlie Parker and Count Basie and you get it.

(And for the record the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany. Sorry Switzerland…)

The First KC Wonder

Following the Italian renaissance, a young artist by the name of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio did his part to celebrate the legacy of the Borgias through his rampant drinking, fornication and fighting. At the same time he attended to the legacy of Michelangelo by borrowing poses from Michelangelo’s work for his own portraiture.

In 1604 Caravaggio turned his artistic talent, at its peak, to one of his favourite subjects: young brooding boys at the cusp of adulthood. This time it would be a private commission by a sympathetic collector, so giving the artist the freedom of a Kansas City musician in his hometown club, with ties to convention and public taste loosened if not cut.

Caravaggio could create the image of a man with his own lustful, violent intensity, a man redeemed by his mission and his myth. In 1604 Caravaggio painted with a murderous passion in his veins if not yet blood on his conscience. (Caravaggio would not kill a victim of his rage until a year later.) The resulting work is Kansas City’s first wonder and it hangs on the first floor of the Nelson Atkin’s Museum of Art.

Sometimes a painting can destroy the works it shares a room with.
Until you’ve studied the Caravaggio, all the other paintings might as well be hallmark wallpaper. If you want proof that the ghosts of artists do not stalk the Nelson Atkins gallery this is surely provided by the fact the paintings to the side of Caravaggio’s do not periodically leap from the wall in frustration. It is a painting that has you questioning the lighting arrangements: surely the curators are using a different bulb, a different intensity of spot lighting for this corner? Such is the power of Caravaggio’s famous light and shade.

Like most gallery visitors, myself included, you’ll grasp for explanation when confronted by such a striking image. And the gallery is helpful with its blurb:

The conception of the image is itself remarkable, for the Baptist had hardly ever before been portrayed as an isolated, seated figure who lacks, moreover, his usual attributes of halo, lamb and banderole. Stark contrasts of light and dark accentuate the perception that the figure leans forward, out of the deep shadows of the background and into the lighter realm of the viewer's own space.

Halo, lamb and banderole are indeed missing: a break with convention to muse over before you step on to the next painting…

But why he left them out we are not told. You should not need to be told. This artist is clearly not interested in religious rigmarole here. The halo, lamb and banderole would just get in the way you see, as this, I am afraid sensitive ladies and gentlemen, is a John the Baptist at his sexual peak. He is, like the artist was by reputation, up for it, with both men and women. And happily for you this Baptist is in the wilderness, with nothing but a fur draped delicately across his loins.

Beside lamb, halo and banderole there is one other thing missing, or at least hidden, that the Nelson Atkins gallery bumpf writers don’t mention. More important than these trinkets of convention, Caravaggio hides the eyes of his fantasy.

When untrained artistic idiots like me, and perhaps you, draw a human face, we will most likely draw the eyes first or second. When an idiot buys a painting he might complain: “where are the eyes! I can’t see the eyes!”

It is 1604. Find a religious portrait where the eyes are all but hidden by shadow. Have a look. Not easy to find one is it? The reason you cannot find one? An artist would have to have enormous courage to cover them in shade, huge faith in the power of his work. It betrays a naturalism that would be condemned by all the critics of the time, powerful critics who held the fortunes of artists in their hands. Ask yourself this: how often do you wilfully do the opposite of what convention, tradition, your paymasters and public taste dictates, simply because you know you are right and they are wrong? Then you can begin to understand this wonder.

Caravaggio has given his John the Baptist a pair of natural shade f**k-me sunglasses. To paint the most erotic eyes? Use a pose and skin tone that emphasises a lustful stare, that draws your eyes to his, and cover them in mysterious shadow. The eyes, all but lost in the shadow of brow, can be filled with your own lusts. If you are lucky enough to get close, and the glare of the museum’s lights hide this, you can see John’s eyes are looking down and to our right, the classic look of innocent thoughtfulness and internal dialogue. Of course they are – after all this is John the Baptist, not some young good-time boy, for the artist to paint and then sodomise…They wouldn’t celebrate that sort of thing in Kansas City now would they?
This painting is a Kansas City wonder. John the Baptist was a favourite subject of Caravaggio and this is arguably his best rendition. It has simplicity and sensuality and technical perfection.

And it is in the right place. Although out and out pederasty is somewhat unfashionable in this part of the world, the love for the young male is not. Be it the soldier or the athlete, these ‘fat’ middle US States such as Missouri and Kansas have perfected a kind of collective Socratic love for their young men, ironed out in innocence without the awkward embarrassment of buggery (physical violence its most common replacement). How Caravaggio would have enjoyed painting K State quarterbacks like Jonathan Beasley or Josh Freeman!

The Second KC Wonder

There is every chance Caravaggio would have been at home at the birthplace of KC’s second wonder: the Kansas City of the 1930’s. Back then this place was jumping and wide open.

There is an unmarked patch of land just south of 12th Street in between Highland Ave and Woodland Ave. This patch of land is where Kansas City born singer and bartender Joe Turner used to shout the blues in the Sunset Club in the 1930's.

This spot is Kansas City’s second wonder. (Hear a clip from 1938 on realplayer)

Jay McShann would later immortalise the music scene of the time with his song “Goin’ to Kansas City”. In an interview with Colin Davey I borrow here he recalls the first time he went to the Sunset Club:

So one night I was to meet some friends over there at the Sunset Club. So I asked them who's over there. They said Pete Johnson and Joe Turner. Well, Pete and Joe, that's the way they'd speak about Pete and Joe, Pete and Joe gonna be there. That's all that needs to be there. As long as Pete and Joe are there it’s gonna be jumping.

When we walked in the club, Pete was just kinda fooling around on the piano, just sitting up there. Wasn't no action going on right then. We walked in and I'd listen to a few little things that Pete was doing up there, just fooling around on the piano. So then finally they got ready to start playing. So when they started, old Joe was standing at the mike. He made some kind of announcement or something and then said "Roll 'em Pete..." and ol' Pete started with all this boogie woogie stuff and started moving and man it just caught my eye. I ran over as close as I could get to it and listened. And then he rolled em for about ten or fifteen minutes. And then Joe started singing. Joe sung for about twenty or thirty minutes and then he hollered back at Pete:

Roll 'em let 'em jump for joy. Yeah man, happy as a baby boy with a brand new brand new choo choo toy...

And I was listening to all those lyrics and trying to take in everything that was happening. I was just completely excited. It was one of the greatest exciting times that I had listening to music…

Pete Johnson and Joe Turner developed this shouting style due to the fact the music was so goddamn fast and so goddamn loud. They were there to get the crowds in and to get the place jumping and rocking.

Of course today this style is more often called “Rock and Roll”. And of course somewhere deep in our subconscious we know Joe Turner was singing it here in Kansas City at the Sunset club before little Elvis Aaron Presley was even born.

But for now commercial success overshadows the innovative original artists: we have the ridiculous charade of US radio stations celebrating 50 years of Rock and Roll in 2004 or the draw-dropping arrogance of Rolling Stone magazine naming “That’s All right Baby” by Elvis Presley as the first ever Rock and Roll record.

It’s a topic America cannot get to grips with because its semantics were formed in a time of racial apartheid. (Oh no here we go…)

But hey, any argument I make cannot equal the experience of listening to a Big Joe Turner recording of his jump blues. Go to 18th and Vine and listen to a recording – they have one in the Jazz Museum.

“Hey this isn’t Jazz. It’s not even Blues. This is some rock and roll!” you’ll say to yourself in wonder as you look at the recording date…

The semantics here need to be handled with great care. A common usage of “Rock and Roll” means a black musical style music played by white musicians from a ‘different’ musical tradition. But music doesn’t work like that. With music if it beats like rock and roll, if it sounds like rock and roll, if it moves like rock and roll then I am sorry, but it is rock and roll. And musicians, like artists, only caring about their creations, are often the most colour blind.

This part of America, as Americans like to forget for 364 days a year, used to be a formal apartheid. A glance at a racial census map of Kansas City will tell you that it largely remains an informal one. The price the city pays for this is it cannot take credit for the cultural contribution of the people it shunned. But even now, perhaps bitter at knowing it cannot take credit, Kansas City cannot bring itself to fully give credit.

To be fair part of the problem is less insidious semantics. Many will say Big Joe Turner belongs to Jazz – his recordings are there to be heard in the Jazz Museum on 18th and Vine. Or if not Jazz he is claimed by the Blues. The KC blues society celebrates “The Boss of the Blues’s” birthday every year. Both these musical genres claim him and rightly so. The very reason he is so in demand is his innovative crossing of styles. Of course the Rock world is hardly neglectful: the Rock and Roll hall of fame inducted him in its second year. In 1954 Joe Turner had commercial success when his original recording of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" (performed by Turner and written by Jesse Stone, himself another black man from Atchison, Kansas) garnered him some overdue national attention following the success of the Bill Haley version. Like Caravaggio, Turner and Johnson were successful in their lifetimes.

But in the common historical celebration of rock and roll music, when referenced before 1954 Turner is transformed into a roots musician, a jazz player or a rhythm and bluesman. A semantic logic shuts him out with no basis in the ethnographic reality or in the nature of music: it cannot be rock and roll because he played for black adults, not commercially for white teenagers. And so the site of the birthplace of rock and roll, here in KC, stays anonymous.

In other spheres America loves invention and innovation. In art, as we have seen with Caravaggio, originality and courage to explore new forms, to have the technical expertise to flourish in unknown directions, is the most valued, indeed the immortal, prize. To put it into context Caravaggio was not recognised as a genius until over three hundred years later when a critic (Andre Berne-Joffroy) at last had the courage to acknowledge: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting." And a sublime example of his genius is here in KC.

Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner’s legacy, remarkable by being so quietly true, make Kansas City the birthplace of Rock and Roll. Kansas City should now have the guts to declare, ideally in an enormous billboard marking the site of the sunset club:

“What begins in the work of Pete Johnson and Joe Turner is, quite simply, modern Rock and Roll.” What follows on from this beginning will be organic: a shrine, a museum, a recreation. People will decide.

Kansas City: home of one of the world’s greatest paintings and the birthplace of Rock and Roll!

Iranian blog

2006-05-08T22:46:00.000+01:00

Mr Behi

A while ago I blogged about how the univeralist vs relativist debate often gets in the way of cross-cultural human compromise and interaction. At least I think that is what it was about...

Basically the observer article defined the debate as between

"those who believe that some moral rights and freedoms ought to be universal and those who argue that each culture to its own."

It is a hot political debate, but my anthropologist wife pointed out to me that it ignores who defines and controls 'culture'.

Anyway that got me thinking about current affairs now and I concluded that one could see what my wife was talking about in media coverage of tensions between Iran and the USA.

Sadly I believe that within 3-5 years from now the US (supported by Britain) will be taking some sort of military action against Iran. I want to believe it will be avoided but I don't. They will have their reasons, and the Iranian government will have its reasons for resisting the demands and influence emanating from Washington DC.

In the lead up to this crisis we will see the media reporting the governments positions and debating the geopolitical rights and wrongs. Fine. What I believe we will not see enough of is cross-cultural compromise and interaction.

So in that spirit I am going to be a regular reader, listener and viewer of Mr Behi's blog. Of all the Iranian bloggers I think he does one of the best jobs of sharing, with honesty and humour (and photo's) some of his thoughts and experiences. Like me he believes in trying to "take the true image yourself" and that:

"despite all these technological advances in the media, the true image of other people or places is still not easy to get. Perhaps, this is one of the motivating factors of blogging."

It seems in Iran the black hole in the middle of the relativist versus universalist debate is easy to see.

Mr Medhi is a man in his late twenties who likes Pink Floyd and blogging. Now my suspicion is that I probably have a lot more in common with him than I would with George Bush, Tony Blair or the Pope. And likewise he will have more in common with me that he would with Ali Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I would encourage all bloggers, whatever their political beliefs, to link to, read and comment on blogs from countries who have had, or who face the prospect of, military action involving their home nation. Particularly Americans - who live in the most powerful country in the world. Perhaps the most influential the world has ever seen.

2006-05-05T17:54:00.000+01:00

America's Burden

Kipling's poem tweaked for today's reader)

Take up the burden of freedom--
Send forth the best you breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the burden of freedom--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the burden of freedom--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the burden of freedom--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports you shall not enter,
The roads you shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the burden of freedom--
And reap its old reward:
The blame of those you better,
The hate of those you guard--
The cry of hosts you humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Iraqi night?"

Take up the burden of Freedom--
You dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all you cry or whisper,
By all you leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the burden of freedom--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

You can read the original poem hereand there's a good wiki of it here if you're unfamiliar with it.

Terrorist threat suspected in Lee's Summit!

2006-05-01T16:20:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago someone kicked in the door of the apartment downstairs from us.

However I will not write about that. It was probably a domestic and none of my business. It was a small crime that passed without fuss.

However something more unusual happened in Lee's Summit. Lee's Summit is an anonymous suburb of Kansas City. It looks like endless other bland suburbs. (If you ate nothing but boiled rice for a month you'd have an awareness of the blandness scale we are talking about.)

In this sterile environment a couple of days ago, someone found a paper bag at the end of their drive. It had duct tape on it, which they said "looked suspicious". So they only went and called the bloody bomb squad!

Now obviously Kansas City has no need for a bomb squad in the police department, so the police told them there was "zero chance" of it being a bomb, and advised the caller to stop being so paranoid and get on with his life.

No. No. I got it wrong. What happened was the police do have a bomb squad. And what happened was they raced out to Lee's Summit, with all their gear and sirens blazing...

In fact they closed off the whole street, evacuated people from their houses and then used a sophisticated robot to crawl up to the package and blew up what we can presume was someone's old sandwiches with a controlled explosion!

Here is the exciting local news coverage featuring funny quotes from bemused teenagers.

Now this really scares me. Sure it is funny - it reminds me of the post-911 spoof story from the Onion about Cedar Rapids Public Library beefing up their security due to the war on terror.

But it also reminds me of pretty much the only thing Margaret Thatcher ever said that I agreed with:

"All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
It must be business as usual"

Business as usual. For me business as usual does not mean calling a bomb squad when someone leaves a paper bag at the end of your drive in Lee's Summit, MO.

Business as usual does not mean the bomb squad actually turning up, acting as if it is a bomb and giving credence to unwarranted fears about terrorism.

No. Business as usual means people like me getting the London bus home four hours after a bus on the same route has been blown to bits by a suicide bomber. Business as usual means getting on the tube the next day after the tube bombings. It means New Yorkers going back to work in high rise offices and getting back on planes regularly.

But it is not just the public. The police and politicians need to lead by example.

It does NOT mean plain clothed policemen shooting seven bullets into the the face of an unarmed Brazilian man on the tube when they get their surveillance targets wrong.

It does NOT mean the ridiculous charade of Dick Cheney dissappearing off to "undisclosed locations" for months after the 9/11 attacks.

When people see their leaders behaving like this it is no wonder they lose any sense of proportion as to the actual threat.

Again the contrast with Thatcher is interesting. She came within feet of being killed when the IRA put a bomb next to her hotel room in Brighton. The bomb killed five members of her party and injured many others. The party conference was scheduled to start at 9:30 am the next morning. Thatcher was there on time - opening the conference as usual.

Later Thatcher was telling us that political leaders:

'must never, never be stopped from going among the people by a few men of violence, because that is just what they want.'

If only this administration walked the walk like she did instead of just talking the talk.

Now I am going to go out on a limb here and say that there will not be a terrorist attack in Lee's Summit in my lifetime. Those security warnings? All that "be vigilant" stuff? DOES NOT APPLY HERE. And for that I am very happy. It was no fun taking the tube after July 2005 believe me. So I hate to see people not appreciating their total and utter lack of risk from any form of terrorism.

Although there is an abandoned car outside my apartment. I wish someone would take it away. May be I should call the bomb squad?

2006-04-28T18:49:00.000+01:00

Here's some music lyrics. Bruce Springsteen. I think they're fantastic. Some critics reckon his lyrics are a little precious. Well young men are a little precious sometimes, although they pretend to be tough.

Can't for the life of me see what all the fuss about this guy is in comparison.

Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight
Forcin' a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July
Down in town the circuit's full of switchblade lovers, so fast, so shiny, so sharp
As the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark
And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore
Chasin' all them silly New York virgins by the score

Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
Those pier lights, our carnival life forever
Oh, love me tonight, for I may never see you again
Hey, Sandy girl... my baby

Now the greasers, they tramp the streets or get busted for sleepin' on the beach all night
Them boys in their high heels, ah Sandy, their skins are so white
And me, I just got tired of hangin' in them dusty arcades, bangin' them pleasure machines
Chasin' the factory girls underneath the boardwalk, where they all promised to unsnap their jeans
And you know that Tilt-a-Whirl down on the south beach drag? I got on it last night and my shirt got caught
And it kept me spinnin', they didn't think I'd ever get off

Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
Those pier lights, our carnival life on the water
Runnin', laughin' underneath the boardwalk with the boss's daughter
I remember, Sandy girl... my baby

Sandy, the waitress I was seein' lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw boppin' down the beach with the radio
Kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of the cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with her lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear, the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do?
For me this carnival life's through-- you ought to quit this scene too

Sandy, the aurora is risin' behind us
Those pier lights, our carnival life forever
Oh, love me tonight and I promise I'll love you forever
Oh, I mean it, Sandy girl

Illegal immigration!

2006-04-24T18:42:00.000+01:00

This is the topic of the moment here in the US.

Congress is currently working on a bill that they want ready by memorial day to address illegal immigration.

Here's the NY Times on where things stand.

The prospect of this bill bought thousands of people out on the streets in protest, including here in KC. This is why:

Under the Senate plan, illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for five years or more would eventually be granted citizenship if they remained employed, had background checks, paid fines and back taxes and learned English.

Illegal immigrants who have lived here two to five years would have to travel to a United States border crossing and apply for a temporary work visa, but they would also be eligible for permanent residency and citizenship over time. Illegal immigrants who have been here less than two years would have to leave the country, though they could apply to be in a temporary worker program.

The paying back taxes is the real fuck you isn't it? We are talking about 2.3 percent of the population here in the world's biggest economy. It is quite a few people but this is America! Is this such a big deal for the land of the free? Obviously it is a big deal to the people without work permits, but should it be to anyone else?

Illegal immigration overwhelmingly means people from less prosperous countries who come to America and most often end up feeding on the crumbs that fall from America's middle-class table. Any social mobility is difficult because of their illegal status. Their 'crime'? I think it is best defined as not having the right pieces of paper.

Personally I find branding people as 'illegal' for doing something we are nagged our whole lives to do - that is "get a job and work hard you lazy son of a bitch", seems to set my teeth on edge.

And all they need is a bit of paper with a social security number and then it's legal. Give them the right numbers in the systems and they are no longer illegal. On a day to day level it is a very arbitrary piece of law it seems, so you would think people would tread very carefully, as it involves all sorts of delicate cultural and socio-political tensions. But alas no.

What we get is conservatives quoting Alexander Hamilton about the importance of keeping America American. Never mind that Hamilton was from the Caribbean and only moved to America when he was seventeen. Never mind this was a politician writing in the 18th century and that he was about as American as I am.

They also say: "well laws are laws and they must be upheld!" Again this is a very shallow argument. The Jim Crow laws were laws. Should we still have those? If all laws are always right then why does the US bother have this silly things called the Supreme Court and Congress and this messy business we call democracy?

Others are talking about threats to jobs and importing poverty - despite all the evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

So it is a security issue? Immigration of people with ties to certain countries is obviously a security issue, but really this is a seperate issue to latino immigrants. Yet it is amazing the degree to which the Department of Homeland Security has become involved in immigration over the USA's Southern border.

The debate just doesn't seem to be following reality.

There is only one reasonable argument for immigration reform and it is this: unless immigration is more strictly formalised then the system will lack basic fairness. Deserving people might lose out on getting the right credentials while others jump the queue. Fine. Personally I would use the arguments of the right wing against this point of view: I am uncomfortable with a bureaucracy having this sort of power over people - like the school board picking the sports teams at school: we'll take you but not you. A bureaucracy is not better equipped than individual American employers to make this decision. Where the government should be helping is by making sure the workers are not exploited when in this country.

So this single valid argument is very unconvincing coming from the right-wing - people who usually preach less government interference in the business of life not more, and who usually run a mile at the talk of government imposed quotas and procedures. And free movement of labour is a central tenet of free market economics is it not?

So am I missing something here?

Aaah yes of course I am: America's racial politics. Now that IS the elephant in the room ain't it?

Now for me I see 'race' as almost entirely a social construct. Latino is not a 'race'. People used to try and keep track of race in Mexico - with different grades of mestino or pure spanish and so forth, but (unlike in the up-tight north) people kept shagging each other, so in the end everyone pretty much gave up as it got a bit ridiculous. It was around this time that white people in America decided that those who lived South of their border were a different race to them, and those South of the border, quite reasonably said "hang on, if we're a different race to you, we'll define what it means thank you very much" and called themselves latino.

By contrast in Europe we don't think of, say, the Spanish people as a different 'race'. It hasn't (yet) been socially constructed in that way. American racial definitions sound absurd to me. The Spanish might have better tans than us but all that means is they are lucky enough to live all year round in the place British people go to get their tans.

And native Americans are the indigenous people of the land. How can you possibly object to them being anywhere?

Understanding race as a social construct is rather important when talking about it. Black people in American are black, black people in Rwanda, on the other hand, are either hutu or tutsi, depending upon some vague tribal distintion co-opted and reinvented by the Belgians. Race is basically whatever people want it to be. So the latino / white divide might make sense to Americans but it baffles me.

What it always boils down to is that many people don't like to interact with people who are not exactly like them, particularly when there is a perception of class difference. The ability to accept and enjoy a (usually minor) interaction with "foreign" people boils down a certain kind of empathetic intelligence a person has, how they were raised to treat others and how secure they are with themselves and their own way of life.

Any talk of keeping America 'American' is just utter rubbish, especially coming from people living in places called Los Angeles, El Paso or San Diego.

I usually find the anti-immigration lobby to be mean-spirited, stupid or as disenfranchised as the people they rail against. It is only the last I have any sympathy with.

So the solution? There is only one that makes sense: an amnesty for those who have been here more than two years, or those who have next of kin here. Status Quo for the rest. And a bill formally introducing Spanish as America's second language, with a mandatory competence in Spanish required to graduate high school.

Juro fidelidad a la bandera de los Estados Unidos y a la república que simboliza una nación bajo Dios indivisible con libertad y justicia para todos.

2006-04-21T21:40:00.000+01:00

Anyway lovely weather we've been having eh?

A few days ago it reached 91 F - near 33 C.

2006-04-19T18:47:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to the doctors' office over on Troost. It is a very good clinic. Once again I noticed how as I moved east I was getting less milk and more cocoa in my chocalate.

When you move to a new country and a new city it always takes a little time to understand the geography, to learn your way around.

Sometimes people are helpful - there are things people want you to know about their city. With other things you have to find them out for yourself. Sure you can read local bloggers, talk to new friends. But with other things you have to get out there and have a look.

Now I knew that American cities have a history of producing ghettos. For me ghetto is one of the most hateful words of the twentieth century. It means Warsaw Jews under the Nazis. It means Africans in Apartheid South Africa. It is an insidious and dispicable concept - and insulting to all to whom it is applied. I would not dream of applying it to KC.

I also knew that the legacy of America's racial tensions meant many cities had divides along racial lines. But I was not prepared for this:

This is a map from the 2000 census showing green for where people identified themselves as black, yellow for where people identified themselves as white, and red for where people identified themselves as latino. (Blue denotes 'Asian' ethnicity, pink 'other')

It is a detail from the whole of KC metropolitan area, shown here:

Now apart from being useful to tell you where you can get a decent meal, buy decent clothes,get an interesting job, hear good music and feel like you are not living in the Truman Show (ie the non-yellow areas) it also tells you Kansas City, for whatever reason, is segregated.

Apart from my neighbourhood that is, which is in the nicely Jackson-Pollock-like square inch at the top. Now one thing you do hear often is what a great county America is, how strong and powerful, full of opportunity, much of which is true, depending upon the context.

But for my money, and I am quite aware the world stopped listening to anything Brits had to say 60 years ago and that I am not saying anything original here, only when urban America starts looking a bit more Jackson Pollock and a little less Mark Rothko can you really call this a great country.

Timeline / Train Artwork

2006-04-18T17:18:00.000+01:00

/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0" width="480" height="100">

This artwork was made by a young artist and graphic designer called Paul Glennon.

Click here for a full screen version.

I commissioned it after Paul explained to me the concept of his timeline.

His idea was perfect for bloggers. He asks you to provide four things:

- a paragraph of personal writing about you

- two colours.

- your date of birth.

- one photo

Then from this information he creates a personalised train - like the one running across the top of my blog. He describes it as "a moving timeline as a visual representation of a life". At the moment he is hosting them on his website and can provide the code to place it on a blog.

He has only ever done two so far. If you are interested details are HERE.

I spoke to my wife again...

2006-04-12T00:00:00.000+01:00

I got it wrong I think. (In the post below about the Relativist vs Universalist debate that an Observer Journo said was now more important than political left and right.)

I think her point is that relativist vs universalist debate is very relevant to current affairs, but will not ever present any answers. The relativist position allows self-appointed cultural leaders to define the culture and restricts the ability of outsiders (as well as those they purport to speak for) to question them.

The universalist position, unfortunately, often simply does exactly the same thing, except with a different set of cultural leaders.

My wife says this is what is happening all the time in current affairs. So you get orientalism - whereby western intellectuals invent this thing called the orient, to which they assign certain cultural traits. Then as a result you get reverse orientalism, whereby intellectuals in the orient say hang on, if there is going to be this thing called the orient then we're going to bloody well define what it is not you. In fact we are going to define it in opposition to you as we are unhappy that you do things like shoot us and starve us and take our land, and we mistrust your motives.

Then you get universalists, who say "well the habits of your culture are not acceptable as they deny human rights" and so forth.

My wife says this is a misleading debate, as it ignores who defines 'culture'. When you actually observe people you see that a unified 'culture' is a myth and that traditions are often invented or defined in the face of opposition or challenge. Or more simply: what people say they do, and what they actually do, are often two very different things, especially when it comes to culture and tradition!

For example an Imam in Somali culture will have a view of female circumcision. They will define and talk about it in a certain way, dependent on a huge variety of factors, not least who they are talking to.

Westerners asked to tolerate it in their midst will have another, probably very different view.

And young Somali mothers will have yet another view, again very different (and their view may also change radically depending upon who they are talking to).

So in the example pointed out by Daisy in the Seattle Compromise
on female circumcision you found a perfect illustration of this. The Seattle Compromise refered to a decision by a hospital, made at the suggestion of Somali Mothers, to practise a harmless symbolic female circumcision in the form of a tiny cut. What you found was:

1. The young Somali mothers, presumably feeling challenged by American cultural norms, defined circumcision in opposition to what they found abhorent in American culture: e.g. teenage (girls) delinquency, promiscuity and pregnancy.

2. When Somali mothers found a sympathetic social interaction, in the form dialogue with hospital staff on the matter, they said that the circumcision could simply take the form of a tiny symbolic cut, doing no lasting harm. (The article here states that this was because the women were "perhaps aware of the hospital's reluctance to perform the procedure." I think this is an enormous assumption to make and a massive mistake in what is otherwise a sensible article. Surely it is more likely that this compromise represented a rare opportunity for these women to express their OWN preferences in regard the circumcision of their daughters. That this social interaction with hospital staff freed them from the pressure from their own Imams and mid-wives, and the staff's open mindedness and pragmatism freed them from defending their own culture in opposition to an alien and hostile culture, that maybe these women do not themselves want to carry out any procedure that might harm their daughters. This is generally what Anthropologists reveal. Unsurprisingly you find when you actually bother to get to know them that Somali women want to mutilate their children as little as American women do.

3. Unfortunately you also find that Americans who want to be cultural leaders can be as intransient as Somalis who want to be cultural leaders. So the Seattle compromise, which was actually a simple, social and very human compromise, between young mothers and sympathetic medical practitioners, was ruined by those who did not believe that cultural traditions or norms should be so pragmatically created, despite all evidence to the contrary showing this is precisely how they are usually created.

In the face of press and public pressure the hospital refused to offer even a symbolic circumcision. In doing to the Somali women were effectively given no choice but to go back to Somali mid-wives (and behind them the Imams) for the procedure.

(It is also interesting, and fairly re-assuring, that the legal analysis concluded that US law would have decided in favour of the compromise).

You see this all the time in current affairs, at the moment with Iran.

Is female circumcision wrong?

2006-04-11T18:47:00.000+01:00

A 'journalist' for the Observer wrote this:

Forget left and right; the defining political divide of the global era is between those who believe that some moral rights and freedoms ought to be universal and those who argue that each culture to its own.

Are you a universalist or a relativist?

He asks.

Hmm.

I have thought long and hard about this question:

Are you a universalist or a relativist?

I have decided that in my time off I am universally relativist. Except at weekends or when I am drunk and then I am relatively universalist.

Anyway I was so confused I asked my wife who is a cultural anthropologist, and a woman, and so therefore wiser than me. *

Now I think that communities of humans inevitably construct rules and structures to live by - and that these rules and structures manage to be very similar, even in the rare occurance that these communities have never crossed paths (yet can be very different to an individuals point of view in the details).

What is always the case is that many people (usually a majority) in communities favour the rules and structures they are familiar with. At the same time there is always a group who challenge these rules and structures, and this process of challenge often involves people, ideas and structure originating outside the community. There seem to be two effective methods of challenge - being extremely friendly, or being extremely violent.

When asked about these things the most common response (and therefore the most human?) is a shrug and maybe a "c'est la vie" or "inshallah" or "tsk what you talking about..."

Until you live in the community that is, and then the response can be seen and understood as a complex evolution of ideas and debates and actions.

The only people who do this with any regularity are cultural anthropologists, but no-one ever asks them what they think for two reasons:

First their anwsers are dull and complex.

Second their answers attempt to be culturally neutral and therefore, in accord with their own findings about human behaviour, are deemed valueless.

But the actual answer is of course we are all relativists to the degree we all have an individual point of view. But of course we are all univeralist in that we are humans who share 99.9% of our DNA.

So what is the answer to a typical question on universalism versus relativism. Is female circumcision wrong?

Right or wrong is determined by the community in which you live. The answer will be determined by the behaviour of the people within that community.

If you wish to challenge the rules and structures of your community or someone elses then fine. This seems to be a very 'human' action. But note it seems the choice of effective challenge is between extreme friendliness or extreme violence. Extreme friendliness is the only option that can possibly result in a successful outcome for everybody, so choose this. Extreme violence may offer a better chance for the success of your point of view, but also raises the possibility of a pyrrhic victory, in which everybody looses with only an illusion of victory for one side or another.

Unfortunately it does appear the history seems to tells us that in the long term communities that take the extreme violence approach do tend to succeed rather spectacularly, so I am sure it will remain a popular choice as long as there are winchester rifles versus bows and arrows, Maxim guns versus spears, and F15 fighter jets versus WWII era anti-aircraft guns.

Is female circumcision wrong?

Let me buy you a drink. I am very interested in your community and want to learn about it. In my community we do many things the same and some things differently. One of the things we do differently is female circumcision. Do you want to know why? No? Oh well let me buy you another drink. Maybe we can get back to it later.

Or

If you carry on mutilating your women we will take away your food, your land, or point a gun at you until you stop doing it.

*E.G. she knows when cabbage is cabbage and when lettuce is lettuce.

2006-04-11T16:55:00.000+01:00

The amazing distance between rich and poor here.

It sneeks in to every news story for me.

Like the outrage at Duke University.

The outrage for me came not in the accusation of rape but in a small detail of the story revealing that the yearly tuition for Duke University is higher than the average wage for the town the university sits in ($41,000).

Then the accusation of rape is in context. Of course the fawned over young men of this rarefied institution's frats, clubs and sports teams are going to be borderline psychopathic. They are treated like young royal princes, using their parents money to pay young black woman to come to their court to dance and strip for them. But they are told over and over that they live in a great republic. What is more they play the national sport of Canada, that was invented by natives of their land they have neither met nor know anything about.

They are told their country was founded on and practises principles of freedom and equality, and yet the life they see has more resemblance to aparteid South Africa, than to the image of the country they are taught in school.

What do people expect them to conclude, other than that 'America' is just handy rhetoric to disguise the truth of their life in the royal court from outsiders? And sometimes that this conclusion might flourish into full blown physical sociopathic disregard for anyone not one of them, rather than the normal social, economic and political disregard they are taught by their parents.

Oh by the way though, I do love this country. It manages to be both better and worse than everywhere else on earth. Incredible.

Sugar hidden in the food; lots of diabetics in the clinics...things we notice

2006-04-11T00:05:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you notice stuff when you move to a new country, which you wonder why the locals don't complain about.

Previously I idly noted my frustration at the sugar in the bread in the US (often guiltily listed as "corn syrup" on the ingredients - so I think they know what they are doing).

There may be hundreds of breads to choose, but it is still very difficult to find bread without loads of sugar. Or 'bread' as it is known in the rest of the world.

In fact, if you start looking, sugar turns up all the time in packaged 'food' on American shelves. Sauces, beans, dressings - you name it, they've found a way to add sugar.

(Or some man made alternative that we can assume are just as bad for you - natural occuring sugars have been tried and tested as food stuff for us mammals by 500 million years of evolution. Synthetic sweeteners have not. Take saccharin as an example. It was made by a New York Scientist in 1879 who was researching coal tar derivatives and found that the product of the oxidation of o-toluenesulfonamide tasted sweet on his fingers. It was patented and now we stick it in our food when we are on a 'diet'. It is now suspected of being a carcinogen but probably isn't in small doses. However my main objection is that it tastes like shit - or rather it tastes like the oxidation of o-toluenesulfonamide.)

Anyway, saccharine is a different story.

Refined sugar, processed and put into foodstuffs is the main story on the shelves. This makes life difficult for me. Firstly it is hidden, unless you scour the ingredients and are sharp enough to spot the corn syrup type bullshit. Second I have a sweet tooth but know I have only a certain allowance of sugar I should eat. I don't want to be just about to chomp into a chocolate fudge brownie, only to realise I can't have it as the bread and beans I ate had as much bloody sugar in them. Do you see what I mean?

Then my wife, who has been visiting lots of health clinics in KC, noted that there seemed to be a extraordinary number of people suffering from diabetes here.

Amazingly I found that the statistics back up her observations: 7% of people in the United States have diabetes compared to only 2.5%% in the UK - and the UK has a diabetes problem itself.

What is more it seems to be particularly prevelant at clinics serving lower income areas. I had noted before that the NY Times reported that 230 diabetic Americans have limbs amputated everyday. Incrediby more Vietnam vets have had limbs amputated since the war due to diabetes than lost limbs in the war.
While wealthy people can still buy real food at places like Whole Foods. And while wealthy people can go to the doctor, people on a budget have little choice but to buy the 'food' on offer at more affordable stores and wait until they have full blown diabetes before going to the doctor. (Over here not only do doctors kill you, they take all your money as well.)

When you move countrys you often consider the question: is x better here in the USA than in the UK?

I am realising the answer is always the same: yes far better (if you have money),but no far worse (if you don't).

Now I stopped being a socialist when I was about 19 years old. But I tell you what. Living here has affirmed my belief in the right of people to receive a reasonable parity in health and education.

Paltry News

2006-04-07T16:22:00.000+01:00

A swan catches the flu in Britain and the leading newspaper calls it "The Day We've All Been Dreading."

Yet this news should not go beyond the pages of Poultry News.

It's a bird disease. A. Bird. Disease. A disease that effects birds. Bad news if you're a bird, or if you've been sneezed on by a swan. A BIRD DISEASE.

But not very interesting to non-birds.

The Guardian has already reported criticism of the government's respones. ALREADY! One bird has flu! They found out yesterday. Were they not quick enough getting the Swan some Lemsip or something? What the hell?

As the Sun op ed would say:

Bird Flu?

More like Bird Brain! .

Wizards

2006-04-04T20:41:00.000+01:00

Went to the football (soccer), which I will blog about in boring detail elsewhere probably.

It was great, but two things bugged me.

First $6.75 for a beer? Actually that is great - not only can you drink during the game they even give you a cup holder. So scratch that one.

Second - why did they need to sing your martial national anthem? And why did they have a national guard apache helicopter gunship fly over? You know the same gunship that chewed up the road to Basra in 1991, dispensing makeovers that look like this.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't protest the war. I even kind of understand your foreign policy. It's just that sport and martial displays of nationalist fervour don't sit well together for me. In fact I thought they kind of went out of fashion at the Munich Olympics of 1936. And your anthem is a purple poem about fighting the British. I mean move on. Anyway, in 1814 the Brits were pretty much fighting everybody in the whole world simultaneously so you were hardly special.

Can't someone pen a jazz number about the D-Day landings or something for a replacement US anthem you can be proud of?

The British Anthem is a terrible durge with even stupider lyrics than yours so I feel free to comment.

Footie was good though. Wizards won easily. Eddie Johnson scored, took his top off and waved his fist at the crowd - that's the fervour we like at football. And Davy Arnaud twisted the full back in and out so much his opponent's legs looked like cork screws by the time he'd finished tormenting him.

I'm a new fan. Come on you blues.

April 4th

2006-04-03T16:23:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is polling day here in Kansas City. This is all a bit confusing to me.

But it seems the vote getting the most attention is a referundum on a new sales tax to be added in this county that will pay for the upkeep of the KC Truman stadium complex and the addition of a swanky new rolling roof.

You can best read about the debate on Tony's KC blog. He has been working himself up into a hugely enjoyable lather about it for months. Just for his sake I hope the 'NO' votes win - although I've never seen a blog spontaneously combust with anger before, which might be fun.

Of course I will have to pay this tax and will not even get to vote on it. But that is OK. I am used to that. Taxation without representation. That is what you get in the UK. Like when London won the Olympics for 2012. I'll be paying for that as well for the next 25 years no doubt and I wasn't even asked. Didn't meet one Londoner who wanted the Olympics. And the Millenium Dome? Oh my God, IF ONLY we could have voted.

At least they have a vote here. Personally I am confused why it is even on the ballot. I was at the stadium on Saturday and it was fantastic and as far as I can tell it is always sunny here. So rolling roof? Thanks but no thanks. But I am a sucker for grand projects and that roof does look cool. Thankfully I do not have to decide.

What I would suggest is that the Jackson County buy the team. If they are threatening to fuck off to someplace else you should buy them out.

Forbes reckon the Chiefs are worth 700 million. If we can raise $350 million I reckon we can raise a loan for the other half.

We have about 655,000 people here. That means $535 a pop. Or $1314 per household. I'm for my share. $1314 is not bad to buy a football team. And you can all take turns to sit in the Director's boxes and share the profits out. You'll probably end up with $50 left over so you can buy the Royals.

What is more I'll broker it. Email me and I'll tell you the PO box in London where you can send your money. Bankers drafts only please.

You own the stadiums, why not the teams?

America's drink problem

2006-04-03T09:59:00.000+01:00

America has a drink problem. But it is very different to the British problem.

I do not miss the problem we have in Britain of our town centers turning into brawling, swearing rivers of puke and aggression every single night at closing time.

Obviously cynics might point out that America has not got any town centers left in which to host this problem. And this is true: drinking America drives home and this would be dangerous if the beer was stonger, if there were any pedestrians to run into and if cars did not have air bags.

But my problem is not with drinking America - when you find drinking America it is a great place with less aggression from the punters, better service from the staff, better prices (even the poshest wine bar round here does good bottles of cold, dry, pinot grigio for 13 USD / 7.50 GBP before seven pm everyday) and a better selection (20 types of scotch, countless beers, proper wine list and an infinite number of cocktails).

And unlike bar staff in the UK they do not take it as a gross personal insult when you do something as rude as try and buy a drink from them.

No, the problem here is that drinking America is so undervalued by their own people.

Bottles are surruptitiously wrapped in brown paper bags. Supermarkets don't stock a good range. People simply don't drink. We went for a weekend away in a hotel and at dinner there were about 50 people eating but only two people drinking alchohol- us.

But most annoying of all is that many places ask to see the ID of anyone who appears to be under the age of 35! This means if I do not have my passport with me, I get some spotty little twerp telling me I can't have a drink as I might be under 21!

One place, guarded by a fat college boy who looked about eighteen himself, even told me that unless I had a US state ID that he recognised he could not let me enter, as my foreign ID might be 'fake'. I explained that I was British and that this would effectively mean I was barred from ever entering, even though I am thirty in May. He shrugged.

What annoyed me is this: he was not doing it to be malicious, to see me squirm, or even because he disliked foreigners, or just wanted a fight. That I would understand.

No - he was doing it because he truly believed that it was so important to stop anyone under the age of 21 getting their laughing gear round a cold budweiser that these rules should be so strictly enforced, with total abscence of compromise or common sense. In the war against alchohol, I was just another piece of collateral damage.

If I was an American teenager I would simply go the less regulated road instead. Drive off somewhere quiet for a smoke with friends. Dope dealers never ask for ID. I presume this is where all the teenagers are.

When I was turned away in a downtown bar, (I had ID but my wife, who was not drinking, did not have her passport) a frat boy at the bar said to his buddy (but obviously for our benefit)

"The real reason you need ID is so the cops can identify the bodies. Har Har!"

This was in a bar that felt as threatening as a play school. I thought your constitution forbade cruel and unusual punishment. I lost it.

"Did you know your country is a joke?" I said. "That everyone else in the world laughs at you? And it is for reasons like this. You send your kids off to places you can't spell, can't find on a map, to fight wars you don't understand but you won't let them enjoy a beer?

You're all fucked. You have a dusgustingly inquitious healthcare system, a failing education system and your pensions are falling apart. All races are divided and quiet bigotry goes unchecked. For all your power, patriotism and money you have built nothing of lasting significance or importance. For all your effort your domestic legacy remains the rape of the native and the enslavement of others. Your religiousity is soiled by fundamentalism, conservatism and division. All you have built are enormous debts and an enormous army with no war to fight except for that disgusting little imperial adventure in Iraq. Your wealth you have eaten until you are obese, you have spent on pollutants so vile you can hardly breath, you have built an urban geography so bland you cannot tell one place from another, your media is so clogged with the pervasive bull of the advertiser you have lost any concept of truth. Point it out to me, why this country is 'great'. Point it out! I don't see it! Show me EXACTLY what it is you are so proud of. And what is more YOUR FUCKING CAP IS ON BACK TO FRONT you FUCKING NOB 'EAD. Now please give me a fucking drink..."

Actually I didn't say any of this. This is utter bullshit and I don't believe a word of it. (Apart from the bit about the rest of the world laughing at you. I'm sorry but they do. You take your country so damn seriously it makes us laugh! I think the joke is that if you were truly strong you wouldn't have to re-affirm your patriotism all the time. In Europe we still associate overt flag humping, colour wearing, anthem belting and showy hand on heart stuff with collective memories of strutting fascism. Not to mention people demanding to see identification for bullshit made up reasons. True patriotism is unspoken, as the majority of sensible Americans I've met understand.)

I love this country, it is a miracle of a country. With plenty of redeeming defects. But my sad, sad addiction to alcohol makes me snappy when denied a drink. Brings out the worst in me.

All I can say is thank you Fric and Fric for your Philly Dilly and your three pints of Boulevard Pale Ale for restoring my faith in the old US of A, all served without demanding to see my identity.

(Yeah I know its my fault. I know the rules and forgot my passport. Sheeesh.)

Comment is free

2006-03-31T19:09:00.000+01:00

I am absolutely fascinated by this... (which is annoying as I am in the middle of a really good piece of 'real' work.)

The Guardian has waded into the blogosphere. Incredibly it is now complaining about the quality of the commments! They are also complaining about abuse they are receiving, which they have responded to by acting all grown up and dissappointed, and then throwing the abuse back. (Funnily enough they have concentrated their attacks on the comments that are damning about the quality of their journalism.)

I love it. It is brilliant. It is like the newspaper has opened its editorial meetings to an angry mob.

Let's hope they make lots of money from web adverts (as we can presume they are not paying the contributors right?) and they can put that money into proper journalism, which it does know a little bit about.

Fantastic New Website Idea

2006-03-29T19:01:00.000+01:00

And it is mine!

It is called www.bloggersanonymous.com and is designed as a self-help resource for blog addicts.

How it works: bloggers can come to the site and read things about how they should do some proper work or sod off outside. They can then add their own comments and it will ferment debate. Guest bloggers can add their own posts and we can link to extreme cases of blogging addiction. We can have daily updates from bloggers about their fight with blogging addiction and they can share the details of their addiction (and any really damn fine blogs they've come across) with other sufferers.

This will give them something to do instead of blogging. Keep them safe and off the internet.

Comment, like poo poo, is free

2006-03-29T15:56:00.000+01:00

The British newspaper the Guardian has started another new blog to add to its collection.

I love it.

This one is a journalist's toilet: a repository for their toilet wall scribblings and other effluvia.

Once this stuff is out there on the tinterweb and the journalist is presumably wiping, visitors are invited to join in what can only be described as a 'pissing contest'. Readers of the internet will be familiar with the sort of thing - comment after comment by anonymous posters (that you just know are nearly all men, men who are convinced that their failure to have a brilliant intellectual career is down to some cruel twist of fate rather than due to the fact they spend all their time in pissing contests rather than doing any work) - trying to show off the quality of their intellectual golden stream.

Naturally I joined (or waded) in.

I chose Madeleine Bunting as she obviously knows how these things work: take some broad themes that are already the subject of academic pissing contests, add your own faux naive gibberish interpretation and hint at an ongoing struggling of great import. Watch the contest begin.

But something held me back. You know when you are all keyed up to go and you just can't...

I could help but to wonder if the Guardian and the journalists involved have really thought things through before they waded into the blogosphere like this.

Seeing a journalist spending their time writing on toilet walls is rather like walking into a doctors office and seeing them refering to the Readers Digest Family Medical Advisor. Or watching a farmer phone Gardeners Question Time before planting his 2000 acres of maize.

Too often it appears journalistic comment is just a cover for poor journalism.

It is a shame as I am sure maybe Madeleine Bunting has an instinct for a story that should be followed up.

Who are these 'hard' liberals she mentions? Are they academics? Politicians? Lobbyists? Other journalists? Bloggers? Can she you give us examples of the methods they are they using against Islam? Has she any evidence of influence or consequences of their actions?

Who are the Muslim intellectuals she mentions? Are these persons of influence? What are they doing in response to these attacks? What is the consequences of them believing, as she says they do, that the enlightenment was shaped in opposition to Islam and how it is now being used against Islam?

But she doesn't. She just comes in, pisses on the floor, and says beat that.

What really annoys me is she does not even have the common decency to feign interest in winning. She is just being LAZY. Believe me I know. I am an expert.

Kansas City

2006-03-28T16:11:00.000+01:00

Things I like about KC:

The sun. It puts in a frequent appearance, unlike in London.

People out and about. Having dinner on their porches. More of this when the weather heats up I'm sure.

The storms. Like nothing I've seen before. They roll across this land like enormous demons. Beautiful and, unfortunately, occasionally deadly.

The Mexican food. Unsurprisingly far better than in London.

Train whistles.

Boulevard Beer.

First Watch. No bullshit, just good food, nicely prepared.

25cent gallons of water. A good idea.

Possums. WTF?

Squirrels. WTF? Way more violent than in London. What is in the nuts here?

Drive thru banks. At first I scoffed. Now I drive throu.

Downtown. It looks like a proper city. Where is everyone though? Your downtown is what people who are not from America want America to look like. Not Zona Rosa.

The Plaza and Zona Rosa - they're fun I suppose in a toytown kind of way. I can pretend I am in The Truman Show. Or dreaming. Or insane.

Ethnographic Research Inc. - leading business Anthropologists and they're here in KC.

The rodeo will come to town. The gay rodeo will come to town. Neither come to London.

Soccer on TV. Phew.

The old wooden houses.

Coffee shops. Brits can't do coffee places like you do.

The Art scene - not up its own ass like in London (believe it or not)

The Kemper and the Atkins - as enjoyable as London's galleries.

Shawnee Mission Park - add some buffalo and it's a little bit of prairie.

Fric and Frac - uniquely American place.

Record Bar - Suburban Punk is always fun. Here you can play pool with the Westport hooligans. Nice lads.

Old School Punks - died out in London (apart from in Deptford for some reason) in about 1987. Here, incredibly, they live on.

Meat. Oklahoma Joe's pulled pork best I've had so far.

Petrol prices. Half the price of England.

Boulevard beer - I've already had this but feel like another.

The politics - passions run high, with local issues to the fore.

Local bloggers - for Brit readers (ok that's Marie and maybe my Dad) the ones I like are at the side.

My area - like London it is ethnically mixed and vibrant. The norm for London - but, we are realising, not the norm for KC, but I'll stop there...

Not being scared of being blown up on the tube. If you are worried about terrorism in KC than, quite frankly, you're an idiot.

Being able to rent Deadwood and The Shield from the video store.

Harry's Bar. I would have to re-mortgage my house to go in a bar that offers 16yr Lavagulin in London. And at Harry's they do half-price bottles of wine at happy hour! Why isn't it full everyday? It should be bursting at the seams!

That chinese supermarket up up near the city market. Full of people speaking Spanish. A love of seafood shared I think.

And the people: I keep getting caught out by people being nice to me in shops and the like. In London strangers who are nice to you are... well I don't know what they are like as I can't remember ever meeting one.

But here they mean it and are nice all the time. Incredible.

And the sun is nearly always SHINING. Of course they are cheerful.

2006-03-27T20:10:00.000+01:00

Blogging is writing on the toilet wall.

There is NO point debating politics on the toilet wall unless it helps you shit better.

(Just thought I'd write that up here to remind myself)

An anthropologist told me a story...

2006-03-27T17:50:00.000+01:00

The anthropologist was watching a young mother prepare her thanksgiving turkey.

Mum trims the turkey down - removing the wings, legs, and even trimming the top end down.

Her young daughter watches.

"Why do you do that?" Asks the anthropologist.

"Oh we've always done it like that. Just a tradition I guess."

"Did you used to watch your mother doing the turkey as well?" asks the anthropologist, noting the keen observance of the young daughter.

"Oh yes"

"Did she trim down the Turkey too?"

"Oh yes"

"Did she say why?"

"No, she just did it like that"

Later the anthropologist is eating thanksgiving dinner with the family. Three generations of moms are present - the young mum has invited both her mum and grandmother.

Remembering the trimmed Turkey the young mum asks the them about it. The young mum's mum agrees - yes I always just did it like that, just kind of traditional.

The grandmother also agrees. She used to trim the Turkey down...

"But only so it would fit in the oven. We had a very small tray and it was the only way it would fit in."

To the surprise of the anthropologist the connection wasn't made. The conversation moved on without a beat.

I wonder if the tradition will continue. It probably will.

And the second amendment of the US constitution states:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be
infringed.

Healthcare

2006-03-27T17:47:00.000+01:00

I went to pick up a prescription for my wife. Antibiotic cream. Very simple medicine.

$5 with our insurance. Without insurance? It would cost $95.

Our insurance costs about $900 a month - of which we pay a third, the employer two-thirds. The employer gets subsidised for their share - the Economist estimates that the US government are indirectly funding about 60% of US medical expenses. Not many people realise this.

There are 45 million Americans without insurance - but most presumably still pay tax.

Every part of American medicine is marketed and commercial. Drug reps visit doctors daily. They pay for their meals and even holidays.

The NY Times reported that 230 diabetic Americans have limbs amputated everyday. More Vietnam vets have had limbs amputated since the war due to diabetes than lost limbs in the war.

And America goes round and round the great wheel of life...and the river dumps the silt on the outside of the bends and shit gets washed into the sea. Or does it...?

Geography lesson. Where does the Rio Grande flow into the sea?

2006-03-27T17:38:00.000+01:00

Gulf of Mexico right? Wrong! Let's have a look with Google Earth:

WTF?

The answer? It doesn't flow into the sea anymore. Not enough water to quite make it. Human beings have removed it all...Ho hum.

Short films

2006-03-24T14:30:00.000Z

http://sheepfilms.co.uk/anims/shortsindex.htm

God bless this fine young man. The one you really want to see is bottom row, third from left. Funny in primary school, funny now.

2006-03-22T18:47:00.000Z

http://blogs.kansascity.com/crime_scene/2006/03/gun_arrest_you_.html#comments

I love this. The local paper carries a story about a youth being arrested with what appears to be a machine pistol at the St Patricks day parade, accompanied with pictures taken by a bystander.

And in the comments someone writes to complain that the paper made a mistake over the type of gun it was. Only in America...

TAX

2006-03-19T04:39:00.000Z

I recently recieved a tax calculation from those folks at the Inland Revenue disagreeing with our calculation of my wife's tax.

They cited an "arithmitic error" in box 18.3 and demanded an extra 300 or so quid.

So who do you think was wrong? Who is better at adding up? This honest taxpayer or the grinding merciless bureaucracy that is the Inland Revenue?

Turned out the IR had mistyped 1097 instead of the 1.97 for bank interest earned that was on our (typed) return, and had not noticed.

If that mistake had been the other way round do you think they would be as understanding as us about it?

Packing

2006-03-19T04:11:00.000Z

As has happened before Struggling Author has prompted me to post. Her blog is about unpacking.

I had a theory of unpacking once. It said that I would only unpack things when I needed/wanted them. Then the unpacking would get done by itself.

If there was anything left packed after 6 months I would throw it out, on the basis I didn't need it.

Complete bollocks of cause. It is theories like this that make me suspect many men would end up as a bum walking the streets if they are not saved by a woman.

Other theories in this category include:

I can revise for my exams in the pub.

Leaving all my work till the last minute teaches me how to work under pressure and quickly - useful skills in the real world.

Never, ever, ever go to the doctor.

Never, ever, ever ask for directions.

All I need is football and pie.

Now my wife tells me that all men are like this so it is not interesting and I should get on with something useful - and she thought I was writing something good, like a story or something, and not more blogging that she agrees with me is best defined as "writing on the cubicle wall of the public internet toilet".

I disagree: I have a theory that blogging will help me develop artistically, spiritually and professionally. It is another in a long line of great theories of mine I think.

Here is a mathematical proof of all this, but in musical form:

http://wrlt.com/listen/audio/files/raylm/trouble.mp3

York, Lewis and Clark

2006-03-17T19:00:00.000Z

Lewis and Clark led the first expedition of the US government to the pacific coast and back.

Their trail passes through KC making Lewis and Clark big historical celebrities round here - and big celebrities in US history. Try googling Lewis and Clark. You get the idea. There are lots of signs like this one along the trail.

So I was a surprised to find out that the expedition had about 40 people - including cooks, translators, porters etc. Clark even had a slave named York who put up his tents, saved him from drowning, hunted meat and gathered food for him etc.

But Lewis and Clark were the captains so they become the poster boys. Bloody typical eh?

Artists

2006-03-17T17:38:00.000Z

Put an article about them on my blog but forgot to do this:

Christian Ward: www.maxwigram.com

Gavin Nolan: www.sartorialart.com

St Patricks Day

2006-03-17T15:55:00.000Z

in KC. We have a parade.

Weird hybrid of a catholic celebration and a disneyfied version of Irishness.

The overwhelming question is: why?

Here's the data:

Races in Kansas City:

* White Non-Hispanic (57.6%)
* Black (31.2%)
* Hispanic (6.9%)
* Other race (3.2%)
* Two or more races (2.4%)
* American Indian (1.2%)
* Vietnamese (0.7%)

(Total can be greater than 100% because Hispanics could be counted in other races)

Ancestries: German (15.4%), Irish (10.4%), English (8.0%), United States (5.8%), Italian (3.6%), French (2.1%).

Do you notice what the significant minority is?

So when is the African-American parade? Can't see any plans for a June Teenth parade downtown... Hmm. Perhaps they could tie it to KC's only cultural contribution of any note - the Jazz scene? No?

Guess we're stuck with the fucking inflatable leprechauns

(Important note: these opinions do not exclude me from going into Westport tonight to have have a Guiness "or two...cos it's st patricks day! Hic!".)

All the brown bread in America...

2006-03-16T14:13:00.000Z

...has loads of sugar in it? Why do they do that?

We went to play tennis yesterday. It didn't work out. We heard on the radio that there was a storm coming and spent ages prevaricating (in my case at least) about whether it was safe to play.

When we eventually decided it was, by that time Bag needed to go to the ladies. Badly. Luckily there are toilets by the courts. But the public toilets were locked. Why do they do that? Is there anything more annoying than finding a public toilet only to discover it is locked? Bag flirted with the idea of pissing against the locked door. We couldn't play - she could hardly run.

Luckily theres a pressure group we can turn to.

Article: “But a five year old could’ve painted that!”

2006-03-15T21:56:00.000Z

Are you missing the basics of fine art?

I was. In 2001 I filmed two young artists for a year. It was the final year of their graduate fine art degree course at London’s Royal Academy and I have followed their progress ever since. When filming finished I was left with one important realisation:

Most people, most of the time, don’t have even the most basic understanding of art.

Most people don't know things that in, say, a maths lesson, would be the equivalent of understanding prime numbers and their importance.
This is a rather broad claim and not one I have tested in any great depth. It is a hunch I have from my own experiences watching and filming young artists and their mentors. I have no quotes from renowned commentators, no survey results, nor academic research to cite. I know because in simply hanging around with young artists I discovered a few very simple things myself. Now I wonder why no one took me aside and whispered them in my ear.

Christian Ward and Gavin Nolan were artists in training when we began to film them. Today Christian Ward is a favourite of arch collector Charles Saatchi. His work is now featuring in The Triumph of Painting show at Saatchi’s London Gallery. Gavin Nolan is still finding his feet amongst the independent shows and collectives of London’s East End art scene. He has an upcoming exhibition with a small independent gallery, Sartorial Art, in London.

In 2001 they were in their final year of their graduate degree. Their sixth year of higher education. Note this is more years formal training than doctors or engineers, and many more informal (since the day they picked up a crayon). But only after this year would they stop being art students and start being artists.

First lesson: training

The doctor analogy is a good first lesson. You do not need to have a degree in medicine to dispense medical treatment. But those who receive the treatment sure like to make the distinction. Clinical medicine and alternative medicine are both medicine. Neither one has the monopoly on effectiveness. Same with art. Gavin and Christian were trained. They were not brute, or naïve or folk artists – the artistic equivalents of alternative medicine. These young men had gained enormous expertise through institutional study.

Second lesson: manipulation

Another thing that struck me was how much these men loved to manipulate physical things. It reminded me of my Grandfather, who used to spend all his time in his shed fixing things. He was good with his hands. And I could not help but think of this as in opposition to someone who uses his or her brain. This was a pretty dumb assumption to make. Of course he was using his brain, merely a different part of his brain, a complicated part, a part open to improvement with practise and as important as any other part. Lay persons like myself might know this as the DIY part of our brain; the bit that switches on when we walk into a hardware store; when you touch wood and metal and paint; when you desire to fit stuff together, or to take a tool to something. I had always assumed this part of my brain wasn’t intellectually important. I didn’t rate it as significant in an academic environment. But in Christian and Gavin this part of the brain was whirring like a super computer. Where I cut myself off from the physical world, they embraced it. I had to adjust old prejudices to even enter their world.

Third lesson: integrity

Their mastery of details was remarkable in two ways: first in that, to a layman like me, it was so technically brilliant; second that it was simply a given.
Of course they could paint like a photograph if they wanted to! Of course they can draw from life like masters! But would it satisfy them or their audience? When so many others before have done the same work? My suspicion that young artists eschewed purely figurative work due to a lack of patience and technique was quickly banished. They choose not to do it with integrity.

Gavin Nolan

Gavin Nolan in particular had a talent for achieving a photo realist effect if he so wished. One of the early works by this tall and attractively shambolic Welshman garnered unusual attention for a student’s work. It was of a large yellow teddy, an old child’s toy, which Gavin had imbued with a remarkable luminescence, so that it leapt out of the canvas. This painting was spotted and bought by a patron of the Royal Academy. The painting proved so popular that prints and postcards of it were made and sold in the Royal Academy Shop alongside prints of the many classic works that reside in or pass through the venerable old institution. It was attention, it was sales, but was it success?
There was one problem with the Yellow Teddy. Gavin had moved on. For Gavin the style was an experiment, nothing more. He and he alone was to be the judge of whether that experiment worked or not. So the Yellow Teddy was cast aside, like so many child hood toys before it. There is no doubt that had Gavin continued to paint along the same theme he would have gone on attracting attention and could have sold his work at very good prices.
Remember this was a young man who was living in London on about half that a minimum wage earner would bring home. Gavin was well known in the School for having his bankcards stopped due to lack of funds, and for using the printing equipment to produce forged travel cards for London Transport. (He was equally famous for being caught with a forged travel card displaying 31st April. If art didn’t work out for Gavin there was to be no career as an accountant to fall back on.)
“You’re crazy. You could have sold them and made lots of money!” I said to him.
“But if that is all I wanted I could paint cats playing with balls of string. I would sell them all, and at good prices. That bit is easy.”
At the time Gavin’s commitment to his own vision, to his own instincts, meant he could turn away from attention and profit. That he could do this so nonchalantly impressed me very much. I walked around thinking I had seen a demonstration of the romantic ideal of the artist. Most of us are so used to success being tied to economics and attention, that while we may superficially understand the cliché of the artist, and know the story of Van Gogh’s troubles, deep down we still presume a lack of success with selling work or a lack of acclaim is down to a deficiency in the artist’s abilities.
I was impressed enough to talk about Gavin’s changing style to the head of the School, himself a very successful artist. He ran the school in the manner of a head coach of a sports team, or a head chief of a kitchen. He was uncompromising, preached hard work, hard work and more hard work. He did not suffer fools gladly. When I mentioned Gavin he shook his head.

Fourth lesson: good artists work through their problems not around them

“Gavin is lazy. Some of those pieces were fantastic.” He seemed like a father talking of an errant son.
“But how can you say that? I thought it was brave of Gavin to leave them behind.”
“Just lazy. He is looking for a shortcut to a style that attracts the kind of attention he thinks fashionable.”
“But what is wrong with that?”
“An artist should look to push and push at what they’ve got. That is the way to progress through the doubts and the brick walls that appear from time to time. Look at what Christian is doing. His style is developing. He cannot just drop ideas until he has thoroughly worked through them. Evolution is always better than revolution for an artist. Gavin could have pushed himself to change what he didn’t like, to break through rather than just runaway.”

Christian Ward

Christian Ward was a quiet young man with his hair often found across his eyes. He is Japanese on his mother’s side and has a dark soulful look and dimples. His paintings are mystical landscapes, with dreamlike holes, coastlines and caves. His graduate work was based on an island off the coast of Japan that Christian enjoyed painting. This work is intriguing in so many ways; it demands the viewer’s time. Its colours are shocking: toxic mixes of luminous rainbow colours. The water is bright light blue except where it fades into bright light yellow. The landscape has a similar deliberate lack of subtlety. Christian has borrowed motifs from traditional Japanese styles and used the insensitivity of a Nintendo game with equal gusto.
He explained how he was exploring false landscapes, originally drawing stylistic inspiration from second-rate motel paintings and a beginners “How to Paint” book. But he was taking this faux naïve basis and putting it to his dreams, his own beloved landscapes. The results were truly magical.
Meanwhile I had noticed that Gavin was in the middle of another revolution. His last batch of work was a series of incredibly detailed studies of iconic images appearing in everyday objects. So Mother Teresa’s likeness appeared in a bun and St Luke (who was patron saint of artists) in a side of beef. Again they were well received. They were witty. They raised interesting multilayered questions about art and religion and iconography (Gavin based some of the likenesses, such as St Luke’s, on classic works by El Greco and others). And as ever they were technically accomplished. Gavin’s St. Luke After El Greco In A Side Of Beef became a particular favourite of mine, with its fierce blue marbled meat and the long El Greco style face staring out.
But again Gavin turned his back on them. New paintings appeared. Warped and dark they were quickly nicknamed ‘Gavin’s turd paintings’ for their resemblance to defecations.
“It’s the ultimate cop out.” Said Gavin in his gravely welsh mumble. “If someone says they are shit, at least I can say yes, they literally are shit.”
He looked mournfully at his canvas, head in hands. For some reason on this one the background was a fierce blue. I asked Gavin why this was.
“Oh I couldn’t afford another canvas so I am painting over an old one.”

Fifth lesson: artists are independent

With some horror I realised he had painted over his St. Luke. I was surprised at myself how upset I was. For the price of a canvas he had spoiled it. I would have given him the money for St. Luke. Surely hundreds of people, if they had known, would have paid to save the work. I told him he was mad. He looked at me as if I was mad. Then shrugged me off and got back to painting his turd.
“That’s part of why he is frustrating” the head of art later told me “it is not the destruction of an old work for a canvas – all artists have to make do in the beginning, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it - but it is his motivation to jump style. It is laziness.” He spat out the word. It drove him mad. Lazy artists. He must have seen so much young talent fail because of the myth that art and artist are spontaneous, purely creative, needing only inspiration rather than the drudge of endless technical improvement and experimentation.
Looking at Christian Ward’s work develop I began to understand what he meant. And as each artist’s own style comes from a constant working development, so art as a whole has evolved. The importance of what has gone before for artists is immediately obvious from spending time with them. Gavin and Christian were students of artist’s pasts, with an enthusiasm and respect for their importance. When Gavin studied El Greco he was well placed to do so by putting himself in El Greco’s galoshes.
It is harder for a non-artist to gain such an intimate appreciation of artists past, but I quickly realised that my lack of knowledge was unforgivable. How could I understand what these young artists were all about when they were both consciously and sub-consciously at the sharp end of so much artistic experimentation gone before?

So here is what I did:

Sixth lesson: artists need to know art history, like generals know military history

I took what I had learned from Gavin and Christian about the way an artist must develop his work and I imagined a child’s painting – say a picture of a person outside. The sky is blue, the skin is pink, the person is flat, and the edges are just lines.
So I did some art history. Tried to read a bit. OK so you can’t be bothered. Well if you can’t do it thorough, do it half-assed. In other words Wiki it on the Internet like this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki….

…Art#Plato – what is a representation of a thing?

…/Giotto_di_Bondone – should it have depth?
…/Leonardo_da_vinci – accuracy?
…/Jan_van_Eyck – what should we use to paint with?
…/Caravaggio – shouldn’t the people look ugly and swarthy? (I.e. like you and me)
…/Monet – what color are things?
…/Turner – how do I show their outline?

…/Wassily_Kandinsky – is shape important?
…/Picasso – I can give whatever goddamn shape I like!
…/Duchamp – whatever dudes. Here’s a urinal…

When you get to Duchamp, you may be allowed into a modern art gallery. Duchamp is the man who influenced more of the current crop of artists than anyone else. Marcel Duchamp and his readymade installation. Yes: it is a urinal. Yes: he has signed it R. Mutt. Yes: he has entered it as a work of art. Yes: it is childish. And yes: it was a middle finger up in the air at curators and critics. (If you ever meet any of these creatures you will understand and know at least one reason why his influence has endured). But seriously the rules are: there are no rules. And who are you to demand differently? So from that child’s painting we have arrived at a urinal. As they say in the east it is better to travel than to arrive.
There is no over-arching authority anymore. But where do we go from here? Well technique has always run through it: even with Duchamp. That is always a place to start. And feeling and power and politics and emotional resonance often enter into it. This is up to artists like Gavin and Christian to explore, and watching them try is one of life’s greatest pleasures. That child’s painting has little relevance other than for what it is: a child’s painting. And the child didn’t, and he couldn’t, have painted like Picasso, nor Gavin Nolan, nor Christian Ward.

The number one thing I learned is the importance of evolving work, both in the artist’s studio and in art history. Like evolution itself it is unintuitive. Hence the common reaction of “my child could have painted that!” Like evolution it involves a lot of drudgery, endless endeavour and dead ends. And like evolution a lot of people seem to want to ignore the reality and reach for the explanation of a spontaneous creator of great genius, a designer, a Picasso or Van Gogh who simply sat down and said this shall be this and created it out of thin air.
So now let me take you aside, as I wish someone had done for me, and whisper a few more things about art in your ear:

The rest

∑ Titles are not important. Gavin and Christian used to ask their fellow students to come up with a title for their work as an after-thought when it was needed for a catalogue or show. In order to get students to title their work the head of the school told them the secretary would pick names if they didn’t. It proved less a threat than a popular option.

∑ Beware of the explanatory card at the side. Generally the artist is as baffled by this as anyone else. It is there for two reasons: one to get the voice of the curator heard, two to meet the craving for explanation from the public. I heard many young artists laughing at the exposition of critics and curators, but I can’t name names as critics and curators are a twitchy and powerful bunch and might get upset.

∑ It is not ‘So Doku.’ There is no single answer to understand. Christian and Gavin would welcome any interpretation as long as they felt it was made without pretence or affectation. This is what the best critics and curators do.

∑ You do not need to understand Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors to benefit from Prozac, just a build of the drug. It is similar with art, and like medicine look for the placebo effect – the more you seek to discover art, its practise and creation with openness, the more you will feel its effects. The more I was surrounded by art, its creation and practise, the more I felt its effects.

∑ Don’t ask these questions:

What is the artist trying to say? (If it could be put into words they wouldn’t have created the work.)

I don’t get it. (Get what? You are probably looking for too much or for something too neatly packaged.)

∑ Remember Gavin’s Yellow Teddy - artists do not make to sell. It is merely a fortunate consequence, if they are lucky, that helps them to carry on working. Price is a perilous guide to the merits of a work of art.

∑ Remember the physical side of your brain. The shape and feel of things bit. The bit you use for fixing and mending, feeling and touching. The bit you turn off when you walk into a library, but turn on in B & Q. Don’t make the mistake of turning it off when you walk into a gallery, just because it has an intellectually rarefied atmosphere not commonly felt in Home Depot.

∑ Start simple. What are you looking at? What colour is it? How has it been forged / applied / constructed. Play spot the face in the cloud if you like, but know that you are just playing spot the face in the cloud. Visualise the blank space / canvas / media and work up from their.

∑ Beware the emperor’s new clothes. People like to proclaim expertise, and people like to proclaim power. Curators, critics and audiences fail just as much as artists, and usually with far less integrity. Just because everyone else seems to like it, doesn’t mean you have to. Practise being negative. You are allowed not to like anything much at all. There is nothing wrong with having high standards.

∑ The more you see, the more you’ll know. As with much in life the more you put in the more you get out.

∑ Look for progression in an artist. Most artists one can only really appreciate by seeing a collection of their work all together. A retrospective is even better. This is why Galleries do them so head on down. If galleries are no good then ask artists nicely if you can visit their studios. Start with Gavin Nolan and Christian Ward if you like. You’ll never look back.

And what about my film? Well the BBC swallowed that up. I did what Gavin and Christian are yet to do: sold out.

KC Blogs

2006-03-15T21:38:00.000Z

I've been checking them out.

Four I like:

TKC Girl
Greg Beck
Tony's Kansas City particularly this post
me, my life + infrastructure