Trish Keenan RIP
I’d say Broadcast were one of my favourite bands, only my relationship with them would make other acts pray not to show up on my Facebook profile. I first heard them in ’96, when The Book Lovers EP was on rotation on the Mark And Lard graveyard shift. Its combination of insistent, brain-tugging harpsichord riff and Trish Keenan’s intoxicatingly distant vocals pulled at me. I hummed it. I sang it. I taped it off the radio.
I felt its strange, airless arrogance as a reproach and an appeal: I was 15, library dwelling and puffed-up with self-doubt. “Oh read the sign/Above the door/You’re unlike anyone,” sang Trish in her curious voice – a classic English pop voice, McColl-ish, naturally warm but technically cool, sliding in just underneath the notes where no one could catch her. The vintage electronica sound of the band’s instruments gave the impression of being someone’s nostalgia, but not quite mine. A dreamworld for the isolated and sickly, which was where I – sulking it out in bed after a long, sapping bout with glandular fever – felt like I lived.
I rewound and replayed the five minute patch of that C90. (It was part of an end-of-show four song segue, with the Divine Comedy’s Booklovers, Dexys’ Burn It Down, and something else about authors, I forget.) But the EP never came my way out in a Midlands market town, and by the time the band’s first album proper came out in 2000, I was doing something else. Listening to New York bands and waiting for escape, I think: English pastoral electronica drifted into the list of things-I-used-to-do, along with going to the library and checking out all the Kafka novels.
And yet, they stayed with me. I would sing The Book Lovers to myself in a half-remembered assemblage of aloof words and drifting notes. It was in me. Eventually, I was shifted to order a copy of Work And Non Work, which I expected to be a bunch of acceptable sounds cushioning the song I couldn’t shake off. It wasn’t. It was all just as needlingly lovely, with Trish’s heart-weary voice winding across the melodies – the voice of someone who knew more about dejection than you could hope to have beaten out of you. “I remember your excitement/Choosing pictures for your wall/And now you’ve seen them all so often/You hardly see them anymore,” she sighs in Lights Out, peeling down the Fight Club poster from my student wall with her languorous tongue and leaving it in papery shreds on the floor.
Maybe it was that feeling of always being ahead and looking back that made me fail to seek out new Broadcast. They already sounded like the echoes of The Stone Tape – archaic, other-worldly. After Trish’s painfully early death last Firday, I read the tributes to their late improvisational gigs, and the reviews of their last album (the Hammer-ishly titled Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age), and I wonder what I was listening to that was more important than discovering more about this eerie, intoxicating band with the singer whose voice spoke sympathy and whose manner held you far away. But I love them, and since Friday I have cursed myself for not recognising their life in the fragile present. She was special. I missed her when she was alive, and I miss suddenly her now.
“Let’s shoot idiots at the moon”
Planet Rock’s breakfast show DJ Lucio invited me to give his listeners my alternative thought for the day. So obviously I talked about queue jumpers, astronauts, and my plan for making the world better with forced space travel. Have a listen:
Advice hijack!
This is from an idea I hit on with Bish training: whenever we read some especially bad response in an advice column, we’ll write our own reply. That’s all. No moaning about the official answer or attacking the editorial standards of the original publication, just a replacement answer offered in the hope that we can be a bit smarter and more sympathetic…
I’m 23 and have had a pretty bad run with men for most of my life. I’ve never been in a serious relationship. After wild times last year (starting university, drinking, one-night stands), I began seeing a friend of a friend casually. Then we started spending quality time together – eating out, cinema, etc. I asked whether we were a couple and he told me he couldn’t take the relationship any further. I feel so inexperienced and I can’t put aside the fear that he didn’t want to be with me because there’s something wrong with me. It’s the darkest of times at the moment, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t know whether this will read as reassuring or terrifying, but no one is as experienced with relationships as they’d like to be. However much you’ve lived through (and I’d say that the wild year of uni and period of dating you describe are nowhere near enough to count as a “bad run”, so you can go a bit easier on the self-criticism), love and sex have a brilliant way of slamming you with some unexpected dilemma or disaster.
Things didn’t work out with this guy, and that’s absolutely fine. A long-term relationship demands a lot of pieces all coming together at more-or-less the same time: mutual attraction, shared aims and ambitions, joint ethics and beliefs. For whatever reason, your ex didn’t see things going the same way as you did. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, just that you weren’t right for each other. And from your letter, it doesn’t sound as though you’re all that cut up about losing him: I think you might be grieving the end of the relationship more than you’re mourning the absence of this man.
You say you’ve never been in a serious relationship, but many of the best relationships start out as downright frivolous – friendships in which attraction takes hold and blooms, and where the desire to be with the other person gradually develops from a weekly date to a daily habit to, maybe, something you both want all the time for the entire foreseeable future. Not every relationship will turn out like that, of course – but that doesn’t make you a failure, it just means that you’re smart enough to figure out what does and doesn’t work.
For now, concentrate on meeting people, doing interesting things, having fun (though not one night stands, as they don’t seem to work for you), and, most importantly, working out what it is that you want from life besides that elusive serious relationship. Because once you’ve got some idea of where you want to go, you may find that the people you take with you fall into place quite painlessly. Good luck.
What’s the blogging story?
There are some questions I didn’t realise were still worth asking. Is blogging journalism? Will blogging kill journalism? Can bloggers save journalism? So I was a tiny bit surprised to find myself talking about all these at a Bristol Festival Of Ideas event last Friday. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive answers are “sometimes”, “no” and “not completely”.
Blogging is a platform, and just like print it hosts good practitioners and bad practitioners. It’s well established now as a complement to straight news – so much so that most newspapers publish their comment sections in a blog format online. Meanwhile, a Wired feature by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argues that the rise of the app market means that the open internet in which blogs have thrived will soon be eclipsed. Media companies might just have found what they want: a way to use the astonishing distribution potential of the internet and make readers pay for it.
Which means the time when blogs were serious competion for an audience’s attention and money could be on the way out – a good thing for the financial security of the journalism industry and its employees, a bad thing if you like the way the web opens up journalism to non-pros with a story and scrutiny-minded amateurs.
The debate I took part in made me realise that not everyone is thinking that way. For some journalists, bloggers remain an exisential threat – forgetting that there are plenty of journalists who blog professionally, or who self-publish extraordinary reporting and testimony, or who do so as an unpaid addendum to their employment. For some bloggers, blogging is the scourge that will clean up a corrupt mainstream media – forgetting, natch, that there are plenty of bloggers as billious and hateful as the worst newspaper employees, and that bloggers have seemingly worked hand in hand with traditional media outlets to get some truly grotesque non-stories going (Guido, The Mail, I am giving you a squinty look).
One of the strangest points in the discussion was when the idea of a code of conduct for bloggers came up, and Brooke Magnanti suggested that bloggers already had their own code of conduct, pointing to the fact that while her identity was known to some in the blogging community, none of those who guessed chose to sell her out. To me, this only says that bloggers are a group with shared social norms that value anonymity: that one principle means nothing in terms of accountability to or honesty about people who aren’t bloggers.
In the Saturday workshop, the delegates from the Bristol NUJ seemed to tentatively approve the idea of extending NUJ affiliation to bloggers and inviting them to adhere to its code of conduct, which is quite good. I hope they do. Bloggers – I think, anyway – are quite likely to become workers for media companies over time, and it makes sense for the union to cultivate the sympathetic ones from early on whether they ultimately turn pro or not.
There were some objections to this from NUJ members: one suggested that bloggers should be required to suspend posting in sympathy with industrial action, because they believed that blogging counted as supplying copy if a journal scraped the content to fill a page. Tagging bloggers as blacklegs for being plagiarised struck me as highly daft, and showed a real lack of understanding about how copyright applies to work published online. Which means that, if the happy anarchy of the web really is on the wane and blogs with it, some people still have a lot to learn before it’s all over.
If you’re really interested in the discussion, you can watch the video above – with contributions from Roy Greenslade, Anton Vowl, Sunny Hundal, Iqbal Tamimi, Brooke Magnanti, Elisabeth Winkler, Kevin Arscott and Donnacha DeLong (yes, there was a vast panel, and it probably didn’t help the discussion to stay focused). I can’t because it’s excrutiating to hear myself talk.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
Gawking and geeking
An interesting aside from The New Yorker’s profile of Gawker founder Nick Denton:
The “geek” sites, as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, io9, and Jalopnik are known internally, bring in twice the traffic of the “gossip” sites, suggesting that British-inflected class angst may not be a long-term-growth model.
The New Yorker, 18 October 2010, Search And Destroy: Nick Denton’s Blog Empire
Most people accept that going low is the way to win the internet: the celebrity skin sidebar of the Daily Mail website, for example, demonstrates a strategy thoroughly inflected by the success of Gawker, Defamer, Perez Hilton, and all the other dirt dishers with an eye for a headline. And it does work.
But the Gawker Media model suggests that what works even better is finding a few subjects about which people have an obsessive desire to be informed, and writing about them. A lot. Because coverage on the geek sites is narrow and deep, they don’t have the same brand recognition as the scandal portals; but the passion of the readerships, and the fact that they come handily pre-packaged for advertisers, makes them very valuable in their semi-obscurity.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
Fast paper
All debates about the influence of social media come down to this. It is just fast paper. Was anyone expecting anything else? I mention this because The Observer today contains a summary of the Gladwell v Shirky spat over the power of Twitter, and while it’s presented as an argument, both of them are basically offering versions of the ‘fast paper’ argument.
Gladwell’s thesis is that social media campaigning doesn’t change anything. Retweeting a hashtag, clicking the ‘like’ button and slapping a twibbon (ick) on your avatar are all heart-warming acts of self-congratulation – a little pat on your own back in recognition of your very fine moral nature – but they don’t have any influence on the real world.
The Shirky response is, more or less, ‘Duh.‘ Some people overstated the case for Twitter activism during the Green Uprising in Iran, but just because social media couldn’t overthrow a government doesn’t mean it isn’t good at other stuff. It’s a communications tool: it’s good at conveying information and emotions. Gladwell is just arguing with the Quixotic extreme when he says, “”Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that [Martin Luther] King’s task in Birmingham, Alabama, would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.”
But campaigners aren’t now using social media instead of direct action; they’re using it to inform and motivate direct action, and to change attitudes. One good example is the It Gets Better Project, launched by Dan Savage in response to the suicides of bullied gay teenagers. It’s a very simple civil rights campaign, in which gay adults upload videos to YouTube describing how their lives have improved since the grim days high school. Pre-social media, it’s the kind of guidance that could perhaps only come about through personal ads and penpal friendships: YouTube makes it possible to broadcast support. You could criticise it for not being the Stonewall riots, but a first-person account of a happy adult life probably beats smashing up a nightclub when it comes to helping these kids.
The truth is that all causes everywhere come with a lot of badge-wearing hangers-on, and even street level activism is enormously inefficient. I don’t think I’m doing myself a disservice when I say that my contribution to the anti-war movement (shuffling around Sheffield city centre, wearing a pillowcase skirt with “NOT IN MY NAME” screen printed on the arse) could have been left undone without harming the overall cause of the Stop The War Coalition. Bluntly, if you’re involved in a protest it’s probably because you’re basically powerless, and you’re not going to get everything what you want anyway. 60 years on from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there are mainstream media organisations pimping the deceit that ‘black’ is synonymous with ‘unamerican’, and 50 years post Stonewall, gay teens are still being bullied to death. Even the most powerful campaigns are only skirmishes in long, slow and sometimes sorrowful struggles.
Yes, social media gives a lot more people the opportunity to be telescopic philanthropists, sitting at our desks plugging our email addresses into petition forms. But that’s purely a function of campaigns being able to reach a lot of people – and useless as these pixel-level gestures may be at bringing about the object they’re supposedly aimed at, they do at least demonstrate and encourage a movement of attitudes leading to long-term change. In terms of campaigning, you’d be a goddamn fool to keep organising flyer drops and forget to update your Facebook group, just because Facebook gives you the dispiriting ability to see who’s lost interest, whereas your flyers never report back when they end up in the bin. And in terms of places to wear a political slogan, I’m going contra Gladwell and saying that ‘in my Twitter feed’ is probably an improvement over ‘on my arse’. Neither does much. But fast paper does it where a few more people will see.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010; photo by arimoore, used under Creative Commons
What to say about Ed
It’s the decision that will determine Labour’s fate over the next five years. It’s the difference between a demoralising era of electoral devastation for the party, and the chance to mount an effective challenge on the next polling day. It’s the choice that could make Labour a force that’s ready for power, or inaugurate a bleak era of impotence.
No, it isn’t the election of a new leader. That matters, of course, but the effect of having one is probably as important as the effect of choosing any individual candidate over the rest. Even with no leader and only a provisional shadow cabinet, the gap between Labour and the Tories has been narrowing consistently in polls since the summer, with public attitudes hardening against the cuts. If Labour can organise itself behind a face that isn’t implicated in the perceived failures of the Blair/Brown period, sustaining and advancing that trend should be obvious. (I’m not saying that Labour can’t fuck this up. Just that it would be an impressive fuck-up if they did.)
Ed Miliband seems likely to do a decent job heading up his party. But there’s another big call to make: how is the hostile media going to characterise him? There’s been an early move to mark him out as “Red Ed”, but that seems like a smear based on the mistaken assumption that the British public is as riotously anti-state as the American one – it isn’t, and anyway Ed is only pinkish round the edges. The Express has even made an early run at the Tea Party approach, with a story headlined “DEDICATED LEFT WINGER FOLLOWS HIS FATHER’S DREAM” apparently modeled on Dinesh D’Souza’s voodoo analysis of Obama (“Obama shares his father’s anti-colonial crusade…”). The gulf between The Express’ curtain-twitching paranoia and the grand insanity of Fox News is filled with bathos, and this stuff looks unlikely to stick for now.
Matthew Parris made a more convincing move, interviewed on the BBC at the Labour conference today, when he said that in five years Ed Miliband would be known as a “ditherer”. By lunchtime, Christina Odone had grabbed the idea and bundled it up with the Mail’s astonishing revelation that Miliband LIVES WITH A WOMAN and HAS HAD A BABY WITH THE WOMAN but is NOT MARRIED TO THE WOMAN. “This is a man who has problems with relationships,” oozes Odone, accusing Miliband of “commitment phobia” as if Ed was liable to run out on the country and leave the electorate chasing his through the CSA.
The Tory-supporting media is shuffling the elements at their disposal like Frankenstein playing with a set of body parts on his operating table (Son of a commie dad! Usurper of primogeniture! Scorner of wedlock!). Eventually, they’re going to make something that’s just close enough to the actual man for it to be functional.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
Who gained from Hague’s embarrassment?
Guido Fawkes likes to style himself as a bottle-throwing avenger of the internet. No party, no loyalties, nothing but unconstrained contempt for the people in charge and a free-ranging vocabulary of abuse. It’s part of his MO to deny any editorial responsibility for what appears on his site: the comments go unmoderated, even the cartoons he runs get shrugged off as being someone else’s work. (Although maybe that’s just because they’re pisspoor and hideous, and even mendacious polemicists aspire to good taste sometimes.)
He knows what makes him successful: gutter gossip, thrown out wide and quick. It doesn’t matter that most of it doesn’t stick. All he has to do is keep up the fiction of distance from what he produces, which he does in both relatively unsophisticated ways (that arch third-person voice) and bludgeoningly unsophisticated ways (the only time I’ve tangled with him in a comments thread, Staines made a point of denying everything, including things that could be obviously verified and things that hadn’t even been attributed to him). Read more…
The Pope seems to think virtue is just the opposite of multiculturalism
For a devout Catholic, seeing the Pope in person must be a bit like going to the best gig ever. At least, that’s the nearest analogy I can come up with from my spiritually stunted, godless, relativist perspective. To stand among thousands, all looking on the same point like one vast eye, swaying and rushing to a single pulse, and at the same time to have the private ecstasy of communion with the person on the stage… I mean, it was pretty awesome when I got to see Nick Cave at ATP, so imagine how overwhelming getting a glimpse of God’s representative on Earth would be. Obviously, I can’t imagine it because I’m a spiritually stunted etc etc, but I’m guessing it would be a bit special.
So my outsiderish perspective on the papal visit isn’t ‘ha ha, look at all the superstitious people thronging round an old man in a greenhouse on wheels’. Well, it is a little bit, but I don’t find the Pope’s congregation any more absurd than my own adventures in transcendent group experiences. (I wonder whether anyone goes home from seeing the Pope feeling a little bit disappointed? ‘Well, I got quite near the front but to be honest it wasn’t all that. I just don’t think he really had the Holy Spirit in him this time. No, I didn’t stick around for the encore.’) Read more…
The coalition’s attack on the family
Iain Duncan Smith loves families. Nice families, of course, with a mum and a dad – not any old rag-tag childrearing unit. His Centre For Social Justice believes that “married two-parent families produce the best outcomes for both adults and children”, and in government, he’s contributed to the policy of removing the dubious “couples penalty” from the benefits system. Read more…
