A. Hitler: Brad’s part in his downfall

aka Inglorious Basterds, is Quentin Tarantino’s latest outing. It’s a rumbustuous but finely engineered send-up, not of World War Two, but World War Two movies with their ludicrous pig-dogs, dirty dozens, and Gestapo dentists. Everybody in the film parodies his or her character all the time, pretty superbly. Young Brad Pitt maintains an Alamo toughguy chipmunk sneer throughout — a considerable achievement.

The film includes historical personages, but, history, Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“What actually happened”) is merely the sandbox in which Tarantino plays. His chosen idiom is crude Spaghetti Western, with a ton of wry filmic homage thrown in, and playfulness with the film plane as well as the actors.
The rabbit that works the controls in Tarantino’s brain is one sick bunny, but functioning at the height of his game.

By way of health warning, If you find Tarantino unwatchable, this will not disappoint you — ditto if you find his films unmissable. Should you have ever have been tempted to write to the BBC complaining that last night's Sergeant Musgrave of the Buffs was portrayed with eight buttons on his tunic whereas any fool knows the Buffs wore nine buttons on their tunics during the peninsilar war, every second of this movie will really annoy you — Not one for military history buffs, then.

The violence is nasty and brutish, but mercifully short for Tarantino, whose Spaghetti Western spends more time building up tension than shooting it out. After years of believing the Americans won the war single handed, it turns out to have been the Jews. There’s a lot of play on languages — subtitles used or not to draw you into lead characters’ awareness of what‘s going on. If you speak French, German and Italian, you will really be in the know, but even if not there are plenty of subtitles. Anyway, a pistol shot in the cujones is pretty much the same in any language.

Sorry to mention the war, but what might Germans think of this movie? Could breaking the mould of WW2 movies be rather refreshing, in fact? Everyone in this movie is equally nasty and amoral, and I imagine many Germans will be up there cheering along the final reel’s magnificently silly carnivalistic Götterdämmerung, along with everyone else still left in the Cinema. Characteristically for Tarantino, Five out of five Stars — or Zero. Additional proof that there’s no such thing as typical Tarantino...

All aboard the Marrakech Express

Best family trip ever. Given the age ranges and proclivities involved, it’s not easy to gather our extended clan any time but Christmas, but it’s worth the effort. Cities work better than country cottages, and cash is tight. The answer this year was Marrakech — nobody had been, mind-expanding, guaranteed sunshine, and significantly less money all in, including flights, food, outings, everything, than the basic rental of a cottage in Scotland.


We stayed at Dar Zarman, in the heart of the Northern Medina. The whole Riad concept was ideal for us — Beautiful medieval house, plunge pool, air conditioning when needed, roof garden, and above all, kind helpful people. Peter Mercer bought the place a few years ago, and did a Grand Designs job on it — our tribe filled it for a week.


Ably aided and abetted by Hassan and Fatima, our hosts could not have been more helpful, fixing up everything that needed local knowledge to fix, getting stuff in, giving advice, helping us through, the occasional slap-up meal, but always with good humour, unerring reliability and a light touch. Help included haggling lessons, how to get around, how to use a local Hammam, tipping etiquette, the works.

This made our stay exactly the right level of adventurousness for a ten year old, fun for the twenty-somethings, relaxing for long-suffering parents. This was way and away the best family outing ever, and, final cherry on the cake, came in at forty pounds under budget — no debt on the credit cards, nothing lost, a lot of fun, plenty ventured and much gained...
(For now just pictures of Dar zaman — more of the place on weekends to come, perhaps...)

Farewell, then, Ted Kennedy

Came home to find Ted Kennedy had died. The only Kennedy brother to make old bones, he probably had higher natural political people skills, than the other Kennedys. Press accounts major on Mary Jo Kopechne’s death, his youthful cheating in a Spanish exam, and his failure to make the presidency. Of course Chappaquidick marked his political career deeply, and it could be that fear of its repercussions stunted ambition to run for executive office thereafter. So the moral is that all politicians are flawed, and members of the Kennedy Camelot more flawed than some. But apart from the President that Kennedy never was, what about the Senator he was?

Kennedy was a New England Liberal from the age it was permissible to be such a thing and say so. His work in the Senate was his life’s work. He won every Senate race for which he entered, over 47 years. Not everybody in the UK understands the functions of the United States Senate, as an engine room of U.S. Lawmaking, especially on larger issues. Kennedy’s big achievements were as a man of the legislature not the executive.

The skill of a good legislator is not just to read the background papers, something Kennedy was famous for doing rather than not doing, but also to formulate bills clearly and strongly enough to stand up to scrutiny on their way through the process, rustling up support, preferably from as many as possible of the other side.

This is what Kennedy did superbly well, and the measure of his success is to be found in the particular legislation in which he had a strong hand — Deregulaton of airlines and truckers, abolition of the draft, voting at 18, the occupational safety and health administration, the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a mass of detailed legislation on civil rights, health, education, and labour. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at his death.

His private life seemed more Rabelaisian and indulgent than his public service, although he seemed largely to have gotten the act together after his second marriage. A man of the Vietnam generation, who came to object fundamentally to that war after various senate monitoring visits, he stood consistently against expansionist foreign policy, and also objected to the Iraq war — over-driven by the executive, under-respectful of the rights of the senate.

So that’s Ted Kennedy — Not a great orator, although his moving Eulogy at Bobby’s funeral is worthy, as is his “Dream shall never die” Democratic Convention speech, ending his presidential bid in 1980, with its sgnature quotation from Tennyson, and clear adumbration of his core social and political creed. Near the end of that speech he produced an image worthy of the global Kennedy brand (There’s a boulevard de Président Kennedy in Marrakech!). It doubtless inspired social progressives through the neocon wilderness of the next twenty years, as well as other rich New Englanders with yachts: “Often we sailed against the wind, but always we kept our rudder true...”

Communal Bath House manners

Interesting times down the local Hammam this morning. Cultural interaction, this being a local rather than tourist bath house, was fascinating. Women whom we would think prudish because they wouldn’t walk down the street in a skimpy top and shorts found our female Western insistence on wearing a top in a wholly female bath house weird and prudish. So what is, actually, “prudish?” what is “natural?” Another conversation with someone local who had been to London posed a question —“why do you need millions of security cameras in England? Here, most people, most of the time, know God will be angry with them if they steal, so they don’t” — a naïve point of view, perhaps, but indicative of another cultural gap?

Back to the Public Bath House. Hammams conserve water and combines the advantages of a shower and a bath — you open your pores and relax like a bath with steam (aided by gommage = mud scrub if you want) but refresh and get rid of the dirt like a shower. The whole notion of a community bath house is a bit odd to our very privatised Western sensibilities. Being bloky and throwing water over ourselves was a lot of fun and we all wish we'd taken the plunge (except there isn't a plunge to take) earlier in the week.

I came away feeling that how we interpret and understand gender are the finest tuned most personal bits of our cultural conditioning, and the easiest to get wrong. Absolutising them is ridiculous. They live within our comfort zones and evolve all the time. It’s all too easy to assume we know that the other person is being liberated or oppressed when all they are being is themselves! Observing gender interactions in an Eastern culture also throws some of the context of the Bible into perspective, as a near Eastern text.

To respond to God in others, we need to listen carefully, reducing our interpretative filters and assumptions to a working minimum, defocusing on our own reactions and respecting their provisionality. We need to express ourselves openly but courteously, suspending our disbelief about the other person’s culture. Then we need to draw gentle and provisional conclusions. That’s how cross cultural sensitivity works, and seeing the different strategies people have for straddling cultures, it’s plain Christianity in an open Cross-cultural environment feels very different to the way it does from an Imperialistic ( = Chauvinstic and standardized) standpoint.

Early Christianity grew best at points of cross-cultural intersection, the open ports and trading system nodes of the near East; so an age of globalised communications should be fertile soil for the authentic article... What has to change in us for this to be the case?

Ghost Maps, ancient and modern

London, August 1854. Cholera swept through Soho, provoking more or less off the wall theories about what it was and how it spread. The medical establishment was highly sold on the commonsense "miasmic" theory — smells and drains and the like. People believed the key to conquering cholera was piping sewage away from people. It was, in a way, but... one result was engineering the sewage away from people, into the Thames, whose water they then drank. There’s everything right about modern sewerage, but putting it in without understanding Cholera meant spending millions inadvertently making its progress easier...

The heroes of Steven Johnson’s wonderful page turner are John Snow, Doctor, and the Revd Henry Whitehead, curate of St Luke’s. Both showed a willingness to think things through pragmaticlly rather than dogmatically to back up hypothesis with painstaking local research. Both showed great courage, especialy Whitehead in staying with the dying and survivors, trying to work out what was really going on. I remember noting as a research student the way in which young Anglo-Catholic clergy in 1866 won credibility for their cause by staying alongside the poor and dying when almost everybody else had fled during London’ last major cholera outbreak.

The parish system, for all its compromises and limitations from a suburban bourgeois point of view, worked by people of self-sacrificing faith, was socially transformational in Victorian London. Church works as dispersed reality, as well as, if not sometimes better than, the gathered righteous model. If you actually believe the gospel is about serving everyone, you can do a lot worse than parcel out a patch on a map and get stuck in.

Mr Johnson goes on to draw really interesting and challenging conclusions about our life and future. Cities could easily be the greenest, most fulfilling, most creative, artistic and efficient way for us to populate the planet — but they could also be the most vulnerable to disease or attack.

The disease bit is fascinating, especially in these days of heightened awareness around Swine flu. As it was 150 years ago, potty or inspired pet theories jostle with hard science to map out a sensible response. By and large, though, the book is confident our level of bioengineering undertstanding and technology is proceeding on a par with, or even faster than the threat.

Unfortunately the same could not be said about the great non-bio fruit of twentieth century science and technology, the nuclear bomb. We may come to look back on the good ol’ Cold War of 1945-1990, balanced mutually assured destruction, as a golden age of innocence, unless we find a way get our heads and hearts around the moral and humanitarian dimension of these babies, brighter than a thousand suns.

Turn that against a City, and the Ghost map will be very much more basic than Snow’s cholera map of 1854...

Dreams are made of this?

Many thanks for the silly season story that makes my week, from the appropriately named British Cheese Board, thanks to Steve Hayes. Four years ago, the Cheese and Dreams Study seems to have proved that you don’t get nightmares from cheesy evenings. Indeed “One of the amino acids in cheese – tryptophan – has been shown to reduce stress and induce sleep so cheese may actually help you have a good night’s sleep,” says Dr Judith Bryans, Nutrition Scientist at The Dairy Council.

Well, you may say, they would say that, wouldn't they? But having given 200 people 20g of various types of cheese half an hour before bedtime for a week, science has finally spoken defnitvely — for now:

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

This has to be good news. From surrealist painters to Wallace and Gromit, the way are now clear to a more fulfilling nightlife...

How healthy is your healthcare?

Max the Cat has been to Michelle the vet this week for an eye ulcer — cost £45 (drugs), & £45 for 3 consultations. But why use the same system as a basis for Human healthcare? There’s been all kinds of blogosphere buzz around the US healthcare debate, some of it comparing our own National Health Service.

Like any system it has its ups and downs, its challenges and pitfalls. Amongst its personal ups as I have experienced them over 54 years are Dr MacArthur, our GP when I was 12. He was an old fashioned Scots socialist who refused to take private patients, and got me a hospital bed in 10 minutes at a weekend because I needed it. He saved my life, and would have been insulted to be offered money over and above his pay for doing such a thing.

Stephanie’s birth as an undiagnosed extended breach in a strange hospital (she arrived early and unexpected on Christmas night) was supervised by one of the finest obstetricians in the world, who gave Lucy the choice, then delivered her faultlessly without a C-Section, using an old midwives’ routine called the Burns-Marshall technique. Both these ace bits of effective medical care were delivered with nary a credit card or insurance policy between them, and I would take a lot of persuading that the kind of medical system we use for Max the Cat would have served us any better.

But if you’re comparing healthcare systems across whole populations, the big statistics are the place to begin. Make no mistake, a system which allows people to die earlier and risks more children’s lives, across a whole population is not as effective as one that delivers higher life expectancy and low child mortality. Efficient use of people’s resources is a bonus, given the inherent and spiralling costs of modern healthcare.

So here are the figures, and the comparisons for the UK, France, Singapore and the USA.
No system is free of glitches, failures and compromises, Every system is challenged by spiralling costs, but what works best is surely an empirical, rather than ideological question. It’s unfortunate that the US faces tough basc choices about healthcare at a time politics has been so snarky and partisan. The basic systems of medicaid and medicare was put together at a time there was a higher level of bipartisan respect and public service ethic. All good systems involve public and private elements, but the clever bit is in how they are belnded for the good of all. With any luck something can be done — why should US babies suffer three times the mortality rates of their counterparts in Singapore?

Cretaceous-Tertiary time for papers?

Two straws in the gale blowing round media and new media, both pointing in the same direction, and one’s blown away:

The Reader’s Digest has filed for bankruptcy in the US. This may be about the reinvention of the dentist’s waiting room as much as anything else, but RD lives on the sheves of second hand book dealers around the world in the form of conedensed books. I haven’t read one in years, and associated the brand primarily with prize draws to sell subscriptions back in the eighties. However it was a great brand in its day, and had a faithful and sizeable following — at 8·2 million considerably larger than anything on the UK print media scene. In June it had prudently revised its guaranteed circ figure to 5·5 million, with worse to come.

RD was the Google newsfeed of 1922, and it certainly soared in its prime. Over 75’s will take a cup of kindness yet for the sake of “humor in uniform” or “laughter is the best medicine?” RD’s radical restructing / demise shows the intensity of the winds of change sweeping through print media. It may be that the magazine died by becoming too comfortably embedded in its clientele. Reinvention is a necessity, not an option.

Anecdotally, five years ago I took stock of a carriage of morning commuters travelling into Marylebone in May and noticed about 40/60 reading paying Fleet Street Titles, mostly Telegraphs, Mails and Times, with half a dozen Guardians. A carriage of sixty people on the same service earlier this year had only five newspaper readers out of 65, two Mails, a Times and two Metros (a new model freesheet with which some say the streets of London are paved). Most were reading books, playing with phones or ipods and doing puzzles. The fact that more than twice as many people in the carriage found it more engaging to stare out the window than to read a Fleet Street paying title indicates the depth of the problem.

This brings me to Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that all his titles will start charging for online content by next year. I can understand why and sympathize. All hard indications are that his present business model is melting under him faster than the polar icecap. He’s already tried diversifying into the yacht hire business, so, Children, this is serious.

The rub has to be how to charge — the devil is most certainly in the detail. It is not easy to fix your roof in the hurricane season, and the music and video industries’ experience is not entirely encouraging. FT is probably the most interesting payment model in the UK, and this may be a way to go. Whether people would shell out for gossip, and if so how much is another question. Will his new subscription income match the amount he will have to spend on lawyers?

Perhaps an inexorable content evolution is happening. The hot journalistic added value is progressively not to be found in the story, which is likely to surface through hot media way before anywhere else, but rather the op-ed aspect of it.

The money shot will be in the quality of writing and comment in depth, not the scoop — the breadth and connection, not the novelty.

People will always pay for particular premium content, but not mass produced Flat Earth news. I suspect that the only UK site I would subscribe to, if I had to, is BBC news. Hang on, I do subscribe. It’s called the Licence Fee and I’m glad to pay it. After a couple of decades economising on journalists, recovering high added value will be difficult on various levels for Fleet Street.

Corporately it will need companies to back out of the cul-de-sac labelled production economies and promotions and invest heavily and counterculturally in good present and future journalists — not something they have shown any particular desire or proclivity for doing. I’m not sure any of the Fleet Street stable have the journalistic resilience to produce anything worth paying for, but I’d love to be wrong.
We’ll see.

PS Thanks to Jeff Jarvis on 24 August, for three more nails in the US Newspaper Coffin — Coupons and Circular (Valassis), Movie listings, and death notices...

h/t the Disney Dinosaur — who found out the hard way all about dwindlng resources and the need to change...