Son of a Preacher Man - Ed's Diner Version

So I was in Ed's Diner having an American Cheese burger and vanilla shake after having seen My Week With Marilyn at the Curzon Soho, after having been to the gym and before browsing round Foyles - my basic default perfect Sunday - when Dusty Springfield starts up on the jukebox, singing this...



and the middle-aged Australian ladies next to me at the counter start singing along quietly to it, in the way that people do at Ed's. And I thought: don't you know how old the girl was when the Son of A Preacher Man came calling? This song is about a couple of fifteen year-olds making out, and the sad thing is that the girl hasn't ever found anyone else who made her feel like making love since. Jesus! Even I knew it was about that when it came out, oh, errrr, last year.

Yet there they were, singing along about how the only boy who could ever reach them was a sweet-talkin'-son-of-a-preacher-man. Nope. Not in their experience. But they were note-perfect. I'm not sure what it proves - perhaps that if you put it in a song, you can get away with a lot more. But then, could anyone get away with Gary Puckett's Young Girl today. I'm thinking not.

Tal Wilkenfeld, Orianthi Panagaris: Australian Guitar Godesses

I have in the last few weeks discovered that Australia has lately been exporting lady guitarists. Well, Canada has the monopoly on lady singer-songwriters, so the Australians had to do something different.

The first is the jazz bassist Tal Wilkenfeld.  Here she is at the tender age of about 23 with the guitar god's guitar god Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott's...

The other is heavy metal guitarist Orianthi Panagaris,who has played with most of the guitar gods you can think of because she impressed the hell out of Steve Vai when he was touring Australia. Yes, that's right, she impressed the guy who impressed the hell out of Frank Zappa when he was about the same age. Here she is with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani...

What's remarkable is the number of You Tube commentators who say something like "yeah, she's okay, but there's loads of people who can play like that". And that may even be true. But it's not what it takes. There's a line in the movie Basquiat where the art critic Rene Ricard says "part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it". Self-promotion, getting yourself heard, sending your CD to Herbie Hancock and asking if you can support him on his tour of Australia, is what it takes. And that's what all those other people don't have. 

To my generation, there's nothing odd about a 20-ish-year old playing at the top levels. Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, Pete Townsend, Tony WIlliams, Herbie Hancock, Steve Vai, Joe Bonnamassa to name just a few. Hancock was headhunted by Miles Davis when he was twenty-three, Williams when he was seventeen. Bonamassa opened for BB King when he was twelve! To my generation, what's odd is guys and gals in their thirties just making it past their first record deal. Jesus! You're supposed to be dead by thirty, leaving a legacy of erratic brilliance behind you.

There is one thing I hope. Ms Wilkenfeld has a fantastic technique and a solid grasp of the harmonic complications of contemporary fusion jazz. Catch is, fusion jazz is emotionally empty. There's more emotion in Coltrane's opening phrase of A Love Supreme  than there is on the whole of a Gwilym Simcock album I bought as an experiment. It would be a huge waste of her talent if she stayed in that line, and a huge use of it if she tried to do something new, with something that moves the soul. The point of being young is that you can learn fast and aren't scared of trying something new. She's still got some time - Ornette Coleman was twenty-nine when he released The Shape of Jazz To Come. 

Guy Debord's The Society of The Spectacle

I had a terrible cold over Christmas and re-read Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. This might be a cue for jokes about French philosophers making more sense if you have a cold, but it isn't. The book is famous and never out of print, but I'm not sure how many people now would read it all the way through. By today's standards it's an abstract tome written in best 1960's academic Marxism. There's no fun bits where we can lament with the author the appalling bad taste of the masses. It's not about The Spectacle, it's about the society that Debord thought it took The Spectacle to maintain. It's also showing its age.

Back in the 1960's the people who ran consumer goods companies and advertising agencies were a great deal more patronising and sure that the consumer would do as they suggested. The consumer didn't have a whole lot of choice then. Companies didn't need to "control" the media because they were behaving reasonably well - by today's standards. Today, from the outside, Capital's "control" of the media looks a lot more assured, calculating and deliberate than it is. On the inside it's a bunch of highly-paid, not-very-bright-but-very-shrewd men (and ever more women with the same values as the boys) desperately trying to clean up the mess before the grown-ups get home, or hoping that the cool kids will like what they're pushing, or the ever-fickle public won't be influenced by this week's scare story and stop buying the crap that fills the shelves, the airwaves and everywhere else. Skilful single-cause activists can cause PR and business headaches with a few low-cost, high-profile stunts. The underpaid, under-resourced churnalists who work in print and broadcast media lap all this pre-packaged stuff up like hungry kittens. Senior managers and advertising creatives aren't patronising, but scared. Those that can, loot everything in sight and move on, like marauding bands of mediaeval knights.

In one sense, the capitalism that Marx wrote about and Debord refers to was defeated, or perhaps changed, sometime in the 1980's. There's a 1967 proverb that it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government still gets in. Capital is similar: it doesn't matter what you buy or even if you buy nothing, it still winds up in a bank account and the capitalists get to use it. I once had a neat little book called Commodify Your Dissent which described how any kind of dissent wound up as a product to be bought. Choose your cause, buy the tee-shirt. In complex economies and societies, some kind of central administration is unavoidable - though whether it should think of itself as "governing" us like so many unruly subjects of a monarch is another matter. Large businesses are unavoidable for mass-markets as well - though whether they should be allowed to send jobs to other countries, pollute the water table to extract gas, and make food that their senior managers don't let their own children eat is again another matter.

It's not the structure that's the problem - it's the content. There's a seminal book called Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television  which, quite apart from giving you a tour round every "alternative" cultural idea of the 1970's, has strong arguments for why you should stop watching TV. When he wrote "TV" meant the set-and-the-shows-broadcast-by-the-networks. Video, DVD and LCD screens hadn't come along to turn the TV screen into a home movie screen on which we could watch anything. Turns out that much of what Manders was talking about was the shows and the idea that TV is something you leave on in the background all the time (some people do, I'm always amazed when they tell me). He used the example of how much more effective an ecological campaign that used images of a dead forest was than when it used images of beautiful countryside. On the TV sets of the mid-70's showing images shot on the video of the time, that's true: on modern 16:9 LCD screens showing images shot on film or HD, it isn't. Beautiful nature looks overwhelming.

Debord died in 1994 and I wonder if he appreciated that at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the post-Murdoch media reached a synergy (or incestuousness, if you're not a fan) with the entertainment industry and business that made the 1960's look like it was run by people who weren't really trying. Need I only say "Fox News"? Are you old enough to remember when the Financial Times didn't consist entirely of re-cycled press releases and pre-packaged spin from "contacts"? And you do realise that sports "news" isn't really news? It's just celebrity gossip and reviews, but about people who have skills.

Debord saw a society where, he believed, people were separated from each other by the Spectacle, because that was what Capital needed. In this he couldn't have been more wrong. It's not Capital that needs us to be isolated in the fear of ridicule of our differences from a norm we imagine everyone else upholds. Capital doesn't care about our social arrangements and personal preferences: it makes money whatever we do. The human condition could be described as one of being separately-together for much of the time, simply because that's what it means to be responsible for our own survival and advancement. The fact that people are so very different means that there's no guarantee we will find congenial company we can trust living within one percent of the Earth's radius from where we were born. It's Government that exploits this to make its job easier. Capital needs us to a) consume, b) work, c) pay our due bills, d) not wreck stuff. Government needs to tax us and not depose it, which is easier if e) we think that it is "just us" who thinks or feels like this, f) believe that everyone else is content with the way things are, and g) fear that the barbarians will ruin our lives if we don't accept being governed.

He thought that the society created by advanced Capitalism and the Spectacle was something new, that once there had been a time when people communicated, formed co-operative ventures, held out against the Bad Guys together and probably raised their children as a village as well. Well, not in any world I'm welcome to. Every now and then, yes, and historians write books about such episodes and revolutionaries dream on them. Then everyone goes back to business-as-usual: distracted from themselves by the work, children, gossip, bill-paying, status and entertainment that make up their lives. For some people that distraction is not enough, while others make it their life's very meaning, but it occupies most people and leaves them semi-connected to themselves and the world. That's what Debord was looking at, and it's been a permanent feature of human life. He wanted that to change, so he had to believe it wasn't.

If The Spectacle really is a structural feature of capitalism that can only be removed if capitalism is removed, then we are condemned to a mass culture of endless soap operas and bad comedies, with temporary fringe cultures around it like so many soap bubbles. But if mass culture and the conduct of business is the result of decisions by people, some of whom live next door to you, doing jobs like yours, then we can think of ways to make those people make different decisions next time. "Let's not do another cheap decorating / cooking show." "Let's not just re-cycle that press release about an odd-sounding condition that Pfizer has an expensive drug to treat". "Let's not lend people money for houses they can't afford." "Let's not send those jobs abroad, let's train our own people instead." "Let's not shove this insurance product down our customers' throats just because we can". "Let's not hire another insecure person who will use their bureaucratic position to bolster their fragile sense of worth: let's hire a grown-up instead."

In the end, this is a temperamental thing. I was raised as an engineer: I know people are not beavers, they don't do design and make stuff by genetic instinct. Anything made or run by people is the way it is because someone made a decision to put them there, design them like that, use those materials, run the procedure this way not that way, and so on. It's sometimes fun to imagine a world ruled by abstract powers and processes, but I can't do it when it matters. When it matters, the little corner of the world that has made our lives worse is the way it is because someone decided it would be that way. They should be found, exposed, questioned, if necessary ridiculed and shamed, and the people who hired them, trained then and managed them should have the same treatment. (Yes, people should make better decisions because they don't want their children to be taunted in the school playgrounds.) The process should be changed. But while people believe they can hide behind institutions, "commercial confidentiality" and self-serving laws that stop individual bureaucrats being identified and called to account, then they will be tempted to take the short-cuts, economies and assumptions of compliance-at-our-expense-and-inconvenience that make the bureaucrat's life so much easier.

Top Five Regrets? Top Five Self-Indulgent Spoonfuls of Chicken Soup!

According to something I chanced upon via 8Tracks and tumblr, the top five regrets as expressed by dying people to a nurse are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 

Pass the chicken-soup! Puh-leeese! These may be the Top Five Regrets You Will Say To A Kindly Female Nurse, but it ain't the truth. For one thing, where is the one regret of all men: 6. I wish I'd made love to all the women I ever wanted to. Notice, "made love to", not "been in a deep and meaningful relationship with". I bet women have a similar regret: 6a. I wish I'd said yes more often.

This stuff is as genuine as a death-bed confession to a priest, and probably fulfils the same function: that until we can accept our lives, we can't let go of them and die easy. It's a way of saying "that was how I lived my life, and I hereby atone for it". Which may make you feel better about yourself, but atonement isn't amends. Step Nine requires amends - practical action to put the wrongs you did right. It's a little late for amends if you're talking to the nurse.

1. Living a life "true to yourself", whatever that means, is possible for the rich and people who don't mind being poor or being supported by their partner who is doing the day job to pay the Serious Bills. Most of us can't earn a wage, let alone a decent living, doing what we would really like to do. A few do, and they just let the side down. Sure, you wish you'd had the courage now, but back then you were behaving like a responsible adult and paying the bills. Probably raising kids as well.

2. There's a reason you worked hard. You were scared - rightly or wrongly - of losing your job. You didn't want to go home, because it was too complicated. What you mean is: you wished the rest of your life had been different so you wouldn't have needed to work hard to avoid the bits you didn't like.

3. You wish you'd had the courage to face the consequences of expressing your feelings. I take it we're talking about unrequited and lost love here, and not all the times you wished you'd called someone as asshole. Because not doing that is known as proper restraint.

4. There's a reason you drift away from your friends. They drift away from you. You all have lives, jobs, families. You change. You stop being able to communicate like you used to. You get tired of their acts, and they of yours. (God knows how I ever had any friends at all, in that case.) Suddenly you start having secrets to keep - like how your marriage sucks.

5. The nurse says that people realise that "happiness is a choice". Is it bollocks. In AA we have a phrase: "you can start having a good day any time you choose" which is meant to remind you that most of the time, you're the one holding onto the bad feelings and you can let them drop. Being free of negative emotions is not the same as being happy, though I'd understand if many people thought it was. What the old guys may be saying here is that they wished they had let go of their bad feelings, not harboured resentments and angers and so on. And if this is what they mean, I'll believe it. But I'll bet at the time they thought they had good reason for feeling the way they did.

I'm not implying that the people who say these things are being insincere. They're just doing what they've been doing all their lives: saying and doing what, as a responsible member of their society, they know they should be saying and doing. And feeling better for doing so. Even if they don't believe it.

Casetlejo Rock Sculpture

I'm deep in the generation of a number of complicated ideas at the moment. There's stuff on statistics, algebraic geometry, the idea of revolution and Debord's idea of the spectacle, and various other things. However, it's all still in the oven, and you know what they say about opening oven door when the cakes are cooking.

So here's some pictures of a rock sculpture someone made on the beach at Castelejo on the Algarve. It's got a slightly Andy Goldsworthy look about it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't him.

Whoever it was, is pretty good at this stuff. It didn't survive a couple of tides, but then that's the point of these sculptures: that they are temporary and exist in the documentation.

New Year's Resolutions: The 2012 Mix

Of the Resolutions for 2011, I missed on: city breaks, reading all the books I'd bought but hadn't read yet, project Coriander, and I thought about my age rather more than I should.

City breaks are expensive, especially compared to twice as many days on the coast, because city hotels are expensive, unless I stay in some Holiday-Inn chain at the end of the transport lines. Reading the books is a never-ending task, as I keep buying new ones. Age? I know damn well I'm thinking about that as a way of staying away from women I know I won't choose well and will therefore want to be away from in a very short time. So those items are off the resolutions list. On the other hand, if I don't resolve to take holidays I won't, as not taking holidays is what I do by default, and if I don't count the gym as a resolution, I'm falling into the trap of making last year's resolutions this year's routines. Which is a fine way of filling my diary before I start. So I'm going to drop the ones that don't work and keep the ones that do and I need to make an effort to do.

What do I want to change about what I did in 2011? There's the not-having-a-girlfriend bit, which is a little beyind the scope of New Year's Resolutions. There's the fact that my Saturdays seem to go by in a haze of nothing-much and I have a very high reluctance to venture into the outside world then - unless it's sunny, I wake up early and the Metropolitan Line is working, when I may well go for breakfast in Notting Hill. I need to do something about Saturdays - I know I should be able to do nothing all day - except cook, iron and clean bits of the house (that's "nothing" when you're single) - and not get a guilty conscience about it, but I don't. Call it "Make Saturday Special" for the moment and make it mean something later.

So here's the list for 2012.

1.  Spitalfields isn't Soho - get over it and set off for the Central Line prompt at 17:00

2.  go to the gym at least three days a week

3.  not eat chocolate late in the evening and avoid excess carbs at lunchtime

4.1 take two week-long holidays abroad and a couple of short breaks in the UK

4.2 one weekend, take the sleeper to and from Penzance

5. spend more time researching stuff that's useful to my various projects

6  do my "36 Views of St Mary Axe" photography project

7  read "Finding Time Again" so I've "read Proust"

8. Make Saturday Special - details to follow

9. make the best of the seven-week Olympic period

10. errr... that's it.

(Resolution 9 does not mean what you think it means.)

So let's see how I do with this. I need to do a couple for work as well, but I'm not going to think about those just yet.

The Epistemological Problems of Privacy: (2) Why You Should Have Screamed

Privacy and secrecy are not epistemic concepts, and have nothing to do with ideas about the nature of knowledge. Epistemology is, or has been up to now, a normative theory: it is about what something should be if it is to be knowledge and what sorts of things can be knowledge-holders. What used to make the subject tricky was the need to include the revelations of faith, and what makes it tricky now is that the most useful and successful scientific theories, theories that send satellites to distant planets and identify brain tumours, are actually false. So if knowledge must be true, it excludes our best physical theories and is danger of being trivial, but how do we distinguish between "good" falsity and "bad" falsity? And no, mere predictive accuracy is not enough.

Privacy is the condition of being unobserved by your enemies - those who would seek to use what they observe to frustrate your intentions and plans, to ridicule or otherwise harm or irritate you. (I'm assuming you don't mind being observed by your friends.) Privacy is what we need when we are doing things other people disapprove of, or, of course, when we are living in a police state. Any right to privacy has to be conditional, because murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers and other assorted carteliers don't have a right to expect that they can hatch their plans un-monitored.

Secrecy is the condition of being kept from public knowledge, a secret is something that only a few people know and they intend to keep it that way. The contents of my kitchen cabinet are not a secret because I take no steps to hide them, the contents of an encrypted journal that I keep on my computer are a secret. Until, that is, some reads it and publishes it to my enemies - then it isn't a secret. A friend who says nothing about what they have read is "keeping the secret".

Neither privacy not secrecy feel to me like the kind of ideas that will take the weight of a philosophical debate: some robust, commonsense legal discussion, maybe. Anyway, the key ideas here aren't really secrecy and privacy, what's important is permission and control.

An unstated but driving idea in Western (Greco-Roman) culture is that we can, should and indeed must, control what others know about us. In the past people did so by behaving in a measured, self-controlled manner, not "giving away" their thoughts, feelings or plans, keeping a "poker face", behaving one way in public or in front of their enemies, and another in the supposed "privacy of our home" or with our friends. Many homes were not actually very private places - with servants coming and going at all times. There was little to know about us, simply because very few people did much and that infrequently. There was word-of-mouth amongst traders about people who didn't pay bills, but no credit-rating agencies, and very few people paid taxes or used banks. On the other hand, in a small town, everybody knew everybody else, if only by sight, because they all went to Church Sunday (or Saturday or whenever).

This worked fairly well for thousands of years, until, to pick a symbolic date, the first urban myth about the job applicant who was turned down because the employer's HR snoops found a Facebook photograph of them smoking a spliff on the beach at Goa. There had been fears about Big Brother government databases, but these subsided as governments and IT contractors showed time and time again that they were simply not capable of constructing such things, and as the huge costs of high-quality data cleansing, verification and stewardship dawned on everyone. (I would also like to think that by the 2000's governments realised that such systems would in practice be run offshore in countries over which they had no jurisdiction, or if onshore, then by people who would have no stake in the proper running and data-fill of the systems, and that the security and economic risks were simply too great.)

The issue is about who controls who uses what information about us. It isn't even about ownership of the data: the data a bank has about my current account transactions wouldn't exist without its computers or my activity, so we're both creators and owners of the data. I create it, they store it. Ownership isn't the way into this conundrum. It's data-about-me, and what makes that different from data-about-alpha-centauri is that I am a person, and alpha-centauri isn't. As a Western person, I expect to control the information you have about me - as I allow you to control the information I have about you. Applying this principle, if the banks want unlimited access to the information they gather about us, then in return we get to be able to gather unlimited information about the banks. Which their Directors do not want us to have.

The point is that I provide the bank with information so that it can act on my behalf, and that's it. The bank will use my payment record to make judgements about how much it is willing to lend me and for how long, and that feels like a legitimate use of the data. My record on paying my bills is a legitimate matter of public interest, even if the "public" is somewhat limited. Sending me "targeted" junk mail, or giving me discriminatory pricing based on my behavioural propensities derived from a model based on "my" data amongst others, doesn't feel as legitimate.

None of this has anything to do with the theory of knowledge. It does have to do with the management of information and data, and many of these issues have been raised and addressed. How long should "personal data", which I understand as data-about-people-and-what-we-do, be kept by what kinds of organisation? What protection should various kinds of data have? What purposes can various types of data be used for, without the explicit permission of the person-or-their-activities-it-is-about? Is personal data-driven advertising just a narrowcast version of broadcast advertising or is there a qualititaive difference involved?

Far from being less valuable than, say, pharmaceutical research, personal data is much more valuable to business and the State. Of course, it is transient and by definition non-universalisable, and so not the kinds of facts that science and technology are about. It doesn't tell us about "the world", only about some stranger in another town whom some company thinks will be a sucker for this special offer. Which is cosmically meaningless, even if all those strangers add up to a lot of money.

Perhaps the real task for epistemologists is to develop a criterion for "cosmically meaningful" information: the kind of knowledge that should be defended by the Western Liberal Rationalist knowledge-is-preferable-to-ignorance creed. This might sound simple, but I suspect that if it's simple then it's going to be trivial. I'd like weapons research not to be preferable to ignorance, but how about research into body armour? I'd like to think that medical research is preferable to ignorance, but some of the results are very, very expensive and have marginal effects or don't cure but merely manage symptoms, and the drug companies are very good at PR designed to get such drugs on the NICE list, thus costing the taxpayer money that should be spent elsewhere. David Hume never thought about these issues - nor has anyone had to prior to 1945.

The privacy and secrecy debates in the press and legal circles are a way of having a debate about who controls data-about-me-and-what-I-did. Very, very large sums of money are involved. If Facebook can't use what we "Like" to target advertising at us, it has de minimus financial value as a business, and neither does Google. The commercial basis of the Internet is that it offers highly targeted advertising, but if we can control ourselves out of it, the Internet starts to lose its commercial value. And it employs a lot of people who won't get jobs that pay as well anywhere else. Privacy and secrecy are about "the economy, stupid". Not the theory of knowledge.