Society

Saturday

Teresa Dracefrancis

Unfinished business | 21 January 2012

The phrase ‘community drummers’ strikes fear into me. When I read it in the programme notes for Survivor, Antony Gormley’s collaboration with Hofesh Shechter, premièred at the Barbican, I paused a beat. The elder cerebral artist paired with the young passionate choreographer: so what exactly is this? In the ladies afterwards I heard the disparaging phrase ‘GCSE work’. Was it music? Was it theatre-making? Was it even dance? There is no narrative to speak of, but a series of sketches using 139 drummers, a band of string players, guitarists, a cameraman and six dancers, among others. A figure shelters in a bathtub. Cannonballs drop from a height on to the

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Doors of perception

Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as he enters his twilight years. An eccentric monograph on Van Morrison was swiftly followed last autumn by a luxuriant collection of his writings on Bob Dylan, and now arrives The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (Faber  £14.99). Marcus doesn’t just inhabit the more rarefied and cerebral wing of rock criticism: he pretty much defined it. Unlike most rock hacks he is not particularly interested in the musicians and their often tarnished legends. No, he listens and listens to the music, listens some more, thinks about it

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Newt’s good week might come to an early end

video platform video management video solutions video player It had been a pretty good week for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. He put in a strong performance in Monday night’s debate, he got a near-endorsement from Sarah Palin (she said ‘If I had a vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going, I’d vote for Newt.’), a poll yesterday put him just 3 points behind Romney nationally, and one today shows him taking the lead in South Carolina. And he can expect to pick up a good number of Rick Perry’s few remaining supporters, with the Texas Governor dropping out today and endorsing Gingrich. Meanwhile, things haven’t been going

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What’s wrong with ‘Avoid the Ghetto’?

Now here’s some good news to cheer you all up. Microsoft has applied for a patent for a Smartphone ‘app’ (I hate that word) called ‘Avoid the Ghetto’. Basically it just tells you the places to stay away from if you’re in an unfamiliar city. You can imagine the areas it tells you stay from. And so, by logical process, you can imagine the sorts of people who are demanding it never be made, be burned on a pyre and its inventors arrested etc. Yes, the NAACP was first out of the blocks, describing the device as ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discriminatory’. But the app, so far as I can gather, does

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s health problems return

Another day, another exercise in obstructionism from the unions. Only this time it’s not Ed Miliband that they’re complaining about. It’s Andrew Lansley and the government’s health reforms. The Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have said that the entire Health Bill should be dropped. They have shifted, as they put it rather dramatically, to ‘outright opposition’. Which must be annoying for Lansley, given how he took time to ‘pause, listen and engage’ last summer, and adjusted his Bill accordingly. That whole process was meant to anaethetise this sort of disagreement, but the tensions clearly persist and could indeed get worse from here. It’s telling that

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Why the government shouldn’t be confident that employment’s rising

No two ways about it: today’s employment figures are difficult for the coalition. The unemployment figure’s up for the seventh month in a row, and now stands at 2.68 million — the highest since 1994. And the unemployment rate — up to 8.4 per cent — is at its highest since 1995. It doesn’t look like getting better anytime soon, either: unemployment’s predicted to carry on rising at least until the end of the year, possibly matching the three million peak of the early ‘90s. In its defence, the government claims that employment is rising too. Today’s figure of 29.1 million in employment is about 150,000 higher than it was

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The John Wilkes Society is Reborn

John Wilkes was radical and wrong; his latter-day equivalents are merely stupid and wrong. To buttress this notion, I submit the cases* of Simon Heffer and Melanie Phillips. We are talking, as you know, about the Scottish Question upon which these Daily Mail columnists have recently seen fit to pontificate. As we shall see, if these are the people teaching Scotland to Middle England then the plain yeomen of England should demand better from their newspaper. It is one thing to peddle nonsense – everyone must do what they can to earn a living – quite another to sell an argument that contradicts itself. Yet hark at this from Mr

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rethinking High-Speed Rail

Previously, I’ve supported the government’s plans for High-Speed Rail, even though the “business case” for them has always struck me as being pretty weak*. On reflection, I’m not sure I was right. The case for HSR in Britain is weaker than I allowed. Not because HSR is undesirable (I still think it could be useful) but because reducing train times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is, though useful, not enough to justify spending £33bn on the project. Or, to put it another way, I suspect it really is a misallocation of resources since this money might more usefully be spent alleviating congestion in the south-east of England while also

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Drug War Madness: Canadian edition

Most of the time the most lunatic examples of Drug War mania, at least in the English-speaking world, come from the United States. but not always! Today’s villains are Canadian. Chris Snowdon has the details of the murderous contempt police in British Columbia have for their citizens. It seems there is a batch of contaminated Ecstasy on sale in western Canada. Five people have been killed. The police know what colour of pills are likely to have caused these deaths and they know what stamps are on the pills. So what are they doing? Nothing at all. Police in British Columbia are reluctant to tell the public what unique, colourful

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Inflation at 4.2 per cent is nothing to cheer

Are today’s inflation figures cause for celebration? The Consumer Price Index rose a mere 4.2 per cent in the year to December, down from 4.8 per cent in November. So, yes, a sharp drop — but only a statistical boffin could describe this as good news. Sure, a similar drop can be expected when the VAT rise drops out of the comparison figures next month. But the prices confronting British shoppers are still rising at twice the supposed inflation target, and will keep rising above this target for months to come. The following graph shows the trajectory we can expect for CPI and RPI over the next few years: The

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Beyonce of many colours

Do you prefer the singer Beyonce when she is black or when she is white? Or could you not give a monkey’s either way? I think I prefer her, marginally, when she is white, although it’s a close call. If she were black and not singing, that would be pretty good. It would be better than white and singing. White and not singing would be best of all. She’s been made to look white for a new album cover. Very white, even whiter than when she got into trouble for looking white when she was photographed for an earlier album. Back then, she really annoyed the ludicrous journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Monday

Jonathan Jones

No more Mr Nice Guy | 16 January 2012

So Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the US Presidential race today. Apparently a battle with Rick Perry for fifth in South Carolina didn’t appeal. Even though he looked like the best bet to beat Obama, Huntsman was never likely to win the Republican nomination. When many Republicans were desperately searching for a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, running as the more moderate alternative to Mitt Romney wasn’t going to be a winning strategy. This year of all years, you couldn’t see a man who had served in the Obama administration as Ambassador to China and who tweeted ‘I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Gove: It’ll take ten years to turn around the education system

Speaking on the new Sunday Politics Show, Michael Gove said that it would take a decade for his reforms to change education in this country. Pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would be able to reverse England’s fall in the PISA rankings, Gove remarked that it would take ten years before we can see whether his reforms have worked in reversing England’s educational decline in comparison to other OECD economies. Interestingly, Gove suggested that one of the measures of the success of his reforms was whether private schools started entering the state sector. He also defended his decision to force some schools to become academies. He argued that he

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Wee

Hurrying for the Underground, I thought I saw a poster for a film by Madonna called Wee. It seemed a strange title even for her, and indeed the film turns out to be called W./E., the initials of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. Nevertheless, wee has suddenly become a frequent word in public utterances. On that quite interesting programme on BBC Four about medieval kings’ illuminated manuscripts, one sequence showed calf hides being prepared for making into vellum. The parchmenter, Mr Paul Wright, mentioned that the urine of abbots would once have been used, as their diet produced rich urine. The presenter, Dr Janina Ramirez, who holds degrees from Oxford

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Eating like a Miliband

I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting Labour doesn’t mean they aren’t posh or mightn’t, at some vague point in the future, become posh. Now it has spat out a leader who makes David Cameron look normal. ‘Beaker from the Muppets,’ says my boyfriend, when Ed appears on TV. ‘Not the face. The expression.’ And the Gay Hussar is Labour’s canteen. The

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 January 2012

Q. After a beach picnic in Denmark two girlfriends and I went for a walk in the dunes. Returning along the beach we found we had to cross a naturist section. A man made it clear that we must conform and so we did, feeling rather foolish carrying our bikinis — but we had nowhere to hide them! — to be greeted at the far end by our goggle-eyed husbands. They said the man had his own agenda. In future, what is the etiquette for crossing the nudist section of a beach? —V.W., London SW6 A. A frisson of excitement is detectable in your enquiry. It suggests that you may

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 14 January 2012

Since turning 48 last October I’ve begun to obsess about getting old. In 21 months I’ll be 50 and by any definition that’s middle aged. For a man, turning 50 is a bit like turning 40 for a woman. It’s an unwelcome milestone. Adjustments have to be made, humiliations prepared for. One form this obsession takes is incessantly monitoring myself for signs of ageing. For instance, there are the multiplying symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s — or, as I prefer to think of them, ‘senior moments’. Sometimes these are quite endearing, such as when I find myself making two cups of tea even though I’m the only person in the

Alan Judd

Motoring: Value for money

The concept of cheap and cheerful appeals for the obvious reasons: the prospect of something-for-(nearly)-nothing; the assumption that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the lack of pretentiousness — suggesting that its owner is also virtuously free of that forgivable vice — and the freedom from burdensome excess. However, the assumption that cheap and cheerful go naturally together is about as accurate as the identification of poverty with virtue: occasionally yes, often no. It’s different with cars — at least, it is now. Hitherto cheap cars were often shoddily assembled from poor materials by workers who didn’t care and managers who failed to manage all but their

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 January 2012

Is it too much to ask for the machines in my life to stop ordering me about? Am I reaching for the stars in wanting to be loosely in control of my car, my phone and my laptop, rather than me being at their beck and call? I’m not talking about the odd message telling me a battery is low or the petrol is running out. I’m talking about them treating me like a despised underling. The other day the laptop decided to kick ten bells out of me for no reason whatsoever. I did everything it asked from the second I switched it on. There was, as usual, a