Fail to plan

Pharmacies, Vitamins and the Philippines

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:24:14 +0100

A normal street in downtown Manila. Outside a branch of Mercury Drugstore, an employee dressed as Snow White hands out free trial packs of multi-vitamins from a basket like some kind of Disney drug outreach worker. This is Saturday afternoon and families mill menacingly round malls and gangs of tweens tweet at each other as they swarm through the plazas and precincts. As an outsider, it seems to be bizarre to be handing out proto-drugs to kids on family outings.

The Philipines is obsessed with drugs. And not the good kind. Like many countries in south-east Asia, the concept of a prescription only really applies to opioids and other such exotica. Anything from your standard analgesics to Zofren, by way of tramadols, omeprazols and propranalols are available. Ask and you shall receive. Heading out for the evening, I stopped in to pick up some anti-emetics and some painkillers for the potential morning after. The fascinating thing was, that at 9.20 on a Friday night, the place was packed, people buying supplements, sachets of fibre to add to food, cough syrups and balms, quasi-medical products with questionable benefits as well as many concerned looking hypochondriacs, clutching magazine articles proclaiming yet another wonder drug that they had simply decided to walk in and ask for.

The role of the pharmacy in encouraging this self-medication is incredible. They push themselves as the first line of healthcare, and even one of the self-declared ‘small’ chains, who sponsored the ‘power ballad hour’ on my Taxi drivers radio station of choice, claimed 1500 branches nationwide, and Mercury Drugstore, the most visible chain in manila has a distribution of at least one every couple hundred meters. And every one is full.

But this pharma-driven, structural approach to health in the Philippines is pervasive. Adverts for slimming teas, fortified breads and ant-cancer dog biscuits- well maybe not the last one- are everywhere. Coffee with an extra seven vitamins, a new brand of flour that has 8+1, there is an algebraic approach to health which seems wholly at odds with the holistic east-asian stereotype one might expect- Whether it is a legacy from successive waves of settlement and influence- Spanish, British, American ‘empire’, adverts for diet aids, skin miracle treatments, laser hair removal are on every corner, and most streets have some kind of private clinic hoping to get neurotic lower-middle class Filipinos to part with their hard earned pesos. It seems that health isn’t something that you look after, but rather that you buy into, less about man as an organism, but as a mechano kit

The End of Structural Debate

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:53:36 +0000

Politics and political economy are not my strong point. I was in fact rejected for a history and politics degree when, as an over-enthusiastic 18 year old who claimed to have read Prouhdon, I struggled to explain quite why property was theft. I have always been an overly enthusiastic name-dropper…

However, I have been struck by what seems to be the end of any last remnants within the public domain of genuine debate about the structure of society. I do not claim this to be something particularity recent- as a mere Historian by training, (thanks to that politics tutor!), my idea of contemporaneity is somewhat vague.

The fall of the Soviet Union sped up this neutralisation of real debate, but it was already an almost-certainty during the height of the freeze. The binary language of East and West, of Communist and Capitalist did much to suck the air out the possibility of alternatives beyond this dialogue in the public’s imagination. The fall of the East and the start of what has been termed by some the ‘unipolar moment’ sped this stagnation up even further, though the language of unipolarity had begun to squeeze the life out of free and frank debate about the very way in which society is structured some time before. The fall of one means the triumph of the other. Of course if the the ‘free world’ truly delivered on its own rhetoric, then the fall of the East should have meant a multi-polar reality, where the liberal freedoms, claimed to be so closely tied to capitalism, meant everything was up for grabs. But after the fall of one monolithic bloc, what we saw instead was the consolidation of the other.

What we see now is a confluence of factors, which, black-hole-like, have sucked life and light out of all but the furthest (lunatic) fringes of the political firmament. What we are left with in politics is a discussion of the manner and not the action. Or to use some schlock-Marxist polemicism, we the people are going to get shafted and it seems the question is whether it is enthusiastically, reluctantly or vigorously. Ultimately the result is the same. The last time there was real debate about the action and not the manner in the UK was the 1983 Labour party Manifesto, subsequently termed the ‘longest suicide note in history’- not a sobriquet that is going to encourage constructive and open debate about the way society is run.

There are four factors I want to look at, overlapping and at times not yet fully defined that come together to create this pessimism

-the assumption of capital

-ignorance of the capitalist-democratic tension

-the depoliticisation of economics

-the catalysing effect of the new business of journalism

The assumption of capital is where this thought starts. The rhetoric of the West during the Cold War established a moral basis for Capitalism which tied it up with democratic freedom and liberal rights (more on this later) but this claimed moral authority meant that when Soviet communism failed, Fukyama’s ‘End of History’ moment, there was an assumption of Capital. That is to say, Capitalism took on the mantle that it had prepared for itself as the unchallenged mode of organisation for society, a consumption-driven (consumption-fetishising?) market system was seen as the only backdrop against which free society could take place, rather than one of the elements of how society is ordered that should be put up for debate.

The assumption of capital becomes even more clear when we look at individual businesses. Rrom consumer-facing pin-up brands, the Starbucks, the McDonalds through the industrial heavy-hitters like GE or Royal Dutch Shell, through to the silent giants you may never have heard of- the BHP Billitons of the world all operate as supra-national bodies. They move money seamlessly within their corporate structures and across borders in ways that individuals never can. They commercially colonise, hiring private armies when they move in to trade in unstable regions. They relocate their nominal headquarters to create tax-efficiencies and are wooed by governments, receiving generous subsidies for building their means of production in a given territory, tax breaks for not relocating and huge state contracts, that amount to public donations to the private purse, to not lay off their workers. Governments of every persuasion court them in a race to the bottom and claim these actions are for the ‘good of the nation’. in short they position themselves above the sphere of society itself and the structures that should circumscribe them.

Capitalism and democracy are not synonymous. For some this may seem like a truism, and for others this may represent something never even considered- perhaps because the assumption of capital means then when you hear ‘democratic’ or ‘free’ you presume this is also inherently capitalist. if you even think about this assumption at all. FailToPlan’s last (apologetic) foray into the deep and murky water of political thought touched upon this idea. There is an inherent tension within the concept Capitalist Democracy as a mode of social organisation that has historically meant it was such a fertile and productive form. From the mercantile quasi-democratic elite of the Venetian city state, who tempered their riches with the sombre robes meant to show their unity, to the ‘embarrassment of riches’ of the Dutch Golden age, where the Burghers of Amsterdam would hide their finest possessions in their most private rooms, through to the monuments to civic pride built by the great industrialists of the British north, this tension played out in surprising and fruitful ways. This all stemmed from the negotiation between man as capitalist/industrialist/consumer and man as citizen. Within Capitalist democracy, the rights and responsibilities of citizen- participation, individual freedoms, contributing to the public sphere crackle and spark as they rub up against the enshrinement of property, the opportunity to consume, the state’s creation of a stable and demarcated area in which the market and capital can flourish.

Yet as the two have become (incorrectly) mapped on top of each other, we begin to see a corruption that has come to characterise late (post-)modernity. The act of consumption, of profiteering has been conflated with participation, with citizenship. Whether it is ‘buying british’ as a civic duty, the fetishisation of home ownership as emblematic of membership of civil society ( Britain was never helped on that front by having a property-based qualification attached to the franchise historically) or small business as the engine of civil society, participation in the market is now an imperfect and flawed proxy for participation in society. This is seen in most sharp relief during key societal inflection points. The most recent in the UK was the 2011 riots, when the shooting by Police of general all round- ne’er do well, Mark Duggan, coupled with the economic realities of recession and a pervading sense of disenfranchisement led thousands of (mainly young) Britons to take to the streets. If they had any sense of their role, of their potential as angry young citizens they would have marched on Parliament. Instead their burnt down shops and looted FootLocker. Political frustration was channeled through consumption. I remember one woman outside a branch of Curry’s, interviewed on the second or third night of disturbances, live by Sky News- “I pay my taxes and nothing get better, there ain’t (sic) enough jobs and I have had enough, I am sick of this government” She was holding a widescreen television looted from the store she was standing in front of. Rather than diagnose itself, the governments response to those who took to the streets- however misdirected those very real frustrations were- was to run the Magistrates courts 24 hours a day in order to sentence and make an example of those who had challenged ‘law and order’ in Britain, further conflating the two uneasy bedfellows. It is here of course, as a marketeer that I personally feel most responsible, spending my day-job hatching ever more elaborate schemes to persuade citizens to self-actualise through consumption.

If there was any doubt that the two were not tone and the same, consider the most successful ‘capitalist’ economy of the past decade and a half- China, has succeeded without (perhaps even because) its Capitalist mode was not harnessed to the once-negotiating, ameliorating, moderating tendencies of Democracy. Instead what we see is a triumph of ‘command capitalism’ and proof that the two must exist in a perpetually renegotiating, tense alliance with each other if we think that the freedoms tied up with democracy are important to us as a society. That is something that must also be put up for robust debate if we want to have a chance of retaining them.

As any career politician knows, Economics is Political. It is tacitly acknowledged in the foundational years of their careers, where the archetypal journey begins with a combined courses in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Yet the rhetoric of the current political consensus does little to acknowledge this. Economics, is complex, imprecise, ignorant of the caprices of human nature, and any one version of how the Economy should operate stems from a political-philosophical viewpoint, however, confused, muddied or contradictory it is. That is to say, economics does not exist in a vacuum. Yet, during the current crisis, both government and opposition rhetoric, despite the adversarial approach that the UK organs of power encourage, builds a consensus around the idea that their hands are mostly tied, that though the opposition would take radically different action, it is only radically different insofar as the numbers will allow. Their range for action is narrow and there are no radical solutions because the ‘economics’ will not allow. As political animals, they choose to absolve themselves of this agency in order to avoid potentially difficult, big questions (and therefore radical solutions). The depoliticisation of economics suits any ruling group as it moves some of the most pressing questions out of a self-defined political sphere, allowing them to administer relatively unencumbered, convincing us that the ‘rearranging deck chairs on the foredeck of the Titanic’ that they occupy themselves is in fact the ‘business of governing’, rather than, in truth, the ‘theatre of politics’ .

I have to thank (or curse, depending on the reaction to this rant) Nick Davies’ book ‘Flat Earth News’ for starting me thinking about this and particularly for this last thought, which conversely was my first. The free press has been a place where Capitalism and Democracy have rubbed along for some time. Though a business, the press has performed an important civic function, as a key check and balance on government and also a forum for public debate. It has a responsibility ( albeit only a de facto one) to raise questions about society, both it action and it manner. The business of journalism has always nipped at the fringes of that role, with owners interests shaping the nature of that debate, but the late 20th Century advent of the Media Mogul, best typified by the Murdoch machine threw this productive tension out the window. The business of the news is now simply to sell newspapers and make profit. The tension between Market and Civic functions which the free press had spent so many years navigating was removed, and with it the free press was reshaped to be far more effective than any party-controlled propaganda outlet at neutralising structural debate. It does this by no longer engaging in (with?) structural debate because is difficult, because it asks big questions that aren’t immediately ‘sexy’ for its audience and because it questions the truths they hold to be self-evident and puts its readers/viewers (consumers?) in an uncomfortable position. Far easier to tell people what they already think then to provide a provoking voice of dissent. Market forces at work in news rooms have caused this to happen less through cynicism or by malaise, but rather through chronic underinvestment. In ‘Flat Earth News’ Davies describes modern newsrooms that are chronically understaffed, with writers turning round many times more copy than they were expected to in previous decades during the 20th Century. With this has come the pervasive spread of PR copy and wire copy, hastily cut and pasted into some of the worlds leading news outlets. Which means the word ‘Crap’ appears more often in the UKs most respected newspapers than ‘Capitalism’.

So what is the solution to this? Questioning. Looking at every assumption, every truth seen to be self-evident. Our current structure may be the best there is, or at least the best for now, but frankly without a robust interrogation we cannot even begin to know whether this is the case. The worn-out old adage says to never talk about Sex, Politcs or Religion. Sex has already been commoditised and merchandised, and religion is an increasing irrelevancy. We should probably start talking about politics and the way society is run in its broadest and deepest sense for all of our sakes.

Burgers, Lobsters and the Petit Trianon

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:05:00 +0000

Marie-Antoinette had an interesting way of unwinding at the Petit Trianon, the small Palace that was her escape from the ‘pressures’ of Queenship up at the ‘big house’ in Versaille. In the grounds of the Petit Trianon, she ordered the construction of a hameau, a mock French farming village, complete with rabbits, pigs, cows and some fields of wheat and barley which she oversaw. A.U Wertmüller, some-time a resident artist at Versaille depicts, in one of his portraits from the French court, one of Marie-Antoinette’s confidants, Adelaide Auguie, dressed in a mock peasant milk maid’s dress in the Queens Laiterie. Apocryphal or not, the story runs that the Queen herself had elaborate shepherdess and farm-girl costumes made by her royal dressmakers, in which she would play at the peasant-girl, tending to her sheep or milking her cows until, bored, she would retire to the Trianon, most likely for cake.

Why I bother to relay this story is because the same disdain I have for this playing at the peasant is how I am beginning to feel about the current trend for single-dish and short menu restaurants in London. What once started as a desire for simplicity, great ingredients and an unfussy return to ‘real’ food has become a caricature of itself, what the hameau was to a working rural village. Just as the immediate post-recessionary automotive craze for matte-black coating Porsches, BMWs and Range Rover Vogues as well as other high end vehicle, ( low profile, low sheen and therefore permissible luxury ran the simplistic hedge-funder logic) these restaurants the Tramsheds, Bubble Dogs and Burger & Lobsters of the world are now seen as a permissible display of status by way of discernment in this post-recessionary realignment, the after-Lehman L’Atelier Joel Robuchon. Except, the problem is that once they become a covert status game, the food suffers. Once the thing is that it is ‘a thing’ then the food is no longer the thing. The shred of dignity provided by their stripped back approach is becoming stretched to the point of absurdity, with a restaurant specialising in only champagne and hotdog or only burgers and lobsters bearing little resemblance to the honest culinary ethos that may have been the one iota of authentic grit in the oyster when this whole charade began. This rule can be almost uiversally applied to anything with ‘streetfood’ in its subhead.

The ersatz nature of the whole stripped back food vibe becomes apparent when you eat at some of these restaurants- catering to a certain comfortable chattering class background that wants to play at the peasant girl. Meat Liquor’s burgers are over-hyped, over-greasy and made from poor cuts. They remind me of the kind of burger that I would get for a pound from a burger van at the funfairs of my childhood. Yet for those who venerate these establishments, these vans were were verboten, so now in urban 20- and 30- something-hood their sustenance, or a repackaged version of it, becomes fetishised, an exciting sense of what is forbidden, an element of transgression to add to dimensionalise this status.

If you want a burger van burger, go to a windy car-park by a builders merchant in Mitcham. If you want to open one of these restaurant, make the narrative about the food rather than pretending its about the food when actually its about the catchiest menu combination or newest streetfood novelty.

Amongst the shining skyscrapers of Dubai, a city that doesn’t do ersatz modesty, culinarily or otherwise, I visited a place in porta-cabin, the Bu Qtair restaurant with no menu and whose clientele consisted of a pretty even split of expatriates, from both East and West, and South Asian migrant workers. Plastic tables and chairs were strewn outside and there was no menu, just large plastic tubs of masala-seasoned fish bought each morning from the boats ( Dubai actiually has a working fishing fleet… ), fried to order and served out of a side window of the cabin. No show, no fuss, no ‘concept’ other than serving incredible spicy fish and chapatis to anyone who wanted to eat. Happiness should be good food, not a culinary mock-hamlet.

Post-Sporting hobbies and idols may offer us a more well-rounded future ( in every sense)

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:37:52 +0000

Lance may have a rap sheet to answer when it comes to childhood obesity. Cycling’s most high profile figure has left a sizeable black mark on cycling and on sport more generally. The narrative which he persisted on pedalling (geddit?!) in spite of over a decade of steadily mounting evidence preceeding USADA’s publishish of their dossier outlining the systematic team-wide cheating that underpinned his 7 Tour de France victories.

The version of history which Lance adopted as his truth casts him as the plucky young American, who faced down the European establishment of cycling, stared death in the face during his battle with cancer, and came out the other side even more gutsy and determined and single minded; , out-thinking, and out-racing the rest of one of the worlds most brutally relentless and merciless sports. In the process he won one of the worlds hardest endurance events 7 times in a row. The idea is that the qualities and values that he needed to succeed in life in extremis, most notably his fight with cancer, mirror those needed to succeed at sport. Sport as not just a metaphor for life, but as a proving ground, a crucible that drives out impurities of heart and mind, forging men (and historically is has been men, not people) into the steely individuals that win at life. Those who are best at sport, excel at life, and professional sport provides us with the stories which we can latch onto, allegories and maxims to cling to, to improve us, as well as champions of the latter day arena who we can suffer with and ultimately overcome with.

Lance’s high profile downfall is not an isolated case. Recent revelations condemning the whole of Australian sport as corrupt, full of dopers and in the pocket of organised crime shows the extent of the canker. Add in bribery and corruption of referees and even whole teams in the Italian league (with servants of the state and the Camorra involved in recent scandals surrounding most notably Juve). Recent reports and statements from the International Centre for Sports Security have warned that the European game is being bought by South East Asian gambling rings, and the Pakistan cricket team was until exposed, pretty much ‘for hire’ to any spot-better who wanted to pay the price. Even cricket is ‘Just not Cricket’ now.

Perhaps sport is still metaphor for life, but one that says an awful lot of negative things about the culture that we live in now. The whole idea of a purity and simplicity that underpinned the optimism and hopes that we place in our beautiful games no longer has a place in contemporary society. When at best, the whole enterprise is laced with cynicism- see the Chinese badminton players in the Olympics in a race to lose even sport’s most aspirational heights start to seem rather tawdry, and that’s before we even touch upon the Jaques Rogge, Hein Verbruggen, Sepp Blatter or any of the others who lead the unelected, unaccountable murky bodies that run most of the worlds leading codes. Millionaire players dive, handball and make racist remarks. (And recently one of the Armitage brothers called me ‘ a F-ing gay’ in a pub in Wandsworth because I was wearing pink shorts. Now whatever my sexuality and whatever my sartorial choices, they bear no relation to each other, or frankly to him.)
Sport is so tarnished that it is no longer a suitable place to put our loftiest hopes.

It is not just a case of commercial drivers purging the last vestiges of the Corinthian spirit from sport. There is an argument that runs that this corruption is natural in a synthetic, augmented world that is preoccupied by material gain through relentless progress, where really the only crime is getting caught. Some argue that rather than trying to hold back the ‘progress’ that doping represents, we should embrace it in unlimited sports, where doping is supervised and the fight for technological supremacy, as in F1, is as much part of the action as the human spectacle. Millions watch WWE every week, glued to the action unfolding while fully aware that it is fixed, whereas this would be a fair, albeit augmented fight. Addition and orchestration can add to the drama that sport offers.

Whether radical suggestions such as these are adopted or rejected, the current state of sport does leave its stars as deficient idols (perhaps they always have been, but the stakes have never been so high before and the attention so great). At the same time, the push-pull twin forces self-curation, vlogging, self-broadcasting-technology breaking down barriers to entry offering everyone a lateral form of celebrity as well as catalysing a growing sense of fame-fatigue around top-down ‘traditional’ stars means that we need a radical reappraisal of society’s heros.

Sport has been a prized source for idols, driven by its historical significance, but it seems anachronistic to draw our 21st century heros from it. The veneration of sports stars and the importance placed on sport, the ‘playing fields of Eton’ school of thought as you might term it in the UK, feels increasingly irrelevant. In the past, the emphasis placed on sport was to encourage participation in activities designed to equip you with the simplistic morals and codes ( as well as physical ability) to fight a war in a far-flung corner of the earth, with cavalry charges. The jobs and roles that needed those skills have all but disappeared- not just war but through mechanisation a lot of heavy physical labour, at least in developed nations where labour is cheap, while any enduring benefit that may have been gleaned from these values has been negated by ‘sport-the business,’ whose commercial interests have razed the positive parts of the anachronism from ‘sport-the game’. The ‘playing fields of Eton’ no longer offer any lessons for battle, with asymmetrical warfare, and its drones and digitised battle plans, smart bombs and insurgencies bringing with it demands for a whole other set of skills that go beyond derring-do and a sense of what’s right. If anything those two things could now be a hinderance. Just at a time where the myth of the army is being fetishised more and more ( thanks Help for Heros…), the actuality is becoming increasingly administrative.

These skills are no longer useful in the workplace either, where collaboration, open-source, long term strategies and projective approaches dominate in industries that produce increasingly abstract things in increasingly alienated, or at least fractalised, forms of intellectual production. It’s no coincidence that those educated on those playing fields, or the blooded Blues of elite institutions are now primarily working in some of the last few industries which still have a reputation for being alpha-dominated, confrontational and where those same battle/playing field instincts are seen as desirable.

Brands have been quick to recognise this seismic shift. The growth of extreme sports and a raft of companies that have co-opted them reflect this. Red Bull is probably the most profligate of all these. Though they sponsor a number of football teams, their AirRaces, Flugtags, Soap box derbies, Stratos’ (Stratii?) reflect a diversification that moves the conversation away from traditional sports and their ever-increasing baggage. Mountain Dew’s, one of the early co-opters of extreme sports, most recent tie-in has been with the recent release of Halo 3.

Computer games are an interesting subject to broach at this point. Often pilloried for their bloody subject matter and graphic depictions of violence, the underlying skills that they require are often ignored. Though we would never want to think that we were encouraging car-jacking or glorifying war, the co-operative missions, strategic planning and lateral and logical thought required to complete these games make them them perhaps better suited as arenas for learning applicable life-lessons for today then the rugby or football pitch. Take the hugely popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. Despite the title, much of what players do is less about fighting and more about thinking. You join a guild ( a loose affiliation of sorts) fight co-operative campaigns for a share of the spoils, but a lot of what players must do before they even get to that point is to level up- completing quests and tasks of varying degrees of difficulty, frustration or boredom, acquiring skills while they test both their ability and patience over time. However, it is not just in the realm of the hardcore gamer or enthusiast where computer gaming seems to be growing up and offering some societal benefit. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nintendo Wii has reconnected people, using an interface that is intuitive enough to be used across the generations, bringing families together and quite literally getting people off the sofa, while in the comfort of their own home. People are (re-)learning to interact with one another and bridging the generational divide. Other, more immersive, less linear games, such as Little Big Planet point to an area of gaming that is about exploration, self discovery and creating a sense of autonomy and self identity, all import skills to acquire in an uncertain and increasingly atomized society.

The lessons that gaming can teach can also be even more direct. The GT Academy, based on the popular Grand Turismo gaming series, sees virtual drivers competing to become real race car drivers, seeing their skills directly transferred from computer to cockpit. Maybe a Flight Sim fighter pilot seems a stretch, but not unfeasible. Suddenly the world in the Barry Levinson’s film, Toys (1992) where child gamers control ‘war toys’ that are fighting real battles remotely from the safety of the factory seems eerily prescient. Just like sport, every pastime has its sinister side.

Sport however seems to be dominated by its demons, with even the legendary olympic running tradition of Kenya now under the microscope in an investigation into ‘systematic doping’ at its key training centres. Perhaps the virtual world offers us some much more worthwhile real-life lessons and should be where we are drawing our heros from.

On 'How to be a woman' by a man

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:57:00 +0000

This is not me deciding to dish out advice on something I know nothing about, but rather some thoughts prompted by some of my Christmas reading…

Over the holidays I read Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a Woman’, though this isn’t me taking my first tentative steps towards an exploration of a change of sex. I somehow don’t think this book would be the best starting point… The book was recommended to me by my girlfriend who just finished reading it and who had bought copies for a number of her female relatives for Christmas.

In what she terms ‘post-post-’ or ‘roughly 5th wave’ feminism, she navigates the maze of modern womanhood in a taut, well-thought out, provoking and humorous way, using her own experience as lens through which to look at what it means to be a woman, and really, want it means to live in the late 20th, early 21st century West. Underwear, bodily hair, sex, children, abortion; the book gallops through a wide field of contemporary issues. One of the most interesting constructs that Moran introduces is that to defuse resistance to the idea of feminism, simply replace feminism with ‘politeness’- that sexism is frankly gender-biased rudeness. Ultimately she muses that we should all just be ‘the guys’, that we should treat each other fairly, giving ourselves the room for difference and self-expression that we all deserve.

The issue is, that with a title like ‘How to be a Woman’, and the gender-specific marketing campaign that went with it, 50% of the population, the ones with a Y chromosome, are missing out on the book ( I read it on the tube at one point, cover glued to my thigh, head down, with the occasional furtive glance up, until my stop, which was the end of the line- when we arrived, I closed the book, hurriedly stuffed it into my man-bag (handbag? bag? person bag?) only to look up and see the one other person left in the carriage, a woman about my age grin at me, then burst out laughing- I had to laugh too). I don’t see The Second Sex, or The Female Eunuch coming in a fluffy pink binding, or with a pastel-and-comic sans cover. Though, unashamedly populist, sideways and irreverent in tone, it is intended as, and offers, an engaging feminist text, and as one that ends in a post-gendered conclusion. With chapters on periods and birth, its primary audience is obviously 20 something and 30 something women, but for their male counterparts, tentatively navigating the modern workplace, parenthood, their social pressures around image placed on them as well as wanting to help their girlfriends and friends navigate the female equivalent issues ( and more, in fairness to the feminist cause) it is a text which is pertinent for all of us ‘guys’ and arguably one that, in male hands can help further the cause as much as in female ( I was particularly taken aback by some of the inadvertently gender-bias things that we all accidently slip into). Its a shame that such retrograde thinking has gone into the marketing of such a forward looking text.

My lasting memory though that I took away was not, however about the modern shape and nature of the cause. With anecdotes of all the bands that she has taken drugs with or, becoming a Melody Maker writer in her teens, or sleeping with Vanilla Ice (apparently) my lasting takeaway from the book was how unlike one of ‘the guys’ Moran herself was. I couldnt help feel that inadvertently it had turned into a brag-fest that made all of us feel inadequate. But maybe that’s equality?

The Golden Age of Staying at Home//Bodley Head & FT Prize Entry Essay

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:46:37 +0000

Mark Twain claimed that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’. Waiting by the gate to board a flight at Dubai international airport, there is a sample of a few hundred of the earth’s residents; a tranche selected by quirks of fate as diverse as late-running meetings in Manila or the impulse to visit a newly-born relative on the other side of the world. Looking around the gate, you can see a hundred pairs of trailing white wires into a hundred different coloured ears. A young boy in a dishdasha languidly swats at a glowing tablet screen, his face a concentrated picture of barely concealed contempt for the whole process. If we are to put any stock in this arbitrary thin-slicing of humanity, then there seems to be little to evidence Twain’s epithet.

Historically, travel has been a disruptive act. To undertake a journey meant to leave home and the relative safety that represented. Perhaps it is for that very reason that the act of travel has been romanticised in literature and imbued with an almost-mystical significance. The risk that it inherently contained meant that it had to be prized to be incentivised. But maybe this is stating the equation the wrong way round. The mystical significance comes from what travel had to offer. The romance was linked to the reward; an expansion of human understanding, the opportunity widen and deepen the intellectual pool. Often this would come from the journey as much as from the destination.

Travel is no longer an individual experience, it is a commodity. The travel industry was worth $1,972.8 billion USD in 2011. ‘Adventure’ is no longer something you have, it is a rack of brochures in Trailfinders, after ‘Action Holidays’ and before ‘Americas (North)’. This has been a long time coming. Even in the days of Earhart, and certainly by the time of Armstrong, while the heroic quasi-mystical version of travel was being valourised, the travel industry was fractionalising and homogonising that same sentiment, repackaging it into 7- 10- and 14-day pieces. Since the advent of the grand tour in the 17th century, travel has been losing its genuine power, replaced instead with fictional significance. Since the glory days of 14th and 15th century explorers, as its real importance has diminished, its ceremonial role has grown in popular consciousness. As early as the 18th Century, some critics were deriding the Grand Tour as “a paltry thing, a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect”. The birth of the itinerary was the beginning of a long and illustrious ending.

With a marked decline in the package holiday since the end of the 20th century, the logical thought would be that travel is once again diversifying, that after the post World War II, mid 20th century standardisation, we are rediscovering our instincts to strike out alone and ‘see what we can see’. But in fact, the lineage can be traced from these first accounts of Byron and his contemporaries in Florence, through the pre-planned, pre-paid excursions and identikit apartments of the Costas to the lonely-planet-guide collecting, tick-boxing that typifies travel now- you may not buy all the pieces in one go and from one place, but it is still ‘Sightseeing’ not actually seeing the sights ( whatever you, as opposed to the guide, might define those sights to be) however you dress it up. One involves taking in the air, the atmosphere, the feeling, the people that make up a place. The other involves checking off ‘must-sees’ from a generic list. Suddenly your mini-break is the same as everyone else’s. The ‘Self guided Tour’ might mean that they are configured in a different order, but ultimately the pieces are all the same. Gradually the publishers who produce these books are dropping the final vestiges of pretence that claim to be opening up a new place for their readers to explore, concentrating instead on sending to print big-hitting top-ten ‘best-of’ books, stripping the guides down to their core checklists. At least its more honest.

What all this amounts to is a transformation of experience itself into a commodity. Where travel was once about a ‘being’ mode of existence, it becomes about ‘having’ acquiring landmarks in a place, rather than experiencing it. One of the side effects of this is that certain cities begin to feel like theme parks to certain eras, playing up to their own guide-book caricatures. As Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega puts it, ‘ like a wax museum with a pulse’. New York as ‘20th Century Land’, a kind of ouroborus cliche that feels like it is only one edict away from having Rhapsody in Blue being piped out of the nearest lamp-post every time you look up to take in a skyscraper. There are no real sights left to see.

Where technology meets with travel, it only serves to catalyse this same process, providing ever more subtle and artful tools for acquisition. If only the tourist wandering round, iPad screen 6 inches from their face, would be the apogee of this- adding an intermediary screen between themselves and the real-world, occasionally tapping on the shutter button to capture a moment as they go. Even the near-commodity point-and-shoot digital camera has much to answer for, lowering the barrier to taking a picture, meaning most see the world perpetually through a viewfinder or screen, visually evidencing their progress through their top ten tick list with angles and shots near-indistinguishable from those in the book to start with. The proliferation of social media means that we do not even have to wait until that friend returns to take us through a slide show of their snaps. Instead we get real-time over sharing of every meal, every landmark, every minutiae of their trip before they have even finished it. And every set-piece shot indistinguishable from the last acquaintance that went to the same place. That same standardised experience is shown when you overhear two ‘intrepid travellers’ who have recently visited the same place. ‘and did you go to X?’ ‘yes we went to X after Y then to the Z that the bar recommended’ ‘ah yes, we went to Z on out last night’. And what both parties thought of it was exactly what the guide thought they ought to.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the international airport terminal, a liminal space cut adrift from time or place, where you are at once everyman and no-one. From check-in to duty free to air-bridge to pressurised cabin, it is a sanitised and efficient process that give no hint of ‘arrival’ or ‘departure’ beyond the lit up signs on the terminal walls, adding to the wholly alienated and alienating experience of modern travel. As we criss-cross the world with increasingly regularity, we continue to shrink it. As states and culture become closer and more porous, the reason to travel, the need to discover becomes less relevant. As destinations become cross-checked and indexed with increasing levels of granularity and every back-street bistro ‘discovered’ by a constant stream of directed patrons, clutching their ‘insider’s guide’, the question remains whether there are even any outsiders left.

But it is not just the increasing efficiency of the physical act of travelling that is reduced the act of discovery to simulacrum. The pervasive technology that connects us, creating an always-on world, that we are told brings us all closer together- highlighting our similarities over our differences diminishes the need to leave home in the first place. Sub-cultures or movements, whether it is Portland Hipsterism or the Darbawia Boys of Saudi Arabia are mainlined into the general consciousness as fast as they can begin to develop. There are no more cultural Galapagos’ left, and soon all the creatures will begin to look the same. Disconnection helps diversity to develop but the danger of this constant connection is the creation of a ‘Grey Mush’ of culture. You can hear it in numerous Top 40 or Hit 100 or any other of the many near-meaningless music rankings around the globe. The same artists crop up across charts, swamping local music trends with magpie-like tracks that steal with pride from any number of genres. When was the last time you heard an RnB track that didn’t include a 90s dance piano riff and a dubstep middle eight? Microsoft are even using dubstep to sell internet browsers. Talk to a current teenager and their music taste will probably encompass anything from Elgar to Gaga, perhaps with some Miles Davis and Frank Zappa in the mix. Even within a given place’s culture, the idea of any sense of tribalism seems dead. Mankind as a species has a long (pre)history of the divisive effect of tribalism, but there is something to be said for the biodiversity it can bring. Looks and sounds used to come from individual cities and were radiated out, from Madchester to Northern Soul, from Tin Pan Alley to Detroit techno, there was a sense of place, or at least of origin that was transmitted with the pop movements they spread. Now the cultural behemoths are transnational, with Lady Gaga as a 21st century Nemo, and her stage show a vast, Nautilus, constantly touring, spreading its agnostic gospel.

Located within this wider movement towards the transnational, the current trend towards craft- the growth of market, micro-brewing, niche designers- feels like an oddly futile gesture in the face of this homogenisation. As companies operate as supra-national missionaries, spreading their brands values and core benefits from place to place, everywhere begins to look the same. The same logos give cities from Lago to Los Angeles an increasingly eerie sense of Deja Vu. Inside the industry they talk about ‘missions’ and ‘reasons to believe’ as if buying and the self-actualisation it is meant to bring is a new religion that could save us all. With one million people a week moving to cities to be bombarded by these companies proselytizing mission-statements, our very aspirations are being standardised. It is the same transnational brands that provide empty ciphers into which we pour our hopes, whether we are a student in Chengdu or a single mother in Quito. It is Apple phones and Nike trainers and Johnnie Walker scotch that will save us, make us look 5 pounds thinner, put a tiger in our tank and a giant in our toilet bowl.

Linguistic trends are only serving to quicken the shallowing. Language serves as the framework from which ideas and culture hang. The peculiarities of grammar and syntax of any given language help to shape its cultural tropes. The lazy cultural stereotyper might want to assign directness in the German character to its penchant for compound words for instance or British circuitousness to the Passive Voice. Sweeping over-simplifications aside, language is an integral part of the cultural narrative of the place where it was evolved and where it is used. It is a living record of an evolutionary trajectory, such as Autumn, reflecting the Renaissance’s influence on 16th century British society in displacing ‘Harvest’ and ‘Fall of the Leaf’ from usage over time. (Incidentally making the continued preference for Fall in American English more English than the English, something no doubt that every (small R) republican and Anglophile will unite in horror over).

The growth of English as a second language because of its dominant role in business, due to the convergence of the growth of America in the 20th century with the legacy of Empire from the 19th century is only part of the 21st century linguistic shifts. UNESCO posits that over half of the 6000 ‘living’ languages in use today will be extinct by the end of the century. When they go, they take with them 3000 cultural histories, 3000 oral traditions, sets of superstitions, beliefs, verbal tics- ways of understanding and interpreting the world. These are instead replaced by a shared lexicon of urban experience, a way of articulating problems and ideas peculiar to the city and at once universal to them all, as that becomes a dominant mode of being, and as cities develop to ape previous templates laid down in the urban environment. It doesn’t help that many newly-urbanising countries are looking to older cities rather than their own history of the communal living experience to set down a path for development, drawing on expertise from the very same ‘Wax Museums’ that are re-imagining themselves as parodies of their own pasts.

At the same time, there is a strong, countervailing movement being brought about by the very same technology that is shrinking the world outside our front doors. While at once bringing the mainstream together into a kind of transnational grey-mush popular cultural consensus, it is also allowing diversity to flourish at its ever-increasing ( and increasingly bizarre) fringes. To experience other cultures we must look to online spaces, where this diversity is being driven. This new transnational eclecticism may not be to everyone’s taste, but there is doubtless something for everyone there and it is undoubtedly made more extreme by the marginalisation it revels in, when faced with an increasingly blander mainstream- a point that is patently obvious after about 30 seconds on 4chan or any online pornography listing site. But what it does do is give life and depth to a sense of other and in doing so celebrates difference in a way that travel no longer can.

But it is not just alternative tribes that are developing online that make this the golden age of staying at home. Greater definition and higher fidelity makes the experience of staying at home more real than most of what you can experience in real life, especially when so much of that is now being viewed through a screen with headphones firmly placed in ears. A friend who was about to head to the mountains of Nepal trekking for two weeks was suffering a sleepless night before departing, worried that he didn’t have the right music selection for this trip on the iPod to walk to. Forget the birdsong or the sounds of nature, if the foothills of the Himalayas needs augmenting, why not do away with the imperfect reality and all that tiresome travel it requires and just immerse in the experience the technology can provide? As trips become tick-lists, and access is limited and planned, surely the Discovery Channel can give you the kind of unparalleled access that going there never could? The Blue Planet in HD, tablet open to wikipedia on your lap is a more immersive and educational experience that a second rate diving holiday or trekking trip could ever hope to provide. How far are we away from the kind of full-wall, holographic viewing technology that mean this will really be the case. And if immersing in this reality isn’t what switches you on, why not immerse in an alternative one? Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games offer an expansive alternative which you can spend days in. For some it has been too seductive a prospect with a number of deaths being reported amongst the most hardcore of these gamers, including a 3 month old child in South Korea who died of malnutrition after being left to fend for herself by its game-addicted parents who were engrossed in an online child-rearing game in an internet cafe for hours each day.

Though, in-extremis, it is shocking, it does show how attractive an option this technology provides. In a world where the experience that we once sought from going abroad is standardised to the point of absurdity, these immersive technologies suddenly offer something more original, something more real than reality. As travel becomes a process to be endured and one city becomes indistinguishable from the next, getting on a plane or train somewhere seems as likely to narrow the mind as it is to broaden it, spending time in identikit terminii with the same jaded nomads. In the next decade and beyond, perhaps it will be the experiences that we have in our front rooms that will challenge and surprise us more than anything we might find up a mountain in Morocco or on a beach in Indonesia if we do not start some kind of cultural conservation. Truly this is the golden age of staying at home.

The eyes have it

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:15:42 +0000

As assertions of female strength go, the eye make-up of the women of Jeddah, were they ever to win any battles, would undoubtedly be a catalyst for Pyrrhic victories. Jeddah is a very different town from Riyadh. A historic trading port dating back to the 6th centrury BC, its involvement in Arabian trade has always made it a multi-cultural hub within the Arab world. It is religion, despite the dominance of Wahabism within the Saudi state, that has helped keep Jeddah so cosmopolitan. Every year over 3 million muslims from every corner of the world descend on Makkah for the Hajj, bringing with them along with their shared faith, local cultures from places as disparate as Chicago to Bradford to Jakarta. It is because of this, amongst other reasons that on Jeddah’s streets, we see a significant portion of women walking with faces uncovered, and many young women wandering the malls, hijab removed laughing with cousins and nieces.

The most remarkable trend amongst the women of Jeddah, though, is their ability, within the confines of ‘modest’ dress as interpreted in Saudi- hijab, abaya, and often niquab- to assert their sexuality, a small assertion of an impotent power perhaps, but one that at least seems at odds with expectations of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Kohled, Mascara-ed, and eye-shadowed to match jewellry or coloured highlights of their abaya’s, their eye make up was a flag of individuality and sense of self within the confines of a set-up that to the west seeks to dehumanise or if not, certainly relegate to a lower division, women and femininity.

Don’t confuse this with any semblance of strength- though you could argue it was a sort of quiet sexual power game bubbling deep beneath the surface of a deeply patriarchal state. Seeing one woman leave her home, accompanied of course, and get into a car that she will never be able to drive and catching sight of a calf through the side of an abaya slit up to the knee gives the impression that however glacially, things are changing.

From Jeddah, on Makati: Trying not to devalue the urban experience

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Makati feels like the kind of place where your key life choices should be to eat, drink and masterbate. And frankly it doesn’t inspire the imagination and I would be petrified of searching for pornography on my work machine. Fast food chain and identikit 5 star hotels line the corners of the avenues, interspersed by mall after mall, brands and concessions grouped by socio-demographic aspiration; dreams tempered by the realities of income. The highlight of Manila’s central business district is the ability to obtaining a small but tactical cache of over-the-counter ( at least here) medicines that will allow one to function the next morning if you decide to drink yourself into a stupor this evening. Tramadol- Check. Methanemic Acid- Check. Melatonin- Check. Diclofenac- Check. Propranalol- Check. The frequency of pharmacy’s points towards a preponderance amongst the populace to medicate. Clearly a highlight of any visit to the Philippine capital is a visit to the purveyor of rare chemicals and cures. Unfortunately both Diazepam and Vicodin are off the menu.

At breakfast in the Dusit Thani, rheumy eye-men old men and their young, hard-edged Fillipina brides sit close together like a mis-matched pairs of shoes at an end of season sales. Driving round the city, there are the most tantalising hints of what the European visitor may crave- old narrow streets, pedestrians, an allusion to some sense of past. An ancient monument under an overpass, a break in the canopyless trunks of anonymous skyscrapers hint at the historic centre, a clearing in the copse. But, to borrow from Taratino, its a wax museum with a pulse.

Wandering round the Malls as an outsider, you feel as though you are in some souless Stepford take on the urban experience. To approach Makati like that is to miss the point. The mall is the urban dream for so many. It’s the contemporary Agora. In Greenbelt 4 groups of young men in their friday best prowl the raised walkways, while young women congregate in knots outside cafes and bars while tables of businessmen, sleeves unbuttoned and rolled, and lone stiletto-heeled escorts both try energetically to seal their deals. Cities are born of their time and shaped by their age (I would contend that some become bridled by them) To impose one model of urban living on all is to miss the vibrancy and fascination that is there.

The strip-malls and shopping centres of Jeddah are the same; couples with and without children bustle into screened off ‘family areas’ in restaurants, while groups of younger men, enjoying ‘time with the boys’ circulate, an endocrine-induced Pavlovian response to the possibility of the night, despite the absence of any unaccompanied females. Its teeming with life and heat and ‘what-ifs’ hanging in the night air

The story is the same in any number of growing cities around the globe, and it is nothing other than real. To impose preconceptions on these cities is to put a barrier between yourself and what they have to offer. Its exactly what I did my first time in Makati City. They may not have the same cultural smorgasbord laid out as older places, but they can offer a very different and equally valuable version of the urban narrative. To see them without really looking because of certain expectations is to devalue the urban experience they have to offer. Cities like this are always more difficult for the visitor to interface with, but a closer look offers a tantalising hint of what is just out of your reach.

Drive Alive

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:02:00 +0100

There was a time when the pinnacle of automotive achievement was to be ‘the ultimate driving machine’ ( I always thought that ‘the ultimate driver’s machine’ would have made a much better line, or if not a great proposition if you were briefing a team for BMW’s competition) Car advertising was about technical prowess, engineering as art. This was represented through a number of tropes. Whether it was the hyperreal phase that a number of premium manufacturers passed through pre-Lehman (typified by Lexus’ car on blue ray-gun road in black ‘nowhere’ enviroment), followed by the modernist phase that they settled into after (car with concrete-and-steel nu-new-international style edifice in background), extreme robustness- Polo’s small but tough- or unimpeachable build quality ( the long-standing foundation of Toyota and what lies belief Golf’s Golf-ness), cars were epic ode’s to manufacture. They celebrated intolerance of micrometric marginal errors. These were cars to be marvelled at, to be respected, to be feared, to be in awe of.

Recently though, it seems like the strong silent world of automotive advertising, where just like when Saturday comes on the terraces, it was permissible to show your emotions, but never to talk about your feelings. And just like that first breakthrough in therapy, once those emotions start flowing, it is increasingly difficult to hold them back. It should have been clear that this was in the pipeline when BMW told us a few years back that they were all about JOY. After that everyone followed.

One of the most interesting emergent trends in automotive communications at the moment is the notion of ‘aliveness’. Of course the car is just another machine, another tool, really little different from a magimix or a crowbar. Cars are also one of the most expensive purchases any consumer will make. Coupled with the amount of time many people spend in one, the ideas that you might place all your loved people and possessions in one and hurtle it across the country along a strip of tarmacadam at multiple times the maximum physical speed that man was designed to top out at ( Bolt’s 27.79mph between the 60th and 80th meters of his record breaking run in Berlin) and for some orders of magnitude greater a distance and it begins to take on a much more significant role. Modern cars, with the addition of driver aids, airbags, limiters and cruise controls are safer than they ever were before- all these machine controls mitigate the risk from the most unreliable part, the driver themselves. Of course, man’s hubristic nature means that as increasingly more sophisticated, and for most, unintelligible, layers of help are introduced, we feel more helpless, more detached. As driving is made better and better, it feels less like driving, and our own paranoiac complexes feel threatened, debilitated by this. So as the engineering drives (!) us ever closer to constructing the ultimate driving machine, we see a counterfactual narrative emerge in the way in which they are sold to us.

This is where the idea of Alive comes in. As cars get ever more clinical, we are now seeing OEMs tell us how ‘alive they are, how intuitive they are, how they feel. Not how they feel to drive, but how they feel. As cars, through engineering, through regulation, through restriction become hyper-rational, we are told that they are intuitive, that they are different from our magimixes and crowbars and televisions. They are or almost are, living breathing machines. It makes sense factually as well as counterfactually. As regulation means that all modern cars offer the same levels of engineering, and increasingly due to fuel and CO2 regulation and the way that dictates aerodynamics, the way they look, we can forget about the actuality of them, and buy into a myth that is purely emotional, instinctual and personal. Peugeot have made a play on the sensation of driving with their new 208 comms- ‘Let your body drive’. Nissan go even further with the Juke- constructing the car around their driver as he falls to earth, onto a stunt ramps, into a destruction derby arena while it is sprayed, before having the finishing kit added underwater, after which we are told it is built to thrill. To thrill idling outside the school gates? Stuck in heavy traffic on the M40? Any good lie, and car advertising, when it works are some of the best, needs a grit of truth. Peugeot uses a touch of humour to encourage suspension of disbelief, but we look at the Juke advert and can;t help thinking ‘yeah, right…’

The best two plays though on Aliveness, offering a fantasy of real sensation as our lives comes to resemble more and more a kind of over-legislated simulacrum come from two very different car makers. In fairness to Jaguar, they have a head start with the permissions afforded them with the name, but how alive are you acknowledges the increasing mechanical complexity that we are surrounded with, encouraging you to contemplate its dystopian possibilities, before encouraging you to prove that you are different from all that by buying car that has more processing power than the machine this is being written on. It is, however a neatly crafted push-pull, highlighting the problem you never knew you had with the machines around you then offering you the solution. The other comes from Toyota, who set you up as being in this ‘real’ virtual world, a Grand Theft Auto, computer-game existence, the escape from which can only come from their new GT86, a car that will wrench you, or rather allow you to wrench yourself into the ‘real’ real world. Modern cars as antidote to the increasingly numbing and standardised real world? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The Paralympic Narrative

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:31:15 +0100

Initial mental sketches for the post were filed under the heading ‘Why the Paralympics should stand on its own two feet’ but I realised that sounded like some kind of sick joke, which certainly wasn’t my intention. As the excitement dissipates from this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic games, London can look back on what was, a very successful summer. Records were broken, probably most significantly in attendance across the two games, and the public’s seemingly inexhaustible chest of complaints ran out just as Frank Turner set foot onto Danny Boyle’s toytown version of Glastonbury Tor, leaving us with nothing except hope for the summer’s games. By the time Thomas Heatherwick’s transient and transfixing flame was extinguished for the second time, people were saying ‘Olympomania’ with a straight face.

The momentum ( and last minute ticket grabs) that the Olympics created, shifted the Paralympics up a gear, generating a level of excitement previously unseen, causing by the end of the games a growing clamour of voices eager to merge the two. This summer’s games certainly established Paralympic sport with its own identity, stronger and more distinctive than before, and frankly, I believe combining the two is counterproductive, especially at a time when both brands are stronger than ever. Commercially, it is a hinderance to growing the Paralympics strength, and from a narrative perspective it is the wrong decision.

Aside from the obvious, that bringing the two together will encourage people to compare them as if they are ‘apples to apples’, it raises all kinds of sports science questions which we have seen tarnish sports twice recently- with the record-breaking era of the Speedo LZR swimming suits and with the protracted can-he-can’t-he over Oscar Pistorius and his Carbon Blades. The swim suit case was much more open and shut, and what was deemed to amount to mechanical doping was eventually banned by FINA. Pistorius’ is more interesting, as there have been many conflicting papers published over the advantages or disadvantages of his carbon blades- whether they recoup more energy than a set of biological calves would in the second half of a middle distance race. Furthermore, Pistorius’ own determination to run both games feels like it is a tacit undervaluing of the Paralympics. The question over any possible ‘unfair advantage’- with swimsuits or prosthetics- uncovers the the central plot to the Olympics; that, after the opening ceremony, the international goodwill, the spirit of the Olympic Truce, it is about individual glory, singular achievement- a ruthless, relentless and frankly, selfish, desire to be the best.

The Paralympics is a much more fascinating, nuanced thing- test-cricket to the Olympics T20, Dostoevsky to the Olympics Chandler. Channel 4 captured this brilliantly with its Superhumans trail for the paralympic games- the complex narrative arc, the incredible feats of humanity to get to the start line, the grit and guts and the teamwork ( in the broadest possible sense)- the real points of difference- in a way that felt neither patronising nor forced. A different broadcast and different lead sponsors in the UK gave the Paralympics a real chance to be set up if not in opposition, then certainly apart from the Olympic games. And the Paralympics benefitted for this. It seems counter to all this work to then try to merge the two, to try and combine these two stories, particularly as the Paralypics is the newer of the two, and as demonstrated by NBC is still a long way off from being immune from prejudice.

The boldest thing to do would be to run the Paralympics further apart- giving time to re-brand stadia, adapt facilities and give the public time to catch their breath before plunging them into a new drama, rather than run the two together and risk one feeling like the other’s denouement. Combining the two would simply cloud two brilliant and very different brands.

Google for the curious

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:07:17 +0100

Forty day and forty nights since the last post on this blog. It has a faintly biblical ring to it. That fact isn’t for lack of ideas, there has been a surfeit of ideas, a torrent even, but run on time. When you finally sit down to write, invariably it is the last thing that you thought of that is the first one out.

I was reading a piece in this weekend’s FT magazine that reminded me of something I had written earlier this year, which in turn echoed a piece I had writted some time the year before. Entitled ‘Free for all, read by none’, in it, Gillian Tett, asserted that the internet, rather than connecting us with the rest of the world, draws us into an ever decreasing spiral, our circle tightening and tightening, like an overwound clock spring that refuses to break. But in many way a break is exactly what is needed. My own version of this ‘Is the Guardian making you stupid?’ was aimed at the self-affirming reading habits at many of those in positions of cultural dominance as well as in fact many who operate in the corridors of hard power ( the current discussion that just reared its head this morning to bring back the death penalty demonstrates how everything is up for grabs, and may come as a surprise for many who have been blithely living in that liberal monoculture). A previous post, some time back ‘Places other than London’ reflected on the geographical version of this navel gazing, particularly applicable during that particular spell in advertising when that was written. Tett’s article takes this to the next logic stage. That as the web becomes bigger, the world that we interact with on it becomes smaller- add to that selecting traditional media brands that hold a mirror to ourselves and parrot back that opinions that we hold to be truths ( Analysis on Radio4 last night was very interesting on this) and the internet is shrinking our mental worlds, just as the cross-connected Alpha cities may be shrinking our geographical ones. The web gives us the potential to connect to ideas as diverse and as challenging to Aboriginal rights in Australia to Lesbian womens emancipation in Zimbabwe. Yet we persist with the same three Comment is Free columnists and an amusing picture of a seal.

So what is the answer to all this. There was a gem of an idea emerging, something which, as a second tier future citizen (‘those who cannot code’) I cannot execute. Google for the curious- a search engine for serendipity, a ‘random article’ button for the whole of the web, to select from the widest possible range of the interesting, obscure, engaging and challenging that is out there. If Google narrows, then this should broaden, provide a sense of chance, happenstance and delight to the web. To bring alive the great undiscovered world that is only one, bling lazy and as-yet un-done click away. There have been those that have tried- those who claim to be ‘discovery engines’, but here for discovery, read ‘similarity’. What we need is a way of plugging into the possibility of the web, rather than limiting the bounds of our own curiosity.

The Serpentine Pavilion and the Tate Tanks

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:52:15 +0100

Ai Wei Wei and Herzog and Meuron’s Serpentine Pavillion was described by its curator as a ‘palimpsest of ghosts’. The structure takes the foundation of the previous 11 years buildings and circumscribes their foundations and rubble to create a structure that is both wholly original and yet also clearly derivative. It is less a structure in its own right as it is a meditation on how the past lives side by side silently with the present. It softly muses on what it means to remember, what it is to live with memory.

It’s record is in many way incredible human. It is in fact a subtle jamais vu. The previous foundations were never there to be ‘unearthed’ in the process of this one’s inception. Instead, it was created by laying the previous designs over each other, building up the past layers as if the next architect had literally as opposed to figuratively built upon each previous pavilion.

The collaboration represented a chance for the artist to collaborate with Herzog and de Meuron on his own terms, after having been employed as a consultant to the architects to work on the design of the Bird Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics and later distancing himself from the project and the whole Beijing 2008 project, wondering why China lacked ‘the self-confidence to clearly examine yourself, rather than to give this kind of pretend smile on your face’. The collaboration itself nearly did not go ahead, with Ai unable to leave China. Skype and other online methods had to be used to overcome his geographical confinement.

In many ways it is typical of both its creators work. Ai deals with memory, forgetting, the past and loss across many mediums in his work, from modernisation’s wrenching of China from its historical past to the experience and memory of the individual within the collective, such as his 2007 work Fairytale where 1001 citizens from across China were brought to Kassel in five groups over 40 days, left to wander, see, and simply exist, bringing their memories and taking with them new ones. Herzog and de Meuron are best known in the UK for their work on the Tate Modern and have a record of integrating extending, refurbishing, and working with previous buildings, reshaping the past, from the extension of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis or their subtle synthesis of winery with vineyard at the Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley to their enlargement of the Unterlinden Museum in Alsace. Both have a streak running through their practices of attempting synthesis where different temporalities come into conflict.

The result of their collaboration at the serpentine, a still shallow disc of water sitting above this soft cork semi-subterranean structure that outlines this architectural archeological model, reminds us of the ghosts all around us, and despite lacking the knowing, gauche irreverence of post modern in-jokes, it quietly acknowledges that everything is derivative and nothing is really new. It is a design that is remarkably low on ego and all the better for it.

The same can be said of conflicts that one may have pre-empted in the newly opened Tanks at the Tate Modern by Herzog and de Meuron, an underground performance art space in three converted oil tanks. Turning storage to display and the closed and claustrophobic to the open could have been a call for drastic reengineering, but the resulting space has been born out of a sympathetic transformation, creating something that is new while remaining wholly recognizable as the previous space, which the Tate Tanks- as art and performance space- both inhabit and exhibit in their new role. It is an incredible achievement, and one that is more significant than the first phase of the Tate Modern- cathedral of power to cathedral to art was always going to be an easier transubstantiation.

The artist and the architectural practice seem to have found collaborators who are very much each the other’s equal, and in London, a place that is a strong fit for both. Ai Weiwei’s and Herzog and de Meuron’s work, whether alone or in collaboration seems to sit well with this city whose present is constantly negotiating with multiple versions of its past and lacks one defining previous era through which to frame that discussion.

The rebirth of the shareholder

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:27:15 +0100

Shareholders. Those people. The individuals whose ownership means companies put profits before people. Some see it as an opportunity to concentrate the capital accumulated by companies in the hands of the few. Shareholding in bulk by the few is a very good way to increase gaps between those who have and those who have not- allowing them ( if all things are going well…and it can be a big if….) to allow the captial that they have to work harder for them, profiting from the hard work of ( and ultimately surplus capital extraction from) others. Seen in a different light though- and funnily enough, it was the same light that one of my personal bete noire’s Lady Thatcher saw it- it can be a redistributive tool, if you can encourage more people to own them- in the same way the Iron Harridan saw home-ownership- then everyone gets richer. Or so the logic goes.

Of course encouraging base self interest and enshrining the idea that we can all simply make money from simply having money, be that through shares or through property (when did houses stop being homes?!) is something which cannot be seen as positive for society. ( Or as they called it ‘back in the day’ Usary). So why then, if I am going to open this post with my schlock socialist schtick (like Karlo, the 6th Marx brother) why is this titled the rebirth of the shareholder?

Until the environmentally driven express train of social-opprobrium against the very act of consumption itself (because, lets face it, buying new shit, no matter how green it is, is never good for the planet) accidentally sideswipes the juggernaut of capitalism at the level crossing of global warming ( these are getting worse…) capitalist democracy looks pretty comfortable in its hegemonic position. Co-opting and commoditizing all dissent ( how are those book sales going, Slavoj?) it is unlikely to move any time soon. And if we do see the democratic half of that equation- the ying to capital’s yang, becoming increasingly administrative rather than ideological, with supra-national companies superseding states, then maybe it is time we franchised ourselves on the capital side. We must not see shareholding as a get-rich-quick, trickle-down riches quick-fix solution to disparities in wealth, but what it can be is the new ballot box.

This isn’t some kind of half-brained Occupy/99% BS. Frankly, from a global point of view, most of those at St. Pauls or Wall Street or any of the other global locations were probably in fact in the 1%. What it is though is a recognition that if companies are making a difference in our lives, then we should have a say in how they are run. If they can affect us as much as our government can- think Gas companies making record profits in a recession by keeping bills high when wholesale prices fall, risky loan decisions that lead citizens being affected as private companies precipitate public sector cuts, news outlets tapping peoples phones and intruding into the private sphere in ways in which the police wouldn’t dare- then perhaps we should have a say in how they are run. And in this brave new future, we have to buy votes, there is no right to them.

This all sounds very extreme, but regulation has failed time and again, so true citizen democracy will have to be shareholder democracy. It’s not so crazy, think about recent shareholder rebellions over executive pay. Potentially we are at an inflection point where what it means to be a shareholder could fundamentally shift. Pension schemes- who hold millions of shares, ultimately on our behalf- are in the US suing Bank of America for misleading shareholders about the strength of the company. FTSE250 listed Heritage oil had nearly 50% of its shareholders refuse to rubber stamp its Chief Exec’s pay deal, despite him holding 33% of the company’s stock! Cairn energy saw 67% of its shareholders reject a pay deal for bosses. Shareholder activism may offer a powerful democratic tool to so many who feel powerless. I would encourage the loony left to try it- if they will put their money where their beliefs are (even if the idea of becoming shareholders feels instinctively wrong) then maybe they might make something happen. After all (political) ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

In defence of copyright- a response to Cory Doctorow

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:17:03 +0100

Last Friday, Cory Doctorow was speaking at the Serpentine Gallery in Ai Wei Wei’s summer pavilion. in many ways it was a setting that was wholly at odds Doctorow’s bleeding edge future facing area of expertise. Science writer, journalist, and blogger, Doctorow blends a faith in the liberating power of technology (primarily in his case, the internet) that he shares with fellow Sci-Fi futurologist Bruce Sterling with an element of Attali’s grand predictions of the next 100 years as outlined in ‘A brief History of the Future’ with a strong streak, of (perhaps unintentional) collectivist anarchy.

Doctorow’s talk on the internet, general purpose computing and its liberating power for humanity started from his core pet subject, his belief in the oxymoronic nature of copy protection. Oxymoronic because in order to protect data, you copy it, rather than preventing is duplication. So far, so reasonable. Data is eternal, but it is the format that it is stored on is fragile. He uses the example of the transience of the human body, compared to the persistence of the human genome- conveniently forgetting in the analogy the vital importance of data corruption, the Chinese-whispers of mutation at the heart of advancement in the form of evolution- a kind of progress though forgetting, reflected back on a more prosaic scale in the ability of each and every one of our memories to cloud and obfuscate as mechanism to preserve our sanity- selective memory as a kind of internal psychological natural selection. But this is perhaps delving into the same kind of minutiae that has been proven better to forget.

Back to ‘Copy to Protect’ as opposed to copy protection. Doctorow sees his current crusade against digital rights management- preventing the copying of human knowledge as a battle for freedom against tyranny. Essentially the kind of technology used to stop the duplication of data, and the kind of spyware that can be used to stop citizens of states from viewing certain things deemed illegal in that juristiction is the same technology that can be used to withhold knowledge or suppress free speech and ultimately stop us utilizing our full human potential. Creating technology to stop you copying ‘Police Academy 5’ is creating technology to turn the Web into chains, transubstantiating, through state-sanctioned terrorism, liberator into captor. So far, radical, but certainly admirable.

He charts the rise of DRM over the years since the early days of computing, likening the escalation of hostilities since the 1970s to putting an ever-more ‘ tough-to-crack safe into a bank-robbers living room’. Once you set a challenge to hackers, they will hack, and in cracking this difficult protection software, you then give them the code to make ‘peiorware’ from governmental malware. For Doctorow, trying to regulate data is like ‘trying to regulate the wheel’.

The problem is that a Hollywood blockbuster or a new album isn’t the wheel. It is not knowledge, but a product. It is dangerous if the things that we create to protect people’s property can be used to suppress freedoms, but then the challenge is not to stop protecting property, but instead to find more subtle, more elegant solutions. But instead he draws no distinction between the two preferring t preach the nightmarish consequences of ham-fisted protection and lack of knowledge amongst law-makers and law-enforcement of how the internet works. Most people involved in technology would tend to agree with this sentiment, but it is at this point the idea of Doctorow as accidental anarchist arises. A thinker who’s ideas have been propagated by arguably the greatest, certainly most fertile Capitalist Democracy that has been seen thus far is certainly entitled to reject that same idea, it’s his inalienable right. There are many, including the writer of this post, who are by no means dogmatically wedded to the Capitalist principle. But Cory can’t have his cake and eat it, the lack of consistency is jarring and undermines his noble aim of ‘Universal access to human knowledge’. If Tim Berners Lee is this era’s Caxton and the internet its printing press, it is worth noting that moveable type never entitled anyone to steal a book. Not while the author was still under copyright, at least. Defending copyright is terribly unfashionable, but if Doctorow wants to defend the freedoms and rights of the democracy bit, he must not align himself against the property part. It allows the successful market incentives for innovation within that Capitalist-democratic framework to exist. Or he could declare himself a Proudhonist, denouncing all property as theft and rejecting the system of tensions between structures and freedoms that allowed him to generate these same thoughts.

Which is perfectly reasonable if he would come out as one.

When challenged on this contradiction, he simply recycled the same argument, refuting any post-capitalist tendencies, while refusing to offer a synthesis of his two contradictions.

No doubt Governments are struggling to regulate and Businesses, particularly those in the industry of content generation, (Film, TV, Music, Literature, the Press) are scrabbling for a way to deal with technology they don’t fundamentally understand, desperate adjust a mid 20^th century business model to the demands of the 21^st.

Some succeed- musicians who are happy to clock up YouTube hits, seeing merchandise and live concerts as their main revenue stream instead. Film fights back creating spectacle- 3D IMAX blockbusters and immersive experiences that cannot be recreated at home or limited distribution art-house works that people chose to support from a curatorial perspective.

Industry and capital will chose the path of least resistance to continue to perpetuate itself, and rightly or wrongly, we will all be allowed to sell our labour in return for surplus capital generation for someone else, or in the case of our paymasters, be allowed to exploit that labour for their gain. The challenge is not then to take our blogger’s stance that because technology challenges our current defenses of property we should give up defending it, (as armchair anarchists such as , in truth, this author may agree with) it is a challenge for those of us who help keep the carotid pulse of this system beating- strong captains of industry, entertainment and culture- to find more pleasant, more effective, more amiable ways of building these defenses, to continue to allow creativity and innovation to be incentivized, in more agile and more novel ways, rather than blunt our creative business impulses through the deaf arguments of an accidental anarchist.

On Data and Creativity

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:54:00 +0100

Recently, I saw a banner online for a debate at last weeks Cannes Lions titled ‘Is Data Killing Creativity?’. Reading the tweets and the blog posts following it, it seems there was a lot of ‘its great because it pisses me off’ and ‘I grudgingly accept it because it gives me the terms of engagement’. Looking at the arguments though, it seems that they all miss the flaw in the question.

Data is creativity, certainly for business. Perhaps there are a few too many frustrated artists in the ad industry (though personally this is something I have never come across…) but unless you are a lone wolf, out there, trying to substantiate the Vasarian myth (in which case you may want to hand back the 6-figure salary, Mister Chief Creative Officer), you ‘art’ is that of selling. And no matter how many Lions you may tame, the real measure is ROI, however indirect, long-term or circuitous. The best way to do this is very often through something art-like, and creativity often aligns closely with effectiveness. But lose sight of that effectiveness comms becomes and indulged art-student on an executives wage, leaving itself justly open to all the criticism it receives.

So how is data creativity? Data- be in quant, qual, cultural, psychological or commercial- is the map of the emotional and rational pressure points, a marketers reflexology diagram of where to push and it is also the ‘how’. In the numbers, or the verbatims or sector reports are the real building blocks for insight. Data is creativity as wine is grapes. The idea that data could kill creativity, to pose the two in opposition to each other is absurd.

Man vs. Food and the New American Dream

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:16:00 +0100

I recently watched an episode of Man vs. Food on one of those nondescript channels that populate the badlands between the post-lad hangover zone of BBC and the less salubrious members of the C4 family and the outer limits of the tragi-comic late night masturbatory purgatory of the Babestations and Rabbit Chats, where dead-eyed women mentally compiling the shopping list for tomorrow’s ASDA run unrhythmical vibrate their spray-tanned buttocks. For those who don’t know Man vs. Food, it is a programme where Adam Richmond takes on ‘big food’ at a variety of local restaurants across the US.

In each programme he meets local chefs who claim to cook the best ribs, the juiciest burger, the spiciest wings. The central set piece of each episode sees Richmond take on an eating challenge at a restaurant in the faceless middle-American town that that episode finds him in. ‘Can Adam defeat the Lamesa, Texas, 25-pound steak challenge?’ ‘Will Adam conquer the Mason Falls, Iowa King Crab Carnivale?’ ‘Is the Sedalia, Missouri Hog-Roast-for-one a Pig too Far?’. Invariably the answer is always ‘yes’ (or no, in the case of the last announcer VO-ed cliffhanger question), this man can conquer this food. At first, I was disgusted by the whole concept, but then I was hooked. We watch spectators watch this man in a restaurant take on a week’s calories in one sitting, transfixed by the site of enough food to feed a family somewhere else for a week is crammed into the gaping pie-hole of one fat American travelling cook. The visceral nature of the whole spectacle, the sense of theatre, the element of dramatic set piece (Will He?- but of course he will) makes the whole thing oddly beautiful, and you find yourself urging him on with every mouthful, despite the victory over food being a foregone conclusion.

But it began to dawn on me that actually was what made it so beautiful is that in many ways it was a renewal of the American Dream, that it was a new covenant that reconnected contemporary America with its pioneer spirit, with its past, with its founding fathers. The sheer wastefulness of the task celebrated the country as a land of plenty, as the ‘big country’, as this vast set of possibilities. The idea that this man was taking in the food represented those who are brave enough to grab that opportunity to take on that surfeit of goodness, of stuff. The ordinariness of the man who is to conquer this food shows how this is available to us all, how we could all make it in America- there is the space the possibility for anybody to become whatever somebody they want to be as Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway says of the embodiment of the same dream gone astray in the mid 2oth century ‘Jay Gatsby…sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.’ Man vs. Food renews the great American possibility of self-creation, re-invention- it represents that blank canvas loaded with opportunity with every oversized steak-knife and giant ersatz-silver salver. In watching this one man over-stuff himself on deep-fried goodness we are seeing a return to everything that once-made America great, a post-MTV rearticulation of ‘The New Colossus’, incribed on the plinth of Liberty, with every bite.

Harry Belafonte, Malibu, and 'the power of culture'

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:51:00 +0100

Monday this week saw the premiere of Sing Your Song, a film about the life and work of Harry Belafonte. For those unaware, Belafonte is an American-Jamaican singer and actor who is credited with popularising Calypso and other Caribbean music styles amongst a post-war international audience, most famous for his rendition of the ‘Banana Boat Song’. The friends and colleagues that he worked alongside includes some of the greatest of the time of his peak- Brando, Poitier and Sinatra to name a few. However, Belafonte himself was never seen in quite the same light, as his greatest successes came in westernised, characterised set-piece performance of traditional Caribbean songs.

Belafonte’s success can be read one of two ways. The story that he tells of his own career is one of breaking new ground, how he toured a play through the deep South where a black man and a white woman held hands, how his show was cancelled from CBS because the sponsors were uncomfortable with the mixed cast that he used- Harry ‘could be Harry’, but the rest of the cast had to either be black or white- or how he gained a fanbase of screaming white American teeny-boppers. The other side of course is how he took and watered down spirituals and folk songs of the Caribbean and performed them to an American audience in a manner that precisely re-enforced their own stereotype of ‘clownin piccaninnies’.

It is unlikely that either of these is the absolute truth, though it is important to remember that this is a man who was recruited to the movement by Dr. Martin Luther King, and who also took part in an election broadcast for JFK, imploring black America to vote Kennedy. He is a figure who sees himself as an activist, right from his work through the 70s and 80s in Africa through to his work now with street gangs and the prison population in the US. So how do we square this Belafonte with the de man singin in de fake patois dat he nah spek wen ‘im a chile?

Speaking after the UK premiere of his film at the Brixton Ritzy, he explained that one of the key influences on his career and his choices was Paul Robeson (Rutgers Valedictorian, NFL All-American, Columbia Lawyer, Lauded Bass vocalist, award winning actor, polyglot, left-wing activist; persecuted by McCarthy and discredited by the country he so wanted to help better). Early in his career, Robeson told Belafonte to ‘make them sing your song, then they will want to know who you are’. Belafonte cited again and again in the Q & A the ‘power of culture’, bringing the other into someone’s theatre of front room to create interest, curiosity, familiarity and ultimately empathy. It is a little reminiscent of the fable about the sun and the wind having a competition to see who can remove the man’s jacket.

Weirdly, as I listened to this 85 year old speak, what came to mind was Malibu of all things. It made me feel that in some ways, here was a company abusing the ‘power of culture’ in the same way that Belafonte’s critics accused him of doing- offering an ersatz, comfortable, over-simplified take on Caribbean culture, pressing on a stereotype rather than expanding, educating, demonstrating. In that light, the whole way in which the brand acts feels out of step with the times, especially with so many more channels and sources for explanation and exploration available to people; there is no need to be so reductive of an entire place. I look at some of Belafonte’s set piece performances now and cringe a little, but knowing that perhaps that is what it took then to get them to sing his song, and how far that helped move on the race relations conversation in the US. What I don’t understand is why a brand needs to be doing that still now, to so thoroughly misunderstand where the ‘power of culture’ as Belafonte put it, lies. It’s the same reason my west indian family doesn’t ‘do’ notting hill carnival- what it once was, an important landmark piece of cultural exchange, education in the midst of a time of deep suspicion and prejudice has now become a vast simplification of black british culture- luke-warm red-stripe, joints and partying. Where is the real snapshot of where its at now? Maybe Malibu wants to step up and sponsor a visual arts festival to sit alongside it? Give them both a chance to paint a fuller picture and really show the power of culture?

Mother Goose and Consumer Aspirations

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:05:00 +0100

Robert Darnton in ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ expounds how folktales can be used as in powerful source for the social mores and sensibilities of a particular culture at a particular time. The particular version of ‘common sense’ or dominant norms at the time are reflected in the stories, legends and rituals of that time. He argues against a structuralist or psychoanalytical approach, and instead influenced by anthropologists, particularly Clifford Geertz, an academic, that even in my studied ignorance, I have heard of, instead favouring approaching these stories as social-historical texts, understanding the truth in the tale.

My own brush was Darnton was brief, ( I cantered through the Cat Massacre for an undergrad essay many moons ago) but one essay of his, ‘The Meaning of Mother Goose’ sticks in my mind that expands on some of his ideas around folk stories as source document. Key ideas he picks out are the limited ambitions of what ordinary peasants, the heros in this collection of 18th Century French folk tales (upon which the brother’s Grimm based their adaptations). Though there are fairy godmothers and castles, the heroic achievements are a reduction in a the back-breaking nature of their work, or an improvement of their conditions, rather than a role reversal with the feudal Lord himself. When instant wishes are granted, it is almost always for food, for there to be plenty, and meat is a recurring motif. The limited, targeted nature of their aspirations reflects the social realities of their everyday existence, by ritualising the telling of stories that are about what is just out of their reach, we understand what their limitations and challenges are on a daily basis. This limited fantasy, retold through the oral tradition gives us a vivid snapshot of their reality, a kind of negative ethnography, describing the negative space around their existence.

There is an element of this when we speak to consumers about what they want in different markets, though obviously they may directly relate their difficulties, in the retelling of them, they are providing their own filter, consciously or subconsciously tuned to their perception of the situation and the audience we put them in. But when they start talking about dreams, aspirations, realities, we start to get much richer emotional picture of their lives, their situations. Ask them to describe their ideal product, and the problems that it may solve in that category, gives us an insight into the real difficulties that they face. What has struck me on a recent project, talking about how a certain FMCG can bring joy is what would provide lower-middle income housewives with joy, how small those aspirations are, how their varied as we went round the table in workshops in four countries across four continents- the emotional window in that gave us individually and the net picture it painted from the number of women we spoke to in each place. From this, we can’t hope to get the depth and breadth that Darnton does out of his Mother Goose stories- the sample can never hope to have that validity, but it does provide an indicative window, using the tales that people tell themselves. It helps to inform the kind of dialogues that are most powerful to connect consumer to brand, to provide products that genuinely fulfil those emotional needs, rather than just simply try and create unmet ones, which if truth be told is a far more rewarding way to grow a business and a relationship.

Is the Guardian making you Stupid?

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:44:00 +0100

I was having a cup of tea and re-watching the night before’s Newsnight with a old university friend last week- the rock and roll lifestyle I lead. He’s a Labour party activist and an investment banker, which in itself is an interesting piece of cognitive dissonance to possess (…perhaps for another time), but he is critical of much of the grass roots of his party. Though aims are admirable, what he sees amongst the party rank-and-file is a failure to engage with the public at large. Of course the provision of welfare is important for the most vulnerable in society and should be safeguarded by government, so the party faithful take it as read; despite the reality being that much of the British population do not. Simply put, they fail to explain why an idea that they take for granted, should be taken for granted, or taken at all in fact. His point got me thinking because this phenomenon isn’t just true of leftwing party politics.

Recently I have been struck by the extent to which the debate that I am engaged in, at work, at home, amongst my friends there seem to be a certain set of truths which we hold apparent, beliefs that are seen as universal and doctrinal. But time and again these are proved not to be the case.

Racism is wrong. John Terry and Luis Suarez clearly didn’t get the memo…or the Met…

Capital punishment is bad. Not according to most ‘state-of-the nation’ surveys

Multicultural Britain brings vibrancy to our nation. Bradford Riots, remember those? And all of the EDLs recent marches

And these are just the most obvious ones that spring to mind while I tap away at the keyboard. Just because #creepingshariah can start trending doesn’t mean there is some kind of triumphant consensus of reason in this country. But so many of us who work in the civil service, or the ‘cultural industries’ those that influence the ‘national agenda‘ believe these things to be set in stone. Even if we look back over our recent history, these have been hard fought and hard won victories for liberalism- with a very small L- (the Equalities act went on the statute books in….drumroll please… 2010) and as such are, in the big scheme of things, young, fragile and growing saplings, not great-trunked trees in the forest of this country’s uncodified constitution. I don’t want to get into that conversation in detail here- @jacksimsoncaird is the person to get in touch with for matters politico-legal- but the point here is that these new positions need to be challenged and then defended vigorously, nurtured and propagated. If they are not reaffirmed in the face of questioning then they wither. The whole nation is not the 217k-odd people who read the Guardian, who in turn set an agenda that is attuned only to views such as their own.

Simply put, I am consistently exposed to a chorus of general agreement. Abu Qatada has been found to be a criminal, and should be treated as such, but over grilled vegetables or a quick halloumi panini the chatter is one of variations on a theme, rather than actual debate. Its those so-called self-evident truths again. Only once have I heard a topical conversation where someone has cited a paper other than the Guardian or the Observer, and it was the FT. If you are reading this post, when was the last time you picked up a red-top? When was the last time you had a conversation in a pub with someone in a ‘working-class’ job (city-boy turned Plumber doesn’t count)? When was the last time you took yourself outside of that liberal monoculture of cycle-commuting, flat-whites and upcycling that you inhabit and engaged with views totally alien to yours, that start from first principles other than your own? When was the last time you considered that people even start from first principles other than the ones you hold true?

After asking myself this, I decided that enough is enough, to do a job in which I have to understand the relationship between Housewives from Hull and their sandwich spreads, or kids from estates in Camden and their relationship with trainers, I can’t live in that same bubble that is surprised when confronted with a view radically different from theirs, who see discimination as shocking, rather than a sad fact of life that needs to be addressed and changed and who rarely have their own bloviated opinions challenged by testing them in the crucible of real difference. So I am giving up the Guardian, kicking the habit; I breathe in enough second hand hoke anyway.

Am I part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:52:00 +0100

The estate agents have been circling, and a few people sent a link my way, knowing it would ignite a theme that they knew would end up with me writing a piece that would inevitably make no attempt to ground an argument, and instead offered my own externalised version of a discussion that I have been wrestling internally. Thanks to Matt Thompson, and latterly Oliver Cox as catalysts for this

The article they sent me from the evening standard, was about my own neighbourhood, Brixton, and included this passage

Charlotte Ryder, 21, said Brixton Market was one of the main reasons she chose to move to the area after graduating in politics last year.

She said that she was instantly attracted by the “multi-cultural and friendly” atmosphere, as well as the vibrant nightlife and transport links.

Miss Ryder, an associate campaign executive for Diffusion PR, said: “I’ve just got back from Thailand and Brixton Market really reminds me of it.

Apparently the neighbourhood is now the go-to place for those who want to pretend their gap-yah never ended. The area is becoming an attractive inner London dormitory for London’s young professionals.

The problem I have with that is that I am both one of them and they are also everything I hate. The case for- I moved to Brixton 2 years ago with 2.1 from a Russell group university, a job in an ad agency, a vintage trenchcoat, and ray-bans reading glasses. The case against- I grew up down the road in a one-bed flat in Streatham with no central heating and my single mother surviving on benefits. I am also mixed-race, (white/afro carribean) though this is less important to the story here in Brixton or in London as it is in neighbourhoods in the US where this has been happening- though not irrelevant.

The Jerk Chicken place at the back of the Granville Arcade (Time Out readers will know it as “Brixton Village”) seems somehow less vibrant. Two years ago it was packed every night, soundsystem blarring the yard packed with sometimes three generations of families, eating and gossiping, but the middle class crowd that dominates the new eateries in the back of the market has affected both rents- as many of the storeholders will attest to- and importantly the local community’s desire to spend time at some of the more long-standing establishments, and the place seems noticeably less lively.Look at it, and its nearest next-door restaurant, the Thai much lauded by Jay Rayner, and it seems like a segregated dining area, separate and unequal.

I wrote a piece last year, berating many of the more long standing members of the community for not using these new facilities- my own response to the three young men, two black and one white who walked through Granville laughing and shouting ‘this is Brixton, where the fuck have all the black people gone?’. But for many long-standing residents what they seek when they have an unstable life is stability. The constant novelty and change, and the pace and way in which it has taken place in the neighbourhood has not brought the community along with them. The constant novelty and change panders to a new influx who seek it as a counterpoise to their stable white collar world- it is not being done in a way that feels expansive, inclusive or ambitious for all.

Charlotte Ryder is my current bete noire. But the pull quote above reflects my same desire to move here. Maybe that’s why in my head I have vilified a 21 year old who I don’t even know. I grew up in South London, and to me, that always was the real London. And coming in with my middle class job and wage and predisposition towards interesting music nights, eclectic restaurants and locally sourced food, I knew that these things would be there already in the community here, not in a sanitised, pre-packaged form, neatened up with the kind of shabby-chic, easily digestible pastiche of ‘realness’ that characterises so many other ‘edgy’ places.

I used to shop in the market for mangoes as a child, I used to convince bouncers to let me into Drum and Bass nights when I was 16 at Mass and Fridge and BugBar. Grandparents and Great-grandparents of mine had lived here when they first came over and got off the boat. I felt (still feel) very attached to the community. I didn’t want to move here for farmers markets and pop-up dining experiences. I wanted somewhere on the tube where there was a market and some vibrancy and most importantly there weren’t people like me. The traditional
professional dormitories such as Clapham and Balham or Finsbury Park in the north, or even 9in fact, especially) the Bow-Soho adland fixed-gear commuter corridor had little attraction. How can I ever possibly improve at a job that demands that I understand how to sell trainers to 16 year old kids on estates one day and the emotional connection between housewives in the midlands and their condiments the next if I spend my whole time surrounded by a liberal mono-culture. On a personal level, it may be what I look like, or what I do, but it isn’t who I am or where I have come from, or for that matter even, where I want to be. I want to go into the local pub and talk to retired builders, ex-cons, bankers and shop clerks and everyone inbetween. I don’t just want to talk to PR girls, graphic designers and corporate lawyers that dress like them.

So how do I feel? Conflicted. Excited to see a new area on the rise, especially one that I have always felt so close to, but apprehensive about how unevenly that rise is happening, with quality of life rocketing for some, and others feeling shut out of the party. The ‘Charlotte Ryder’* idea of a multicultural neighbourhood is a restaurant filled with clones but just enough colour beyond the plate glass to make it seem ‘real’.

Not much more than a decade or two ago, those on middle class wages were fleeing to the suburbs and beyond as fast as they could, leaving behind those who could not afford to flee. So many of these communities did what they could do get through as best as they could, studiously ignored by councils and governments. Open a couple restaurants and suddenly the flow reverses, and in run all the kind of people who would have turned their back on a neighbourhood like this even three years ago. And in they come, pricing out locals, alienating rather than integrating, as if to say, ‘Thanks for holding the fort, but you poor people can all fuck off now.’

*apologies to Charlotte Ryder for becoming my own Milquetoast or Mitty for the purposes of this piece…