Echo Two

This is a popular history book about a relatively small chunk of London that is now famous for its numerous jewellers and purveyors of engagement and wedding rings. The story reaches back to the medieval period and as ever the amount of fidelity modern London has with the layout of its ancient forbearer is amazing. Hatton Garden still essentially follows the bounds of the Fleet river and the monastic estate that lay beside it.

The book traces how precious metalworking and the diamond trade came to end up in Hatton Garden and how in recent years it has declined, perhaps terminally. While there is a lot of emphasis on the Jewish refuges and their community (partly because Lichenstein is a descendant of some of those refugees), there is also an excellent review of the Italian community that bequeathed the Italian church that lies on Clerkenwell Road.

It is also good at charting the way that areas rise and fall, alternating between putrid slaughter houses, crime-ridden rookeries and fine houses and rising rents that force out the craftsmen that give the area its modern reputation. It is a good picture of a city in constant motion, always changing and becoming something new.

See also the Guardian's review

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.

This book was a birthday present but one that immediately grabbed my interest as it told as the story of an academic who decided to learn to play the guitar after enjoying the Rock Band and Guitar Hero rhythm games. Along the way he does a lot to explain the psychology and neurology of music as well as some basic music theory (although that thread tails off too quickly in my view). There isn't enough discussion of how folk, blues, jazz and pop songs are structured for example or the basic chords structures.

There are pen portraits of various ways children are taught music and comparisons to adult teaching as well as discussions as to why so many musicians are self-taught or at least wait a long time before undergoing formal training. As part of that discussion Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is discussed with a few simple counter examples that show that famous musicians started getting paid session work at different intervals indicating that something other than time invested is at play. For Marcus talent is the multiplier, all musicians benefit from practice but innate musical ability makes the practice more valuable. Marcus is also careful to differentiate between mastery of formal recital from the practice of creating new popular music. Creation does not seem to be subject to the experience limit in a meaningful way.

One of the interesting themes that runs through the book is the question as to how difficult adult learning is and the extent to which adults can achieve expertise in things like music or language if they start post-adolescence. This is a very optimistic book from that perspective, stating that it is possible for adults to learn very complicated new skills like playing the guitar or learning a new language. However as the learning experience is more difficult motivation, support and structured learning are much more important to adults than children. It also makes the simple observation that children have more time to invest intensely in things, whether they be computer games, instruments or the statistics of sports teams.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about the neuroscience of music, apparently there are no specific areas of the brain identified with music and instead creating and listening to music is one of the general brain activities that requires many parts of the brain. However a lot of music matches and uses the language capabilities of the mind. Things like meter, rhyme and structure are common and there are some interesting examples of how children care about the words of a song than dissonance in the music.

It also ventures an explanation as to why everyone likes the music of their youth, saying that when it comes to music and songs familiarity breeds satisfaction. The more you listen to a song the more you like it. Human memory makes it hard to hold a piece of music completely in the mind, we use an overall impression of a piece of music to store the high-level details and the short term memory only really accurately remembers the latest minute or so of music. So we value harmony in proximity but fail to notice shifts in key or subtle alterations in phrasing. It also means that we are forever discovering new things in music that we like. Subtleties in harmony, rhythm or the lyrics.

The music of our youth really represents the time that we can invest in listening a great deal to music and therefore it is always pleasing to us in future, more so than more recent unfamiliar music.

I've read some of Caroline Alexander's books before including the brilliantly left-field depiction of polar exploration, Mrs.Chippy's Last Expedition.

The war that killed Achilles (Guardian review) is a brilliant exegesis of The Iliad that attempts to reclaim the story as one about the dreadful waste of war. Achilles is envisaged as a rebellious warrior as eager to return home to obscurity as he is to vengefully fight for glory. Homer is the poet that humanises the fallen victims of a war on both sides and sees in the conflict the fall of both Greek and Trojan.

There are lots of interesting observations throughout the book. Achilles mother Thetis is an immortal, already estranged from her mortal and aged husband and soon to lose her son. Her grief will be all the greater for being immortal and eternal, her son is short-lived but the grief of his death must be born forever.

Hector decides to save his life and flees Achilles, only to be tricked by the gods into facing him and subsequently dying.

Alexander is also adept at invoking the fate and tragedy of the women of the Iliad. Taken as prizes and put to the service of the murderers of their family, removed to foreign lands and utterly powerless.

Ultimately she feels that the true message of the Iliad has been usurped and this is an attempt to re-position it as the ultimate and complete tragedy, corrupting and destroying everyone who takes part in it, including the gods themselves.

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.

This week the Guardian won the 2014 Pulitzer prize for public service. It is an amazing moment to be part of the organisation, which after all has a lot of people doing a lot of mundane stuff day after day to create the platform from which you can change the world. I feel proud of what the Guardian has done and I do feel that my job has made some kind of contribution towards to making this possible.

It has been a strange time after the Snowden revelations, the UK government succeeded in having a chilling effect on reporting in the whole of the UK with their ongoing commitment to what they term "national security" and persecution of anyone who questions it. There is no doubt in my mind that winning awards like the Pulitzer is an important part of justifying the reporting that the Guardian has been doing and restoring some press freedom in the UK.

It is moments like this that makes working at the Guardian different from any other job I have had.

I thought the first Captain America film was pretty dreadful so I was surprised to see how well reviewed the follow up was.

The addition of Black Widow (Scarlet Johanssen) to the cast brings some quippy dialog between the leads that creates a spark that was lacking in the first film.

It is an interesting film in that it is stylistically very indebted to the language of comics and the plot is so formulaic I couldn't imagine anyone being surprised as it unwinds.

What does make it interesting is the layer of contemporary comment that runs through it. Captain America (Chris Evans) feels out of sync with the modern world but the film has sympathy for his old-fashioned values of liberty and freedom in the face of the technocratic plan for world order advanced by SHIELD and (ho hum) the UN.

Banding (and bonding) together with Iraq veteran Falcon (Anthony Mackie), an excellent take on a not very interesting member of the Marvel Universe, strikes a blow for individual liberty against the state and gets his groove back under the Stars and Stripes and via massive property destruction.

By interrogating the spy state, the imperatives of national security, the nature of a soldier's service and the limits of their loyalty the film engages in a way that only the best pop culture can.

Essentially when the film isn't featuring driving then it is pretty bad, even some of the driving sequences are absurd, such as vehicle to vehicle refuelling. The dialogue clunks along like the actors are hitting it with spanners. The leads are good but they are given nothing to work with. Imogen Poots and Aaron Paul have good chemistry, Dominic Cooper broods in his villainy, but it's mostly about cars and men looking grim as they steer them. Like dance-off movies the reasons why people have to race cars are very contrived, even when they are given a way to resolve their goals they choose to ignore it in favour of driving... very.. fast.

Despite this there is some interesting screencraft, the one time that the heroes are in genuine jeopardy is when they are being shot at in a scene that calls back to the end of Easy Rider.

The relationship between the male and female lead is curiously chaste until you realise that they are almost literally id and ego. Julia is Tobey only without the grief and remorse, they like the same things, they can do the same things, you're almost expecting a Fight Club resolution at the end.

There's some silly sexist behaviour and this is a script from before the Bechdel test so don't hope for much on that front.

However when it comes to cinematography for street racing this film does actually move things along.

One of my Christmas presents was a copy of Whedon's take on Much ado about nothing. Shot in black and white and featuring a lot of Whedon's regular television collaborators the entire film was shot in Whedon's (large) house and nearly in chronological order.

I like the play, it's one of my favourite Shakespeare pieces, but I was also curious to see how Whedon would handle it.

I wasn't disappointed the film is clever and makes great use of the Californian environment and stellar talent Whedon has access to. The performances are universally great and while the language is a little laboured at times the flying barbs and mockery flows well.

Of the interpretations of the material, I liked the idea that Borachio is in love with Hero but felt that the idea that Benedick and Beatrice had a one-night stand prior to the play doesn't really fit in with the idea of Hero's public "shaming".

One absolute standout is Nathan Fillion's performance as Dogberry. It is one of the best I've ever seen and almost crying with laughter funny.

It was a great present and I think this version of the play stands equal to any of its predecessors.

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.