This week see the 30th anniversary of the release of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the New Musical Express has published an anniversary “special” featuring interviews with the surviving members (sadly not online), which we can probably take as a sign that the nation’s 16/17 year olds still think Joy Division matter an awful lot. Which is amazing for an album that peaked at number 71 in the album charts on its initial release.
The album was recorded in the winter of 1979 in an unheated studio in Stockport and it captures the mood of imposing decay of Northern Britain with its austere and dark production. Unknown Pleasures is firmly fixed in a time and place: the Manchester of the late seventies, and yet its appeal endures.
At the time Jon Savage, writing in Melody Maker in 1979, praised, ” Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss. …. [a] perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th century – seen gaping like rotten teeth from an orange bus.”
In remains, to my mind, one of the greatest albums of all time. From the deliciously minimalist cover designed by Peter Saville (which was recently parodied as a Pelican Classic, above right) to the equally minimal, and haunting, production by Martin Hannett, to the ten beautifully crafted songs which simply refuse to date. We are still in its axis, musically at least. Think of this way, we are as far away in time from Unknown Pleasures as Joy Division were from the music of Perry Cormo and Frankie Laine and yet still it features on the front cover of the music press.
To London on Friday to attend the private view of a rather unusual exhibition revolving around the furniture of arch-modernists Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret created for the Indian city of Chandigarh. Situated in P3, an enormous subterranean gallery beneath the University of Westminster, the exhibition tells the story of the timely rescue of furniture from the city’s public buildings created by the two cousins in the 1960s. Chandigarh, the administrative capital of both the Punjab and Haryana, was India’s first planned city and is home to several architectural projects by the two great Swiss architects.
The city is world renowned for its urban planning and building, but the pair also worked on the smaller details of public life, including many fine examples of modernist furniture. Over the years many of the original handmade pieces had fallen into disrepair and were being cast aside by the the city, or else being stolen and finding its way into foreign auction houses . Apparently the curators stumbled across several items being disposed of in the street and requested that they be allowed to save for posterity.
It’s a great exhibition, fittingly housed in the university’s former concrete construction hall. The examples of furniture differ greatly from our expectations of what constitutes modernist design: handmade, vernacular and largely constructed of wood. No two pieces are identical.
The hall also reconstructs a section of the city’s Palace of Justice, including a handsome spiral defendant’s dock. Much of the furniture on show is a reminder that we often fail to appreciate until we are threatened with its loss. Indeed, the Times of India has reported that now thathe t city’s heritage is being internationally recognised, the government has belatedly realised what’s been going on and issued an urgent directive instructing government departments “not sell or dispose of any heritage furniture to any person or agency.”
The Furniture of Chandigarh – Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, June 20 to July 12 P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London Nw1 5LS +44 (0)20 7911 5876 www.p3exhibitions.com.com
The sudden protest in Tehran burst like a firework onto the internet last night. The Boston Globe published an impressive gallery of vociferous photojournalism within a couple of hours of the demonstration’s close (including the image above). Video of the protests taken on mobile phones arrived in an abundence, leading one source to argue that YouTube was providing better coverage than the major news networks (there was certainly more of it). The debate in Iran, over a protested election result, burnt so brightly that the microblogging service, Twitter, has even postponed rescheduled maintainance to allow Iranians to continue tweeting while the government shut down opposition websites and choked as many channels of communciation as it could.
Most commentators agree that it has been an extraordinary night, the likes of which haven’t been seen in Iran for 30 years. Back then, in 1979, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, covered the Islamic Revolution with a memorable economy. I decided to dig out my copy of Shah of Shahs, his splendid account the events in Iran in 1979, and found one passage that, give a word or two, could have been written today:
“Now the most important moment, the moment that will determine the fate of the country … and the revolution, is the moment when one policeman walks from his post toward one man on the edge of the crowd, raises his voice, and orders the man to go home. The policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd are ordinary, anonymous people, but their meeting has historic significance.
They are both adults, they have both lived through certain events, they have both their individual experiences.
The policeman’s experience: If I shout at someone and raise my truncheon, he will first go numb with terror and then take to his heels. The experience of the man at the edge of the crowd: At the sight of an approaching policeman I am seized by fear and start running. On the basis of these experiences we can elaborate a scenario: The policeman shouts, the man runs, others take flight, the square empties.
But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It’s a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that’s the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence.
We don’t know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid – and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman’s ally and the man in the crowd’s foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything.
Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddenly broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can now go their own ways.
Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy.
And so I arrive in Manchester on the day after the election of the far right British National Party to the European parliament. It’s good to be back North, a place and an idea and a set of traditions that I’ve always been intensely proud of and so, naturally, I feel a heavy note of dismay about such a disastrous result.
According to some excellent coverage in the Manchester Evening News, the city is awakening to the grim realisation that its allowed Nick Griffin, the party’s leader (who can be seen above being pelted with eggs) as one of the region’s eight seats. David Ottewell, in a strident op-ed piece, summoned up the spirit of Edmund Burke, citing his well-known maxim that “all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing”. This stuck something of chord with me. Although I couldn’t vote in this region, I had allowed my electoral registration to lapse and, therefore by extension, I am one of the many apathetic millions guilty of allowing this to happen: our inaction and complacency has allowed he far right a legitimate democratic voice.
I mulled all this over while enjoying a delicious belly of pork at the New Emperor, a Cantonese restaurant, all piped jazz saxophones, polystyrene ceiling tiles and watercolour wallpanels, and wondered what the BNP would do with a wonderful places like this, if they ever got their grip on some real power.
So it is worth reminding ourselves that the BNP are all about: that it wishes to repatriate all non-ethnic Britons, including owners of Chinese restaurants. That Andrew Brons, the BNP’s elected candidate for Yorkshire and Humberside, was once belonged to a neo-nazi group whose members were found gulity of firebombing Jewish synagogues; and that Nick Griffin, elected in the North West, believes that the gas chambers found at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Majdanek (and hasitly disassembled elsewhere) as a “nonsense” and a “total lie”.
So, like the egg throwers who pelted Griffin at Westminster today (worth it alone for the image, bottom centre, where Griffin’s pantomime mask of dignity falls from his face), I’ve decided that I can no longer do nothing. It’s been a while since I’ve attended an anti-facist demonstration, but this trip back to the North, and this splendid dinner in one of the quarters most threatened, has really brought the threat of the BNP home to me.
It was my father’s 60th birthday back in April. To help him celebrate Anna and I presented him with this family tree (high-res here). The whole project took about two weeks to complete and although we still have some gaps on the Dodson line (Irish records being less complete than English ones) we did manage to trace our ancestory back to 1582, to the small hamlet of Noke in Oxfordshire. Other branches stretch out to Licolnshire and through our home county of Yorkshire. My darling Anna drew the image above, adding much attractive detail to the drawing.
On a self-depracating note, as part of my research I did uncover the origins of the name Dodson. According to the Internet Surname Database, Dodson is “a patronymic of the Middle English given name “Dodde, Dudde”, from the Olde English pre 7th Century personal byname “Dodda, Dudda”, And its meaning? Ahem, Dodda or Dudda is ultimately from a Germanic root “dudd, dodd”, meaning “something rounded” and used to denote a “short, rotund man.” Which delighted Anna no end.
Can I also add a note of thanks to both Paul Weaver, who through the shared ancestor of Thomas Stokes I was able to trace our Oxfordshire roots as far back as to Queen Elizabeth’s reign; and Jacky Clarke, who through our shared ancestor, Camack Lammyan,I was able to trace our line through Coningsby in Licolnshire to discover that one of our forebears, Peter Desforges, was a huguenot refugee who landed in Tower Wharf, not far from my old stomping ground of Brick Lane in east London, in 1681. Many thanks to you both.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may or may not be the most important novel of the 20th, as claimed on the front page of the Times earlier this week, although it is a very important one. The novel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its first publication on June 08. Naturally all the papers have been full of it. Here’s a rundown of the best bits:
The Torygraph offers a handy A-Z of Orwell, which includes the delightful vignette about the Queen Mother sending a Royal Messenger to Secker & Warburg to buy a copy of Animal Farm. They’d sold out. So off he goes in his bowler hat to the Freedom Bookshop, the anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel.
Over at the New Statesman, which once spiked Orwell’s eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War, Keith Gesson praises Orwell’s “eternal vigilance”, while DJ Taylor claims that his novels of the 1930s were even more frightening.
Robert Harris in the Times offers this more general piece which suggests, erroneously in my opinion, that 1984 would have lost some of its “unassailable posthumous integrity” if Orwell hadn’t have suffered an early death. Really?
The LA Times takes the tourist route: you too can go on a Orwell holiday.
While I might go and see Orwell: A Celebration at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall.
I really want to see Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about an extraordinary couple who built up a major art collection on a humble postman’s salary. Despite their modest means they built up a superb collection of minimalist and conceptual art in their tiny one-bed apartment in Manhattan. After 30 years the collection was valued at several million dollars, so they donated the lot to the National Gallery of Art in the US rather than sell it and be rich. The film by Megumi Sasaki is doing the festival rounds. Hope it comes to the UK very soon.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this essay by Tom Slee. He writes about how the very tools that help us navigate the web are the very things that drive everyone towards the same locations. He uses a useful topological analogy, stating that the recommender systems, like Digg and Netflix and Amazon, allow everyone to see the most popular material out there: “customers can see further,” he argues “but they are all looking at the same hilltop.”
”Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distill the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.”
The trouble he argues is that in staring at the peak we often miss material that is nearer to us.
But for me this paradox extends beyond recommender systems, reaching right into the heart of the internet itself. For what is a list of Google search results other than a mountain of indexed content with the first page or results representing the peak? The point being that although Google does try to weave a degree of immediacy into its search results, most people just bother to look at the summit of the search, ignoring the other material located further down the slope.
Of course nobody want to return to the days before Google made the mountain scalable in the first place. But we should be aware that the more successful it becomes the more monocultural the internet is likely to become. There may be more content out there, but increasingly most of us are seeing the same things which creates the opposite of diversity.
This monoculture of content then re-inforces itself as the material that finds its way to the top of Googles list and on to the likes of Digg and Facebook and Delicious et al, like successful football teams, the longer they stay at the top of the league, the more powerful and rich they become.
There are of course different ways to scale the mountain. Google’s advanced search option, for instance, allows you to filter your searches so that you can search for content uploaded only today, or only this week or only this month. Searching this way at least makes it easier to find content that is less established, but potentially more interesting.
I love its software and much of my life is in some way governed by it. But it has become so successful, so powerful, that its difficult to see over it. Maybe that’s why they set up office in hills northwest of San Francisco. In a little place called Mountain View.
I was among those who signed the original MySociety petition back in January which attempted to stop MPs from blocking a Freedom of Information request into their expenses claims. I still believe that a transparent system – where MP’s expenses are published on the internet – is the best way forward. The hysteria being whipped-up over MP’s snouts stuck in the allowances trough is deeply disillusioning though. Thank heavens, then, for Stephen Fry who provided some welcome perspective on the scandal:
“Lets not confuse what politicians get really wrong,” he told Michael Crick on BBC Newsnight. “Things like wars … where people really die; with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession of whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It isn’t important. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about.”
+ The Observer’s Robert McCrum on Orwell’s 1984 and how it killed him. Nicely timed to anticipate the 60th anniversary of its publication next month.
+ Newspapers and coffee go together like Chinese and takeaway. So Czech newspaper group PPF have decided to put them together by opening a series of cafes-cum-editorial offices. The idea being that you order a latte then chat to the local reporters as they prepare the local paper. Great idea, although nothing is new under the sun.
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To London on Friday to attend the private view of a rather unusual exhibition revolving around the furniture of arch-modernists Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret created for the Indian city of Chandigarh. Situated in 
It was my father’s 60th birthday back in April. To help him celebrate Anna and I presented him with this family tree (
