Weekend TiVo / Sky Plus Round-up

We've just been given a TiVo box. Didn't want it. Don't need it. But technology is foisted on you nowadays. I'm looking to see what I might record over the weekend and never get round to watching. Thought I'd stick it here. POTENTIAL REGULAR FEATURE.

1) Clydebuilt: The Ships that Made the Commonwealth 

"Commonwealth"? Just say Empire. I love Scotland. I love the idea of watching all of these.

2) World Cup's Best Ever Goals, Ever!

This will be rubbish and full of stuff you've seen before. But it's great to have in the archive. It'll come into its own one time a friend's over and we're drunk.

3) Buddy Rich: Live in '78

Buddy Rich is tremendous.

4) Audition

When's going to be the right day to watch this? Never. Still, may as well have it there, nagging me.

5) Ghost Town

I actually really like this film. Would be nice to have it around. Other than the Office, easily the best thing that Gervais has done.

My Dad

Today I found out the best thing about my Dad. Before each holiday he fires up Microsoft Flight, checks out the destination airport and runs through a few landings. Just in case.

Brilliant.

Do we all like Phil Collins nowadays, or is that a bit 5 years ago?

I can't remember where we all are with Phil Collins. We used to hate him (can't remember why, his popular music, I think, and that divorce by fax) but then we realised that African American people liked him, and African American people are the coolest of all people. That was confusing.

Then he popped up on This American Life being all vulnerable and wise, and we figured maybe we'd got him wrong.

But then everyone said that he was good, actually.

So presumably it's time to say he's shit again. I lose track.

Anyway, here he is (via Slate) singing in front of a band full of middle school kids at his sons'… something, probably a prom.  That's nice, right?

Now, would you like me… to be the cat?

Pick sexier leaders and save democracy

If Boris Johnson, George Galloway and Nigel Farage have taught us anything, it's the enduring British affection for a  rogue.

There's something deep within us which will forgive you anything, provided you look like you'd buy a round in the pub, could share a joke with a taxi driver, and know one end of a woman from the other.

You could call it charm. Or confidence.

Or, brace yourself, sexiness. You may recoil in horror from the idea, but truth is, these men do have sex appeal. Maybe not to you, but they've done well for themselves.

You may hate them, but it's hard to deny they have a certain alpha-maleness; and it's silly to deny that people respond to that.

Now, here's a problem.

Those who choose the leaders, the political class, the media, are the most immune to the charms of the alpha male (or female) so their success always comes as a surprise. The (culturally) middle class tend to be resentful of charisma, mainly because in its youth it was an unpopular, though self-regarding, spod.

The working and upper classes hate the cultural middle class. Sad, but true.

It's not jealousy; it's because the (cultural) middle class are the least sexy and least charming of all classes. Indeed, they deny the existence of sexiness or charm. They look for their leaders to display things like ideological purity, moral seriousness, all the while wearing terrible ill-fitting suits. Outside of the group this is very confusing.

To the cultural middle class Ed Miliband as Labour leader makes sense. To everyone else it is baffling, verging on insulting. THIS GUY? You are JOKING!

Really?

The electorate doesn't give a fuck about the Labour leader's credentials - they want to be swept off their feet by someone dashing, someone who'll repeatedly let them down then look them in the eye, and make them feel like there's no one else in the world but them. A wink. I can't stay mad at you.

Who in the Labour party can you imagine seducing anyone? I mean, other than a drunk researcher on the last evening of a conference. Blair's problem was not his transgressions - it was his protestations of wide-eyed innocence. If he'd managed a wink, a shrug, a leak of that Wendi Deng thing, he'd still be in power.

We can't let the fringe parties (UKIP, Respect, Conservatives) have the monopoly on charisma. We need sexy bastards in the mainstream. Are there any out there? Suggestions in the comments.

Soured Beets

I was going to spend my lunch writing this thing about culture, and cultural imperialism, and how it's important to notice it's not just the things you don't like which are trampling over native cultures, but we had a load of beetroot in the fridge so I decided to make some sour beets instead.

Recipe

• Grate
• Salt
• Jar
• Leave

We had a couple of turnips knocking around so I stuck those in too. Fight the power.

Wife away for the weekend. Part 1.

Cartoons!

For those of you who remember my bursts of cartooning in 2004, 2007 and 2010, I've tracked them all down from various sites and stuck them on a Tumblr.

Several are no good, but together they form an autobiography of sorts so I've kept them in.

Any new ones I do will go there (and, most likely, here).

Jah Jah Holiday #2: Chipy (sic) chips

Jah Jah enjoying his holiday!

The importance of a non-London specificity

Right. This post is not bemoaning the lack of non-London set drama. This is about specificity.

Everyone has a mental map of London, even if they've never been there (the Gherkin and banks are over there, theatres are somewhere else, the museums and parks and Buckingham Palace). Everyone in Britain has seen thousands of images of London, and, crucially, they have been labelled LONDON.

This is what London looks like.

The problem with the rest of England is that its images are seen, but they are rarely tagged to place.

There was an article about this in the LRB the other month. France is much better at giving its provincial towns identity. Here stories are either in London, or in a hazy non-London.

19th-century literature could represent life outside London only with vague gestures of generalisation, as if the naming or describing of actual towns in the provinces fell under a pudeur scarcely less than that obscuring sex... Middlemarch is the title of a great novel, but the town itself is an abstraction, whose relation to the Coventry at which scholars try to peer behind it is notional. Was ‘Coketown’ – one of Dickens’s few excursion outside London – based on Preston, as some believe? It hardly matters.North and South? Skirts drawn up around Manchester, set in ‘Milton’. In Hardy, the faux-archaism of ‘Wessex’ and its cod-toponyms – Casterbridge, Melchester, Christminster and the rest…
Even in modern times… Amis’s Lucky Jim tippexed Swansea, and Lodge’s ‘Rummidge’ trilogy could not bring itself to name Birmingham. The persistence of the convention speaks volumes for the low standing of urban life outside the capital, novels risking loss of audience if they speak too openly of a particular city, as unlikely to be of much interest to anyone outside it.

When you start thinking of more examples you can't stop. Lot of things have been filmed in Bradford (e.g. Billy Liar), very few are set there. A Kind of Loving is set in "a Lancashire town". Not Preston, not Blackburn, not Burnley. Just "The North". The Nottingham-ness of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a big part of the book, considerably played down for the film. Even J.B. Priestley, Bradford's foremost literary son, talks of the amalgamous Bruddersford.

"The North" (actually Accrington)

Why I think this is important! 

Specificity confers legitimacy. Despite its complexity London is simply easier to visualise than anywhere else in the UK. Because of this (I theorise), and leaving economic considerations to one side, people are more likely to move there after university because they can picture themselves there. It becomes the only feasible destination for internal migration.

It's also subtly easier to support investment projects like Crossrail or a new airport as we can imagine what it might look like and how it'd fit in to our existing mental model. Consider a Crossrail which went from Liverpool to Hull. The national mental image would be something like:

Liverpool: Beatles -> Warrington… rugby league? -> Manchester… football/Oasis -> West Yorkshire… don't know -> Bradford: curry -> Leeds… don't they have a Harvey Nichols? -> Hull… Who knows anything about Hull? 

Without a strong mental picture it's a hard idea to get behind. Once these cities had football teams to represent them. With the globalisation of the Premiership these teams have become international brands who happen to have head offices these towns and cities.

And you know, the images we're missing don't even have to be positive. The Olympics is one thing, but deprivation in Tower Hamlets, gangsters, riots - it all adds to a solid idea of "LONDON" and an unvoiced suspicion that London is the only place which is actually, you know, real.

A nice counter example is Happy Valley. We watched the first episode last night. It was pretty good! The best thing about it was its accuracy. This wasn't "Yorkshire" it was the Upper Calder Valley. Things happened in Sowerby Bridge. Todmorden got a shout out. Until recently we lived in that valley, before moving 15 miles east to Bradford. We've never regretted that move, but last night the images on the TV, just because they were images on a TV, started to tug at me. Suddenly the place felt more real, just from being reflected in culture.

Hebden Bridge

I started to miss the place, even though it was portrayed as a picturesque hotbed of junkies and drunks. As I say, the best thing about it was its accuracy.

Kids' films and the forces of counterrevolution

The following contains spoilers for old children's films. Not to be read by four year olds. 

Now I have children I think more about children's films. You know, they're harsher than you'd expect. 

Many have an element of something magical and wonderful coming in and making a child's life great. Hooray! However, this greatness is rarely allowed to last. Usually the wonderful thing will leave, and the child is returned to a regular life, with nothing but memories. Booo! 

Generally the wonderful thing -- a monster, alien, animal or magic thing -- is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a device to teach the protagonist (or, often, the parents of the protagonist) something about living life. (Loosen up, Dad, stop taking work so seriously.) 

Harry: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

However, unlike in films for grown-ups, the protagonist is not allowed to stay with the life-enhancing sprite. 

The plot of a mainstream romantic comedy is, and watch the self-conscious way I phrase the following so as not so sound sexist: girl and boy meet, girl and boy have a lot of fun, girl and boy have troubles, usually a misunderstanding, and are torn asunder, girl and boy get back together. The end. Everyone's happy. 

Compare with E.T. Boy meets Alien, boy and Alien have a lot of fun, boy loses alien, boy gets alien back. The End? No! Not the end. Boy loses alien again. THE END. Tears all round. 

E.T. is not a mismatched couple making good. E.T. himself is not a manic pixie dream girl (or "magical negro") as he has his own motivations and goals, and from them, internal conflicts. This is not romantic comedy but romantic tragedy. This is Brief Encounter, not Maid in Manhattan. 

Now, what's so bad about a happy ending? Is this simply that it is narratively expedient to put the world back the way you found it? Do more permanent changes in the imaginary world get in the way of suspending disbelief? 

Or this instead a deep conservatism? You can have your fun but ultimately you have to give up on the strange and fantastic and fit back into a world whose social relations remain intact. You have your memories, now work hard at school, get a proper job, get married, have children, vote: these are the messages of Batteries Not Included and Flight of the Navigator.

The kids never end up with the girl. We must wave farewell to Mary Poppins. She's done her job teaching parents to pay a bit more attention to the kids, and these are apparently all the lessons they need. Her goal is not permanent revolution, it is not breaking down the structures of bourgeois society and the family. Her actions underpin conventional living, as the welfare state underpins capitalism. Think what chaos she could cause if she stuck around! But no, she needs to go and make another upper middle class family that bit happier. Her magic is not for slum kids. 

Capitalist foot soldier

UPDATE! Just thought this might be why Roald Dahl so popular with children and still frowned on by adults. In his stories the world and its social relations are permanently changed. Nasty parental figures don't learn, they are killed! Children ascend to power, and not fairy tale power, which is often about reclaiming a 'natural' place in the hierarchy (lost princesses coming home etc), but new power.

I do a bit more childcare than average

I have to be careful when I talk about parenting, coming from a man it sounds bad. Still, much of modern parenting trends (by which I mean, "how middle class parents raise their kids") seem to be about ruining mothers' lives as much as possible.

Patriarchy in action

My wife gets guilty. Worries if she's doing enough for them. Beats herself up about having birthday parties for them. Takes them places.

I don't feel guilty at all. Ever! Right from the birth of our first child my wife and I have split the childcare and housework equally. The expectations on fathers are so low I cleared them years ago. In the society's eyes I'm a hero.

Mr. Mom

I'm fine with sitting here writing this while they tear around me, playing. My self-serving theory is that children develop best through knocking about. No need to get them in the car and give them a learning experience. I might take them out later, but only if I get bored.

It can be a pain though, Dadding. Everyone in the NHS treats you somewhere between a family friend and a potential kidnapper. Taking my youngest for his vaccinations led to the question, "does his mother know he's here?" Needless to say, my wife does not get asked about me when it's her turn at the doctor's.

Having been through the last four years I hold the following to be equally true:

1. It has been a gift. Shocking that I could have sleepwalked into missing out on this time with my children.
2. It is a great burden, one which I now couldn't possibly expect my wife to bear alone. 

All in all, I recommend making the childcare as even as possible. Dads are generally lazier. I recommend more laziness in parenting.

Jah Jah Johnston Hall of Fame: Randy Travis

Easy reasons why country music is good: songs written for adults; good singers.

Here's Randy in full flow.

He's had his troubles. Here's a more recent photo.

Jah Jah Johnston wishes him a full recovery.

We forget Elton John at our peril

Sauerkraut, our greatest teacher. 5 life lessons from fermented vegetables

First thing: forget vinegar. We're talking here about fermentation. 

There are recipes for making sauerkraut. Here's one. Here's another. You don't really need anything other than this:

Cut vegetables up. Sprinkle with salt. Bash around a bit (or not, if you can't be bothered). Shove into a jar. Top up with water if necessary. Use a jar or similar to keep the vegetables below the water level. Leave. Top up with water if the level goes down. Make sure the vegetables stay under water. Try it every few days. Put in the fridge when it's to your satisfaction.

That's it. An easy way to keep your vegetable intake up. Tangy, nice with some meat. Lasts forever. Great! But the real gift is in how it changes your world.

Some Sauerkraut

1. You know the world isn't just a collection of visible objects, but you don't quite believe it, not really. Watching something change through the interaction of millions of bacteria who are making something to eat: that's a trip.
2. It subtly undermines an internalised worldview that something's value comes from its price, and that legitimacy is conferred through capitalism and exchange, i.e. it is good because it comes from a shop.
3. You have to rely on your senses. It is ready when you think it tastes nice. Not when Giles Coren says it tastes nice. 
4. It is not a recipe but a process. You're not making something, you're allowing something. Or watching something. The world is not a collection of static objects moved around by people with agency.
5. The recognition that you may not be who you think you are. You are not a single voiced "soul" housed in a flesh robot. You are a system and collection of cells, many of whom (bacteria) do not share "your" DNA. You are a community. Embracing that, and looking after the little guys, can have a huge effect on your health, immunity and mood.

I can say these things, and you may find them plausible, but it is only in doing that we internalise the ancient wisdom of the veg picklers.

Just make some sauerkraut already. 

Reclaiming the British Hinterland for the mainstream

Did you see Hinterland? It's a Welsh detective series currently being shown on BBC4. We'll come back to that.

Its characters switch between English and subtitled Welsh. When was the last time you heard Welsh on television? Britain's second language, and it's never heard by non-Welsh speakers. 1% of the British population speak it, and the other 99% are never exposed to it. Ever. You could go your whole life watching British media and never be confronted with the beauties of Welsh. Not saying the rest of us should speak any, but to never hear it? 

Watching it I caught glimpses of another possible Britain, one in which we are used to hearing other British accents and languages, where they weren't presented as other and strange to an audience assumed to be from the South East of England.  

Hinterland looks beautiful, it's exciting. It's mainstream. Now, I'm not saying it's particularly good; the reviews have been very kind. It was a bit silly, and full of the usual crime series cliches. But it is mainstream. The only thing which is different is it's not entirely in English. It should be on BBC 1, and it was originally shown there (IN WALES) but for the rest of the country it's confined to BBC 4, home of the European drama series. Something which should be completely natural to us has been made niche. 

A similar story with The Fall, a crime drama set in Belfast. The best thing about it, by far, was its Belfast location. But that location wasn't presented matter-of-factly, as somewhere natural to tell a story, but instead made strange through the eyes of a visiting southern English detective, the way in for the assumed (English, Southern) viewer. 

The British countryside looks a lot more like this:

Yorkshire Dales

And this:

Bodmin Moor

And this:

Black Mountains

And this:

Peak District

And this:

Loch Lomond

And this:

Lake District

Than it does like this:

Don't know - England though, right?

Or this:

Kent

And our cities more like this:

Glasgow

And this:

Newcastle

And this:

Leeds

And this:

Belfast

Than this:

Not sure - not a British city by the looks of it

Yet all of Britain is presented as other compared to an assumed South East norm, undermining any sense of British identity. All of the regions feel alienated from "Britain" (i.e. the South East). There's been a decades long propaganda campaign to normalise the un-British ways of the greater London region. Enough! Time to point the finger the other way. We're not different, London, you are. You cockney fucks. 

Better Living Through Fermented Vegetables

I've just been chopping cabbage for sauerkraut.

I need to do a series of posts on the glories and wisdom of sauerkraut. It may be the simplest, most cost effective way to improve your life. It's doesn't even have to be cabbage. I'm quite partial to some sauerrüben, myself. And of course sour beets.

People often say, "this book changed my life" when what they mean is they really liked it. Well, this book might actually change your life, Sandor Ellix-Katz's Wild Fermentation. He can get a bit freaky deaky, but in its essentials it's killer.

Here's a video of the man. The book also includes yoghurt, cheese, bread and booze.

There are profound insights ahead for anyone willing to stuff some grated carrot in a jar.

The Brilliant Spanish

Since I last had a regular blog I've moved out of London and had two children. However, the biggest change in my mentality is a cooling of my crush on the USA and a mental embrace of Spain. It appears I must always construct a magical place in my head, somewhere to enliven everyday reality. If I could only split my time between my home, and this other, everything will be OK. I'm predicting the next one will be Germany.

Anyway.

Spain!

How glorious and confounding!

My favourite thing about Spain is the propensity of its parents to dress their children in sailor suits for special occasions. Now, this does sometimes happen in Britain, generally for birthday parties. The children look like this:

In Spain, there is fierce latin pride in play. They don't dress them up for fun, but for very special occasions like first communions. And if we're playing that game, why act as if this child has been press ganged from a Portsmouth tavern? My child is special. My child is a high ranking officer. And they dress them up like this.

And this:

And this:

Spain!