Novelistme.com

Wilco Live at the Tivoli in Brisbane

2010-05-03T21:29:00.001-07:00

You know a band is good when you lose count of how many times you've been to see them and the most recent gig seems like the best.

Such was the case with seeing Wilco at the Tivoli in Brisbane. Seriously the place is the size of a pub and getting the chance to watch Wilco (probably the best live band in the world at the moment) at close quarters is going to be hard to beat.

What next... still fancy catching Pearl Jam in Hyde Park but...

Why not have one tax system?

2010-05-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

So for some reason this is a question that has been bouncing around my head for a while.

There's few people out there who would hold central government up as a symbol of efficiency.

Likewise there's few people who would argue the merits of complexity over simplicity when it comes down to taxation and financial management.

So why when these things are true is taxation so complex?

Think about it. How many ways do you pay tax? And how clear cut are those taxes? I like to think of myself as reasonably financialy astute but I realised quite some time ago its to complex for me to get completely across.

So why is it so complex? My cynical reasoning comes to one answer. Its so complex so we, the people, have no real clear understanding of how much we are really being taxed at all. Let's just take a couple of taxes.

1) Income Tax - You have a tax free allowance each year. Then above that you have multiple tax rates that kick up to 40% and then 50%.
2) Then we have National Insurance. Last I checked this was 7.5% but it may have changed.
3) Then on everything we buy we pay Value Added Tax (VAT @ 17.5%)
4) Then you have additional taxes on things like Petrol, Alcohol, Cigarettes, TV Licenses.
5) Then you have local council tax

Bearing in mind how inefficient we know government to be would it therefore make sense to have them performing the same task (tax collection) in all the above different ways? Or would it be easier, simpler and more efficient to simply say from now on we are just going to tax your income at a higher rate or we are just going to tax the things you buy?

Now I suspect there is a counter argument here that says if you just tax one thing then it will unfair to certain individuals. But if this is the case with a simple, singular tax system it would be easy to fix this. You dont have to worry about all the far reaching consequences of a change in one tax to the myriad of other taxes.

The fact is we're all being bamboozled by complexity and its surprising to me no one has seriously brought this up as a political debate. Dont we all want to know how much tax we are really paying? Do we really want a million stealth taxes? Wouldnt it be better for everyone to be able to have a clear and simple understanding of their tax obligations. Wouldnt this in fact make it easier for the government to collect their tax revenue? Rather than have to police and enforce some of the most complex financial legislation in existance they can just concentrate on policing one policy emphatically?

Food for thought?

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

2010-05-03T21:03:00.001-07:00

So as you may gather I'm a big Douglas Coupland fan. Or should I say was? It's one of those less desirable quirks of time passing that your heroes (ok heroes is probably a little strong but cant think of a better softer term that's less lame sounding than "favourite writer") are fallable and more than that with the passing of time they will disapoint you. And so it is with Douglas Couplands new book that I've just finished reading (whilst on hols in Oz). For any Coupland aware people out there the parallels between this book and his still most famous novel Generation X are clear in both the title and in the subject of young listless individuals searching for meaning by engaging in story telling. However that's pretty much where the similarities end. Where as Gen X was fresh and original when it came out Gen A is like a stale, decaff version of its ancestor. Where Gen X was somehow managed to come across as emotionally powerful and almost spiritual in both its narrative and its characters existential angst and sense of being lost, Gen A is just vacuum packed. There's little story, little difference between any of the characters and after peddling the same uber cool zeitgeist prose for so long little of any originality.

The decline has been coming for some time lets hope its not terminal. But you get the feeling its going to require something profound for Coupland to reclaim his form.

Dont be fooled by the jacket on this novel which seems to carry an incredible amount of praise for the book. Most of the reviews I've checked out online seem to be equally scathing!

Over and out.

Apologies

2010-05-03T21:01:00.000-07:00

I read with horror that my last blog was in August. Man that shows how busy things have been. I need to up the tempo or this thing is going to become even more pointless than it currently is with its readership of nero (that near zero LOL!)

On a Mission!

2009-08-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

Have come up with some hair brain schemes to entertain myself whilst I count down the days to Cuba:

1) Operation Grand Union

A walk from West Drayton following the Grand Union Canal to its terminus in the City of London. Plan would be to split the walk over 2 days starting on a Sat and finish up in town on a Sunday and just crash somewhere on route whilst partaking in a few ales.

2) Operation Dungeness

Got this idea from a book I read the other day by Alain De Botton called the Pleasures and Sorrows of work. In it the follows the path of electricity pylons from Dungeness Nuclear Power Plant (in Kent) into London. Again its a two day walk and I think would be quite an experience. Dungeness sounds like quite a desolate and strange place. And I've been meaning to check it out for years - and doing it on foot sounds a lot more rewarding than in a car?

3) Operation Go Kart

With Formular 1 actually being exciting this year it's time for me to test my mettle on a track myself. Go karts having the advantage that they are cheap, quick and a pretty pure way of testing your track driving skills!

Any other suggestions gratefully recieved!

Purple Rain

2009-07-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

And now for something else super cool! How about Prince's Purple Rain album covered by a load of modern musicians? If you are interested go to the following website and type in the answer "keyboardist":

http://www.spin.com/articles/get-your-free-copy-spins-prince-tribute

If you do you will be granted access to a free download that was given away with the July 2009 edition of Spin Magazine.

The Shield is over - Reflections on a TV great

2009-07-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

Just finished watching the final season of The Shield.

And as per usual with great television its a bitter sweet conclusion.

Inevitably two things happen when you finish watching a great series, firstly you wonder what can you watch next that reaches such a high standard, and secondly how does this TV series rate against the other great works we've seen in the last 10 or so years (i.e. The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing)?

And it seems like I'm not the only one. A brief search of the web through up the following articles that are worth reading if your interested or are considering watching either The Wire or The Shield. First up there's an article in the Guardian that compares The Shield to The Wire and controversially advocates the former over the latter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/dec/27/tv-drama-david-simon-wire-shield

For me, if you are interested, dramatically The Shield often had highs that I think surpass The Wire. However where I think The Wire may edge it is just the sheer size of the canvas. The Wire is somehow epic, whereas the The Shield is a lot more claustrophobic and therefore sometimes much more intense. The following article also has an interesting counter response to the Wire Vs Shield debate:

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/chris-petit-and-the-wire-v-the-shield

In terms of an ending however I think The Shield really aced it. By comparison the end of The Sopranos lacked something, although it is I have to admit wonderfully ambiguous! But that's both great and frustrating.

Next up Generation Kill the series that David Simon did after finishing The Wire.

Watch this space....

The coolest thing on the web!

2009-07-16T03:56:00.000-07:00

So what could it be? Well how about a legal website that pretty much allows you to listen to any music out there for free? Interested? Well to access it simply do a google search on "Spotify" and just download the free mini application and within a couple of minutes you can be up and running with a near infinte supply of music. Talk about a killer app. And if your looking for some inspiration then simply look up some of the following bands:

Wilco

Elbow

Doves

Curtis Mayfield

The Smiths

Suede

Bon Iver

Happy listening!

All Quiet on the Blogging Front

2009-06-21T01:28:00.000-07:00

So its been a busy few months with developments a plenty. A holiday in Fiji, more life in Oz, a whole host of movies watched and many more books digested. Some of those that I can remember include:

Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely (3.5 out of 5)

Another book in the behavoiral economics mold. If you lapped up Freakanomics then you'll probably enjoy this. I remember enjoying it reading it but now a few months on I've forgotten it all - so couldnt have been earth shattering.

The War of the Worlds, Nial Ferguson (4 out of 5)

So in my mind one has to be naturally suspicious of someone as prolific as this fella. Not only is he a prolific writer/historian, but he also is a Professor of History at Harvard, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University and then when he's not doing that he also manages to knock out the odd BBC TV series! Not bad huh? To make matters worse he's a fantastic writer who has the art of making history real and interesting (something that my history teachers at school really struggled with). Ferguson talks in pretty plain English and has a great eye for unique insight, that quite often forces you to re-think and re-evaluate what you think about the subject. In this book he talks about conflict in the twentieth century and puts forward a pretty powerful argurment for why it has been the most blood thirsty in the history of human kind. This basically revolves around 3 key points:

1) Ethnic Conflict

2) Economic Volatility

3) Empires in Decline

There's many things in the book that really got me thinking. One big one that was really news to me was learning just how much ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing there has been this century. I had always thought that the Nazi's persecution of the Jews had been a one off thing. But the truth is that's a somewhat flattering view of History. For 40 years before WWII the Jews had been getting a pretty hard time across pretty much the whole of Europe and they weren't the only ones. It's pretty sobering reading.

This is the 3rd Ferguson book I've read (the others being the Ascent of Money, and Empire) and I have to say they've all been good value. Although there are some common threads that intertwine them. Ferguson seems fond of History validated through the lense of Economic Analysis, and also as you'd expect the British Empire plays a prominent roll in all 3 books. However there's plenty of fascinating original insights to keep the pace up, and the attention focussed.

Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis (3 out of 5)

So you have to be a Chilli Peppers fan to enjoy this book. And even then its format is pretty predictable as Kiedis lurches from addiction to rehab to be saved by music/love/women before falling back in the clutches of his demons. It does get a little bit tyresome, but there's just enough music related stuff to keep it lightly entertaining. But at the end your kind of happy you are not him despite all the money, the lifestyle and the plaudits.

Bad Vibes - Britpop and My Part in its Downfall, Luke Haines (4 out of 5)

A very different book, very differently told. Haines is acerbic, bitter, droll and hilarious as a result. Again this book will only appeal to fans of Haines in his various guises (The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, Baader Meinhof) or at the very least those who grew up and revelled in the storm drain of Britpop. Fascinating stuff.

Fooled by Randomness - The Hidden Rule of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (4 out of 5)

So I started off by reading Black Swans first, which actually followed this. But I think this is the better book. They both cover pretty similar territory but Taleb's insight into the folly of financial markets is refreshing and amazing insightful, especially when you consider that this was written when everyone and his borther was busy worshipping at the alter of Wall Street. The markets are random. Those who pretend otherwise are shysters. Its better to lose small often and win big infrequently. Long term performance charts are a lot less important than you think. And our obsession with studying "succesful" people and millionaires for their unique insights and intelligence is just plain wrong. There's has to be winners and there has to be losers. Luck plays a bigger part in success than almost anyone is prepared to admit.

Whilst I may not agree with everything he says - he provides thought provoking statements that your forced to consider aplenty. Well worth the price of admission.

The Third Brother by Nick McDonell, 2.5 out of 5

2009-03-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

So lets be clear I'm writing this a little disapointed but not without hope. For those believers who read McDonell's first book Twelve there is just about enough here for them to keep the faith. But only just. But why? Well it comes down to a few simple things. McDonell is good, if not great about doing the New York thing. He understands how the city, and its people work. He is very much one of them. Part of the reason why Twelve was such a revelation was that we finally had a new writer who could pick up from where McInerney and Ellis have left off. Where as those writers had moved on to develop their middle aged spread we had no-one who could tell us about the new modern New York and what was really happening now. Part of the appeal of Twelve was that it really had that gritty authenticity of a NYPD Blue style New York. Likewise Twelve's narrator lived in that familiar self absorbed cold Western world that we often inhabit, the tail end of the Gen X dilema, where our place in the world and the value of the lives we lead (and those of our parents) is very much in question. But in The Third Brother McDonell tries to do something different and its an ambition that blows up in his face. The novel starts in Hong Kong and quickly moves on to Thailand where Mike our main protagonist is sent as a journalist. But that's kind of part of the problem. These places are just names, and McDonell's eye for detail just picks up the surface and stereotypes. He talks about the whores, the clubs, the scary motorbike rides of Thailand without really revealing anything new about the place or telling us anything that even a cursory knowledge of the country would reveal. It's all just surface. And unfortunately exactly the same can be said for the characters, they are all just names. Some authors make minimal descriptions an art form, others go to obsessive lengths to conjour a feeling in readers mind about what a character is really like. McDonell doesnt so much write his characters here so much as sketch them. And each sketch is drawn directly from the well of overfamiliar and lazy stereotypes: the drop out traveller, the angst fueled war reporter, the whore with a heart of gold, they all find their place here. So much so that when the first half of the book closes with the death of one of the major characters, this point that should, you're sure, be a major point of reflection and change within the book, is met with mild dis interest.

As you may have guessed the first half of the book is really a disaster, and its to McDonell's credit that the latter stages of the book managed to pull it around and at least make it a little bit interesting. It is therefore no coincidence that as the book and the writing improve so does our character return to the world McDonell actually knows: NYC. But its at times great writing that is pushing against the flow of a meaningless and unconvincing story. It's almost as if McDonell panics half the way through writing the book and realises it's a pile of shit and returns to what he knows and love best. By this point though other than moments of great writing we get a story which amounts to repeated and ever growing amounts of bad news. If the death of a major character in the first half wasnt enough, Mike's parents then die, then his brother and then September the 11th happens. It should I'm sure be some sort of moving spiritual meditation on loss and suffering in the modern world but becasue there's only the thin veneer of an inplausible story you cant help but think "get over it" or see some kind of comedy in the never ending barrage of bleakness.

So having said that will I buy his next book? I think I probably will - but probably only after reading a few reviews first to make sure he hasnt lost his way quite like he does in this one. It's an old adage that you should write what you know. And in some ways I guess that carries a great deal of pressure when you debut is universally lauded. But on this showing more of the same (i.e. NYC stories) is most definitely what's required.

Recent Gigs

2009-02-06T17:44:00.001-08:00

Saw The Hold Steady this week following Ryan of the Adams the other week.

They were entertaining but very odd. Craig Finn the lead singer is a strange kind of rock star. To listen to him you'd imagine him to be some rugged rocker carved out of the same stone as Bruce Springsteen. The reality is somewhat different. Craig Finn to look at is the rotund bespectacle guy you find at your side in most bars. You wouldnt look at him twice. That is until he gets on stage and uses his charasmatic Minneanapolis snarl and start flailing around the stage. Some rockers ooze cool, some rockers have the crowd in their hand, the audience hanging at their every beck and call. That's not what's going on here. Craig Finn, this man with the most masculine of voices, flails around the stage with a bizarre campness thats hard to fathom. But where I'd imagine a hardened rock crowd to be troubled by such campness, he somehow uses this to strike some strange everyman relationship with the crowd. He's one of them and no one is asking any questions. And the rest of the band look like pretty much any pub rock band you'll see banging out the hits in your local. But the sounds they make is a force of nature.

Ryan Adams was a different proposition altogether and it caught me by surprise. I was expecting some rough hewn finger bleading country rock and what we got was something so polished and artistically perfect that I found myself both in awe and strangely disapointed. But saying that it was still a good night out.

And prior to that I'd also caught Gomez and The Black Keys. Gomez were the usual melodic pop/rock/blues that I love and cant criticise. And the Black Keys were blistering and raw. Just the two of them on stage, the drummer and guitarist banging out seven shades of hell from their equipment. Highly recomended.

And next up Coldplay! (oops)

Just wanted to suggest you have a listen to a couple of the warm up bands I came across that blew me away. The first is Dr Dog who's myspace site is as follows. We saw these guys supporting Gomez and The Black Keys: http://www.myspace.com/drdog The second is The Vasco Era who are a Melbourne based band and they mean it man! They were supporting the Hold Steady: http://www.myspace.com/thevascoera

Belated Updates

2009-02-06T17:32:00.000-08:00

So it's been a long time.

Obama has made it to the White House.

The wheels are falling off

The worlds financial system

I feel strangely insulated from it all being in Sydney

I guess there's a few reasons for that

1) Oz seems to be about 6 months behind the rest of the world in feeling the economic impact

2) Its a long way away from home

3) Oz is coming off the back of an extended financial boom

4) The news from home sounds particularly dire

It's the first recession of my adult life

And looking at it objectively I'd say the UK is in for a hard time

We've enjoyed a standard of living since the hey day of the empire

That you can only really think is going to decrease over time

We produce nothing

We consume a lot

We've become very complacent and lazy

Which probably explains why I feel a strange optimism about things

It feels like its time to re-evaluate

Time to reset the clocks

To dust ourselves down and start again

To take a look at ourselves and move forward

See if we can fix the long term unemplyed

Irradicate that sponger, stay at home culture

Build a new sense of national identity

Try and figure out what we want being British to mean moving forward

We've been great and we can be great again

But it means recognising that we've let things go a little stale

But the potential is still there...

Absolute Genius - Obama meets Bartlet

2008-09-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

So if you are a fan of either Barack Obama or President Bartlet (and what right thinking person can't be) then you will laugh yourself silly at this genius discussion that Aaron Sorkin penned between the Democratic Candidate and the "Greatest President Ever" from the "Greatest TV Show Ever":

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21dowd-sorkin.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Californication, 4 out of 5

2008-09-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

I really did consider giving this 3.5 instead of 4 as its guilty of exactly the same crimes as Heroes season 2. Its a little too polished and a little too clear about its intent to be truly great. But despite itself it manages to carry off its entertaining premise.

So if you fancy kicking back and watching Hank Moody, the stereotypical haunted novelist who's struggling with selling his soul to the man whilst torturing himself with a diet of easy sex and cheap drugs to allay the guilt for a failed relationship with the mother of his daughter, then this is the show for you.

As you might predict with such a ripe premise its pretty funny stuff, however the writers do well to keep it fresh throughout the season. You'd have thought such a premise might become a little strained 12 shows in. Although saying that I think they may struggle to make the second season as entertaining?

Heroes Season 2 - 4 out of 5

2008-09-30T03:35:00.000-07:00

So not a great by the same standards as the West Wing and The Wire. But enjoyable none the less I think of Heroes as a guilty pleasure with enough artistry to it to not feel like a complete indulgence.

I actually think I prefered Season 2 to Season 1 although from a quick few google searches it seems I'm in the minority re this. The digressions of season 2 and the lack of telegraphed plot lines and resolution that are often criticised in the reviews Ive read are what I find make the season interesting and little less linear. There are, whether deliberate or not, some interesting questions posed by the story, some examples being mans quest for immortality, and exactly what does does saving the world really mean?

If your looking for some good entertainment with high production values that doesnt tax the brain too heavily then Heroes Season 2 is your gig.

The Wire - 5 out of 5

2008-09-30T03:18:00.001-07:00

So if you havent already heard of the TV series The Wire then I come bearing great gifts, and gifts you are going to want to thank me for.

If you are the kind of person who raises a suspicious eye brow when you hear the phrase "greatest show on television" then you are like me, particularly if that charge, draws you in and forces you to watch said programme just to prove it wrong and ridicule such an outragous claim. Unfortunately for both you and I if you watch just one series I'd bet a weeks wages you won't have the will to argue with such a statement.

So whats the best way to give you an idea of what the Wire is? Well to all intents and purposes its a cop show. Not just any cop show however as its as interested in the criminals as it is in the cops. And it is unflinching - not that Ive ever experienced any of these things directly - I havent ever been to Baltimore - but it tastes 100% real and authentic.

I guess the best and most succinct way of positioning what the Wire is about is to say it's Barrack Obama's favourite TV show:

http://www.motherjones.com/riff_blog/archives/2008/01/6933_barack_obama_sa.html

http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/11/obama_loves_the_wire_i_now_love_obama

And what I'm trying to say by that is its real, its authentic, its complex, its ugly, its sometimes slow, sometimes addictive, sometimes viscous, sometimes funny, its intelligent, its thought provoking and its a million miles away from being definitive about anything apart from making clear that things are broken in America, people are easily corrupted. But still over riding all of this hope somehow seems to battle through. Just like the plagued characters of the wire. All have their cross to bare.

The Diviners by Rick Moody (2 out of 5)

2008-09-30T02:46:00.000-07:00

I generally have a rule about books. If I get bored reading the first page I put it down. If I get bored in the first chapter I put it down. If I get bored at a point beyond that I put it down. Most books fail to get past the first step. Those that do, probably 50% fail the second step. But as a rule if you manage to write one good chapter then most generally keep me going to the end. However for my latest read, The Diviners of this blog entries title, I went against that rule and here I am sat here now trying to figure out why I've waisted those hours of my life reading a book that cheated me from the start.

You see the first chapter was good. It was original in concept and interesting in execution. The opening of the book started with the sun rising in California and then for the entirety of the chapter it follows the sun as it breaks around the world. A neat little set piece. But having read it and now the rest of the book I'm frustrated as its nothing but a fraud. It has no or little bearing on anything that follows.

I'd read one of Rick Moody's books before. His book "Garden State", which I originally thought had something to do with the quite entertaining film. I'm not sure which I saw/read first but the film is definitely the better. However there was something about the book that I liked. Its kind of off kilter, slacker prose seemed original and pretty unique. Like a drop out version of Douglas Coupland.

The reviews on the book cover also lured me in:

"A sweeping, dramatic, intelligent and utterly absorbing state of the nation satire" Tim Teeman, The Times.

I say to this hang your head in shame Tim Teeman. The "sweeping" comment leads me to suspect he's just read that same first chapter that foxed me and stopped there. Intelligent here basically means non-sensical in the same way that sometimes great artists moments of obscurity are held up to be something a lot more impressive than they are. And "utterly absorbing" it definitely isn't. However saying that there was something strangely compelling about it. The only thing I can really compare it to is the film Southland Tales that I recently watched. For both are terrible works of art in their own right. But the more watch or read either the more your compelled to see just how bad things can get. This particular fascination of course relies on the auteur having had some previous moment of greatness. For Rick Moody this was probably his novel The Ice Storm, which Ive not read but seems to be held up as a great. For Southland Tales it was the director and writers first movie, the often well over rated Donnie Darko. Both fall into the crate marked car crash art. Although Southland Tales for me is by far the more pleasurable experience as all its weirdness is wrapped up in little more than 120 mins and within it there are some incredibly strange - and in some ways fascinating things - although I suspect this is unintentional. I may come back to this in a later Blog entry.

As for Henry Sutton from Esquire who claims Moody to be "America's greatest prose stylist" then I think we might as well shut the door and turn out the light on any ideas we have about The Great American Novel TM.

The book is lazy, lazy, lazy. If you cant be bothered to write meaningful characters these days it seems if the critics are on side this just gets called satire. Likewise if those 2d characters that you sketch are so uninteresting that you the writer cant even be bothered to stay with them for more than a couple of chapters then this gets labeled a "sweeping narrative". It doesn't so much have a narrative ark as a narrative stumble. We meet characters who are lightly sketched and we get the sense of an interesting premise and then nothing really goes anywhere. And then we move onto another set of equally unsatisfying characters who are in some way tenuously related and they don't really go anywhere either. Now I'm a huge Raymond Carver fan so I don't need simple A to B plots and resolution. But if your not going to tell a story or have any form of narrative progression you are going to have to, a) be a great writer to get away with this and b) make me care about the characters. Moody fails on both counts by some margin.

So there it is. My spleen is vented. I can now move on to the next book which will hopefully be a great deal more satisfying.

You may be wondering why I gave it 2 out of 5 and not just 1 out of 5. And the only reason I can come up with is that the book to me seems like its fuelled by either lazy bravado (let me just knock this together) or a novelist who's lost all complete confidence in what he's trying to do. Either way there's something about either option in our car crash world that somehow makes us want to read on regardless.

God Is Not Great

2008-08-04T00:29:00.000-07:00

So following on from my earlier post I thought it might be useful to share with you some of the chapters from Christopher Hitchens book and my distillation of their key arguments. That way you can hopefully get a feel if the book interests you!

1) Putting it Mildly

2) Religion Kills

3) A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham

4) A Note on Health to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous

5) The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False

6) Arguments from Design

7) Revelation: The Nightmare of the Old Testament

8) The New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the "Old" One

9) The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths

10) The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell

11) "The Lowly Stanp of Their Origin" Religion's Corrupt Beginnings

12) A Coda: How Religions End

13) Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

14) There Is No Eastern Solution

15) Religion as an Original Sin

16) Is Religion Child Abuse?

17) An Objection Anticipated - The Last-Ditch Case Against Secularism

18) A Finer Tradition - The Resistance of the Rational

19) In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment

Apologies for Lateness

2008-07-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

Cant believe its been over 6 weeks since I last blogged! Admittedly I've been pretty busy. I'm now living on the other side of the Earth in Sydney. Have a new job (admittedly doing something pretty similar to what I was doing in the UK), and am still enjoying crap weather (the difference being that I left crap weather in British Summertime and arrived in Sydney for more crap weather in the depths of Australian Winter). So now I'm here I expect at some point I'll get around to commentating on what weird cultural differences I can spot here amongst the convicts! LOL!

So far I've reached the following conclusions:
1) The TV is crap - Realise what a wonderful thing the BBC is!
2) They love Gordon Ramsey over here. He is on every night (so some things dont change).
3) People eat out a lot more over here

So 2 weeks in and they are the conclusions Ive reached. Not exactly eath shattering! LOL!

Nuff for now. Over and Out.

Thoughts on Religion

2008-06-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

So back in the saddle with this old chestnut as prompted by my new book "God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens. So what I want to write about here isnt so much what Hitchens says but my thoughts on the subject as prompted by reading both this book now and Richard Hawkins "The God Delusion" last year. So first starters, the first thing that occurs to me is both books are fairly angry books and both lack a little compassion and charity. This isnt however to say they dont make good points - for they both do - but they are both written in such a way that they could only ever really preach to the converted. If I think about religion on the large scale it seems to me to boil down to one essential point that seems to override all others. Religion for me I see as a construct that simply helps people cope with the scary concept of death. I say this because whenever I get into religious discussions with people it always, sometimes indirectly after a rambling narrative, comes back to this. It prompts a lot of questions from:

"what's the purpose of this life?"

First off who says it has to have a purpose? Does a cup of tea have a purpose? Is it to get drunk? Following this line of thought our purpose could be seen to be to act as fertilizer! From a strictly biological perspective our purpose is to pro create. Yet we as humans seem unhappy with so animalistic a motivation. Instead we have constructed ideas of knowledge, learning, wealth etc. that represent some way of keeping score. Whilst none of us really know lifes purpose it doesnt stop us making implicit assumptions all the time about what lifes purpose really is. Think about the phrase "he's done really well for himself". All this is is just a way of keeping score. Of saying such and such has done and typically either collected wealth or learning or something like that. Yet if you challenged people on this view I'm sure the vast majority would deny such a "shallow" world view. Of course the fact that we deny it doesnt mean its not true!

"what comes next?"

The ground, closely followed by the worms.

"don't you believe in life after death?"

See above!

"what about all the bad things that happen to people?"

Bad things happen. There's no hiding away from that. Likewise even though we try and impose our will on the world around us (with systems of government, laws etc.) its at best like trying to grasp sand. The world around us exceeds any system and controls we place on it. It's clear we struggle to come to terms with our real vulnerbility and find the true close proximity of chaos unerving - but this is all irrelevant as it doesnt change anything. Bad things happen to good people and bad. Perhaps the one true thing we can do by building good institutions and good codes of behavoir around us we can perhaps in some small way reduce the chance of bad things happening to us. For example the chance of bad things happening to us in a lawless society are many times that of things happening to us in a reasonable democracy.

"dont you believe we just have a soul?"

This is dangerous territory. The concept of soul is so wrapped up in religion its shake ground for anyone who considers themselves an aethiest to own up to. However anyone who has an appreciation of science knows that the probability of us having a firm grasp over the fundamental nature of everything around us right now is pretty small. So the concept of a soul I believe in is one that simply is something more than the biological understanding we have and understand right now. This isnt to say I believe in concepts of heaven or any form of afterlife that is divorced from your physical being. I believe when you go, you go and thats pretty much it apart from living on in peoples memories. And that in itself is really no bad thing. I lived, I existed, I loved people, I am remembered. That's enough.

"what happens when we die?"

As per above.

How on earth?

2008-06-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

So for some reason I've been getting into history recently. I'm just nearing the end of John O'Farrell's "Utterly Impartial History of Britain - or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge" which as the name suggests gives a whistlestop tour of the major events of British History. And what a history it is? I guess one of the things that dawned on me while I was travelling was how much wherever I want there was such a strong British influence (South America, India, China, Japan, Oz and NZ). And all this from such a small seemingly insignificant bit of land on the edge of Europe. Which prompts my title question, how on earth did this happen? Ironically for the first 1000 years of this countries history we were lagards compared to the rest of the developed world. Admittedly we got nudged on a little bit in terms of progress by the Roman invasion but for the majority of time we were on the recieving end from any European power who at that time were looking to expand their borders (The Vikings, The Celts, The French, The Germans etc.).

The frightening thing about all this is how little I knew. And upon learning a lot of this stuff my initial emotional response was frustration. How could you not teach kids this wild and wacky tale of progress? Admittedly there's a lot to teach but even a cursory understanding of history would help irradiacte any possible argument of England for the English. If there's a country in the world with more of an ethnic mix I'd like to see it. First of all there were the Romans, Then we were ruled by the Vikings, then the Germans, then the French and then back to the Germans (the current Royal family). I had no idea that England was ruled by a French King for over 200 years around 1200 when the Lingua Franca amongst Royalty and all the upper class land owners was French not English! Or that in relatively recent times (1714) we'd have a King who it is rumoured could not speak a word of English despite the fact he sat on the throne for 13 years!

Now if you understood that from an early age could you really contest any other foreign national to come to this country? I dont think so. And for that reason alone I think its criminal we're not taught British history (all we ever learnt at school was WWI and WWII).

So back to the question! How did we manage to become so influential? Well the greatest export of the UK seems to be an intellectual one. I hadnt realised how much of the founding philosophies of the Western World actually originated from these shores. And I guess part of that is probably down to the melting pot of people and ideas that have enabled that. What am I talking about here? Well whilst the Spanish and Portugese beat us to Colonization by some 200 years they didnt take it to quite the extreme that we did. Not withstanding the crimes that occured during this time it was the cultural equivalent of hitting the fast forward button. We were the first people to really recognize that Royalty wasnt really divine and to get them to respect legal procedures and that his will for the first time was to be bound by the law. In addition to that we admirably ejected the Catholic church (although the establishment of extremist Protestantism did its best to tarnish that achievement). And in that new world where Royalty and God were less influential we came up with many of the ideas that would help fill some of that void and carry huge influence (ideas and developments in science, mathmatics, philosophy, politics, and modern concepts of democracy, rule of law, freedom of press and capitalism; as we recognise them today can be argued to be of British origin).

I guess in some way the Explosion of the British Empire validated in the eyes of many the intellectual concepts of the home nation across the world. Yet few people today seem to question or challenge these ideas despite the fact that they have ultimately proved self defeating (the Empire after all fell). But then again all Empires have, so perhaps such things are inevitable and the ideas can't be held accountable?

The other intriguing thing that the book touches upon is this changing idea of who the British are, and what they are about? It's not something I'm going to tackle here - it's a big subject - but it is fascinating to think how much we have changed in just 50 years, let alone in 2000! Which leaves the tantalising question what will we be like in another 50, 100, 1000 and 2000 years?!!!!!!!

Too many foreigners in English football?

2008-06-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just find myself banging my head against the wall. It seems these days that the press has become so lazy that they are happy to make the most flawed point, and just repeat ad infinitum until people just start to accept it. The best example of this at the moment seems to be the ongoing debate around quotas in football. Whilst I agree with the need for quotas within the English game the reason for doing so, is, I have to admit based on emotion and intuition as evidence at the moment fly's in the face of doing so.

The big justification that's used for the quota system in the press at the moment is how poor the England football team is, as evidenced by our failure to qualify for this years European Championships.

However anyone who knows anything about football can not deny that the England players of today are way better than the majority teams we've ever fielded, certainly in my life time.

There's two facts at the heart of this that people seem to choose to ignore. Sometimes freek/poor campaigns happen despite having great players. And the second fact, that everyone knew at the time, but has chosen to forget now as the story has ran its course, is that our manager was crap and completley out of his depth!

If your credentials for an England manager are to:

* never to have won anything
* have come very close to being sacked the season directly preceeding your appointment to the England job
* managed the most boring team in Premiership history

- then we definitely got the best man for the job.

So then the England team is not crap. How you can claim this when 3 out of 4 teams in the Champions League final are from the Premier League and 10 of the starting 22 player? But whilst the talented few get to train with the best players in the world on a daily basis this does result in there being fewer places in the top flight for English players. And although there is I am sure a point at which this becomes detrimental to English football I'm not sure we are yet at that inflection point. However I dont think many people would argue that a team like Arsenal who quite often field a team with no English players, is doing a great deal for the advancement of the English game - despite how good to watch they are.

So in closing is a quota system a good thing? I think in the long run it has to be. Why? Well as Ive said before its partly an emotional thing: If we're talking an English league then it's surely fair to expect that the majority of the players are English? The other part is just this concept of the inflection point that will inevitably come, where if things go on as they are, there just wont be enough English players in the top league to benefit from training with the best of the worlds talent.

So there that's my position on it.

But the interesting thing is when you take this line of thought and apply it to the wider and more important / more serious question of immigration. That raises a whole other load of questions... that I'll no doubt return to at some point. After all I plan to be an immigrant fairly shortly! LOL!

Scientology is a cult

2008-05-25T09:20:00.001-07:00

A somewhat provocative headline you might think! But more a moral protest at a disturbing story of the Metropolitan Police in London arresting a kid for holding a placard saying exactly this!

You can find more info at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/21/do2110.xml

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

2008-05-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

There’s great TV and there is GREAT TV! Studio 60 is so much in the latter category it’s scary but it’s got me wondering how on earth it could have been cancelled after just one season? And likewise how come it got such a mauling by the media?

So Studio 60 for the uninitiated (go out and buy the DVD set now) is Aaron Sorkin’s follow up to the greatest TV show ever (The West Wing). The only reasons I can come up with for the cancellation are the following:

1) Those who criticised it / cancelled it never watched it
2) Those who did watch it and cancelled it anyway found it a little too much of a fuck you from Sorkin to the big machine of US network television
3) They don’t like intelligent television
4) They didn’t like Sorkins politics
5) They just pure and simple didn’t get it
6) OR and I have to concede this one – just not enough people watched. A damning indictment of the state of US television. Roll on the next series of “I Married a Millionaire”, “Police Stop Action” and 24 Season Infinity!

So before I say too much more I guess I have to give a précis of what Studio 60 is all about. So the whole concept of the show is that it basically tracks the behind the scenes goings on of a US Comedy Show that is basically a doppelganger for Saturday Night Live. When we enter the story in the pilot the previous writer/director hijacks the show on air after the network president bans him from telling an inflammatory anti-religious joke on the show. During his highjack he bemoans the state of modern television and buries the production values of the show, the network and the American nation. After sharing that the old producer is duly sacked and the newly appointed president of the channel recruits two old members of the team Matt Albie (Matt Perry) and Danny Trip (Bradley Whitford) who it turns out, were the original writers of the anti-christian sketch that was banned from the air and caused this whole mess in the first place! The show carries on from that fairly wild premise, blessed with a fantastic array of great actors and well drawn characters to explore the emotional spaghetti of this high pressure creative environment. And that is just the backdrop for Sorkin to explore his favourite subject: the discussion and exploration of what is right and just. Along the way he also manages to riff on subjects ranging from race, religion, the morality of the Iraq War, drug addiction, and what constitutes good tv. Add to that a little romance and the trademark smartest dialogue you’ll ever hear in a TV program and you start to get a feel for the richness of the work. If Bob Dylan is musics answer to Shakespeare, then Sorkin is TV’s Bob Dylan. Basically he’s the opposite of dumbed down TV (would that make it dump up TV???).

Despite loving every minute I’ve watched so far the show is not completely faultless in much the same way that Dylan’s voice can’t really be described as Operatic. His dialogue is, it has to be said, unrealistic. The sheer intelligence of it gives everyone the ability to wise crack like Raymond Chandler. And as a result every character is just so smart and so damn likable you can’t help but end up thinking gee I wish life was really like that. So if anything Sorkin’s palette of characters can lack variety. Thinking back through all the episodes of the West Wing and Studio 60 so far I cant think of any character who’s occupied any serious amount of screen time who can be described as dark, sinister etc. Considering the two series we are talking about play in the rather murky domains of TV and politics you might reflect that’s quite surprising. It’s not like you’d have to stretch your imagination too far to imagine such characters!

So the show is some sort of hyper- view of reality. Hyper what I’m just trying to figure out. Thinking about it the best I can come up with is hyper aspirational. It’s like both the people and the environment are what you wish they would be. And for me aspiration is a word and concept that is loaded with power, positivity and most of all hope. And what more powerful force for change is there in the world other than hope?

Making sense of things - Meditations on the practical benefits of Buddhism

2008-05-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

So those of you who know me well know I’m very much in the atheist camp. Last year while travelling around the world this view was hardened by what I saw and many of the drunken conversations I got involved with. This would ostensibly seem to suggest somehow a negative experience in some way – when in truth the experience was the complete opposite. Every negative thing I witnessed was outweighed by many more positives. Whilst its fair to say that the majority of negatives I saw were, in my mind at least, the off shoots of overzealous religion, the most life affirming things found many forms: most striking was the humanity and generosity of spirit I encountered, along with a sense of wonder at what we can collectively create when we put our minds to it. Whether that be the immense cityscape of Hong Kong, the beautiful and simple architecture of historic rural China, the incredible tranquillity of Kyoto and so on.

So where am I going with this? Well yesterday I finished up reading a book I originally bought perhaps 8 or so years ago. It’s called Buddhism Pure and Simple. For some reason when I originally bought it I only got about half way through but recently I’ve been trying to finish off a number of half read books from my bookshelf (Again the reason as with many things at the moment is my departure to Oz in June – and not wanting to acquire more stuff before I depart). It was a strangely opportune time for me to dip back into Buddhism. The last time I’d read it to any great extent (other than when I purchased the book) was at Uni. The writing of the Beats and in particular Jack Kerouac led me to it. Loving Kerouac’s writing as I did (and continue to do) you can’t help but negotiate Buddhism if you truly are drawn into his work. At the time it resonated for me but not in a traditionally religious sense. It gave me some enhanced self awareness and a basic understanding of some of the precepts of Buddhism. Although I didn’t wade in any further than this cursory reading and understanding I think it had made enough of an impression on me to hold it warmly in my affections, respect it for its virtuousness, and mark it as something that I would come back and revisit at a future time.

My next encounter with Buddhism was via the Landmark Forum event I attended around 5 years ago. Whilst the Forum proclaimed itself as being non-religious a number of its self awareness teachings were clearly derived from Buddhism. It was here that my cursory knowledge of Buddhism came to life a little bit. The main thing I’ll take from that event (which is no inconsiderable gift in itself) is the whole concept of catching yourself in the state of thinking. This probably sounds like airy fairy new age nonsense to those not familiar with it, but it’s probably one of the most important things I’ve ever learnt. So what is it? It’s all about recognising that the thoughts that run through your head are just that, thoughts that run through your head. Too often we view them as world defining, as reality defining. When the truth is that reality is not these things, it exists outside regardless of what we think. Again I realise I’m struggling to sound concrete here so I’ll use an example. The easiest and best example I can think of is when your sitting in traffic. How many of us allow ourselves to get wound up and distracted, sometimes even to the point of rage, by just being stuck in traffic? And if we ask ourselves what good will such a negative reaction achieve? Any sane, logical individual will know the answer is none. Yet we continue to do it! I’m not going to try and psychoanalyse why we do this, as this is complex in itself. But what we can go into a little bit is the alternative – and the benefits of it. The alternative way to reacting to this is to try and catch your thoughts as they occur and view them, as far as you can, as an objective observer. Be mindful of the fact that you are feeling frustration and perhaps anger but the fact that you are observing them means you give yourself the option of how you wish to respond to this. And if you are given the choice of working yourself up into a state for no possible benefit or just observing and deciding to let those feelings go, then surely the latter is the better option?

This is a simple practical benefit of one aspect of Buddhism that I have chosen to adopt as often as I can. I’m far from being the finished article but I do practice this quite often. Emotions and knee jerk reactions still get the better of me sometimes but at least once a day I catch myself in the process of thinking and rather than just reacting I now chose how I wish to respond to the situation. What this allows me to do is make the right decision as I objectively access it. And strangely making the right decision does, in some weird way I can’t quite explain, make you feel good. Even if it doesn’t make you feel good its better than crashing and banging around completely unaware of the fact that you’re just knee jerk reacting to everything and anything that happens around you. You are not choosing who you want to be, or what you want to do, you are just reacting what happens around you. In a single day if you want to get a view of the benefits of this self awareness just walk down the street. When you come across any small negative thing that might cross your path, be that someone dropping litter, a mother scolding her child, teenagers verbally abusing each other etc. ask yourself are they aware of what they are doing? Are they making a conscious decision to do that? Would they benefit from just being able to step back from reacting to everything and instead objectively appraising their situation and choosing what they’d like to do next. I’m sure 99% people would agree the objective option is preferable, and 99% of people would be happier if they adopted this “philosophy”, useful tip, or whatever you’d like to call it? Yet strangely there was no mention of this stuff at school?!!!!!

So as I said this was a lesson of Buddhism I learnt some time ago, so not really what’s prompted me to write here. What prompted me to get blogging was finishing the Buddhism book that I’d started several years ago. The book moves on from talking about self awareness to expand upon the implications of this idea to tackle two of lifes biggest and most scary concepts: life and death!

Certainly in the past I’ve held the view that fear of death is probably one of the main reasons people continue to cling to religion in the 21st century. When we consider the fact that we are here on this earth for a finite amount of years and then after that we are no more, our reaction is quite often understandably fearful. The thought that everything we’ve ever known, everything we’ve ever thought, our whole construct of the world around us will cease to be once our heart beats its final beat – scares people so much they often choose to ignore it. Or look for solace in fanciful stories that offer the promise of salvation in return for the adoption of certain rules and behaviours.

Buddhism’s teaching in this area provide a different view of the problem that I find strangely comforting, and I guess its sharing that that prompts me to write here. Before I get into explaining my understanding of it I shall make two big disclaimers, firstly I am summing up my understanding of this Buddhist concept on the basis of this one book I have read (so far from an authoritative view), and secondly this seems to conflict with some other tenets of Buddhism I’m aware of that seem to believe is some concept of reincarnation. So as I’ve said before Buddhism views this “problem” differently. The whole self awareness idea is actually founded in the fact that reality is something that happens outside us. Our mind in order to try and understand things races away trying to build understandings of things by constructing concepts and thoughts that allow us to reduce and simplify reality into categorisations. Its important to understand there is nothing inherently wrong with making these categorisations in and of themselves, however we need to be aware that they are not reality. As previously stated they are constructs of reality that we use for practical means and advancement. Where problems occur is when we forget that reality is something quite different from this view we impose on the world. And Buddhists believe it is this misperception of reality that causes suffering. But how does that help us with our life and death question you may ask? Well if we expand upon that idea, almost everything we know, think and talk about relates to constructs of the world. More often than not these constructs are a) very rigid and b) binary. Something is either hot or cold, right or wrong, good or bad. Whilst these concepts have their uses (its useful to understand that something hot will burn you etc.) it’s important to understand they are concepts we overlay on reality, and not reality itself. But these concepts are so basic and familiar to us all what could possibly be wrong with using them? What would we gain from separating them from our perception of reality? Well this is big discussion so I’m not going to give an all encompassing answer here. What I will do however is give a couple of points that warrant food for thought and suggest there may be benefits in taking trying to detach our view of reality from these concepts. So first what’s wrong with these concepts? Well, by their very nature they are reductionist. Conceptually they tend to boil things down to binary positions. Something is either good or bad. As humans we don’t deal with ambiguity that well. We look to apply certainty where there is none and as a result our model of the world, or our perception of the world doesn’t quite fit with the reality we see before us. This leads to problems or in the Buddhist vernacular “suffering”. How? Well politics is a great example. A politician is either left wing or right wing. It’s a reductionist view that makes politics a lot easier to understand (politicians by and large take positions that are pre-dictated by the association of what constitutes left wing or right wing thinking, and where they position themselves) but fails to take a sensible view of the problem. Surely the correct way to judge policy is to review it on the basis of the evidence available and make the best possible decision. Not on some moral leap that you may have taken 20 years ago to herald a set of pre defined fixed values – each of which is unlikely to be the perfect response to each challenge that arises. Likewise the same problem exists with concepts of good and bad. Depending which country you are born in your view of whether a terrorist is good or bad may change (if you think he’s good he’s more likely to wear the moniker freedom fighter). The key point here is that when we use these terms we think in absolutes yet what they represent is not definitive or fixed. Therefore surely it makes sense to be mindful of the gap between they constructs and reality itself? Ask yourself, if we could do this and get everyone to be aware of the gap between perception and reality, to view things more objectively, to be less certain and fanatical about what is supposedly incontestably true – wouldn’t we have removed the motivation for every major conflict of modern times?

So that leads us on to the big one! Life and Death! What does Buddhism have to say about life and death that may help us? Well as you may be starting to realise Buddhism rejects the question itself for it rejects the concepts of both life and death as we view/construct them. This sounds super whacky I know but this isn’t any great claim for eternal life. Strangely Buddhism bases itself in what it can prove. What it says is that reality exists. It has existed in the past and it will continue to do in the future. The problem and the suffering that people fear around the subject of death is largely due to the construct we have of a “self” and the sense that that self had a beginning and will have an end. If we recognise that what we refer to as a self is a construct then all we can prove is that reality exists. We are part of it. It is part of us. Any distinction between what we are and what exists around us is itself a construct. Therefore if we take the view that things have always existed and will continue to do so then the trauma associated with death is reduced. But this might warrant some more explanation.

If we ask the philosophical question what is a self how should we answer? What do we refer to when we use “I”? It’s an interesting question! And if your initial thoughts are anything like mine you’re thinking it’s an easy one to answer. However the more you think about it the more difficult and complex it gets! For the “I” I refer to now is different to the "I" I referred to 10 years ago who is in turn different from the I of 20 years ago and so on. This is incontestable. But whilst there is difference there is also, obviously similarity. But if we try to definite what that similarity is its different. If we say its our physical body then with the benefit of modern science we know too that that is not clear cut. I seem to remember reading somewhere recently that the oldest cells in our body at any time are something like 14 months old! So in essence we are continually regenerating ourselves. Clearly there is some continuity but its hard to definite as is the difference. The point is the “I” we use to refer to ourselves is fixed and in reality we are not. We, like the world around us, are constantly changing in ways that we still don’t really understand.

So I guess the take away from all this long rant is that if we remove ourselves a little from the obsession with I, and view it for what it is (a useful construct), then we are free to view ourselves in a different light. One that is as much a part of everything as it is separate from it. And viewed in the light the concept of this physical collection of molecules. emotions, thoughts, and mind bending complexity etc. taking its last step really isn’t half as scary as that of the self obsessed place most people find themselves in at this moment in the 21st Century.

Finishing & Clearing Out

2008-04-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

So, as the title suggests, the two main things on my mind at the moment are finishing and clearing out. By this I guess I mean:

Finishing - So this is kind of specifically referring to the music I've been working on recently. As you may know I've been working on recording an album since June last year. The original plan was just to record some old songs that I had knocking about and complete it all in the time I was in the UK last year. However things kind of grew from there and the more I recorded the more the material seemed to come out. Which is a great thing as one of the reasons for wanting to record all the old stuff was to allow me to get it out of my system and write new songs. However its now kind of got a bit stupid as Ive recorded over 20 songs now, have another 10 in the pipe and there's no way I'm going to be able to get all that on a single CD. So I've drawn a line under recording any new tracks and all my creative juices have to be focussed on finishing the album and whittling it down to approx 80 minutes! Now I know 80 minutes is a long time for an album but what the hell. I'm not song constrained and I just want to get some of this stuff out there! It's also a bit of challenge. Speaking to my mate Chris he threw down the gauntlet to name a decent double album. He's very much of the less is more camp where an album is no more than 11 tracks and the best live gigs are short and punchy. Obviously there are some great double albums (The Beatles White Album & Prince Sign of the Times for starters) but its a challenge none the less! But I guess there are also practical concerns for me in that I have to oversee the production of this little lot so I dont want to have spend my team churning out several little albums when I can bang it all out on one (well the best stuff anyway).

So thus far I'm about 5 tracks into finishing off a track listing not far off 20!

I'm also feeling the urge to try and finish writing a story I barely started last year while travelling. Its weird I keep getting these flashes of where the story needs to go next in the most mundane of situations... I kind of had a title for it as well "30" but then I realised the reason I wanted to call it that (that Im hiding for now) might make it a bit long. Instead I'm favouring "X" at the moment! LOL!

Clearing Out - So this is just tied into to my planned depature to Oz. I had thought that I'd got rid of most of the stuff I didnt need before travelling last year. However it seems a little ferret through drawers etc. constantly turns up stuff that I've been holding onto for years for truly no reason. And I think I must be becoming a bit of an ebay addict. Its good on so many levels.

1) There's a kind of spiritual tidyness about it - in letting go of things that you just dont need or really want - kind of like an ethical fen shui
2) It puts cash in your pocket
3) It reduces clutter
4) It takes things that are of no value to you and gives it to someone who values it - which is kind of nice in itself
5) Its plain old interesting to see what you can get for stuff

So far I'm £500 up and Ive sold nothing that I will miss! Now thats not bad going?

The Fuck Up

2008-04-17T05:30:00.000-07:00

So there's a trend developing here! I finish yet another book on the Paddington train. This one (The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersesian) however could not be more different from the last one (Black Swans). I swapped psuedo business economic philospophy for fiction and the zeitgiest!

There's always a strange emotional reaction I have when finishing a book - or I guess finishing anything for that matter. But this book and the reaction I had to it was particularly strange. Why? Well I originally bort it a few years back and read about a quarter of it at the time. The quarter of it I did read didnt blow me away but at the same time didnt put me off that much - but something came up and made me drop it. Anyway after searching around for the next book to read I think I saw something on Amazon (one of those if you've read this you'll like this) things that referenced this book which got me thinking and motivated me to find it. This would have perhaps been impossible at any other time but as I'm furiously rifling through all my posessions at the moment and making the life/death decision of what goes and what I keep (what goes is getting posted straight on ebay where I'm now up to 59 sales!) due to my upcoming Sydney adventure, I managed to find it.

And delving back in it all came back to me. It's such a strange and difficult to describe book. The story, as the tile suggests, is quite a downbeat one. Basically it's the "darkly hilarious odyssey" (as the cover puts it quite aptly) of an "anonymous slacker" who is a:

"perennial couch surfer, an aspiring writer, searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfried to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theatre, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian who manages to create humour and suspense out of urban desporation."

So its a bit of a cop out quoting a back cover like that I know but... it hopefully in a few simple lines gives you the jist of what the book is about. But there's a few things about it that still sit oddly for me. The book isn't really funny despite the jacket claiming it is. In the same way it kind of sits oddly between the realistic and fantastic. Somehow its neither. And our main character likewise seems to straddle the position of having our sympathy and at other times just frustrating us. I guess in the end its this awkwardness, this tension in the text that drew me to it.

There is also some beautiful writing. Strangely this only really starts to come to the fore in the second half of the book where it seems to give up on trying to be funny and gets down and dirty in the more tragic stuff. Some great lines that jump out at me when I flick back through include:

"Greed has no patience, and there are no claims from beyond the grave". P150

"Helmsley: My mentor, that athlete of the mind whose passion was rivalled only by his logic, a minor twentieth century New York philosopher who had unfailingly caught me whenever I dropped from my tightrope. He was dead.
I didnt have energy in me commensurate to the loss. I sat on his bed and carefully labored to conjure, summon, recollect, and sythesize all the nuances twoard the identitiy of Helmsley Micinski; to address his distinctions, and why in a world of five billion he was indispensable, and how mankind somehow would never solidly complete its final purpose - whatever that might be - because of his robbed life. But most of all, I tried appraising how much of me was Helmsley: how much of my own thought syntax and spiritual matrix was traceable to him, was him? All of this stewed in that greasy pot of agony." P151

Black Swans

2008-04-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

So last night on the train home from not so sunny Paddington I finally finished reading Black Swans. It's took me a month (originally purchased in Edingburgh on the JP Roadtrip) but in summary its been a worthwhile and... necessary read. Strange word to chose I know but it seems apt. Its one of those illuminating books that pulls back the veneer of conventional wisdom and shows you that some assumptions you make: that things are just the way they appear, are actualy constructs that have implicit implications.

So what's the book about?

It's another of these socio-economic, philosophical books like Freakanomics etc. The difference here being that I think it sets out to debunk a lot of the wisdom peddled in such books.

So what is a Black Swan?

A black swan is a random unforseen event. And the books basis is really critiquing anything and anyone who sets themselves up as an expert on pretty much anything! Nassim Taleb, the author in making such bold claims is as I'm sure you can gather, not backwards in coming forwards! What he really rallies against is mans desire to try and establish models around things that are essentially "unknowable" (risks). The chief culprit Taleb identifies as the Financial Services arena. Ironically Taleb himself comes from a financial services background.

To explain this in a bit more detail, Taleb argues that we suffer from a gross narrative fallacy. That is we look back at history and try and compose narratives (models, controls etc.) that make sense of the past. This whilst understandable isnt inherently dangerous - just deluded. They become dangerous when we take these tools (that are constructed based on a highly questionable view of the past) and project them forward, and then present this as proven, factual, and scientific - when it is absolutely not.

A model that is created based on historical data clearly can not be criticised or objectively evaluated on that same past historical data. However when these tools are focussed on the future they inevitably break. The alarming thing here is that most fund managers do operate on exactly this basis. Likewise Hedge Funds achieve their profitability on the basis that they "understand" the risks. There is no real acknowledgment of the real risks. And the real risks or black swans are those things that happen that are outside the norm - or more correctly outside the expectations of the founding historical view.

I'm starting to realise in trying to explain this why the book itself is quite so long and spralling. It's very concept seems to ebb and flow between a multitude of concepts (some tightly related some would appear light years apart).

So what should we do?

Taleb argues that we should view anyone who presents themselves as an expert with suspicion. This is good with me! :) Second he argues that both in life and financial matters we should be very mindful of the effect of black swans upon us. And as a result of this we should protect ourselves from their negative impact, whilst at the same time maximizing our exposure to positive black swans. I appreciate this may sounds contradictory! So how to explain this?

So an example of a negative black swan is 911. A financial black swan is the present credit crunch. Most financial companies will wash their hands for any culpability regards either of these situations because their "perfect" models could not foresee them. They present it as being outside the bounds of their responsibility. Yet in the real world there is no such thing as pure finance. Things evade strict definitions and boundaries. Stock prices etc. whilst they can be modeled to some extent are inherrently very limited in the range of factors they can incorporate.

Fortunately to balance this we have positive black swans. Examples of this are Google, Microsoft, The Internet etc. Companies that from nothing grow exponentially to create almost inconcievable wealth.

So following on from this what Taleb recomends from a investment perspective is to go ultra defensive on about 85% of your assets and on the other 15% go crazy and open yourself up to the most risk and therefore the most black swans possible!

Mediocrastan and Extremistan

So I've kind of run ahead to the conclusions and missed out a lot of the founding theory behind these conclusions. One of the big concepts that's important to understand is why do the models we have break down. Why do they fail us so completely? The answer to this Taleb puts forward is that these models live in the world of Mediocrastan - where things can differ but generally things lay comfortably within the limited range of the bell curve and therefore can be understood as such. An example of something that can live comfortably within Mediocrastan is height. The tallest person on the planet might be 8 feet and the shortest 1. But over thousands of people it is safe and fair to make forcasts and predictions on what someone's height may be. If you have to guess someone you havent mets height you cant be that wrong - a few feet here or there.

In Extremistan this does not hold true. And today most people will acknowledge we live in a world of extremes. Perhaps the grossest extreme we can talk about is personal wealth. If we compare the wealth of an individual in the UK to a person from Africa then we have a big differential that starts to stretch the plausability of any predictions made on the data. Then once we combine that with individuals like Bill Gates the data can get horifically distorted. Even across a large sampling of data such disparity makes using tools from Mediocrastan dangerous. You do not understand just how wrong you can be. Its not too much of a stretch to see the worlds financial system as belonging to Extremistan!

The book is choc full of anecdotes and ideas along these lines. And it makes good if dizzying reading. One particular chapter title I'll leave you with, that I particularly like, is"Information Is Bad for Knowledge". In the persuasive world of Mr Taleb he kind of has a point!

Blog Day 1

2008-03-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

So a new start. Welcome to the world of blogging. It's kind of new and familiar at the same time. Having kept the "Travelogue" last year I'm hoping this will prove a little easier! The only downside is that I can only really update this whilst online! And thus far this year I've been unable to get broadband service at home despite 3 months of trying with 3 broadband providers (BT, Post Office and now AOL).

So in addition to starting the blog the other big news is that I've made the decision to ship out to Australia for a couple of years! It's a long story, not necessarily for telling now, but I'm sure the reasons will be divulged in subsequant logs!!!!

So stay tuned and get in touch!