One of the first articles I ever had published was an opinion piece for the Herald newspaper in Glasgow, back in 1996. In it, I argued against an impending ban on drinking alcohol in the city’s streets and parks. (At the time this was not a routine measure as it is in much of Britain today.) When I first called the paper’s comment editor to pitch the piece, he asked what credentials I had to be pontificating on the issue. I explained that a few years earlier I’d organised a demonstration against a curfew on nightclubs in Glasgow, as well as the introduction of a cctv scheme in the city centre. This proved satisfactory: I was an activist or campaigner or some such, not just any Tom, Dick or Harry. Not just a member of the public, that is, who presumably would have been advised to send in a letter instead. My article was published, and (I’m really feeling my age now) I even got paid for it.

The question of who is granted a voice in the media, and in what capacity, is a central concern of Dan Hind’s new book The Return of the Public. ‘So who is Dan Hind to be pontificating on such matters?’, you might ask. Well, he did write an interesting book on the rhetoric of Enlightenment, The Threat to Reason, which I reviewed when it came out in 2007 (1). The new book’s dust jacket adds that he was a publisher for ten years and is now working on a programme of media reform. The book itself sets out what this means, and it turns out to have a good deal to do with Hind’s ideas about what the public is, as well how it might gain access to the media. In short, Hind’s ideal public is not made up of individuals or groups with particular interests. Instead, it is a community of disinterested scholars. This is a very peculiar idea, but we’ll come back to that.

The media and the public

‘Media reform’ itself is an intriguing concept, given that the media do not constitute an institution subject to reform by a particular agency. With the significant exception of the BBC and its overseas equivalents (such as they are), most media outlets are privately owned and operate in a market, albeit one regulated in various ways by the state. Rather than cranking up such regulations as some critics would like to, however, by banning certain kinds of advertising, perhaps, or insisting on political ‘balance’, Hind proposes to supplement the existing media with a new, more accountable model, which he calls public commissioning. In the UK, this would mean the establishment of a statutory body in each English region and devolved nation (2). These would distribute public funds (Hind proposes this should be a chunk of the revenue from the television licence fee) to investigative journalists and researchers, enabling them to pursue projects voted for by the public following pitches at open meetings. Local TV stations and newspapers run by local authorities could be mandated to broadcast or publish the results, along with other newly-emerging public outlets.

While countless objections might be made to this idea, it is worth taking seriously as a thoughtful intervention into the debate about the future of the media, which is too often characterised by despair rather than imagination. And Hind is refreshingly sanguine about the possibility that rabble-rousing anti-Semites or Islamophobes might try to manipulate such a system in pursuit of their own agendas. This is because, unlike most media critics, he has a basic respect for the public, and believes in our collective ability to see reason: ‘Whatever is true, no matter how unlikely or unpleasant, deserves to be considered. Whatever is false, no matter how pleasing or plausible, deserves to be challenged in open debate’ (p192). Similarly, he refuses to blame the public for the dumbing down of the media, noting instead that, ‘the resort to trivia makes perfect sense in an environment where the sources claiming to offer reliable information do nothing of the sort’ (p121).

As Hind sees it, the failings of the existing media, the traditional public service model as well as the market model, not only leave journalism impoverished and unreliable, but frustrate the very possibility of a healthy public sphere. He is careful to distinguish his own argument from that for ‘public journalism’, according to which journalists should make an effort to champion public causes, but essentially within the existing institutional framework (pp161-162). Hind associates this model of journalism with the public as conceived by Jürgen Habermas, who wrote influentially about the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century. ‘Though flattered with the title of public, the emerging society organized around the club, the tavern, the stage and the novel is better understood as an audience’ (p39). For Hind, it is not enough to be kept informed of social and political developments by civic-minded professional writers. He looks instead to a more radical and participatory political tradition with its roots in 17th century English republicanism: ‘Public commissioning, like the early republicans, recognizes that a sovereign public can only establish itself under conditions of general participation’ (p173).

That ‘return’ in the book’s title is not that of the post-war public service ethos, then, or the old welfarist consensus generally if implicitly invoked by other critics of ‘neoliberalism’. And the ‘public’ Hind has in mind is not a synonym for the state. He is up to something much more interesting than that. But hang on, here comes that funny conception of what the public does mean: ‘public commissioning will provide a means by which an actually existing public, a public of individuals who are able to act outside the constraints imposed on them in their working life, might come to approximate the ideal public of a disinterested group of scholars’ (p173).

For Hind, the problem with the media is that they are too beholden to private interests. There is more to this point than the conventional (and never entirely convincing) charge that newspapers and TV stations are no more than mouthpieces for tycoons like Rupert Murdoch. Hind sees a problem with the way public debate itself is conceived: ‘At present, reliable access to publicity depends above all on institutional position. Individuals are invited to share their views and to contend with one another in debate to the extent that they can demonstrate some private stake in the matter at hand.’ (p46) This includes trades unionists as well as business people, of course. It also includes professional experts such as think tankers, and even academics inasmuch as they are constrained by institutional pressures.

A public without interests?

Hind sees interests as private by definition, along with any concerns or responsibilities we have as part of our working lives. He takes this idea from Immanuel Kant, who made a distinction between the use of reason in a private, interested capacity and its unconstrained or ‘public’ use. Hind cites Kant’s example of a priest who endorses the dogmas of his faith in his ‘private’ capacity as a priest (and can do so in good faith provided he is not certain they are false), but who can question those dogmas when he considers them in the light of reason ‘as a scholar addressing a reading public’ (pp44-45). This is perfectly logical in its own terms, but it must be said those terms run against any commonsense understanding of what we mean by public and private, and certainly against the use of the words in ordinary English. Most of us would talk of the priesthood as a public role, and of any doubts a priest has about the teachings of the church as private doubts.

Of course, words are used differently in different contexts, and theoretical couplets like public and private are notoriously difficult to pin down. It is useful to be reminded that a professional who sets aside institutional accountability to write ‘in a personal capacity’ is indeed addressing private views to a reading public, as a member of the public. But the problem here is not merely semantic. Hind effectively conflates Kant’s notion of public reason as a scholarly ideal with the whole idea of public participation in politics. The effect is to restrict severely what counts as properly ‘public’ participation, and even public opinion: ‘What we call public opinion takes much of its form from, and hence is substantially the instrument of, private interests’ (p156).

The example given above of trades unionists is as a reminder that ‘private interests’ are not always about wicked capitalists plotting to hoodwink the masses. When the masses look to their own interests, then in Hind’s terms they do so not as a public, but as individuals or at best as a private group or groups pursuing collective private interests. But isn’t the latter a pretty good definition of a public? Just because there is no popular movement in Britain today consistently articulating the interests of those outside the elites does not mean we should see ‘private’ interests per se as somehow inimicable to public life.

This highlights a tension within the republican tradition historically. Certainly republican thinkers tended to emphasise public spirit, self-sacrifice and indeed loyalty to the nation over private interests. But the Bastille was not stormed by a community of disinterested scholars. Republican ideas always appealed to particular sections of society and served as a vehicle for particular interests, and were not necessarily tarnished by this. The later emergence of class politics reflected the fact that some conflicts simply could not be resolved through reasoned debate. Sometimes it depends whose side you take.

Hind’s commitment to the idea that media reform is the way to change society leads him to the startling claim that, ‘Injustice must base itself on lies’ (p174). Unless injustice is defined so narrowly as to make the statement tautological, it is just not true. Almost every social injustice, from the oppression of women to the exploitation of labour, can and has been justified ideologically, to the point of being common sense. And ideologies are not exposed by investigative journalists, but defeated by political movements, typically comprising a potent mixture of interests and ideals.

For Hind, though, interests are to be exposed rather than fought over, and when the facts are out, all reasonable people will agree. So, for example, he says: ‘The financial crisis has shown that neoliberal reform of the public sector has left the state unable to protect the general interest’ (p193). This assumes there is such a thing as the ‘general interest’, which is by no means obvious. Of course, if the public had better understood the uncanny operations of the financial economy, things might have been different, but how exactly? Who was offering a credible alternative to ‘neoliberal reform’, and in whose interests? What is in the general interest now, and how do we get it?

Marxists used to reject the idea of the national interest altogether, on the grounds that the interests of the international working class were directly opposed to those of national bourgeoisies. That’s a position that ultimately made sense only if you believed in the possibility of world revolution, a possibility that has now been removed beyond doubt for the forseeable future. But that does not render the idea of a general interest any more straightforward, or tell us how we might effectively pursue it. The more we understand about the political and economic situation we are in, the better. But the overarching question of political agency is not one that can be answered by investigative journalists.

The public and freedom

‘The public’ is not a bad place to start, however. Certainly, it makes more sense than looking to the bankrupt political class for solutions, or expecting traditional class politics to reemerge. But a public of disinterested scholars committed to the general interest seems a particularly bloodless and uninspiring model. Curiously, if characteristically, Hind looks for inspiration to the bespectacled John Dewey, who described what he sees as a similar crisis in the US in the 1920s. Dewey worried that industrial technology and organisation had transformed American society, replacing the face-to-face interactions of small communities with vast, impersonal bureaucracies. He argued that for democracy to survive, the public would have to come together as a ‘great community’, reviving the spirit and habits of the early republic. ‘It may not be clear precisely what Dewey had in mind when he talked of a “great community”,’ Hind concedes, ‘but his instinct to seek the resources for reform in the traditions of republican self-government was, I think, sound’ (p69).

Though Hind doesn’t mention it, one can’t help thinking of David Cameron’s Big Society here. However self-serving and ill-defined, the Conservative prime minister’s big idea certainly evokes a similarly nostalgic vision of a vibrant and autonomous civil society. The problem is not simply that this is a screen for spending cuts, but that Cameron and his colleagues think it is the state’s job to foster civil society, and that they’ve wedded the idea to an authoritarian ‘nudge’ agenda, so instead of republican self-government, we get official licensing and regulation of everyday life. Well, that’s one way of conceiving the return of the public, so Hind is surely right to see the question of freedom as a crucial one in this context.

Cameron’s approach is very different from the traditional right-wing liberalism Hind takes on in his useful discussion of different conceptions of freedom. Hind emphasises that a genuine public requires more than the ‘negative liberty’ traditionally favoured by the right, the freedom to be left more or less alone while the ruling class gets on with running things. In the republican tradition, freedom requires that citizens have an active role in government. Critics of such ‘positive liberty’ have long contended that this leads to tyranny, however, as idealists and dreamers trample proper freedoms in pursuit of some greater good.

Isiah Berlin famously argued that negative liberty is about limiting authority as such, while proponents of positive liberty simply want it for themselves. Hind responds by insisting, ‘The point for republicans is that “authority as such” can only be limited effectively when a public of citizens is its sole source’ (p27). This is true, and an important rejoinder to those who see laws like the Human Rights Act as a reliable guarantee of civil liberties, and the great unwashed as the major threat to them. But the implication that republicanism is primarily about limiting authority concedes too much to Berlin. More than that, it is about exercising political power. And this is the most important sense in which a genuine public differs from a community of disinterested scholars.

Rather than simply defining the public in opposition to self-interested elites, we can understand it as a polity. And rather than ruling private interests out of public debate, we can see the public sphere as precisely the place where private interests are made public, through open discussion and argument. We can recognise when people are speaking in favour of their own interests, whether personal, professional or corporate, and neither swallow their arguments uncritically nor dismiss them out of hand. But democratic decision-making is not an academic affair - any more than the pursuit of knowledge is a democratic one. The naked self-interest of the majority trumps any argument, however reasonable, unless that majority can be persuaded to act against their immediate interests for some reason, not as scholars but as particular people with lives to live and bills to pay, as well as dreams and aspirations. Naturally a well-informed public is less likely to be manipulated by minority interests – Hind’s major concern – but they will make calculations with their own interests and ideas in mind, as long as they are free to do so.

Crucially, however, much public opinion has nothing to do with private interests narrowly understood. Take attitudes to public drinking. Recent measures to ban or curtail the consumption of alcohol in public parks and streets are presented as a response to public disapproval and anxiety, but represent a narrowing of our understanding of what public means. My own criticisms of such developments stem not from a private interest in drinking in the street (though it’s nice to have the option), but from a concern that the transformation of public spaces into hyper-regulated, ersatz private spaces reflects a deeper diminishment of public life. Significantly, the prejudice that only self-interested tobacco companies and their minions could seriously object to smoking bans has stifled and distorted public debate about that related development. I wrote my Herald article on the Glasgow booze ban neither as a self-interested street drinker nor a disinterested scholar, but as someone politically interested in the issue precisely as a member of the public.

What I wrote then, and much of what I write today, was neither scholarship nor investigative journalism. Those are both vital enterprises in a democracy. But what I wrote was propaganda -  not in the sense of something deceitful or misleading, but in the morally neutral sense of writing meant to spread certain ideas and opinions. The same could be said of Hind’s book - though The Return of the Public also contains a fair deal of scholarship. Propaganda also has a place in public debate, perhaps especially as a means of challenging ideas that are accepted uncritically as ‘enlightened’ opinion, or as serving the ‘general interest’. The word propaganda might be tainted, but most people understand the value of vigorous, partisan argument - substantiated where necessary by scholarship and investigation - in politics and other controversial areas. If public commissioning does take off in the UK, I’ll be there with a pitch or two.

1) See The truth is not enough, by Dolan Cummings, Culture Wars, August 2007
2) Hind notes that similar proposals for media reform in the US have been made by Dean and Randy Baker, John Nichols and Robert McChesney. McChesney’s book was reviewed on Culture Wars in 2009. See A more or less partisan press?, by Sarah Boyes, Culture Wars, 28 August 2009

Public and private

This week on CW, Dolan Cummings reviews Dan Hind’s new book, The Return of the Public, and argues public debate cannot be separated from private interests. Temi Ogunye is unimpressed by the case against eating meat put by Peter Singer and co at a public debate in London last month. And adman Bill Borde looks ahead to the future of advertising, and warns that the line between creative content and commercial messages is blurring. 

4 January 2010

I was anticipating this last of the Intelligence Squared Winter Season 2010 debates both eagerly and anxiously. Eagerly because because the question of the moral defensibility of eating meat is an important one and, as a life-long meat eater, it is a question to which I should have, or at least be actively seeking, an answer. Part of living a morally consistent life is being able to justify your actions to yourself – even before you justify them to anyone else – and I hoped that by attending a typically robust and high quality Intelligence Squared debate I would be helped in this aim.

I was also anxiously anticipating this debate, because it had the potential to lead me to a rather difficult conclusion. If compelled by the arguments of the proponents of the motion, moral consistency would demand that I drastically change my eating habits and stop eating meat – potentially a very traumatic experience. As it turned out, I had little reason to be either eager or anxious. Firstly, because, by Intelligence Squared standards, the quality of much of the debate was poor. And secondly, because by the end of the debate I was still without a clear answer. Indeed, I left the debate with more questions than when I arrived. 

The first speaker for the motion Abbas Daneshvari, Professor of Art History at California State University, set the tone for much of his side’s contribution when he said: ‘I would like to impress upon you that while I will, of course, will be rational tonight, this problem cannot be solved through our rational prisms. It is fundamentally an emotional issue’. He continued:

‘If you expect to move from one side to the other, if you expect to become pro or against this issue of animal rights, you are not going to get there by simply thinking of the logic of it. For the logic of man is fundamentally flawed and has nothing valuable in it. A Nazi thinks that he is logical. Just as a religious fundamentalist thinks he is logical. Just as a Taliban, when they kill their women, stone them to death, cut their noses and their ears, they fully believe that they are logical and they are rational.’

On first impressions, Professor Daneshvari’s hyperbole is actually hilarious, but there are also quite a few things wrong with what he is saying. First, he overstates the importance of emotion. Purely emotional responses can, of course, lead us to nice, fluffy conclusions, but they can also lead us to primitive, and barbaric conclusions, too. Second, Professor Daneshvari completely misrepresents human rationality. It is naïve and misguided to think it knows no bounds, but is nonsensical and deeply misanthropic to think human rationality has nothing valuable in it. In fact, this crude misanthropy is a theme that runs throughout the contributions of the proponents of the motion. Third, by what method is the professor evaluating the logic of Nazis, fundamentalists and the Taliban? When he says they ‘think’ they are logical and rational, does he not have a ‘correct’ standard of logic and rationality in mind? Just because human rationality can be used for evil or has been illegitimately invoked as a justification for evil, it, quite obviously, does not mean that it is itself evil. Finally, the fact Daneshvari made his first reference to Hitler so early on in his contribution suggested worrying signs of desperation.

Professor Daneshvari, and many other animal rights activists, do seem to think there is a genuine similarity between the behaviour of the Nazis (or Europeans during the slave trade, or the Ku Klux Klan, etc.) and meat-eaters. It is, I think, why they are so passionate – often aggressive and even sometimes violent – about this issue, in a way I always found difficult to understand. They think that the farming, killing and eating of animals is equivalent to the exploitation of Africans during the slave trade, or the oppression of German Jews during the Holocaust and African Americans in the Deep South in the Jim Crow era. They think ‘speciesism’ is equivalent to racism.
 
Heather Mills, the third speaker for the motion, and Animals Rights Campaigner of the Year 2008, spent most of her time outlining the alleged health benefits of a vegan diet. Not only was this boring, it was also irrelevant. Settling the issue of whether or not meat is good for you does not even begin to address the moral issue of whether eating meat is morally permissible. Although the motion ‘Don’t Eat Animals’ does not make explicit that the debate is about the moral defensibility of eating meat, it should have been pretty obvious.

I will refrain from commenting on the numerous examples of astonishing piousness, self-congratulation and -aggrandizement that littered Heather Mills’ speech. Instead, I will limit my further comments to her confident assertion that if we all turned vegan, it would end world hunger. The final speaker against the motion, Julian Baggini of the Philosophers’ Magazine (and author of several books, including The pig that wants to be eaten), quite rightly challenged this idea, noting that it’s generally understood world hunger is not about a shortage of calories in the world, but structural and politics problems, especially in conflict zones. The dialogue that ensued sums up much of the debate:

Heather Mills: ‘How many of them have you been out to?’
Julian Baggini: ‘Sorry?’
Mills: ‘How many of them have you been out to? How many conflicts have you been out to? And how many fields of grain have you seen in Africa that are flourishing that could actually be utilised in there own country?’
Baggini: ‘I’m afraid that’s not really an argument. The fact that I’ve been there doesn’t mean that its an argument…’

I was actually embarrassed.

The real and interesting debate occurred between the two philosophers in the room: Peter Singer and Julian Baggini. Peter Singer (who was speaking via videolink, which gave him a transient, somewhat holy aura), Professor of Bioethics at the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and guru of the animal liberation movement, was the second speaker for the motion, sandwiched between the irrationality of Professor Daneshvari and irrelevance of Heather Mills. His argument had two independent fronts. First, killing animals for their meat is speciesism. About speciesism, he says:

‘We regard beings who are not members of our species as if they do not count morally or they count very little morally. And that is simply because they are not members of our species which, I think, does not give us any justification for disregarding the interests of any being who has interests. In just the way in which the slave traders disregarded the interests of Africans because they were not members of their race, so we still, despite having improved with regard to human rights, we still draw up moral boundary at the bounds of our species, which I don’t think is justifiable. I think if a being suffers, then that suffering ought to be taken into consideration and should be given just as much weight as the similar suffering of any other being.’

Before addressing this in detail, let’s consider the second horn of Singer’s argument, which related to the environmental harm caused by the farming of animals. He said: ‘We now realise that one of the major contributing factors to greenhouse emissions is animal production… livestock emissions exceed all transport emissions.’ I have always been unsettled by climate change arguments that have as their final recommendation some limitation of something otherwise permissible or even celebrated. Such recommendations often exhibit the most backward and anti-human instincts. I think to myself: if we should stop eating meat because of its ramifications for the environment, then why not give-up on industrialisation and its benefits altogether? But I must concede that this response is not really good enough. Just because it may undesirable to do everything we possibly can to avert climate change, it does not mean that we should do nothing.

There maybe some other problems with Singer’s environmental case against eating meat, however. Baggini states noted that, ‘From a resource point of view there’s are a lot of arguments that producing some kinds of meat can actually have an environmental benefit’. Even George Monbiot, the Guardian’s environmentalist columnist, recently retreated from his very vocal endorsement of veganism on the basis of climate change. Putting all of these things to one side, I would say Singer’s climate change argument against eating meat is the weaker of the two. It offers conditional reasons not to eat meat, but not necessary ones. Its says: ‘because meat production is bad for the environment, and assuming that we care about the environment, we should stop eating meat.’ If we found a way of producing meat that was not so bad, then presumably it would be fine on the climate change front.

Singer’s first, animal-centred argument is the stronger of the two, because it offers necessary and absolute reasons not to eat meat. But I do not agree with it. In fact, I am quite offended by it. However nice it may sound to some people, the idea that we should treat all animals with the same respect we afford to humans is monstrous (and, you guessed it, somewhat misanthropic). As Baggini highlights: ‘Anyone here who would treat the life of an infant mouse with the same respect as that of an infant human is not a moral person as far as I’m concerned at all. No one truthfully does that, so the idea that all life should be treated with equal respect is a non-starter’. If you think about it, for this to work we would have to mourn the death of every fly was accidentally swallowed. How would we ever rid ourselves of infections or viruses? They are caused by living things too.

All meat-eaters would be guilty of the charge of speciesism if there was no morally relevant difference between different living things. I think there is. Julian Baggini was right when he said: ‘The fundamental point is that there is a continuum of sentience and complexity in life, that creatures can suffer, they can feel pain but their capacity for the sophistication of their experience… does make a moral difference to how we treat them’. But my quest for a definitive answer on this subject received a bodyblow when he went on to say: ‘The only way through this is, unfortunately, one which involves imprecision, imperfect judgements, erring on the side of caution… if we are not sure in a given case with a particular type of animal if it is OK to eat it, let’s not eat it’. Is that it, then?

I left the debate with many more questions. The most pressing of all was: even if we accept there is a continuum of sentience and complexity, and a corollary continuum of respect and treatment, why is ‘do not kill and eat’ the first thing that we disregard when we start to think of non-human animals? There are many other ways we could express our greater regard for human life without going so far as actually killing and eating animals. The answer probably relates to the importance of things that make human lives– and sometimes also animal’s lives – better in the long-run, such as animal testing, and the specific nature of the capacities, and hence interests, of specific species. The capacity to have ambitions, a life-plan and be able to pursue that life-plan, for example, is surely a highly morally relevant feature. Julian Baggini left these questions unanswered, while, perhaps even worse, the proponents of the motion didn’t even bother to ask them.

Even more questions follow. Where is the allowed to eat/not allowed to eat cut-off point? Are there animals that we know currently exist that we are not permitted to eat? What happens if we find the missing link, a community of half-human half-apes? Would eating them be wrong? What if highly evolved aliens crash landed on earth and fancied some barbecued Brazilian rump? Would their higher state of sentience and complexity entitle them to eat us? I was getting a bit confused so I started to chew my thumb – I do that sometimes. ‘Wait’, I thought, ‘is that even allowed?’ 

In one of JG Ballard’s short stories, advertising hoardings beam rays into the minds of consumers, causing them to swerve off the motorway to stock up on cigarettes. Much science fiction uses motifs of corporate logos and intrusive ad-mongering. There is almost a consensus that Nike swooshes will be projected onto the clouds while Utterly Butterly commercials play out in our dreams.

When authors construct these dystopian futures, they are reflecting a contemporary apprehension about the power of advertising. But the advertising blimps that hover over LA in Blade Runner, or Minority Report-style hoardings that know your name, will probably never come to pass precisely because there are so unsettling. The outlines of an alternative future are beginning to be discernible.

Currently, the most common kind of advertising works by attracting attention through providing content that we want to consume and then interrupting it with the sponsor’s message. A TV drama stops for the ad break, a parade of products get your attention, the TV programme resumes. In a newspaper, adverts are dispersed between the writing so that by necessity you will see them as you read.

As the internet delivers us into futurity it seems likely that more subtle kinds of advertising will become the norm. While advertising companies have been wrong-footed by the web in a number of ways, they are at the point of figuring out formats that really do work in the online – and they do not involve the ‘interruptive’ advertising just described. In this new landscape, we can anticipate three changes that will mean advertising and entertainment will converge into one.

On the internet there are no rules

Currently there are an array of rules which regulate the ways advertising is presented to consumers. Many of them are designed to keep TV programmes separate from the ads - product placement is illegal, and there are numerous regulations about co-branding, sponsored prizes, and so on.

On the internet these rules do not apply. Newspapers have already made the transition to the web, and TV won’t be far behind. Other rules, set by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft might apply, but all of those companies have their interests fundamentally aligned with generating ad revenue. The laws designed to stop us from being buried under an avalanche of ads are about to become anachronisms.

On the Internet you must chose to devote your attention to ads

One of the most important changes associated with having our entertainment and information mediated by the web is that the sheer quantity of stuff available gives users an enormous range of choice. That choice includes the option to ignore the adverts. Far from being the end of the commercial messaging, advertising can respond to this blow like a horror movie monster, and come back in an even more invincible form.

Once you had to sit through adverts every third song on commercial radio, because there was no alternative. This model does not work on the internet, and streaming music service Spotify is proving it. Spotify cannot find a sustainable business model based on advertising because there are too many ad free alternatives: YouTube, Last.FM, Pandora. The same is true for video. You don’t see many YouTube ad breaks. In fact, YouTube has recently introduced a new service allowing users to skip through the adverts that appear at the beginning of some videos - otherwise people simply move on to be entertained somewhere else.

The solution the ad agencies have found is to make the entertainment and the advert one and the same thing. For example, ad agencies might recommend a brand should sponsor (pay for entirely) a film. When the film, which is carefully tailored to evoke the brand ethos, is released, the sponsor company will have monopoly rights to interviews with the stars, its branding at the premiere and its logos on the adverts for the film. In short, the film will be the advert.

Recently Old Spice won several awards for its hugely popular advertising campaign based around YouTube videos. It didn’t, however, pay for adverts to be inserted into popular YouTube videos -  it simply launched its own videos which were themselves both advertising and entertainment. This mechanism will allow commercial interests to overcome the issue of consumers choosing not to listen to or view their adverts.

On the Internet the shop is only one click away

The picture painted so far is one of advertisers taking direct control of TV programmes, films and radio shows, and taking advantage of the lack of restrictions on the internet to integrate promotional material within the content itself.

There is one more link to add to the chain. If you have a television (YouTube?) series produced by an alliance of clothing manufacturers as a platform to promote their wares, then why not make that TV programme a portal to their respective online stores? It’s the next logical step. Most importantly it allows them to analyse how effective the TV programme is at shifting shoes, shirts and skirts, and to adjust the programme to maximise conversion.

There is a legitimate concern that people subject to such sophisticated persuasion will have their ability to make rational choices about how they spend their money undermined, especially when the barrier to entry is as low as a single mouse click. In this respect the new mode of advertising described here is different in degree from the old kind, but this concern has always existed to some extent.

But the new model raises a completely fresh concern: wouldn’t it just be more civilised for a nation’s cultural life to revolve around something other than deliciously crunchy breakfast cereals and not believing it’s not butter? Even if you do think the benefits of bacterial yoghurts are of paramount importance, the transition from entertainment and factual information that was once merely interrupted by adverts to content which is simply a shop front should be cause for concern.

As mentioned earlier, the internet offers many choices, so won’t people just choose not to watch this advertainment? No doubt there will be ways to avoid advertising, but high quality entertainment costs a lot of money, and the big budgets will come from brand’s advertising budgets, as they always have. Avoiding prgrammes made by brands will be the equivalent of refusing to watch ITV.

When the ad budgets once spent on TV start are reallocated to the online sector a whole tranche of persuasive techniques will unleashed, and many of them ought to feel a little intrusive. Why does Red Bull want to be my friend, even on Facebook? How has this advert been targeted to me?

While these points are frequently discussed, what goes relatively unmentioned is the removal of the barrier that once existed between creative or editorial decisions on the one hand and commercial interests on the other. The future might not see you swerving off the motorway to buy cigarettes, but you could find yourself clicking through to discounted whisky every time you see Mad Men’s Don Draper spark up. Or perhaps he’ll be tucking into a Muller Fruit Corner, depending on who buys the franchise….

Now, don’t get me wrong: I like Flyboy, Matthew Robins’ mutant schoolboy, half-human, half-fly. I like the useless and arbitrary nature of his essential characteristic. I like the winding, limitless quality of his adventures; the way a whole host of bonkers things befall him and get dealt with somehow or other. And I certainly like the stylishness of Robins’ shadow-puppetry: fragile, clumsy and homespun as it is. But in this gig-cum-cabaret session, my god, Flyboy gets underneath your skin.

If the average life expectancy of a fly is between 24 and 48 hours, two and a quarter is equivalent to several human years. To survive that length of time, Flyboy needs a grand narrative. And there really is no reason why he shouldn’t get one. It certainly worked when The Death of Flyboy was projected onto the vast National Theatre flytower. However, here Robins only gives us musical vignette after musical vignette and the result is a variety show without variety. Flyboy is a sideshow act, a genus that needs company. Lacking it, Flyboy quickly becomes an irritant.

What Flyboy does have is an effortless pathos. He seems to us an unfortunate outcast in an ordinary world. But really we know very little of that world. We assume it to be familiar, given that its architecture and municipal amenities resemble our own. In his school uniform - an outfit we immediately associate with fitting in and falling out of the crowd - Flyboy seems at a permanent disadvantage.

Every miniature adventure that Flyboy winds up on - be it a trip to the zoo or hauling a planet across the solar system - is, therefore, a small act of spirited defiance. He carries on in spite of his lot; the plucky little mutant in a human world. His accomplices are not people, but animals. It is with them that he associates himself.

But, as I say, all this is based on assumption. The only other occupant of Flyboy’s world that we encounter is Mothboy, a schoolboy in a similar position. For all we know, Flyboy and Mothboy could be perfectly normal, because Robins doesn’t show us the norm. He leaves it to our anthropomorphic assumptions. A world that looks like ours, we extrapolate, must be a peopled world.

Nonetheless, the charm of Robins’ work is undeniable, even if there is a tendency to drift towards the twee. Certainly, he overplays the scuffed performance aesthetic of mangled manipulation and apologises far too readily from his piano. All of which makes the National’s Beauty and the Beast (for which he has supplied the spiky, crisp and delicate shadow-puppetry) a better showcase for Robins’ obvious talent.

Till 2 January 2011

Christmas thoughts

This week on CW, Alastair Donald reports on a challenging architecture winter school that offers an inspiring model for the beleaguered world of higher education. Adelah Bilal makes the case for legal aid as funding cuts loom. And Matt Trueman reviews Anthony Neilson’s mischief-making Christmas play Get Santa at the Royal Court in London.

If you’re looking for yet more stimulating reading over the holiday, now’s a good chance to catch up on this year’s Battles in Print essays, specially commissioned to complement the Battle of Ideas festival in the autumn. And you can support Culture Wars by visiting Amazon.co.uk via here to buy books etc.

23 December 2010

Last month, 26 eager young architecture students from cities across England, Scotland and Wales converged on central London, only to find themselves held in a windowless basement for 24 hours, where they were engaged in eight consecutive hours of discussion, kept up all night, and then asked to sing for their suppers (and breakfasts). Contrary to those who patronise youth and warn of the harmful effects of such challenges, the students enthusiastically embraced the experience, declaring their intention to come back for more of the same as soon as possible.

The students were attending Critical Subjects, an educational experiment organised by mantownhuman, and the first ever 24-hour Winter School for architecture and design students. From 157 postal entries, an international jury selected the 26 students (representing 22 different universities across the UK) to participate in the 24 hour hothouse: a day of debates facilitated by leading names in the field. This was followed by an All-Night Design Challenge: from 9pm until 9am the following morning, they designed an entire project and presented their work to an eminent panel of architectural commentators, academics and practitioners. Admittedly, the students were tired, but nevertheless they seemed genuinely invigorated by an educational experience centred on acquiring knowledge, thinking critically and exercising intellectual judgement.

In recent years, the idea that education should be about engagement with difficult ideas has been out of favour. Many promote the dispiriting idea that university life is merely the path to securing a job. The failure to defend the value of education per se has significant consequences and the recent announcement by universities minister David Willetts MP that the future of higher education would be ‘more two-year degrees, more part-time students, and more courses with placements in business’ has met with little controversy.

Government cuts in funding should be resisted, but it should also be recognised that universities themselves have failed to defend education from instrumental attacks. Architecture schools, which sit within the Arts and Humanities have, for some time, recognised the potentially harmful impact of cuts to the teaching grant and the reorientation of research funding towards social policy objectives. Unfortunately, instead of mounting a stout defence of the subject and academic freedom, schools have instead accommodated to the current anti-educational climate. Some choose to downplay what is felt to be an elitist concern for aesthetics, and instead emphasise the interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary nature of architecture. Out has gone the emphasis on the rigorous mastering of history and theory with many schools reorienting themselves around those themes judged more ‘relevant’ – such as building and environmental science, sustainable design or, the role of design in meeting the numerous social policy objectives (from building communities to the promoting well-being). This is not to deny that architecture has a social and political dimension, but actually we never (except for ‘community architects’) used to rely on those aspects to justify the value of our work.

Unsurprisingly when education becomes mandated to deliver environmental and social objectives within the academy, then an open, inquisitive, critical approach to knowledge comes a poor second, or worse, is discouraged as a barrier to the student acquiring the ‘right’ answers. As Roger Scruton argued recently, what is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences today is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal. The problem is that a university does not exist simply to convey information or expertise, but provides an environment for the discovery and the pursuit of truth through active discussion and engagement with difficult concepts and ideas.

In this spirit, the students at Critical Subjects were offered the opportunity to explore topics such as critical thinking, the nature of beauty, visionary architecture and design autonomy. Rather than organising lectures, the sessions throughout the day were debates with speakers from the world of architecture and beyond. Each was designed to stretch the students intellectually and to force them out of their comfort zone. To give them a chance to hone their critical faculties they were encouraged to challenge the speakers, ensuring, as one panellist remarked afterwards, that the speakers also left with more thoughts than they brought with them.

In the evening after the sessions finished, the students were issued a design brief and given the night to develop a response before pinning up their designs and for a ‘crit’ at 9am with a panel of expert judges.  As students, they were given free range to explore ideas – imaginative flights of fancy if they wished - provided they could convince a jury of the merits of their design intent and their thought processes.

In an architecture school, the crit is a vital part of the educational process, where students display their work and explain it to a panel of critics. The panel’s job is to critique and probe not just the outcomes, but the ideas behind the project, ensuring that the students become engaged in a thorough defence of their ideas and forcing them to rethink and rework them.  For this process to work, it is also important that the critics are open-minded. As John Berger wrote in 1972, ‘the more closely I, as a critic, examine a work, the more I have to say about the world, not about it’.

In recent years, the crit has become much more technical and students are less likely to be engaged in a thoroughgoing exploration of the ideas behind their project. Simply resorting to empirical data to vouchsafe a project is often jokingly referred to as ‘post-rationalisation’ but is a serious problem: instead of forcing the student to become self-reflective is allows them to resort to instrumental ‘justifications’. For instance, it is common to hear students regurgitate the mantra from the real world, that their scheme proposal is ‘good’ because it deals with sustainability, tackles carbon emissions or engages the community. Reduced to little more than a challenge to the validity of the student’s ‘evidence’, it shuts down the educational content of a crit rather than opening it up through daring intellectual engagement. It is important to note that the university sector, and the tutors within it are to blame for allowing this to happen – although students arrive at universities seldom having had to argue for their beliefs either. Unsurprisingly, confronted with such a formulaic process, many students grow weary of - or accommodate to - such narrow criticism.  In a telling comment, one Winter School student revealed that it was the first time in his experience that a crit had not included Health and Safety criteria as a major point of discussion.

Another danger is that schools become reticent about putting students under academic pressure, and even tend to limit their freedom to engage with the educational experiences of their choice. In many universities these days, the ‘All-Nighter’ studio session is often frowned upon, with some schools shutting down 24 hour access to studios. One tutor at Northumbria University refused to let its students have the details of Critical Subjects on the grounds that it that was inhospitable to the ‘healthy work-life balance’ the school wanted to promote amongst their students. In a heated debate at Central St Martin’s School of Art a few years ago, one tutor closed down a discussion – which the assembled students seemed to be enjoying – by saying that they ‘looked really tired’ and it was time to stop (at 7pm!).

Such a censorious and patronising attitude is bad enough, but the real damage comes from the impetus to downgrade the critical process itself. In its assessment of the architectural reviews process, the Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE) criticised the way that ‘pressure’ put students in an ‘emotionally weak’ position. It worried that having to present in front of critics made students feel as if they themselves were being assessed. That, of course, is actually the point.

CEBE may be right that sometimes an adversarial relationship between presenters and judges brings out the worst in both parties, in that a defensive attitude from the student sometimes encourages an aggressive inquisition from tutors. The problem though is not the format of the student review, but the reduction of education to a narrow technical affair in which student and tutor argue the toss over how well a design meets certain tickbox criteria. This undermines the student engagement with ideas, and deprives the crit of its crucial exploratory dynamic. The solutions suggested by CEBE – for example to make crits ‘student-led’ so that tutors are either not present, or are required to remain silent during the review – is a worrying illustration as to how the cowardly approach to education ends up destroying it.

Confident that students would prove the nay-sayers wrong, the emphasis in Critical Subjects was to challenge the students. In the crit they were asked to defend - rather than justify - their work using the armoury of argumentative styles and ideas garnered over the previous day’s debates. And just as they had done in those discussions, they rose to the challenge. Bleary-eyed, but determined, the common sentiment was that the event had been inspiring, both in terms of its ambition and content. As one remarked: ‘It may not have been the easiest 24 hours, but (he’d) certainly do it again’. Another suggested that he had ‘never been so energised by such a tiring experience’.

No doubt the government has a point when it says that many students now view university as merely a route to a bigger pay packet – merely because it would be surprising if they proved immune to the current degraded notion of education that it espouses. CEBE may also be right in saying that some students are stressed by the pressurised arena of the crit. But funnily enough, when they are given the chance, they are very able to cope. More importantly, they seem to thrive. 

The most refreshing outcome of this experiment was that while educationalists busily downgrade what they think students are capable of, when offered the opportunity for something demanding, intellectually challenging and even unsettling, students happily confound all expectations.

Critical Subjects was sponsored by Eckersley O Callaghan Structural Design and supported by Blueprint magazine, DACS (Design & Artists Copyright Society) and RIBA Bookshops.
Further details at www.mantownhuman.org/Testimonials

It is inevitable that budget cuts and increases in taxes will hit the poor more than anyone else. Despite the fact that over two million people rely on legal aid, justice secretary Kenneth Clarke has announced a reduction in funding of £350 million. This threatens to undermine the principle that everyone should have access to the court system, and that the state should provide legal services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford representation.

There are many conditions which must be fulfilled In order to qualify for legal aid. So how poor is poor? How poor must one be, before considered as absolutely desperate and in need, to be entitled to legal aid? Eligibility for legal aid is dependent on the type of case you need representation for, whether you are in receipt of certain benefits, and you must have a monthly disposable income of under £315 in order to access the full legal aid scheme. Nevertheless, there are certain exceptions to these qualifying rules. This includes the case of the three MPs on trial for claims of false accounting collectively amounting up to £60,000 in allowances. Despite each having been on an annual salary of £65,000, Jim Devine, David Chaytor and Elliot Morley will all receive legal aid to fight their cases.

This leads us to question the fairness and equality of the legal aid system. Surely those who earn above the average income will not be as sorely affected by legal aid cuts as families below the means tested amount, who struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis? This is without even considering the size of their families, other financial issues, such as debt, and further expenses the government does not deem as ‘necessary’.

Legal aid lawyers will also be affected, as one of the lowest paid groups in the public sector, earning around £25,000 a year. If potential law students already felt deterred from completing their training contract in this field due to the meagre wages (compared to the £40,000 of corporate city firms’ trainees), the scrapping of the legal aid training contract grant scheme would only have added to this feeling.  The scheme ended this year as ‘legal aid has to bear its share of the cuts across the whole public sector’.

With over 3,500 new criminal offences introduced under the Labour government, surely it would be more effective and efficient to have more lawyers dealing with the inevitable rise in criminal cases? Rather than having fewer lawyers, weighed down with growing case loads, and the same ridiculously low income. However, if they thought this was unfair and wanted to challenge the system, they would have to do so out of their own pockets as these underpaid lawyers still wouldn’t qualify for legal aid.

Legal aid funds will also be cut by reducing the scope of work made available to those who require it. Kenneth Clarke said tax payers should not have to pay for ‘unnecessary court cases’ that could be resolved by other means. A person involved in a personal negligence case should seek a ‘no win no fee’ policy regardless of the risks and liabilities involved in the conditional ‘losing’ fee. This fits in with the view of those who believe that the UK holds a ‘compensation culture’. Certain legal disputes are regarded as ‘trivial cases’, which should not be brought into the court, and should definitely not be advocated by state-funded barristers. Rather, it is thought that we should seek justice between each other and resolve disputes outside of court. 

Perhaps this is just romanticising the nature of dispute resolution. Surely, if one is prepared to go through the rigorous process of a court case, in order to solve their problems, they must have exhausted all other means? Take the example of a divorce case, a couple struggling to split their assets and share custody of their children. Without a doubt they would have sought therapy, mediation, and various other forms of intervention to solve their marital issues privately. Certainly, going to court and seeking legal advice would be the least favoured means of resolution, and definitely a last resort, before having all private details of their marriage inspected and questioned in a court. Everyday countless disputes arise, where people involved do not even recognise that there are legal issues surrounding their problem, let alone taking extensive means to reclaim their compensation. In turn this leads us to question if a ‘compensation culture’ truly exists, or is it simply a myth to deter people away from accessing full justice and complete legal advice.

Whereas ‘no win no fee’ policies, legal insurance and private arbitration may all seem like cost effective replacements for legal aid, the truth is legal defence is irreplaceable. These methods of replacing the legal aid system would in fact result in the ‘cheapening of justice’, and the value of what it represents.

Another argument made in favour of legal representation choices independent of the state is that as defence barristers are commonly defending their clients in cases against the state, state money should not be used to pay their fees. However, if prosecution is state funded, then in the interest of ensuring total access to law, irrespective of means to pay, legal defence should be made available to all. Legal aid is the only service available which levels out the playing field between classes and in doing so places the focus on justice and the rule of law.  Without a system such as this, many legally ignorant people could end up fighting their own cases in court unsuccessfully, despite their innocence.

Discouraging people from seeking legal advice when issues arise, may marginally reduce the UK’s deficit, but will definitely have a great impact on people’s lives should they be consulted with incorrect legal information in an attempt to save money. Furthermore, should this happen, this could just be the creation of a vicious circle of increasingly complex and expensive court cases. If the budget assigned to legal aid is cut, not only will poorer individuals suffer, but also legal aid lawyers and firms, families with incomes under the national average, and those with disputes the government considers ‘unnecessary court cases’. Legal aid is a fundamental element of the rule of law, and therefore it should not be considered as a political choice, but rather a social and legal necessity.

Pity those parents with inquisitive kids, for they shall be faced with a barrage of whys after the Royal Court’s first ever family offering. Why is Santa such a grumpy grumbleguts? Why does Gran have a regular tattooist? And why – oh why – has Mum married a dog called Bernard? To these questions – and many, many more – there really is no answer. Shoulders will grow tired from bemused shrugs.  The response – ‘I really don’t know, dear,’ – will squeeze through increasingly clenched jaws.

If it occasionally baffles, Get Santa does so with laudable relish.  Really, we should have expected nothing else from Anthony Neilson, a writer who has always been intent on smashing sensibilities. Here he delights in mischief-making. Sometimes, he sides with the kids, throwing in barmy plotlines and asides that defy adult logic. Elsewhere, he is gobsmackingly subversive, like an uncle needlessly delivering half-camouflaged home-truths to the child sat on his knee. Newsreaders lie, we’re told; all adults do. Santa’s good-children-only rule is nothing but ‘a system of control’, Justin Beiber isn’t all you’ve been lead to believe and parents can be every bit as selfish as their offspring.

Get Santa involves a plot to do just what the title says. Ten year old Holly – a smart, if shouty, stage debut from Imogen Doel – is seeking revenge for disappointments of Christmases past. All she’s ever asked for is the return of her father, and yet, each year, all she gets are standard issue material goods. Only the trap she lays, of crisps, superglue and spark plugs, snares not Santa, but his bungling beanpole of a son, Bumblehole (Tom Godwin).

Her hostage situation, however, turns into another, after Bumblehole accidentally animates her teddy, who immediately hatches a plot to keep himself thus alive. Pretending to be Holly’s father, Teddy convinces Holly to magically restart Christmas day repeatedly in order to prolong the spell of life.

It’s here that Neilson and his storyboarding collaborator Nick Powell (also responsible for the nauseatingly sweet songs that recur) score highest. Increasingly dishevelled adults, cracker hats hanging off their heads, are forced to endure endless Christmas cheer. Bloated and exhausted, they give and receive the same presents daily. At one point, Mum seems to have woken with yesterday’s final truffle still chewing around in her mouth.

With Miriam Buether’s garish living room (once again, proving herself the boldest designer in the country) becoming increasingly strewn with Christmas detritus and the messy innards of party-poppers, Get Santa is more Nickelodeon than CBBC. It feels like Doctor Seuss on a sugar rush: all E-numbers and artificial colourings. Kids will go wild.

But I can’t shake the suspicion that Neilson spoils the broth with too many crooks. There are too many villains for a satisfying narrative. With a snide, Scrooge-like Santa, a conniving Teddy and the oft-brattish Holly facing off, there comes a point where you can’t side with anyone. Each holds another hostage, much like Tarantino’s three-gun salute in Reservoir Dogs. Neilson comes close to scuppering himself with his own defiance of conventional cheer.

Nonetheless, Get Santa holds its own in a very Royal Court way. In that, parents ought consider whether their children are ready for it. Neilson and Powell don’t hold back, but every now and then, at Christmas in particular, over-stuffing is excusable.

Till 15 January 2011

There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that inhabit that film, but also many of the characters that populated his later films, including even some of his polished but bloated, lifeless garbage with Leonardo DiCaprio. In it, the thugs played by stars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro go along with a couple of other pals to shake down a pool hall owner who’s behind on a protection or loan payment. They basically insult the owner, who says he’s not gonna pay them because he’s offended. He calls one of the punks (not Keitel nor De Niro) a mook. The punk famously rejoinders, ‘A mook. What’s a mook?’

The reason this scene is so important is because it bears on one of the key factors of the characters portrayed, in this film and Scorsese’s others - who is genuine and who is a phony; or, who is a real man, and what does it take to be a real man. For Mean Streets is a film about testosterone, not honour nor sin, nor many of the other things it’s been labelled as representing. And the question of who’s a real man, who’s genuine, is amply displayed in this scene, almost as an inside joke for those in the know about the lives of low level gangsters in the late 20th century. A mook is a slang term for a guy who’s basically a brainless ass; someone with all brawn, but no smarts. These characteristics were well known in men whose identities were tied up in being ‘muscle’, or foot soldiers for Mob bosses. The fact that the fellow called a mook, as well as the characters portrayed by Keitel and De Niro, is clueless as to what the term means, shows to the viewer, and to the pool hall owner, that they are not as tough and connected as they think they are. Any real mook would know what he was being called, and why. The pool hall owner has thus called their bluff, and is emboldened enough to even punch the one punk, thus ensuring a melee ensues. That the guy called a mook lacks both brains, and as shown subsequently, brawn, makes the scene doubly funny - and disturbingly real. It’s a realism that, in recent films, Scorsese has been almost oblivious in recognising the absence of.

It also evinces the terrific screenplay written by Scorsese and Mardick Martin. Yet, when critics write of great screenplays, a film like Mean Streets is never even remotely thought of because most of its character speak monosyllabically. Yet, it is scenes like the one described above, which so thoroughly and perfectly capture and embody the film’s and director’s ‘message,’ if you will, that make it a great piece of writing. And this film was amongst the first independent films that followed characters in a non-conventional plot. There is no ‘grand event’ that occurs in the film, like the explosion of the bridge in David Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai. Instead, it is a film that uses moments in the lives of its characters as character exposition, from the opening credit sequence (set to the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’, and flashing up the names of the main characters as they first appear), to its closing montage, and even in a scene where one of the thugs cuddles up with a pet baby tiger.

The main characters are Charlie (Keitel), a guilty Roman Catholic, whose guilt seems to stem from nothing and everything, and seems to lodged in images of pain through fire, and whose uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova) is the local capo. His de facto brother is Johnny Boy (De Niro), a slightly demented no-account, who’s into a local loan shark for over two thousand clams. That loan shark, Michael (Richard Romanus), spends most of the film trying to collect from Johnny Boy. The other thug of note is Tony (David Procal), the guy who owns the tiger. The final main character of the film is Johnny Boy’s epileptic cousin, Teresa (Amy Robinson), who’s also Charlie’s girlfriend. Much of the film consists of Charlie’s divided loyalty between his love of Teresa and his big brother instincts toward Johnny Boy, whose character ranges from demented and vicious, firing a gun from rooftops, to the childish (verbal sparring with Charlie and use of fireworks). He also develops a possibly dangerous sexual fantasy over a black stripper who works at one of the clubs on his protection racket.

Charlie simply wants to run his own legitimate business, yet seems to not be able to get away from working as a protection racket thug for his uncle. Johnny Boy, meanwhile, keeps sliding further out of control. At one point, he even pulls a gun on Michael, after dicking him over by making him wait for a mere $30 payment on his overdue debt. This brings about the film’s denouement, wherein Charlie and Johnny Boy borrow Tony’s car, and pick up Teresa, in order to flee. Michael pulls up beside them, and his shooter plugs Johnny Boy in the side of the neck (prefiguring a later wound De Niro’s character Travis Bickle would suffer in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver), wounds Charlie’s hand, and causes Teresa’s fist to fly through the front windshield. Yet, life goes on. Cops and an ambulance rescue the trio, Michael and his shooter watch the carnage from afar, and the other characters in the film go on doing what they do. And this is in perfect keeping with the film’s narrative structure. It does not move relentlessly toward a fixed end point, for how rarely does life do that? It stops and starts, meanders and careers, then comes to a climax, and continues on, even as the San Gennaro festival in its background, ends. Likewise, the film ends, but the universe it shows goes on.

This is what a good screenplay does; it resists formula, and treats its viewers as adults, even when the characters it exposes are not that adult. And, in this film, Scorsese developed the template of his style that would exist in all of his great earlier films, and even up through his last work of real substance, Kundun. After that, his films became not only bloated and lifeless, but utterly mechanistic. Scorsese, as an artist, NEEDS to go back to working with low budgets, so that his creativity is hungry, not sated. Mean Streets is an example of an artist with a growling belly. His last decade of DiCaprio-starred films, by contrast, is a surfeited maw.

The DVD, by Warner Brothers, is a solid one. The film is well transferred, and looks great. There is the original theatrical trailer, and a vintage 1970s small film featurette called Back On The Block. It briefly shows some of Scorsese’s old pals, on whom he based the film. Then there is a audio commentary with Scorsese and Amy Robinson. It’s a good one, but the two commentators were recorded separately, and the comments are scene specific, meaning that when a scene without commentary comes on, the disk forwards to the next commented upon scene. The result is that the film, which runs an hour and fifty two minutes, only shows scenes totaling and hour twenty. That said, Scorsese’s comments are good, although he rambles a bit too much. Robinson gives insight into her character and the making of the film, especially scenes actually shot on Los Angeles studio sets. Definitely worth it, but, for a lousy extra half hour of commentary, couldn’t they have had Scorsese do a little more? The film is shown in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

The acting in the film is terrific. Keitel and De Niro are standouts, and their verbal interplay takes on almost Abbott And Costello-like humor. Robinson, Romanus, Proval and Danova are also quite good. Romanus really nails the wannabe who’s not as tough nor smart as he thinks he is - just look at the scene where he stoops to ripping off two suburban burnouts out of $20 for fireworks. The film evinces a cinema verité aesthetic, so the cinematography by Kent L Wakefield is not as important as the superlative editing by Sidney Levin. But, the most important aspect of the film was how it brought already popular music into modern filmmaking, and wove it in seamlessly, as if it had been composed specifically for the film. Scorsese’s always been one of the best directors in the world at effectively deploying music.

It’s the overall style Scorsese created that is really important, because, whereas poseurs like Jean-Luc Godard merely aped Hollywood noir, and tried to use their low budgets to claim novelty, Scorsese really does do something without precedent - in noir, in John Cassavetes films, or in gangster films. He creates a stylised realism that was absent in noir, affected in Godard, formative in early Cassavetes, and unreal in gangster films. Only Cassavetes’ later The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, are as effective in realistically portraying most mobsters; as often inept bumblers whose idiocy, even more than their ethical corruption, leads to their downfall.

There are, of course, aside from the classic scenes mentioned, some interesting cameos, such as Jeannie Bell, as Diane, the black stripper Charlie lusts for. Her prior claim to fame was as the second Playboy magazine centerfold Playmate, and the first black cover model. Then there is the bizarre scene with the Carradine brothers, wherein Robert shoots and kills a drunken David in Tony’s bar. It’s funny, but pointless, except that it’s the sort of pointless violence that happens in that sort of world. There’s also a classic scene, after the killing, where Michael, Charlie, and Johnny Boy end up in a car with two queers who flame. It’s a hilarious sequence. There is also a possible cameo by Scorsese as Michael’s shooter, in the car, in the final scenes. Scorsese did this in some of his early films, but never followed in Alfred Hitchcock’s tradition.

Mean Streets is not as polished a film as Scorsese’s later great films, like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy, After Hours, nor Goodfellas, but it is every bit as good in its raw sensibilities. One only hopes that, now that he got his ‘Honorary’ Oscar for the merely solid The Departed, Marty from the nabe will return to his roots, and make some films where he cannot have every whim indulged. It worked once. It can work again. If not, then American cinema lovers will be left with a tarnished legacy for one of its most original and brilliant filmmakers. Mean Streets is proof of that claim. Here’s hoping Scorsese can finally find his way home.

The season on stage

This week on CW, a selection of London theatre shows playing over the Christmas season. Matt Trueman reviews Gregory Burke’s acclaimed Black Watch, now at the Barbican, and finds it as powerful and timely as when it opened two years ago. At BAC, he finds a still more topical show in 1927’s insightful but restrained The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, while he has qualified praise for the proletarian values of Katie Mitchell’s Beauty and the Beast at the National Theatre. Finally Miriam Gillinson enjoys Living Structures’ theatrical ghost-train Cart Macabre at the Old Vic Tunnels.

11 December 2010

Almost inadvertently, 1927 have found themselves on the political frontline. Little over three miles away from the Battersea Arts Centre, in the cutthroat cold of Parliament Square, students and schoolchildren were clashing with riot police. ‘Whose streets?’ the marching youth had cried earlier, ‘Our streets!’ So when 1927’s animated young stick-figures tear up a communal park, bouncing on ice-cream vans and setting fire to lampposts, it no longer seems the stuff of dystopian fantasy. Offstage reality was only missing the animals.

I only say ‘inadvertently’ because the uncanny precision behind such concurrence goes beyond prediction’s reach. Work on the show began almost two years ago with a first scratch showing in January. Nor are 1927 directly concerned with tuition fees and the incumbent coalition. I add ‘almost’, however, because the echoes of offstage reality are not entirely coincidental. They are the product of Suzanne Andrade’s insight and foresight, which is astonishing enough to jokingly call for the ducking stool’s reintroduction. This is more than just a matter of right time, right place.

For Andrade sets her story in a city divided by wealth. Its wide-angle panorama is of impressive skyscrapers and economic success. To look beneath the surface, to peek between the cracks, however, is to see its discontented underclass, crammed into a cockroach-infested, overpopulated ghetto called the Bayou. This is a ‘fully-furnished shithole’; it’s ‘someone else’s bad dream’ and, in its midst, its children are revolting. Their demands: ‘Better living conditions, better education and,’ in an eagle-eyed sideswipe at the so-called post-ideological generation, ‘an Xbox’.

It’s a wry aside typical of Andrade’s unfailingly delicious text, which swaps the cheeky grin of Marriott Edgar and Eric Idle’s poetry for an arch snarl. Set to Lillian Henley’s silent-film pastiche of a piano score – all tumbling tinkles and chase sequences – Andrade’s text approaches layered libretto. Simple rhythmic repetitions underpin some dazzling linguistic acrobatics.

This marks a major, major step up for the celebrated young company. Where their breakthrough piece, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, was a touch ramshackle and brittle, here they prove themselves ready to fly the Fringe. While Paul Barritt’s animations remain as luscious as ever – the move from Victorian silhouette to graphic novel adds colour and complexity – the company has cracked the enigma of integrating live action and projected image. Where before it traded on its own awkwardness, the innovative technique has graduated to a slickness that allows it to be truly spectacular. The reason is a reversal of cause and effect. Previously animation affected action; now, the effects of action appear onscreen. Dust clouds emerge from sweeping brooms; splattered stains appear after flies are swatted.

But most admirable is the newfound restraint. The narrative’s requirements always come first, sometimes at the expense of dead-end gags. That can see performers doing very little; it can even get rid of them entirely, allowing the animation to take the lead. In other words, the form has evolved from novel gimmick to a genuine hybrid.

Plot-wise, it revolves around a glum, misfit janitor with ambitions to leave the Bayou, and a social reformist, Agnes Eve, determined to pacify the unrest, preferring education to the sedative sweeties distributed by the government. But its success is the world Andrade and Barritt have created, with quirky details lurking in every nook and cranny.

The result is visual theatre that drips with class and fresh possibilities. Its prescience and perception stands testimony that devised work can trade political punches with playwrights without sacrificing aesthetics or playfulness. It’s about time something replicated the success of Shockheaded Peter, and 1927 could deservedly follow Improbable into the commercial realm. Alert the judging panels: The Animals & Children Took to the Streets should not be overlooked.

Till 8 January 2011

The audience (all 32 of us) is led through a bizarre airport check-in scenario and asked to leave our belongings behind. Thankfully, the critics are allowed to hold onto their notepads, though one feels a bit of a wally, clutching pen and pad whilst being wheeled on a wooden trolley through pitch darkness. This is not the kind of darkness one normally encounters in the theatre, with exit lights gleaming and phones glowing. Instead, this is real, I-can’t-see-the-back-of-my-hand, blackness. It is this darkness which forms the canvass for Living Structures’ theatrical ghost-train, Cart Macabre, an abstract journey through a purgatorial wasteland, which occasionally slips into limbo but consistently unsettles.

Living Structures, led by artistic director Klaus Kruse, wisely decided to start small and expand the visuals and sensual shocks gradually, as the audience settles into the experience. This is a company that understands the audience psychology behind immersive theatre, and that it is best to initially embrace, rather than isolate its spectators by scaring the life out of them. So, when we are led from our trolleys into a small carriage, which will be our auditorium for this show, it is a gentle hand that directs us. These hands carefully point out the sharp edges of the carriage and, though one can’t see a thing, the heart settles slightly. Living Structures recognise that for us to really experience this show we must lose ourselves in it – and we will only do this if we trust our guides. 

So, having been delicately placed in our cadaver carriages, in which four people nestle incredibly closely together, the darkness snaps suddenly into light. A shutter opens up to reveal submarine-style portholes, down which something red and bloody drips. It is elegant and beautiful, a mesmerising dance performed by something normally frightening and sinister. Oil drops in afterwards and the small comfort we took from the glimmering red is slowly snuffed out.

Blackness descends again and titters ripple around the carriage. It is extraordinary how loud and communicative an audience can be in a less conventional show like this. A few roads down, at the Old Vic itself, it’s unlikely you’ll even make eye contact with your fellow theatre-goers. In the tunnels, strangers hugged, chatted and confided, as if attending a huge grown-up sleepover. Faced with the unknown, the audience starts to get to know each other instead.

Perhaps it is this comradeship that gradually chips away at the tension in this production. Initially, led alone on a rickety cart, isolated and blind, one is understandably tense. Yet, as soon as the mini-audience in the carriage begins to interact, it becomes harder for the show to ensnare us. Perhaps this is why some of the more low-key and contained aspects in this show do not work quite so well; they are not emphatic enough to jolt the audience out of its newfound comfort zone. A puppet moth, controlled by hands we can see but a face we cannot, flutters restlessly around a candle. Around and around it goes, with the audience restless for the inevitable collision. Finally, the moth reaches the flame and bursts into flames. Satisfaction rather than fear seeps through the carriage.

The canvas expands again. The slates ahead of us are lifted to reveal a huge screen, on which a heart is being ripped apart. But god, does it put up a good fight. Everyone talks of the heart as our strongest muscle, but here is the proof and it’s almost enough to make one proud. Despite the stubborn grappling from the hand, the relentless twisting and turning, the heart refuses to submit. Below the screen, a blood red pool glistens in the half light. It is a clever and complicated image, suggesting the clawing approach of death and life’s hardy, instinctive resistance to its reach. 

At one point, all eight carriages are joined up and the curtains that once separated us are lifted. We are treated to a surrounding puppet show, where silhouettes appear of rats, a foetus, eagles and anything vaguely associated with death. The audience, now facing each other and emboldened by a new safely in numbers, chatter amongst themselves. The rather low-key visuals do not overcome the shift in ambience and the tension, again, starts to slide away.

Yet there is a finale that is enough to frighten or at least captivate the bravest of spectators. The eight carts are separated again and the sides opened up. Suddenly, the cavernous darkness of the Old Vic Tunnels is fully mobilised. Huge extractor fans swoosh through the air, marking out endless time and space. Haunting Irish folk music, a constant feature in this show, tinkles in our ears about life, death and somewhere in between. As the carriages continue to rotate a huge ladder, made out of massive bones, swings into view. It looks the mutated backbone of a long-dead giant. A naked man clambers up and down this hanging, hefty skeleton. It is an extraordinary image and a highlight of this patchy but impressive show, in which life and death struggle to survive in the same space.

Till 22 December 2010

In May of next year, the 150 British troops still stationed in Iraq will quit the country, a year after the majority were withdrawn. While even one soldier remains there – or, for that matter, in neighbouring Afghanistan – Black Watch will remain a social necessity. The National Theatre of Scotland’s landmark production serves a stark reminder that those of us nestled comfortably in velvet seats are a long, long way from the front line.

Heralded by The Sunday Times as amongst the top ten plays of the last decade, it’s hard to approach Black Watch without expectation weighing heavy. Perhaps that explains my initial scepticism. It first half is almost casual, off-hand. Off-duty soldiers in a Scottish pub meet tense playwright for a guarded introduction and interview. With such plaudits, one expects explosive brilliance from the off. We want our two hours worth of tears and anger dished up with an immediate jugular attack on those responsible.

But Gregory Burke’s script is cleverer than that. It rejects both sensationalism and sentimentality. This is no Journey’s End; the company contains neither pristine young Raleighs, nor war-stained Stanhopes. Instead, it shows these men as professionals, there of their own choosing. It’s not that they ‘cannae do anything else’, nor down to exploitation. Much as David Elridge did with the hawkers of Market Boy, Burke heeds the soldiers due respect without the patronising disservice of airbrushing, indeed, without necessarily approving of them.

The squaddies are, at times, childish, defensive and unfeeling; prone to a laddishness that can stray quickly to brutality, as when one jumps the playwright and threatens to snap his arm at the elbow. But they are also proud, humorous and very human, often to the point of fragility. More than anything, they are a unit. One eye is always looking out for another.

Mainly, though, Burke keeps individual personalities at arms length. ‘Who’ is less important than ‘that’. Despite the camaraderie between characterful individuals, the soldiers are, foremost, instances of a species; a small selection standing for the many. Even at the end, as a suicide bomber sends three flying through the air in a nightmarish spectacle, they are identified by number, not name. They don’t die on our terms or those of the media, as heroes or as victims, as young lives cut short; rather, they simply become P4, the army’s code for ‘dead or dying’. Black Watch’s power resides in its constant restraint; in turning its back on easy, lazy manipulation of our heartstrings.

Part of that discipline is the refusal to attempt full representation. The closer Black Watch gets to the action, the stronger its dread, the more shocking its violence, the further John Tiffany’s production retreats into theatricality. It parries horror with elegance, at times, approaching the splendour of ballet. Faced with in-company tension, the sergeant orders his men to cool off with a ten-second wrestle. Here, choreographed by Stephen Hoggett of Frantic Assembly, it becomes a contagious pas de deux that spreads through the cast. It reeks of testosterone and temper, scarily so, but it also glints with homo-eroticism and grace. Its beauty – its unexpected delicacy, its sudden familiarity – slams home the distance. Sat here, good little liberals all, we don’t know the half of it.

But Burke also forces us to address the unimaginable by turning focus on the familiar. Though they never make the news, everyday pressures and problems don’t defer to the situation’s graveness. Comrades rub up against one another, jokes grate, the drinking water is almost undrinkable and, on one operation, nature comes a-calling. We recognise such symptoms as uncomfortable, but place them in a warzone, where three-inch bullets fly and IEDs lurk, and the situation becomes unfathomable.

Unfathomable, but not impossible – and certainly not pitiful. War, after all, is what the men from Fife and Tayside have trained for and aimed for. Whether aptitude came first or developed along the way – we see glimpses of the training process throughout, but they mostly dismiss it as satisfactory preparation – is by the by. ‘It’s not like any other job,’ says Cammy, acting as the group’s spokesman, ‘It’s part of us. It’s who we are.’

This non-judgemental frankness, Burke’s ability to tell it straight, is what makes Black Watch so vital. Perhaps he damns the war in Iraq too frequently, having a commanding officer describe it as ‘the biggest Western foreign policy disaster ever’ and never missing an opportunity to spin it as invasion rather than mission. But that is not the decision of the troops. They are not responsible for their presence in Iraq. They only have to deal with being there and their daily grind, on the knife’s edge of survival, is captured with unflinching empathy and honesty that leaves you shell-shocked.

Its revelations about the everyday realities of a modern soldier’s existence seem, to us, intolerable. And yet, these men do more than just endure. There are no tears to be had here. There is no fierce sense of injustice or righteousness. There is just something entirely glad its not you, because you simply couldn’t do it. And a deeply felt respect – not untinged with incomprehension – for those that can, have done and continue to do.

Till 22 January 2011

Few seasonal offerings for family audiences contain overt espousals of proletarian values. Fewer still have their heroine reject the trappings of feminity, pointedly throwing off fine gowns for the freedom offered by britches. Only Katie Mitchell’s will tinker with the fairytale’s telling to demonstrate the motives behind the narratorial voice.

While I’m all for this breed of smarty-panto, I just wish it wasn’t quite so constrained by its goody-goody attitude. Much has been made about the improbability of arch-experimentalist Mitchell helming a children’s show. Far more unlikely, in my opinion, would be directors wedded to psychoanalytical realism; Howard Davies, for example, or Michael Grandage. Mitchell’s willingness to explode stories, to leap over the conjunctives, seems an ideal grounding. Uninitiated in the art of suspended disbelief, children can be more at ease with the theatrical self-awareness of onstage storytelling.

Mitchell takes advantage of this by framing Madame de Villeneuve’s fairytale in the musical hall. Leading proceedings, accompanied by a shoe-boxed insect orchestra, is Mr Pink (Justin Salinger), a stilettoed dandy with a whirling bow-tie and a candy-floss suit (Reservoir Dogs, this is not.) Aided by two browbeaten assistants and a ‘Thought Snatcher’ mind-reading device, Pink controls the telling: pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding to suit the needs of his bitterness.

With this device in place, Mitchell has given herself room for spirited fun. Her camp emcee has licence to run riot, but instead offers a muted presence. For all his strengths, Salinger is not a larger-than-life actor. His charisma rests in subtlety, which is wasted on a clown so far downstage. The barked orders of a bossy-boots seem merely petulant; the turns of a show-off have too much grace. Politeness does not become Mr Pink.

Without hurtling into the gusto and bawdiness of music hall – even aimed at kids – the split becomes unnecessary, disrupting what is, in fact, an elegant and pertly sophisticated main-course.

On Vicki Mortimer’s lush cream set, thorny roses curling up the wall, Mitchell takes real care of both Beauty and Beast. Sian Clifford’s Beauty is more than just a pretty-faced princess in waiting; she is a young woman increasingly torn, between her family and her own life, between immediate contentment and long-term happiness. The slowness with which she thaws, eventually offering a coy hand for Mark Arends’ monster to kiss, is delicate and captivating. As for Arends, he is truly monstrous: an unkempt hairball with a carnivorous jaw and the distorted voice of Legion. His features are nightmarish, echoing the warped bunny of Donnie Darko. Towering over Beauty on stilts, he moves about the stage with a spider’s swiftness and menace. Escape is not an option.

Even when the prince finally oozes out of the carcass, with all the grossness of a sci-fi movie, Arends keeps sight of the beast. His legs remain twisted and inhuman; his hands seem awkward. There is in him the most touching vulnerability. Without self-control, you sense, that gourging, animal horror could return. It is a superb performance, entirely without vanity.

Perhaps that makes sense of Mr Pink, whose frippery and poise (one can easily imagine him being scented) is set against the ragged savagery of the Beast. Such excessive civility is no more befitting of man than its total absence. One wishes that Mitchell had found equal beastliness in Mr Pink. Or else, just let Beauty and her Beast be.

Till 4 January 2011