When you think too hard when listening to OK Computer. (BSDA #9)

There's been a lot of philosophy sloshing round my head lately. Due to the influence of the work of Myles Dyer, which continues to interest, and also partly bewilder, me, and the upcoming practical events about which I have been moralising, that is, the royal wedding, the AV referendum and my exams, I've been rather too often contemplating the major metaphysical and philosophical questions of today, as opposed to, you know, revising, or some other socially useful activity. (Also my sentences are getting longer and more convoluted. Can you tell?)

Two days ago I managed to get a copy of OK Computer by Radiohead onto my iPod. This was necessary as I have effectively exhausted the capacity of my other examples of what I call thinking music, such as Sigur Ros, to direct my thoughts and emotions. Like any other human being of the last two decades, I have of course previously heard the album, but only in segments and without the time to give it the clarity of focus that is really necessary for an artwork of such stature.

Wikipedia suggests that the album contains references to themes of consumerism, social disconnection, political stagnation, transport, technology, insanity, death, modern life in the UK, globalisation, and political objection to capitalism. All of which are very interesting. As with all great art, however, as an independent piece it kind of falls apart. It is only when considered as part of the society it critiques that the album's genius can be seen. And this is what this last weekend has enabled.

I went to an aristocratic stately home, redolent with the imagery of a decaying and outmoded class, while all the same still occupying a privileged position within the society of Britain today, a view which can be clearly extended to the royal family, about whom I have previously made my feelings clear, the privileged bourgeoisie, who David Cameron laughably calls the "sharp-elbowed middle classes" and the hyper-wealthy, a group most clearly defined as City bankers, who of course take home sickeningly fabulous profits from their pie-in-the-sky gambling games with ordinary taxpayers' money, despite a failure so dramatic that it caused the greatest economic crisis since the Depression. (We learnt today, incidentally, that the ostensibly Independent Commission on Banking has refused to recommend legislation to separate the commercial and investment arms of our banks, which would have created a system similar to that in the USA after FDR's Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which perfectly controlled the excesses of the banking system until its repeal in 1999. Though sadly none of the other excesses of American life.)

Similarly, I've been taking more notice of advertising and in particular the perfect, impossible images of what one should aspire to that it creates. One thing that is incredibly irritating in this regard is when adverts are filmed with actors clearly only mouthing, and the sound is later dubbed on in some metropolitan studio. Maybe it's just me, but I find this effect extraordinarily dehumanising and asocial, perhaps a reflection of the essentially impossible task of living up to these created visions of social worth, a choice that regrettably we all seem to partly subscribe to, however powerful and positive the expansion of subcultures to include the previously marginalised is.

Which leads me to the internet. I have a truly ambivalent relationship with the rapidly changing internet society, caused by an essential ambivalence toward technology and its power to effect social change. While we have seen some momentous developments in recent months, which were at least in part to do with social networking sites (I'm thinking of course of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia), there are so many examples of the way in which the internet now only serves the interests of the established status quo - by bringing us closer only to the minutiae of celebrity lives, Twitter has further distanced us from any meaningful control of power, and the fabulous profits now made by the major social networks at the cost of any real affinity for the consumer seems to indicate only the reification of the human beings who are ourselves continually creating such possibilities.

OK Computer, more than any other recent album (though there has been some magnificent work even this year, so anyone who tells you music is dead is a liar), makes me think about things - especially the individual and his relationship to a rapidly changing, information exchanging, power controlling new consumerism whose only unique selling point is its facility and meaninglessness. While not as dismal as The Bends it is nonetheless profound, and to me it presents in musical form the feeling of wanting to curl up in a ball and wait till it all goes away. As I said, I think too hard. It deadens my head, actually.

Explosions of the mind. (BSDA #8)

For the last few hours, while reorganising my history revision notes into things of true beauty, I've been watching Rory McIlroy, the 54 hole leader and favourite, implode mentally in his fourth round at the Masters. He never really got going and after a freak tee shot at the tenth, which hit a tree branch and ricocheted to the left, leaving him out of position and able only to get a triple bogey, he collapsed over the next few holes, missing easy putts left right and centre to put him well back on the leaderboard. It is all too similar to his second round 80 at the Open at St Andrews last year, after his record-equalling 63 the previous day. What can we learn from this? Only, I think, that it is a mental issue, nothing to do with ability.

I have experience of this myself, though naturally not on the scale of McIlroy today. In exams, interviews and other important events, I have found myself vulnerable to mental collapses when considering the scale of what I am attempting. This year, with exams approaching apace, I am trying to fully relax myself by only revising when it feels right to do so, rather than forcing myself into it at inopportune times, and by organising my notes into something I am totally confident with, rather than the confusing mess they ended up as last year. Clearly whether this will work is something I will only discover on results day, but I am far more confident as a result of these measures that I hope I can realise my goals and prevent a recurrence of previous explosions of the mind.

Finally, congratulations to Charl Schwartzel, whose composure has been in my view the deciding factor in his Masters success.

The visual and narrative conventions of documentary television. (BSDA #1)

[So I'm attempting BSDA, my own acronym for Blog Some Days in April, a kinda cop-out version of the internet tradition. Two reasons why I can't do every day - I'm away from the 18th to the 22nd, and, well, I have a life. Not to mention revision. My challenge is therefore to do 20 blogs this month. I hope you'll join me in my quest. If you want to, please follow. Now - on with the rant.]

I really hate watching Andrew Marr walk around shopping centres. By this, I don't mean that I occasionally see him perusing the shelves at Topman or whatever, because I don't go to those kind of places. And I'm sure he doesn't either. What I'm talking about is documentaries. It seems that today it is absolutely essential for every director on the BBC to fill at least 40 minutes of their hour-long shows with fatuous nonsense, moody music and presenters walking around NOT SAYING ANYTHING.

Yesterday I watched a programme about the census with Marr and one about employment practices through the last half-century with Kirsty Young. They were an hour long each. I managed to watch them both in 37 minutes. Why was this? Simply, I fast-forwarded through any pointless scene-setting or conclusive narration (the BBC seems to take the philosophy of "tell them what you're going to say, tell them, then tell them what you've said" to ridiculous levels by giving each the same amount of time), transitional shots of the presenters a) walking through busy streets b) waiting for trains or c) driving massive cars through the countryside (green credentials writ large), and any attempts by the presenter to talk to a non-expert in the middle of the street, or, worse, their cosy suburban households. I simply hate listening to people tell me about their own life as if that somehow illuminates a wider social change (because very often this leaves gaping holes in the argument as the presenter searches desperately for some way to qualify a personal anecdote as though it were an established social trend). All these things are, it seems, held to be necessary for people to remain interested in a programme for a whole hour, a timespan so immense in the days of 24/7 television that it's necessary for newsreaders to tell us the time four times in every broadcast, as though we were fruitflies and might die, unfulfilled, before the next announcement.

Another tremendously irritating convention is to send your superstar presenter all around the world to film tiny little segments of to-camera work in front of as many different examples of "nature" as possible. The rockstar-turned-physicist Brian Cox has fallen victim to this, with his latest series Wonders Of The Universe featuring him making sandcastles and smiling inanely into camera in the Namibian desert. Not Brighton, not Blackpool, not even a freaking studio but a country thousands of miles away whose only connection to a spiel about entropy seems to be its larger collection of sand. Despite that, he still used a regular bucket.

I like TV documentaries. I like their capacity to inspire, educate and entertain, in the great Reithian tradition on which public service television was founded. So it really hurts me to see directors waste their presenters' talents by filming them silently reading train timetables or standing in front of Patagonian glaciers as though that in itself were somehow information. This madness has got to stop.

Barely quantifiable anger

So I was reminiscing today about last year's student protests, and how a largely peaceful and passionate movement was hijacked by a few vandals, who of course got all the attention from the conservative media. While a pessimist might note that the protests entirely failed in their aims, that seems a fairly pointless conclusion to reach given that a majority of the population supported the protesters (who did include me, though on a school-level protest, not the main London one - we got on the local news though!) and the disapproval rates of the government have stayed high all winter.

Last Saturday, the March for the Alternative in London brought together 400,000 people opposed to the irrational and ideologically motivated cuts to public services introduced by this government. (Let's be clear - no-one voted for this, me because I was too young (!) but most people because even the Tory manifesto said "no frontline cuts" and "no top-down reorganisations of the NHS".) Once again, there was sporadic trouble but this time literally only 50 or so people did anything criminal at all. The Daily Mail's resident bigot, Melanie Phillips tried to tar the legitimate protest group UK Uncut with the epithet of anarchists, but, y'know, they aren't. However, it emerges that the UK Uncut members who occupied Fortnum and Mason were tricked into arrest by the police, who, a video released on the Guardian website makes clear, said they would be free to go when they left the store. They then walked out... straight into a police kettle where they were immediately arrested. Ho hum.

So this brings me back to this blog's title. Anger is a relative concept. It's possible to get astoudingly angry about tiny little things, while allowing capitalists to get away with paying only a pittance in taxes to a country which gives them everything. Anger must be directed if it is to achieve anything. The March for the Alternative and the UK Uncut movement are all legitimate harbingers of anger, but we must be so careful not to let vandals and wreckers destroy them as they did the tuition fees protests. An irresponsible and biased media is clearly not going to help here. Therefore activists must keep making their case eloquently and passionately in the British democratic tradition, so that the barely quantifiable anger against the government of the country's progressive majority can be refined into a real popular movement - a movement with the power to change.

Phillips: http://bit.ly/fK7Pe7
Guardian footage: http://bit.ly/fto02l
My point made better: http://bit.ly/iaxIEH

Dream School?

British people will no doubt be aware that chef-cum-Superman Jamie Oliver, who in earlier series has saved us all from the evil Twizzlers of Turkeia, who zoomed down from outer space to defile our children and destroy the nation's health, only to be vanquished by the Crepe Crusader, has recently turned his attention to the failing education system, and has taken to trying, in his own inimicable way, to solve its problems.

Oliver's plan basically rests on the idea that celebrities can teach subjects they claim to know about far better than so-called professionals. Predictably, however, most of them were catastrophic failures - David Starkey alienated the entire section of the population that Oliver had earlier tried unsuccessfully to humiliate and segregate by calling a boy "fat", and then proceeded to carry on with the ensuing argument for so long that I had to check he wasn't actually one of the children. After all, as Connor reminded us, he is "only four foot tall". Alastair Campbell gave splendid advice as to how to follow in his footsteps: to become a lying, sycophantic apologist for a war criminal, and, rather imaginatively, simultaneously aroused the homophobic sentiments of some of the class, leading to an outright brawl of words of the kind not seen on Channel 4 since Brookside was cancelled.

As far as I can tell, the kids seem about as interested in this scheme as Nick Clegg is in listening to the electorate, judging by the amount of time they spend on their gadgets, hiding away from doing any work and wearing the now-patented gormless hangdog look that has become so associated with Clegg over the last year. This whole programme seems like a propaganda exercise for Michael Gove's Free Schools project. No, you don't need specialist or trained teachers, any old C-list celebrity will do! I can only imagine the sequels:

Jamie's Dream Hospital, where Hugh Laurie carries out emergency heart surgery while Ducky Mallard sets 80% of the commissioning budget...

Jamie's Dream Forestry Commission, where TV's Robin Hood Jonas Armstrong carries out the demanding task of keeping ramblers off land that is rightfully theirs while Bear Grylls and Ray Mears show us all the proper way to tend to 5% of our national area...

Jamie's Dream Foreign Policy Crisis Unit, where Ross Kemp solves the Libyan problem by having a mealy-mouthed shouting match with Gaddafi from the top of a Chinook while Jack Osbourne tells the search-and-rescue operatives of the day how to correctly throw yourself out of a plane at thirty thousand feet.

(Although in that case I still might consider them over William Hague.)

There is a real issue here. We seem to have been sucked into the vacuum of assuming that "celebrity" equates to "worthy", that fame and fortune and everything that goes with it are substitutes for training, hard work and a real focus on doing your job properly. In their continuing war against the state and what it stands for, the coalition government seem to be following a very dangerous paradigm that suggests that anyone who actually does a job for money (in the capitalist tradition) is some kind of scrounger off the state - hence why we apparently need to cut all the real staff at libraries and post offices and run the bleedin' things ourselves, in our spare time. I'm not sure whether this is stupidity or arrogance, because the two are never too far apart within the Tory party.

It seems that in this age of 24-hour news and instant gratification, we only want stories that can be tied up neatly into bundles. No-one wants to hear about the teachers who work day-in, day-out to slowly improve the standards of less talented kids in their schools - we'd all much rather some televisual superhuman waltzed in at the eleventh hour and saved the day with moments to spare. So this is the real message of Dream School for me, and I hope the producers will be honourable enough to make this their ultimate conclusion too. Very little outside the goggle box happens in a scripted order, with climaxes before the ad breaks and a neat conclusion at the end. Life is messy and inconsiderate, and so our TV companies, and, more importantly, our elected representatives, must stop looking for elegant and quick solutions to our nation's woes and concentrate on what really matters - helping people to live their lives in a better, fairer and more understanding society.

CREDITS: The idea for this comes from Charlie Brooker's Guardian column and commentators thereon. It's alright.

Pretentious philosophical post

The insoluble problem of human existence is defining its goal, its direction, its purpose. The great minds of our species sparked with electric impulses, neural pathways connecting in hitherto unnoticed ways, as their owners wrestled with their membership of this elite caste called humanity, and the consequences of such an association for the activity of the independent brain.

What separates our cognitive biology, in tissue terms, from that of the so-called lower animals, is well known to our psychologists. We have a larger brain in proportion to body size. This, from a purely biological perspective, tells one all there is to know about the mystery of human consciousness. Darwin tells us in The Descent Of Man that “No one, I presume, doubts that the large proportion which the size of man's brain bears to his body, compared to the same proportion in the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his mental powers.” That, then, may well describe why we have intelligence. We are even beginning to learn from which segments of the brain certain actions and ideas are controlled; the prefrontal cortex, to take a simple example, governs the prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and complex decision making, it is hypothesized. These are known as executive functions: an ironic title, given that they seem all too frequently absent from our senior businessmen and political leaders.

Nevertheless, there is much we do not, and, many would say, cannot, know about the human consciousness. What is inbuilt, what comes from the environment outside – are we at source as bees in a hive or the empty hard drive of a shiny MacBook? Whence comes compassion, whence hatred, whence love? In what sense is there a target for our existence – service to a higher conscience, devotion to an ideal or ideology, or the elimination of worldsuck, perhaps? These questions can be assessed, say the scientists, by their emotionless, empirical method. But there is, it seems, a deeper meaning under the purely measurable, further complexities that underpin the human psyche. Here exists the difference between merely electrocuting flesh and bones, and creating what Mary Shelley’s tale calls “the modern Prometheus”.

A newly created true Man, were such possible, would have more than cells, tissues, blood and mucus – as hidden within the physical cage sits the metaphysical other, the unknowable soul, the undistillable essence of humanity.  Such a concept cannot be understood by a rock, or a table, or a pencil, for precisely the reason that such objects lack a soul of their very own. Without any way of attesting that one lives, one cannot live. Cogito ergo sum, it would seem. When the writers of the Enlightened Age told us that the new extra-human science could explain away superstitious notions of love, God, spirit, they gave up understanding what life means to those that live it. Our goal must be to die without wasting the brief span of breaths and heartbeats on impossibilities; to drive forward the boundaries of understanding, yes, but always to understand that at the centre of our humanity lies a thing, an idea, an essence, that elevates us into sentience, and, as far is it is possible to tell, into a position of free will, of power over our biological instincts, and of liberty to live as beings, and as thinkings, within this universe of our own minds.

NOTE: I am not a psychologist, nor in fact any kind of academic. If the science is wrong, so be it; the philosophy is mine and mine alone.

Why do thoughts evaporate when you're trying to write a blog?

This is a ridiculous thing that keeps happening. I have so many witty, urbane, observational thoughts in my head during the day but whenever I get down to writing here they all disappear.

I could write something fascinating about sociology or politics, which are my main foci (oh don't be ridiculous with your vocabulary, you utter blancmange) but the most I could muster would be some feeble done-to-death tirade about Tory cuts or some attempt to pretend I understand the complexities of Middle Eastern geopolitics by talking about Gaddafi or some such rubbish.

Sollte ich vielleicht Deutsch sprechen, weil das eine andere Interesse ist? Nein, glaube ich. Kann nichts interessant sagen. Schade, weil diese wunderbare Sprache so schön ist, dass mein Blog viel besser aussieht.

I could go to bed. It is, after all, midnight. The witching hour. Maybe if I don't, though, a Big Friendly Giant will whisk me off to save the Queen. But then again that would offend my republicanism, so maybe I should sleep.

But beforehand, I'll leave a list of things I could write about in the future. Like a totally uninteresting version of a time capsule.

Racists
The Daily Mail
Tory cuts
Royalty
Americans
British people
Music
Grapefruit
Blancmanges
Pointless lists
Self-conscious entries in lists which illuminate the artifice of the construction in a postmodern way
Bananas

I remain your good and faithful servant,

antmoorfield.