What’s Wrong With Mediocrity?

I read that the Conservatives are promising to make children learn their times tables (up to 12 at least please, 15 would be better) by the time they are eleven, and also to stamp out mediocrity in schools. I’m all for children learning their tables, but mediocrity gets an undeserved rap.

What’s wrong with mediocrity? It means average, not very good. Which is what most people are at most of the things they do, including me. By definition, excellence can only be for the few (although one generation’s excellence can be another generation’s passing grade, as has happened in the music world. Once upon a time, very few orchestras could play the Rite of Spring, and now student orchestras knock out technically flawless performances as a matter of routine.)



(Not polished, but not out of tune and missing stuff either.)

Being good at X means you have to give up the time needed to become even competent at a whole bunch of Y’s. Being professional at X means you will be unable to do most of the Y’s in the world.

But that’s not the point. The point is that Capitalism needs mediocrity. You and I need the next guy and gal walking past us to be mediocre. We need them to be average and content with a mediocre lot (actually I don’t care if they are content, just as long as they don’t organise and revolt) because our lives depend on the provision of services and products that can only be made by processes that need to be run by people prepared to do routine and often entirely ceremonial jobs that only make sense in the context of a large organisation. We don’t want people to be creative, we need them to be able to tolerate huge amounts of boredom.

Specifically, I don’t want people choosing quality culture, I want them at home watching junk, so I can get a ticket when I want to without too much forward planning. I don’t want exceptional people, I need most of them to be concerned with their own personal and family affairs, with raising their children and with doing their jobs.

Mediocrity is like marriage: it’s something other people should definitely do. Sadly, just as I am far too shallow, self-absorbed, narcissistic, selfish and Peter Pan-ish to be worthy of marriage, I am also socially inept, introverted, pretentious, don’t know how to relax and have fun, and just plain too intellectual, vain and with a little OCD, and so I want to be better than 97.5% of the human race at whatever it is I choose to do. Of course I’m not and I’m delusional, but I have a better chance of being so if the other 39 people can’t even hold a camera steady and couldn’t sweat an onion without burning it.

January 2015 Review

“Has every day this week felt like it’s lasted 15 hours?” Asked a colleague as we exited the building the first working Friday of the year. Yes it did.

It’s been so cold this month that just getting through the day was enough. At this time of year, the animals are more sensible than us: burrow deep, stay warm. (You want to find a gene that will unlock all the bigger workings of the genome? Find the hibernation gene.)

I hit my seventh (!) session of sports massage at Sports Massage Zone on Throgmorton St. Before Christmas I decided to get the aches, tension and accumulated abuse out of my legs. Whereas you get tense shoulders and back, I know enough not to do that, but I take it out on my legs instead. I had ropey muscles where you don’t even know you have muscles, and the wonderful Maggie has been digging her elbows into all of it. I’m getting there, but it’s painful. And slow. And undoing many, many years of bad habits.

I watched Burn Notice S7 and Inspector de Luca on DVD; Birdman, Whiplash and Wild at the Curzon Soho; Foxcatcher and American Sniper at Cineworld.

I read Philip Kerr’s A German Requim, Elmore Leonard’s Swag, John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder, Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation, Hubert Dreyfus’ Skillful Coping, and the first half of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.

Saturday lunchtimes, I cooked: Kidneys Turbigo; Ragout of lamb with borlotti beans; Liver venetian. And Sis and I ate at Herefordroad in Bayswater.

Despite all this activity, I’m still haunted by a sense of inactivity. I need to revise my CV and LinkedIn, but just can’t get worked up enough about it. And there’s a mysterious patch on the kitchen wall I really need to talk to the insurance company about.

February is going to be just as cold. And I haven’t bought any tickets for the Sadlers Wells Flamenco festival, which will be the first time in about eight years that I haven’t gone. But then again: do you know how much sports massage costs?

The Illusion of Marketing Segmentation

One of the things that Insight Analysts are expected to produce from the data are useful customer segments. The conventional wisdom is this:

Customer segments are differentiated by the customers’ different requirements for your product. The value proposition for any product or service is different in different market segments, and the price strategy must reflect that difference. Your price realization strategy should include options that tailor your product, packaging, delivery options, marketing message and your pricing structure to specific customer segments, in order to capture the additional value created for these segments.

Publishers have been doing this since Gutenberg. It makes sense for cultural production: books, music, paintings, wallpaper, paint colours, rugs, furniture, plate design, perfume, clothes, pens, watches and so on. But for domestic water? How do you vary “clean water”? The logistics of water supply mean that we all get the same water.

And just how different can a telephone service really be? It’s all the same copper and fibre, and no matter what price plan you’re on, you’re going through the same switches. Those price plans are there to smooth the usage out. Data services can be made faster or slower, but not telephone calls. Are Hertz “segmenting” when they offer you a range of cars from a Ford Fiesta to a Mercedes E-class? Insofar as a car is a cultural object, yes they are, but the service you get, from online reservation to them checking it for damage and petrol tank fullness on return is the same.

Airlines don’t segment their customers when they provide First, Business and Economy: they segment their cabins and hope there are enough people willing to pay those prices. If they researched their customers, they would hear overwhelmingly that we all want 36 inches or more leg-room, no middle seats, no reclining seats, and either no children under about 18 outside a special sound-proofed part of the cabin. Like hell airlines are going to do any of that. 

The truth is that in most cases you can’t "tailor your product, packaging, delivery options, marketing message and your pricing structure to specific customer segments”. A supermarket can’t identify who will take home delivery of groceries until it offers it, and offer it at a sensible price and under sensible terms. The most it can do is conduct some interviews and surveys, and everyone knows the problems with those. 

An airline can’t identify who will pay for flexible return or more legroom: it can only offer it and see. Or conduct those same dubious surveys. A bank, however, can make a good guess about who it is prepared to lend money to. A supermarket can make a good guess about who might be tempted by an offer of a discount on Pampers. Because unlike the airline, who don’t have a clue about their passengers' disposable income, a bank does. And so do supermarkets, at least for some of their customers.

But companies with access to really good MI are few and far between. Banks. Insurance companies. Supermarkets (includes Amazon). Two out of three of those industries are basically commodities. And strictly, so are retailers. (Think carefully: the shopping experience is the same, whether you buy the branded or the Value Range, fresh baked or sliced white - you’re pushing the same trolley round the same aisles and standing in the same queues. Supermarkets provide a commodity service: what they sell sometimes isn’t.)

It’s not customers who drive segments, it’s producers and providers who take the risk of creating them. A company can create a product no-one wants (I’m looking at you, Sinclair C5), and it can create a product everyone thought they wanted until they got it and then they realised it wasn’t that great (hello, Kindle), and there will be those (hiya Steve Jobs) who say it can create a product that no-one knew they wanted until it was there, but I’m not so sure. I think every product has a fore-runner of some kind. The theatre has spun off the cinema, radio, TV, videotape and DVD. All come from the same desire to have dramatic entertainment.

And those companies will have absolutely no idea who will take up the products - unless the company has a strong cultural image (take a bow Apple). That’s how Burberry got themselves into a mess a while back.

Jazz and Whiplash: Review

A couple of months ago a friend of mine told me about a movie he'd seen in which a young man drives himself crazy trying to play drums like Buddy Rich. I saw it last weekend. it was a well-made, beautifully-shot and dressed movie, nice editing, the script, the acting, all top-notch. But. They didn't push the envelope. On the level of content, it is entirely nonsensical, on an emotional level it works rather well.

What this film is really about is how Academia has wrecked jazz as a music form. Let’s get this more or less straight: jazz ended with On The Corner.


Miles was to jazz what Jean-Luc Godard was to movies: On The Corner was his fin du cinema moment from Weekend. Oh sure, plenty of people went on playing stuff they were playing back in the 1960’s, and Wynton Marsalis came along and re-cycled time-no-changes while Miles was in hiding during the 1970’s, but nobody did anything new. Miles, Trane and the avant-garde guys did it all in the 1960’s.

The point of jazz and blues is that it’s freedom within a genre: they played blues, ballads, hard bop, cool, swing, modal, time no changes, or free, and they did it in their own manner and with their own voice. That’s why even a newcomer can identify Miles, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Ron Carter, Wynton Kelly, Tony Williams and about fifty other players after just a few notes. Those musicians had voices as distinctive as any composer. They learned as much technique as they needed to make the music they wanted to make.

That’s not what happens now. Listen to Giant Steps.


It took Coltrane three months to figure out how to solo over those fast-changing chords. Let me say that another way: it took the one of the most creative jazz musicians that ever lived three months to figure out how to solo over those chords.Yet young saxophonists are expected to be able to play a Coltrane-like solo over those chords before they graduate. They have amazing techniques, which are entirely beside the point. If Giant Steps has to be used at all, and not treated as a musical dead-end, they should be expected to figure out their solo over those chords. Coltrane’s solo was a solution to a problem: how do you play a hard bop solo over so many chords? Solved. Next problem: how do you play a different solo over those chords? It may be the Koybayoshi Maru of music problems, but it’s better than learning to play a bunch of changes quickly.

And Giant Steps lead to the chord-scale system. It’s the reason all contemporary jazz sounds cold, identical, soul-less and un-musical. Because the musicians are so darn occupied trying to remember what scale they play over E maj 9-5 that they forget to play a tune and a feeling. A real musician can play one note and make you feel an emotion. With chord-scale, the musicians don’t get time to get to the emotions.

Chord-scale, and polished technique, is what gets taught in the colleges. So there’s an analogical, emotional truth in Whiplash: the tutors might not actually shout at the students - and they would lose their jobs if they talked as JK Simmons does - but what they teach crushes them into moulds just as surely.

The ending of Whiplash was yet another bully-and-victim reconciliation scene. Those don't happen in real life and everyone over the age of about 12 knows it. I wanted to believe it, even though I knew it was hokum.

The "good job” speech that Simmons character gets is utter twaddle, both as an author's message and from that character. Which brings me to what I really didn't like about the film. I lost count of the number of times the JK Simmons character told the Joe-Jones-threw-a-cymbal-at-the-young-Charlie-Parker story. (And as my friend said: he did it once, not eighteen times a day for a year.) The teacher's excuse was that he was trying to find, or make, the next Bird. And that's arrogant beyond all measure. It's not a teacher's job to produce another Charlie Parker, it's a teacher's job to teach the frickin' trade skills and knowledge at the speed required. It's the artist's job to become an artist. Teachers are there to set a pace, but not to push. If the student can’t keep up, you let them ring out. You don’t throw chairs at them.

Here's my idea. Talented young man who can ace the technical stuff but wants to play his own music. Get girls, has friends, but those are just entertainment. Fifty minutes of all the different kinds of music in New York. Some glimpses of how the various scenes (jazz, Latin, etc) work, what the economics are. He's trying to find what Miles called a "direction". His friends join orchestras to play other people's music, or bands to play genre music. His girlfriends do what they do - office jobs, whatever. And then he hears it. Five bars. Boom! And we're off. Because that's how creativity works: we build on what others do. And when he finds his musical direction, he finds The Girl as well, because that's the kind of happy ending the audiences like. Everybody behaves well, and nobody gets pregnant or shouts. The most we get is puzzlement: why would anyone want to miss out on jobs and careers just to find their own music? And that is what the story explains.

Just a thought. I mean, it's not within the realm of conventional cinema... but what if?

December 2014 Review

Am I the only person who realises that Dickens was commissioned by the retailers of central London to write a story that promoted the true, consumerist, meaning of Christmas? A Christmas Carol is as blatant a piece of PR as anyone should ever recognise. Scrooge is quite right: Humbug! The whole damn country shuts down for about a week to ten days.

The best thing that happened in December is that I finally threw off the colds and food poisoning I’d had for the last two months, and then had to address the extra poundage I was carrying as a result of all that carb-heavy comfort eating. It took while for the guys at what’s now my regular lunchtime cafe to get that I just wanted meat-and-salad, but that’s what I eat now. Do it consistently and it works.

I read FUSE: The Russia Shift by Johnston and Greenwood; Rupert Smith’s eye-opening The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World; Neville Shute’s On The Beach; Richard Bentall’s Doctoring The Mind; Mat Ruff’s Bad Monkeys; Unziker and Jones’ Bankrupting Physics; and Philip Kerr’s March Violets, and The Pale Criminal.

I watched all of Elementary S1, Sons of Anarchy S5 and True Detective S1; we had the annual Peter Jackson family outing to Cineworld Feltham to see The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies; and The Grandmaster and Electricity at the Curzon Soho.

Sis and I had the worst supper we’ve ever had at the Golden Dragon in Chinatown, and I made it up to her with supper at Hix. Four of us from work filled a table at Tay Do on the Kingsland Road with starters and had an excellent meal; I had lunch at Randall and Auben, and at Balans as a friend knocked on the window and waved me in as I was passing by.

I worked the days between Christmas and New Years', using them to revise my SAS Base and document exactly how much I don't like using it. And I made sure I went training so I didn't make the mistake of taking a fortnight out and needing a month to get back to normal.

Coral and Boots: The City

Yep, more photographs with silly captions.

I've been on a streak with the Riemman-Roch essay and a couple of other things, and haven't had the time to write about anything else. Besides which, I've said a lot of the things I want to say - even if I have to go back and remind myself I said them.

Je Suis Charlie: Pas Peur

What's really sickening is the way that the security service and police use such random tragedies to pitch for bigger budgets and more powers.

The thugs who shot those journalists were not terrorists in the way that the members of an IRA Active Service Unit were terrorists. The IRA had political demands, objectives and plans, the "Islamist" terrorists have nothing: they have no political demands, and no State or organisational backing. They are a-political and un-aligned. They aren't terrorists because the last thing they want is to get rid of the State that pays their welfare cheques. They are young men with what will soon become a recognised psychiatric condition.

This is the right sentiment:



The sooner these random killings are seen as the work of emotionally-disturbed people, and not as some kind of religious or political protest, the sooner the various States will get the proper perspective on what's happening.