Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Marwan Bishara analyses the fight for Tripoli
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, interprets what the fall of Tripoli means for Libya.
UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker
A masked man in Hackney during the early August riots. The report by Tim Morgan, of Tullett Prebon, says our country's consumerist ethos has 'extremely damaging consequences. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The recent riots in London and other big cities were the product of an "out-of-control consumerist ethos" which will have profound impacts for the UK economy, a leading City broker has said.
The report by the global head of research at Tullett Prebon, Tim Morgan, is part of a series in which the brokerage analyses bigger issues for the UK. It details recommendations to resolve what it sees as a political and economic malaise: new role models, policies to encourage savings, the channelling of private investment into creating rather than inflating assets, and greater public investment.
It warns: "We conclude that the rioting reflects a deeply flawed economic and social ethos… recklessly borrowed consumption, the breakdown both of top-end accountability and of trust in institutions, and severe failings by governments over more than two decades."
The note pinpoints the philosophy behind the riots as consumerism.
A typical internet user sees a hundred adverts an hour, the report says, and the underlying message many receive is: "Here's the ideal. You can't have it." Accompanying this is an inflation of government and private debt, a key theme of Morgan's other work.
"The economy has been subjected to repeated 'boom and bust' cycles, above all in property. The overall pattern has been that an over-consuming west has borrowed and spent the surpluses of the increasingly productive and under-consuming East.
"The dominant ethos of 'I buy, therefore I am' needs to be challenged by a shift of emphasis from material to non-material values. David Cameron's 'big society' project may contribute to the inculcation of more socially-oriented values, but much more will need to be done to challenge the out-of-control consumerist ethos.
"The government, too, needs to consume less, and invest more. Government spending has increased by more than 50% in real terms over the last decade, but public investment has languished. Saving needs to be encouraged, and private investment needs to be channelled into asset creation, not asset inflation."
Morgan adds: "A young person who tries to become the next Alan Sugar or James Dyson is as likely to fall short as if he or she sets out to become the next global football star.
"But… failure to become the next Alan Sugar can still leave a person well equipped for a career in management, finance or accountancy. Failure to emulate James Dyson will leave the aspirant with useful engineering or technological skills."
Alex Hawkes @'The Guardian'
The recent riots in London and other big cities were the product of an "out-of-control consumerist ethos" which will have profound impacts for the UK economy, a leading City broker has said.
The report by the global head of research at Tullett Prebon, Tim Morgan, is part of a series in which the brokerage analyses bigger issues for the UK. It details recommendations to resolve what it sees as a political and economic malaise: new role models, policies to encourage savings, the channelling of private investment into creating rather than inflating assets, and greater public investment.
It warns: "We conclude that the rioting reflects a deeply flawed economic and social ethos… recklessly borrowed consumption, the breakdown both of top-end accountability and of trust in institutions, and severe failings by governments over more than two decades."
The note pinpoints the philosophy behind the riots as consumerism.
A typical internet user sees a hundred adverts an hour, the report says, and the underlying message many receive is: "Here's the ideal. You can't have it." Accompanying this is an inflation of government and private debt, a key theme of Morgan's other work.
"The economy has been subjected to repeated 'boom and bust' cycles, above all in property. The overall pattern has been that an over-consuming west has borrowed and spent the surpluses of the increasingly productive and under-consuming East.
"The dominant ethos of 'I buy, therefore I am' needs to be challenged by a shift of emphasis from material to non-material values. David Cameron's 'big society' project may contribute to the inculcation of more socially-oriented values, but much more will need to be done to challenge the out-of-control consumerist ethos.
"The government, too, needs to consume less, and invest more. Government spending has increased by more than 50% in real terms over the last decade, but public investment has languished. Saving needs to be encouraged, and private investment needs to be channelled into asset creation, not asset inflation."
Morgan adds: "A young person who tries to become the next Alan Sugar or James Dyson is as likely to fall short as if he or she sets out to become the next global football star.
"But… failure to become the next Alan Sugar can still leave a person well equipped for a career in management, finance or accountancy. Failure to emulate James Dyson will leave the aspirant with useful engineering or technological skills."
Alex Hawkes @'The Guardian'
HTRK - Slo Glo (Live ICA 27/11/10)
TRY AND SNAP ME OUT
OF THIS CRUEL PHASE
SCATTERED LIMBS ABOUT
STOPS ME THINKIN’
FOCUS IN & OUT
START TO FADE
BETTER SPIT IT OUT
CAUSE IT’S NOT STICKIN’
OF THIS CRUEL PHASE
SCATTERED LIMBS ABOUT
STOPS ME THINKIN’
FOCUS IN & OUT
START TO FADE
BETTER SPIT IT OUT
CAUSE IT’S NOT STICKIN’
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
BAIL ME UP ALL NIGHT
BEAT ME UP ALL NIGHT
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
BAIL ME UP ALL NIGHT
BEAT ME UP ALL NIGHT
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
TRY AND SNAP ME OUT
OF THIS BLASÉ
TRY AND BLOW MY COOL
WHILE IT’S STILL SINKIN’
FOCUS IN & OUT
START TO VAGUE
I DON’T EVEN CLOCK
THE TOCK YOU’RE TICKIN’
OF THIS BLASÉ
TRY AND BLOW MY COOL
WHILE IT’S STILL SINKIN’
FOCUS IN & OUT
START TO VAGUE
I DON’T EVEN CLOCK
THE TOCK YOU’RE TICKIN’
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
STICK ME UP ALL NIGHT
BAIL ME UP ALL NIGHT
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
STITCH ME UP ALL NIGHT
DESTINED 2 COLLIDE
STICK ME UP ALL NIGHT
BAIL ME UP ALL NIGHT
SET MY HEART ALIGHT
STITCH ME UP ALL NIGHT
DESTINED 2 COLLIDE
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage
Dreams that Money can Buy: a film by Hans Richter with many artists. This is a Duchamp's fragment with music by John Cage.
Jerry Leiber RIP
"When Jerry and I started to write, we were writing to amuse ourselves," Stoller told Rolling Stone in 1990. "It was done out of a love of doing it. We got very lucky in the sense that at some point what we wrote also amused a lot of other people."
Leiber met Stoller in Los Angeles in 1950 when he was still a senior in high school. They had a mutual love of R&B, blues and pop, and began writing music together almost instantly, with Stoller mostly handling the music and Leiber mostly handling the lyrics. "Jerry was an idea machine," Stoller says in their 2009 memoir Hound Dog. "For every situation, Jerry had 20 ideas. As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices. When Jerry sang, he sounded black, so that gave us an advantage . . . His verbal vocabulary was all over the place – black, Jewish, theatrical, comical. He would paint pictures with words."
In the early days, they pulled 12-hour days writing on an upright piano in Stoller's house. "We're a unit," Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. "The instincts are very closely aligned. I could write, 'Take out the papers and the trash,' and he'll come up with 'Or you don't get no spending cash.'"
Within three years of meeting each other, Leiber and Stoller were the hottest songwriters in the business –writing hits for the Drifters, Coasters and the Robins and many other R&B groups of the era. In 1956, their career went to a higher level when Elvis Presley took "Hound Dog" – which they wrote for Big Mama Thornton four years earlier – and turned it into a gigantic hit.
Leiber was extremely irritated by the changes that Presley made to the original lyrics. "To this day I have no idea what that rabbit business is about," he said in 2009. "The song is not about a dog; it's about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis' version makes no sense to me, and, even more irritatingly, it is not the song that Mike and I wrote. Of course, the fact that it sold more than seven million copies took the sting out of what seemed to be a capricious change of lyrics."
Despite their success with Presley, most of the acts that Leiber and Stoller worked with were black. "I felt black," Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. "I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people."
Not all of their songs were as innocent as they seemed. "Pure and simple, 'Poison Ivy' [a 1959 hit they wrote for The Coasters] is a metaphor for a sexually transmitted disease – or the clap – hardly a topic for a song that hit the Top Ten in the Spring of 1959," Leiber said in 2009. "But the more we wrote, the less we understood why the public bought what it bought."
The hits continued into the early 1960s with such classics as "Stand By Me" and "Spanish Harlem," but when the Beatles broke in America in early 1964, the music industry changed very quickly. The duo never stopped working together, and in 1972 they produced "Stuck In The Middle With You," which was recorded by Stealers Wheel. In 1995, their catalog of hits was turned into the Broadway musical Smokey Joe's Cafe, and this past May, American Idol devoted an entire evening to their music.
Andy Greene @'Rolling Stone'
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