In a wardrobe no one can hear you scream

It's Tuesday in August. You're at work, the weather's disappointing and life in general feels kind of futile.

All that might be true, but at least you're not this guy...

"A man from Cambridgeshire was killed in February 2004 when his wardrobe fell to the floor and pinned the door shut while he was cleaning inside. He was found dead inside after trying to gouge his way out for a week."

This tale of woe, one of a collection of unfortunate passings published by the Daily Mail here, serves a helpful purpose.

It reminds us that whatever miseries might be heaped upon us, whatever fresh ordeal we are forced to endure, we are not - most of us - dying a slow death, alone, inside a dirty wardrobe in Cambridgeshire.
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More obvious boobs

Imagine if someone you'd known for several years suddenly showed up looking ever-so-slightly different, in unfathomable ways.

I don't mean a haircut or a different cardigan. Nor even a new nose or more obvious boobs. I'm talking about when something fundamental - something essential but indefinable - seems out of place.

And so, over the weekend, I met - for the first time - the identical twin of a guy I've known for almost five years. It was a little unnerving.

As is the general way with twins, they looked the same, but not quite the same. But the similarities themselves weren't the issue. After all, I knew a pair of identical twins at school, and their twin-ness seemed to wear off within minutes.

I think it was more the fact that, unlike the school twins, to whom I had been introduced at the same time and whom I knew roughly-equally well, this time I was familiar with one half of the set - the 'original' - and was confronted by what looked to me like a rip-off version - a reinterpretation. No offence.

I found myself trying to spot differences, both physically and otherwise, but I kept coming back to the similarities. The voice, the pauses, the glances, various tiny gestures.

No doubt if I got to know the 'new' twin as well as the old there would be nothing to blog about, save for sharing the occasionally hysterical reactions of strangers confronted by a pair of identical-looking twins for the first time.

But because I knew one without the other, meeting the other was a strangely disconcerting experience - a doppelganger made flesh - and one to remember.
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Death of a cocktail bar

My favourite cocktail bar has vanished.

I was in Brighton last night, visiting a friend, and I dragged him and his girl to the spot where I thought Zoot Street was meant to be. I kept walking up and down Queen's Road in the hope I'd somehow mislaid it. Eventually a shopkeeper told me it had closed six months ago and I had to admit defeat.

So now there's nothing left but slightly hazy memories, and a bunch of reviews still floating about in cyberspace like so much ethereal junk.

Fortunately, we stumbled across Oki-Nami, a new-looking place apparently co-owned by Norman Cook, the DJ. We got seats on the little balcony upstairs with a great view of the newly-pedestrianised New Road and I ordered a cucumber martake, their "eastern" take on the martini, with sake, hendrick's gin, creme de lychee and a slice of cucumber (one of my five-a-day). It was good, although it should have been served colder, and it wasn't Zoot Street.

Fortunately I recently discovered (thanks, F&C) another, amazing bar which I'm sure will help me get over ZS's passing. It's called Raoul's, in Oxford's Jericho district, where I had my first Sazerac, the official cocktail of New Orleans, no less.

And thus the wheels of booze keep turning.
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Boris likes cars more than people - fact!

They say politics is about priorities.

So what do you say about the priorities of a city mayor who takes well-developed plans to pedestrianise one of London's most famous but traffic-choked squares, and tears them up?

Unbelievably, Boris Johnson has ditched ex-mayor Ken Livingstone's scheme to bring Parliament Square - the one opposite the House of Commons - into the public realm, blaming concerns about "increased traffic congestion".

Ken's angry, of course. And who can blame him? One of Livingstone's lasting achievements was the transformation of nearby Trafalgar Square from a pigeon shit-soaked roundabout into a magnificent public space. No doubt he came up against the motorist lobby then too... and no doubt he told them to get on their bikes.

It's to Johnson's lasting shame he would rather put traffic first - and for what? So it can inch through central London at 7mph rather than 6?

Bring on 2012.
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Don't read all about it

London Lite versus thelondonpaper.

We in the capital are blessed with two free evening papers to help us endure the tube home.

But which is worse?

The London Lite is published by Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, morning freebie Metro and the Evening Boris.

Thelondonpaper is a Murdoch joint, he of The Sun, News of the World, The Times, Sunday Times, Sky News, and half the rest of the world's media.

Interestingly, studying the papers’ stablemates doesn’t really help us pin down where they're coming from.

The brash, trashy Lite looks more like The Sun than the Mail, albeit with fewer obtrusive nipples, while the thelondonpaper feels like the product of a vodka-fuelled one-night stand between the Daily Mirror and The Independent.

Both titles would claim they understand what makes London tick. But a brief flick through today’s editions suggests neither of them seem much interested in what's going on in the city at all.

If I discount the “briefs”, those three-sentence space-fillers, the Lite contains an impressively tiny tally of FOUR London “stories”.

They are:

* Blackfriars tube to shut for 30 months (featuring a byline for Dick Murray, the Evening Standard’s transport correspondent, this piece is clearly cut-and-pasted from its paid-for sibling)
* City lawyer ‘groped’ girl at strip club
* The ‘alternative’ hot property guide to London (based on research claiming people who live in the wealthiest areas of the capital are rated the most attractive).
* Mum’s fears for fashion boss stab victim (a slender follow-up to a murder in Camberwell)

The Lite's three most prominent stories have little to do with London at all, featuring missing Scot Madeline McCann (on the front), Notting Hill star Rhys Ifans with a “mystery blonde” in Ibiza (written, incidentally, by Georgina Littlejohn, daughter of repugnant hate-monger Richard), and Robert Mugabe, getting himself banned from the Beijing Olympics. The rest of the rag is mainly pictures of people sunbathing.

For sure, thelondonpaper has its share of random celeb stories, and a huge number of photos of said slebs.

But it also publishes the following:

* Brown poised to scrap stamp duty (the splash - including how much the measure would save the average London buyer)
* Face of the latest fatal stabbing (that Camberwell murder)
* Alesha’s ex Harvey in Javine ‘knife’ threat (yeh, I know, but the alleged domestic did take place in Dollis Hill, at least)
* Cabbie Mitch Winehouse (dad of drug-addled Amy) getting a presenter slot on BBC London radio
* Lawyer fired for taking intern to Soho strip bar
* London trains are the UK’s most crowded (including that Blackfriars tube closure)
* Eat, Drink, Vote and be Merry (Bayswater and Croydon named best places in the capital to eat)
* Chasing Some Beijing Bling (Feature on London-based Olympic competitors)

That's EIGHT, in case you weren't counting. It's only one day, but I reckon it's a fair reflection of both papers' news priorities.

So what does it tell us? Go out and buy The Guardian? Well, yes. But if you’re looking for a London paper, pick up thelondonpaper. The London Lite is liter.
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HateTML

I spent THREE hours last night trying to work out how to put “Read more!” on my blog to break up my rambling post on The Wire. It was my most disturbing brush yet with HTML. What’s wrong with BASIC? - that’s what I want to know. And, by the way, don't bother clicking “Read more!” below this post. There’s nothing more to read. Apparently it just appears there automatically now.
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Reporting on The Wire

I start from the presumption that The Wire is the best thing ever broadcast on television. Or, as Charlie Brooker has it, “the best TV show since the invention of radio”.

Amusingly, this view is almost universally shared among critics, who get rather excited by its sprawling, novelistic structure, political subtext and morally interesting characters.

If you haven’t yet read enough breathless praise for the show, set in inner-city Baltimore and described by creator David Simon as a “treatise on the death of America”, take a look here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In joining this orgy of worship I am conscious of appearing tediously predictable, but what else am I to do?

Having toured and tackled Baltimore’s drug trade and cops, dockworkers, politicians and schools in seasons one to four, the spotlight shifts in the fifth (and final) to the role of the media.

My particular interest here, as someone with a background in (British) newspaper reporting, is how effectively the show captures life on a regional paper, and whether it illuminates any interesting differences between British and American journalism.

Some of you will have sped through every episode after downloading them offa the internet. But for anyone doing it the old fashioned way, tuning in weekly through the medium of broadcast television and a cable channel they are calling FX, I’ll confine my comments to the two opening instalments...

Simon, the genius creator, was well placed to create The Wire’s version of the Baltimore Sun, or the “Baltimore Sun”, as I should probably call it to avoid any legal action, since he worked for the real one for 12 years.

I should point out that the Sun’s circulation, 232,000, is more than five times larger than any paper I have worked for, so comparisons are potentially pointless. Still, here goes.

In episode one, we are introduced to the Sun’s editorial staff as they discuss fears of imminent job losses. This theme of cost cutting – an international challenge to good journalism – provides a backdrop to the corner cutting that will come later.

If it’s not “buyouts” or “pay-offs” (voluntary or compulsory redundancies), which so often signal a paper's decline, in real life as in The Wire, it’s the quiet but steady phasing out of positions as people move on and aren’t replaced, piling extra pressure on surviving staff.

We soon learn of the managing editor’s fondness for employing younger reporters. Although there is a salacious edge to this suggestion, the reality is that “all them 20-somethings” are cheap to hire and easier to fire, which is why – along with the erosion of pay – the average age of newsrooms is, in my experience, falling.

I knew an incredibly experienced and effective veteran reporter who was outrageously forced out for costing too much.

Inevitably, younger reporters are also less experienced, in an industry in which experience counts – a point demonstrated in The Wire soon afterwards when it takes an old hand, with the kind of local knowledge that can only be built over time, to spot an important story in a city council agenda.

Later on in the first episode, we learn that the Sun has missed a good transport story after the management failed to replace the paper’s previous specialist transport reporter.

This triggered memories of a daily paper I worked for that for a long time refused to appoint education, local government, transport or crime reporters, preferring the cheaper option of leaving general reporters or trainees to muddle along as best they could.

Trainees, by the way… £10k for a 50-hour week, anyone?

The Sun plot in the first instalment of The Wire culminates in a depressingly familiar statement from the managing editor, Thomas Klebanow, who tells staff: “Editorial cutbacks shouldn’t affect our ability to put out an excellent product. We simply have to do more with less.”

Reminds me of that other favourite management adage, wheeled out to demand ever more stories from a shrinking pool of reporters to cover for their own (under)staffing (mis)judgements – “You need to learn how to manage your time more effectively”. What are we supposed to do – freeze it?

Central to the Sun storyline is Gus Haynes, a dedicated desk editor (in the UK they’re called news editors) who has to organise the paper’s reporters, draw up a list of stories and go into the daily news conference to persuade the editor they’re worth publishing.

Gus is clearly meant to be the principled one, battling against the incompetence, ignorance and shortsightedness of the paper’s management. Some have suggested his straightforward saintliness, which contrasts with the moral ambiguity of most of the other main characters, threatens to undermine the show’s complexity and authenticity. Whatever. He helps to highlight the problems of low-cost journalism.

In an unrelated side note - the bored silence with which Sun staff greet the "two-car fatal on the beltway and two overnight murders in the city" on Gus's news list demonstrates how Baltimore’s press, or perhaps the media of large American cities in general, have come to wearily accept murder as part of the fabric in the same way we in Britain might tolerate council tax.

The Wire also seeks to document the growing obsession of newspaper editors with "prize journalism" – those all-important Pulitzers – implying that reporting on a budget leads managers to look for simple, attention-grabbing controversies rather than seeking a fuller explanation of complex issues, something the British press has been doing very well for years without Pulitzers to play for.

Again, in episode two, Gus is the good guy, arguing for the importance of “a lot of context” in examining the city’s failing school system. I found this a little strange, since in my experience it has always been the news editors – the British Guses – who push constantly for stories to be boiled down to their basics, stripped of unhelpful detail or complexity, perhaps not for a prize, but in the interests of simplicity and readability.

But the prize chasing is clearly a big issue in the States, where there have been several high-profile scandals of reporters caught making things up to secure a scoop (as opposed to making things up and getting away with it, as happens in the UK, where there are weaker rules of attribution and fewer checks).

The show's producers set out to explore how far things might go when managers turn a blind eye. So an implausible exclusive by ambitious young reporter Scott Templeton is splashed on the front page on the order of the paper’s executive editor, despite Gus’s protests.

The story, about an orphaned 13-year-old wheelchair-bound gun-victim truant who can’t afford a ticket for the major baseball game, is published despite the absence of a name (other than a nickname – E-Jay), an address, a picture or indeed any identifying details at all.

I don’t see how this could happen in the UK, not least because agencies or rival papers would soon be chasing up the details for their own version of the story. It would be too risky. The most likely outcome would be a bollocking for the young reporter for failing to bring back anything useable.

Despite appearing to commit its own occasional exaggeration in the interests of a compelling story, The Wire provides some truthful insights into the life of a newsroom. I would hazard that the budget pressures on smaller daily papers in the British regions are even more intense than in the States. On a provincial rag here you certainly wouldn’t be told, as one Baltimore Sun reporter is in a later episode, to go and spend “a couple of weeks” researching a story about a heroin addict. You’d be lucky to get a couple of hours.

But the most important point of the show's exploration of the media, spelt out by Simon himself in a forceful comment piece here, is that failing to invest in journalism leads to what one British writer has dubbed “churnalism”, and that means the important stories don’t get told. If you haven’t already, get your teeth stuck into The Wire.

* The third episode of the fifth season will be broadcast on FX on Monday Aug 4 at 10pm.

Going nuts for The Wire…

"An obscure jewel to be snatched from TV's outflow pipe." - The Guardian

"If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it." - New York Times

"The Wire makes The Sopranos look like The Waltons." - Jim Shelley

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Nunchuckles exclusive: Engaged

I got engaged last night. I proposed to M in Madame Jo Jo’s, the club where we met seven years ago. She said yes! It was Keb Darge’s “undisputed number one” Legendary Deep Funk night. We even got chatting to the Legend himself, at the bar. He told us he knows three people who got married to people they met at his night, which is now in its tenth year. I’m sure he was wearing the same shirt he was in 2001.
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Critical masses

Something is happening on the streets of London. Where did all the bicycles come from?

I’ve been cycling to work, on-and-off, for a couple of years now, and I’ve never seen so many bikes on the road.

This morning, stopped at a junction, I counted more than a dozen comrades-in-saddles. When the lights changed and we pushed off, en masse, we filled the entire width of the carriageway.

It almost felt like a protest – a Critical Mass without whistles. No more cowering in the gutters - we owned the road - but only for a few seconds. A moment later our party thinned and, sadly, the cars reclaimed the streets.

I’ve experienced several of these spontaneous critical masses now, and they seem to be getting more frequent. It made me wonder where all this is heading. We’ve seen an 83% increase in cycling on London’s roads since 2000, and I don’t see any sign that things are slowing down.

How has this come about? We were lucky to have, in Ken Livingstone, a true champion of two wheels for eight years. I'm still gutted Ken's super-highways are now unlikely to see the light of day, choked at birth by the worst kind of dumb blond.

More recently, we've had a bit of sunshine - that always helps a few more hop on their bikes. Nothing beats the feeling of wind in your helmet.

And then there's the tube. The tube in summer was the trigger for my switch to the saddle in 2006. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

Nowadays I have a sneaking admiration for those who still take the Escalator of Doom down to the bowels of the city every day for a sweat-soaked hour of hell. And then do it again on the way home.

It always surprises me when transport bosses boast about squeezing more people onto the tube than ever before. Apparently it already carries more passengers than the entire national rail network. Does it really need any more?

But all this is good news for the capital’s 'cycling community'. The worse the trains, the more appealing the pedals. And the more people who bike, the less likely they are to die. Figures show London’s cycling boom was accompanied by a 31% fall in the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured. It’s safety in numbers.

What happens next? Will the approaching cold, dark autumn and the inevitable English rain snuff out this foetal cycling revolution?

Or will the movement continue to grow, inching towards some kind of unstoppable tipping point? I do hope it's the latter.
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A little sugar coating

My younger brother has gone off to Paris for a couple of weeks to hang about in cafes and discover the beating hearts of the French, eat croissants.

To prepare for his trip he watched a couple of films to get him in an appropriately French frame of mind. His choices? Amelie and Paris, Je T’aime.

I know, it’s a bit like watching Mary Poppins and Notting Hill to get a feel for London. But perhaps there’s no harm in a little sugar coating from time to time*. Don’t most of us, as visitors, try to project on to a place whatever it is we are looking to find there anyway? It's not as if coming back from a trip with brutal memories and dashed hopes is going to fix a city's social problems.

Before I went to New York, Woody Allen's wonderful cinematic tributes had led me to suspect that most, if not all, New Yorkers were neurotic intellectuals with a penchant for complicated relationships. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case - and whatever happened to the jazz soundtrack? Still, I'm pretty sure it was the Woodster’s efforts, particularly Annie Hall and Manhattan, that ensured I was too busy focusing on the magic of his home city, like those amazing skyscrapers, to notice much of the grimmer, grimier reality on the ground.

So if people want to imagine London as a warm-hearted town full of books and stained glass and well-meaning children who aren't capable of stabbing anyone, or Paris as a dreamy stage for fairytales, romance and Carla Bruni, then good luck to them.

After all, I shouldn’t think sitting through La Haine or Irreversible would have made my brother’s croissants taste any nicer.

*Within reason. Too much sugar can rot the brain. Stay away from Love Actually.

Some good films set in London (in descending order of quality):
Withnail and I
Shaun of the Dead
Children of Men
Notes on a Scandal
Closer
This Year’s Love
Scenes of a Sexual Nature
Face
Match Point
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A superhero we can believe in...

Do you think this one's followers will blame kryptonite when Hope implodes?
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Difficult second post (Batman)

I quite enjoy ludicrous analogies between politics and pop culture. They make even the most tedious of subjects seem so new, so “now”! So you can imagine how pleased I was to come across an interpretation of the new Batman film as “a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage” of George W. Bush.

According to Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal, President Bush is the real-life embodiment of the Dark Knight because, like Batman, he is “vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand”.

There's more. You know that beam of light they project into the night sky to rouse our cinematic superhero? That’s not a bat – it’s a “W”.

Disturbingly, rather than dismiss this love letter out of hand as a laughable attempt to salvage some admiration for a politically bankrupt leader, I fear Klavan may have a point. The “terms” of confrontation adopted by Bush and Batman do seem comparable in some respects, although perhaps not in the way he intended.

[Enter the spoilers…]

Batman kidnaps (extraordinarily renders, if you like) a dodgy businessman from Hong Kong and dumps him outside a Gotham police station, no doubt flagrantly breaching all kinds of diplomatic niceties. He listens in on the phone calls of the entire city without authorisation, and he beats up the bad guy to extract information.

Bush, as if we need reminding, is content to stretch a few rules too, initiating a secret programme of wiretapping without warrants, detaining suspects indefinitely without charge and torturing those who fail to co-operate.

That said, and without seeking in any way to undermine what is in many ways a wonderfully crafted edifice of bollocks, Klavan’s analogy falls down when it comes to the respective characters’ willingness to follow through.

While Batman resiles from killing the nasty Joker when he has the chance on more than one occasion, instead handing him over to the authorities to be dealt with under the rule of law, Bush pursues his enemies violently and ruthlessly as he struggles to secure world domination at any cost.

Bush's indelible link to human suffering, combined with a special talent for leaving chaos and instability in his wake, recall an entirely different character from the movie. He may be vilified and despised, but he’s no superhero.
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I am a Blogger

If you'd told me ten years ago that one day I'd become a blogger, I'd have said "wha?". But here I am. Apparently if I write it they will read it. So welcome bloggees. Welcome to my Thought Shed. In the coming decades you'll be able to hear and enjoy my views on everything from politics to culture, via media, food, science and space exploration. All the big issues, plus some of the fringier ones too. Buckle your seatbelts.
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