Dave Fiuczynski: a fan writes

Years ago - I suppose I should now write many years ago - a curious device arrived called the ‘MP3 player’. I’m not exactly a technical bozo, and it took me a while to get my head around it, and I was not especially fast off the mark in getting one. This was especially so because the iPod had then been recently launched, the iPod was - as, it seems, are all Apple products - pretty expensive, so non-iPod MP3 players, I reasoned would also be pretty expensive.

Then one day (while on holiday in Devon for a travel piece I was going to do for the Mail, which can be found here. UPDATE: No, you can't any more. The bastards seem to have wiped it from their system. But you can read a travel piece about a Tuscan cookery course here and a travel piece about a nostalgic trip to Berlin here.) I came across someone using one and, not knowing too much about them, began to question him. What first of all surprised me was how cheap the model he had bought was. It was, admittedly, not half as useful, user-friendly or ‘cool’ as the iPod, but it did exactly what the iPod did at something like a tenth of the price. I then began to investigate the things, on many visits to my local branch in Kensington of PC World, and I eventually bought one. I think it was a 128mb model and I think I paid something like £49 for it, which might help you work out how many years ago this was: not many in human years but several lifetimes in technological years. You can probably no longer get an MP3 player that small, and as a 2/4gb USB memory stick will not set you back more than £6/7, that 128mb model I bought would be yours for about 94p.

With my new MP3 player came the usual gubbins of guarantee and a small user manual, but with it also came an offer to download, I think, 20 tracks for nothing. All you had to do was register on a website. I did and downloaded a collection of jazz tracks by a variety of different musicians. I can no longer remember much about the tracks or most of the musicians, except that the tracks were pretty conventional and the musicians were more or less all well-known names. But one musician stood out for me because he was a guitarist and I am a guitarist manque (very manque. I could be better if I practised - anyone can be better if they practise - but I don’t, and as I just noodle around on guitar because I like noodling around on guitar, I don’t care). The guitarist was called David Fiuczysnki and he struck me as a tasty guitarist (although as all guitarists the world over are better than me, they almost all strike me as tasty guitarists).

This is where it all gets a little, or rather very, hazy. I decided to check out David Fiuczynski to see what else he had done and whether he had made records of his own. Indeed he had and I bought one, although as I say everything is a little hazy and I can’t remember why I bought that particular one. It is called Amandala, and it was a revelation, music unlike any I had heard before. More to the point it pressed every musical button in me I want to have pressed and then some. It was exactly - exactly - the kind of guitar and music I would like to play if I had the gumption to practise a lot more and apply myself and was able to play to that standard. And not only was the guitar playing great, so were the drums and bass.

After buying Amandala (not to be confused with Miles Davis’s Amandla, which is also great but very different), I then bought Lunar Crush (with John Medeski), then Kif and most recently Jazz Punk.

Some reading this will be familiar with Fiuczynski’s guitar playing and music, many more will not, but to try to describe it to those who are not is, I’m afraid, pretty much impossible. Fiuczynski (who was born in the US, but who moved to Germany with is parents when he was eight and didn’t return to live in the US until he was 19) has described himself as a ‘jazz musician who doesn’t want to play just jazz’.

He most certainly can play ‘conventional’ jazz guitar, but when you get to hear his own music, you’ll understand what he means. It is accessible to those coming to it from jazz, but it would be equally accessible to those coming to if from rock and heavy metal. But it would be utterly misleading to try to categorise it as something - as crass as - rock/jazz fusion or even jazz/rock fusion. It is almost a genre of its own. It is organic, it is itself and for me ‘fusion’ implies some kind of melding of two, rather like a mule being half-horse, half-donkey.

I am writing about Fiuczynski because I have just recommended to a young colleague who was asking for ideas of what to give her dad for Fathers’ Day that she might like to give him one of Fiuczynski’s CDs. She is 23 and her father is 49 and, she says, ‘likes rock’, but he might now be of an age to expand a little, if he hasn’t already done so. (These days I find rock, however pleasant, just too two-dimensional, if you get me.) I lent her my iPod to listen to some, and she agreed it might well be the kind of music he would like.

Then, driving home from London last night (and stopping off at The Brewers Arms in South Petherton to watch the second half of the Holland v Germany match, and weren’t Holland a peculiar kind of unimaginative shite?), I spent the best part of two hours listening to Fiuczynski. And what with Syria, the euro, the euro and the Middle East and all that crap, I decided to blog on something entirely different: just how great David Fiuczynski’s music is and how much I like it and how glad I am that I came across it. Apparently, according to Wikepedia, he is a ‘full-time professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston’ and since 2011 ‘Guggenheim Fellow’, but please, please, please don’t let that put you off.

The way I described it to Libby is ‘if you don’t like it, you’ll hate it. And if you like it, you’ll love it’. So get a taster and see what you feel.

UPDATE: February 26, 2019

PS If by chance you visit this entry again, here is a taster of Dave Fiuczynski


Amandla/Dave Fiuczynski

‘Germany abandons euro and re-introduces DM’ - that, I think, is a headline we will read at some point in the next two months. And Euro 2012 kicks off with my bets already going awry

For what it’s worth, my guess in the whole Germany v Everyone else in the euro crisis will be that Germany blinks first, but they won’t do what we expect. To bring you up to speed, Germany and its people are industrious, conscientious, don’t throw money around like confetti, like to pay their way, are good savers, make quality goods the world wants and, as a result of all that, are doing rather well, thank you very much, while the rest of the eurozone is slowly - painfully slowly, to be sure, but nevertheless surely - going to the dogs.

Well, that is my view, and there are others. One, for example, which I can’t quite get my head around (though blame my Dick and Dora grasp of economics) is that when the euro was set up, it was set up to benefit the Germans. That, at least, is what some are claiming. But whatever is true, the solution to the crisis now universally put forward is ‘eurobonds and fiscal union’. Eurobonds mean that in theory all eurozone members would be responsible for paying of the debts of every other eurozone member, and fiscal union means that tax rates would be centrally established for the whole eurozone.

Given that Greece is largely in the trouble its in because it borrowed money, spent it grandly and now can’t pay off its debts because it lived beyond its means (and no self-respecting Greek pays a cent in tax), Germany is ineffably reluctant to agree to pay of Greece’s debts or anyone else’s for that matter. My view is ‘can you blame them’, although I am honour-bound to admit there are other views. As for fiscal union, it would work in theory, but would take years of detailed negotiation and preparation to set up, whereas the eurozone has got about another month to go before it goes the way of the dodo. And that brings me to my point that Germany blinks first.

For several weeks now, I have believed that the most likely outcome of the crisis is not that Greece, or Spain, or any of the other eurozone members will be forced out, but that Germany will pay its respects, kisses all round, tell everyone what a smashing time it had, and then head for the exit to a far safer and far saner world of a re-established Deutschmark. That would, naturally, precipitate a collapse of the euro and eurozone and all such a collapse would entail, but Germany and its hard-earned wealth would avoid all the fallout. It would most certainly be reviled from here to Timbuktu for a year or two, but as is the way of these things, in time it would be forgiven. And that is what I am now certain is going to happen, although I admittedly do not have shred of evidence. The great thing is that if I am right, folk will say ‘well, he’s a bright cookie, and make no mistake’. And if I am wrong - well, people have exceptionally short memories.

. . .

I’m not any good at football, despite 143 of watching the game on TV man and boy, but I can think of no reason why I shouldn’t add my two ha’porth worth on games I’ve seen on TV. Tonight was the opener, Poland against previous Euro champions Greece, after Greece’s performance tonight it is worth asking just how did they clinch that championship.

 It ended even-stevens 1-1, although I thought Poland had the edge, showing more flair - just - and being the more disciplined players. Their first goal was a good one, and when Greece had a player sent off for his second yellow card, I thought that was that. And as I have two bets riding on the result - a double and a Yankee or something - I was rather pissed off. But then Greece equalised, with a goal which once again wasn’t at all bad, although Poland’s defence was pretty bad, and when they were awarded a penalty after Poland’s defender fouled a Greece striker and got a straight red, I thought I was quids in. Was I hell.

The new goalie guessed the right way and dived the right way and save what was not a bad strike but not a good one, either. Things did look up when Greece seemed to score again, but had the goal disallowed for offside. So that was that. My first bet, the double, is now out of the window, and although my second could still return if I get the other three results right, my winnings, because of the nature of the bet, will be very much reduced. On to the next game in  20 minutes, Russia agains the Czech Republic. I’m backing the Czechs so it looks as though Russia will be a shoo in.

Euro 2012 Part II: the Russia v Czech Republic game made Poland’s spat with Greece look like Sunday league. OK, so Russia won and played some great football (and I have already lost money on bets), but the Czechs also played well. Where Poland v Greece was kick and rush at it worst, sometimes, Russia v Czech Republic was like watching to Champions League sides playing at their best. Anyone disagree?

The question we are all asking ourselves: will it rain? And several Royal facts the papers won’t tell you

It can surely not have escaped the attention of the rest of the world that our glorious, glorious Queen Elizabeth is this weekend celebrating 60 years of occupying the throne. (Note to foreign readers: not literally, of course. Although we Brits are sticklers for tradition and custom, no one in his or her right mind will have expected that she literally spent all that time with a crown on her head and keeping a sceptre straight in her right hand. It used to be like that, of course, but we British do like to move with the times a little, whatever French cooks thing).

Prince Philip, who has in the past demonstrated a superb organisational flair suggested that the Queen should row most of the stretch, but that idea was ruled out on health and safety grounds because the Queen is apparently not qualified to row more than half a mile in any 24 hours. (And, it will surprise, our foreign friends who think Brits are utterly in thrall to their monarchy and all it stands for, if she does do so and health and safety gets wind of it, she risks a stiff fine just like the rest of us. We didn’t behead Charles I just for the hell of it, you know). It has to be said senior courtiers, who were appalled by the suggestion from the off as they regarded it as insufferably infra-dig, were for once wholly supportive of what is quite obviously an intrusive piece of unnecessary bureaucracy. (NB If you think that’s far-fetched, take a look at these this and this.)

Whatever: the Queen won’t be rowing, although as a compromise (Labour insisted that she should, at least, make some kind of demotic gesture in solidarity with all those who have no choice but to row to work every day, so I understand she will symbolically ‘touch an oar’.)

The following day there is to be an open-air concert outside Buckingham Palace, when the Queen has agreed to ‘strum the first chord’. The line-up of artistes (I think that’s the word) was only finalised last week and, it has to be said, has not met with universal approval. Cliff Richard is set to perform, as are The Moody Blues (or the two of them still alive), Leo Sy Duck in Gravesend (a favourite haunt of Charles Dickens’) to The Pig and Whistle at West Molsey where the Queen is due to down a pint of Jubilee ale and polish of a plate of pie and mash. Prince Philip originally suggested (with the enthusiastic support of his daughter Anne, who takes after him in many ways) that the Queen should row most of the stretch, but that idea was ruled out on health and safety grounds because the Queen is apparently not qualified to row more than half a mile. And, it has to be said senior courtiers, who were appalled by the suggestion from the off as they regarded it as insufferably infra-dig, were for once wholly supportive of what is quite obviously an intrusive piece of unnecessary bureaucracy.

Whatever: the Queen won’t be rowing, although as a compromise (Labour insisted that she should, at least, make some kind of demotic gesture in solidarity with all those who have no choice but to row to work every day, so I understand she will symbolically ‘touch an oar’.)

The following day there is to be an open-air concert outside Buckingham Palace, when the Queen has agreed to ‘strum the first chord’. The line-up of artistes (I think that’s the word) was only finalised last week and, it has to be said, has not met with universal approval. Cliff Richard is set to perform, as are The Moody Blues (or the two of them still alive), Leo Sayer, Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney, Lulu, the last remaining Bee Gee, Kira de Something or other (the one from New Zealand), and several other bands, singers and what-not who are thought to personify the Zeitgeist of the past 60 years. There was a lot of loose talk about disinterring Noel Coward and Jimi Hendrix (who is now regarded as an honorary Brit because he lived in the house once occupied by George Frederic Handel) but again health and safety were rather against it all, as I write that idea has gone to appeal and no judgment has yet come down. We do know that Brian May (who was lead guitarist for Queen, not married to the Queen as far too many people in the US seem to believe) will also strut his stuff, and if you’re a nostalgia buff, the concert outside Buck House is not to be missed.

But that, rather neatly, brings me to the dilemma central to this entry. Let me make it plain: I am neither a rabid monarchist nor a rabid republican, but I would like to see it all, from the Queen swimming upstream to Windsor Castle from the Tate & Lyle pier in Rotherhithe to what promises to be a really fabulous open-air concert, succeed. And it all, as does so much else in Britain, come down to the weather.

The Met Office have ruled out unseasonal snow, but are adamant that they cannot ensure that it won’t piss with rain. And rain would, of course, ruin it all. So far the forecasts are by no means optimistic. Rain, I’m afraid to say, has been forecast. Usually at this juncture, we Brits fall back on the hope that, as a rule, the Met Office, more or less totally useless to a man and woman, always get it horribly wrong. But . . .

So let us pray: no rain, please God, no rain. The idea of the Queen spending most of Sunday and Monday huddled under a large umbrella with just Prince Philip and Prince Charles for company while everyone else whistles cheerfully and insists it doesn’t matter, is just too awful to contemplate. Think about it: Britain would be the laughing stock of the world and it would surely be curtains for the Coalition. Think about it.

. . .

I realise that there are many, many, many people who simply cannot get enough of our British Royals and there are many books which will reveal the inner workings of the our monarchy to satiate that appetite. There are, however, several facts which aren’t that well-known about the Windwors, so here are a few:

Prince Harry, though still a young man, has shagged more women than most of us (though not me) have had hot dinners.

Prince Philip is a very proficient spoons player and even applied to appear on Britain’s Got Talent. Unfortunately, senior courtiers, who have a fine ear for these matters, nixed the idea and, it has to be said, the Queen, who otherwise is wholly supportive of Philip, agreed with them. So no Prince Philip on our screens.

Charles, a keen gardener whose garden at Highgrove is a classic of its kind, is often satirised after he admitted ‘talking to his plants’. What is not as well known is that he has a very good relationship with a herd of cows at Highgrove and will often doss down in the cowshed for the night if he feels his presence will cheer them up.

Anne, the Queen’s only daughter and second child, now has to shave every two days.

Prince Andrew has a ‘love child’ in every continent. In fact, he has several in every continent, but only one in North America.

Edward, who plays the cello rather well, was once offered a job with the Halle Orchestra. But he had to turn it down, again on the advice of those oh-so-stuffy seniour courtiers.

William can fly a helicopter blindfolded.

The Queen once admitted that she was a keen EastEnders fan and even wanted to knight several leading players in the soap. But yet again - you guessed it - senior courtiers persuaded her not to do so.

Prince Philip has the world’s largest collection of original Bill Hailey recordings, and turned down a multi-million from Bill Gates to buy them.

. . .

UPDATE (June 4, 2012): A reader has kindly alerted me to the fact that a diamond jubilee doesn’t celebrate 50 years, as I mistakenly thought, but 457 years, and I have now corrected this entry accordingly. Apologies to all readers who had begun to doubt their sanity (‘Surely it's not 50 years? I mean it just can’t be, can it?’) and, of course, to you Ma’am.

This isn’t pleasant viewing (especially if you aren’t white)

I can’t deny that I’m not excited by the prospect of three weeks of wall-to-wall football coming up when Euro 2012 kicks off on June 8 in Poland and the Ukraine. But I’ve just watched a BBC Panorama report on iPlayer about racism and white supremacists in Poland and Ukraine which makes sickening viewing. It would be dishonest to retort, as I’m sure some will, that ‘they are only a minority’, because that minority is well-organised and some of its elements are even training themselves up for quasi-combat. Actually, describing this behaviour as racism is a little misleading. These idiots, both young men and women, are also virulently anti-semitic.
I know from experience that it is very possible and very easy for a reporter and his team to go out there and construct the story you want, but what was so striking about the report was the footage of massed supporters giving the Nazi salute and beating the shit out of a group of Indian students who were sitting, thinking themselves to be safe there, in the family area. Take a look at the whole programme and make up your own mind as to how sickening it is: Just to play it safe: this video is the copyright of the BBC and the report was shown on BBC One's Panorama on Monday, June 4.

Let’s hear it for Mr Clarke who came into my life rather late in the day, but what the fuck

Those geeks who advocate all things binary were onto a thing or two, though they will be appalled to hear - as though they didn’t already know - that dichotomy, for that is what this 0 1 thing is all about is not in the slightest bit original. Everything, it seems, comes with its opposite and without which it might never exist. So to start at the beginning: there was nothing, then there was something. Things were dark, then they were light. But I shan’t labour the point, which I think you might well already have grasped. Fast forward several thousands of millennia from that fateful point in time when God became a little bored and decided to have some fun by creating everything to now.

By now, of course, I don’t mean now - 21.50 on May 31, 2012 - but now, which - I crave your indulgence - is more or less contingent with my lifespan (and what is left of it). So ‘now’ we have all kinds of opposites: to carry on, spuriously and not to say meretriciously, with the scientific angle (to give this entry an intellectual feel, don’t you know), there’s matter and antimatter (though I am sure I’m not alone in wondering what the bloody hell ‘antimatter’ is or could be). When I was younger, there were The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Or how about Michael Jackson and Prince? In sport there’s, or there once was before a certain whore of a team hitched its wagon to the good fortunes and billions of roubles of yet another Russian oligarch, Chelsea and Fulham.

Broadening the it all I could refer to sweet and sour, New York and Chicago, good and bad, night and day, gays and straights, truth and fiction, but none of it brings me any closer to what I want to write about except, perhaps Liverpool and Manchester. For those who give a hoot, I am unashamedly Manchester. I have Liverpudlian friends and acquaintances, and I like and respect many of them. But unfortunately for me Liverpool, like Newcastle (where I once lived and worked) has a fatal flaw: it and its people are unbearably - or, more fairly, can be be unbearably and insufferably - sentimental and lachrymose, forever reminding the world and his dog what fine fellows they are, how unfairly the world has treated them, what a spirited place their city is, what marvellous, generous, kind-hearted people live there. Manchester has none of that: Manchester has the acid which cuts through all the grease. And I like it.

Manchester is, though Mancunians would be horrified to hear me say it, a first cousin to Birmingham. And then there’s that accent. I love it, too. . . . Some fuckwit somewhere wrote along the lines that to ‘be born British is to have drawn the first prize in the lottery of life’. Perhaps (though Brits don’t like it that every other nation under the sun says the same about itself, except, perhaps the Poles. I think the Poles rather suspect that they are the losers of this world. But that’s another entry.) Well, this fuckwit would like to paraphrase that other fuckwit and say to ‘be born in Manchester/Salford/Wigan or wherever the fuck else is nearby is to be born at the very least with the right accent and attitude to make a first-class comedian’. Does that make sense? But let me cut to the chase

. . . .

Born in November 1949, I was 20 in 1969 and a prime candidate for all the hippy-dippy acid bollocks. To be fair I never subscribed to the airy-fairy flowers-in-your-hair philosophy and never quite got into all the music, but I liked the dope (as in cannabis, not heroin) and had a fairly substantial number of trips. (Musically, I was seduced rather early on into R&B - what was then R&B, not what is now R&B - soul and eventually gospel, funk, jazz and the rest.

Crucially, I found it impossible to dance to on-beat rock and was very relieved to discover music which celebrated the off-beat. Man.) But having been born in 1949 I was 30 in 1979, or more pertinently 27 in 1977, so the whole punk thing passed me by. I didn’t particularly like the music, except that of certain ‘punk’ fellow travellers such as The Police, but in all honesty for me to turn up at some Clash gig and pogo would have been dishonest.

Oddly enough, punk spawned more important trends in what might very loosely be called contemporary art than its forbear, the hippies. (And it is no mystery to me why punk so successfully followed the hippy-dippy bollocks: it was quite simply a question of younger brothers and younger sisters wanting to do the complete opposite of their very boring, very condescending, very preachy and increasingly very, very dull older brothers and sisters.) But let me now bring the two strands together: Manchester/parts of Lancashire and me being just a tad too old to be a punk. What this entry is all about is John Cooper Clarke. . . . I heard of John Cooper Clarke when he was in his heyday but paid no attention. He was, after all, a punk thing and by then age had rather brutally excluded me from the punk thing. But by chance I have, very late in life, come across him again. And he is a gem.

There are many others who could rave about him far better than me, so I shall simply say that as far as I am concerned he is a one-off. His poetry might not impress the middle-class ‘poets’, but then they don’t impress him, either. He is witty and funny - and they are not always the same thing - he has verve, he has a love for language, he is good-natured and honest, and he does the virtually impossible: he takes what he does seriously without taking himself seriously. I think I am rather lucky to have finally come across Mr Clarke so late in life and I shall not pass up the opportunity to find out rather more about him and his work. For a flavour of the man, try this recent interview in the Guardian.

Let’s look on the gloomy side for a change: the idiots now have the upper hand, we can expect no more change out of China, and Syria is going to explode. So what can we do? Raise a glass to the Irish and get them to tell us a few jokes as we all go down in flames. And when will bloody Google get off our backs?

One of the reasons I took a break from writing this blog was that more and more I was writing about the same issue - the euro crisis and how inexplicably daft various governments are behaving in their ostensible aim of solving it - and I started feeling like the nutter in a bar who perhaps amuses for the first ten minutes you know him, but becomes tedious after 20, insufferable after an hour and is subsequently avoided at all cost whenever next he crosses your path. And who wants to be regarded as a nutter in a bar. But developments in the eurozone have become so bloody ludicrous and many politicians are behaving with such breathtaking inanity that I could and can no longer hold back. But I shall at least - with an eye on all those adverse to nutters in bars - try a different approach.
I shall be 63 in just under six months and it is a commonplace that old folk, or oldish folk, seem doom and gloom at every turn.

So I’ve been asking myself whether what’s going on in the world is any more frightening, threatening and dangerous than 27 years ago, in September 1985, when my dear old dad was just under six months short of 63. Or what was the state of the world in (I think 1953) when his dad was approaching his 63rd birthday. Certainly, for Walter Powell, chain-smoker, primary school head teacher, county councillor (which might have come later) and cricket buff there will have been plenty to worry a worrier: the Korean War, the increasingly bitter Cold War, a piss-poor economy in Britain with rationing barely over, the Empire so obviously well on its way up the swannee and generally a feeling that things should be better. The bright spot will have been that World War II was over and done with, though just how much solace Walter and Elsie, my grandmother, will have gained from that I really don’t know.

In 1985 things did look a lot brighter. The worst of the early Thatcher economic pain was over, money was plenty, the internet was not yet born so people were not immediately being made aware of the latest horror, although Britain’s miners were feeling bitter, having lost the very stupid fight started by that arch ham and undoubted chancer Arthur Scargill. But there was most certainly much to worry about, if not at home or in Europe, but elsewhere.

That is, of course, if you were in a worrying mood. My father, I rather think, wasn’t. He had retired three years previously on a very generous pension, he was happily remarried, he was ‘working on [his] book’ (completed but never, or not yet, published), he lived in a very pleasant part of the country and was enjoying the kind of country gentleman’s life to which he had always aspired, and the prostate cancer which was to develop and eventually kill him at 68 was still several years away. He was, however, a worrier, though I really can’t tell you what he might have been worrying about.

To be honest, I do think there is something in the idea that as folk, especially men, get older, they are more apt to see gloom and doom lurking in every corner. Yet having said that - so take that as a caveat - I do think that on many different horizons extremely ominous storm clouds are gathering.
. . .

As far as the euro crisis is concerned, it might help to try to look at daily and weekly developments as though they were past history. So, for example, what are we to make of Angela Merkel’s suggestion that euro debtor countries should consider handing over their gold reserves to pay off their debts? As a news item you heard an hour or two ago, you might feel inclined to say: ‘Well, why not? Makes a certain degree of sense.’ But reading about it in many years time, as a history student, say, as one of the many factors ‘preceding the great crash of the early 21st century, it might strike you as rather different. Let me set the scene: Germany is solvent and prosperous and is finding it so easy to borrow money that it doesn’t even have to offer a tasty interest rate on what it raises. It has low unemployment and low inflation and whichever way you look at it is doing rather well, thank you very much.

The one cloud on the horizon comes from several other members of the monetary union which are apparently heading towards bankruptcy, where one in four of those of employable age have no job, where pensions and social security payments are being slashed, where its people are so worried that their banking system will collapse that they are withdrawing as much money as they can and getting it out of the country and, finally, where the more democratically inclined political parties of the centre are rapidly losing their support to parties either on the far left or the far right. But because they are part of the same monetary union as Germany, their demise not only could, but most certainly will, be disastrous for Germany. So what does Germany do: it demands that if these countries want help, they should hand over their gold. As sweet-talking goes, as a way of pouring oil on troubled waters that is a lunatic approach.

It doesn’t, of course, help that in the not too distant past Germany - though I must and will stress a very different kind of Germany - was in a similar position of lording it over various other nations in Europe, thereby allowing those who want to do so to make - in my view wholly unjustified and gratuitous - jibes about das Herrenvolk and Das Vierte Reich. But is no one in Germany aware of the growing bad blood? Are there no siren voices in Berlin telling the German government to soft-pedal a little, take it easy, this isn’t working out as we would like it to? Apparently there aren’t.
. . .

I’m well aware, or think I’m well aware of the economics of it all and forgive me but I can’t hold back from commenting that I, as well as many, many others, warned that this whole fuck-up was going to happen at some point. The only - the only - unknown factor was when it would happen. But that is all water under the bridge now. The disaster is upon us, inexorably bearing down on us like some huge tanker cannot slow down and which cannot be turned around.

 The economics are stark: we’re now damned if we do and damned if we don’t. It is not going to end peacefully. I don’t expect there to be any civil wars but I do expect any number of mischief makers to seize the opportunity to make their mischief, whatever that might be and whatever they hope to achieve from it. There will be fighting, there will be riots, there will be deaths, there will be appeals for calm. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world other events will worsen the situation. The era of cheap goods from China, who export from China and import into Europe gave everyone a feelgood factor, is now over. There is an upward pressure on wages in China and many firms who went there to benefit from cheap labour are now upping sticks and moving on to other countries, such as Vietnam.

The situation in Syria is getting worse by the day. There is no way out for Assad and his supporters, so they will undoubtedly fight until the bitter end, unless Russia can persuade that gang to relinquish power. But who would then take over? The situation in Syria, we are continually being told, cannot be compared to the revolution in Libya. Libya is a sparsely coastal strip with massive of desert. Syria isn’t. Libya might be tribal, but as a rule they all regard themselves as being in the same club. They don’t in Syria. Syria is split between Sunnis and Shiites as well as between Islamists and Western-orientated folk. Should a war in Syria bother us?

Well, various fools are calling for what they regard as a universal panacea of ‘Western intervention’, not doubt on ‘humanitarian grounds’, yet they dont’ seem to have learnt the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan of leaving well alone. But whether or not the West ‘gets involved’, as far as I know (i.e. from my superficial reading of news magazines and listening to the radio) a war in Syria would to a large extent be a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, that beacon of Middle Eastern freedom, and Iran, that other beacon of Middle Eastern freedom and the West would be best to keep well out of it. Israel, of course, couldn’t and could well become ‘collateral damage’, no doubt creating as much collateral damage of its own as it goes downs.
And all this would be going on while Europe and the EU crumbles.

Am I merely being too gloomy? I am suffering from just a standard bout of pre-retirement Angst. I bloody well hope I am. Though I rather think I’m not.

. . .

Then, of course, there’s Ireland. Honest Ireland which played by the rules, upset no one, made a lot of good friends (as usual), and generally played it straight, but is still being burned by the big boys. For about the umpteenth time in its history. No wonder those poor Irish saps turn to drink. They have a referendum coming up in which, as I understand it, the question will be: Do you, being of sound mind and sane judgments want to screwed and taken to the cleaners by Tweedledum? Or would you prefer to be screwed and taken to the cleaners by Tweedldee? God bless the Irish. At least they can laugh at themselves. . . . I know that by writing what I am about to write I shall be seen as hugely ungrateful, but I can’t resist it: Bloody Google really get up my nose. They are fucking everywhere! These past few years you couldn’t install anything with a bloody Google toolbar being installed while you weren’t looking. Now I am getting a warning every time I access my blog to post or edit that my browser will soon no longer be supported. Well, why not? I use Firefox because I am used to using Firefox and I like Firefox and I update Firefox every time Firefox - politely - asks me whether I want to update Firefox. The crucial difference between Firefox and bloody Google - and a difference I appreciate a great deal - is that Firefox doesn’t impose on me, take me for granted, do things behind my back and generally behave like to complete pain in the arse. So my - Google - blogspot will soon no longer be supported on Firefox. Why not? Only because Firefox isn’t bloody Google, that’s why. Why don’t the Islamic terrorist do something useful for a change and go and blow up Google HQ. Call themselves terrorists!

The lunacy of newspapers – Pt 4,337 of an occasional series

This is not, admittedly, the worst example its kind, and one or two jugheads around the world might even ask themselves what the hell is he talking about. But for me the following does somehow typify, in a quiet way, just how wacky newspapers and those who produce them are and why in any sane country all its hacks would be settled quietly in a corner out of harm's way with a bottle or five of spirits and a tin of shag.

Anyone turning to Page 60 in today’s Daily Mail (May 23, 2012, available at all good newsagents) will find the Wednesday travel page. Today we are highlighting several spots around the world where you can get a great view of the sky at night. The – rather obvious – headline says it all: Star struck, and the sub-head reads: Nothing beats sleeping in the big outdoors. Follow our sparkling guide to the top star-gazing holidays. Several pictures accompany the piece, of which the main one (which has the headline superimposed on it) shows a night sky and a modern four-poster bed on a terrace. Sleeping out in the open, geddit? That’s when the trouble started.

Rather late in the day – that is the page was due ‘off stone’ at about 7pm and the deadline was approaching – someone noticed that there were precious few stars in the night sky for whoever would be sleeping in the four-poster to gaze at. In fact, there were none at all. And gazing at stars at night while sleeping in the great outdoors was the whole point of the piece. So the picture was sent of to the colour studio to have stars added. Back it came, but those in charge decided there weren’t enough stars, so off the picture went again for the addition of more stars. Then it came back for a second time, and now those in charge decided that there were enough – it has to he be said, fake – stars to give the impression of a star-filled sky, but that they weren’t, umm, bright enough. So off the picture went for the third time for the bods in colour to brighten the stars.

If you are able to get a copy of the paper today, buy it and turn to Page 60 and see if you don’t agree with me that not only is this kind of modus operandi just a tad short of mad, but the ‘stars’ in the picture won’t win any prices, either. For those who can’t get hold of the paper, here is the picture, though it was obviously posted online before the bods in colour applied their peerless skill.

Pip, pip!

I’m back and still predicting doom, gloom and misery. And a short break in Spain was very welcome

After something of a hiatus, I'm back. Just as many opinions and just as much bullshit will be on offer, but I should tell you that one of my few principles - dangerous things principles, but I do risk it once in a while - is 'bullshit for fun, never seriously'. There is too much of it around and I don't want to add to the sum total in this world. I stopped posting for a while because I suspected I was beginning to take myself a little too seriously, so I wanted to knock that on the head as soon as possible. So no posts for a while.

. . . .

Nothing much has changed out there, as you will have noticed from the news. Greece, and now Spain, are still going to the dogs, though Greece is doing so rather faster than our Iberian cousins, and everyone, but everyone knows the outcome: Greece will leave the euro and resurrect the drachma, in time the euro will collapse and the whole rasion d'etre of the European Union will be up for question. Why, countries will ask themselves are we members if, in the long run, we aren't assured the prosperity we were hoping for. That's not so say that they aren't, just that the outcome they all so fervently hoped for is simply not as achievable as they thought it was. The trouble is that people are apt to remember bad times rather longer than good times, and they will see what is happening in Greece, Portugal and Ireland and wonder whether that might not happen to them, too.

One glaring mismatch between the EU and those who have recently joined or still hope to join is that whereas the apparent guiding princple of the EU, one fondly encouraged by those running it - superannuated to-the-left former Sixties politico hippies - was a kind of brotherhood of man, a vaguely capitalistic socialism in which everything is done for the common weal is hugely at odds with the motivation of new and aspiring members, namely self-interest.

Self-interest most certainly wasn't behind the idealistic thinking of the original Iron, Coal and Steel Community members, who later became the 12 before insanity took over and the 'European Community' became the horribly unwieldy 27 member states, but that is what now drives most members forward. In the early days, the motivation was quite simple and delightfully admirable: to ensure that a merciless war such as World War II would be a thing of the past. But now look where we are. Germany is once again being blamed for everything. Admittedly, it only has itself to blame in as far as Berlin obviously cannot understand how others might not share its values, but to my dying day I shall defend Germany against the charge that it is 'trying to dominate Europe'. Germany is, at worst, guilty of appalling political naivety and incompetence, but if that were a capital offence, there would few far fewer politicians round. Sarkozy would have been one of the first to have last his head.

I think the real problem is that the EU all too soon lost sight of its fundamental objective: to unite Europe through trade by bringing down barriers to trade, spreading prosperity and ensuring that we all had too much to lose by going to war. But when things were going well, as most certainly they were for many years, it all went to their heads and the idealists committed the cardinal sin of believing their own bullshit. The rather more down-to-earth Brits were labelled troublemakers for urging caution and refusing to join in an increasingly silly game, but mainland Europeans went ahead. They did not understand that most people are still intrinsically local, that loyalties are still local and all this bull about a political union was simply not welcome or, at least, way ahead of its time.

But now we have the mess. Launching a common currency would only have been a good idea within a political union, but as such as union was still decades off, the euro was far too premature. And now we have the mess, a mess which will not only bring misery to Europe but North America, China and Asia. The only part of the world which will be spared a great deal of misery is South America. Am I too much of a doom monger? No, I really don't think I am..

. . . .

I have just returned from a very pleasant and relaxing seven days in Spain. I wasn't, thank goodness, on the Costas rubbing shoulders with Brits complaining that you can't get a decent cup of tea for love or money, but in the back of beyond about 70 miles north of Valencia between a one-horse town called Els Ibarsos and a rather bigger places (a three-horse town?) called Albocasser. I was visiting a friend of my stepmother's who I knew vaguely before I went and who was very good company. He is a potter, and the son of one of Brtain's famous potters with wide interests. More about that, perhaps, another time when I am not at work and pretending to be beavering away on something, anything, which isn't personal. I took quite a few piccies and shall post some of those, too. Pip, pip!

. . .

Well, there has been movement of a kind on the Eurozone front as various EU state finance ministers prepare for the next in a long, long, long series of ‘make or break’ summits, so having regained my verve for adding my two ha’porth, I thought I might add a word or two to the above.


It does strike me that were one to set out to create a messy situation which would be farcical were its implications not so tragic, then you would be hard-pushed to do better than the current cock-up with the euro. Quite simply, there is now no longer and acceptable outcome. Whatever happens will be unpleasant for everyone, not just those of us living in Europe, but for the American and Asian economies. South American economies might be spared as long as they don’t rely too heavily on exporting to the rest of the world. But we should all be clear: the shit is going to hit the fan soon, whatever clever ruses the EU finance ministers come up with on Wednesday.

The talk is that France now has the upper hand over Germany in as far as there is widespread support among member states for the creation of so-called Eurobonds. These are the same as national sovereign bonds but imply that the EU is one fiscal unit, with every member of the Eurozone being equally responsible for every other member’s debts. Well, I can’t see the good and thrifty folk of Germany settling for that. Furthermore, the Eurozone is not a fiscal unit and the chances of it becoming one any time soon are rather smaller than me getting a romp in the hay with Holly Willoughby. Germany is against such Eurobonds, though not for sensible reasons: it wants to carry on with austerity.

This is all a supremely good recipe for the mainstream democratic parties in the EU to lose ground to the various crackpot groups on the left and right. Hungary already has one in power. For a venture which was designed to ensure peace in Europe for ever and a day, it is all pretty poor going.

Blame who you want, but don’t blame the Vietnam War on the vets. (And the bookies win again)

Thirty years ago, Britain achieved a remarkable victory over Argentina when it successfully deployed ships and troops to the Falkland Islands more than 8,000 away and retook them after they had been invaded and occupied by the Argentines. Whether it could do so again were that lovely woman Cristina Kirchner, Argentine’s president, to decide that the domestic situation is dire enough to warrant a foreign adventure to concentrate Argentinean hearts and minds is another matter and - thank goodness - not the point of this entry. What is most certainly beyond doubt is that Britain’s response might have been a great deal less wholehearted had Labour been in government or even Tories of another stripe.

As it was Mrs Margaret Thatcher was in charge and she was never one to do anything by halves. Whether or not you actually believe retaking the Falklands was actually worth the effort involved to say nothing of the deaths it cost is again not the point of this entry. I happen to believe it was, in as far as Britain, then as now, is still one of the world’s leading nations and has a reputation to protect, and allowing the Argentines to get away with it would have done a great deal of damage diplomatically. So having Maggie in charge was a stroke of luck. Some cynics claim that going to war over the Falklands was also a stroke of luck for Maggie herself. Politically things were not going too well for her at the time as economically things were pretty dire in the country, so not only did the Falklands crisis take away a great deal of attention from the domestic situation, but once it had been concluded successfully, it also earned her a great many very useful brownie points.

Naturally enough, and for a variety of different reasons, some honourable and some most certainly not, not everyone supported the campaign to retake the Falklands, and of those who were opposed, some were employed by the BBC. The BBC, from its inception and throughout its history, has often been accused of being a tad pink round the gills and are only too pleased to oppose when the government of the day is right-of-centre. There were, of course, others in the BBC who, professionals to their fingertips, were keen to ensure the BBC’s coverage of the conflict, initially in the run-up and then the campaign itself, remained studiously neutral. Good for them, I say, but others disagreed and felt that as the country was once again ‘at war’, the BBC should wave the flag as vigorously as possible, if not even more so.

It all came to a head when the current affairs TV programme Panorama broadcast an edition about the crisis simply called Can We Avoid War? That, of course, went down like a lead balloon with the Tories who smelt treachery at every turn. What especially enraged Thatcher at the time was a comment by someone or other in the BBC that it was not the corporation’s role to boost the morale of British troops and that ‘the widow in Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires’. To that I must - and shall always - give three cheers. And that quote brings me rather closer to what this entry is about (although you might already have an inkling from the title of this entry).

. . .



That quote likening the widow in Buenos Aires to the widow in Portsmouth says it all for me. Being half English and half German I was always angry - or, at least, always once I was old and mature enough to understand these things - with the prevalent attitude in the Fifties that, in World War II, for exampe, there were the guys in white hats and the guys in black hats. Most certainly no one in his or her right mind would spend more than half a second defending the Nazis who created the conflict. But to equate each German squaddie fighting on the ground with the party elite seemed to me particularly asinine. Yet that was what many did and still do. But growing up in the Sixties (and living in what was then still West Berlin) I was caught up in the Cold War and its equally moronic monochrome view of the world. We, the West, stood for all that was good, honest and true in life. They, the East were Commie rats who opposed us and were thus, by definition the personification of evil.

I should like to make it very clear as soon as possible that you will never find me breaking a lance for any of the shower in power in any of the Soviet bloc countries, but we now know that the motivation of the West, and especially the United States was anything but pure and principled (unless, of course, you regard it as a matter of principle that we should do anything and everything, ethical or not, to maximise profit. I don’t). In his address to the nation on national television on January 17, 1961, the outgoing U.S. President (and very admirable) Dwight D. Eisenhower was quite explicit about the threat to democracy posed by his country’s growing military-industrial complex, (you can find the text of his speech here and even the most benighted idiot alive would be hard-pushed to persuade anyone that Eisenhower was a commie stooge. As it happened no one seems to have heeded his warning. Most certainly many took it seriously and knew that Eisenhower was no alarmist hootsie-tootsie, but this was in many ways the height of the Cold War and I imagine many would have argue that now wasn’t the time to get to get the problem under control. If only they had.

I think the suspicion that America’s military-industrial complex actively promoted escalating the war in Vietnam is pretty uncontentious these days (but then these days we seem to have overshot the mark rather badly: where once we were naive saps who believed everything, now we are cynical saps who believe nothing). There were enough politicos in Washington who were persuaded that ‘something had to be done and something had to be done now’ to halt the spread of communism and what was called the domino theory so it was not difficult to persuade everyone who needed persuading that South Vietnam needed more U.S. ‘military advisors’ to combat the threat from the North of the country. Later, of course, the figleaf of describing the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who were sent out to South-East Asia as ‘military advisors’was dropped completely, but by then America was so entrenched that that was the least of its concerns.

But back to the widow in Buenos Aires and the widow in Portsmouth and how in many ways they are soul sisters. There might not seem an obvious link between them and the grunts fighting the Vietcong, but to me the link is quite obvious: at the end of the day, both widows deserve our sympathy and in a curious, but for me related way, so do the grunts. They didn’t start the war. And although - according to various statistics I dug up once I had decided to write this piece - only a third of the U.S. servicemen and women were actually conscripted (i.e. two-thirds had signed up to serve wherever their country chose to send them), that cannot - to my mind, at least - justify the shit that was figuratively poured over many of them once they had returned home and once the Vietnam War and its perceived evil had become a national shame. That, really, is the point - the only point - of the video I have posted above.

. . .

I should say that from the first time I heard Third World Man by Steely Dan on the Gaucho album I imagined it to be about a Vietnam vet who had been to hell and back and simply lost his marbles. That’s in as far as any Steely Dan song can be ‘about’ anything. Yesterday I decided to scour the net for any images of wounded soldiers serving in Vietnam and any I might find after they had returned home. These are the ones I came up with (or, at least, most of them.) I enjoy putting images to music as I have done for this video and doing so, indulging myself, so to speak, was as much a reason for constructing it as posting it and making a point I have long felt should be made. But earlier on today something odd happened. While editing and constructing it (in Apple’s iMovie), I realised that one of the images I had included was anything but what I thought it was. It is the fifth in the sequence. Look closely: what you’ll see is three U.S. soldiers engaged in water-boarding a prisoner (I assume a Vietcong). So how does that fit in with my purported motive.

I must be honest: these were my thought - look at the image and it is pretty unmistakable as to what is going on. In anyone’s lexicon ‘waterboarding’ is ‘torture’ and that is what these guys are doing. So what was I to do? The obvious thing was simply to remove it, but I decided not to. I decided that whatever the image did actually portray, it did fit in with the other images. In fact, some people might not have spotted what was going on unless I hadn’t alerted them to it as I am doing here. And my second thought was that one get-out clause might be to do what I am doing now: coming clean, alerting the viewer to the fact that one of the images is not what is seems. So that is what I have done.

It did occur to me to add a line suggesting that as war brutalises those who engage in it, in a sense (or, more honestly, ‘in a sense’) these three have become brutalise by a war which was not of their making and so, in a sense (i.e. ‘in a sense’) they are not ultimately responsible. Thus, they were demonstrating what could be regarded as a dramatic truth (‘dramatic truth’).

But that is, of course, complete bullshit. The more astute among you mgiht, however, have noticed that I have, perhaps, pulled off a double bluff: by giving the line of the three being ‘brutalised by war’, but then apparently rejecting it, I have succeeded in giving the line (and possibly gaining from it in some quarters) but then scored a moral point or two in other quarters by rejecting it. Then, of course, there are the super-astute among you who might have noticed that I might even have managed to pull off a triple bluff simply by writing the very paragraph you are now reading and by coming even cleaning underlining my integrity. But as for the super-super-astute - get to fuck.

. . .

But I don’t really want to end this entry on such a flippant note. The end of my video says it all: blame the Vietnam War on whoever you want to blame it one, but give those who had little choice in the matter a break. Don’t blame the vets. It wasn’t their war.

. . .

Well, if there are easier ways to lose your money than by backing a horse, or several horses, in the Grand National, I have yet to hear of it. Laying bets online with Ladbrokes for my family, both close and extended, we are all in total about £60 down because none of us came within a country mile of getting the winner.

The New Yorker reluctantly makes it official: the Daily Mail is not quite as evil as North London claims. Damn!

When I thought of writing this piece about a profile of the Daily Mail which has just appeared in The New Yorker, the phrase ‘the man you love to hate’ kept occurring to me which I could then adapt to ‘the newspaper you love to hate’. But being a nosy sort, I googled the phrase to see to whom it was applied and came up with the names of German film director Erich von Stroheim and South London wrestler Mick McManus. I should imagine that the phrase was first applied to von Stroheim, courtesy of a studio press office, and McManus, or his manager, adopted it as being far too good to be wasted. All that by way of a rather unnecessary preamble. Now onto the Mail and its profile by one Lauren Collins in The New Yorker.

When all is said and done about the only honest conclusion one can make about the piece is that it is distinctly odd. I might be wrong on this, but I’ve always assumed The New Yorker is generally read – avidly in some case, I should think – by folk who like to think of themselves as a tad brighter than the hoi polloi and most certainly more enlightened, not to say liberal. Whether fairly or not, I’ve often got the impression that your average New Yorker reader is, well, just a little up him or herself, and although they have more than a great deal of sympathy for the dispossessed of this world, they most certainly wouldn’t be seen dead socialising with them. Being of a liberal, quite possibly left-liberal turn of mind, they most certainly would not approve of the Mail, its readers and its assumed politics, and reading the piece by Ms Collins I got the distinct impression that she was itching to disapprove. But she never quite manages to do so. Why not?

The Mail and its web sister the Mail Online are a modern success story. According to circulation figures released by the ABC, all the circulation of all British nationals is falling, in some cases dramatically, not to say embarrassingly, but the Mail – damn its eyes – is, ahem, doing rather less badly than the rest. And bien pensant folk hate, hate, hate the fact. I am not, and would never, suggest that the fact that the Mail is holding its own has anything to do with the worth of its assumed politics, but it has a great deal to do with the popularity of the paper: whereas fewer and fewer people are prepared to part with £1 to buy the Independent or the Daily Telegraph or £1.20 to buy the Guardian or The Times, the number who will gladly part with 55p to get their own copy of the Mail is, again ahem, holding up rather well. Ah, you cry, but it’s half the price of the ‘serious newspapers’. Well, yes it is, and so what? The Express is also half the price of the ‘serious’ newspapers and its circulation is plummeting.

The New Yorker’s Ms Collins must have spent quite a few days in our offices and, given the potted history of the paper and its current editor Paul Dacre, she obviously did her homework. She was even invited to sit in on conferences (and, according to Private Eye, those attending were warned to be on their best behaviour and to eschew the kind of coarse language which is the lingua franca of most newspaper offices I have worked in) and her piece is the kind of workmanlike and rather long feature article we have come to expect from a Yankee hack working at the serious end of her

“Well (sniff) one doesn’t really want to condone such popularism and Lord it is such an awful rag, but well (sniff) one is, one must admit, obliged to be fair (sniff), though more’s the pity”
industry. And I’ll repeat: while reading it I got the impression, time and again, that she was just dying to let fly, to be outraged, to be disgusted, yet she never quite managed it. It could, of course, be because she had no reason to. Ms Collins touched on the Mail’s alleged institutional racism but, in the event, she was again obliged to pull her punches. And I suspect that this was because for an allegedly racist organisation, the Mail employs a great number of folk whose origins, or that of their parents and grandparents, lie in Asia, Africa and the West Indies. More to the point, they are not kept hidden away in cupboards: anyone walking on any floor and in any department – for some reason particularly in the IT department will spot them very, very easily and with no effort at all.

Well, if the paper is not racist, it can be charged with being trivial. And that it most certainly is: the print edition, but even more so the online edition, brims with what at my most charitable I can only describe as celebrity crap and bollocks. But the fact is that that is what the punters rather like to read, that and that the world is going to hell in a handcart. In the unlikely event that the saintly Guardian decided to start printing just as much celebrity crap and bollocks, we would all witness is harsh decline in circulation being reversed. Can the Mail be condemned for providing – this is me speaking, not the paper – morons with the kind of fodder morons relish? Not in my world they can’t. And, as it turns out, not in Ms Collins’s world either. But read the piece for yourself and make your own mind up. Incidentally, don't ever