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Thursday 24 February 2011

The Christchurch earthquake



Why is some news more newsworthy than others?  What brought this to mind was the Christchurch earthquake which, while obviously tragic, seems to me to be attracting more headlines than other, bigger natural disasters.  Why should this be?

The answer is, I'm afraid, obvious.  Christchurch doesn't look like some odd foreign place with an unpronounceable name, and the people who live there look like us.  They don't live in poverty and their skin, by and large, is the right colour, so the news channels think we'll have a greater degree of empathy with them.  

Before you shout me down, reflect on the Haitian earthquake of 2010.  It too got sizeable coverage - for a while, before the West lost interest.  The estimate is that somewhere between 92,000 and 220,000 people died, and almost 2M were made homeless - the Christchurch death toll is likely to be less than 200.  Remember the Chilean earthquake of 2010?  Possibly not, because 'only' 500 or so died, and they were, well, Chileans.  Now how many Chilean miners was it that got saved?  Didn't that get much more coverage than the earthquake?

It's an unpalatable conclusion to have to draw, but it does seem to me as though race and affluence play a major part in the way news stories get covered.

Oh, and by the way, it is estimated that 15M children per year die of starvation.  That's 75,000 Christchurch earthquakes per year, or 204 every day?  Still think the coverage from New Zealand isn't a tad out of line?

Friday 18 February 2011

Death in the afternoon

The main entrance to Pere Lachaise
An afternoon in Pere Lachaise cemetery – I was last there almost 20 years ago.  So much was the same, but there were differences,  At the north-east end there are now modern memorials to infamous plane crashes that involved French citizens, as well as individual ones to the victims of almost all of the Nazi concentration camps.  Some of them are truly beautiful, and all of them are moving.
We have our war memorials commemorating our dead, but it is different in France.  In Paris there are plenty of elderly people who recall seeing German troops occupying their city, and that makes their experience very different from that of the British.  At the Arc de Triomphe there is a ceremony every evening where, at 18:30, French military veterans stoke up the flame at the tomb of an unknown French soldier.  This ceremony has continued uninterrupted for many, many years, and even took place on 14 June 1942 when the Nazis occupied Paris. 
Apparently the German troops at the arch were amazed to see two elderly French gentlemen, in full military dress, solemnly march towards them.  One of them, carrying the title of The Guardian of the Eternal Flame, saluted, and the Germans, always keen to respect authority, instinctively sprang to attention.  Somewhat disconcerted, they saluted too, and the ceremony continued unabated throughout the occupation.
Back, however, to Pere Lachaise.  Oscar Wilde’s tomb is a must-see.  The last time I was there a young Irish woman with a suitcase – either arriving in, or about to depart from, Paris, stood there weeping copiously.  She then kissed the tomb, dried her eyes, blew a kiss, and left.  Wilde’s tomb is very different now, having been replaced since I last saw it with a grand edifice including a sculpture by Jacob Epstein.  The figure apparently used to have – how shall I put this – a significant appendage that made it abundantly clear that it was male!  Now it has a sad, broken stump, courtesy of an outraged visitor who took a brick to it!  Allegedly the missing member is now used as a paperweight by the Director of Pere Lachaise!
The tomb is covered in lipstick kisses and graffiti, but somehow that doesn’t shock.  Vandalism it may be but it’s stuff that meant something to those who kissed and wrote, not just wanton destruction.  In a way it’s artistic and it doesn’t offend – or at any rate it didn’t offend me.

None of the lipstick was mine

Jim Morrison’s grave is still the biggest draw for young Brits and Americans, many of whom were not even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes when the lead singer of the Doors died in Paris in 1971 at the age of 28.  His grave is protected by crush barriers but that hasn’t stopped admirers laying flowers on it. 
Morrison's grave

My other favourite is the grave of Edith Piaf, the great chanteuse buried with her young lover.  Fresh flowers have been brought to the grave by admirers every day since her demise: the French have a very special way of doing death.
Je ne regrette rien
I somehow missed the grave of Jean Pezon, a French lion tamer (or not) whose tomb is marked by a statue of him riding the lion that ate him. Next time.
Jean Pezon astride Brutus. for whom he became a tasty lunch



Wednesday 16 February 2011

The ring sting and the Mugabe hustle


Walking past the Musee d’Orsay, a Roma woman coming towards us reached
down and apparently picked something off the pavement.  She then stopped us
and said something along the lines of ‘Look what I’ve found, it’s a gold ring – is it
yours?’.  We said that it wasn’t, whereupon she tried it on her finger and showed
us that it was  too big for her.  She shrugged, and gave me the ring.  As we set to
walk off she grabbed my arm and asked for her ‘reward’.  It was at that point that we realised that it was a scam.  She wouldn’t take the ring back and pointed out some marks that looked a bit like hallmarks – I put it on the wall by the quay, and she said something which I assume was a curse.  It wasn’t the first gypsy curse I’ve had, and I doubt it will be the last.
One hundred meters up the road, it happened again, only this time we saw the woman reach down, drop the ring and pick it up – as one we both loudly said ‘Non!’ and walked on.  Cursed again.
Over the Passerelle Solferino, and into the Tuileries Gardens, and we’re greeted by a very plausible man claiming to be Zimbabwean.  He wants us to sign his petition against the regime of Robert Mugabe – no harm in that, surely?  As we sign he tells us that Mugabe is siphoning off funds that are meant for medical aid – again, no surprise there.  As we make to walk away, the thumb that had been holding the clipboard moves, and underneath it is written ‘€20’.  Yeah, sure, if we gave you the money it really would make its way to the poor in Zimbabwe, wouldn’t it?
Today, more ‘ring stings’ and more petitions – these ones weren’t for Zimbabwe but we didn’t even break step in ignoring them, so  I don’t know which ‘worthy cause’ has lost out.

Thursday 10 February 2011

Four candles or Fork Handles?

A friend passed me this gem which was found on the BBC World Service.

During the recent floods in Queensland, The Rockhampton Morning Bulletin reported the following:
 
More than 30,000 pigs lost in floodwaters.
 
“More than 30,000 pigs have been floating down the Dawson River since last weekend, with a piggery at Baralaba paralysed by flooding which has killed most of its bred live-stock. Baralaba Butchers’ Sid Everingham ... said: ‘We’ve lost probably about 30,000 pigs in the floods ....’”
 
But a few days later, the newspaper published a correction:
 
What Baralaba piggery-owner Sid Everingham actually said was “30 sows and pigs”, not “30,000 pigs.”
 
If ever there's an object lesson in checking your facts it's this!  “Crikey Sid, that’s a lot of a pigs mate, are you sure you mean 30,000?” would have done the trick! 

The 90-day news cycle

The Slow Food movement started in 1986 as a response to the growth of fast food.  The planned opening of a branch of MacDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome was a step too far for its founder, Carlo Petrini.  To paraphrase their point of view: good food requires good ingredients, skill in preparation, and it takes time.  In their view all that fast food has going for it is the speed with which it's delivered.  Since then the concept has expanded into a wider Slow Movement covering such areas as Slow Parenting, Slow Gardening and so on.   We can now add Slow Journalism to the list.

Delayed Gratification sounds like some sort of sexual practice, but in fact it's the UK's newest magazine, retailing at a princely £12 per issue.  It's published by the Slow Journalism Company, and just as the Slow Food movement was a response to the growth in fast food, its remit is to act as 'an antidote to throwaway media' and it seeks to make a 'virtue of being the last to breaking news'.   Founded by Marcus Webb, Time Out's International Editor, it is run from Time Out's London offices.

Delayed Gratification: Time Out's international editor Marcus Webb launches premium-priced quarterly magazine
The cover of the first edition of DG
The other underlying principle behind Delayed Gratification, DG to its friends, is that print isn't dead.  They hope that readers like to possess, touch, and feel their magazine, so its design and production values are outstanding - the hope is that there's still a market for high quality printed material.  This isn't a mag that you will find in your local newsagents, it's available from the DG website, in independent bookshops, and in luxury hotels and on airlines - presumably not in economy!

Its aim is to take the main news stories from the previous three months and subject them to review and analysis; as Webb says, "Our idea is to play up to print strength – we're not anti-internet but we wanted to create something pretty which readers would enjoy consuming slowly. We wanted to let writers return to stories with a bit of hindsight."

It's a fascinating idea, and you have to hope that it will succeed - a review of the first edition of DG will follow in due course.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

Get your Daily iPad news 'ere!

The newspaper business has been described as ‘turning information into money’.  Whilst that might have been true at one time, more and more papers have found that the process has been more like tearing up £50 notes.  With circulation falling pretty well across the board, and losses on the rise at a number of papers, proprietors and editors have been looking for their very own silver bullet.

One reason for declining sales has been that more and more customers are choosing to read their news on-line, and in most cases, for free.  Recently, however,  Rupert Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times have started to charge for their on-line content, a measure that is being closely scrutinised by the rest of the industry.  If they can make this work, then others will surely follow, and the chances of a good night’s sleep for editors and proprietors will be increased.  The Murdoch empire has launched another initiative in recent days, with the launch in the US of The Daily, the first digital newspaper designed specifically for the iPad.

THE DAILY - Rupert Murdoch by LeStudio1.com
Rupert Murdoch at the launch of The Daily


The iPad is an enigma within a riddle: it has always seemed to me that it is a clever gadget in search of a niche, but Apple’s currently on one of its periodic ‘ups’, so who knows?  Simply because it’s stylish and made by Apple, it will sell in its millions to their  loyal army of gadget freaks – what some of us call the ‘more money then sense brigade’.   In fact, there are a lot of those people out there, and Gartner, the most respected of the IT analyst firms, reckons there will be around 70M of them by the end of 2011: a big number, but still peanuts in the greater scheme of things.  Those iPad customers are currently being invited to pay 99c. per week, or $40 per year to subscribe to The Daily, but how many of them will take up the offer?

Estimates seem to come in around the 1%-2% mark, so the circulation could be somewhere around 1M sometime in the next few years.  Will $40M p.a. be enough to make The Daily pay?  Not without a fair old chunk of advertising revenue too – Murdoch said that he is aiming for a 50:50 split between subscription and advertising revenues. 

Every day the plan is to produce around 100 pages of news, sport, comment, games, and more, including no doubt, celebrity gossip.  Murdoch said at the launch, ‘“New times require new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of conventional journalism … and combine it with the best of new technology,  Our aim is for The Daily to be the indispensable source for news, information, and entertainment.”
What I am most looking forward to following is the cultural battle that seems to be set to take place.  Murdoch’s empire generally propounds conservative views – at the launch he said that the political tone of The Daily would be in the hands of the editor – well he was hardly going to say anything different, was he?  However, he also implied that it would be generally patriotic, which is no surprise, given the support formerly given to the Tea Party by some News Corp companies (although Murdoch stepped in to curtail Fox News’ overt support).  Now I don’t see your average iPad user being a Tea Party fan – Apple’s success has been built on its differentness, its quirkiness, and its lack of  the traditional US corporate ethos.  Will those Apple customers be pleased to get The Daily’s conservative news agenda on their dinky new iPads?  I have my doubts.

Monday 7 February 2011

Desert Island Discs

I used to really dislike Desert Island Discs, as it was always old people choosing music that I’ve never heard of, and which I didn’t like.  Now, of course, I’m older than many of the castaways, and they sometimes choose music that I like – I still don’t get Classical music though, as I’ve never heard a piece that couldn’t be improved by some drums, a bass line, and a decent set of lyrics!  Passing the time on a long drive I’ve often wondered which bit of music I would choose, so here goes.  I’ve cheated a little bit and chosen albums rather than single tracks – and the ten are in no particular order.

 

Love – Forever Changes.  Obvious I know, but it’s no coincidence that this has been voted greatest album of all time in so many polls – as time has passed, naturally Forever Changes has slipped down people’s lists, but it still features in almost all of them.  It’s 44 years since it was released but it’s hard to describe just how revolutionary it was. It may be a Love album, but it’s the great, and truly eccentric, Arthur Lee’s masterwork.  I still play it regularly, and it still moves me.  It has influenced so many bands over the years – listen to it and then Belle and Sebastian’s latest!


Amadou & Mariam - Dimanche a Bamako.  Released in 2005 by this blind Malian duo, and produced by Manu Chao, it’s the perfect introduction to what is referred to somewhat condescendingly as World Music.  Not a week goes by without me playing an Amadou & Mariam album, and Dimanche a Bamako is top of that list, with Camions Sauvage my all-time favourite World Music track.  I’ve always liked guitarists where their style is so individual that you know it’s them as soon as you hear a few notes, and that’s what you get with Amadou Bagayoko – it’s simply wonderful stuff.


Richard Thompson OBE – Watching The Dark.  I couldn’t get by without a Thompson album - I like my lyrics to be beautifully written, and his are that and as dark as can be.  The master guitarist who first came to prominence with the best Fairport Convention line-up, the next 40 years have produced a string of great and not-so-great albums, but even the latter category always feature some great songs.  I’m cheating with Watching The Dark as it’s a three-CD retrospective, and has my favourite Thompson song, From Galway to Graceland.


Michael Marra – Posted Sober.  Another album where its absence would make life on the island almost intolerable – although I know every word of Marra’s songs so I guess I could sing them loudly to console myself.  Scotland’;s best kept secret, Dr Marra is from Dundee and is a master of his craft – right up there alongside the likes of Richard Thompson.  Posted Sober is simply magnificent with gems such as Frida Kahlo’s visit to the Tay Bridge Bar.  Everyone I’ve introduced to Marra’s music has loved it, and it’s a scandal that he’s so little known outside of Scotland.


John Martyn – Solid Air.  Even when he was bad – which he often was when drunk or stoned – he was still better than most other performers.  When he was on top form he was utterly brilliant, and Solid Air has him at his absolute best.  In my undergraduate days this was the ultimate seduction music – if you heard this playing late at night you could draw your own conclusions!  There isn’t a duff track on the album: Solid Air is s tribute to Nick Drake, and May You Never is just plain wonderful.  My favourite Martyn track is not on Solid Air, it’s Small Hours which is on One World which appeared a few years later.  Almost everything John Martyn did was worth listening to, but Solid Air captures a period in time for me, and it still gets lots of plays – again, it appears on lots of lists of greatest albums, and that’s because it’s timeless.


Orchestra Baobab – Pirates Choice.  Another World Music choice, this time from Senegal.  Pirates Choice was the ultimate ‘slow burner’: recorded in 1982 it was acclaimed by critics and was popular in France, but only really impacted on the UK when it was re-released in 2001.  Originally the house band of the Club Baobab in Dakar, the Orchestra has had many, many personnel changes in its time, but Pirates Choice captures a moment in time perfectly.  A truly great album and a cracking introduction to World Music – even I want to dance when I hear this one!


Van Morrison – Enlightenment.  There will have to be some Van the Man on the island, and from a remarkable back catalogue I’ve chosen Enlightenment.  It’s funny how particular tracks strike a chord with us, and ‘In the days before Rock ‘N’ Roll’ does it for me.  The image of turning the wireless knob through strange names such as Luxembourg, Athlone, and Hilversum is etched deep in my consciousness, as it is for many of my generation.  When Morrison sings about it I go back more years than I care to mention, and it’s not a bad feeling.


Pete Atkin – Driving Through Mythical America.  Everyone knows the polymath Clive James, but fewer know that he considers one of his greatest achievements to be the songs he wrote – and still writes – with singer Pete Atkin.  I first encountered this music through a video (one of the earliest ones) of the title track of this album that was featured on the Old Grey Whistle Test, and I loved it immediately – ‘Four students in the usual light of day, set out to speak their minds about the war’ is simply the best of several songs written about the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio on 04 May 1970.  I’m a sucker for clever lyrics and some of James’ / Atkin’s are almost too clever by half – ‘He couldn’t tell a wah-wah from Akira Kurosawa’ and ‘The powers-that-be will arrange a, pre-release of a Beautiful Stranger’, to mention but two!  It’s clever, witty, touching stuff and I still play their albums a lot.  


The Clash – The Story of The Clash.  I was at university in 1976 – Nottingham was run by the Federation of Conservative Students – lovely campus, great place to study, but as right wing as it came!  You might say that I rebelled against this and the release of The Clash’s eponymous debut album was like a bolt from the blue.  Punk had an energy that was the perfect antidote to the over-blown nonsense of the early 70s, and The Clash were different from a lot of the other Punk bands in that they had real talent.  White Riot, and Police and Thieves were inspiring, but then came London Calling in 1979, and it’s simply one of the greatest ever Rock albums.  The compilation album has 28 tracks and would help me rage against the injustice of being stranded on an island.

Finally, we have the most perfect 3’18” of pop music ever recorded.  I’d be happy with the single, or even better, a compilation of the original and all of the covers of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division, but in the spirit of the list lets go for:


Joy Division – The Best of Joy Division.  Dark, desperate and beautiful are words that can all be applied to Love Will Tear Us Apart, and on this double album there’s a studio and live version of the song.  If you want to know more about this wonderful band, and their trials and many tribulations, watch ‘Control’, Anton Corbijn’s excellent film about their singer Ian Curtis.

I don’t much fancy a desert island, but give me that box of CDs and it might just be a bit more tolerable!

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Elvis told me when I was down the chippy.


It’s the silly season as far as the supporters’ websites are concerned.  The Aviva Premiership is barely half over, and we haven’t got to the Heineken Cup quarter finals, but already fans are fretting about the shape and size of next season’s squads.  The comings and goings rumour mill is already in full swing, and there’s barely a club that’s unaffected.

Let’s start with the obvious: there’s a salary cap in place and from what we hear, it’s even going to be policed to some extent.  Now, whether that’s driven by a sudden desire for fair play across the Premiership, or by financial expediency, who knows?  My hunch is that it’s the latter.  So, that should make for something approaching a level playing field, shouldn’t it?  Not in the fans’ minds as far as I can see.

Bath, despite languishing in the bottom half of the table, are on a financial high: new owners, new training facilities, and, if you listen to their fans – driven it must be said by some enthusiastic coverage in their local paper – after anything that moves that has ever worn an international shirt!  In recent months their supporters have linked Bath with Messrs. Attwood, Hook, Charlie Hodgson, Croft, Haskell, Golding, Luke McCallister, Berrick Barnes, Geraghty, Cussiter, Doran-Jones and Louw, some of whom have, of course, already signed elsewhere!  That would have been some squad that was being assembled down there; however, it was the stuff of Fantasy Rugby!  If it had been even half true the Premiership salary cap policeman would have been winging his way down the M4!

The Bath fans are no worse than any others in this, and a look at most other clubs’ fans’ sites will reveal lots of ‘I heard from a mate down the pub, who knows a bloke who goes in his local chippie whose sister is married to someone who works with xxxxxx’s brother…’ and so it goes on!

And then, of course, there are the agents.  Their job is to look after their players’ interests, and if we pluck young kids straight from school and put them into the Academies, then they’re going to need someone to do their negotiating for them.   Agents are much reviled by fans but all they’re doing is the best they can by their players.  Even the most tentative of discussions with another club is sure to leak out, and that further drives the rumour mill.

It’s the nature of professional sport that players come, and then they go – one-club men are getting fewer and fewer, and the days of clubs being dominated by local boys are long gone.   However, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the merry-go-round is going to be spinning faster than ever over the next few months.   Financial pressures aside – and rather than increasing the salary cap, a bigger question is which clubs are able to spend up to the current limit – the Rugby World Cup complicates matters.  The final is on 23 October, and shortly after that expect the flights into Heathrow to contain more than a smattering of Saffers, Kiwis and Wallabies.  Some will be heading to France but purse strings are tightening there, to the extent that fans over here are picking over the bones of some of the clubs in the lower reaches of the Top 14.  More than one website has the entire Bourgoin squad listed with the question ‘Anyone we fancy?’ being posed.  We live in interesting times!

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Crisis at Sky Sports.  I fully expected a black screen and martial music to be playing around tea time last Sunday, after Munster crashed out of the Heineken Cup.  It’s part of the British psyche to react against something, someone or some team being ‘hyped’ beyond belief: for a while we take it, and then it starts to grate.  Such has been the depth of the Sky love-in with the men in red that I have found myself longing for them to get stuffed, just so I can see the Sky guys squirm, and I know that I’m not the only one who has felt that way.

The Barnes/Harrison combo is the best comment and commentary team around in rugby – so good that it simply makes all of the others look worse than they actually are – but Munster has long been their blind spot.  They have been so over-the-top in their admiration and praise that one has to wonder whether their genealogy efforts have uncovered some long-lost Limerick relative. 

The Republic has a population of less than 5M, compared to England’s 50M, and it might be reasonable to suppose that the proportion of Sky subscribers in each country is broadly similar, but it seems as though the Irish province gets a disproportionate amount of Heineken Cup coverage. 

I’m pretty well Munstered out for a while, and I’m not sorry to see the back of them in this year’s competition, although the danger signs were there late on Sunday afternoon: you mark my words, Leinster is the new Munster as far as Sky is concerned!

First published in The Rugby Paper on 23 January 2011 and reproduced with the editor's permission