We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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We’re based in London, and this is about London at one of its most glorious moments, the one that gave us William Shakespeare (1564-1616):
The London theaters represented a revolution in culture; they were apparently the first capitalist businesses in the world built entirely around entertainment. The heart of this cultural business model was the actors company, in which a group of actors invested money in a common stock of properties, costumes and plays. Each company of actors obtained finance from an impresario, who got a share (usually 50%) of the box office. Shakespeare was 10% owner not only of the Chamberlain’s Men but also of the Globe (that is, the building and real estate itself.)
Theaters were “big business” for the time. Costs included hundreds of very expensive costumes (velvet cost 1 pound a yard), plays (which if bought freelance were usually purchased outright for about 6 or 7 pounds), the salaries of “extras” and minor actors on stage and the salaries of about 30 paid hands (including musicians, actors, prompters, bookkeepers, stage keepers, and wardrobe keepers) behind the scenes. Hundreds of playbills, pasted up around the City, served as advertisements. The range of business affairs was so complex that each company had an administrator, usually called an actor-manager.
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So just keep all this in mind next time you attend a Shakespearian play—what you are seeing was NOT created as “art for art’s sake.”
Friedrich of 2 Blowhards dot com wrote that after himself reading Peter Hall‘s book Cities in Civilization. I wonder if the people – scriptwriter Tom Stoppard in particular – who made the film Shakespeare in Love, the running joke of which is how similar Shakespearean London was to present-day Hollywood, had also read this book. I possess a copy myself. Friedrich’s piece reminds me that it’s about time I read it.
In general, 2 Blowhards looks really good and I’m going to be reading that some more also.
The other night around Perry’s house after a few cans of beer and the usual chit chat I said that I was thinking of making a “my favourite music CD”. Perry is always trying to get me to post things on Samizdata, so he suggested that I come up with my list, post it on the blog and ask others to do the same. In some way this may give us an insight into the types of people that read this blog. I am not sure what we will get out of this, but it’s worth a go. So please feel free to post your lists as comments to this post. If we get enough, maybe a super list of the favourite music can be compiled.
Now I have put together tapes of my favourite music before, but they have always consisted of music that I was into at the time. What I wanted to do this time was put together a list of songs/tunes that I would take with me to a desert island if I was given the choice (desert island disc’s style). Now I have started to think about it, it is actually harder than you initially think. I had to make one or two rules for my self just to make things easier. I limited the number of songs to 15 (thats about what you can fit on a CD) mainly because I didn’t want to calculate the lengths of the songs and add them together to see if they would fit and the second rule was that you can only take one piece of music by any particular person.
When I was thinking about what to put on it, three tracks came straight to mind. These have always been favourites of mine since first hearing them, and have always been near the top of the pile of CD’s or records that get played, now all I have to do is get another 12 songs and I’m finished. I have been ill for the last week, so I have had plenty of time to contemplate what I was going to choose. The hardest thing to do was to not choose a song because it was a ‘classic’ song, you know the ones that always get chosen even if you don’t particularly like them, they just make you feel comfortable when you hear them. What I was looking for were songs that I really, really liked and could listen to for the next 10 years (or so). Also I do listen to a lot of music, and I have chosen not to put any of the new music I am listening to at the moment into my list. This is purely because it hasn’t survived the test of time yet, I like it now but may not like it in a years time. Anyway, less of my ramblings, here is my list of my most favourite music. If you don’t like my choices, I don’t care because it’s my list. Make one up and post it as a comment.
Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the waves
Golden Brown – the Stranglers
Norwegian Wood – The Beatles
This Woman’s Work – Kate Bush
Visions of You – Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart with Sinead O’Connor
Mr E’s Beautiful Blues – Eels
Night Boat to Cairo – Madness
Jangle of a Dogs Collar – Butthole Surfers
Ghost Town – The Specials
Sul-E-Stomp – Astralasia & Suns of Arqa
The Rhythm Divine – Yello with Shirley Bassey
59th Street Bridge Song – Simon and Garfunkel
Danse Macabre – Saint-Saens
Stop the Car (12” version) – The Woodentops
Big Noise from Winnetka – Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen
Responding opportunistically, and there’s nothing wrong with that, to our last two slogans of the day, Radley Balko has emailed to tell us about this, this being, I kid you not, a Nietzschean analysis of The Simpsons. Well we can’t all be deciding what to do about Iraq.
The Simpsons bit that I often like best comes right at the beginning, when Bart is shown writing lines on a school blackboard, which allude to whatever he’s been doing that day that the school says he shouldn’t have been doing. My favourite: “Bart’s Bucks Are Not Legal Tender.”
A question for the USA, maybe for Balko himself, or maybe just for Brits with Sky TV (which is where The Simpsons were first shown here). The Simpsons is now on BBC2, but it often goes straight to the surreal TV sofa scene, and skips Bart’s blackboard lines. Is this because the show itself sometimes does this, or is this the BBC inflicting vicious cuts? The latter, I suspect, but maybe only so that they can cut it down to less than twenty minutes, for their own BBC reasons. Or, maybe they really do feel the need to cut out the most disturbingly anarcho-libertarian messages?!?! I await comments.
Balko, you say you want to train your dog to retrieve beer from your fridge. Stay tuned to Samizdata for some canine management advice, gleaned from my nice sister Daphne and her nice husband Denis (i.e. these two), which I will be posting Real Soon Now.
And while we’re on subject of dogs, don’t we all think that K19, now showing at London cinemas everywhere, sounds like a Silly Police Dog Movie, rather than a Serious Russian Submarine Movie? Yes we do.
Do I digress? But what could be more Simpsonian – nay Homeric – subjects than your dog getting beer for you from the fridge, and not-very-good-movies?
There’s a nice review by blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh of Ayn Rand’s 1940s classic The Fountainhead, and it got me thinking not so much about architecture, where I think Rand’s views were often an uncritical acceptance of Modernist ideology, as about the fact that she missed a key argument for free enterprise – it can be a lot of fun! Let’s face it, the main hero, Howard Roark, doesn’t come across as the kind of guy to let his red hair down at a blogger bash, does he?
I think one of the unacknowledged aspects of liberal capitalism is that it can tap into humans’ need to play and experiment. Paleo-conservatives like David Brooks, author of Bobos In Paradise, which is a mild send up of 1990s America, seems almost offended that geeky tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere liked to have fun even as they made – and later lost – their billions. But what’s the problem with that? In fact, one of the most potent memes we can inject into the culture is the idea that not only is collectivism morally and economically bankrupt, it is also bloody boring. For a good and more considered take on this point, Virginia Postrel’s excellent The Future and Its Enemies is highly recommended.
some graffiti: tblives!
Twenty-five years after his death people all over the world are gathering to celebrate the life of Elvis Presley. And when I say the world, I mean the world. Not just all over the USA but in Britain, Germany, Holland, Japan and even Malaysia.
Elvis Presley is bigger, more popular and more influential now than he was even when he was still alive. He is a global phenomenon that shows absolutely no signs of waning. His memory and his music continues to proselytize across borders and generations.
Elvis was so much more than a great rock ‘n’ roll singer. He was dirt-poor red-necked farm boy who earned fame and fabulous wealth by exploitation of his raging talent. He was all about looking good, living fast, having fun, driving gas-guzzling cars, eating hamburgers the size of cathedrals, wallowing in pretty girls and not letting anybody tread on his blue-suede shoes. His consumption was not merely conspicuous it was outrageous.
In a story linked to the one above, Chinese Elvis Impersonator Paul Hyu says:
He has gone down in Far East culture less as a rock star, and more as an icon of the West presented to them in a stage of their development.
For so many academics and ‘intellectuals’, Elvis represents everything that is crass and vulgar but for millions of other humbler folk he is the American Dream made flesh. It is a dream that are buying into as they gather together in every corner of the planet to shake, rattle, roll, jive and jitterbug.
Whether they realise it or not, Elvis fans are engaged in a glorious political act.
The King lives on.
When Janis Ian wrote her first article on the rather big shop of horrors the music industry has become, she expected it would be read by the usual few fans and industry friends who visit her web site.
Boy was she ever wrong!
Janis was not fully aware of the magnitude of the war raging across the Internet between “us” the consumers (and lowly creators) of music and “them” the parasitic entities of “Big Music”. At the very least she did not expect a huge organized opposition ready and willing to adopt her as a figurehead.
She should have known better and I mean that in a very positive way. Read her response to it all and you will see what I mean. This is one extremely intelligent woman, someone who is far more than a well known songwriter. She understands the business of music and how to make a living off it. She knows how to research, learn and synthesize technical issues in short order.
She’s also a very nice person who took the time and trouble to individually and personally respond to many strangers who contacted her. One of them was myself and she and I had a lovely email chat. We grew up only a few short miles apart in the Ohio River Valley in the same time period and we both started writing songs early on so there is a bit of commonality Of course the difference is her songs were great and she is justifiably famed for them, whereas mine were merely okay and I am perhaps justifiably unfamous.
What is important to those of us who have never reached her heights in the “biz” is her inside knowledge that the Majors are just as sleazy, just as crooked and just as intent on screwing the last possible dime out of the artist as any of us ever imagined we knew.
If you have any interest in music or in keeping culture open, read what she has to say.
Oh, and by the way… go buy some of her records. She’s a really nice lady and deserves your support.
I’ve just listened to Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on Free Culture and highly recommend it. Larry describes how much liberty we have lost in the last fifty years. A small number of giant media Corps have used their lobbying power to criminalize more and more of what was once unregulated behavior.
Government acting alone is not the only threat to liberty. The self interest of exceedingly greedy corporations in conjunction with exceedingly greedy lawmakers is a formula for the destruction of civil society. Think how close the world of William Gibson’s Corp ruled dystopia is. The combination of latent totalitarians such as Jack Valenti and outright crooked politicians – Sen Hollings (D Disney) comes to mind – is a deadly one for everything we as libertarians stand for. It is also an attack on the core of everything the Left and the Right believe in as well.
Therein lies our hope.
As Ben Franklin said: “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
There are several companies that anti-capitalist protestors love to hate and two of them are Disney and MacDonalds. These companies are seen as the very embodiment of American ‘economic and cultural imperialism’. Samizdata contributor and blogger in her own right Natalie Solent once remarked on the Libertarian Alliance Forum (20 June 2002) that there is a near 1:1 correlation between people who slag off MacDonalds, using derisory terms like ‘MacJobs’, and people who are in reality advocating a nihilistic communistic reordering of society.
And yet whilst I think Natalie is generally correct on that point, in the right leaning Daily Telegraph, Andrew Gimson also writes a rather flaccid article about why he too does not like Disney and it has nothing to do with big business.
Like Andrew Gimson, I have nothing against big business and am an avid supporter of globalization. As a result I regard Disney and MacDonalds as remarkable examples of international commerce and I have no problem with them plying their toxic wares everywhere across the globe… hang on a minute…’toxic wares’?
Yes, the truth is, I detest both Disney and MacDonalds. 
Much in the same way as I support the right of looney toon Nazis and incoherent socialists to publicly advocate their idiotic views, so too do I support the right of Disney and MacDonalds to hawk their wares from Peoria to Petropavlovsk… and just as I support the right of people to shout abuse and pour scorn on Nazis and Socialists when they do air their views, so too do I support the right of people to vote with closed wallets in order to protect their children from near-fraudulent cultural hijacking by Disney and heart disease and obesity by garbage-like ‘food’ sold by MacDonalds.
If Disney wants to create animated movies (that are in reality little more than an exercise in merchandising) from whole cloth, then I have no real objection. But when they produce something like ‘The Little Mermaid’, I find my blood boiling. The Little Mermaid is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, and was written not as Disney would have us believe, to convey the message ‘go for your dream, girl, and live happily ever after’. No, not at all.
Your tail will then disappear, and shrink up into what mankind calls legs, and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow. If you will bear all this, I will help you.”
“Yes, I will,” said the little princess in a trembling voice, as she thought of the prince and the immortal soul.
This is far from the pallid castrated ‘culture’ that Disney’s marketing wonks would have you believe the story contains. Now I realise this sort of gritty prose might not sell so well in some places with sugar coated rose tinted views of what children should hear and read, but then why the hell call it ‘The Little Mermaid’ then? Call it ‘The Adventures of Ariel’ or ‘Fishgirl gets her Prince’ or anything that does not claim to have the slightest intellectual similarity to what Hans Christian Andersen was actually trying to say.
Feel free to purchase Disney’s drivel if you wish for your hamburger bloated offspring, but do not kid yourself that your children are hearing anything whatsoever from probably the most famous writer of children’s stories who ever lived.
Musically inclined Samizdata readers will be familiar with the reportage we’ve had over the months, from Dale Amon especially, about what computers, the internet, etc., are doing to the orthodox music business. Basically, the orthodox music business is finding it harder to do business. I found this reportage strangely unsatisfying. Okay, this is the kind of music-making that computers, the internet, etc., are making more difficult to do, and more difficult to profit from. I didn’t doubt the truth of this, but something was missing from the story.
Then I read an article in NY Times by Kevin Kelly (to make this link work you have first to register with NYTimes.com, but this worked fine when I did it), which contained sentiments like this:
If this … power of the digital copy were to play out in full, the world would be full of people messing around with sound and music much as they dabble in taking snapshots and shaping Web pages. The typical skepticism toward a scenario of ubiquitous creation and recreation of music is that it is always easier to read than to write, to listen than to play, to see than to make. That is true. Yet 10 years ago, anyone claiming that ordinary people would flock to expensive computers to take time from watching TV in order to create three billion or more Web pages — well, that person would have been laughed out of the room as idealistic, utopian. People just aren’t that creative or willing to take time to create, went the argument. Yet, against all odds, three billion Web pages exist. The growth of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that civilization has witnessed. Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.
This was more like it. Dale and his ilk had been telling me what the music business would not be like any more. But Kelly was telling me what it would be like.
I mention this because Instapundit, which has always been strong with the “impact of technology on the music business” stuff, is now also onto this, the creative rather than the destructive side of the story. Glenn Reynolds, himself a musician, links to another musician/blogger, Eric Olsen, who makes a similar point to Kelly’s:
The parallels between music-creation software and blogging are unmistakable: both enable “ordinary people” to enter into areas of creativity and, equally important, distribution, that were only previously available to select professionals: those who were allowed to pass through the portals of either the press or the record labels by the guardians at the gates. By enabling a large number of people to engage in these activities, both technologies are democratizing their respective fields and battering the barriers between “creator” and “consumer” in both directions.
Maybe, Tom Burroughes, this is where the next bit of British popular musical excitement will come from.
Britpop now is as musically dead as it has ever been, at any time since the arrival of the Beatles. Mostly, it’s just an excuse to dress up and have a bop around, led from the stage by a lipsyncing group of formation dancers who have abandoned all pretence of being able to play any instruments. Does anybody remember an old TV show called “Come Dancing”. That’s what Top of the Pops is subsiding into: elaborately dressed young(er) people dancing about for the entertainment of dewy eyed oldies. Half the tunes in the hit parade now were written before the current performers of them were born. Kylie Minogue’s music is mostly just an excuse for us all to gaze at her cute smile and state-of-the-art bottom. Rap, which is often offered as the answer to where interesting pop music is going these days, is all about words and rhythms. It doesn’t actually need music to be attached to it at all.
There’s nothing wrong about any of this. There’s nothing wrong with boy and/or girl groups spending five hours rehearsing dance moves to every hour they give to rehearsing music. There’s nothing wrong with pre-teen girls caring what pop stars look like and move like, rather than what they sound like. There’s nothing wrong with black versifyers versifying, accompanied only by drum machines. Kylie Minogue’s smile is delightful and her bottom is one of the great glories of contemporary British culture. It’s all very entertaining. It just isn’t very fascinating musically.
Will a new generation of Britbloggers change all that, by putting the music back into music?
First the print media. Now music. For the next big-media green bottle to fall (when our computers have all got big enough to accommodate the results), see David Carr‘s Libertarian Alliance Cultural Notes No. 44. This is called “DIY Hollywood“!
I’d just like to say how impressed I was by the insightful piece on soap opera television by Patrick Sullivan the other day. It kind of chimes with an observation I made about the profoundly anti-business culture on television drama several months ago on Samizdata.
For me, what is so god-awful about Eastenders, and for that matter other soaps in the UK like Emmerdale Farm, Coronation Street and so on, is that they represent human beings as essentially victims of events, not as efficatious beings. If anyone is portrayed as strong, it is either a woman who is showing her strength by having to resist the charms of a dodgy man, or a crook or thug using his ‘strength’ to overpower or trick someone else. People in business rarely get presented in a positive light. Take Coronation Street. The shopkeepers and pubowners seem fairly wholesome types, if rather pathetic, put-upon folk who clearly are bored by the grind of their jobs. Any major businessman is a crook – period.
Another theme of British soaps is betrayal. Husbands and wives cheat on each other relentlessly. Indeed, infidelity, between married couples and long-term partners, is a constant theme. And lack of trust and loyalty is shown all the time in business.
In mitigation, all I can say is that the scripwriters feel that issues like betrayal and dishonesty add lots of spice to the stories, whereas wholesome behaviour is bound to be boring. I kind of understand that, but I think nevertheless that the genre in the UK is overwhelmingly skewed in one direction. Another problem is that soaps – with the odd glorious exception – rarely contain much deliberate humour. If you do laugh at a soap star it is usually at their expense for crummy acting or a silly voice.
If you watch a British soap for any length of time, you come away with one abiding message – Life Sucks. Which is pretty much why I loathe the whole lot of ’em.
Bring back Dallas…at least they were rich!
Someone called Patrick Sullivan visited me this afternoon, sent to me by Sean Gabb who has been teaching him. He is a promising young libertarian writer who showed me two pieces he had done. One was very long and rather dull-looking, full of sensible opinions about pension reform and the EU, of the sort that have been said many times before. But the other was about the British soap opera Eastenders, and was, I think, of real interest.
We don’t have nearly enough libertarians commenting about TV drama. We have lots with opinions about pension reform, but not so many who know what happened on The West Wing last night, or who is just about to be expelled from Big Brother. So here is Patrick’s piece about Eastenders. It’s called “Why Eastenders leads to Big Government”. Any month now Patrick will have blogs and websites charging off in all directions, but for now this is all there is, so no links, just a piece of writing.
Every week 13 to 17 million people across the nation tune into Eastenders. This programme is often derided as trash. I would not agree. Eastenders is very clever television. The production values of the show are high, and it skips very cleverly between story lines at least every 90 seconds, which means that the viewers are able to keep numerous plot threads in their minds at once. Eastenders also carries a message. This message is: “Your life is miserable. No matter what you do, it will go on being miserable. You are unable to look after yourself, therefore you need the state to look after you.” Eastenders creates a demand for an intrusive government.
In Eastenders a person in a suit is almost always a villain. This must cause many of those watching the show to distrust men in suits. Men in suits are often businessmen. Whenever a big corporation pops up in Eastenders it is more often than not to cause trouble for the cast. Big corporations never seem to offer jobs and opportunities for individuals in the fictional world of Albert Square.
The cast of Eastenders are always in a perpetual state of misery. They never seem able to surmount the obstacles in their way. Whenever a cast member seems to find a problem too overwhelming to deal with, the state is generally expected to solve the problem.
Eastenders also pushes the Blairite constituional agenda, and seeks to undermine the institutions of this country which protect liberty. New Labour has so far failed in its attempt to abolish trial by jury. In Eastenders, the character of “Little Mo” was found guilty of attempted murder even though she was innocent. “Little Mo” was found guilty by a jury of her peers. The message this gives out is that trial by jury doesn’t work and that a centralised judiciary would do a better job.
In Eastenders nobody seems to better themselves substantially. There appears to be little room for entrepreneurial vigour in the world of Albert Square. When a character leaves Eastenders, it is not to pursue opportunities elsewhere. It is due to death, going to prison or the desire to flee from some problem or person.
Compare Eastenders with the Australian soap Neighbours, which is also shown every week day on British TV. Neighbours offers viewers a positive message: “Life isn’t miserable. Hard work will get you somewhere. You don’t need the state to solve your problems. There are opportunities if you seek them out.” . In Neighbours, characters often leave due to opportunity elsewhere. The state rarely appears, and when it does it is usually a nuisance. Alas, the production values of Neighbours are lower than those of Eastenders, and Neighbours only attracts an audience of 7 to 8 million viewers per episode.
If you sat two children of identical background and mental health in front of a television set for a year, with one watching Neighbours and the other watching Eastenders, the child who watched Neighbours would be less dependent and happier than the child who watched Eastenders.
Patrick Sullivan
Seeing a reference to the marvellous children’s programme Thunderbirds over on the Brothers Judd sent me off on a rare bout of nostalgia.
Thunderbirds was far and away my favourite programme when I was young and this was long before I appreciated the shows astonishing libertarian political message… These guys were like the real world RNLI only with guns and spaceships!
‘International Rescue’ were shown as a benevolent but armed covert high tech para-military search and rescue organisation, privately controlled and funded by a philanthropic American businessman’s multinational company (Tracy Construction and Aerospace Industries), run secretly by his family and loyal friends. IR was completely independent of any government! What is more, International Rescue’s ‘muscle’ was provided by British aristocrat Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, cruising in a pink six-wheeled armoured Rolls Royce, capable of travelling at 200 mph complete with a hidden front grill mounted auto-cannon. No anti-capitalist or anti-private ownership of weapons vibe here!
Now that is a splendid role model for children rather than the usual dreary assortment of statist lawyers, severe cops and government spies who are trotted out to pass for heros!
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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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