This Year's Challenge?

In my first couple of years at The Bank I was always feeling as if there was six month's work for me and then I would be out, as the job would be done. My manager at the time told me that it didn't matter: exactly what we did would simply change, but there would always be work. He lacked the re-assuring bedside manner to deliver the message with conviction, but it's turned out to be very true. In the last three years, I've moved from pricing implementation, to reporting-centered MI, to projects intended to fill in some large gaps left by the IT and data people, to insight analysis, and my latest incarnation is now apprarantly as a product manager. No change in job titles, but some quite real changes in function. The sail of my job description swings with the organisational and political winds.

A little bit of background. When I started working at The Bank, it was dominated by the retail sales function, along with every other financial services company for the last thirty years, which is why the FSA is fining them now over insurance and will be fining them later over Added Value Accounts. Specialist functions such as pricing and product development trembled at the thought that what they had done might have reduced sales. (The same sales the FSA are saying shouldn't have been made.) There was no room for creative thinking about products or promotions: all anyone wanted was a edge on stuffing more down the customers' throats.

It took a change of top management to see that maybe there might be a better way of running things, and sometime last year, product management was duly granted a divorce from sales. It's taken a while for the management to work out what that means for how and what they contribute. The result is that I have become a product development guy with a sideline in insight-focused MI. No more regular reporting, no more projects to make up for the shortcomings of the IT function. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of absent-minded doodling in a meeting followed by Powerpointing the next afternoon, I put together a product outline that people think is a neat idea and needs developing. By me. It's dawning on me that I should be thinking about spending much of the rest of this year developing and shepherding through the NPD process (pretend The Bank really has something that deserves the name for the moment). Which means I have to look like I'm actually a part of what happens there, and I'm not sure I want to be that. Because what has happened there has attracted a lot of attention from the regulators. Do I really believe it's a different organisation? Has Daddy really quit drinking?

The change in priorities is probably a good thing, because I'm getting tired of working round the limitations of The Bank's IT and data capabilities. It's time other people developed some serious chops, or were hired to provide some. If there was some cool software to be used, or a new language to be learned, I might feel more reluctance, but our three-year-old Chinese laptops use Windows XP SP4 and Office 2007. We don't have access to a real programming language - thought VBA deserves less sneers than it gets. So I'm ready to move on. It's very probably this year's challenge.

Keep Feeling Fascination

I buy fashion magazines and I have done ever since forever. Not obessively, but more frequently than the average Aston Villa supporter. I'm not interested in women's fashion. If I was, I would read Vogue, and I don't, exactly because it really is all about the frocks. When I say fashion magazines, I mean i-D, Ten, Pop, Dazed, Dansk, Zoo and the like. Not all of them every month, but at least one of them.

I like looking at the girls. Editorial fashion models are not, however, the kind of girls boys are supposed to like looking at. From time to time I've wondered about that, but not so I'm worried about it. It took reading Ashley Mears' excellent book Pricing Beauty to let me understand what was going on. Editorial models are not chosen to be generically good looking: they are chosen because they have The Look. It's about individuality, personality, a touch of fierce, and being on the edges of mainstream ideas of attractive and good-looking. Editorial models are about being walking modern art. (I don't find Generic Catwalk Girl any more attractive than you do.)

'Fit' and 'hot' are for catalogues, calenders, retailer websites, mass-market companies, Yoga and health magazines. If you want to be hit in the eyeball by the difference, go into one of the Soho fashion newsagents: look at the girls on the front of the edgy magazines and then at the yoga and health magazine covers. The Yoga Fit women look pleasant, and trim, and bland - like someone else's wife. The editorial models look as if they are going to be Trouble and Wilful and occasional Amazing Sex. That's The (Editorial) Look.

In real life there's a thing called The Look as well: for me, it's about sex and fascination. I don't mean a bubbly Mark One Fit Girl - though they are perfectly good company. I mean whatever it is that makes me look twice, and then again, and then maybe cross the line to creepy old man (or perhaps "Oh my god, that's the first time a man's looked at me like that for six months"). There's no formula for that Look, and you and I would very possibly disagree on a given example.

I enjoy the sight of a Yummy Mummy, a Mark One Fit Girl, or an NSNF (Nice Smile, Nice Figure), but they don't make my pulse skip a beat and remind me that my life is missing something. They don't make me think of hotel rooms, damp sheets and doing it just one more time just because. It's the girls and women with That Certain Something who make me feel the emptiness of my evenings. It's the women with a look, who reward being gazed at, who fascinate me, it's those women who make feel the empty evening that waits for me every day. As well as being an addict and alcoholic, I'm an aesthete, and for me a woman is both a person and an art object.

Days can go by, even weeks, and in the limited commuter-groove life I lead I never see one woman with The Look(s), except in magazines or on the Internet. And in real life, I know she's a person, with hang-ups, baggage, attitudes, bad experiences and that make it impossible for someone to maintain a stable, long-term, ring-signalled relationship. The same for me, of course, and it makes both of us wonder if whatever good times there might be will be worth the effort and the bad times that surely will be.

(Both pictures in Spring 2012 Tank Magazine.)

Heartbeats / Can't Find My Way Home: Songs That Get You From The Start

The other day I put the Blind Faith album on my Nano. I hadn't listened to it for many years, and it came over my Bose earphones straight out of my schooldays. Blind Faith was Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Rick Gretsch, and they were the first "supergroup" (the other was a band called Humble Pie, but they never really convinced me). One track, Can't Find My Way Home, took me off to another place entirely, which given that I was commuting to work at the time was a major feat. 

Here is the original album version...

 For some reason I thought of Jose Gonzales' version of Heartbeats...

 

Both songs are acoustic and have similar structures, with multiple repeats at the middle eight, and their lyrics barely make sense in an evocative way. Heartbeats is a strong song, as shown by the number of people who have covered it already and the beating it can take at their hands.

Heartbeats is about, well, what, exactly? "One night to push and scream / And then relief" could be about childbirth, and the song could be about the parents coming together only for the birth and then splitting "We had a promise made / Four hands and then away". I'll go with it being a hectic and heady one-night stand between two people who are attracted to each other, couldn't be in a relationship, are confused about why they are there and need to "speed up truth" to resolve what they are feeling. I'm guessing something like this is what most people think it's about if they don't think about what it's about.

The lyrics of Can't Find My Way Home sound like a man asking a woman to stop being a distant princess and let herself get into a relationship with him. But I wonder if it isn't actually about someone on drugs: the throne being the distance a drug user gets from the real world, and quitting drugs being "leave your body alone". Again, I'll go with the love lyrics. The song, the whole thing, is a musical evocation of what it is to be "near the end and I just ain't got the time / And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home". The guitar tune, chords and Winwood's scat singing then become an essential part of the song. 

Which as I write this, I realise is also true about Heartbeats. Seriously. Play any version on You Tube - except the Knife's - and those opening chords and tune get you at the start. It's what these two songs have in common and so few songs do. Enjoy both.

My Ideal Philosophy Degree: What Makes a Philosopher?

Every now and then, I've tried to design my ideal philosophy degree. There would be a fair chunk of history, and not just the history of philosophy, but some economic, military, social and scientific history as well. If you don't know anything about seventeenth-century England, you won't get the context of all those debates about duty, obligations and virtue that the moralists had. Under post-modern capitalism those ideas are more or less a joke, but when the King can demand that you put a chunk of your money and people at risk in his latest idea for a war, and it's your duty to do so because he's the King and you swore an oath, then the idea of obligation and duty becomes very meaningful. As well as costly. And of course the debate was conducted in the abstract, because if they had named the issue openly, it would have been treason.

My ideal course would have a lot of history because that was the bit I didn't appreciate and missed when I studied the subject - and perhaps 'studied' implies rather more reading than I did. The students on my course should come away with  a party trick: some obscure - to the general public - school or philosopher that they can impress dinner-party guests and strangers forevermore. And they should have been put in the way of reading as many of the classics as we can expect an undergraduate to read - that's part of the bit where they get an education.

Which leaves the bit where they get an idea about what being a philosopher is about. Most of the people in philosophy departments are teachers and scholars. At some point, they decided they liked the academic life, they could network effectively in it, could work the system and also seemed to be quite good at understanding what Leibniz, or Roger Bacon, or Heidegger or whoever, was going on about. So they became scholars of that thinker. Others find they like a certain branch of the subject and enjoy the compare-and-contrast involved in teaching the thoughts of the creative philosophers. They have jobs in philosophy departments but they aren't necessarily philosophers.

What makes a philosopher is an attitude of informed scepticism, a distrust of authority and all its works and pronouncements, a respect for logical consistency and conceptual coherence (the philosopher's version of having a sense of style), the desire and ability to see the world more clearly than others do, and a desire to understand some part of the world on their own terms - or in the grand manner of Aristotle and Hegel, all of the world. Since the world is more complicated now that it was, and since there are more people and organisations making more self-interested and dubious claims than there ever were, and there are more branches of empirical knowledge and theoretical speculation than ever before, this is a larger task than it used to be, and takes a lot more background knowledge.

One starting point is the ability to identify bogus arguments and all the tricks of informal argument and presentation. Another is to have a guided tour round the follies and promotions (in the evil eighteenth-century sense of the word) of the past - you may rightly suspect a reference to Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds coming, and there it was. A couple of case-studies of the irrational behaviour of authority - the Lille-Reed affair, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory - wouldn't go amiss, as would a brisk description of street con-tricks and Wall Street Ponzi schemes. I would want my students to feel confident enough to conclude that if, after careful examination and diligent enquiry into whatever it is, it still doesn't make sense, then it's a trick, an illusion, or just plain downright craziness.   

I've always thought that there should be three compulsory courses that run for the first two years: 1) The History of Philosophy and its Worldly Context, 2) Logic, Rhetoric and Epistemology, and 3) Law, Morality and Politics. Now I would add in the second year, 4) The Sceptical Citizen: Data, Statistics and Common Sense. The third year would have two projects: one would be an extended essay on the student's chosen party trick, and the second would be the examination of some recent scam, hype or madness. There are, after all, enough of them.

Downloading Books Is Killing Literature - Or Not

Apparently you can download books now. Illegally, that is. I have to think Amazon knew that would happen, as did all the publishers who agreed to make Kindle and Apple editions of their books. Large companies who foresee a consequence of their decision and still makes that decision desire the consequence. Large companies who don't foresee consequences are just dumb or careless. This isn't true about non-millionaire people and your uncle's bakery, because they can't afford lawyers and programmers and all the other people who could have foreseen or prevented the consequence. The money guys can and it's their job.

Medieval copyists complained that once Gutenberg had set up the type for a book on one of his presses, that was it. No more work for them. I bet they put up quite a fight as well. Which worked out well for them. Every time publishing technology changes, the chances of people getting stuff for free increases.

The music industry has been bitching since forever. If it really cared about free access to music, it would stop 8Tracks, Last FM, You Tube and all the others. It doesn't. They're promotion channels. One day I may buy a Ke$ha CD, because I've been watching her videos on You Tube. Otherwise I wouldn't go near it. I suspect the music industry is doing the same as the tobacco industry, which used to sell masses of cheap cigarettes to fat guys with addresses in Malta and then say it was shocked, shocked! to see those cigarettes on sale in the poorer parts of Italy, all of Romania and all over Africa. If they didn't say that, governments might think they were conspiring to avoid paying taxes. I'm not sure about the music industry's motives, but one day we'll hear something and say.... ahhh, so that's why.

The real question is this: what are you objecting to being downloaded? The data or the story (music, movie, whatever)? Downloading data isn't stealing anything, it's making a copy. The copyright owner may have put restrictions on making it available for copying, but then their case is against the person who made the copy available. That's who the contracts are between. Copying data is not the same as stealing a physical book. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Stealing a book is stealing a bunch of paper and ink. You deprive someone of the paper and ink, and the reason copying isn't stealing is that you don't deprive the owner of the original of anything. If all you do is copy the file to your hard drive, there's no theft. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Once I open the file and start reading / listening / watching or using the program - that's when the theft occurs. Because nobody buys a bunch of paper and ink, they buy a story. They don't buy a plastic coaster, they buy music. They don't buy an EXE file, they buy software. It's the use that creates the theft from the author and the publisher. Stealing the book is theft from the retailer. Reading it is theft from the publisher and author.

The catch is this: when you borrow a book from a friend, or when your children read a book on your shelves, that's exactly what they are doing: stealing the story from the author. You aren't stealing the physical book, but you are stealing the story from the publisher and author.

Since no judge in the world, nor any government, is going to pass a law or allow a civil ruling that says a child can't read their parents' books or that friends can't lend each other DVD's, what everyone pretends they get upset about is the medium. Which was kinda acceptable for books and vinyl, but is hard to argue for basically costless data. After all, the whole point of going digital is that it reduces the marginal costs of the medium to almost zero. See how the exact law gets a little tricky to frame? It's very technology-dependent.

However, by now we should have a fair appreciation that putting a Kindle file in your Dropbox public folder for friends and family is the same as lending them the book but putting it on a Google-searchable filestore for anyone anywhere to download is not. If we can define or explain the difference between a real (old-skool) friend and a new-age Facebook non-qualifying friend, that would tie it down a little more.

All we would need is for the media giants to be sensible and accept the difference.

Sunday, I Ran 2.4 Kms Without Getting Breathless

Big deal, I hear you say. You do a "10K" in forty minutes. Then you change into your gym gear for some serious running. But I hadn't been able to run without getting breathless for the last nine weeks or so. Since before Christmas. Nine weeks ago I hopped on the treadmill, set off at 11.6kph for two miles as I had been doing for a while and was gasping, heaving for breath after 800 metres. I had to stop three times even to manage a mile and a half at 9.6kph. It got worse.

Four weeks ago I did something I have never done before and you don't see many people doing at all, which was quitting Clarissa's Tuesday Spin class. I simply lost the will to carry on. One morning scurrying down the back streets of Waterloo to Blackfriars Bridge I very nearly just sat down on the pavement and stopped. My legs didn't want to go on walking. I haven't been spinning since.

I've only started to get my strength back over the last couple of weeks. I couldn't even walk up stairs without suffering loss of breath and heavy aches in my legs. I have never felt that bad. Of course it was a damn virus. Of course I blame the damn offices.

So when I trotted along at 9.6kph Sunday for 2.4kms and didn't feel any strain, it was a sign that I may actually be turning back into a human being again. Instead of this sick thing I was.

Young Adult - Diabolo Cody, Jason Reitman, Charlize Theron

I saw this film about three weeks ago and I still haven't quite sorted it out. I like the director's other movies, and Diabolo Cody is my kind of writer. They made Juno together and that was enough for me. I was a confused by Young Adult, and when I'm confused, I turn to Roger Ebert. I don't always agree with him (especially over the grossly over-rated Synechdoche: New York) but his reviews often help me clarify what I'm thinking.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis, a late-thirties freelance writer of adolescent novels who lives in an high-rise apartment in Minneapolis, drinks too much and her battle prep includes manicures and pedicures. She's divorced, behind on delivering the final novel in the series that's been paying her bills, and suddenly gets a mail from her high-school boyfriend Buddy Slade  announcing the birth of his daughter. Off she goes to the baby shower, or whatever they call it, to bring the boyfriend back with her. 

Would a real-ish Mavis really do those things? Well, here's the painful identification bit. Mavis reminded me of me when I was her age - except I was prettier than Mavis and didn't drink Coca-Cola to get over hangovers. We both had relationships from our youth we held onto as a kind of fantasy, neither of us were happy in our jobs, neither of us were happy where we lived, both of us drank too much, but we hadn't crossed the line. I knew my unresolved crush was married and had children, and living a life more suited to her than any I could provide. Somewhere in the bit of my brain where reality rules, I knew there would be no reviving anything. But very few people have the grasp of reality I have - something I've been told a number of times, as if it's a bad thing - and without that, yes, I would have set off after her. So I accepted Mavis' homecoming both as a plot premise and as an emotional truth.

That connection was totally lost when I was asked to believe she would stick around after meeting the dreadful, gender-shaming betamax that her high school boyfriend has turned into. A man who bottles his wife's breast-pumped baby milk, and who quit drinking out of solidarity with her during the pregnancy? No. Had I actually met my unresolved fantasy, who I'm pretty sure is an exemplary wife and mother, I would have muttered something about having the wrong address and left quickly. The real exemplary mother wasn't the fantasy. So I couldn't buy Mavis not reacting the same way, and I lost the connection.

When she's visiting her parents, Mavis says she thinks she may be an alcoholic. Ebert believes this. I didn't. Alcoholics have a streak of self-pity, even after years in recovery and a good few runs up the Steps. Charlize Theron is just too tough to be a victim. I think Jason Rietman wanted it that way. Because he gets to have her behave as an alcoholic woman with neither judgement nor protective vanity, but without us emotionally believing it - because Charlize Theron's body language just doesn't communicate it. 

Young Adult is about how awful small town life is. Since you're not allowed to say that - unless it's made unreal by being spoken by a teenage girl - this has to be disguised as a Homecoming movie. Homecoming movies are either like Sweet Home Alabama, where the local-girl-made-good-in-the-big-city learns to value her home-town roots and high school boyfriend, or lead up to a Revelatory Climax in which we discover that a) the heroine was a bitch or b) the heroine was molested by her father. There's a Revelatory Climax in this movie, where we discover that the heroine nearly had the boyfriend's child, but it was spontaneously aborted. I didn't buy that as anything but a script fix, so I ignored it. It's just there to confuse us. The real climax is the speech from Collette Wolfe's character Sandra Freehauf to the effect that, yes, the small town life utterly sucks, and will Mavis please take her to the Mini Apple. Mavis says no, but the speech gets her right back on track. "Thanks, I needed that" she says.

That I did identify with. And the bit where she gets out. With a completed novel. The couple of scenes where she writes in diners and fast food joints, and steals lines from the very people who make up her audience? Those I liked, those actually swung. The film ends with her Young Adult novel's character leaving behind high-school and heading into the real world with high hopes and a couple of ego bruises. Is this supposed to be Mavis? Or is it just her book? I think that's another ambiguity to make the story palatable. Because what awaits Mavis isn't pretty: she isn't going to be happy, satisfied or content - except for a few brief moments. You understand I'm speaking from experience here. She's going to spend the next forty years showing up and faking it. Which is no way to end a general-release movie.

And that's the thing with this movie: there's no-one to like and connect with. Because that would engage our sympathies with them and against the other: with the small town, against Mavis; with Mavis, against the small town. For some reason Cody and Reitman wanted us to do neither. Which makes it more real, but for that reason, less satisfying.