10:54am
I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with bugging an MP.
Let me qualify that.
There seems to be a lot of pompous rot being written about conventions and MPs' sanctity.
I express no view of Sadiq Khan, who is no doubt a fine, upstanding Member of Parliament. But I can't see why MPs should be treated any differently from other people when it comes to bugging. If it is felt by the police or security services - with good reason, and duly authorised - that it is a useful excercise to bug conversations between an MP and his or her constituent (perhaps because there is a well-grounded reason to think that the constituent might impart useful information to the MP in their conversation) then I can't see why on earth it should be ruled out in principle, any more than a conversation between a councillor and his or her constituent should be ruled out.
The fuss in this case ought surely to be over the sheer bloody incompetence of the government - that no minister appears to have known what was going on, and that Number Ten can't even keep track of letters sent to it by the Shadow Home Confidence.
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10:32am
The great man has enabled comments on his site. And guess what his second subsequent post is about? A proof that: "David Cromwell, co-founder and editor of Media Lens, is an ignoramus".
As Nick Cohen puts it in his comment:
Come now, Oliver, this is transparent. You are worse than the visitors to Bedlam who used to shake the chains of the lunatics to provoke a reaction.
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8:08am
We're all so used to crap service and "computer says no" responses that when someone does something helpful it's almost unsettling.
Mrs P and I went to see Cirque du Soleil last night. When she booked, she chose seats in the raised stalls. When we arrived at the Albert Hall, it turned out we'd been given seats at the edge of stage, below stage level. Useless, in other words. The usher told us that that the layout had been altered at the last minute.
That's all very well, but when you book one thing and get another, which is massively inferior, it's not satisfactory. We went to the box office expecting a shrugged shoulder and an "it's sold out, nuffink we can do" response.
Instead, the curteous and helpful box office manager apologised profusely, explained why it had been out of their hands and promptly offered us some of the company seats they hold back, in prime position.
Mistakes happen. It's how they are dealt with that matters. I don't know his name, but the Albert Hall box office manager last night was as good as it gets.
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8:02am
Lordy. Jonathan Woodgate says:
The manager, the players, you can see what they are trying to build. It’s like when I was at Leeds and all these new players came in and I was excited.
Help! That means we'll be bankrupt and relegated in a matter of months.
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12:04pm
There's a very good NYTimes piece on the growth of think tanks in Washington in recent years. It's worth reading in full. But I loved this line:
The research institutions say the boom is fueled by three major factors: big money from Wall Street, a post-Sept. 11 sense that foreign policy matters and anger at the Bush administration.
...“To a Wall Streeter, intellectuals are pretty cheap,” said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World.” “There are wedding rings that cost more than I do.”
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10:38am
Dominic Lawson has a very good piece today on that old perennial - whether great art can be made by a shit:
On Monday, the Berliner Morgenpost criticised the first of many celebratory television documentaries which, it claimed, "wiped off the table" the awkward issue of Karajan's membership of the Nazi Party. The newspaper reminded us that he joined the Salzburg branch of the NSDAP as early as 1933; then, showing a certain determination in the matter, he joined again in Aachen in 1935. After the war, Karajan was restricted in his work by the Allies' "de-Nazification" committees; somewhat paradoxically, he fetched up in London, where he became the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1948 and rebuilt his career with spectacular effect. Yet there was, in fact, no paradox. Karajan was a supreme opportunist – or careerist, if you prefer.
...Much as we would like it to be the case, there is no connection between good character and good art – in music as in anything else. Bobby Fischer, who died a fortnight ago, regularly expressed a violent and abusive anti-Semitism which would not have been out of place in Der Stürmer; but Fischer's best chess games have an elegance and creativity which compares with a Mozart symphony. He had, in that sense, a beautiful mind. He was also a hateful person.
My own view - irrelevant to the point at issue - is that Karajan was in any case greatly overrated. I have - it's impossible not to if one is serious about collecting CDs - a great number of his recordings. How many do I listen to? Hardly any. His Richard Strauss is superb, and I would say unsurpassable. But that says so much about Karajan's music . It is full of the sheen - the velvet, if you like - which so much Strauss demands.
But however good Karajan might have been earlier on his career - some of his Philharmonia recordings are wonderful, such as his Falstaff - he became a one-dimensional conductor who could nothing other than produce beautiful sounds, which often obscured the music. I remember hearing him being interviewed and questioned on this. His reponse was to ask why anyone would want to hear ugly sounds, which of course missed the point. Music is not simply about producing a sound akin to being smothered in whipped cream.
As for the issue of character, my hero - Furtwangler - was not a Nazi, but he clearly had what one might best call moral issues. Take this recording:
Before the onset of YouTube, I used to be able to put out of my mind the image of the concert halls in which many of Furtwangler's greatest performances were given. I have hundrerds of CDs of those concerts and adore them. But now that one can see the videos so easily, how can one possibly ignore what they show? Can one simply forget the swastikas? I can't.
Even if the composer had been inoffensive the image is simply disgusting. Add the frisson of the piece performed being by Wagner, and the combination is foul.
And yet. I have flown across oceans to hear and see Wagner being performed. We went to Tannhauser on our honeymoon. And listen. Listen to the Meistersinger overture. It is a performance which surpasses almost any other recording. How can one ignore that, either?
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