March « 2009 « The Unforgiving Minute

March, 2009

Leafcutter John remix competition

Leafcutter John – I like him, how about you? – is crowdsourcing a remix of his microsong “Big Black Eyes”. Since I have no experience at all of remixing, I decided that I’d give it a try. I sent him the MP3 this morning, but I thought I’d post here as well for maximum embarrassment. Enjoy!

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While you’re listening, here’s a fact about me that I can pretty much guarantee that you don’t know. When I started learning to play saxophone, my teacher was Mark Lockheart, all-round top bloke and currently one of John’s bandmates in stellar British jazz project Polar Bear. It’s a small world.

music — No Comments
27
Mar 09

He slung his hook – forever

Anybody who’s still reading this blog will know that this year has been a bad one for musical death, and that it’s affected me quite badly. The most shocking news this year is the death of Eddie Bo, whose track “Hook and Sling” is the equivalent of a Force-10 hurricane in your feeble musical climate.¹ Unfortunately he never recorded anything else higher than Force-8, but that’s still pretty badass, right? He had a good run and his life in music is celebrated at the ineffable 16 Corners blog, with a run of great tracks and mixes to download, and complete background on the man.

UPDATE: Actually, “Check your Bucket” was also Force-10. If Kieran Wyatt is reading this, it’s Not Jazz.

Where Force-12 is Dyke and the Blazers remixed by the Prodigy IN MY DREAMS and Force-1 is the solo career of any member of Boyzone. [↩]

writing — No Comments
26
Mar 09

Bruce Chatwin in the Information Age

While reading this post, you should be listening to Little Brother by ‘O’rang.

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It’s time to admit that being published by Granta – even if only online – was one of my teenage ambitions. Granta published “The Coup” by Bruce Chatwin, the first piece of travel writing I remember reading, as well the first truly beautiful writing that I can remember. It was around the time that I started to wake up to the world, and Chatwin’s reports reassured me that one of the things that I wanted in my own life – the possibility of perpetual arrival – was out there, somewhere.

As I got older, I realised that the Chatwin that I read about was a fictionsuit¹ for the real Chatwin, and that he was dreaming himself into the world in much the same way as I was. It seemed that his world was far grander than mine until I got older still, and realised that the world that I read about in Chatwin’s books was also a fabrication – in the nonfiction as much as in the fiction.²

Bruce Chatwin flat out made shit up, and he never got seriously called on it. He was in a position of privilege – a published writer that would get the benefit of the doubt from the establishment – and those who would call him down had none of his resources. The playing field has changed since Chatwin was a literary superstar – the internet has made it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to read my work, for which I am thankful. At the same time it’s created a feedback loop which makes it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to point out any egregious errors in my writing.

I’m under no illusions that I’m half the writer that Chatwin was, but once my piece on northern Iraq in 1998 was published, I began to wonder whether my own recollections would stand up to scrutiny. My memories – shaky at the best of times – are over 10 years old now; I wasn’t able to check with Segwan, a key character in the piece, whether my memories of him were accurate, because I have no idea where he is now. Nobody has yet popped up to tell me that the Turkish army were never in northern Iraq (of course they weren’t, of course), but if I was a bigger fish (or Granta was a smaller pond) then I’m sure that they would.

Truth and accuracy are not the same thing, but unfortunately there’s a legion of pedants on the web who beg to differ. The internet has made it possible for us to (re)create ourselves on a scale that Chatwin would have envied, whether it’s as a serious blogger with serious thoughts or a firebreathing transexual avatar in Second Life.³ Following close behind, though, is the reverse of possibility, the closing down of possibility; the anti-possibility that we might be tracked all the time, whether in the anthropological enclosures of Facebook or further out in the wilderness, and that all of our creative acts of the self – all of our lies – might be hunted to extinction.

Chatwin was a genius because he sometimes let his imagination run away with him. What else do we lose if we lose that capacity for running away?

Grant Morrison coined the phrase, he didn’t invent the concept. [↩]
Recommended reading: Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin. [↩]
That’s not me – my avatar is a heavy-set bloke with a beard and hawaian shirt. [↩]

politics — No Comments
26
Mar 09

Cursing NATO

The ever-entertaining Belgraded posted on the inventive curses carried by national television during the NATO bombing campaign. My favourites were “Tomahawk Democracy in Warrior Adventure”, “Goebbels-persistent Villains” and “Mongoloid Conglomerate”, but the list is endlessly entertaining….

writing — No Comments
25
Mar 09

Bad news for foreign correspondents

In theory:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

- Clay Shirky

In practice:

In the 1990s, Mr. Cohen chronicled, in person, the horrors that accompanied Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Today, correspondents doing such work can find their time being sucked away by the profusion online of viewpoints and images and tweets from the scene, which multiply and demand attention. But keeping abreast of the Internet chatter is not the same as bearing witness.

- Anand Giridharadas (via Andrew Stroehlein)

In the field:

Last week one of my newspapers asked me to go to Tanzania. The cost was going to be $1100, about $500 of which was simply the flight. With the pound now running so low against the dollar this would be a hefty investment for a newspaper that paid in Sterling. Thanks very much, they said, but that’s too much.

- Rob Crilly

When I was younger I dreamed of being a foreign correspondent; it looks like I made the right career choice, since it’s hard to see how the profession can survive the tidal wave that Shirky is tracking. It’s actually not hard to see what will replace it, but that’s not something that I want to talk about, since it makes me want to lie down in a dark room.

politics / war — 1 Comment
25
Mar 09

Ten years of nothing

In an interesting but patchy essay from 2004, Goran Stefanovski wrote:

It is street wisdom in the Balkans that it is impossible to be born and die in the same country. Within one’s lifetime, the house will fall on your head and you’ll have to start building again.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. I was against the repression of Kosovar Albanians by state and state-sponsored institutions, I was against the NATO bombing campaign and I was against the killing and cleansing of Serbs from the province by Kosovar Albanians. Generally speaking, I’m against things that increase the sum of human misery, and all three of those things fall into that category. Could i make my position any clearer?

In the beginning, the first few days, it was scary because nobody knew what to do in this situation… ou decide after a couple of days that this bombing is not so terrible after all. Schools are out, university too, almost nobody goes to their jobs. It’s a big party on the streets… But after a while, it starts to get boring, and towards the end it really gets intolerable. Not even the pirated films on the TV and endless arguments over the internet represent much joy to you. So you are really glad it’s over.

- Belgraded

Yet I get more angry with the Serbs than I do with the Kosovar Albanians or NATO. I like Serbs, and I think they were royally screwed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it astonishes me that ten years later there still doesn’t seem to be the will to face up to their situation. It was always fairly clear (if not always explicit) that NATO hoped the Kosovo campaign would lead to Milosevic’s downfall (which it did, eventually); meanwhile, the Kosovar Albanians were usually honest and unapologetic about their desire to extract revenge on the provincial Serbs who stayed behind after the bombing (which they did, immediately).

… others said the action would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe resulting from Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanians. (in 1999 there were 81% ethnic Albanians and 11% Serbs in Kosovo…so how realistic are these theories?!)… Yugoslavia had been attacked because it had used its sovereign right to fight terrorism and prevent the secession of a part of its territory which had always belonged to Serbia and Yugoslavia.

- Nothing Against Serbia

Yet as I watch Serbian and Montenegrin television (with my comically limited Serbian), I can’t help but notice that there seems to be very little mention of the reason/excuse (take your pick, as if I care) that NATO had for bombing in the first place. When talking with Serbs, you sometimes feel that they believe that the bombing campaign came out of nowhere – almost an act of god – with a casualty list that seems to include a lot more people than the ones that actually, you know, died.¹ The NATO campaign emphasised the positive aspects of the Serb character (such as their dark sense of humour) but also exposed the negative aspects, particularly the victim mentality.

There is a saying about Serbs, that we always forgive but never forget and this is very true… For most of us, the war and the hatred towards the West ended with the last bomb that fell in Serbia… We come back to this and many other events every year, to remember the fallen and drop a swear or two on our miserable lives, but that’s pretty much it.

- PećkoPivo

Perhaps it isn’t forgetting that’s Serbia’s problem, but remembering – at least, remembering the decade that preceded the NATO campaign. Ten years ago their house fell, and I would argue that Serbia has barely begun the difficult task of rebuilding that house. Raise your glasses to the dead of the past ten years, both Serbian and Albanian, and then let’s get on with the job of construction.

UPDATE: Phew, it’s not just me, Nenad Pejic spotted it as well.

Amusingly extended to include Albanians who were actually killed by Serbian military and paramilitary forces, as if that was NATO’s fault – “Don’t make me beat you!”, as my old boss used to say. [↩]

politics / Uncategorized / war — No Comments
24
Mar 09

You want theories, we got theories

The sector of military-political thinking that deals with “small wars” is particularly fertile right now – an entire generation of soldiers, scholars and soldier-scholars can thank Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush for giving them something to write about. Obviously not all of it is rubbish – in fact, some of it is excellent – but sometimes it’s easy to suspect that much of the theory is about securing uncertain funding rather than unstable countries. David Axe (whose writing generally falls into the “not rubbish” category) is contributing to a new book on “fifth-generation warfare”:

The “fourth generation” of war entailed irregular combatants fighting for an ideological cause, seeking to remake society according to their ideals. Fifth-generation war, or 5GW, now coalescing, is less clearly ideological but just as sweeping in its goals. 5GW is when a party exploits or encourages an existing or emerging crisis to achieve strategic goals that those most directly involved in the crisis might not even be aware of.

To be honest, that sounds a bit like the Cold War (at least the version I studied at university) than some entirely new phenomenon, but fifth-generation warfare is a widely-accepted concept. The beauty of this particular concept is that – rather excitingly! – it lacks any clear definition. This means that absolutely anybody can write absolutely anything about it – truly a gift horse for the military-academic complex. I wonder what we would see if we looked the gift horse in the mouth – the remote possibility that none of this theory seems to be helping anybody to win any wars?

The Yorkshire Ranter has suspicions regarding similar rumblings about “CyberWarfare 2.0″, suspicions which lead him to conclude that the concept is of more value to the accountant than the academy. I wouldn’t go so far to say that about “fifth-generation warfare” – oh, alright. I would.

The Unforgiving MinutePaul Currion struggles to explain himself.