Up the Amazon without a paddle

One of the problems with our successful economy is abundence of everything. In many ways beneficial, the sheer amount of options can become burdensome when one is in the position to buy. I have recently had a hankering to purchase a camcorder (atrocioius name, I know, but one I necessarily must use). Frankly I know nothing about them and the bewildering variety of types of camcorder (ie dvd, mini-dv and for all I know thermo-nuclear quark powered dv) is baffling enough even before one considers the spec of each individual models.
In former times, such a situation would never have arisen. The few variants of a product would have been easilyassessed; but rather like science in the twentieth century, product information has almost entered a state of quantum-like abstraction, with a staggeringly long list of its attributes. In the case of camcorders, the details include sensor resolution (in kpix), effective sensor resolution, lens aperture (which is something like F/1.5-2.6), connector type (IxIEEE 1394 firewire enabled or would you prefer 2 x s-video?) etc etc. Unless you have a deeply knowledgeable friend, which I do not, it can be mind destroying.
So people like me rely on information and insights gained from the internet. Much of this info can be very good (ie from forums) and one can gain a basic understanding as to work the models actually do for the money. However, there are exceptions to this, and one such is Amazon.
Amazon has its own customer reviews listed beneath the products. The reviewers themselves give the product a rating (between 1 and 5 stars) give a little commentary and readers of this are invited to say how helpful this was. For a long time now I have been aware of how useless this system is.
Firstly, a lazy habit seems to have developed whereby the reviewer either gives a product 1 star or 5; very few give it anything in between (although these people's reviews are generally much more worth reading, they at least have given it some thought). Secondly, the readers of these seem, equally lazily, to mark the reviews on the basis of how helpful they find them but whether or not they agree with them, which is a crucial difference.
This tendency is especially marked with books of a controversial basis or things which involve a degree of personal taste such as music. You very often see a review with 5 stars with a commentary that reads nothing more than "This is the greatest album of all time!!!" which has received "46 out of 48 found this review useful" to be followed lower down with a 1 star " avoid this stinker" (no other comment) which apparently 23 out of 27 people found helpful.
Occasional a more thoughtful person will add a longer, more intelligent review, which always appears much lower down the page, if at all. The product will be given, say, 4 stars and an in-depth analysis, running to several paragraphs with many insightful comments. This will receive something like " 7 out of 22 people found this helpful". One wonders why such people bother really although we must be grateful they do.
Ordinarily thsi would be no more than a passing annoyance, except when one actually wants to buy something and needs a guide through the plethora of choices. Then the amazon game of playing favourites becomes very tiresome indeed. Looking for a camcorder, I am struck by how many are given a 5 star rating. Surely all these people do not really believe that their camcorder is the best it could possibily be? Surely they might be able to find a few ways in which it could be improved? I've rarely in my life encountered anything perfect, but apparently I am a majority among Amazon users.
Until such time as people learn to make sensible reviews of products, Amazons reviews will be virtually worthless. Its a pity intelligent reviews would actually mean that a good many people would save a lot of money and a lot of their valuable time having to search for information.

Progressives against progress

BBC4 has beeen showing an alleged comedy series entitled The History of the world backwards. The rather complicated premise of this is that time runs backwards form now while people still continue to age normally, so we have people born in the 1980s looking back nostalgically (or otherwise) from the 1910s at the age of high technology -long since passed- of their youth.
This premise, which would have formed the basis of a sketch a generation ago, is stretched out to several half hour episodes. I have not been minded to check how many since watching even part of one was more than enough for me.
This show has been masterminded by Rob Newman, once a darling of the British comedy scene, who along with his partner David Baddiel, were credited with making comedy the "New rock'n'roll" selling out, in the process, huge London arenas. It seemed, in those halcyon days, that Newman was the genius and most predicted that he would move on bigger and better things while Baddiel would probably fade into obscurity. This proved not to be the case, however. After their partnership expired, Baddiel found himself part of the hugely successful Skinner & Baddiel act. David Baddiel, like the composer Richard Rodgers, has found himself part of two huge double acts, wearing out one Hart before finding another Hammerstein.
Meanwhile, Rob Newman went awol from the comedy scene. There were quiet mutterings that he had become an activist and "eco-warrior". Latterly he has returned to his roots via stage to television. Appearing as it does on BBC4 it will have a small audience by comparison to his old shows. Frankly, whatever audience it gets will be too high for its merits.
This show makes the cardinal sin of comedy. Namely it is not very funny. Actually it is so appallingly unfunny that it is at times quite numbing. Newman has clearly got an agenda -an anti-globalisation, anti-technological one- and that does not make for good comedy especially since he adopts a very preachy tone (ie using terms like "climate change criminals" etc). Newman's world view appears to be so Luddite that I wonder if he should consider changing his name to Oldman? It would suit his agenda a lot before.
This series represents a kind of Polpottian wish fulfillment among the Newman-luddites of this world, a blithe return to an agragarian idyll, living in a world of plenty communing with mother nature. It is as realistic as Marie Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess and acting out her milkmaid fantasies while the real shepherdesses were starving around her. We should never forget the world is a harsh place and it is only in the scientific age that famine and disease have been tamed although not yet entirely expunged.
Needless to say, as time runs backwards in Newman's fantasy world, only technological advances would disappear not the social progress that went with them, so that a return to tilling the land would not be accompanied by a return to sexism, racism et al even though these advances were only made possible by the advances in science.
Newman is one of a number of priveldged westerners who might be termed "Progressives against progress". At least they tend to portray themselves as progressives, and would see themselves in a Leftwing tradition except that is, that the leftwing tradition has been very much pro-technology until very recently. This is another example of the tpsy-turvidom of our times; we now see "progressives" aligning themselves to positions which were adopted by the most arch-conservative reactionaries in the past.
As I was writing this blog I looked up the phrase "progressives against progress" on google. The first site listed was a funny and highly accurate parody of this kind of thinking which unfortunatey seems to have been removed. One of its slogans reads:
The past is in our future
You can see find it in google's cache. I suggest you have alook at it. Its a lot funnier than The Hostory of the world backwards

Lyrical Terrorists

It has been modish for a long time to idealise the rebel and social outcast. Tales throughout the ages have resounded with names of Jessie James, Dillinger and more recently, Che Guevara. This trend goes back at least as far as Robin Hood and will probably continue so long as armchair revolutionaries exist. Rebellion is, after all, a natural state in growing up.
Often the individuals admired are in reality deeply unpleasant, and sometimes homicidal. The real life Che Guavera, for instance, was a mass murderer and torturer, but as is common to these folk tales, these negative qualities are tamed or mostly overlooked completely. Many of the petty hoodlums of America's depression era (Dillinger, Babyface Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde etc) were folk heroes even in their own lifetimes. No doubt their exploits represented a kind of wish fulfillment among the poor and the desperate, a naive escapism made palateable by their more unseemly acts (such as murder and sadism violence) being either ignored or, in true Hollywood fashion, made to seem an inevitable retaliation to the brutal forces acting on them.
Dylan, in his classic 1966 album John Wesley Harding, imagined the eponymous hero as a Christlike figure who "was never known to hurt an honest man". The real Hardin (without the g Dylan unnecessarily added) killed, by his own account 44 people, making him one of the bloodiest men of the Old West. No doubt Dylan was using JWH as a metaphor for his own burgeoning vision of divinity rather than an accurate depiction of a Wild West Rebel, although I do sometimes wonder whether Dylan might not be parodying the whole "misunderstood outlaw" myth by casting a man so drenched in blood in quite so lamblike terms. But then, since Dylan takes himself very seriously, probably not.
Up until recently, it had always been an important part of this type of mythology to whitewash the rebel as much as possible and make him a reluctant fighter against an unjust establishment. Not a psychopath, you understand, but "one of us". But such is the decline in any sort of moral compass that this appears to be no longer the case. Charles Manson, a lunatic who, along with his "family" commited a series of gruesome murders at the end of the 60s which shocked the flower power generation, has proved to be such an inspirational character that at least two sucessful acts have named themselves in his honour. This is two more than Martin Luther King to my knowledge. But then, he's not such an inspiration to modern youth.
The acts in question are Marilyn Manson (real name: Brian Warner) and Kasabian, named for a member of Charlie's gang. Since Manson and his followers murdered several people including women, in cold blood and there can be no whitewashing of it (none is ever attempted), one can only imagine that sadistic murder emanating from mental illness has become a new kind of "Cool" to an age bored of such things as human dignity. Indeed, to such an age, which places trangressive behaviour high on its list of artistic endevour, a deranged sociopathic serial killer acquires the status as much as a deviant savant as a rebel. Manson is thus both iconic and iconoclastic simultaneously.
Of course, much of this is a shared fantasy by the adolescent audience who would like the guts to be able to shock their parents doing "a Manson" while at the same time indulging their wildest sexual and retribution urges, but some of this does rub off on certain individuals. Witness, for example, the epidemic of high school shootings. In time, and unless the present zeitgeist changes, much the same rebellious authority will be afforded some of these shooters whose exploits will be memorialised in band names like Virginia Tech Massacre or SturmGeist89.
Perhaps this honour has already been bestowed onthe September 11th hijackers. I can imagine their would be a great temptation for bands giving themselves names like ATTA or The Hamburg Cell, primarily for the trite shock value but no doubt justified at press interviews as a recognition of their daring anti-establishment attitude. Certainly one young Muslim girl here in London, Samina Malik, has been so inspired that she has taken to penning verses -alongside downloading terrorism manuals- under the Nom De Guerre Lyrical Terrorist, a name which she chose bacause it "sounded cool". Among her literary efforts are a poem called How to behead and a ditty about firing rocket launchers.
I wonder how long it will be before a band appears with the cool name "lyrical Terrorist"? Not long I fear. Our popular culture really is that debased.

What makes a modern rock star?

For some reason I have been considering what makes for a rock star today in constrast to a generation or two ago. Here are the generalities I have discovered. Anymore thoughts on the subject would be gratefully received.

Pre-and embryonic Rock stars (-c1965)
* Looks respectable * Wholesome image * Lots of cover versions * Generic mid-50s style of singing ie crooning and sentimental * Did not write own material * Song topics: love almost exclusively * Never outspoken or given to sermonising * Considered themselves entertainers primarily * lLittle or no difference between live and recorded versions of songs*

Classic Rockstar (c1965-c1980)
(This age ushered in by The Beatles, Dylan, The Stones etc)
* Looks distinctive or preferably iconic * Showmen * Some cover versions but lots of new material * Egotistical * Fun-seekers * Ostentibly extrovert * Distinctive voice * Song topics: love, mystical, self exploration * Rarely outspoken or given to sermonising * Considered themselves entertainers primarily but also used music as a means of self-expression * Laughed a lot and considered rock basically a fun music * Music generally uptempo and very danceable *

Modern Rockstar (c1980-present)
(This age ushered in by Sting and Bono)
* Look as ordinary as possible* Generic modern vocal delivery ie mumbled with lots of falsetto * Introverted and moody * Music as a means of self-expression paramount, entertainment value less important * Preachy and finger-waggy both in songs and person * Song topics: anything worthy or which will get you taken seriously, love themes less common * Rarely smile and consider Rock an important medium "for change" * danceability very low, lots of slow meandering "epics" * Drummers can only play to a clicktrack *