Universal principles are better than alliances

This weekend was the Battle of Ideas, this year instead of challenging the concept of Identity politics is basically piled in with a wild leg-breaking two-footed tackle. In the midst of the melodrama though it did help me think through something that has been bugging me, namely the concept of being an "ally".

I've primarily seen this concept in terms of feminism and Black Lives Matter and superficially it seems a positive thing. In the particular case a way for men or white people to declare themselves as active supporters of a movement. However during a panel discussion on the struggle for black civil rights one of the panellists pointed out that people claimed equal rights not because they are black but because they are human. A movement that claims rights merely for one particular group was weaker than one that claimed them for everyone.

There is no need to be an "ally" for equal rights, civil rights or human rights. You can believe in them and want to create a system that ensures that everyone has access to them and recourse when they are denied them. Your personal identity is completely irrelevant to your belief and your commitment to it.

Generalising this the principle of equality is universal and anyone can believe that people should have equal access to society and government. Your gender, sexuality or lack of it, race or any other personal characteristic is irrelevant.

Mass-movements and universal principles seem to have fallen out of favour or are expressed in only absolutist terms like the concept of the caliphate. I think there is much to be gained be reviving them and no movement based on affirmation of identity loses by participating in them.

Great Britain

I went to see the matinee of Great Britain, which falls somewhere between a farce, satire and a play from the headlines. Dancing around the legal boundaries it tries to tell the story of modern British newspapers and tell the story of Andy Coulson, Rebecca Brooks and Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond.

In some ways it tries to synthesis the political turmoil of a succession of scandals: phone hackings, MPs expenses, the corruption and racisim of the Metropolitan police, Murdoch's television monopolies and a sequence of child murders starting with the Soham murders and intersecting with the rest of the issues with the murder of Milly Dowler. The play feels like an attempt to accuse the complacent British public and to throw back their Little Englander attitudes back in their face by pointing what little of value is left in British society and in particular its institutions.

However it never commits to the satire and instead heads to the safety of comedy. Our leaders are self-serving idiots rather than being truly corrupt or more frightening, ideologically committed to the changes they make in society. It is easy to see a series of tactical expediencies as not something fundamental rotten in the British character but rather something temporary and an aberration that will soon pass in the face of fair play and the green and pleasant land.

The vision of Britain it paints is bleak and fundamentally depressing but it was telling that during the performance the audience laughed readily and easily as if they were in on the joke rather than its target.

It uses archetypes and caricatures which are easily dismissed, the truth is more complicated and far less amusing. Also telling the play is stuffed full of monologues which indicate how little faith the writer has in the drama to convey a message.

The cast is pretty good and obviously attention has been focused on Billie Piper's lead role (she makes the transition to stage well with excellent presence) but the cast is far stronger than the material. Robert Glenister does a great job of portraying a tabloid editor, filthy, furious and out of his element once he leaves the newsroom.

The final monologue is the one where Piper's identity as a celebrity makes the accusations more interesting. As Piper's character justifies her intrusion into the lives of people like Piper herself we get close to what the play could have been, interrogating the nature of celebrity culture and what it is doing to all the participants in it.

Great Britain left me with the desire to see a play with a really great analysis of the role of the press in society and another that tries to stake of what Austerity Britain has become.

Harry Callahan at Tate Modern

I hadn't heard of Harry Callahan before this small exhibition of his work at Tate Modern. The exhibit was divided into street scenes, urban and rural landscapes and portraits of his wife Eleanor.

The rural landscapes were interesting, one in particular (labelled Detroit but presumably in the city periphery) of a road and telegraph poles from a foreground of a pool or swamp was great but felt very intense due to its small size. The detail and density of the image was overwhelming.

The street photography was okay but no great shakes. There seemed to be a few experiments with double exposure or composition on the photography paper. The best of these was the pensive face of a woman, perhaps waiting at a crossing, superimposed on the window of a shop with shoppers bustling up and down in front of it. I felt like it captured the tension of when shopping shifts from leisure to chore.

The urban photography was the section I liked the most with a very bright saturated look at cities like Chicago that made them look like the Mediterranean. However the picture that I liked the most was a picture of two men standing outside a gaudy burlesque club. The are almost symmetrical, leaning in towards one another but both looking in the same direction down the street at something happening outside the frame. The natural posture of their relaxed waiting contrasts with the busy decoration of the venue and its contrived spelling, there's an innocence that contrasts with the vice.

Music reviewing in a post-scarcity age

There was a time when you had to physically buy and keep music. The amount of music you had access to was a function of your ability to purchase it and store it. During such a time the value we put on music was higher and therefore we cared more about what we should expend our money, space and time on. Critical opinion mattered as a guide to what was worth of such devotion.

Now you can possess years of music in a mobile-phone sized device. If you're honest then you can have the same from a streaming service. The cost for streaming is less than what you'd pay for a CD so now the music you have available is effectively infinite.

The nature of criticism has also changed. Once you needed to convey the nature of music in words, so someone could picture what kind of music you were talking about.

Want to know what Lorde's Royals sounds like? Well there's a link right there. You can go and listen to it. Did you like it? Well then bookmark that link, now you can listen to it when you like.

The need to describe music has disappeared in the digital age. You can just listen. It's actually an improvement over the dreadful formulas of things like "Afrobeat Neu! meets Southern-fried rock".

What hasn't changed is the act of recommendation and curation. When I used to go to record shops I loved to delve into the stacks and find the little hand-written notes and stickers describing what was on the record or CD and why you shouldn't leave the store without it. That kind of loving curation (mostly by talented and aspiring musicians themselves) just doesn't exist in the anti-septic world of "likes". Comments on Soundcloud are mostly assine.

A record shop was also finite, you could exhaustively check all the sections once a week and be satisfied that between such obsessive trawling and the occasional kind under the counter reservation by the staff that you had seen everything that was available.

You can't listen to the internet. You need a like-minded friend to help guide you and you need to be a guide too.

I have a venerable blog about music that started in the era of obscure CDs issued by labels that didn't seem to last longer than a couple of years. Recently I decided to restart posting to it. Although I don't have amazingly obscure tastes I felt that culturally there is an embarrassment of riches and that while some bands and musicians are internet savvy and have their own websites and online presence there are still a lot where it is difficult to just Google the artist's name and find something relevant.

What I want to try and do is re-create that record store post-it, if for no-one else then at least for me.