Lazy I know, but yesterday put me on a Sigur Ros kick. I used to drive my office manager mad with them playing in the office. I was allowed short bursts but then I was the boss.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, this came to mind this morning after a conversation I’d just had with someone. I know it’s used to death on telly but I’ve loved Sigur Ros for a long time and anybody who doesn’t like them is a fool. They are one of the bands that come to mind when I get one on me about the number of people who own a record by James Blunt.
One for you Bilbo!
I may be stealing somebody’s thunder here when it comes to blogging about dogs. (And how unfortunate that the phrase ‘dogging’ has already been appropriated by something else.)
Anyway, the news that staff at an RSPCA centre have had to teach a dog English after discovering it only spoke Polish, reminded me of this old Gary Larson cartoon.
Nobody likes her.
It should be enough that she has a very shaky track record as a minister and never took any responsibility when things screwed up and has followed the usual politician’s route into commerce, address book in hand, yet thinks nothing of returning to tell everybody else where they are going wrong. But the reason she won’t be able to rally people to her cause in the current leadership furore in the Labour Party is because she’s just so hard to like.
Her manner is all wrong. She betrays herself with the way she deals with people. If they disagree with her, it’s not because they have a valid alternative point of view, it’s because they SIMPLY DON’T UNDERSTAND. So to help them see the error of their views, she starts to speak at them more slowly, with a small inward smile and a pitying tilt of the head. It’s very reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher. A smile on the mouth but eyes that would like to see you dead.
Shhhhh
Published January 4, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: Branding, How the media works, Media, Technology
On Silence by Aldous Huxley
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.
That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but usually create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ear, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s core of wish and desire.
Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose — to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground.
from Silence, Liberty, and Peace (1946)
When I was young, I used the library in Newcastle under Lyme to educate me in ways that school didn’t or couldn’t. I was after the sort of vicarious ‘interlectewalism’ you can only get by carting around Orwell, Dostoevsky and Kafka and which is only impressive in your own delusions. A lot of it inevitably either went over my head or was beyond my maturity and none of it helped make me more attractive to women, which is what I was also preoccupied by at the age of 17.
While large chunks of what I read passed me by, bits of it stuck. I recall reading the essays on war and humankind by Aldous Huxley in a collection called Ends and Means. His core argument in one essay was that the ends can never justify the means because the means determine the ends. It’s an idea that I still use to filter the thoughts of other people and it came to mind when thinking about the latest justifications of Tony Blair, that supposedly committed Christian, forthe Iraq war.
What Blair has said about his commitment to the war, which he now admits was going ahead regardless of whatever justifications were needed for it, is fundamentally wicked. Huxley the humanist was way better and way ahead of him. In 1937 he wrote: ‘no government has the right gratuitously to involve its subjects in war. War is so radically wrong that any international agreement which provides for the extension of hostilities from a limited area to the whole world is manifestly based on unsound principles. Modern war destroys with the maximum of efficiency and the maximum of indiscrimination, and therefore entails the commission of injustices far more numerous and far worse than any it is intended to redress.’
‘Those who prepare for war, in due course get the war they prepare for.’
There are a lot of interesting aspects to the Meredith Kercher murder case. But one of the most remarkable is the role that PR and marketing has played and continues to play in the defence campaign of Amanda Knox. The family of Knox has waged an impressive PR campaign in their battle to free her.
Her father Curt is a marketing executive. So it was perhaps an instictive response when he hired PR consultant David Marriott, a former TV journalist, to organise a campaign including appearances on the main US TV networks. Whatever you think of this sort of thing, the campaign was impressive and has certainly swayed opinion in the US. Amanda Knox has also counted on the support of the Friends of Amanda pressure group, which posts messages of support and seeks donations on its website and has mounted an equally impressive if misguided and unnecessarily abusive campaign in the blogosphere where ad hominem attacks on people are often seen as perfectly fair. In fact, earlier this year, Seattle police were asked to investigate death threats issued by people who believed Knox to be innocent against others who had argued her guilt on a website.
The voices that went up in protest when she was found guilty of the murder were loudest from this lobby, understandably. In part I believe their bewilderment at the verdict is rooted in a failure to grasp that US public and media opinion have little impact in Italy, where the system of law is very different and more dependent on the judgements of magistrates, not juries. However wonderful a campaign they put together, there is a less powerful jury to influence ahead of a trial.
This idea that an investigation and trial is carried out as much in the media as it is in the courts is a very modern one. It is also disturbing to think that defendants with access to the resources can influence a trial through the media, especially in countries such as the US and UK. There are elements of the Kercher case that are likely to sway public opinion in such campaigns, not least the fact that she is an attractive middle class woman with a devoted and industrious family, accused in a foreign country (crucial) with evidence that may be compelling but which can also be disputed. Add in to that the campaign’s ongoing appeal to paranoid suspicions that the case is tainted by anti-americanism and you can see why this whole thing will roll on. And on.
Even if Knox is unsuccesful in her appeal, which seems likely, the battle will rage on the Internet. What remains to be seen is whether this is an isolated incident or whether the Law will have to find new ways to take account of expensive co-ordinated marketing campaigns for those who can personally afford them or drum up enough public support to fund them.
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