Monday, June 30, 2008
Pigeons, mobile phones and grasscutters
Apparently pigeons have been trained by the inmates to take mobile phones and drugs into Sao Paulo prison. When I think of pigeon post, it is a picture of a sepia tinted time where history is ‘another country where they did things differently’ and the pace was slower in all things – except post by bird, of course! I think of wars in trenches or wizards in castles. I am using dove-carriers in the work I am doing on an agnostic’s guide to the spiritual, mentioned in previous blogs and whose early chapters can be found on this site. This trilogy of novels is set in a pre-medieval world of tribes and clans who worship different gods in different ways. To have pigeons as vehicles of modern technology seems like a figment from one of those science fiction films or novels which use medieval cultures as the basis for any futuristic mise en scene. Remember Gilliam’s film, Brazil? Or the Star Wars series? Post apocalyptic visions often combine societies broken down into feudal anarchy or fractured dystopias, yet with the alarming technologies that destroyed them, lying around and still available for use and abuse. It is difficult to write novels which are entirely of the future because we find it too challenging to read and identify with something which is so completely alien. We have to have a map with ‘You Are Here’ on it, a familiar starting place from which to march out and engage with the novel or the extraordinary. Making the common place exotic is the basis of much fiction. But there is always a bit of the common place for reassurance.
Pigeons carrying mobile phones in what we think of as of the real world of the here and now, raises the question of what comes next? My thoughts turn to aerial spying, the carrying of microphones and cameras and all the guff of surveillance. A spy pigeon in London would be lost in the infested sky of city birds and could do a lot of terrorist damage. Particularly if it had been trained in the mountains of Pakistan.
I am, currently, in Ghana (I will intersperse blogs on my times here with the usual diverse murmurings) and here there is a directness about surveillance which has its amusing side. Large posters adorn walls and boards with maxims such as:
“The Tip-off. Your civic responsibility!”
This seems refreshingly old world when compared to the civic-spy cameras positioned everywhere in Orwell’s 1984 which nowadays have become an accepted part of UK urban furniture. Here, there are mobile phones aplenty but the pigeons are too small to carry them. On the other hand, I ate a creature called a ‘grasscutter’ yesterday. I don’t know what it is or whether it crawls, runs, burrows or glides but I am wondering about its potential in the arms and telecommunications race. The name suggests it flies very close to the ground, at stalk level, invaluable in getting under enemy radar.
Apparently pigeons have been trained by the inmates to take mobile phones and drugs into Sao Paulo prison. When I think of pigeon post, it is a picture of a sepia tinted time where history is ‘another country where they did things differently’ and the pace was slower in all things – except post by bird, of course! I think of wars in trenches or wizards in castles. I am using dove-carriers in the work I am doing on an agnostic’s guide to the spiritual, mentioned in previous blogs and whose early chapters can be found on this site. This trilogy of novels is set in a pre-medieval world of tribes and clans who worship different gods in different ways. To have pigeons as vehicles of modern technology seems like a figment from one of those science fiction films or novels which use medieval cultures as the basis for any futuristic mise en scene. Remember Gilliam’s film, Brazil? Or the Star Wars series? Post apocalyptic visions often combine societies broken down into feudal anarchy or fractured dystopias, yet with the alarming technologies that destroyed them, lying around and still available for use and abuse. It is difficult to write novels which are entirely of the future because we find it too challenging to read and identify with something which is so completely alien. We have to have a map with ‘You Are Here’ on it, a familiar starting place from which to march out and engage with the novel or the extraordinary. Making the common place exotic is the basis of much fiction. But there is always a bit of the common place for reassurance.
Pigeons carrying mobile phones in what we think of as of the real world of the here and now, raises the question of what comes next? My thoughts turn to aerial spying, the carrying of microphones and cameras and all the guff of surveillance. A spy pigeon in London would be lost in the infested sky of city birds and could do a lot of terrorist damage. Particularly if it had been trained in the mountains of Pakistan.
I am, currently, in Ghana (I will intersperse blogs on my times here with the usual diverse murmurings) and here there is a directness about surveillance which has its amusing side. Large posters adorn walls and boards with maxims such as:
“The Tip-off. Your civic responsibility!”
This seems refreshingly old world when compared to the civic-spy cameras positioned everywhere in Orwell’s 1984 which nowadays have become an accepted part of UK urban furniture. Here, there are mobile phones aplenty but the pigeons are too small to carry them. On the other hand, I ate a creature called a ‘grasscutter’ yesterday. I don’t know what it is or whether it crawls, runs, burrows or glides but I am wondering about its potential in the arms and telecommunications race. The name suggests it flies very close to the ground, at stalk level, invaluable in getting under enemy radar.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Despotic Mongol, the Animated Iranian and the Abducted Child
When I’m in London I become a cineaste first, gallery viewer second and eater, third. Theatre has drifted down my list. of priorities. I find it harder than ever to suspend my disbelief, except on first nights when the adrenaline is burning through the actors. But, then, tickets are at a premium and I don't organise myself that far ahead. The opportunity of choosing from so many screens, pandering to every taste from art house to gross-pop, always makes a trip to the capital, inviting. Usually. Also, there is an opportunity to catch up on something that you may have missed, embedded as I normally am, in the Pyrenean mountains. So, I thought I’d mention three films I have seen over the last few days here. These are Persepolis, an animated autobiography of a young woman’s life in Iran (including her escape to Vienna), Gone Baby Gone, a child abduction drama and Mongol, an epic about Genghis Khan.
Despite the adulatory reviews, Persepolis seemed to me to have neither a mould-breaking approach to its animation nor a gripping narrative, exacerbated by its somewhat pedestrian black and white format. Whilst it dealt with revolution and war, the bizarre, horrific and cruel Islamic and Shah regimes remained so broad brushed that I came away no more informed than from watching the daily news. I know people’s lives in such circumstances are appalling, degrading and almost without hope. Art should have the power to tear away the bandaged wounds of my heavily doctored response to the bestial, in new ways and open them up again.
Gone Baby Gone explores an alternative, grim underbelly to the McCannesque abduction scenario. We are all aware and, to different degrees, (unless we are emotionally crippled) affected by what happened to Madeleine. It is a parent’s worse nightmare. In this film there are no articulate middle class advocates. The milieu of this abducted child is seedy and indefensible in any society. The plot line is so labyrinthine it takes you a while, afterwards, to tease out the strands. It is tense and well acted, using down at heel, mouth and spirit locals to grit out the textures. Casey Affleck is a fine actor and produces a compellingly nuanced but entirely different performance from his Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James, one of my favourite films of recent times. However, the production suffers somewhat from too much plot and not enough backfill on character - but it’s worth a look.
Mongol was a disappointment. If you have a look around my website you’ll find the first couple of chapters of a trilogy I am undertaking, set in Central Asia in some indeterminate past and drawing heavily on the notion of the shaman-warrior, the beginning of ethical codes and the unification of clans into tribes and their belief-constructions of Gods and Fate. In effect, it is also an agnostics’ guide to spiritual experience for our current times. I have a vested interest, therefore, in depictions of similar periods in history. Having spent time in Samarkand and Tashkent, I am aware that Genghis Khan is revered as a hero in bringing together warring factions and introducing a code of loyalty to the Khan and country. At the same time there was an uncritical acceptance of his violent, heartless and inhuman capacity for mayhem. But the film is episodically free from an underlying rationale for his rise to power and purpose. In fact, it struck me that there was little of his life, as highlighted in the narrative, to substantiate the claim that he would mature into that most terrible of the Khans. In those days, threat was dealt with as summarily as in a fundamentalist Islamic court in Persepolis, yet on at least three occasions, the young but hardly formidable loner, Genghis, is allowed to fester in stocks or prison, rather than be impaled, minus his body, on a pike. The film looks good some of the time but the script is barely competent and doesn’t know how to engage with the dangerously chaotic borders between the prophetic and the psychotic.
Afterwards, in my hotel room, I watched A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s brilliant foray into the dark mainstream. Now that’s a film!
When I’m in London I become a cineaste first, gallery viewer second and eater, third. Theatre has drifted down my list. of priorities. I find it harder than ever to suspend my disbelief, except on first nights when the adrenaline is burning through the actors. But, then, tickets are at a premium and I don't organise myself that far ahead. The opportunity of choosing from so many screens, pandering to every taste from art house to gross-pop, always makes a trip to the capital, inviting. Usually. Also, there is an opportunity to catch up on something that you may have missed, embedded as I normally am, in the Pyrenean mountains. So, I thought I’d mention three films I have seen over the last few days here. These are Persepolis, an animated autobiography of a young woman’s life in Iran (including her escape to Vienna), Gone Baby Gone, a child abduction drama and Mongol, an epic about Genghis Khan.
Despite the adulatory reviews, Persepolis seemed to me to have neither a mould-breaking approach to its animation nor a gripping narrative, exacerbated by its somewhat pedestrian black and white format. Whilst it dealt with revolution and war, the bizarre, horrific and cruel Islamic and Shah regimes remained so broad brushed that I came away no more informed than from watching the daily news. I know people’s lives in such circumstances are appalling, degrading and almost without hope. Art should have the power to tear away the bandaged wounds of my heavily doctored response to the bestial, in new ways and open them up again.
Gone Baby Gone explores an alternative, grim underbelly to the McCannesque abduction scenario. We are all aware and, to different degrees, (unless we are emotionally crippled) affected by what happened to Madeleine. It is a parent’s worse nightmare. In this film there are no articulate middle class advocates. The milieu of this abducted child is seedy and indefensible in any society. The plot line is so labyrinthine it takes you a while, afterwards, to tease out the strands. It is tense and well acted, using down at heel, mouth and spirit locals to grit out the textures. Casey Affleck is a fine actor and produces a compellingly nuanced but entirely different performance from his Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James, one of my favourite films of recent times. However, the production suffers somewhat from too much plot and not enough backfill on character - but it’s worth a look.
Mongol was a disappointment. If you have a look around my website you’ll find the first couple of chapters of a trilogy I am undertaking, set in Central Asia in some indeterminate past and drawing heavily on the notion of the shaman-warrior, the beginning of ethical codes and the unification of clans into tribes and their belief-constructions of Gods and Fate. In effect, it is also an agnostics’ guide to spiritual experience for our current times. I have a vested interest, therefore, in depictions of similar periods in history. Having spent time in Samarkand and Tashkent, I am aware that Genghis Khan is revered as a hero in bringing together warring factions and introducing a code of loyalty to the Khan and country. At the same time there was an uncritical acceptance of his violent, heartless and inhuman capacity for mayhem. But the film is episodically free from an underlying rationale for his rise to power and purpose. In fact, it struck me that there was little of his life, as highlighted in the narrative, to substantiate the claim that he would mature into that most terrible of the Khans. In those days, threat was dealt with as summarily as in a fundamentalist Islamic court in Persepolis, yet on at least three occasions, the young but hardly formidable loner, Genghis, is allowed to fester in stocks or prison, rather than be impaled, minus his body, on a pike. The film looks good some of the time but the script is barely competent and doesn’t know how to engage with the dangerously chaotic borders between the prophetic and the psychotic.
Afterwards, in my hotel room, I watched A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s brilliant foray into the dark mainstream. Now that’s a film!
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing
Reading the paper over coffee this morning I noticed that Health Ministers are giving the go ahead for hospital consultants’ success and failure rates to be put on-line. This could be as bad as it gets for patients.
Some time ago now I developed one of the first appraisal systems for top medical professionals. An issue emerged that caused me a great deal of anxiety. Imagine five heart surgeons in a specialty. We want to appraise and measure their expertise so that, if they need extra training we can pinpoint where. We take the hard data on each of them. It turns out that Mrs Brown is by far the worst performer. Roughly 80% of her patients die. Looking into this more deeply we then discover that Mrs Brown ONLY operates on patients with a 2% chance of survival. In other words she is a brilliant surgeon. If we publish her results, she might (as actually happened later in reaction to league tables in some hospitals) decide she is only going to operate on patients who have a reasonable chance of survival. Patients with severe conditions will be turned away. This will make the overall tables for the speciality look a lot better – and the hospital benefits from extra funding!
This is an example of the gruesome consequences of the unforeseen. Often, policies are produced and implemented in social organisations right up to cabinet level, which result in unpredictable side-effects. So, in the case of the publication of consultants’ surgical records, what might result, adversely? Well, those surgeons who are easily bullied or are vulnerable to criticism, may leave for warmer climes where this tyranny by transparency does not occur. Those that are, like Mrs Brown, capable of offering the 2% chance of survival might withdraw on the basis that all the despairing Googling patients from a thousand square miles might want them to take on their inoperable conditions. Then again, given the way unscrupulous or frightened senior managers have fudged or skewed their hospital data over the last few years, to appear less conspicuously inept in league tables, who is to say that patients will actually be seeing robust evidence of performance, anyway?
BUT, probably the worst fall-out of the proposed online information, is that our terrified, death-sentenced, Googling patients will discover that there is only one Mrs Brown in the country and she just isn’t available, either because of the length of her lists or because she’s having a break down, trying to manage so many would-be patients. So they have to accept they will be under the knife of Mr Grey, whose success rate with those with a 2% survival-chance is, well, bang-on 2%.
Try telling them to go into the theatre, feeling optimistic .
Labels: On-line surgeon success rates. Hospital league tables. patient choice.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
It’s a load of Balls Ed
For some time the dubious solutions to failure in the private sector have been imported into the ‘uncompetitive’ public sector. The assumption behind the strategy is that by introducing competition, then standards rise. Thus, cleaning firms win the right to increase MRSA in hospitals by offering minimum wages, rock bottom tenders and dirty floor cloths. And security firms win the right to bang up prisoners as if they were Ryanair passengers or battery chickens whilst ensuring their claustrophobia is alleviated by extra supplies of drugs.
Now we are told that schools are to be on 50 days parole and if they still fail then they could be closed and opened as academies, or twinned with successful schools. We know how easy it is for business to go into liquidation and then reopen under another name, thus thumbing their noses at creditors and sad punters but it seems that the strategy appeals to Ed Balls and the Men from the Ministry. It is this or the slightly passé approach of removing senior management and bringing in a flying squad of super-heads.
Meanwhile, the problems just don’t go away. Schools remain an inappropriate means to an end. Their primary purpose, actually, is to keep the great mass of adolescence off the streets so that their unpredictable hormones don’t cause chaos in the social order. If you want career education for your young then, providing you have the wherewithal (fees, post code, influence, parental coaching) you can pay the value added and get it. No amount of management tinkering will change this overall pattern.
I began life as a teacher in a run down secondary school which was due to close the following year, with everyone moved, en bloc, into a purpose built comprehensive. I had a knife pulled on me, whole class attempts at disrupting my lessons, blatant sexual provocation from 14 year old girls and a headmaster who was more interested in his roses than the school. I came through it, somehow. At the same time I felt affection for the pupils and the area. Some I helped and some I didn’t. I was thought to be a better than average teacher, despite the failures under my care and when they left, students with whatever academic outcome shook my hand and grinned their awkward goodbyes. Of course nearly all of them could have done better, given improved home environments, better facilities and brothers and sisters who were academic role models. At the same time they felt it was their school, for better or worse and that it was connected to their lives and, in a roundabout kind of way, respected them, whatever their ambitions. The teachers, like myself, taught how they wanted. One or two should have been summarily dismissed. But there were no league tables, no SATS, no competition with the school next door, except on the playing fields. I doubt the results today, overall, are any better or worse than then, except in one respect and that was that the teachers were not under constant threat and my first school was closing within a strategy of providing better facilities for all.
Today’s teachers are pressured to be technocrats. The system is a positivists’ dream of measurement with myriad competencies and skills. Training has superseded education. All is regimented. Teachers deliver by the accepted manual. To impress the public, there must be those schools and individuals that fail and become pelted in the stocks of inspection and closure. It is not an education for all. It has no visionary socialist intent. It is neo-con, nasty and class driven. There is no liberalism left in it.
Haphazard education, with no clear sense of what the outcomes might be, where relationships between people are most important and emotional stability the first credo, might do a great deal more to help society cohere, than this mumbo jumbo of market forces and standardisation.
Labels: Closures, Ed Balls, Education, Failing schools
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The bald shall not inherit the earth
Some research says baldness can be equated with extra virility in men but that cuts no ice in today’s desire for a beautiful, undifferentiated ‘norm’. Scientists have found a way to extract hair-producing cells from my scalp and propagate them in the laboratory before injecting them in my bald area and waiting for them, like seeds in the spring soil, to sprout their many-branched shoots. This skull-based husbandry will be universal in five or so years – they say. All those ads in papers and magazines stretching back to the last but one century, showing before and after treatments, including dung-based preparations, herbal extracts, monkey glands and electrolysis to the latter day business of transplanting follicle-clumps, like sods, from one overgrown area to a hitherto lawn-free pate, will be a thing of the past.
Is the ‘problem’ of baldness in men our own version of the main body image issue in women? Has the desirable man become someone with luxuriant, ungreyed topiary and a hairless chest, just as the media-inspired desirable, catwalk-prancing woman has become a slim boyish figure with obvious breasts (but not over large)? Men are now, apparently, suddenly consuming an enormous range of cosmetics to retain their quasi-youthful looks.
How can we men retain our self-confidence if we do not conform to this multi-million pound inspired ideal type? Here I am with an ever-expanding spam (the remaining hair shaved very short to give my baldness a semblance of ‘style’) and an unaccountable, almost tropical growth of chest hair. Why is nature playing this paradoxical game with me? What evolutionary purpose is it fulfilling? Whatever its hidden benefits are, they are remaining just that, beyond my ken.
At its heart, the preoccupation we have with our bodies and how they look, is tied closely to mortality. The loss of hair is symbolically equated with the loss of the power of the body. Samson, after all, lost his strength when his hair was cut. The army conscript loses his unpredictable independence. The hairless man is a dead man walking. Meanwhile the growth of body hair is a atavistic shift to a more primitive state of evolution. The hairy chested man is the ape shambling. Combining one with the other for a monstrous parody of beauty and the beast, creates a perfect opportunity for marketing. So much visual dissonance to straighten out with the products of the age and a single desirable image for today’s man.
It becomes a social imperative. We must wax our chests and cover our head-skin with wigs, replants or expensive remedial head treatments, straight from the snake-oil factories of our pharmaceutical giants.
Some research says baldness can be equated with extra virility in men but that cuts no ice in today’s desire for a beautiful, undifferentiated ‘norm’. Scientists have found a way to extract hair-producing cells from my scalp and propagate them in the laboratory before injecting them in my bald area and waiting for them, like seeds in the spring soil, to sprout their many-branched shoots. This skull-based husbandry will be universal in five or so years – they say. All those ads in papers and magazines stretching back to the last but one century, showing before and after treatments, including dung-based preparations, herbal extracts, monkey glands and electrolysis to the latter day business of transplanting follicle-clumps, like sods, from one overgrown area to a hitherto lawn-free pate, will be a thing of the past.
Is the ‘problem’ of baldness in men our own version of the main body image issue in women? Has the desirable man become someone with luxuriant, ungreyed topiary and a hairless chest, just as the media-inspired desirable, catwalk-prancing woman has become a slim boyish figure with obvious breasts (but not over large)? Men are now, apparently, suddenly consuming an enormous range of cosmetics to retain their quasi-youthful looks.
How can we men retain our self-confidence if we do not conform to this multi-million pound inspired ideal type? Here I am with an ever-expanding spam (the remaining hair shaved very short to give my baldness a semblance of ‘style’) and an unaccountable, almost tropical growth of chest hair. Why is nature playing this paradoxical game with me? What evolutionary purpose is it fulfilling? Whatever its hidden benefits are, they are remaining just that, beyond my ken.
At its heart, the preoccupation we have with our bodies and how they look, is tied closely to mortality. The loss of hair is symbolically equated with the loss of the power of the body. Samson, after all, lost his strength when his hair was cut. The army conscript loses his unpredictable independence. The hairless man is a dead man walking. Meanwhile the growth of body hair is a atavistic shift to a more primitive state of evolution. The hairy chested man is the ape shambling. Combining one with the other for a monstrous parody of beauty and the beast, creates a perfect opportunity for marketing. So much visual dissonance to straighten out with the products of the age and a single desirable image for today’s man.
It becomes a social imperative. We must wax our chests and cover our head-skin with wigs, replants or expensive remedial head treatments, straight from the snake-oil factories of our pharmaceutical giants.