Department of Well I Never

John Kennedy, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley all died on the same day.

Huh.

Knife-dodging

We're in the middle of a fully-fledged moral panic. Everyone has been, or is about to me, stabbed to death with knives. Or, failing that, is a knife-wielding hoodie about to stab you (cue the Beeb's hilarious shots of yoovs with butcher's knives).

Oddly, everything looked peaceful this morning. What's going on?

I awoke to an absurd discussion on the radio yesterday morning. Some chap from a northwestern accident and emergency ward was reacting to what he and many others believed were government plans to ferry young knife carriers around casualty departments as he and his colleagues attempted to patch up the victims of stabbings.

The doctor's rather obvious objection that neither the suturing medics nor the suffering patients would appreciate such a distraction, wasn't diminished by the fact that no one in government was actually suggesting any such thing.

No, ministers' ambitions were limited to having visits to the wards. Even so, the doctor summoned up an unexpected expertise to say that even such less dramatic mechanisms for confronting young people with the consequences of crime had been shown (in the US, of course) not to work.

I have no idea how he knew this, but when it comes to the prevailing moral panic, we are all experts now. Top experts, naturally, are the Government, about to unveil (or unleash?) their latest youth crime action plan. What is actually going on in the first place?

Only yards behind are the other political parties, each with their own very definite views on what ought and what ought not to be done about knife crime, and the newspapers, whose certainty concerning remedies is matched only by their total confusion as to what the problem actually is.

Is it gangs? Is it just young men and boys? Is it just knives, or guns too? Is it all attacks with bladed instruments? Is the incidence rising or falling? Is it younger victims and perpetrators that are the problem here?

If so, what are the figures, once we subtract older people, purely domestic violence and unusual (if horrific) killings, such as that of the two French students in South London? I want to remind readers of the total pointlessness of including, for instance, the murder of a husband by his wife's brother in a statistic that is then used to indicate the problem of casual street crime.

And if people think that they know what is going on, perhaps they could explain to me why knife crime was almost static in London between the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, had increased by nearly 20 per cent in Northumbria, but had halved in Derbyshire.

Had there been a sudden outbreak of divorceless marriage in Derby round about 1992? Or a fashionable run on shivs in Newcastle this January? And what differences in parenting, imprisonment, policing, schooling or social conditions help us to understand why knife crime levels in Scotland are 3.5 times higher than in England or Wales?

I am not saying that nothing is happening. I am saying that in most discussion of this subject - and particularly in those involving politicians and the media - there is darkness rather than light.

That this is a fully-fledged moral panic is evident when the father of the recently murdered Jimmy Mizen speaks about couples who have told him that they were thinking of not having children at all because they fear their children being murdered.

This - statistically, at any rate - is half as sensible as staying childless because of a fear of filial suicide. As far as we can tell, violent crime, which had climbed for three decades, has now fallen by something like 40 per cent since 1995, and the proportion of that involving knives has not changed much. True, one problem with these statistics is that they don't include the under-16s. They will soon, and that at least we can all agree about.

So, for this problem that - in so far as we can quantify it - isn't much worse than it was, and is carried out for reasons we don't fully understand, we now have a plethora of instant solutions. Much of this involves prison, not just for knife wielders, but for that very different category, knife carriers.

With Gordon Brown knife carriers get jail or “community payback”, with David Cameron they can “expect” a spell in the slammer. Meanwhile, for the Liberal Democrats, Chris Huhne derides the Government for being in past denial about knife crime, but may care to explain why, in their January 2007 document Together We Can Cut Crime the un-denying Lib Dems failed to mention the word “knife” or “knives” on a single occasion.

Are knives so epiphenomenal, that they have taken just 18 months to become a big social problem? “Prison is the only place for knife carriers,” opines The Daily Telegraph, adding - without an iota of supporting evidence - that “the ‘shock' of a spell in prison, even of short duration, will be far more potent deterrent than one of Miss Smith's hospital visits”.

That depends, doesn't it, on why you are carrying the knife in the first place, something that we still don't know. No, I'm sorry, of course we do. It's the Daily Mail's “breakdown of the family and education system”. Or, as David Cameron put it, too many young people “do not recognise a sense of right or wrong”.

And the evidence for this contention is what, precisely? Of all the things that I imagine I observe about young people today, a failure to discuss moral or ethical values is the least characteristic.

We have been here before. Guns last year, flick knives in 1958, razor gangs in 1938, skinhead aggro in 1970 (when steel-capped boots were the weapon), mods and rockers in 1964, young men and boys stabbed or shot or stomped by other young men outside pubs, clubs, dancehalls and stadiums.

In many cases it was just luck that separated the victim from the perpetrator. That point was poignantly made by Alice Miles in these pages recently.

I can't help wondering whether what may be behind any recent real rise in knife crimes, is precisely the recent unreal moral panic over knives. Everyone hears that everyone else is carrying, so they carry too; and if you buy a ticket for the fatal lottery sometimes you win.

It is striking, of course, that almost all those involved in casual knife fatalities are young males. In The Times yesterday there was a story about young girls self-harming, suggesting an unpleasant symmetry - the brothers stab others, the sisters stab themselves. But we start, don't we, with offended masculinity, fear and peer pressure, and work from there?

We might look at actually giving the recent £3 million anti-knife advertising campaign some time to work, at developing non-prison forms of deterrence, at televising court procedures in cases of violence, at simultaneously diminishing the amount of violence-as-entertainment on television and in cinemas, at outlawing violence against children, at reinstituting civility in the public sphere, starting with ourselves. Anything but the present pathetic apology for a national discussion

Wireless Festival 08: Underworld, Fatboy Slim

Bjork has a great deal to answer for. For the first time ever, the Icelandic art-pixie is in my bad books (you listening, Bjork? Yes, I do mean you). Mere days before the Wild in the Country festival, due to take place in leafy Knebworth, Bjork pulled out, citing a lack of co-operation from the organisers. In rapid succession, more DJs, plus Battles, I band I've long wanted to see, followed suit. And then, on the Thursday before the weekend, the plug was finally pulled. Cue mass panic among our number: we were all geared up with nowhere to go. A plan B was needed, quick smart.

So, when V remembered almost immediately that the Wireless Festival was on in Hyde Park, featuring Bootsy Collins, MSTRKRFT, Booka Shade, Underworld and Fatboy Slim, our weekend was saved. Moreover, apart from the tantalizing prospect of seeing Bjork, there was some measure of relief that we weren’t going to have to troop up to Knebworth and troop back again.

Our day begins with a rendezvous in the leafy surrounds of Primrose Hill. M's mum is the famous folk singer Bonnie Dobson, author of the folk standard "Morning Dew", and her house is accordingly festooned with the artistic bric-a-brac of a lifetime: photos, postcards, trinkets and paintings. It's a great way to start the day — and wonderful knowing that this will be our retreat when we finally decide that it’s all a bit too hectic.

So we cab it over to Hyde Park, where we loiter by a tent where an instructor is given dance lessons — V is excited by the sounds of distant Groove Armada track. I can only hear a muffled throb. Good lord, has my hearing become that appalling? We catch up with M’s motley crew and head, after a chastening episode or two in the toilets, to the huge tent at the back of the field to catch the closing strains of MSTRKRFT. Their set of dark tech seems confuses me until I realise that I’d been confusing them with M Craft the whole time. But a set of hand-cranked lo-fi folk tunes would have got no-one in the mood for Underworld. It’s a good job we get to the tent early — they’ve stopped letting people into the tent, such is the crush. Good for the space; not so good for those of us who might want to use the toilet.

It’s very dark and very warm by the time Underworld come on. They are superb, Karl flailing like a lunatic who’s plugged himself into the mains just for kicks. “Two Months Off” is lethal, "Born Slippy" takes everyone to the mental place, especially when they release the giant balloons (at least I think that happened), "King of Snake" keeps them there, and "Jumbo" is a blissful way to end, the crowd drifting out for the start of Fatboy Slim... but what’s this? They’re back for a frenzied encore of "Moaner”, an overload of hyper-staccato synths and Karl's maniac rant, plus a frenzied strobe. It all helps create a sensory overload (M had to leave the tent, such was the claustrophobia in the tent) that we agree that Fatboy's gonna have a hard time beating.

Initial omens are not good. We're at the periphery of the crowd, where the beats are a little quiet and the sound is getting sucked hither and thither by the wind. We creep closer, looking for paths of lesser resistance. You'll forgive me if I don't remember a great deal about his song selection from this point, as I spent the next hour and a half grinning like loon. We’d seen Fatboy play the famous Beach Boutique II down in Brighton (along with, what, a quarter of a million others?), and that had been — OK. Most of my memory of that is taken up with finding it hard to dance on the sloping pebbles and then spending a small lifetime leaving the beach to the never-ending voice on the PA: “please make your way off the beach” etc.

But this time, Fatboy was truly amazingly good, spending the whole set grinning like the extraordinarily lucky man he is, resplendent in Hawaiian shirt and continually exhorting the crowd to give it up, which we were more than happy to do. The music got continually harder and deeper and harder and more technoid and then came up the other side with a kind of ecstatic techno I’ve never really heard before more ecstatic. There were super-deep versions of "Sunshine of Your Love" and "(I can't get no) Satisfaction", a frenzied "Block Rockin' Beats", aa cleansing "Jump Around" and then, right at the end, a soaring remix of Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go". The whole thing was like the sun coming out — which was odd because it was getting progressively cloudier. I read later that he played "Crazy in Love" — but I'll have to take that on trust. He also finished with “Praise You”, before leaving us, in true superstar style, wanting more, bereft that he’d finished so early. It wasn’t even 10:30.

After that — we braved the cold and the buses and made our way to The End for some Layo and Bushwacka, then headed back to our Primrose Hill base for a debrief. Sleep was a long time coming.

So a big thanks to that capital fellow, Fatboy Slim. Oh yes, and a belated thank you to Bjork as well...

[Any info about a track-listing most welcome]

Jay-Z - Wonderwall

Oh me of little faith. Jay-Z at Glasters was, from the smattering of small screen footage we caught, the gig of the year (helps that we failed to turn up to the MBV gig). I really didn't know how many songs I'd absorbed iPod-wise; moreover, I couldn't have guessed how transfigured these songs would be live. My god, this guy can rap (yeah, yeah, I know. It's hardly news).

Better yet, he told Noel where to get off:



But just as I was writing this (faintly drunkenly and with dangerously low blood sugar), Marcello wrote this magnificent piece. It's too perfect too pick out a quote. But let me try:

I think, therefore, you'll gather that Saturday was a glorious strawberry and absinthe lollipop of a F*CK YOU...

Go read.

How to account for Alan Cumming?

Oh dear. I'm afraid I may have led you up the garden path. The answer to the posed question, as any fool knows, is that there is no way to account for Alan Cumming.

But, on a completely different topic, an Italian study has proposed a new genetic theory of homosexuality, which essentially states that the genes for homosexuality survive because their female carriers have, on average, more children. The study looked at the patterns of procreation among the female relatives of male homosexuals and compared them to patterns of procreation among the relatives of non-homosexuals: et voila! more children.

The genes in question are not 'genes for homosexuality': they are genes for androphilia — for loving men. Which, among women, might lead, all other things being equal, to more offspring.

Will Saletan has a succinct discussion at Slate.

Bad Wolf

Turns out we really weren't paying attention...

http://www.badwolf.org.uk/

A trouser-rubbing timewarp that needs no new balls

Not my headline: Marina Hyde's, for a brilliant piece about the ongoing objectification of female tennis players:

They [the Lawn Tennis Association] recently launched their Think Pink campaign, a new initiative "to raise awareness of women in tennis, and sport in general". A couple of weeks ago they got lots of promising nine- to 11-year-old girl players to dress up in pink clothes and demonstrate their skills. "We're looking to bring out the glamorous side of the game," explained Think Pink ambassador Claire Curren, "and really tap into what appeals to girls growing up these days."

Wait: that's the big idea? To wear baby pink and emphasise "the glamorous side" of tennis? Why, we'll be producing Grand Slam champions inside a decade. It's a little-known fact that as ambitious tweens, Venus and Serena Williams raised their game by repeatedly asking themselves, "What would Malibu Stacy do?"

Hyde, Charlie Brooker and Laura Barton have become my essential Guardian reads. Brooker's last piece was about, um, hats, so I won't link to that. But consider this piece from Barton, on being a fan of William Elliott Whitmore and searching for new music:

When you are awaiting new material by a musician you love, you become a man roaming with a terrible thirst (goodness only knows how Guns N' Roses fans are getting by). And you find you are quenched, just a little, by rough new songs posted on MySpaces and played at shows, by duet records and live albums and by snippety journal entries on homepages; they are the clink of the glass and the splash of the tap, the promise of what is to come, and we stand like hens drinking rainwater before it has landed, nipping at tiny liquid insects, taking anything we can get.

That'll do, while we wait for more weather-beaten banjo classics from the man himself

The First Excuse

Christopher Hitchens on the the accusations of sexism coming from the Hilary camp:

In common with quite a lot of men, I have or have had a mother, wife, grandmother, mother-in-law, daughter—more or less everything female except a sister, which I wish I had had—and given all this feminine backup, I decline to be talked to in such a condescending fashion. There are many ways in which to be a bad person, and I don't think that I would ever deny that the Y chromosome especially encodes some of these. I certainly don't know any feminists who wouldn't agree with me that some regrettable traits are forever associated with the male sex. But in that event, it will not be easy for Sen. Clinton's supporters to argue that she can't be identified as womanly, or even as a woman, unless (or do I mean until?) the word woman becomes more coterminous with the word saint or angel or the term nurturing person than it is now. Her whole self-pitying campaign, I mean to say, has retarded and infantilized the political process and has used the increasingly empty term sexism to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest and most bigoted candidacies in modern history.

Agoria: At The Controls

I so so want to do a longer post on compilations and I so so will (I hear the cry go up: hooray!), but I really have to mention Agoria's stellar entry in At The Controls series, already essential listening thanks to James Holden (his compilation at my BPM threshold but utterly thrilling for that) and M.A.N.D.Y (just bonkers).

Agoria gives us two CDs of quite stunning music, Disc 1 the more straightforward, Disc 2 really out in orbit. The section that traverses Fairmont's "Flight of the Albatross", Planningtorock's marvellously histrionic "When Are You Gonna Start" and Grand National's "Drink to Moving On" is just jaw-dropping — each wonderful piece of music dovetailing into its neighbour as if part of a divinely-ordained plan. It's the Jack Torrance of track-listings: but of course Stefan Goldmann's "Lunatic Fringe" morphs into the peerless "Dark Soldier" by Roland Appel — it always has (Lunatic Fringe hit upon such an obvious idea: these days, if a piece of minimal tech doesn't feature a Bulgarian women's choir, I'm not interested).

And then onto a blissful end with the sublime staccato of Apparat's "Arcadia". So what if Ellen Alien did it already. Since it's The Best Song in the Known Universe as of Today, we're allowed a bit of double-up.

Go fetch.

Quote of the day

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

~ Robert Frost