What I Read and What's Missing

Nicholas Nassem Taleb, author of The Black Swan, does not read newspapers. Rightly he considers that most of them are full of junk press releases and what amounts, especially to a someone who used to be a trader, to very old news. I have finally reached the stage where I think that reading newspapers and even listening to the news on the radio leaves me feeling less informed than before I started. I don't even read the Sunday papers, the FT Weekend or The Economist - not since I realised they were being written about a parallel universe.

When I was a teenager, I read Motoring News for the reports of Grand Prix races - no multi-billion dollar Formula One TV coverage in those days - Model Cars and Model Car and Track both about slot car racing (yes really), and for a while I read Melody Maker until the NME became the only music paper anyone needed to read. The Financial Times was irrelevant and Private Eye was incomprehensible. (Try making sense of Le Canard Enchaine and you'll get the feeling.)

Now I read Private Eye and Art Monthly regularly and Vanity Fair, Tatler or Esquire or some other such life-style magazine every now and then. Put Kate Moss on the cover and I'm going to buy it. On some kind of whim, I've just taken out a subscription to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which at £39 including membership of the BSPS itself, is a pretty good deal. If you're into the philosophy of science. I gave up on Sight and Sound a long time ago: if I read any movie magazine at all, it's Little White Lies, the house magazine of the Curzon Cinemas. I don't read book reviews, I prefer to browse, and I can do that because my local bookshops are Foyles and Blackwells. Every now and then I sample a music magazine, but mostly I rely on Last FM or Amazon reviews to point me in an interesting direction. If I hear about a band, I'll look them up on You Tube first, then I might buy the CD or download. If I really need a movie review, I'll read Roger Ebert. There's a reason he's a millionaire. I buy 'zines to cover the fringe stuff, and I can do that because I have the newsagents of Soho on my doorstep.

It's all interesting but like the mainstream media, but it's the sparkle on the waves. It's not the currents and it's not the tides. The rubbish on the streets of Naples, to take a current story, isn't about trash bags not being collected, it's about the grip of the Camorra on the government of Campania. That story doesn't get covered, but Berlusconi's posturings do. On the other hand that story has been running for decades. The mainstream media doesn't describe the currents and tides that make the stories break on our beaches. Recent historians prefer froth to trend as well: the shelves are currently groaning under the weight of books about Britain in the twentieth century, each volume covering a decade in hundreds of pages of detail that make less sense that a Jackson Pollock.

The tides and currents are made by demographics, criminal organisations, industry and legislation, not by culture and certainly not by party political maeouverings. Businesses have a strong interest in keeping what they are doing quiet: if I was a doing to the British economy what a modern CEO does every month, I would hide behind commercial confidentiality and a harum of hard-faced blonde PR's too. I don't have the time or resources to investigate it. I don't know who is supposed to be: not journalists and judging by what gets circulated by The Bank's Economics department, not the research departments of large companies either. I don't know where you find the serious stuff. I have a suspicion that it isn't on the Internet and it costs fairly serious money. Actually I have a suspicion that it doesn't actually exist.

Oh Comely - The Official Magazine of Pixie Girls Everywhere

The third edition of Oh Comely is out. I found a copy of the second edition about five weeks ago in one of the many absurdly-well-stocked newsagents in Soho and Charlotte Street. (Those newsagents have magazines - mostly fashion, style and design - that you couldn't even find in Borders before it went broke. I'm pretty sure there isn't a newsagent outside that square mile anywhere near as well-stocked. Certainly not W H Smug.) It describes itself as "a magazine about people and their quirks and their creativity, rather than money and what it can buy". If it were any more cute, it would be twee, and it is so girly it could never be gay. It took me a while to understand what it is, but it's the long-awaited official Pixie Girl Magazine.

To understand that, you have to know what a Pixie Girl is. She isn't the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" of the movies, though they may look alike. MPDG's are a male fantasy. Real Pixie Girls are, well, they look like Nadia Dahlawi and Sara Jade, who are not only the record label Young and Lost Club, but also damn near reference PG's.

The PG is feminine without being sexual, and attracted to all things slightly insubstantial (cupcakes, embroidery, folk music, non-corporate careers). Confident without being assertive, she yet has an air of uncertainty, and while she isn't a Material Girl she does like the trinkets and objects she surrounds herself with. They can be promoted without being ambitious and while they would never admit to husband-hunting, when they grow up, PG's become those self-satisfied well-off suburban wives and mothers (aka "Twickenham Wives") you see during the day in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Guildford, Putney and other such places. No-one was ever a PG at school: it's something that happens to a girl in the summer between the school and university.

The magazine has many nice moments and lots of wistful photographs of pretty girls. The essays and interviews are refreshingly not about successful people, and I could buy it just for the quirky decision tree at the back. The guiding lights / editors are liz bennett and des tan (it's a lower-case kind of magazine) and they seem to have decided that they're tired of the usual editorial tone of modern magazines, which, let's be honest, hasn't changed much since the early 1990's and is of marginal relevance to the 2010's. It's also not about money, just like it says, and that's probably what attracts me to it.

Buy a copy. Really. Enter a gentler world.

Tank Magazine Vol 6 Issue 1

Every now and then I'm entitled to a really trivial entry. I remember Tank when it first came out. It's always had more interesting essays than most style mags – check out The Cruel Jerk by Kevin Braddock as an example of one of the better essays – and an interesting line in photography and styling. Well, they've changed the format, made it larger, put in a spiral binder and in the latest issue, have lots of pictures of la Claudia. What's not to like? You can download a pdf of the shoot at their website, but here's something to be going on with.

You can, by the way, do a lot worse than see a movie just because it's got la Claudia in it (okay, other than Ritchie Rich): Black and White, The Blackout, Friends and Lovers and Love Actually are all a better way of spending your time than watching Funny People or The Hangover.

Why I Don't Watch TV

(I used to have a website – no-one read that either. Ah the freedom of anonymity! This was on there and written in about 2003 or so)

I don't watch TV. I do watch DVD's on a television and I watch box sets of certain TV series, but I don't watch broadcast television. You can use a television set to watch DVD's if you have the aerial unplugged and any receivers de-tuned so nothing happens if you press the channel buttons. I don't even sneak a peek at home. I watch zero hours of television programming every week. How did this happen?

Every spring here in the UK, the BBC sends out its demand that you pay your Licence Fee for the coming year. The world-famous BBC is not financed by the Government-controlled taxes: it's financed by a tax on watching television called the Television Licence. This name is confusing, because it sounds as if it's a licence to own or operate a TV set, but it is not. It's a licence to watch so-called "terrestrial" television. In 1998 I got my demand through the post - for £105. I am a professional pricing guy, I know all about margins, volume vs profit payoff and above all about what retailers call 'price points'. One 'price point' is a number above which you'll say "Damn that's expensive" and another is the price at which you'll think it "My heavens, that's cheap". Price points are about people's tastes, perceptions and backgrounds. But no matter who you are or what you're paid, £100 is a price point ($100 in the USA - in the UK all prices are 35% higher than they should be while all net salaries are 15% lower than they should be). Seeing that £105 I paused and asked: "What am I getting, exactly?"

So now I need to tell you about an evening which I remember to this day. I must have been tired: long day at work and all that. So I took a bath, cooked dinner and ate it while watching the 7:00 pm news on Channel Four. (Channel Four at the time had sexy presenters who now all have jobs in the USA with CNN and Sky. I'm shallow like that.) Then I flipped over to The Bill (please, don't ask: I am going to discuss US vs UK cop shows in a minute). Then I flipped over to Two Fat Ladies (a cooking show). And suddenly it was 9:00 pm, time for more news and just what had happened to my evening?

The memory of that evening joined my professional irritation at how anyone could charge £105 for anything. So what was I getting for my Licence Fee?. Here's the answer: E.R., N.Y.P.D. Blue, Homicide - Life On The Street and This Life. When I got around to watching them. I loved This Life but I had to stop watching it: at the end of each episode I'd want to have a drink and light a cigarette and pretend I was in my mid-twenties again. Three shows I wanted to watch but didn't always get around to, and one I had to stop watching for the sake of my health? Plus the possibility of wasting evenings in the manner I just described? For £105? No thank you.

So I called the TV Licence people and explained that I did not want to watch television, but did want to watch videos (this was before DVD's) and what could I do? They said: unplug the aerial and de-tune anything that can receive a signal and you will be within the law. Of course they send me reminders every year to make sure I declare I have not re-connected the aerial, but that's officials for you. So I did and I've been a happy bunny ever since.

Is that all? I'm just cheap? Well, for one thing, I belong to a socio-economic group (post-graduate single men over 35 in professional-type jobs) that doesn't watch much TV anyway. We tend to watch the news, business programs and maybe some science and technology stuff (plus one soap and a cop show we are not going to own up to). We still have the idea that, if you're watching television, there's something better you could be doing - like, maybe, sleeping. No, it was something else. Take a look at that list again.

When that £105 made me think about it, I wondered why all the shows were from the US. I realised that English television had poor production values, dull photography and set design, was smug, tidy, trivial and unimaginative. The soaps are either about a working class that simply does not exist (Coronation Street, Eastenders, Brookside) or were pale copies of Dawson's Creek (Hollyoaks). English TV comedies are based on the idea that people are funny (because pretentious, bossy, pathetic, etc) whereas I prefer comedies based on the idea that jokes are funny (even Yes Minister which had a first-rate script, depended on the caste-based parodies that were Sir Humphrey and The Minister). The police dramas, oh please! Inspector Morse aside, do I have to make out a case for the poverty of UK police programmes? Is it even sensible to mention The Bill, Heartland, Cracker in the same sentence as The Shield, NYPD Blue, Homicide - Life on The Street, Hill Street Blues and others?

The difference between what the US studios and budgets could do and what the poor old Brits could do was simply too great. There is simply no way that a UK film or television company will ever rise to the standard of The West Wing: it doesn't have the money. There are British directors who make good films, but they do so in Hollywood, not on British television or for British production companies (exception: Working Title) And when the Yanks come over here and touch British subjects, something happens and everything they know about making good films falls out the back of their heads: I say no more than to ask how they could make Veronica Guerin? Yes I know that the US turns out a vast amount of low-budget rubbish: both industries can dredge the bottom, my point is that the heights are now well above the BBC's budget.

And that's why I dumped the licence: because UK television was cookery programs, costume dramas, "hard-hitting" dramas about the English Underclass. Now I have shelves full of DVD box sets. It might cost more per year than the Licence Fee, but I don't get that frustrated feeling everyone gets when they go looking for entertainment or information on the television and find instead that "there's never anything on". The evening doesn't go by while I'm slumped on the couch watching a programme made because it has a low cost-per-minute. And I get about twelve hours a week more spare time than the average bear.