2008 | static squid

BOB QUICK AND THE TORIESIn this great democracy of ours, you shouldn't accuse the Conservative party of dobbing you in to the Mail on Sunday, especially if you are a police officer. Met Police Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick apologised but that hasn't stopped the Tories from demanding his resignation.Funny to see the party of law and order coming over all Militant Tendency as regards the police. Is it good politics? Iain Dale...

FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO BY BON IVER - RECORD OF THE YEAR?

Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago has cropped up on a lot of album of the year lists. For those who haven't heard it, it's a bunch of well-crafted, tuneful indie-ish songs, played on guitar, sung in a pleasing, treble-y voice, often multitracked so that at extremes it sounds as if it's being sung by a small choir. The effects pedal is used frequently but tastefully, principally to add echo. The effect is at once intimate, thanks to the subject matter (a broken love affair), the vocal style and the use of silence and quiet passages, and sweeping, thanks to the echo and overdubs.

The story behind the album is that Bon Iver, whose real name is Justin Vernon, retreated to a cabin in a Wisconsin wilderness after splitting up with the Emma of the title. He took with him a guitar, a couple of drums, an effects pedal and some basic recording equipment. He spent three winter months in the cabin, writing and recording and emerged with the songs that make up the album. The bleakness of the landscape seems to have chimed with his mood and it is easy to hear in For Emma, Forever Ago a sense of wintry, solitary despair and reflection. "Bon Iver" is, near enough, French for 'good winter'.

I bought the record in the summer, played it a couple of times, put it on my iPod and forgot about it. I got it out recently and listened to it a few times: I do like it, but clearly not as much as some of its fans.

The reviews have praised the music, but also responded strongly to the back story of the heartbroken young man in his cabin in the woods. The story adds that valuable quality of authenticity: had For Emma, Forever Ago been funded by Simon Cowell and recorded in a studio in West London, good though it is, I doubt that it would have received quite the same acclaim.

OCTOBER CRASHESA side note on the current stock markets crisis. For some reason market crashes almost invariably happen in October. Black Monday, the crash of 97, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 - all in October. Four of the biggest single-day falls in market history took place in October, and the fifth was in November. So the worst could yet be to co...

FIRE IN ISLINGTON AND THE JEWEL OF MEDINAThe BBC is reporting that two men have been taken into custody after setting a fire at a publishing house in Lonsdale Square, Islington. The only publisher I can find at that address is Gibson Square, which has recently taken on the novel The Jewel Of Medina.This book tells the story of Mohammed's relationship with his nine-year-old bride Aisha (a historical fact that allows a certain kind...

NO SYMPATHY FOR ESTATE AGENTSEstate agents have been badly hit by the recession, to the point that they can only sell one property a week. It seems fair to point out that estate agents have organised things so that their earnings are linked to property prices, by insisting on percentage fees. They do very well out of this when the housing market is booming so shouldn't complain when it is flat.Stephen Pollard wonders why estate...

ANTISEMITISM ON FACEBOOKA friend drew to my attention a truly nasty Facebook group called "Sweet Memories of The Holocaust" which, while claiming "we dont have brplem with jews our problem is with izrael and zionz" (their spelling), is predictably full of anti-semitic filth. It seems to have been set up by some death-metal mentalist but is attracting a depressing number of members. I shan't link to it but I will point...

IF HARRY'S PLACE IS DOWN.......this is probably why.....And if that is down too, then in brief, Harry's Place posted an interesting piece about neo-Nazi websites. An academic mentioned in the piece, Jenna Delich, took exception to a sentence in it that linked her with the website of David Duke, the neo-nazi ad former Ku Klux Klan leader. Harry's Place retorts that evidence for their claim is in the public domain. I trust...

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGINGWhat an interesting figure Dylan Jones is. In the mid-eighties I used to see him at warehouse parties in places like Battlebridge Road, King's Cross. If memory serves, he may even have organised some of them. It always struck me as a very lucrative enterprise: find a warehouse, get a sound system, buy hundreds of cans of Red Stripe from a cash and carry, charge a fiver at the door, confiscate any drink...

MET POLICE CRME MAPReally good use of Google Maps by the London Metropolitan police to provide local crime information by postcode. You can drill down to ward and sub-ward, which is as micro-local as one can reasonably expect to get, see the number of incidents for an area and track trends. It would be nice to know more about the kind of offences - were the five in my area last month burlaries, muggings, murders, thefts from cars...

PRESS OFFICERSWhen I worked for Yahoo!, I occasionally had to do radio interviews and very often a press officer would accompany m e. She was very nice and efficient and made sure I got where I needed to be in time and knew what I would be asked about. However, she insisted on scribbling notes on a large piece of card and waving them at me during the interview to remind me to say, or not say, one thing or another. It was extremely...

SPARE A THOUGHT FOR THE FAMILIES OF CONFESSIONAL COLUMNISTSSome journalists I know refuse to write about their families. Others have made a career of it: one thinks of the noxious and self-obsessed Liz Jones and Nirpal Dhalirwal. At least those two had a right of reply to the other's whingeing; the relatives of most confesional writers don't have this opportunity. I enjoy Tim Dowling's column in the Guardian Weekend magazine...

WORDSCRAPERThe clever Agarwal brothers have come up with a replacement for Scrabulous. Wordscraper is now available on Facebook and it looks, at first sight, not unlike Scrabble/Scrabulous: a similar sort of board, albeit with circles instead of squares, letter tiles that you use to make words, albeit the letters don't have numbered scores attached to them. The circles on the board are labelled 2/3/4L or 2/3/4/W which evidently...

JOURNALISTS ON THE MOVEJeff Jarvis is puzzled by Peter Barron's move from Newsnight. Not so much because he's joining Google but because he's going in on the PR side.I don't know Barron at all, though I am a Newsnight fan but, speclating wildly, I suspect money plays some part in it all. Google are pretty good payers and the Beeb, on the whole, are not. Google also feels like a cool company to work for, whereas the BBC can be...

LAST NIGHT A D-J...Quite interesting to read that Peter Barron of Newsnight is to join Google in a PR role. More interesting to me was the discovery that Google's European head of PR is one D-J Collins. I assume this is the same D-J who once ran the press office at the Department of Education and is, according to Rachel Sylvester in The Times, apparently part of the unofficial campaign team forming around David Miliband who is...

HOW TO SPEND SUNDAY AFTERNOON

On a beautiful London afternoon, I got on my bike, cycled to Hyde Park and had a look at Frank Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion. The park was packed with sunbathers, roller-bladers, beautiful people in summer clothes. The Pavilion is worth a visit - I wonder if Gehry would do me a conservatory.

That's what I was doing. Meanwhile a bunch of people on Harry's Place were doing this. Reading the fruits of their afternoon's labour, I was reminded of this cartoon.

GYPSIES AND THE DAILY MAILRebarbative though it can be, the Mail retains the ability to surprise, pleasantly. There was the Stephen Lawrence case, of course, in which it led the way in exposing racism and identifying the probable killers. For all its liberal principles, the Guardian has never managed anything so brave or important.Now it gives prominence to Italy's shameful treatment of gypsies, in a report by the excellent Sue...

BABY TALKI quite enjoy Zoe Williams' writing in the Guardian but her Antenatal series is wearing terribly thin. "What's the ideal number of children to have?" she asks today. Two seems to be the answer. Coincidentally, it is also the answer to the question "how many articles can even a talented and amusing writer produce about her children before her readers rise up in protes...

SCRABBLINGAccording to Valleywag, Hambros, the makers of Scrabble have filed a lawsuit against the men behind Scrabulous, which is now the only reason to spend time on Facebook. Valleywag, which is never wrong, says Hambros is bound to win.I can't help thinking that Hambros are in danger of buying themselves a lot of ill will, given the huge popularity of Scrabulous. If they close Scrabulous down and replace it with their own...

WRITERS V SUBS"Subs is cunts", a former deputy editor of the Observer used to remind me when we worked together on another newspaper. Giles Coren of the Times certainly agrees.Here he is complaining in an email to subs about the removal of the word "a" from a restaurant review. It's an entertaining mail, clearly deeply felt, if a bit luvvie-ish ("It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine" etc).Though he comes...

"I AM SOMEBODY!"Here's Richard Reeves, the new director of Demos, articulating his own significant place at the very heart of things in an Observer review of Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein."Everyone who is anyone has been nudged by the amiable prof (I bought him dinner)."As Reeves points out, Thaler is very vogueish currently. He follows in a long line of American intellectuals crossing the Atlantic with theories that...

GORDON THE GRINNING GUNMAN

This is one of those pictures that I imagine we'll see again and again, whenever, in fact, someone wants to make Gordon Brown look foolish. It was snapped at Baghdad Airport on the PM's visit to Iraq, as he chatted to the crew of an RAF Puma helicopter. Seemingly, the gun was allowed to swing round in front of the Prime Minister, so it looked as if he was preparing to shoot someone, all the while with a slightly daft grin on his face. According to the Mail on Sunday, which carried the story, a Number Ten press office went white with shock on seeing the image.

Gaffes do happen, even though Gordon Brown has a press officer whose job it is to stop embarrassing pictures being taken of him (as Have I Got News For You frequently reminds us)

UPDATE: I see the Telegraph, Observer, Express and Independent are all carrying the pic, too, though the Obs nd the Express don't appear to explain the circumstances in which it was taken.

LAWYERS, MADELEINE AND MURATRoy Greenslade in the Guardian asks some good questions about the tawdry way newspapers dealt with Robert Murat. In particular, he wonders why newspaper lawyers didn't rein in the coverage. In my experience of such cases, lawyers from different newspapers sometimes confer and agree how far they will allow a story to be pushed, even if they know it is legally questionable. The reasoning is that there...

SEEQPOD IS GREATThere are a few tunes that I've been trying to track down and listen to for a while now: an EP of Fall covers by Sonic Youth, called 4 Tunna Brix and anything by the Desperate Bicycles, about whom I wrote last year.4 Tunna Brix, recorded for the John Peel Show may years ago, was never released officially, as far as I know, while the Desperate Bicycles oeuvre never made it to CD. It is all to be found online...

EVERYONE'S A CRITICReally interesting article by Jay Rayner in Sunday's Observer on the web's challenge to newspaper criticism, which he blogs about here. As a newspaper restaurant critic, Rayner obviously isn't neutral in the debate but he's produced a fair-minded and compendious survey of the subject, which is well worth a read.A few thoughts:1 Several of the newspaper critics interviewed (notably Brian Sewell and Clement Crisp...

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