Hot hot hot. Especially the 1st, when I spent the afternoon and evening swimming, at a meeting and then had supper in Rosa’s. Any time I moved, sweat poured off me. But these things have to be done.
I read Curationism: How Curating Took Over The Art World and Everything Else by David Blazer; The True Story of the Fabulous Killjoys; Jose Saramago’s Death at Intervals; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Adam Warren’s Empowered Unchained V1; Hot Naked Kittens: Stories by Delicious Tacos; Andy Clark’s Being There.
Sis and I had Supper at Mosob on the Harrow Road, where were complimented on how well we cleared the good stuff off the plates without filing ourselves to bursting on the soft Eritrean bread.
I had meetings with solicitors, the family IFA, my nephew and Sis about wills, investments and powers of attorney. All of which is a little more attention-taking than you might think. And fitted in an emergency visit to the orthodonist.
Spontaneously, I bought a neat Hugo Boss rectangular watch and went to talk to Number Six in trendy Dray Walk, opposite Rough Trade Records, about a square Tsovet I liked. This is called “distraction”. And I probably needed it.
Thursday, 13 August 2015
Monday, 10 August 2015
Movies I Have Seen An Unhealthy Number of Times
(Inspired by Hadley Freeman’s book on 80’s movies, some of which she’s seen way too many times, and most of which were written and directed by John Hughes. None of mine were.)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1974) Loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, Elliott Gould shambles his way through early 1970’s Los Angeles. The photography, by Vilmos Sigmund, is gorgeous, and the script, by Leigh Brackett, has a memorable line or exchange in every scene. I saw this twice in the week it came out at the Odeon in Exeter, and haven’t stoppped watching it since. The critics didn’t like Altman’s Marlowe when the film came out, but as time has passed, this movie has become a legend. It’s flip, cool and has a great payoff at the end.
Dog Town and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001) I once contemplated a post called “Everything I Know About Excellence I Learned From This Movie”. I didn’t write the post, but I probably used the thought as an excuse to watch it again. Tony Hawk, or whoever the New Guy is now, can do tricks that the original Z-Boys would never have thought possible, but the point is, these guys were the first to work out how to do an arial spin out of a swimming pool. There were no half-pipes in your local council playground like there are now. And they were better then than almost all the kids at the park or even on the South Bank are now. Above all the story is about how to get good at something, and the importance of looking good while doing it.
The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999) From the opening shot you can feel the heat, the humidity and the weirdness. John Travolta is a maverick undercover army policeman who happens to be there when the General’s daughter is found dead. Showing a total lack of judgement, the Army puts him in charge of the investigation. He gets teamed up with Madeline Stowe as a fiesty female detective, with whom he had an previous affair. “Brussels. We’ll always have Brussels,” Travolta reminds her. James Woods as a gay PsyOps colonel, a bondage dungeon, a painting cat and a bunch of great lines, plus an outstanding performance from Travlota. “My father was a drunk, a womaniser and a gambler: I worshipped the man” he tells Woods with all sincerity. Great lines, glowing photography, fantastic sets, and justice triumphing at the very end.
Grand Prix (John Frankenhiemer, 1966) In fifty years, nobody has made a better film, or produced better live-action footage, of motor racing. And that includes all the on-board cameras in Formula One for television. The 1960’s were the last decade of gentleman’s motor racing: the season was about ten races long, with most in Europe, one in America and one in South Africa. The film’s version of the Italian Grand Prix was eerily prescient of the actual 1967 race, when Jim Clark lost a lap and made it all back up to take the lead, and John Surtees in theYamura Honda really did win by overtaking out the last corner before the finish line. Everything else is pretty much fiction. Frankenhiemer followed the actual F1 circus from race to race, and many real racing drivers make cameo appearances. I watch it when I’m feeling down, and it never fails to lift me up.
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) I came out of seeing this movie when it was released and felt more alive than I had for several years. It was the mid-Ninteties and I was in early recovery, but I saw a lot of other movies then that didn’t have that effect. The film alludes to Basqiuat’s drug-taking, but doesn’t get the sheer scale of his debauchery and chaotic behaviour. You have to read the books for that. Schnabel was making a film about Basquiat’s art and the art scene in New York at the turn of the Eighties, so I’m with him on leaving out Basquiat's excess. My favourite passage starts with Anina Nosei visiting Basquiat’s flat and looking at his drawings, and moves on to him producing his first great works in the basement of her gallery. Apparantly, Basquiat’s estate wouldn’t let them use originals, so Schnabel and his assistants re-created his paintings for the movie. Compare this with the documentary, Downtown 88, and it looks glossier, but has the same feel. Schnabel did a good job.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (Ben Nicholson, 2009) I liked Dan Flavin’s stuff before I did my O-levels. I have the catalogue from the Kinetics exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (I think half London went to that one). For some reason I lost track of art in my thirties and then made a concerted effort to catch up again in my Forties. I have been on the Contemporary Art Society coach tours. What changed in the time I was away was the importance of the art market, especially for contemporary art. The major buyers are hedge funds, investment houses and other rich people, plus own-account art traders, and for them, it’s a business. They could lose a few million on their holdings of, say, Gerhard Richter, but then they could lose just as much on their holdings of General Motors or HSBC. And Ben Nicholson does a top job of taking us round the players in the market circa 2008, most of whom are still major players and artists now. There’s lots of art on display, lots of interviews and the odd bit of self-indulgence. Just the sort of thing I like.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse S2) (Edward Bennet, 1988) In which by some miracle, a bunch of English actors and film crew channel the exact cynicism of Raymond Chandler to perfection. The cast is ridiculous, from Suzanne Bertish at her most controlled, to a young Liz Hurley, and John Thaw playing Morse at his most depressed, cynical and despairing. “Well, they put me on these things when they smell a corpse. One file... anyone. Two files... Ainly or McKay. I'm the three file man... No, she's dead.” Set in the well-off upper-middle classes and oozing with Morse’s dislike of them, in the end, it’s about a man pulling himself out of his own despondency and solving the case. It’s about privilege and dishonesty and a side rip to London where we can see a flash West End estate agent showing tenants round Chelsea Harbour. (Cutting edge stuff at the time.) “We ought to be able to arrest him for his taste, but we can’t,” comments Morse.
Civilisation: The Skin of Our Teeth (Kenneth Clarke, 1969) He wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this episode now. Clarke was the last of the great Hegelian art critics, for whom “culture” meant Greece, Rome, the Catholic Church, and above all the Renaissance. In this episode he looks at the coastal and island Christian communities of the post-Roman days, and it’s the light and images of those islands and beaches that triggers a whole bunch of childhood memories of English coastal holidays for me. Was Clark right? Did Western civilisation survive because of these isolated monasteries? No. Mostly it survived because the Arabs in Constantinople preserved and developed the literary legacy of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years while the European world seemed to be suffering a minor Ice Age that sapped the life out of it. Love or hate Clarke’s thesis, the imagery of this episode conveys the beauty and spirituality of those remote locations.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell,1994) Every scene has a great line. It looks fabulous and everyone is pretty. The prettiest people have the most problematical love lives. Yep, it must be a Richard Curtis movie. It’s basically a contemporary costume drama starring Hugh Grant looking gorgeously foppish and English, which is why the rest of the world loved it, with a sharp portrayal of the love life of an attractive young man about town, which is why I loved it. The critical scene is “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”, in which we see Grant’s previous girlfriends, who are the most shallow, shrill, awful bunch of women ever collected round one table. Without that scene you’re going to spend the whole movie wondering why Grant hasn’t been snapped up by some well-bred Eight. With it, you know what he’s avoiding. And if you haven’t had a morning scene like the ones with Andie McDowell in the country pub or the Ritz - but maybe not in such glam locations or with Andie McDowell - then, my friend you do not know the bitter-sweet tastes of love. The most gorgeous shot in the whole film is looking downstream on the Thames just before we cut to Grant and McDowell in her hotel room. (“I think I can resist you: you’re not that cute”. Yea right.)
I could add a whole bunch more that fall under ‘slightly less obsessive’: The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), An American In Paris (Vincente Minelli, 1951), The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), A Few Good Men, (Rob Reiner,1992), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999), quite a few more I can’t remember right now, and of course the entire post 1980’s contemporary films of Eric Rohmer.
What if anything on earth links all of these films? The leading character is usually an attractive single man, who is an outsider with something to prove to himself if not to others. The main obstacle to achieving his goal is his own temperament - there’s a sequence in Grand Prix with James Garner and Toshiro Mifune about exactly that - and once he learns to overcome his own weakness, he gets the girl (Four Weddings), wins the Championship (Grand Prix), solves the case (Last Seen Wearing, The Long Goodbye), wins the trial (A Few Good Men). That’s one theme.
The other is about deciding to commit oneself. In The General’s Daughter, Travolta has to decide to be a policeman first and an Army man and maverick second; Basquiat has to decided to come out hiding when opportunity - in the form of Annina Nosei - comes visiting, and then throwing yourself headlong into the work; Dogtown (and The Great Escape and The Warriors) is about the unexpected rewards of excellence achieved for its own sake, and the value of having a bunch of Bros dedicated to the same thing.
An American In Paris is almost the opposite of all this: it’s a film is about a bunch of modestly talented middle-aged dreamers who will never really make anything of themselves (except the French stage star, who has, if that’s your idea of artistic success). It’s about and for all the middle-aged men who haven’t quite succumbed to the living death of normal life but can’t really break out into the life they want. It says that if you do that, you’ll have to wait for Leslie Caron to change her mind at the last moment and come rushing back to you. Which is why those are called “fairy-tale endings”.
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1974) Loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, Elliott Gould shambles his way through early 1970’s Los Angeles. The photography, by Vilmos Sigmund, is gorgeous, and the script, by Leigh Brackett, has a memorable line or exchange in every scene. I saw this twice in the week it came out at the Odeon in Exeter, and haven’t stoppped watching it since. The critics didn’t like Altman’s Marlowe when the film came out, but as time has passed, this movie has become a legend. It’s flip, cool and has a great payoff at the end.
Dog Town and Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001) I once contemplated a post called “Everything I Know About Excellence I Learned From This Movie”. I didn’t write the post, but I probably used the thought as an excuse to watch it again. Tony Hawk, or whoever the New Guy is now, can do tricks that the original Z-Boys would never have thought possible, but the point is, these guys were the first to work out how to do an arial spin out of a swimming pool. There were no half-pipes in your local council playground like there are now. And they were better then than almost all the kids at the park or even on the South Bank are now. Above all the story is about how to get good at something, and the importance of looking good while doing it.
The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999) From the opening shot you can feel the heat, the humidity and the weirdness. John Travolta is a maverick undercover army policeman who happens to be there when the General’s daughter is found dead. Showing a total lack of judgement, the Army puts him in charge of the investigation. He gets teamed up with Madeline Stowe as a fiesty female detective, with whom he had an previous affair. “Brussels. We’ll always have Brussels,” Travolta reminds her. James Woods as a gay PsyOps colonel, a bondage dungeon, a painting cat and a bunch of great lines, plus an outstanding performance from Travlota. “My father was a drunk, a womaniser and a gambler: I worshipped the man” he tells Woods with all sincerity. Great lines, glowing photography, fantastic sets, and justice triumphing at the very end.
Grand Prix (John Frankenhiemer, 1966) In fifty years, nobody has made a better film, or produced better live-action footage, of motor racing. And that includes all the on-board cameras in Formula One for television. The 1960’s were the last decade of gentleman’s motor racing: the season was about ten races long, with most in Europe, one in America and one in South Africa. The film’s version of the Italian Grand Prix was eerily prescient of the actual 1967 race, when Jim Clark lost a lap and made it all back up to take the lead, and John Surtees in the
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) I came out of seeing this movie when it was released and felt more alive than I had for several years. It was the mid-Ninteties and I was in early recovery, but I saw a lot of other movies then that didn’t have that effect. The film alludes to Basqiuat’s drug-taking, but doesn’t get the sheer scale of his debauchery and chaotic behaviour. You have to read the books for that. Schnabel was making a film about Basquiat’s art and the art scene in New York at the turn of the Eighties, so I’m with him on leaving out Basquiat's excess. My favourite passage starts with Anina Nosei visiting Basquiat’s flat and looking at his drawings, and moves on to him producing his first great works in the basement of her gallery. Apparantly, Basquiat’s estate wouldn’t let them use originals, so Schnabel and his assistants re-created his paintings for the movie. Compare this with the documentary, Downtown 88, and it looks glossier, but has the same feel. Schnabel did a good job.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (Ben Nicholson, 2009) I liked Dan Flavin’s stuff before I did my O-levels. I have the catalogue from the Kinetics exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (I think half London went to that one). For some reason I lost track of art in my thirties and then made a concerted effort to catch up again in my Forties. I have been on the Contemporary Art Society coach tours. What changed in the time I was away was the importance of the art market, especially for contemporary art. The major buyers are hedge funds, investment houses and other rich people, plus own-account art traders, and for them, it’s a business. They could lose a few million on their holdings of, say, Gerhard Richter, but then they could lose just as much on their holdings of General Motors or HSBC. And Ben Nicholson does a top job of taking us round the players in the market circa 2008, most of whom are still major players and artists now. There’s lots of art on display, lots of interviews and the odd bit of self-indulgence. Just the sort of thing I like.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse S2) (Edward Bennet, 1988) In which by some miracle, a bunch of English actors and film crew channel the exact cynicism of Raymond Chandler to perfection. The cast is ridiculous, from Suzanne Bertish at her most controlled, to a young Liz Hurley, and John Thaw playing Morse at his most depressed, cynical and despairing. “Well, they put me on these things when they smell a corpse. One file... anyone. Two files... Ainly or McKay. I'm the three file man... No, she's dead.” Set in the well-off upper-middle classes and oozing with Morse’s dislike of them, in the end, it’s about a man pulling himself out of his own despondency and solving the case. It’s about privilege and dishonesty and a side rip to London where we can see a flash West End estate agent showing tenants round Chelsea Harbour. (Cutting edge stuff at the time.) “We ought to be able to arrest him for his taste, but we can’t,” comments Morse.
Civilisation: The Skin of Our Teeth (Kenneth Clarke, 1969) He wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this episode now. Clarke was the last of the great Hegelian art critics, for whom “culture” meant Greece, Rome, the Catholic Church, and above all the Renaissance. In this episode he looks at the coastal and island Christian communities of the post-Roman days, and it’s the light and images of those islands and beaches that triggers a whole bunch of childhood memories of English coastal holidays for me. Was Clark right? Did Western civilisation survive because of these isolated monasteries? No. Mostly it survived because the Arabs in Constantinople preserved and developed the literary legacy of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years while the European world seemed to be suffering a minor Ice Age that sapped the life out of it. Love or hate Clarke’s thesis, the imagery of this episode conveys the beauty and spirituality of those remote locations.
Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell,1994) Every scene has a great line. It looks fabulous and everyone is pretty. The prettiest people have the most problematical love lives. Yep, it must be a Richard Curtis movie. It’s basically a contemporary costume drama starring Hugh Grant looking gorgeously foppish and English, which is why the rest of the world loved it, with a sharp portrayal of the love life of an attractive young man about town, which is why I loved it. The critical scene is “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”, in which we see Grant’s previous girlfriends, who are the most shallow, shrill, awful bunch of women ever collected round one table. Without that scene you’re going to spend the whole movie wondering why Grant hasn’t been snapped up by some well-bred Eight. With it, you know what he’s avoiding. And if you haven’t had a morning scene like the ones with Andie McDowell in the country pub or the Ritz - but maybe not in such glam locations or with Andie McDowell - then, my friend you do not know the bitter-sweet tastes of love. The most gorgeous shot in the whole film is looking downstream on the Thames just before we cut to Grant and McDowell in her hotel room. (“I think I can resist you: you’re not that cute”. Yea right.)
I could add a whole bunch more that fall under ‘slightly less obsessive’: The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), An American In Paris (Vincente Minelli, 1951), The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), A Few Good Men, (Rob Reiner,1992), Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999), quite a few more I can’t remember right now, and of course the entire post 1980’s contemporary films of Eric Rohmer.
What if anything on earth links all of these films? The leading character is usually an attractive single man, who is an outsider with something to prove to himself if not to others. The main obstacle to achieving his goal is his own temperament - there’s a sequence in Grand Prix with James Garner and Toshiro Mifune about exactly that - and once he learns to overcome his own weakness, he gets the girl (Four Weddings), wins the Championship (Grand Prix), solves the case (Last Seen Wearing, The Long Goodbye), wins the trial (A Few Good Men). That’s one theme.
The other is about deciding to commit oneself. In The General’s Daughter, Travolta has to decide to be a policeman first and an Army man and maverick second; Basquiat has to decided to come out hiding when opportunity - in the form of Annina Nosei - comes visiting, and then throwing yourself headlong into the work; Dogtown (and The Great Escape and The Warriors) is about the unexpected rewards of excellence achieved for its own sake, and the value of having a bunch of Bros dedicated to the same thing.
An American In Paris is almost the opposite of all this: it’s a film is about a bunch of modestly talented middle-aged dreamers who will never really make anything of themselves (except the French stage star, who has, if that’s your idea of artistic success). It’s about and for all the middle-aged men who haven’t quite succumbed to the living death of normal life but can’t really break out into the life they want. It says that if you do that, you’ll have to wait for Leslie Caron to change her mind at the last moment and come rushing back to you. Which is why those are called “fairy-tale endings”.
Thursday, 6 August 2015
Four Panoramas in London
I'm starting to like the panorama feature on iPhones and more recent cameras. For one thing, it's a lot closer to how I see the world. My peripheral vision when not focusing on a screen is darn nearly 180 degrees. Looking at a regular photograph, even landscape, always feels like looking through a window.
From top to bottom: one of the Pen Ponds in Richmond Park; Primrose Street; Spitalfields Market; Millennium Bridge, view upstream.
From top to bottom: one of the Pen Ponds in Richmond Park; Primrose Street; Spitalfields Market; Millennium Bridge, view upstream.
Monday, 3 August 2015
Why the UK Taxpayer is NOT Making A Profit on the Lloyds sale
It seems that everyone is delighted with the continuing sale by the Government of its once 43% stake in Lloyds Bank. If all goes well, say the journalists, prompted by the Treasury, “the taxpayer” will make a £7bn profit on the sale. Well, no, not exactly. You see, the sales are to the large institutions. They get their money from the trees that grow in their basements, or the Chinese, or maybe Russian oligarchs. No. They don’t. They get their money from you and me, UK pension scheme contributors. Which means we, through the institutions, are buying those shares for our pension schemes, at a higher price than we did when the UK Government used our tax monies (or loans guaranteed by our tax monies made by institutions who had previously got the money from us) to buy the shares from the market back in 2008.
In other words, we’re paying twice, because the Treasury isn’t going to return the money it used to by those Lloyds shares the first time. We’re not making a profit of £7bn, it’s the Treasury. Are we going to get a one-off rebate of £7bn / 30m taxpayers = £230 next year? That would be a NO.
Do the Treasury know that the they are making £7bn from the taxpayer? I’m almost certain they do. Do the journalists? I’m almost certain they don’t. Gotta be worth that £13.50 a week subscription.
In other words, we’re paying twice, because the Treasury isn’t going to return the money it used to by those Lloyds shares the first time. We’re not making a profit of £7bn, it’s the Treasury. Are we going to get a one-off rebate of £7bn / 30m taxpayers = £230 next year? That would be a NO.
Do the Treasury know that the they are making £7bn from the taxpayer? I’m almost certain they do. Do the journalists? I’m almost certain they don’t. Gotta be worth that £13.50 a week subscription.
Thursday, 30 July 2015
Monday, 27 July 2015
Minimum Wage, Subsidised Childcare and Middle-Class Lobbying
Two editorials in The Economist this weekend that roused my ire. One on the folly of raising minimum wages, and another on the need for subsidised child care to maintain a country’s population. The two are linked. Not by any economic theory, but by the class interest of the journalists and interns who write for The Economist. The people who write for The Economist want cheap tradesmen to work on their St John’s Wood flats, cheap nannies to look after the children so that Charlotte can go back to her career as a consultant at Accenture, and, of course, more immigrants. Lots of immigrants. But that’s another subject.
Anglo governments are talking about minimum wages because the overwhelming majority of low-paid workers are women and immigrants, two constituencies which are seen as block votes with a tendency to turn left. It’s also because Governments are getting tired giving tax subsidies to low-paid workers which end up in the profit line of large companies who then: cut jobs; create social uncertainty; sell, make or provide goods and services of ever-decreasing quality; and generally make Governments look as though they are presiding over a decline the quality of life. It also happens to be the right thing to do: how on earth does anyone run a society when only about 20% the workforce can afford to live in an independent, adult manner? The rest have to get married or live in subsidised housing to even pretend to be living an independent life.
If you’re doing something that isn’t profitable unless you pay low wages, you probably shouldn’t be in business. Either you don’t know how to price properly, or you’re being screwed by your customers (any farmer supplying any supermarket in any country in the developed world), or you aren’t supplying something that people really want. Like Morecombe Bay cockles. Low wages are the result of bad management. It’s an entrepreneur’s job to find something people want at a price that makes it profitable when the workers are paid enough to live like adults. The reason cleaners aren’t paid a lot of money is that their clients are quite prepared to live in dusty and slightly messy conditions. A cleaner-cleaned house is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Now, if parents risked having their kids removed by social services should a random inspection find fecal matter in the toilet bowl or a trace of grime or spilled milk in the children’s room - guess how important it would be to employ a cleaner? Guess what would happen to cleaning rates? Especially if cleaners (not the agencies) had to be local-council certified first?
According to Charlotte’s editorial-writing husband Jasper, the reason Charlotte should have free child-care so she can go back to her job at Accenture is that developed countries aren’t producing enough children to keep their parents in fat pensions and luxurious healthcare when they get old. (Oddly, one way out of that is, Jasper’s editorial says is, yes, more immigrants! But I digress.) However, a declining young population is not a problem. The problem is declining GDP. Anyone who sees a declining population as irrevocably linked to declining GDP, again, probably shouldn’t be running an economy. And who says that healthy old people should be exempt from work, especially when there won’t be enough (younger and middle-aged) people to do all the work that needs doing? Keep the oldies working. When they start dying, close down what they needed to live behind them. And instead of importing more people to do low value-add jobs with a low tax take, work on figuring out how to increase GDP per capita so that the economy doesn’t shrink even while the population does. More exports and fewer imports of high-value goods would help. (It wouldn’t hurt if Vodafone, Google, Apple and others paid their due taxes either. Who cares if they go somewhere else, since they aren’t actually making a net contribution to the country? But again, I digress.)
Seriously? A magazine with the self-advertised stature of The Economist should not be lobbying for the benefit of a bunch of wanna-be BCBG’s. Perhaps if paid its staff more, they wouldn’t use its pages in such a blatant manner.
Anglo governments are talking about minimum wages because the overwhelming majority of low-paid workers are women and immigrants, two constituencies which are seen as block votes with a tendency to turn left. It’s also because Governments are getting tired giving tax subsidies to low-paid workers which end up in the profit line of large companies who then: cut jobs; create social uncertainty; sell, make or provide goods and services of ever-decreasing quality; and generally make Governments look as though they are presiding over a decline the quality of life. It also happens to be the right thing to do: how on earth does anyone run a society when only about 20% the workforce can afford to live in an independent, adult manner? The rest have to get married or live in subsidised housing to even pretend to be living an independent life.
If you’re doing something that isn’t profitable unless you pay low wages, you probably shouldn’t be in business. Either you don’t know how to price properly, or you’re being screwed by your customers (any farmer supplying any supermarket in any country in the developed world), or you aren’t supplying something that people really want. Like Morecombe Bay cockles. Low wages are the result of bad management. It’s an entrepreneur’s job to find something people want at a price that makes it profitable when the workers are paid enough to live like adults. The reason cleaners aren’t paid a lot of money is that their clients are quite prepared to live in dusty and slightly messy conditions. A cleaner-cleaned house is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Now, if parents risked having their kids removed by social services should a random inspection find fecal matter in the toilet bowl or a trace of grime or spilled milk in the children’s room - guess how important it would be to employ a cleaner? Guess what would happen to cleaning rates? Especially if cleaners (not the agencies) had to be local-council certified first?
According to Charlotte’s editorial-writing husband Jasper, the reason Charlotte should have free child-care so she can go back to her job at Accenture is that developed countries aren’t producing enough children to keep their parents in fat pensions and luxurious healthcare when they get old. (Oddly, one way out of that is, Jasper’s editorial says is, yes, more immigrants! But I digress.) However, a declining young population is not a problem. The problem is declining GDP. Anyone who sees a declining population as irrevocably linked to declining GDP, again, probably shouldn’t be running an economy. And who says that healthy old people should be exempt from work, especially when there won’t be enough (younger and middle-aged) people to do all the work that needs doing? Keep the oldies working. When they start dying, close down what they needed to live behind them. And instead of importing more people to do low value-add jobs with a low tax take, work on figuring out how to increase GDP per capita so that the economy doesn’t shrink even while the population does. More exports and fewer imports of high-value goods would help. (It wouldn’t hurt if Vodafone, Google, Apple and others paid their due taxes either. Who cares if they go somewhere else, since they aren’t actually making a net contribution to the country? But again, I digress.)
Seriously? A magazine with the self-advertised stature of The Economist should not be lobbying for the benefit of a bunch of wanna-be BCBG’s. Perhaps if paid its staff more, they wouldn’t use its pages in such a blatant manner.
Monday, 20 July 2015
50 Great Myths of of Popular Psychology
Reading 50 Great Myths of of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconception about Human Behaviour, I came away with the feeling that the authors were a tad smug and unaware of the exact grinding banality of the human condition in the precise circumstances of Really Existing Capitalism of this exact time, despite the copious references to papers in journals nobody knew existed. In the end, I had to review their stance on each one of the 50 myths. I agreed with most of them. Here’s the list in their order.
(Abbreviations: V = Verdit; YAMT = Yet Another Movie Trope)
1. Most people only use 10% of their brain power. V: utter twaddle.
2. Some people are left-brained, some people are right-brained. V: utter twaddle
3. ESP is a well-established scientific phenomenon. Me: Was there anyone who believed this?
4. Visual perceptions are accompanies by emissions from the eyes. Me: Jeez, things are really bad in the USA.
5. Subliminal messages can persuade people to buy things. V: urban myth
6. Playing Mozart’s music to infants helps them develop. V: sheer marketing
7. Adolescence is invariably a time of psychological turmoil. Verdict: YAMT. Most kids are well-adjusted and love Mom and Dad.
8. Most people experience a mid-life crisis in their 40’s or 50’s. V: YAMT. (*)
9. Old age is typically associated with senility and crankiness. V: YAMT 10. When dying, you will pass through Anger-Denial-Bargaining-Depresson-Acceptance. V: No, you won’t.
11. Human memory works like a movie camera and forgets nothing. V: YAMT. Me: did anyone believe this?
12. Hypnosis can bring back memories. V: No, it can’t.
13. We repress the memory of traumatic events. V: YAMT. We remember that shit just fine.
14. People with amnesia forget the details of their previous life. V: YAMT. In fact, amnesiacs have trouble forming new memories, not recalling old ones.
15. IQ tests are biased against certain groups. V: No, but I get you want to dispute that.
16. If you don’t know the answer, stick with your first hunch. V: Not really.
17. Dyslexia is about switching letters. V: YAMT. It’s not actually clear why some people have problems processing written words.
18. Teaching styles should be matched to learning styles. V: utter twaddle.
19. Hypnosis is an unique state different from being awake. V: YAMT. Nope.
20. Dreams have symbolic meaning. V: Not systematically.
21. You can learn in your sleep. V: In your dreams.
22. There are “out of body” experiences. V: No, but there are times when your senses get real scrambled.
23. The polygraph is reliable. Me: is there anyone left alive who believes this?
24: Happiness is mostly determined by our external circumstances. V: Keep your hand on your wallet. It isn’t (*)
25. Ulcers are cause almost entirely by stress. V: Ah heliobactor pylori! Stress plays a role, but it’s not clear what.
26. A positive attitude can stave off cancer. V: No, it can’t.
27: Opposites attract. V: YAMT. No, they don’t (*)
28. The more people at an emergency, the more will help. V: famously, no. But someone will.
29. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. V: No. (*)
30. It’s better to express anger than hold it in. V: No. 31: Raising children similarly makes them similar adults. V: A little, but not much.
32: We can’t change heritable traits. V: Yes we can. But no-one said it would be easy.
33. Low self-esteem is the cause of psychological problems. V: No, it isn’t.
34. Sexually abused children develop severe personality problems as adults. V: YAMT. No, they don’t. (*)
35. The Rorschach inkblot test works. V: No. Me: Shouldn’t people be disbarred for using this?
36: Graphology works. V: No.
37. Psychiatric labels stigmatises people. V: Only if you’re an a-hole.
38. Only depressed people commit suicide. V: Nope. They commit suicide when they start to get better and realise how messed-up they are.
39. People with schizophrenia have multiple personalities. V: YAMT. These are two different things.
40. Adult Children of Alcoholics display a distinctive profile of symptoms. V: No. This is the Barnum effect. (*)
41. There’s been a recent epidemic of infant autism. V: No there hasn’t (*)
42. Psychiatric admissions increase at the full moon. V: No they don’t.
43. Most mentally ill people are violent. V: YAMT. No more so than ordinary people.
44. Criminal profiling helps solve cases. V: It helps profilers make money.
45. The insanity defence really works. V: Not very well.
46. Anyone who confesses to a crime is guilty of it. V: No. False confessions are common.
47. Expert judgement and intuition are the best ways of making decisions. V: No. (*)
48. Abstinence is the only realistic treatment for alcoholics. V: No (*)
49. Effective psychotherapy forces people to confront some episode in their childhood. V: YAMT. No. Me: Wait. There’s “effective psychotherapy”?
50. ECT is brutal and ineffective. V: not if used sensibly.
The only issue I have with 41 is that they don’t mention that in the USA, doctors often diagnose Autism because that way the parents get funding that they wouldn’t get if the doctor diagnosed Asperger’s. So there’s an epidemic of diagnoses caused by the healthcare system. I have serious issues with...
8. Mid-life crisis: the authors are right to say that this isn’t well-defined, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, for some people. If there is a man over 60 out there who didn’t at least once have a sustained doubt about the value of the life he was leading… he’s either terminally self-satisfied, utterly lacks self-awareness or is lying. Otherwise, “mid-life crisis” is what happens to a man who wakes up one morning and realises that he’s still in shape, but his wife has turned into a shapeless lump.
24. I quote the authors: “…our life circumstances can…affect our happiness in the short run, much of our happiness in the long run is…independent of what happens to us…[it] is a function of what we make of our lives.” How convenient for Wal-Mart that their staff wouldn’t be any happier they were paid enough not to need to claim welfare benefits plus a couple of extra bucks an hour. Capitalism turns everything to its advantage.
29. The authors do say there are slight differences in male and female communication styles, but not so much that you’d notice. The studies they quote are measuring all the wrong things. Type A communication is managerial and supervisory: it’s done to persuade and influence. Type B communication is used to convey facts, suggestions and instructions. Male managers often communicate in a Type A manner, and women at work sometimes communicate in a Type B manner. For all sorts of reasons, women need to persuade and influence more than men, and that’s why you immediately knew that “Type A” really meant “feminine”.
34. The author’s argument is two-fold. First, they say that therapists have a distorted view of the world, so they don’t see the people who were abused as children and turned out okay (the authors don’t tell us where to find those adults). Second they quote Rind’s paper which showed that there was only a weak correlation between self-reported childhood sexual abuse and eighteen fairly severe psycho-pathologies. Coming from a conflict-ridden home was a much better predictor of these pathologies. I would have preferred that this one was presented as “It takes something as harsh as sexual abuse to induce adult psycho-pathologies”. To which the answer seems to be: “No. Mummy and daddy throwing things at each other all the time, and having arguments and taking it out on the children, will work even better.”
40. Read the ACoA “Laundry List”. This bears no resemblance to the psycho-babble questions the authors quote from the studies. Wotiz and others diluted the List to the point where it does get a bit Barnum. Read the original List carefully. Ordinary people, for instance, are not “frightened” of angry people. “Frightened” speaks to a paralysis and loss of control that ordinary people don’t usually experience. And ordinary people are not “addicted” to excitement. And as for confusing love and pity and tending to "love" people they can "pity" and “rescue”, that is the exact opposite of the behaviour of ordinary people. However, two siblings may turn out differently despite the common background. But almost no-one from the fabled “good enough” home ever ticks many items on the Laundry List.
47. The authors cite studies where rule-based diagnoses do as well as the experts. What they miss is that rules work where they work and don’t otherwise. And the best AI systems don’t use "rules” but replicate an expert learning process. As for “intuition”, psychology isn’t one of the areas where expertise become behavioural, so they would never experience “just knowing”.
48. The keyword is “only”. Abstinence works for a minority of alcoholics. For the others, anything else is better than waking up with another hangover in a part of town they’ve never seen before. Some of those others can handle controlled drinking. Some of them can’t. You want to be sure you’re not going to wake up again, three hundred miles from home wearing lipstick and a dress? Quit. Full time.
Most of the myths are pop-culture nonsense. Much smaller, but very valuable, are discussions on myths about clinical and medical techniques. Some of the myths are not myths at all, but moments that don’t happen to everybody, and it’s those I took taken exception to. Polygraphs are always random, mid-life crises happen to a certain kind of man.
I think there’s a reason the authors made this mistake, and it’s pretty much at the heart of psychology. Psychiatrists deal with the serious cases needing unpleasant drugs with nasty side-effects; therapists, 12-Step and self-help groups deal with dysfunctional people, and have varying degrees of success. This leaves psychologists studying regular folk. Regular folk are largely untroubled by everyday insults and inconvenience, recover with appropriate speed from the serious upsets and tragedies, and most of all, regular folk keep what little inner life they have to themselves and also from themselves. People lie "all the time" when they answer those psychologist’s quizzes, and it takes a lot of questions to reveal this cheating: the latest MMPI tests for nine different kinds of ‘cheating’ and takes about fifty or so dedicated questions to do so, as well as duplicating many others to test for consistency. Asking people to describe and assess themselves is no way to discover what they are feeling or what is happening in their lives. (Unless it’s a study about the many delusions of regular people, which the Kahneman crowd do so well.) As a profession, psychologists seem to be here to tell us that a) whatever it is, we will get over it, b) therapy, drugs and chanting won’t get us through it any faster, c) it will have no lasting effects. This is a nice message, and it may be what emerges from enough studies of self-satisfied regular people with almost zero self-awareness (ah! accountants! how I envy them their smug self-satisfaction), but it’s not what the taxpayer needs.
What the taxpayer needs is some advice for coping and dealing when life hits hard and they are down on resilience. It’s not enough to say “Lost your job? Well, our studies say that you’re overdoing it. Most people said that they eventually overcame the shock of losing their jobs and made happy new lives for themselves earning half of what they were for working twice as many hours for an insecure bully of a supervisor. Because happiness is all in the mind, not the external world.” I’m exaggerating slightly, but read this book, and you will find out just how slightly.
(Abbreviations: V = Verdit; YAMT = Yet Another Movie Trope)
1. Most people only use 10% of their brain power. V: utter twaddle.
2. Some people are left-brained, some people are right-brained. V: utter twaddle
3. ESP is a well-established scientific phenomenon. Me: Was there anyone who believed this?
4. Visual perceptions are accompanies by emissions from the eyes. Me: Jeez, things are really bad in the USA.
5. Subliminal messages can persuade people to buy things. V: urban myth
6. Playing Mozart’s music to infants helps them develop. V: sheer marketing
7. Adolescence is invariably a time of psychological turmoil. Verdict: YAMT. Most kids are well-adjusted and love Mom and Dad.
8. Most people experience a mid-life crisis in their 40’s or 50’s. V: YAMT. (*)
9. Old age is typically associated with senility and crankiness. V: YAMT 10. When dying, you will pass through Anger-Denial-Bargaining-Depresson-Acceptance. V: No, you won’t.
11. Human memory works like a movie camera and forgets nothing. V: YAMT. Me: did anyone believe this?
12. Hypnosis can bring back memories. V: No, it can’t.
13. We repress the memory of traumatic events. V: YAMT. We remember that shit just fine.
14. People with amnesia forget the details of their previous life. V: YAMT. In fact, amnesiacs have trouble forming new memories, not recalling old ones.
15. IQ tests are biased against certain groups. V: No, but I get you want to dispute that.
16. If you don’t know the answer, stick with your first hunch. V: Not really.
17. Dyslexia is about switching letters. V: YAMT. It’s not actually clear why some people have problems processing written words.
18. Teaching styles should be matched to learning styles. V: utter twaddle.
19. Hypnosis is an unique state different from being awake. V: YAMT. Nope.
20. Dreams have symbolic meaning. V: Not systematically.
21. You can learn in your sleep. V: In your dreams.
22. There are “out of body” experiences. V: No, but there are times when your senses get real scrambled.
23. The polygraph is reliable. Me: is there anyone left alive who believes this?
24: Happiness is mostly determined by our external circumstances. V: Keep your hand on your wallet. It isn’t (*)
25. Ulcers are cause almost entirely by stress. V: Ah heliobactor pylori! Stress plays a role, but it’s not clear what.
26. A positive attitude can stave off cancer. V: No, it can’t.
27: Opposites attract. V: YAMT. No, they don’t (*)
28. The more people at an emergency, the more will help. V: famously, no. But someone will.
29. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. V: No. (*)
30. It’s better to express anger than hold it in. V: No. 31: Raising children similarly makes them similar adults. V: A little, but not much.
32: We can’t change heritable traits. V: Yes we can. But no-one said it would be easy.
33. Low self-esteem is the cause of psychological problems. V: No, it isn’t.
34. Sexually abused children develop severe personality problems as adults. V: YAMT. No, they don’t. (*)
35. The Rorschach inkblot test works. V: No. Me: Shouldn’t people be disbarred for using this?
36: Graphology works. V: No.
37. Psychiatric labels stigmatises people. V: Only if you’re an a-hole.
38. Only depressed people commit suicide. V: Nope. They commit suicide when they start to get better and realise how messed-up they are.
39. People with schizophrenia have multiple personalities. V: YAMT. These are two different things.
40. Adult Children of Alcoholics display a distinctive profile of symptoms. V: No. This is the Barnum effect. (*)
41. There’s been a recent epidemic of infant autism. V: No there hasn’t (*)
42. Psychiatric admissions increase at the full moon. V: No they don’t.
43. Most mentally ill people are violent. V: YAMT. No more so than ordinary people.
44. Criminal profiling helps solve cases. V: It helps profilers make money.
45. The insanity defence really works. V: Not very well.
46. Anyone who confesses to a crime is guilty of it. V: No. False confessions are common.
47. Expert judgement and intuition are the best ways of making decisions. V: No. (*)
48. Abstinence is the only realistic treatment for alcoholics. V: No (*)
49. Effective psychotherapy forces people to confront some episode in their childhood. V: YAMT. No. Me: Wait. There’s “effective psychotherapy”?
50. ECT is brutal and ineffective. V: not if used sensibly.
The only issue I have with 41 is that they don’t mention that in the USA, doctors often diagnose Autism because that way the parents get funding that they wouldn’t get if the doctor diagnosed Asperger’s. So there’s an epidemic of diagnoses caused by the healthcare system. I have serious issues with...
8. Mid-life crisis: the authors are right to say that this isn’t well-defined, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, for some people. If there is a man over 60 out there who didn’t at least once have a sustained doubt about the value of the life he was leading… he’s either terminally self-satisfied, utterly lacks self-awareness or is lying. Otherwise, “mid-life crisis” is what happens to a man who wakes up one morning and realises that he’s still in shape, but his wife has turned into a shapeless lump.
24. I quote the authors: “…our life circumstances can…affect our happiness in the short run, much of our happiness in the long run is…independent of what happens to us…[it] is a function of what we make of our lives.” How convenient for Wal-Mart that their staff wouldn’t be any happier they were paid enough not to need to claim welfare benefits plus a couple of extra bucks an hour. Capitalism turns everything to its advantage.
29. The authors do say there are slight differences in male and female communication styles, but not so much that you’d notice. The studies they quote are measuring all the wrong things. Type A communication is managerial and supervisory: it’s done to persuade and influence. Type B communication is used to convey facts, suggestions and instructions. Male managers often communicate in a Type A manner, and women at work sometimes communicate in a Type B manner. For all sorts of reasons, women need to persuade and influence more than men, and that’s why you immediately knew that “Type A” really meant “feminine”.
34. The author’s argument is two-fold. First, they say that therapists have a distorted view of the world, so they don’t see the people who were abused as children and turned out okay (the authors don’t tell us where to find those adults). Second they quote Rind’s paper which showed that there was only a weak correlation between self-reported childhood sexual abuse and eighteen fairly severe psycho-pathologies. Coming from a conflict-ridden home was a much better predictor of these pathologies. I would have preferred that this one was presented as “It takes something as harsh as sexual abuse to induce adult psycho-pathologies”. To which the answer seems to be: “No. Mummy and daddy throwing things at each other all the time, and having arguments and taking it out on the children, will work even better.”
40. Read the ACoA “Laundry List”. This bears no resemblance to the psycho-babble questions the authors quote from the studies. Wotiz and others diluted the List to the point where it does get a bit Barnum. Read the original List carefully. Ordinary people, for instance, are not “frightened” of angry people. “Frightened” speaks to a paralysis and loss of control that ordinary people don’t usually experience. And ordinary people are not “addicted” to excitement. And as for confusing love and pity and tending to "love" people they can "pity" and “rescue”, that is the exact opposite of the behaviour of ordinary people. However, two siblings may turn out differently despite the common background. But almost no-one from the fabled “good enough” home ever ticks many items on the Laundry List.
47. The authors cite studies where rule-based diagnoses do as well as the experts. What they miss is that rules work where they work and don’t otherwise. And the best AI systems don’t use "rules” but replicate an expert learning process. As for “intuition”, psychology isn’t one of the areas where expertise become behavioural, so they would never experience “just knowing”.
48. The keyword is “only”. Abstinence works for a minority of alcoholics. For the others, anything else is better than waking up with another hangover in a part of town they’ve never seen before. Some of those others can handle controlled drinking. Some of them can’t. You want to be sure you’re not going to wake up again, three hundred miles from home wearing lipstick and a dress? Quit. Full time.
Most of the myths are pop-culture nonsense. Much smaller, but very valuable, are discussions on myths about clinical and medical techniques. Some of the myths are not myths at all, but moments that don’t happen to everybody, and it’s those I took taken exception to. Polygraphs are always random, mid-life crises happen to a certain kind of man.
I think there’s a reason the authors made this mistake, and it’s pretty much at the heart of psychology. Psychiatrists deal with the serious cases needing unpleasant drugs with nasty side-effects; therapists, 12-Step and self-help groups deal with dysfunctional people, and have varying degrees of success. This leaves psychologists studying regular folk. Regular folk are largely untroubled by everyday insults and inconvenience, recover with appropriate speed from the serious upsets and tragedies, and most of all, regular folk keep what little inner life they have to themselves and also from themselves. People lie "all the time" when they answer those psychologist’s quizzes, and it takes a lot of questions to reveal this cheating: the latest MMPI tests for nine different kinds of ‘cheating’ and takes about fifty or so dedicated questions to do so, as well as duplicating many others to test for consistency. Asking people to describe and assess themselves is no way to discover what they are feeling or what is happening in their lives. (Unless it’s a study about the many delusions of regular people, which the Kahneman crowd do so well.) As a profession, psychologists seem to be here to tell us that a) whatever it is, we will get over it, b) therapy, drugs and chanting won’t get us through it any faster, c) it will have no lasting effects. This is a nice message, and it may be what emerges from enough studies of self-satisfied regular people with almost zero self-awareness (ah! accountants! how I envy them their smug self-satisfaction), but it’s not what the taxpayer needs.
What the taxpayer needs is some advice for coping and dealing when life hits hard and they are down on resilience. It’s not enough to say “Lost your job? Well, our studies say that you’re overdoing it. Most people said that they eventually overcame the shock of losing their jobs and made happy new lives for themselves earning half of what they were for working twice as many hours for an insecure bully of a supervisor. Because happiness is all in the mind, not the external world.” I’m exaggerating slightly, but read this book, and you will find out just how slightly.
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