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I oppose Gun Control and I oppose Porn Control. In the War on Drugs, I am confident that the side I back (Drugs) will eventually be declared the winner. But what I actually like is classical music, and about a week ago I visited Mr CD in Soho, which is my second-favourite second-hand CD shop in London, to get another fix. Just now, some of the CDs there are particularly fine bargains.
Two purchases from Mr CD have given me special joy, namely two double albums of violin concertos by Vivaldi, at £2 (~$3) per album, i.e. £1 per CD.
I have a love hate relationship with the music of Vivaldi. I love it when it is played as I love it to be played, and I hate it when it is played as I hate it to be played. And I hate it when Vivaldi is played in the “authentic” style, on “original instruments”, by musicians who also fancy themselves as scholars. What this means in practice is coming down on the first beat of every bar with a great bulge of over-emphasis. What I like is best described by the Italian word “legato”, a steady line of melody in which the volume doesn’t come and go within each note. And of all the famous composers, I find that the gap between how good it can sound and how bad it can sound is greatest with Vivaldi. Good Vivaldi is heartbreakingly lovely. “Authentic” Vivaldi is boringly, relentlessly pointless, like the worst sort of ‘elevator music’.
The most detestably authentic musicians I’ve ever heard are some people called “Musica Antiqua Köln“, who are misdirected by a man called Reinhard Goebel. I have a CD by these people, which I have only kept so that I could one day denounce them to the entire world without miss-spelling their names. They shouldn’t all be taken out and shot by a firing squad which specialises in using original weapons, because that would be wrong. As a libertarian I defend the right of people to express themselves in any way that does not aggress against the rights of others, no matter how horribly they avail themselves of this right. But you get my point.
But ah joy, the Vivaldi CDs I came upon in Mr CD were played by the Chamber Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, in other words by real musicians. I think this orchestra may be a slimmed-down version of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra itself, no less, a suspicion strengthened by the fact that one of the solo violinists in the Opus 3 Concertos (“L’Estro Armonico”) is the great Willi Boskovsky, the VPO’s long time leader. The recording was made in 1964, long before authenticity struck, but just recently enough for the sound quality of the recording to be okay. Viennese opera musicians wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a baroque recording project these days.
I played the CDs eagerly as soon as I got home, and all the joy I used to get in my youth from listening to Vivaldi came flooding rapturously back.
The difference between this sort of music making and Musica Antiqua Köln is the difference between making lingeringly rapturous love, and merely humping up and down, trying and failing to force on an orgasm.
On the same expedition I also acquired the latest recording in the LSO Live series, a beautiful performance of Elgar’s First Symphony conducted by Sir Colin Davis, brand new this time, for a mere £5. This is my favorite LSO Live CD so far. (You can find out more about this and the other excellent and keenly priced CDs in this series, and about how to purchase them, by going to the London Symphony Orchestra website.)
The impression usually left in the mind of the listener by this wonderful symphony is of great dignity and great splendour, the main tune of the first movement being especially dignified and splendid (it’s marked “nobilmente”). But in this performance it was the quieter and subtler orchestral details that most caught my attention. Sir Colin Davis is quoted in the sleeve notes thus:
“If I am conscious of being older now I think my feelings must have changed too! Like a lot of older people, I am looking for space. There is more space between the bar-lines than people understand. There is more time for musicians to gauge the rise and fall of a phrase. There is no virtue in driving things just for the sake of it, which is a temptation of youth. But of course if one did not do that when one was young one would not enjoy not doing it when one was older!”
For once, the artist’s sleeve note claim and the artist’s actual artistic achievement correspond perfectly.
People who say that money can’t buy happiness are just no good at shopping.
Perry, question. Did not one of your dead relatives preside over the manufacture of an airplane named like the above? Was it not one of those post-war jet-propelled contrivances with a pod in the middle for the driver and the engine, and then two sort of strut things going backwards from the two wings to support the tail, in the manner of those flaps they have on the back of grand prix cars?
If I’m right about this, and following on from David Carr’s outing of himself and myself as vampires, do we not have a collective name for us all, or at least for David and me? Yes I think I finally have an answer, after more than half a century, to that Question you always get asked in bars and at parties: “What do you do?”
“I am a de Havilland Vampire.”
Thanks for all the kind reactions to Brian’s Lament. No-one said, American style: “Get over it!”, which is a big part of why I probably will. I’m among friends.
However, the Vampire situation has become complicated. According to David Carr I’m one, and thanks to me, so is he. And then about one day after that startling revelation, we were all given an award for our prowess in hunting Communist vampires. I suppose if you’re hunting vampires, it helps to have a couple in your own team.
I’ve also been cheered up lately, following on from Tom Burroughes’ complaints about television, by Britain’s two current late night chat shows. On Channel 4 on Friday (repeated the following Thursday) is the sublime Graham Norton. Less commonly noted in Britain these days is that over on BBC1 (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays) Johnny Vaughan is doing just as well as the heterosexual community’s answer to Norton. Before Vaughan, on BBC1, there was Jonathan Ross, and that show caused everyone involved, Ross, the help, the guests and the viewers to ask themselves: “Is this as good as Graham Norton?” and to answer: “No”. The Ross show was full of embarrassing gay references, because, you know, er, that’s what late night chat shows have to have these days. Before Ross, there was Parkinson and he’s past it. Vaughan, on the other hand, is the genuine article.
Vaughan’s politics are not right wing exactly, more masculinist. A fortnight ago there was, for example, a short but respectful interview with a train strike trade unionist, a buddy of Arthur Scargill’s, the point being not: here’s a stupid lefty dynosaur, but here’s a “forgotten man”. Man, is the point. He also specialises in getting glamorous women on, and then a bloke, and Vaughan and the bloke then get deep into some ultra-bloke topic while the woman’s still there. The other night he had this fat and hairy comedian on and they assembled this big three-piece Star Wars toy with three Star Wars characters fighting each other, and there was this actress watching it all … Well, you had to see it. Both Norton and Vaughan have in common that the agenda is pleasure, not politics. Norton ignores politics completely. He’s too busy celebrating the uncensored joys of the Internet. Vaughan does the occasional sneer at things like £40,000 research projects paid for by the government which reach such conclusions as “traffic jams can seriously frustrate the travelling public”, before getting stuck back into the serious business of finding out what it was like being an actor in Blackhawk Down or how some farmer nearly got chewed to death by his own bailing machine and has a Captain Hook hook on his arm to prove it. When American superstar visitors appear on these two shows they seem genuinely to enjoy themselves
I know what Tom Burroughes means. Capitalists get a horrible rap on the telly. But the products of capitalism get a good showing. Look at it this way. Lefties don’t produce any decent stuff. The only decent thing about them is that some of them do decent impersonations of decent people (which is perhaps why lefties dominate the TV advert voice-over profession). But capitalists produce all that great capitalist stuff, and that’s what they’re selling. They’re not selling themselves.
I have another even better answer to Tom’s problem, about how the capitalists might sell themselves, but I’ll save that for later.
I note a state of mind which I have detected in myself, and wonder if any others share it?
Once Upon A Time, I was a happy libertarian. I knew only about a dozen other libertarians at all well and I was one of the cleverest and most dedicatedly productive of them. The rest of my little world consisted of the Great Unenlightened, the Statist Masses, all of whom I outranked. I knew of other libertarians, in far away countries of which I knew little such as America, but they didn’t loom large in my mind. Occasionally they sent us little bits of writing through the post, but nothing impressive enough to threaten my sense of my own libertarian magnificence. I and my little gang of friends, we few, we happy few, were shining the torch of liberty in little England. I thrashed out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, secure in my own libertarian splendour. I was a Big Fish in a Small Pond.
Then came the Internet. Suddenly I am becoming acquainted on a daily basis with the clever – often very clever – thoughts of as many dozen libertarians as I can make myself attend to. Worse, Little England no longer needs me to tell it about libertarianism, for it too can plug into the great Magic Filing Cabinet in the Sky, the Great Conversation Machine. In such a world, does my little voice, my little computer keyboard, count for anything? What do my Libertarian Alliance pamphlets signify, when set beside the thousands upon thousands of other libertarian writings out there? I still crank out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, because it’s what I do. It’s what I am. But what I now am is a Small Fish in a Big Pond. I feel melancholy.
This experience is not confined to libertarians. I am suffering from a universal syndrome caused by better global electronic communications. (I’ve even read a book about this, by, I think, someone called Oliver James.)
Because of daily TV broadcasts of the best club and international football matches in the world (which he knows others are watching even if he can’t bear to watch such things himself), a man who was happy when thinking of himself as the second best footballer in Doncaster, is now forced to contemplate the fact that he is the 9,673rd best footballer in the world – a depressing demotion indeed. Ditto in every other area of human endeavour.
It sounds to me as if most of my fellow bloggists here at Samizdata found their first voices, so to speak, as contributors to the Great Global Conversation, and are making steady, satisfying progress up the relevant, if huge, pecking order. “Last week I was the 934th best libertarian” (or however exactly they classify themselves). “Now I’m the 919th best. Next year, if I keep it up, I’ll make it below 900”, etc. I’m talking subjective experience here and my guess numbers are just that, pure guesses. I am aware of no rating system for libertarian writers and activists of this kind, of the sort which now says that Sachin Tendulkar of India – for I think it is he – is the now the best test match (i.e. international cricket) batsman in the world (thereby depressing all other batsmen everywhere). Thus, the other bloggists do not feel melancholy. But then again, maybe if you are starting out at the bottom of the global libertarian pecking order, the prospect of that long trudge from 900 to a probably peak of, I don’t know, about 300, and then back down to 1,000 followed by oblivion, depresses them too.
Serious confessions of unhappiness are not cool, coming from libertarians, and especially not if the cause of the unhappiness is something so triumphantly capitalist as modern electronic communications. Trivial snarlings about the annoyances of the latest version of Windows or non-trivial snarlings about politicians and their many misdeeds, yes, fine. But confessions like this one cross some kind of line.
Which of course is why I choose to write thus. Good writers regularly cross such lines, and I’m still bashing on, trying to write well. So don’t worry everyone, everyone who cares that is to say. My confession is serious, but the unhappiness I confess to is not overwhelmingly serious. I’m not talking suicide here. I’ll soldier on, and all the better if this piece of confessional therapy does its job and helps to reconcile me to my new (small) place in my new (big) world.
But, does anyone else out there know what I’m talking about?
As I noted in a previous blog article, the British media have finally turned seriously nasty with the Labour government. Why? Search me. Could it be that they (a) now believe that “New Labour” is running seriously out of steam and that, (b) knowing new Conservative Opposition Leader Ian Duncan Smith better than the rest of us yet do, they believe he’s got something going for him? (a) and (b) feeding off each other, of course. After all, if Labour’s now mountainous majority is seriously reduced at the next general election, then the Labour government that follows will be a lame duck, in the manner of the John Major regime. And if the next Labour government is going to be a lame duck, their threats and promises of advancement already, now, count for less than they used to, and Ian Duncan Smith’s threats and promises now count for somewhat more. In politics, perceptions of the future are facts in their own right. Therefore, the media are now switching their loyalties.
I think this may make sense of this bizarre “America snubs Britain“ stuff that Our Great Leader (the Owl Man I mean, not Tony Blair) has been complaining about. He’s right. I don’t feel snubbed either, and I don’t know anyone who does.
But, there could be a subtext, as they say in the theatre. Isn’t one of the implied messages of this America-snubs-Britain spiel that all Tony Blair’s recent World Statesman performances count for very little if he and his mates can’t get so much as a pair of handcuffs and a blindfold removed from one Al Qaedist in US custody, and that the Bush White House doesn’t give a damn what Tony and his Cronies think about this, that or anything else. Ergo Blair’s a twat. I’m not saying Blair’s a twat myself. I’m saying that the Daily Mail and the rest of them are saying it, in a slightly roundabout way.
Could that be part of what’s going on?
These pictures show two of my favourite things in the background:
First picture was taken on the London Eye by Alice and shows favourite thing number one: London
And the second shows favourite thing number two: Libertarian Alliance pamphlets
Interesting story in the January 25th 2002 Times, front page and rightly so in my opinion. It begins:
“The Office for National Statistics announced yesterday that it would stop collating data on the number of days lost to industrial action, as further strikes loomed in the already hard-hit rail industry.”
Something big may now be happening in British politics. The New Labour dictat against big increases in government spending may now be expiring. Perhaps they think their reputation for financial rectitude is now fireproof. In reality, if they abandon financial rectitude, their political supremacy – their public support is “wide but shallow”, as many a commentator has noted – could vanish like the morning dew.
Strikes are caused by, among other things, financial uncertainty, and the biggest creator of such uncertainty is the State. By hinting that blank cheques may be available for keeping “public services” going (on account of them being essential, too important to be left to the private sector, etc. etc.) but by explicitly claiming (e.g. to railway managements) that, actually, State funding is strictly limited, each side is primed for a fight. Management insists it can pay only so much. The workers now think they smell a different atmosphere. The feeling in the country is now: time for something to be “done” about “public services”, and to many “done” sounds like “spent”.
It doesn’t have to mean this, which is what privatisation is all about. The government should now “re-privatise” the railways, probably on the basis of the old regional companies, with track and trains being combined again.
Will they be smart enough to do this? If they do, will the new Conservative leadership finally have the sense to split Labour by agreeing with the policy? Only if the answers are Yes and No can New Labour sail on unmolested.
Maybe the government will get a grip on things. But then I thought they’d get a grip on the Dome and they never did. The Conservative opposition under its new leader is showing distinct glimmerings of adequacy and the media are finally getting nasty with New Labour, hence the above story, among many others. (There’s also a huge ruckus now going on in our newspapers about just how bad the National Health Service is and whose fault it is.)
There’s lots more one could say about this. I will content myself with noting that the phrase “the honeymoon is finally over” is being much used in Britain nowadays.
I’m new to bloggery, so please everyone bear with me while I get the hang of it.
Guns. Much is made by libertarians of mass civilian gun ownership, and this does matter, especially politically. But with crime, the mere right of civilians to own a gun, even if most of us choose not to exercise that right, is, I surmise, critical.
If you are thinking of becoming a career criminal, then the difference between a world in which just a few civilians are weird enough to own guns and crazy enough to use them against intruders, and one in which such people are so rare as to be for all practical purposes non-existent… is all the difference. It’s the difference between being shot on about your hundredth robbing expedition (i.e. quite soon), and not being shot ever.
The difference between half the population being armed and all of it being armed is, in contrast, not much of a difference. So, you get to do about one unmolested robbery before the hospital or the morgue beckons, instead of no robberies at all. Not a big distinction.
I sense that we in Britain have perhaps – what with all the new restrictions following the Dunblane massacre – moved from the first of these two gun-worlds to the second.
For decades, the number of robberies you could hope to get away with before getting seriously hurt has been climbing steadily, but you still had to be very short-sighted to become a robber. That didn’t stop everyone, but it did stop most. Gun wimps like me could live safe from most potential robbers, because the robbers didn’t know for sure that we were all gun wimps.
Now, everyone’s a gun wimp. Now, I surmise, robbers can reasonably hope to rob for life.
I have a personal stake in this. On the radio a couple of years ago I announced that there was a big increase in violent crime under way, not because I knew this to be true, but because for the sake of my argument I needed it to be true. (I wasn’t expecting a gun argument, and hadn’t been attending to recent crime news properly.) Sadly, it seems that I was right.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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