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Simon Reynolds: Total recall - why retromania is all the rage

Has pop finally eaten itself?

There's no single thing that made me suddenly think, Hey, there's a book to be written about pop culture's chronic addiction to its own past. As the last decade unfolded, noughties pop culture became steadily more submerged in retro. Both inside music (reunion tours, revivalism, deluxe reissues, performances of classic albums in their entirety) and outside (the emergence of YouTube as a gigantic collective archive, endless movie remakes, the strange and melancholy world of retro porn), there was mounting evidence to indicate an unhealthy fixation on the bygone.
But if I could point to just one release that tipped me over the edge into bemused fascination with retromania, it would be 2006's Love, the Beatles remix project. Executed by George Martin and his son Giles to accompany the Cirque du Soleil spectacular in Las Vegas, the album's 26 songs incorporated elements from 130 individual recordings, both releases and demos, by the Fab Four. Hyped as a radical reworking, Love was way more interesting to think about than to listen to (the album mostly just sounds off, similar to the way restored paintings look too bright and sharp). Love raised all kinds of questions about our compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history, about the ways we use digital technology to rearrange the past and create effects of novelty. And like Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Love was yet more proof of the long shadow cast by the 60s, that decade where everything seemed brand-new and ever-changing. We're unable to escape the era's reproaches (why aren't things moving as fast as they did back then?) even as the music's adventurousness and innocence make it so tempting to revisit and replicate...

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@'The Guardian'

Henry Kissinger agrees to help FIFA

Newly re-elected FIFA President Sepp Blatter is turning to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to help investigate problems within world soccer's governing body.Blatter says the 88-year-old Kissinger has agreed to be on a "committee of wise persons" to advise FIFA's new corporate governance and compliance body.
Kissinger's spokeswoman, Jessee LaPorin, confirmed that Kissinger agreed to participate. She said Kissinger has not yet received a formal request, but did receive an exploratory letter from Blatter.
Kissinger, who was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under presidents Nixon and Ford, is an ardent soccer fan and worked on the failed U.S. bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
Blatter also says Wednesday that he wants to appoint Dutch great Johan Cruyff to the committee, which will have the power to investigate and suggest solutions to problems as FIFA recovers from a bribery scandal.
@'ESPN'
Ungfugnlaublich/Infugncroyable!!!
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Baillieu finds crime pays

Illustration: John Spooner

Perhaps crime does pay. At least, that's what the Baillieu government seems to think. The Premier's lieutenants might be reluctant to discuss big issues such as infrastructure, public transport and the environment, but ask a minister about crime or anti-social behaviour and they almost jump out of their skin with excitement. So much so that an outsider might be forgiven for thinking Melbourne has been overrun by gangs of louts screaming abuse.
Is it just me, or is this law-and-order stuff getting out of hand? Take a decision this week to make permanent laws giving police extraordinary powers to issue $240 on-the-spot fines for swearing and offensive behaviour.
As Attorney-General Robert Clark put it: ''Victorians ought to be able to go out at night, to be able to go out with their families and not be opposed and offended and have their trip made miserable by the obnoxious and offensive behaviour of louts.''
I'm not sure where Clark spends his evenings, but last time I went out I had a very pleasant night. Not a lout in sight. Exactly what constitutes the misery-making behaviour referred to by Clark will be up to the discretion of individual police.
The government this week also announced plans for an online survey to measure public opinion about appropriate sentences for criminals. According to Clark, the survey - which is apparently being conducted in tandem with the Herald Sun - will underpin a tough new sentencing regime for criminals to ''meet community expectations''.
This sort of nonsense may represent clever politics, but it's a shocking way to conduct public policy. You can almost guarantee the results will not accurately reflect public opinion because of the survey's ''self-selecting'' approach. Anyone who feels strongly enough is invited to go online and offer their opinions, rather than relying on a random selection. Ask any pollster, and they'll tell you the results are very likely to be heavily skewed towards the extreme.
Another interpretation, of course, is this is nothing more than a cynical political exercise. If that is the case, the results will either be ignored (as they were with a similar exercise conducted by the Kennett government), or they will be used to justify the government's tougher sentencing agenda.
The government also confirmed plans to impose mandatory minimum two-year jail sentences on 16 and 17-year-olds who commit acts of gross violence. Such a move, according to legal experts, is likely to breach the United Nations declaration on the rights of the child, while doing little to rehabilitate young offenders.
It seems Premier Ted Baillieu has put a large number of eggs in the law-and-order basket. There may be a genuine problem with violence and anti-social behaviour in Melbourne's CBD late at night. This could relate to a range of factors, including a binge drinking culture that has been allowed to fester, boredom, and perhaps bad parenting.
But the government's main motivation seems to be that many law-and-order policies are relatively cheap, but produce big results politically. Although boosting police numbers and installing protective services officers at every train station are costly, running a survey with the local tabloid on sentencing, or beefing up laws to tackle swearing, or locking up 16 and 17-year-olds, cost very little. Yet such policies can produce big political gains, particularly if elements of the media are complicit.
Such policies are all the more attractive in an age when the media continues to make loud demands for regular big-ticket announcements from our politicians, who have very little money left for new spending.
There are consequences. First, Victoria is fast trundling down the ''nanny state'' path, with a rising tide of rules and regulations inundating daily life, including permission to swear in public.
Such thinking is known as ''nudge theory''. The idea espoused by nudge theorists, led by US President Barack Obama's regulatory commission head Cass Sunstein, is that people need to be ''nudged'' into making the right decision because of a herd-like tendency to copy others' decisions. There may be some truth to this, but surely the justification needs to be weighed against costs. In this case, the costs include an increasing infringement of individual liberty.
Second, there is a danger that the government's law-and-order obsession comes to represent a cheap substitute for genuine action to tackle problems facing Victoria, including improving public transport, health and education, and tackling booming population growth.
Third, the Baillieu government's law-and-order agenda is itself in danger of spiralling out of control as it struggles to manage public expectations. Plans are now under way for a radical shake-up of the Office of Public Prosecutions, in addition to a review of the police force command structure. It has a massive task on its hands in recruiting thousands of additional police and protective services officers, not to mention the additional guards it will need to keep an eye on all those extra prisoners set to flood Victoria's jails.
This is not to say law-and-order is unimportant, or that there aren't problems with violence and anti-social behaviour that need to be addressed, or that the government didn't map out its law-and-order agenda during last year's election campaign.
But the cash-strapped Baillieu government has now gone too far, and it's time for a reality check. When Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies said, ''We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary, but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise,'' surely he had something different from this in mind.