Andrew Hickey

Introducing Doctor Who – The Rescue…

A poor orphaned waif with a forbidding guardian, waiting to see if their ship will ever come in. The sinister figure that terrorises her while claiming to be her protector. This is Doctor Who at its most Dickensian – set on an alien world four hundred years in the future. Maureen O’Brien debuts as the series’ first ‘new companion’, to be comforted by William Hartnell’s Doctor at his most delightful and menaced by Sydney Wilson’s dastardly Koquillion (but it’s not him who callously kills her pet). A small but perfectly formed story from 1965…

I’m celebrating Doctor Who’s fifty-second anniversary with one story every week (though I’ve got some catching-up to do right now) for a year – and my husband Richard is joining in with his own eclectic choices if you want different recommendations. You can read more of what this Doctor Who 52 is all about here. But if I were you I’d just read on, then press Play on the DVD.

Seriously, just press Play, especially on this one. Usually the DVD menus have a mix of tantalising moments from the story, like an ambient trailer; that’s how the main menu works here, but the Special Features sub-menu is just one continuous clip of the climax. There are some preposterous decisions elsewhere in the range, but this probably wins the ‘What were they thinking‽’ award for most random and complete spoiler. So when I say there are spoilers lower down my list this time, I mean it…

Ten Reasons To Watch The Rescue (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – It’s an ideal Doctor Who story for New Year (and yes, I have failed my resolution to write these on time each week). It’s a bit of a new start, but not too much. It’s small and manageable, not too complicated, but with a refreshing twist. And they get to sleep some of it off. While The Rescue didn’t start a new season, it was first broadcast on January 2nd, 1965, and it’s perfectly pitched for new viewers to jump on board with the new companion. We see the TARDIS materialise – literally a beacon of light throughout – before we see within, always crucial in making us appreciate that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, and the small cast gives us much more time with all the characters. Most of all, we get to know newcomer Vicki, and we get to know the Doctor all over again. Written by original Doctor Who lead writer David Whitaker, this is quietly the series’ first relaunch. Of course, the honest New Year Doctor Who would be Resurrection of the Daleks (massive overindulgence followed by regret and resolutions that you’ll break immediately and double down instead) then The Twin Dilemma (the awful hangover)…

“We can travel anywhere and everywhere in that old box, as you call it. Regardless of space and time.”
“Then it is a time machine?”
“And if you like adventure, my dear, I can promise you an abundance of it.”

2 – Vicki is the first new companion. And the story goes as far as it can to make that easy on the viewers – or, rather, to make us go easy on her. When we first met the Doctor, it was through his granddaughter Susan, a mystery for her schoolteachers Ian and Barbara to follow. But Susan fell in love and out of the TARDIS in the previous story. How would the Doctor take to someone else? How would we get used to a new teenage face in the show? And what could bring her on board? She’s not another relative, and while the Doctor effectively kidnapped Ian and Barbara, that was bundled up with the role-reversal on teachers who know nothing, and not something a kinder, gentler Doctor could do to a teenage girl. The producers nearly brought on board a gutsy young freedom-fighter from the previous story, but instead chose to go quite the other way. They pull out all the stops to make us feel sorry for her and want her looked after.

Vicki seems, to begin with, much younger and less capable than Susan. Maureen O’Brien – here beginning an impressive career, though thanks to a forgotten early work of Andrew Davies’ I grew up thinking of her as an evil witch-nun – plays her with huge eyes, a waif-like form and outfit, and just enough pluck that she doesn’t make the audience wonder why on Dido she’d want an abundance of adventure after spending every scene cowering. Today Vicki is easy to read as abused or at least crushed by her multiple bereavements and oppressive semi-guardian – she’s young and full of hope that’s ever cowed, he’s dark and brooding and rains on every parade – and to see how after being adopted into a friendlier sort of family she’s going to gain the self-confidence of a cheeky teen anarchist (though inconsistent writing will give her wild mood swings between the two).

But for now, Vicki sets a template that will often be repeated for new companions, and which I once sarcastically labelled ‘Daddy was a lord, but he’s dead now’. Her mother has died, so her father takes her away to make a new home on a colony world. But their ship crashes on the inhospitable planet Dido, so they don’t get to their new home. And then her father dies too. Not just him, but a massive explosion that takes out every other person she knows, except one. And he doesn’t like her. So there is literally no-one on this planet who loves and will look after her. She is the most thoroughly orphaned person possible (until the show eventually takes this to extremes with Nyssa), and the Doctor and his friends spend most of the story getting to know and befriend her, so by the end of the story there can be no possible objection to her choosing – and she is very carefully given a choice and time to choose it – to leave on the TARDIS. Just to make sure we get the point that she is utterly and totally destined to be the new companion, she even introduces herself to Barbara twice. The second time spelling out her name, letter by letter.




3 – Even more effectively than it introduces Vicki, The Rescue reintroduces the Doctor in a subtly reworked role that retains all of William Hartnell’s intelligence and authority but allows him to be kindlier and funnier, giving us his ‘twinkle’. This is a great place to start for Mr Hartnell, showcasing just how versatile the Doctor could be and will be from now on – stern, affectionate, vulnerable, incisive, embarrassed, and often comic here, too. People often dismiss the youngest Doctor – the one looking like the oldest man – as a grumpy old thing, not least because when we first see him he’s terrific but not kind in running rings round his companions. He takes a while to warm or warm to, and longer to seem trustworthy. Yet I can’t think of another Doctor with more facets. This story doesn’t so much soften the Doctor’s character as give him a chance to shine in many different ways, not least as the only person who sees everything that’s going on in the story. I love Bill for his speeches and his passion, and there’s plenty of that here – at the climax of the story, he follows previous ‘courtroom’ triumphs with a stunning confrontation in a majestic Hall of Judgement. He charms budding companion Vicki with his understanding, then is chuffed to bits overhearing how much she already likes and trusts him. He promises her he’ll be diplomatic… Which last about ten seconds before – though he’s the last Doctor of whom you’d expect it – he picks up a girder to use as a battering ram and determines on breaking a door down.

William Hartnell turned a powerful acting presence learned as the stern sergeants and ruthless crooks of his film career into the perversely authoritative anti-establishment Doctor… But he also had great comic timing, and his vulnerability in a character role inspired producer Verity Lambert to make him the Doctor. Both are on full display here. The show needs us to move on from Susan, but the Doctor can’t forget his granddaughter just yet; rarely do we see the Doctor so quietly hurt as when he starts to ask her to open the doors here, and falters, Barbara gently offering help instead. Before long he’s showing he’s sharp as ever to Ian, then wondering if he can get away with pretending he landed on Dido deliberately before remembering that he did it in his sleep, playfully undercutting the danger of his becoming a know-it-all. On the surface, The Rescue may be designed to repair the ensemble cast by introducing a replacement fourth member, but compare it with a year earlier and it’s not just the teenager who’s changed, nor even the Doctor’s character that’s evolved – it’s not an ensemble any more. He’s the Doctor. The ‘new companion’ makes it clear that the others are just that: his companions. If there was ever a doubt who was the star, there isn’t now.




4 – Alien Design. This is a small, cheap story, but designer Raymond Cusick – who created the series’ first alien world – carefully chooses where to put detail that fills in a civilisation. Though his big alien beastie here isn’t a patch on his Daleks, the various stylised representations of it are fabulous. Massive carvings draw your attention from bare rock walls; pillars give shape and purpose to the Hall of Judgement, transforming it from a big empty space to the eerie, majestic heart of the story, aided by smoke and (reused but atmospheric) musique concrète. And the alien figure of Koquillion, all leering tarantula-faced bristles and tusks with the manner and mendacity of a wicked Dickensian stepfather, is decidedly creepy every time he comes to call and tell Vicki not to go far from the crashed ship, or he might not be able to protect her from his people…


5 – The Doctor’s sympathy versus Barbara’s exasperation. One of the biggest changes in the Doctor since the series started a year before is that he’s now much more concerned for and tactile with his companions, no longer just with his departed granddaughter. In their first scene together here, the two teachers are worried; she’s noticed that the vibration of flight has ceased, meaning that for the first time, the Doctor’s slept through a landing. They rouse him and he comes to, embarrassed but charmingly tactile with his friends, pretty much giving each of them a hug, so when Barbara breaks his flow to try and tell him what’s happened, he jumps wonderfully to the wrong conclusion and clasps her hand to his breast in concern and delight. Then he’s more embarrassed when he realises what she actually meant…

“Oh, but Doctor, the trembling’s stopped.”
“Oh, my dear! I’m so glad you’re feeling better. Hmm!”
“No, not me – the Ship!”
“Oh, the— Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.”

6 – The Doctor’s knowledge versus Ian’s exasperation. Ian and Barbara have developed since the of the series, too – this time, they go off exploring, while the Doctor dozes in the Ship. But when they’re menaced by Koquillion, Barbara’s toppled from a cliff and Ian caught in a rock fall, the Doctor springs out to help… Only to wind Ian up by knowing considerably more than he does, despite as far as Ian is concerned having only been outside for a moment while he was out risking his neck exploring.

“Oh, there was this – thing, this repulsive thing with a – hideous face.”
“With hands and feet like claws?”
“Yes, that’s it. How do you know?”
“Well, this is the planet Dido. I’ve been here before. I know them very well.”
“What?”
“They’re very friendly people.”
“Friendly?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! It wasn’t friendly to us.”
“…This thing. Was it armed?”
“No, no, it wasn’t. Wait a minute… It was carrying – some sort of – jewelled club. About so long.”
“With a big head? Resembling a spanner?”
“I don’t know why you bother to ask.”

The Doctor gives him a quick glance up and down and tells him no bones broken, but somehow Ian doesn’t seem to mean it on thanking him for “The most thoroughgoing medical I’ve ever had.”

Though the Doctor gets an exasperated moment of his own later, as the two of them clamber across a narrow rock face in the dark and then, as if that wasn’t enough to put up with, hear a roar from ahead of them. Ian sticks the torch right in the Doctor’s face.

“What was that?”
“Well, it’s not me, is it? Shine the torch down there!”

7 – Making you think about time travel (and tact) for yourself. Charmed by the Doctor, Vicki has started to bond with Ian and Barbara, so they start to exchange confidences: Vicki about her loneliness, and the two teachers about their travels. Ian tells Vicki that their spaceship travels through time as well. Barbara tells her that they left in 1963, instantly regretting it.

“1963! But that means you’re about – five hundred and fifty years old!”
“Well, yes, I – I suppose I am. Yes, it’s a way of looking at it, but I’ll try not to look at it too often.”

The camera lingers first on Vicki calculating, then Barbara trying not to look monstrously offended – in the fragile moment of still feeling very in the wrong just after Vicki’s forgiven her – while Ian covers his mouth and chokes with laughter in the background. And all neatly reintroducing the series’ concepts, and letting the viewer go, ‘Hang on – no – that’s not right – let me work it out…’ while Babs is writhing in embarrassment and elbowing her long-term companion in the ribs, before Vicki drops another clanger on the audience, too:

“They didn’t have time machines in 1963. They didn’t know anything then.”

The same conversation gets one of my favourite moments in the book, similarly making us think:

“‘Oh, come on, you’re imagining things, Barbara Wright,’ Ian laughed. ‘You’re as bad as that awful little Tracey Pollock in 3B!’
‘Tracey Pollock . . .’ Barbara murmured. Coal Hill School suddenly seemed a million miles away. In fact it was a great deal further and long since buried beneath the Metropolitan Disposal Plant.”

8 – The double (or single) entendre. Ian Chesterton at one point calls the villain “Cocky-lickin’”. I suspect it’s only that William Russell seems so sober and respectable and that Ian is written as the most reassuringly ‘straight’ of all the Doctor’s companions that he ever got away with it. It’s almost as bare-faced as one of the stories in the first ever Dr Who Annual, published the same year, being titled The Fishmen of Kandalinga. In later years, The Rescue was described by one infamous guidebook as being set on the planet “Dildo”, which I knew people were finding funny some time before I understood why. But it’s Ian Marter’s novelisation that’s mostly likely to make you blink. It was the book he was writing just before his untimely death, and I can’t help but wonder if he inserted some passages as a gag, expecting his editor to take them out, and then the editor didn’t want to change any of his last book. Right on the first page, a character sniggers at the script’s time-reading of “sixty-nine” flying hours until they reach Dido, which was so blatant that I spotted it even as a surprisingly innocent teenager, while in Chapter 5 there’s so much manipulating of oily, lubed rings that when I re-read the novel later in life I read it back again to be sure those were really the words.


9 – A very Doctor Who moral: don’t judge by appearances. The Doctor and Ian struggle to avoid a howling Sand Beast at the cliffhanger (both episodes end with pretty much literal cliffhangers). We see a Sand Beast staring at Vicki with its big shining eyes on stalks as she innocently goes about finding shrubs to eat, then lumbering forward. And Barbara sees that too. So she seizes the crashed ship’s flare gun and runs out of the wreck to blast it in the head (which Ian Marter’s novelisation describes tastefully as a “smouldering toffee-like blob”, after cheating rather in the build-up). Its keening death wail is rather distressing for the viewer, but worse for Vicki: “Sandy” was herbivorous and her only comfort as a pet, and now this becardiganed murderer has killed him! Alien-looking doesn’t mean nasty, human-looking doesn’t mean nice, Barbara and Vicki between them have to learn both lessons, then poor Vicki is slowly brought to understand and forgive her by the Doctor listening to and trusting the orphan.


10 – The two-faced guardian. And finally, the big twist. The Rescue is sometimes described as a whodunit, but of course the point is that it only becomes that once you know who’s done it. You don’t even think of it like that when you can see the monster Koquillion played, as always, by a man in a monster suit all the way through. The glowering Victorian authority figure, the only other survivor after the wicked alien natives killed all the crew at a feast of welcome – but somehow managed to kill all their own people in the explosion too – had murdered a crew member on the voyage and everything else was his attempt to rescue himself. Vicki was ill in her cabin and didn’t know, so he dressed in Didoi robes made from local animal skulls to menace her as Koquillion, personification and maligner of the beastly natives, setting her up as witness to Dido’s cruel, murderous and conveniently unable to answer back inhabitants for when a ship arrives from Earth to rescue them both. It’s an entertaining dual performance from Ray Barrett – double-credited behind a portmanteau pseudonym of Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson, two of Doctor Who’s co-creators – though outshone by William Hartnell. The Doctor’s been enchanting right through the story – but now he sits like a marble statue in the Hall of Judgment of a slaughtered people to wait for the killer. And while the murderer made me think of Dickens throughout, the Doctor’s intellect and the plot he unmasks reminds me of Conan Doyle’s The Norwood Builder.

There are few scenes in Doctor Who that make me sit up and pay attention so keenly as when the Doctor, eyes racing but not turning as Koquillion enters the Hall, calls for him to come in. The atmosphere’s already electric, and then – casually, conversationally, because both of them know, so there’s no need to announce it, and because that way the audience is all the more likely to go ‘What? What did he say?’ – the Doctor informs him by his real name that such robes are only for absolutely ceremonial occasions. And from then on everything about the scene is relentless.

The Doctor doesn’t shrink from the ‘alien’, but he backs away as something far more sinister – an evil man – closes in on him. A betrayer, a cruel tormenter, a genocidal mass murderer, a rotten heart of darkness. Though ironically the man in a monster suit looks far more effective than the monster of the week, fans have often speculated why, in a later story, the Doctor’s visions of past monsters as part of his inner fears should include an image of Koquillion, because he wasn’t even a monster. I wonder if they’ve ever watched it.

What Else Should I Tell You About The Rescue?

I’ve always thought The Rescue a lovely little story, not one I’d put in my ‘best of’ countdowns but played, written and directed so neatly that I can’t help enjoying myself. It was only the second William Hartnell story I ever saw – brought along by an older friend to a bootleg showing by some university club in Manchester – and it opened my eyes to how endearing a character he was. I still remember falling in love with his comedy scenes at the start, and his shy delight on overhearing Vicki talking about him. There are a couple of moments that don’t work – a monster that tries to break up the human form and really doesn’t succeed, and the Didoi being defined as another ‘Planet of the Hats’ people who all think the same way – but it’s a neatly-formed story, well-told, and gently relaunches the Doctor and the series while handling its first big change, all at the length of a modern Doctor Who episode, a rarity in the Sixties. You can buy it in a double-DVD set with the more comedy-toned The Romans which I’ve heard called, but which you sadly won’t find labelled as, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vicki’.

Ian Marter’s novelisation has a very different flavour to the TV version – where 1965’s The Rescue is a small-scale story with an innocence that’s marred by one terrible betrayal, 1987’s reworking takes place in a much more cynical universe and expands the action considerably. The rescue ship is very of its time, going from an occasional voice on the radio to scenes on an explicitly American spacecraft – a “heap of Reaganium” – whose crew are shaken by the TARDIS and snap, “Don’t press my button!” It all makes the subtext of the damage done by ‘settlers’ to Native Americans much more the text, linking it to gung-ho ’80s US military clichés and, with the author seizing on the original serial’s New Year broadcast dates, giving a bitter festive commentary on the show’s hopeful ending. Not all the humour is so black – the Tracey Pollock moment always makes me smile, and the Doctor gets several new entertaining lines, particularly an incisively bitchy comment on the villain’s story and at the TARDIS’ next destination – while Dido is given a feel of ruined grandeur and horror at the end of a civilisation well beyond the TV’s budget. The science is rather dodgy, but the main flaw for me is that the structure falls down badly in the second half; as with the innuendos, I suspect Target Books’ editor didn’t want to alter the text of Ian Marter’s final book, but when the story comes to a head and the climax is then deferred for forty pages of sub-sub-Tolkien ruins and giant beasties, it could have done with another draft. You can buy it on audiobook, read by Maureen O’Brien in a warm, intimate style, with a vulnerable Vicki and an endearingly querulous Doctor.

And, if you need one, my score:
7/10

If You Like The Rescue, Why Not Try…

The Evil of the Daleks, utterly marvellous, another script from David Whitaker, introducing the exemplar of the companion as Victorian orphan innocent of her sinister sort-of-guardian (though sadly mostly burned by the BBC). Voyage of the Damned, another Christmas hangover with an ill-fated ship and a blatant companion audition piece, with a twist. The Ambassadors of Death, another tale of aliens who aren’t really hostile being used as cover by scheming humans. Dragonfire, a refreshing change to the timid Victorian orphan companion trope and another fearsome monster concealing something unexpected. But I’m in the mood for another short one…

The Sontaran Experiment. Another brisk two-part story set on a rocky wasteland of a world where the population’s extinct – or is it? – and we meet the survivors of a destroyed spaceship, one of whom is not what they seem, all of which is later greatly extended by an Ian Marter novelisation.

Meanwhile, On the Other Side…

Richard is watching… Black Orchid. A carefree social whirl until the murders start popping out of the woodwork. Then it’s all secrets and masks and betraying guardians.

Next Time…

Through illness and other impediments I’ve fallen so far behind now that it depends on which angle I next attempt to climb the mountain. But next time in the original plan, whenever in the future this particular story might emerge, features another new companion who is caught up in a whodunit that’s not really a whodunit and finds both that humans can be more alienating than the aliens and that stepping on board the TARDIS and leaving it all behind was only the start of her problems.

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January 27th, 2016: DID YOU KNOW: if you're topless right now, I can fix that?? – Ryan

So I was reading this dismaying post from Tracy Moody — “The Most Disturbing Messages From Christians Found on the #ThingsTheGodlySay Hashtag,” which is just what it says on the cover — and thus I was trying to remember the name of that infernal doctrine that the saints in Heaven will watch, and rejoice in, the eternal torment of the sinners in Hell. But I couldn’t remember the name  of the idea, only that it’s an appropriately awful, gloriously pious euphemism for the most despicable, venal sentiment imaginable.

[Here is where I will update this post with that name I can't remember after some of you brilliant folks remind me of it in the comment section. It's _____________________. Thank you.]

The inability to remember this sent me deep down a Google hole. Alps on alps arose and I wound up losing an hour reading all sorts of wretched things from folks like Tertullian and Jonathan Edwards. And all of that led me, somehow, to a strange, unsourced, curious theory about Edwards’ most famous sermon and the so-called Conspiracy of 1741.

So first we’re going to have to talk about the New York Conspiracy of 1741. This may have been a slave revolt. Probably not, though. It seems it was probably just a white mass hysteria sparked by the fear of a slave revolt. Our history of this event is a bit like the history of the Salem witch trials. All we have to go on are court records from the many trials and proceedings, and all those records really show us is how appallingly flimsy the supposed evidence is that anything happened at all and how eager the public seems to have been, despite that, to see lots and lots of people hanged and burned and gibbeted.

What happened was a series of fires in lower Manhattan in the spring of 1741 — a not altogether unusual thing in a city of wooden buildings heated by fire. A slave was seen fleeing one of those fires. That might simply have been the perfectly sensible act of someone who didn’t want to be trapped in a burning building, but it was interpreted as evidence that he had helped to set it and, probably also, that there was a massive conspiracy of slaves and Jesuits plotting the overthrow and destruction of the city. (New York, at the time, was a city of about 20,000 people, 2,000 of whom were enslaved.) PBS’ Africans in America series describes this as a Witchhunt in New York:

The government, in an attempt to expose the culprits, offered a handsome reward and, if necessary, a pardon to anyone who would name names. Authorities questioned Mary Burton, a 16-year-old white indentured servant (a servant contracted to work for a set amount of time). Promised her freedom and 100 [pounds], she revealed the plans of a vast conspiracy to burn down the city and kill whites. She pointed the finger at John Hughson, the owner of the tavern where she worked, Hughson’s wife, as well as two slaves and a prostitute who were regulars at the tavern. They were all tried by the New York Supreme Court. All denied knowing anything about the conspiracy. All were hanged.

The accusations continued. Authorities were particularly suspicious of persons with ties to the Spanish colonies or to the Catholic Church, for Protestant England was at war with Catholic Spain at the time. Five Spanish Negroes were implicated, convicted and hanged. A white teacher named John Ury was suspected of being a Jesuit priest in disquise and the instigator of the uprising. Mary Burton confirmed this. He was hanged. The list goes on.

The “witchhunt” ended when Mary began to accuse wealthy, prominent New York citizens. She was then granted her freedom and given her 100 [pound] reward.

Eighteen black [people] had been hanged. Thirteen had been burned to death. More than 70 had been deported [to slave plantations in the Caribbean].

The first hangings in response to this mass hysteria took place on May 2. The executions, public hangings and burnings at the stake continued until the end of August.

I never learned about any of this in school. I’d never heard of this at all until I spent part of a snowy weekend chasing a string of links that started with the depraved delight of some theologians and led me, circuitously, to an odd little anonymous website about the local history of Brattleboro, Vermont,* and an amateur historian’s confidently speculative unsigned essay about two significant events that took place far from there in the year of 1741.

The first of these events was the New York Conspiracy of 1741. The second was Jonathan Edwards’ preaching of his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The latter was something I learned about in school. Edwards’ sermon is excerpted and anthologized in many American history texts as an example of the sort of 18th-century revivalist sermons that helped to spread the Great Awakening. (It’s a pretty poor example of that, actually, since Edwards’ Calvinism prevented him from offering any sort of altar call or suggesting that his audience had any recourse for escaping the damnation they deserved.) The sermon also appears in most American literature anthologies because, well, they’re desperate to collect any scrap of anything that was written down before 1800.

Our friend from Brattleboro starts with a couple of facts in evidence. First, several historians have argued that Edwards’ sermon fits the rhetorical model of the American “execution sermon.” That, unpleasantly, is an actual genre of literature. Execution sermons were a thing that preachers in Edwards’ day sometimes preached, delivered to a full congregation with the condemned seated right up front. And they tended to hit many of the same themes that Edwards hit, hard, in his famous sermon. The theory that “Sinners …” was an execution sermon is still just a theory, supported by the style and content of the sermon, but — as far as I can tell — not yet supported by further evidence or reports on the occasion of Edwards’ composing and delivering it.

The second fact that our Green Mountain essayist rightly notes is that Edwards delivered this famous sermon on July 8, 1741 – right in the middle of the panic surrounding the supposed conspiracy in New York City.

Alas, this second fact leads our friend to make what seems to me to be an unfounded leap — that Edwards’ sermon is a response to, and an example of, the hysteria that was sweeping New York, and that it was intended to address that situation directly. That’s a fascinating claim — intriguing enough that it sent me on another long Google chase. Yet I haven’t found anything, anywhere, to support the assertion this essay makes of a direct connection.

The essay includes some factual claims that are almost certainly wrong. It never quite contends with the distances involved — Edwards was preaching in Enfield, Connecticut, more than 130 miles from New York in an age when that was a formidable distance. And it fails to offer any supporting evidence from Edwards’ own writing, or from other contemporary accounts.

So, despite our friend’s confident tone, I can’t endorse their theory. I don’t see any evidence to support the idea that Edwards’ New England sermon is, in any way, directly related to the events then unfolding in Manhattan.

And yet.

That second fact above remains a fact — a vitally important fact that I’ve never previously encountered in any of the many, many discussions I’ve read of Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And while there’s nothing to suggest that Edwards was directly affected by the hysteria in New York, news of it had reached New England, where slave-owning white people like Edwards himself were unsettled by the prospect of slave revolts.

The theory argued by our friend at Brattleborohistory.com is riddled with errors, unsupported by the evidence, and almost certainly very wrong. But it’s also certainly less wrong than every other thing I’ve ever read about Jonathan Edwards and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Because every other thing I’ve read about that famous pastor’s famous sermon approaches it from the pretense that it is insignificant and not worth mentioning that this is the sermon of a slave-owner delivered at a time when the northern colonies were gripped with the fear of slave revolts. And the contention that none of that had any influence on Edwards, on Edwards’ theology, or on his composition and delivery of this particular sermon, is more outlandishly absurd and patently false than anything suggested in that unreliable essay.

Anyway, I still can’t remember the name of that odious theological theory about the saints in Heaven delighting in the spectacle of sinners suffering in Hell. Help me out with that.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* While I can’t agree with the thesis of the site’s essay on Edwards’ sermon, I do commend the rest of the site for its terrific collection of early photographs of Brattleboro, which is a charming place with a Main Street that Hollywood location scouts really need to see.

Abe Vigoda, best known for his roles in The Godfather and on Barney Miller, has died at the age of 94. We haven't done it lately but we'd been monitoring his alive/dead status at this website which now has the sad news.

I don't have a lot to say about Mr. Vigoda. When I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter back in the seventies, we shared studio space for a time with Fish, the spin-off series from Barney Miller, so I saw him a lot. The first time we were introduced, I thought he'd be impressed or interested that I knew he had a brother, Bill Vigoda, who'd drawn Archie comic books. I was wrong. Abe didn't care. I'm not sure if he didn't care about his brother or he didn't care that I knew that but he didn't care.

I didn't talk to him much after that.

Not long before that, I sat next to him at an industry screening of the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This was before it was released to the general public and many folks involved in the making of the film were present including Mr. Spielberg. Mr. Vigoda did not like or understand the movie and throughout, he kept muttering aloud — in that crotchety, expressive voice of his — little things like, "What the hell is that?" and "Why is he doing that?" It was very much like the Mel Brooks short, The Critic, and it had me and everyone around us laughing out loud. I wondered how Spielberg reacted to this little pocket of the audience that was guffawing during non-humorous scenes.

I think the last time I spoke with Abe was because of my friend, Howard Morris. Abe and Howie occasionally toured in The Sunshine Boys, with Abe playing the Jack Albertson/Walter Matthau role and Howie as the other guy, plus Howie directed. They were booked for another tour and then Abe changed his mind and bowed out. Howie took me along to a lunch with Abe (and other actors in the same age group) and while the lunch was purely social, he did hope to persuade Vigoda to change his mind. Howie needed the work and if Abe didn't reconsider, Howie would either lose the job or have to do it with an actor he utterly despised but who was liked by the tour organizers.

He was unable to persuade Abe to rescind his decision. Howie made his case and then Abe folded his arms and said with great finality, "I'm too old to do something I don't want to do." And that, by God, was that. This occurred at least twenty years ago so I'm guessing that thereafter, Abe did absolutely nothing he didn't want to do, except maybe leave us.

Funny man. Good actor.

The post Abe Vigoda, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

You may have seen the front page lead of today's Guardian: a deeply worrying story about a sudden spike in the number of mental health patients dying unexpectedly in NHS care.

It was based on figures obtained by the former health minister Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk.

The Guardian quoted Norman's comment on the figures:

"Significant numbers of unexpected deaths at the Mid Staffs NHS trust caused an outcry and these figures should cause the same because they show a dramatic increase in the number of people losing their lives,” Lamb said. 

“NHS England and the government should set up an investigation into the causes of this as these figures involve tragedies for families around the country and the human impact is intense.” 

Underfunding of sometimes threadbare mental health services which are struggling to cope with rising demand for care is to blame, Lamb claimed.

One of the best things about politics since 2010 has been the new importance given to questions of mental health. This was exemplified by the 2012 debate in which MPs from both sides of the Commons spoke about their own experience of mental health problems.

So how did Luciana Berger, Labour's shadow mental health minister, respond to Norman Lamb's comments?

Let me show you:

.@normanlamb until 8 months ago u were the Minister for #mentalhealth. What did you do about this during ur 2.5yrs? pic.twitter.com/G4fFEF8vkV

— Luciana Berger (@lucianaberger) January 25, 2016

Why did Berger break from the cross-party approach to mental health?

It is certainly not because she is a wild left-winger.

Though, as the great niece of Manny Shinwell, she has some claim to come from the working-class aristocracy, she comes from an affluent background. She attended the private Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls (current fees £15,516 per annum).

When she was parachuted into the Liverpool Wavertree constituency just before the 2010 election she soon became a controversial figure. She was seen as a Blairite, not least because of her friendship with Euan Blair.

But being a Blairite won't do her any favours now. Not with boundary changes in the air and threats of deselection coming from Corbyn loyalists. Certainly not on Merseyside.

Hence the stupid, partisan tweet we see above.

I am sure Berger is intelligent enough to realise that this approach will alienate the moderate voters Labour needs to win over to have any hope of winning the next election.

But she is trapped. And her fellow moderate Labour MPs are trapped too until they see the opportunity and summon the courage to depose Jeremy Corbyn and his strange inner circle of Trots and Stalinists.

Yesterday brought the sad news that Marvin Minsky passed away at age 88.  I never met Minsky (I wish I had); I just had one email exchange with him back in 2002, about Stephen Wolfram’s book.  But Minsky was my academic great-grandfather (through Manuel Blum and Umesh Vazirani), and he influenced me in many other ways.  For example, in his and Papert’s 1968 book Perceptrons—notorious for “killing neural net research for a decade,” because of its mis- or over-interpreted theorems about the representational limitations of single-layer neural nets—the way Minsky and Papert proved those theorems was by translating questions about computation into questions about the existence or nonexistence of low-degree polynomials with various properties, and then answering the latter questions using MATH.  Their “polynomial method” is now a mainstay of quantum algorithms research (having been brought to the subject by Beals et al.), and in particular, has been a mainstay of my own career.  Hardly Minsky’s best-known contribution to human knowledge, but that even such a relatively minor part of his oeuvre could have legs half a century later is a testament to his impact.

I’m sure readers will have other thoughts to share about Minsky, so please do so in the comments section.  Personal reminiscences are especially welcome.

Yes yes I know
You are all itching for the next installment of Moby Dong
but right now I gotta take a quick break
and tell you a tale
from a mythos hand-selected by my patreon backers.
Don’t like it?
FUCKING SIGN UP FOR MY PATREON AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Anyway yeah it’s Lovecraft time

I WASN’T ALWAYS A WEALTHY INTERNET CONTENT CREATOR, FRIENDS
many years ago I was a surveyor
I lived in Boston and I went around and surveyed shit
and this one time I had to go to this little village
near a town called Arkham
to plot out where to put a new reservoir
my job was very boring
this is one of the reasons I quit.

Another of the reasons I quit is that fuck Arkham
seriously, holy shit, never go to this place
bad shit happens there ALL THE TIME
like, example
this little village I had to go to
right over the hill from Arkham proper
was totally abandoned and spooky as fuck
it was abandoned, according to locals
because it was FUCKING CURSED
different people had tried to live there for a while
but it was too god damn spooky so they all left

Now, I figured this was bullshit
curses are bullshit
what am I,
a character in a short story written by a demented racist?
HAH
but it turns out this isn’t some ancient rumor about this place
turns out it got cursed in like
THE 80s
and in the center of this spooky god damn ghost town
is this huge chunk of gray-ass land with nothing on it
just dusty bullshit for like six acres
and a gross well
it’s super easy to survey, which is nice.

So obviously I have to check out these rumors
I don’t want my bosses building a reservoir on like
an ancient indian burial ground or something
nobody wants to drink ghosts
not even diluted ghosts
no ghosts are the kind of ghost I would want to drink
so I hit up basically the only dude crazy enough to still live here
this old dude named Ammi
like I said, he was the only dude still there
so I couldn’t pick someone with a less dumb name to talk to

Ammi’s like 80
so he was around for all the shit that happened 36 years ago
and according to him
it all started with
A METEOR
that landed on this dude Nahum Gardner’s farm
but this meteor didn’t wipe out all the dinosaurs
OR contain a baby superman
it just glowed faintly and shrank and was hot
so Nahum and his fam did what you normally do with shit like this:
they called some scientists
and the scientists did what they normally do in stories like this:
they were fucking useless
they bit off a chunk of this gooey rock
they bathed it in acid
they looked at it under a spectroscope
which showed them a color THEY HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE
and so were TOTALLY UNABLE TO DESCRIBE
like, did it not have a wavelength frequency?
How were these scientists content with “oh
we found a new color
nobody knows what it is”
WHERE IS THE FUCKING MATH ON THIS COLOR IS WHAT I’M SAYING

anyway
their sample shrinks and burns up their glassware and vanishes
so they have to go back to the farm to get more
and when they pry off a bigger chunk
they find this glass-type globe embedded in there
THE SAME INDESCRIBABLE COLOR AS THAT SPECTROGRAPH FROM BEFORE
so they do science to it
by which I mean some dude hits it with a hammer and it shatters
and they take no readings or analyze it in ANY WAY
and then they leave with their new rock chunk
and that night lightning strikes the meteor SIX TIMES
and then in the morning it’s gone
and the scientists continue to learn nothing
the end

OH WAIT NOT THE END
it looks like that meteor did something to the soil
because now Nahum Gardner’s trees are all fruiting
and the fruit is HUGE
which would be awesome if it didn’t all taste EVIL
INDESCRIBABLY EVIL

Oh and then it’s winter and his cabbages come in
and THEY’RE EVIL TOO
they’re HUGE and they are this INDESCRIBABLE color
(are you noticing a theme here?
I’m not sure this color is all that alien
I think everybody in this village is just terrible with words)

also all the little woodland creatures start mutating
their features and movements are all wrong
in a way no one can exactly put their finger on
and in the summer the farm swarms with insects
but these aren’t NORMAL insects
NO
they’re … different
… somehow

Some shit is pretty easy to describe though
like the fact that all the plants now GLOW IN THE DARK
or that the trees move even when there is NO WIND
(WHAT DO I KEEP TELLING YOU ABOUT TREES)
And then the plants start turning grey and crumbling to dust
and then the animals start turning grey and crumbling to dust
and the whole time Ammi keeps visiting
and being like “Yo maybe you should move
or maybe like at least stop drinking from your well
you know
your well that is clearly evil?”
But then instead of moving away
Nahum’s wife goes crazy
so he locks her in the attic
and then one of his sons goes crazy
so he locks him in the attic too
then the well sets another one of his sons on fire
so he’s down to one son
but then I guess the well eats that one too
but it’s cool because Nahum thinks he’s still alive
because Nahum crazy too now

this is around when Ammi shows up
like “hey I brought some groceries and some OH FUCK”
and Nahum is like “Sup Ammi come chill with me by the fire”
and Ammi is like “Dude there is no fire your house is haunted
your house may actually just be a ghost at this point.
Gonna go upstairs because you probably forgot to feed your wife”
(oh yeah the first crazy son is also dead now)
so Ammi goes up to the wife’s room
and he opens the door and a vapor that is CLEARLY A GHOST comes out
but he’s too busy freaking out about the wife
who has decayed into grey dust
but is STILL MOVING.
Now, Ammi didn’t tell me this straight out
but I’m PRETTY SURE he beat Nahum’s wife to death
it was the right thing to do.

So by now Ammi’s freaking out obviously
he heads downstairs and Nahum is suddenly decayed as fuck too
and he’s like “AMMI IT WAS THE METEOR
THE METEOR POISONED THE WATER AND KILLED MY KIDS”
and Ammi is like “Yes, obviously
I have been telling you not to drink the water or live here
you are an idiot made of grey dust goodbye”
then he goes and gets the police
who insist on draining the evil well
and there’s dead bodies in there because what did you expect
or at least dead skeletons
and then all of a sudden the whole house starts glowing
and light starts shooting out of the well
IN A COLOR WHICH, EVEN NOW, NO ONE CAN IDENTIFY
YOU WOULD THINK THEY WOULD HAVE AT LEAST COME UP WITH A WORD FOR IT
OH WELL
anyway everybody runs away
and the trees all start raving pretty hard
and then the color goes to space
so this whole time
it was just a weird color that wanted to go to space
and murdered an entire family in the process
but some of it probably stayed in the well
which is why nothing grows in that big plot of land now
it’s all just grey dust
and a well
and the greyness might be growing like an inch a year too
who knows?

I sure as fuck don’t know
I don’t want to know anything more about this nightmare farm
as soon as Ammi was finished with his story
I went right back to Boston and quit my job
because fuck me if I’m working for a company
that wants to build a reservoir on top of SPACE GHOSTS.

The moral of the story I think
is that the middle of an unprecedented alien crisis
is the WORST time to abandon the scientific method.

The end.

In 2014 for the 1939 Retro Hugos, we did not have a Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category because there were not enough nominations to make the category viable. (I confess I had not heard of most of the possible nominees.) The Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category included four Orson Welles radio plays and a TV adaptation of R.U.R. (which cannot have been seen by very many of those nominating). The War of the Worlds scored a crushing victory, with 813 first preference votes out of 1058. But there was no cinematic representation on the final ballot - The Brave Little Tailor missed being a finalist by a single vote, and Porky in Wackyland by two.

This year it's a different matter. There are a number of viable and interesting films which could be considered by voters for the 1941 Retro Hugos. The big problem is that most of them are less than 90 minutes, which is the current boundary between the Short Form and Long Form categories. There is wiggle room of 20% either way; a lot of them could be shifted to Long Form as they are 72 minutes or more in length; or alternatively, all but Fantasia and the serials could be classed as Short Form, being less than 108 minutes in length. I guess this year's Hugo administrators will decide pragmatically, on the pattern of nominations. (We won't have this particular problem next year - there will be no Retro Hugos for 1942 because there was no Worldcon in that year.)

Steve Davidson has done us all a service by listing some potential nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation from 1940, here and here. I've been doing a little browsing and have adapted his list, in order of popularity on IMDB, as follows:


Pinocchio - Wikipedia; IMDB; When You Wish Upon A Star. I'm surprised to see this ranked quite so high - I am not sure that I ever saw it all the way through. Anyway it seems that we will soon have a live action version from Disney to compare it with. A shade under 90 mins but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

Fantasia - Wikipedia; IMDB; Beethoven performed by winged horses

This has my vote. It's extraordinarily ambitious for its time, and full of myth and fantasy. At 125 mins, the only single-shot cinema release on this list that is too long to be put in Short Form.

The Thief of Bagdad - Wikipedia; IMDB; Mary Morris is a six-armed robot:

I saw the 1978 version in the cinema when it came out - looks like I have missed a treat with the 1940 version.

Dr. Cyclops - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Mad scientist miniaturises visitors to his radium mine. According to John Brosnan (quoted in Wikipedia): "It's a fast-paced, inventive film though the dialogue is awful and the acting is undistinguished with the exception of Albert Dekker's portrayal of Dr Thorkel." Only 77 minutes but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

The Blue Bird - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Shirley Temple plays a little girl who goes on a fantasy dream journey in search of the Blue Buird of Happiness, based on L'Oiseau bleu by Belgian Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck. Patriotic fervour may move me to watch this. (Steve Davidson missed it in his list.) A shade under 90 mins but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

One Million B.C. - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

I'm familiar with the 1966 remake starring Raquel Welch; I'm not sure I need to familiarise myself with this one. 80 minutes but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

The Ghost Breakers - Wikipedia; IMDB; trailer:

Stars Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard; it's not clear to me that the ghost and zombie are "real"; maybe I'd better watch it and find out? 85 minutes but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

Beyond Tomorrow - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Three ghosts help two young lovers who they knew in life. (Steve Davidson missed this one too.) 84 minutes but clearly belongs in Long Form if that's the way the administrators decide to go.

The Mummy’s Hand - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full; trailer:

Actually recycles bits of the 1932 film The Mummy which it basically rips off. Only 67 minutes, so below the 72-minute cutoff of Long Form eligibility.

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full starting with first episode:

Steve Davidson lists this in Short Form; it's pretty clear to me that the whole 12 episodes should be considered as a potential single Long Form finalist, at 220 mins in length, which is less than some recent winners.

The Invisible Man Returns - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Not in fact a sequel to the 1933 Claude Rains The Invisible Man, but using (obviously) the same core idea, in Vincent Price's first horror role. I will check this one out. 81 minutes but clearly belongs in Long Form.

The Invisible Woman - Wikipedia; IMDB; trailer:

Same again, but played as comedy with an obvious twist in the lead character. 72 minutes, so Long Form / Short Form eligibility in question.

The Green Hornet - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Another serial listed by Steve Davidson in Short Form, but which clearly should be considered as a potential Long Form nominee for all 258 minutes. However, I'm not convinced that it has sfnal content.

Black Friday - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Brain transplant film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Only 70 minutes, so below the 72-minute cutoff of Long Form eligibility.

The Fatal Hour - Wikipedia; IMDB
Listed by Steve Davidson, but I don't see any evidence that it is sfnal (even though it stars Boris Karloff).

The Ape - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

Stars Boris Karloff as a kindly mad scientist whose attempt to cure a young woman with an ape's spinal fluid goes horribly wrong. At only 62 minutes, it would surely fall into the Short Form category.

Doomed to Die - Wikipedia; IMDB
Sequel to The Fatal Hour; again, it's listed by Steve Davidson, but I don't see any evidence that it is sfnal (even though it also stars Boris Karloff).

Before I Hang - Wikipedia; IMDB; trailer:

Another Boris Karloff film, in which he plays a doctor facing execution for murder who secretly tries an experimental serum on himself, with unexpected results. At only 62 minutes, it would surely fall into the Short Form category.

Mysterious Doctor Satan - Wikipedia; IMDB;

Mysterious Doctor Satan Part1 Return of the...
Another serial, this one originally intended to be a Superman series until rights issues scuppered that plan; mysterious hero The Copperhead prevents Doctor Satan from taking over America.

Son of Ingagi - Wikipedia; IMDB; in full:

The first science fiction-horror film to feature an all-black cast. Once again, only 70 minutes, so below the 72-minute cutoff.

Weltraumschiff 1 startet (Spaceship 1 is launched) - German Wikipedia; IMDB (with incorrect date of 1937); in full, with English subtitles:

This is definitely from 1940, not 1937 as some sources say; there is a good article about it here; basically it was patched together from two shorter films which were not completed. It's also completely untrue to suggest (as Davidson does) that it's a Nazi propaganda film; it's simple sensawunda space travel stuff, only in German, with some excellent special effects of the rocket taking off and circling the moon. This and Flash Gordon appear to be the only things on this list with actual spaceships. However, at only 23 minutes, it clearly belongs in the Short Form rather than Long Form category.

As you know, Bob, online links to full-length films tend to have a short lifespan. I'd recommend that you have a quick look at these now, and ensure that you are able to watch the ones that interest you at your leisure. I'd be surprised if we are not able to fill out both categories of Best Dramatic Presentation this year. If you are a member of last year's Sasquan, this year's MidAmeriCon II, or next year's Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, you can nominate as long as you join by 31 January, which is a week from today; Worldcon 75's rates go up from that day too, so what are you waiting for?

[View in black-and-white]

I.

The US has at least two different systems of what gets termed "socioeconomic class". They are everywhere conflated, and this is bad.

Two of them I will term economic class and social class.

Economic class refers to money. It refers to the wealth or poverty of a person, and to the privileges they do or do not have because of their economic might or lack thereof.

Social class is what is being referred to by such terms as "middle class", "working class", "white collar", "professional", "blue collar", and the pejoratives "white trash" and "townie".

It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class. But what what differentiates, say, the middle class from the working class is not mere wealth or earning power; as we all know, a plumber (presumed working class) may make much more money than a professor (presumed professional).

To use myself as an illustration: I make very little money, so I am heir to the misfortunes that disproportionately impact the impecunious – the almost-certain forthcoming hike in T fares looms large in my anxieties right now – but I am a professional with an advanced degree and possession of the shibboleths of the professional class. I didn't stop being in the social class I had been in when I dropped to a much lower economic class. The privileges I lost were only those attendant to economic might; I retained the privileges of social position.

So, for instance, if I don't like the medical care I get from the doctors my state-subsidized health plan (thanks, Mitt!) gives me access to, I can't just whip out my checkbook and buy myself care from a better reputed specialist. Being poor might yet shorten my lifespan, as it curtails my access to care. But on the other hand, if I present with a serious booboo to just about any doctor, I will have narcotic pain relief offered me with no questions asked, because someone of my social class is not suspected of being one of those naughty "med-seeking" addicts. The decision of whether or not to trust me with a prescription for percoset is not made on the basis of the MassHealth card in my pocket marking me one of the precariat, but my hair style, my sense of fashion, my (lack of) make-up, my accent, my vocabulary, my body language, my (apparent) girth, my profession (which, note, doctors often ask as part of intake), and all the other things which locate me in a social class to observers that know the code. Contrariwise, a patient of mine – who is a white woman of almost my age – who is covered with tattoos, speaks with an Eastie accent, is over 200lbs, and wears spandex and bling and heavy make-up, gets screamed at by an ER nurse for med-seeking when she hadn't asked for medication at all, and just wanted an x-ray for an old bone-break she was frighted she had reinjured in a fall.

A common point of confusion is in how the two relate. Some people might think they are the same thing because many of the things that indicate social status cost money, and are therefore are less available to people of lower economic class. Or to put it more precisely, your economic class mediates your opportunities to perform social classes. College educations don't grow on trees, yo.

Mediates, yes, but does not determine. Just because your economic class is high enough to afford certain signs of a higher social class doesn't mean you will choose to spend your money on them; indeed you might prefer to spend your disposable income on the indicators of the class you're already in – encrusting something in Swarovski crystals doesn't make it higher class, just more expensive. And conversely there is much in class signaling which is not expensive or is free. I have spent less on my clothes in thrift stores than my working-class clients have in department stores. When I need to dress-to-dominate, I wear a lovely plum-colored blazer I picked up for, IIRC, $20. I'm pretty sure none of my working-class female patients have ever bought a blazer; I suspect none have ever shopped for one. Why would they?

And there is another way economic and social class relate. The privileges of social class can be worth cold, hard cash; you can make bank on conforming to the norms of privileged social classes. The secretary that has the "professional" appearance has a better shot at the promotion to "senior executive assistant" than her peer whose blue-collar roots show, quite aside from her actual work skills. The small business owner who appears "businesslike" has a better chance of getting a loan out of a banker than someone who seems like a tradesman. In this way performing social class can elevate one's economic class.

Thus social class and economic class are not identical, they are intersectional. They relate and they mediate one another, but they are not the same thing.

II.

The difference between economic and social class is pretty obvious looked at this way, but there is a huge social pressure to conflate them.

It has long been commented (e.g. Fussell, Class) that discussing class is basically taboo in American culture: but, specifically, the class which it is taboo to discuss is social class. This presents a problem for Americans because social class is a real phenomenon, an important phenomenon around which huge amounts of American policy, politics, and culture organizes. It's the elephant in the American living room.

Social class is taboo to discuss, but economic class is not, and that presents an obvious "solution": Americans conflate social and economic class so they can talk about social class under the guise of talking about economic class.

This rhetorical substitution of economic class for social class has a particular virtue for people in more privileged social classes: it allows them to discuss the lack of privileges of the lower classes in a way that holds them blameless of bigotry. So it is okay – preferred, even – to discuss the difficulty of the poor to become non-poor due to lack of resources: how terrible it is that the poor are thwarted in their efforts to improve their employment by not having the money for interview clothing, for transit to better jobs, for qualifying education or training. Real problems all – but also handy substitutes for discussing the much, much more uncomfortable topics of discrimination against job applicants and promotion candidates for having an accent, a hair-do, a sense of style, an address on one's resume that is lower-class.

Another way we substitute economic class for social class is in the "polite" – i.e. euphemistic – terms we use for referring to social classes, terms which allude to type of work or educational attainment as the organizing principles of social class. That's what we're doing – and what I did above – when we use terms like "white collar" and "blue collar" and "professional" and "service-industry worker" and "college-educated". These are not worthless terms, but they are not actually the same thing as social class. We just use them as if they were. Two baristas stand at an espresso machine, pulling drinks for identical wages: for one, this is a day job while she pursues her singer-songwriter career while living out of her lover's condo on Beacon Hill; the other is working two jobs to support three children in an illegal apartment in the basement of an Everett triple-decker. These two women are both "service-industry workers", but if they turn out to have two different social classes, would this be a surprise?

The graduate school I went to has a mission to bring educational opportunities to those who have been historically denied them. It does a pretty good job of that. Consequently, a lot of my classmates were the first people in their families to get graduate degrees – or to go to college at all. This was, obviously, a thing the faculty and administration knew about – and even took pride in – so, bless them, it was addressed head on. We got some very interesting and useful instruction and support around the issue. I have no criticisms there; I think it was handled wonderfully and helpfully.

But I do note that even in this bastion of class-conscious psychologically-savvy expertise on adult students, always the issue was addressed in terms of "being the first in your family to go to college." Which is not wrong. But what they were really talking about was social class: the social classes in which going to college is not normal or normative, and the social classes in which it is. What they were warning us about was running afoul of the cultural expectations of members of a class that are neither familiar with what collegiate study entails nor much appreciative of it.

They warned us about being derided as "thinks you're too good for us now" and "snobs" for choosing to attend class or do homework over being available to our families for emotional labor and traditional obligations – which is to say, they warned us, in not so many words, that if our families were from lower classes, we might find ourselves attacked as class traitors, on the barrel-end of epithets used to disparage higher classes.

What they were telling us – extremely obliquely – was that if we weren't already in the professional class, we would be, and had already started the process of, acculturating into a new, higher class.

I came from a college-going family; the vast majority of my programming coworkers and friends attended college, and many had advanced degrees. The classmate seated next to me that does not come from a college-going family, that doesn't predominantly move in social circles of college-going people, almost certainly doesn't belong to the same class I do. Like the two baristas, we weren't all of the same social class, even as we sat in the same graduate school classroom. We were all "college educated" and on our way to being "professionals", but what class we were in at that time was not solely – or maybe even predominantly – a product of how much education we had. It was how normal it was to have that education in the people we came from.

I'm not saying that education and occupation have nothing to do with social class. To the contrary, I think I'm pointing out they have a lot to do with it. But I am pointing out that social class is something distinct from either.

And when we talk about education and occupation as a substitute for social class, we're talking about something a lot safer to discuss.

III.

But if educational and occupation are not what social class is, then what is social class?

Social classes are cultures.

I wrote previously on what a culture is:

That's what a culture is: its thousands or millions of value assessments; a collective set of opinions as to what is right, and good, and tasteful, and useful, and pleasing, and normal, and appropriate, and decorous, and on, and on, and on.

Or put another way, a culture is a very large set (of thousands or millions) of value assessments held in common by a group of people. It doesn't require perfect congruence and conformity. Not every member culture has all the same value assessments as every other. Not every member shares in the common set of values to the same extent as every other. But people may be said to share a culture to the extent they share value assessments.

The social classes of the US are cultural groups: people who largely share values in what is good in dress, speech, occupation, food, recreation, family relations, personal style, worship, power relations, music, manners, morals, and so on and so forth.

Social classes function like ethnicities or nationalities. They have entitativity. They command loyalty. They have customs. They have territories. They have insiders and outsiders; they Other others. They have rivalries. They are performative.

This is why there are such readily read class signifiers. This is why certain preferences and tastes are indicative of a larger cultural identity. It is, in crucial sense, the answer to the question, "Why do they dress like that?": "Because in our class, this is normal, and considered becoming."

Social class being culture means that all of what we know about culture is also true of class, and this is illuminating. For instance:

• Class identity is not entirely opt-in or otherwise self-determined: we are not just what we think we are, nor what some objective property designates us – we are as we are judged to be by others. We perform classes, as we perform cultures, and that performance is received, interpreted, and judged by the societal audience.

• Changing classes is a matter of acculturation – literally adopting a new culture, adopting its tastes, styles, norms, mores. As such, it can cause acculturative stress, and culture shock.

• People vary in how much they identify with their class.

• People vary in how cosmopolitan they are in their attitudes about class differences, in their awareness that there are class differences and tolerance of them.

• People prefer members of their own class. (When someone doesn't prefer members of their own class, they change to become members of the class whose members they prefer.) They will tend to stick with people of their own class, given the choice. (In fact it is a staple of stage and screen that cross-class friendships or romances are intrinsically outrageous and therefore a source of humor.)

IIII.

To say these things is at once to point out the obvious and stray into dangerous territory. To say "social classes are cultures" is nicely abstract and bloodless, but concrete beating visceral implications are just under the skin of it.

In the US, we have a rule: to describe a person as "lower class" is an insult; less obviously, to describe them as "upper class" is as well. To describe something as "lower class" or "upper class" is to denigrate it, and to attribute a "lower class" or "upper class" thing to some one is to denigrate them. It is the designation "middle class", alone, which is virtuous – a fact which explains in a nutshell why, famously, all Americans arrogate the term to themselves. There is no neutral language for discussing social classes in the US, save our economic euphemisms. All the explicit terms we might use for them are electric with valence; all words are compliments or insults (or both).

There are people who have offered specific observations about these classes as cultures before, and they are mostly humorists – e.g. Fussell's Class, Foxworthy's "Redneck" shtick – trading on the Fool's privilege to speak the unforgivable with impunity in the face of the King.

For me to ascribe a custom or moral value to a class – for me to even describe class in terms of having customs or moral values, in the abstract – is dangerously close to – or, depending on whom you ask, entirely over the line of – disparaging people for not having the right culture. We are not even permitted to acknowledge these cultural differences exist.

Some years ago a local newspaper editor got on a bit of a hobby-horse about the growing illegality of cigarette smoking in public places. Notably, he raised the argument that banning smoking was an attack on "blue collar" "working class" people. This of course brought the obvious rebuttals: that just because someone was "blue collar", poor, poorly paid, worked with their hands, didn't mean they were too stupid to understand that smoking was bad for you; that not all "working class" people smoke; that the matter was simply one of good public health policy, and arose out of no inter-class hostility at all; and that the people that bore the brunt of the health consequences of second-hand smoke in places of public accommodation such as restaurants, bars, and hotels were the service workers in them – the waitstaff, bartenders, cleaning staff – that were themselves "blue collar".

While all that is true, none of it actually contradicts the contention, and he was absolutely right: cigarette smoking has come to be seen as uncouth among the middle class, but was (and remains) socially acceptable among the lower class, and as such is much more prevalent in that population. The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it – was instituted largely by middle-class people to coerce lower-class people from engaging in a behavior that violated middle-class norms. It was not done to that purpose, but it was de facto classist.

The ruthless suppression of discussion of social class as culture means we cannot perceive, much less consider, reason, and debate about situations such as these.

When we rhetorically substitute economic class – or occupational or educational indicators – for social class, we project our own (classes') values on others. For instance, when we speak in terms of economic class, well, who wouldn't like more money? Surely someone of low economic class would like to move to a higher one. Surely (the middle class reasons) someone of low economic class would like to be availed of resources so that they can move up the economic class ladder: educational opportunities, interviewing assistance, donations of work-wear, etc. In other words: surely they would like to be more like us. Surely they would like to leave their social class and join ours.

This may come as a rude shock, but while most people would appreciate more money, not everybody wants to perform middle-classness. There are probably quite a lot of people who would prefer to move up the economic ladder not by going to college and taking up desk work and changing how they dress and speak, but by getting raises and being paid overtime when they work it and not having to endure wage theft and getting to dress and speak as they are accustomed.

Most people, at all times and in all places, do not like to give up their culture. Memento, terrigena. Suus cuique carus.

They most especially do not like to be forced to.

(They also don't much care to be forbidden to, those that are inclined to leave one culture for another.)

V.

Yet social classes are different from most other sorts of cultures in one very important way: they exist in hierarchy. That is why we call them "classes" (as opposed to any of our other terms for cultural groups) and talk about them being "higher" and "lower" than one another.

I'm not going to explore the nature of that hierarchy today, not least because I'm still figuring it out. (There's a lot of "everything everyone thinks they know is wrong" sign about the topic. It involves careful consideration.) But I will observe this:

Neighboring social classes socially abut.

People in a given class are most likely to know people of their own class. But of people of other classes that they know, they are most likely to know people of the class immediately "above" theirs and immediately "below" theirs. Because those are the people they are most likely to encounter.

Obviously, I'm positing a system of more than three classes. I think Fussell's 12 [eta: 10, h/t ashley_y] class system works fine though his details are now out of date, as does Church's Three Ladder System [ETA: Link into Archive.org snapshot, original has been taken down] which is almost an independent rediscovery of Fussell's system, though in largely economic terms and with some differences.

Because people gravitate to people of their own class, and their daily lives tend to bring them into social contact predominantly with people who are members of the social classes one degree above and below, most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own.

This means that when people do encounter others from more distant classes, culture clash and hostility is a reasonably likely outcome. It is my suspicion that a substantial amount of the challenges of dealing with that most dread military commander, the General Public, are owing to culture clash. If in your job duties you work with the general public, whatever class you belong to, a lot of the people you encounter on the job don't belong to that class. Depending on which swath of the general public patronize of one's workplace, and which class one comes from – the waiter from Revere who works at a fancy steakhouse downtown, the doctor from Cambridge who works at the Boston Medical Center ER – it may be approximately none at all.

Working with the general public is widely seen as terrible, and I suspect this is a large part of why.

This also has a ramification for social mobility – for those who do wish to change classes. It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.

And to the extent it is taboo to discuss social class – and social classes – explicitly, the wall is invisible. If nobody will tell you what the shibboleths are, then you can only learn them by direct, personal reconnaissance: getting close enough to observe it for yourself.

We humans can learn culture by immersion; in fact, that's generally how we do. It is by living and working and socializing with a people that we begin to adopt their ways. But that is precisely what most people do not have opportunities to do with people outside of their own class and the two adjacent classes. And when opportunities do present, they often find the cultural gap so uncomfortable, the experience so alienating, that they retreat from it.

If one wants to be in a higher class, one pretty much has to seek it out and go there, wherever it is. Of course, one could do this deliberately, if one knew that was how it worked. But we Americans are careful to always maintain that that is not how it works; that the difference is really about money; that the important difference is race, or political affinity, or region of the US, or anything else; that we're all one big, happy middle class.

These phenomena are stabilizing – calcifying – forces of social class in the US. It is not that we don't have social class mobility here, we do. But we have much less than the American myth pretends we do.

Americans tell themselves that because we don't have castes based on "birth" and inheritance and aristocracy, that you can "be anything" here. And that is, in a sense, true: there are no sumptuary laws preventing you from wearing anything you like, there are no customs forbidding people of certain trades from pursuing political office, there are no rules against social mobility. You can be anything you can figure out how to be.

It's just that it's almost impossible to learn how to be in a class much higher than the one you're in. And to the extent it's not impossible, it's something almost nobody will tell you how to do. You'll be substantially on your own for figuring it out. (Unless... well, see below.)

It is a tyranny of structurelessness: the rules are never explicit so they can never be appealed – or repealed.

We Americans do not need rules to "keep people in their place". We have an organic, emergent system that achieves the same thing. It grows out of the scrupulous silence about social class, that keeps those who might wish to reckon with it – or object to it – in the dark.

VI.

Above, I explain that educational level is not the same thing as social class, that your social class in the US is not determined by how much education you have.

But higher education does have a relationship to American social class. Just not quite the one people think it does.

The one great instrument of social mobility in the US is college. But it's not the degree. It's the socialization. College – residential college – is most people's one great shot (or not so great shot) at being socialized into a higher social class.

College admission interviews are largely auditions of the applicants' ability to perform a social class: to dress the right way, to speak the right way, to have the right manners, to observe the right rituals. College admission officers are tasked with doing something much like casting a play: they are selecting individuals who seem highly likely, with the appropriate (and ideally minimal) direction, to "succeed" at the roles in which they're being cast. The entering class will function as a great ensemble piece, with everyone playing that class for everyone else at least modestly well, while upperclassmen and professional academics and administrators carry the show.

Whether it's called "leadership", or "character", or "professionalism", or "workplace-readiness", or "professional orientation", or whatever they're calling it this week, what colleges are really talking about imbuing their students with is a social class. And they do it by being a little society of people of that social class, into which entering students are acculturated.

Obviously, not all colleges socialize their students into the same class; different colleges offer entry into different classes. Pretty much what we term "prestige" maps to height of social class. Some colleges – particularly commuter schools – are very handicapped in their ability to acculturate students, due to having less opportunity to.

This may sound horrifying to you if you romanticize the educational function of higher education, but I do not by explaining this mean to criticize it. To the contrary, I think this is the one part of college that is unambiguously worth the price – if it delivers a class to you to which you would not otherwise have access, and if you then can figure out how to leverage that into a higher economic class.

Maybe remember this the next time someone suggests community college is a great way to skip the expense of the first two years of a bachelor's degree.

VII.

I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist.

And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.

I was raised in a family that was explicit in its classism. I do not mean some sort of vague pretend-aristocratic snobbery that ranked people's "worthiness" to receive decent treatment or equality before the eyes of the law. I was taught not that there were "better" and "worse" people, but that there were better and worse ways to be – and if you're thinking that's a mighty fine hair to split, you'd be right – and we, in our family, were doing the better way. Other people could do what they want, be in the classes they wanted; we were aiming higher.

My parents were born of blue collar families in blue collar communities and were of concerted agreement that their life goals were to flee that class and never have anything to do with it again. Elevating their – and their progeny's – social class was the family project. They enlisted my sister and I in this project, and were explicit, formal, and unapologetic about it.

Normal professional-class-aspirant families police their children's class performance by characterizing undesirable behaviors are "rude"[*], or "not nice". Mine would just characterize them as lower class. My parents couldn't care less if we said "please" and "thank you" (I had to be housebroken by friends), but would verbally check us in a heartbeat if the vowel in our "to" started getting too schwa-like.

[* But, of course, it's worth thinking about what the word "rude" literally means. But that's a topic for another post.]

They were hampered in this project by two things. The first was their own blue collar upbringings, and the limits of their opportunities for socialization in higher classes. But they were very smart, and very determined. My father got his ticket punched through going to college; my mother went to a secretarial school, and then worked in law firms. But being outsiders, acculturating, their grasp of their target class was imperfect; they made mistakes. For instance, I believe they badly misjudged the class of the neighborhood they moved us to when I was five, and I think they did so because of erroneous beliefs they had about how to judge the social class of a neighborhood.

The second was a lack of vocabulary with which to make their instruction as explicit as they would have preferred. This was remedied by the publication of Fussell's Class the year I turned twelve. My mother assigned the book to my sister and I and from then on, we had a common language to discuss the family's primary preoccupation. ("Mom, is this shirt too prole?")

Being raised thus, I am in a strange place with regard to social class. I reject their moral judgmentalism regarding class. Because I was raised in a higher class than they were, I see their class insecurity as, itself, an indicator of their humbler origins.

Yet because I was raised with social class acknowledged so explicitly, it is not invisible to me. It was simply not taboo to discuss in my family of origin. And as such – as intended – upward social mobility was much more available to me than it otherwise would have been; I got to make very conscious choices at a young age which served me well at advancing my social standing.

And because I grew up talking about it, class relations – including what may, or may not, be class oppression and injustice – are very visible to me in a way that, clearly, they aren't to most Americans. I am better positioned to just notice what is happening when it happens around me.

But then, on a third hand, I, too, have my own social class affiliation, and it is as dear to me as anyone's is to them. I am in no way transcended over my class loyalty. I look at other classes and go, "Ew", and, "Oy". I have in no way bought into the idea that all classes are equally good ways to be. I'm on-board with the idea that all people have equal rights before the law, and entitled to a baseline level of respect as fellow humans, but I'm not sure how much further than that I go. Somedays, the extent of my charitability is the possibly very problematic and never actually said aloud, "Well, what with how hard it is to change social class, you probably can't help being like you are."

I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."

A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of.

The one position I cannot find much represented is a discussion of social class as culture which treats those cultures with the sort of baseline respect one (or at least people of my class!) would expect shown to an ethnic, regional, or national culture. It is no longer considered tolerable (at least in my class!) to describe an ethnic, regional, or national culture with contempt, as broken or defective – unless it is one's own, and one is making an insider critique to other insiders. Yet that is precisely how discussion of (others') class cultures typically proceeds. I'm not even entirely sure I can get on-board with the idea that all US social classes are equally valid and worthwhile cultures, but it would sure be nice to see somebody working from that premise.

---

Please note: for purposes of this discussion, the topics of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and native language are all derails of the topic, which is class.

There is a huge tendency in the US to attempt to conflate race and class. Do not do this. Most especially do not do it here. I hope at some further date to discuss intersectionalities of race and class in the US, but not today. I will merely advise you that many (or even most) people – white, and black, and other – wind up saying things they don't even realize are hideously racist (anti-black) when they start talking about what they assume are the relationships between class and race. So let's leave race out of it for the moment.

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If you haven’t seen Tim Farron’s first Lib Dem leadership speech, you should. It’s good in general, but I want to concentrate on something said in the first ten minutes. He came to praise his predecessor Nick Clegg, not to bury him. He explicitly said that he was proud of Nick’s achievements in Government, proud that the Liberal Democrats had gone into Coalition to do our best by the country, and that the tough five years for us as a party was nothing compared to the tougher five months for the country under a majority Tory Government since May 2015.

Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, he has said nothing of substance about his predecessors. The general impression is that Labour is a brand-new party, completely separate from the days of Miliband, let alone the days of Brown and definitely the days of Blair. Any criticism of Labour’s record, both in Government and in Opposition, is met with “Yeah but that was before Corbyn”. I don’t believe that that dismissal is valid, even if we ignore Corbyn and McDonnell’s terrible, meaningless U-turn on the Fiscal Charter (exposed neatly by John Humphrys’ interview with Diane Abbott around 2:42), and the inevitable further cock-ups and rebellions to follow. Most of the Labour MPs under Corbyn’s leadership were MPs under Miliband, and many under Blair and Brown (including Corbyn himself). They have their own power and ability to influence the party’s direction. There is a long-term threat to rebels in terms of deselection and replacement in 2020, but a party is always more than just its leader. Especially if, as Corbyn says, he wants a less Presidential style of leadership – and the Parliamentary Party still has a lot of Blair, Brown and Miliband about it.

The same sort of people who put Labour above reproach are the ones who claim that the Lib Dems are “still Tories” because Farron hasn’t actively disassociated himself from the Coalition – despite never having served in the Coalition Government – because he hasn’t disowned Clegg. We must remember that today’s Labour party is not so different from yesterdays’, or the day before that, and continue to hold Labour’s feet to the fire for their failures in Government and in Opposition.

Leicestershire's Conservative MPs  were busy retweeting this photograph last week.

It shows them and the Conservative leader of the county council Nick Rushton meeting the local government minister Marcus Jones to press the case for more generous funding for Leicestershire.

The Leicester Mercury quoted Sir Edward Garnier, MP for Harborough:

"The difficult financial situation for Leicestershire County Council means that unless we get an improved funding arrangement, the services that vulnerable people need the most will have to be cut. I know the Minister fully understands the case we made and took into account our concerns as Leicestershire MPs and those of Coun Rushton. We will wait to see what transpires over the next few weeks."

I would love to see a more generous settlement for Leicestershire, particularly if Rushton is right to say that we are the lowest funded county council.

But we are not the only Tory-run county asking for more.

Over to the Shropshire Star and the new leader of the council there:

Shropshire Council leaders today called for Government help to stave off the impact of multi-million pound budget cuts. 

Council leader Malcolm Pate and the authority’s chief executive Clive Wright warned that without assistance they face a considerable reduction in the county’s services. 

They have urged either an increase in the amount they can raise in council tax or an alteration of the formula by which councils receive central Government funding.

The formula cannot be unfair to everybody, so It looks as though Conservatives are really complaining that central government funding is not generous enough. Even David Cameron has been at it.

And they are right. It is not just the slightly quaint things this blog has a weakness for that will suffer - rural bus services, branch libraries - but central services like adult social care.

If there is a country vs court rebellion in the Conservative party, with their council leaders rebelling against the cuts they are being compelled to implement, all Liberal Democrats should welcome it.

For the time being, tax cuts should be off our agenda.

That's what Guido Fawkes reveals in the Sun today:

You have to feel for the Lib Dems. Wiped out at the ballot box in May and now they are being evicted. 

Aides are preparing to leave their HQ at Great George Street after Westminster, one of England’s most Tory councils, gave the go-ahead for plans to turn it into flats. It’s the Tories telling the Lib Dems to pack their bags all over again.

It won't be the council who have given us notice, of course, but the owners of the block. You can read about their plans for this building on New London Development.

Since Liberal Democrat News ceased publication I have not had much reason to visit party headquarters, but Great George Street never appealed to me the way that Cowley Street did. Maybe it was the arms dealers upstairs.

Where will we turn up next? Maybe it's time to reread the call from Simon McGrath for party HQ to be moved out of London.

I got a postcard today from the Commonwealth that my call for jury duty has been cancelled. \o/

I am mostly very relieved, because I don't really have the stamina to be sitting on a jury (I was seriously thinking of asking for a letter from my PCP), and also it would be a body-blow to my income.

But I am also disappointed, because jury!

But, of course, that just raises the question of whether, at this point in my life, I would ever actually make it through voir dire. I gather that defense attorneys preemptorily challenge anybody who worked in corrections on the assumption we are heartless bastards disinclined to acquit, and prosecutors preemptorily challenge therapists on the assumption we are bleeding-heart pollyannas unwilling to convict. I was kind of looking forward to seeing how this played out in my case.

I mean, if both the defense and prosecution want me out, and they both know that, and they each have the standard limited number of preemptory challenges, it actually puts them in an interesting prisoner's dilemma type situation: who spends one of their precious preempts to get me gone, or do they wind up playing chicken and both "losing" by my getting empanelled?

Obligatory Flashback Prologue: May 2012

Mich, Mattie, Cindy and I were driving to the cemetery to bury our Best Frodis Femme Friend Forever, Anissa. Aside from a brief moment of tears the afternoon I arrived in Ohio, I had kept it together. After all, I was the one who drifted away into a looser friendship for a decade, the one who felt the need to throw myself into accomplishments to keep my demons at bay. The only thing I had figured out in the past few days since I learned of Anissa’s death was that I had screwed up colossally. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but the very actions I had taken to keep myself from wasting my life had actually caused me to waste my life on a deeper, more important level. I knew step one was to be present for Cin and Mich, to hold them as they cried and to be the strong one. This wasn’t my first time to bury a friend, after all, though I was pretty sure my friends didn’t know that and it didn’t seem like the time to bring it up. The first time I saw a dead body was my friend Jenny. She was 7. I was 4. Her heart defect killed her. My heart defect was successfully “corrected”. I’ve been trying to earn that quirk of fate ever since. Anyway, I got through Jenny’s viewing at an age when most kids were still grappling with the mortality of goldfish, and so now I would be strong and stoic and help my friends through Anissa’s funeral. It was the least I owed them. The car radio was blaring Monkees, of course. I was staring out the window on the way to the cemetery, pretending to look at the beautiful countryside outside Columbus. And then, the stereo caught my attention as Cin’s Random MP3 shuffle turned to Sometime in the Morning. As the song played out, I was getting closer and closer to losing it. For the first time it felt like Carole King’s lyrics were describing my unlikely friendship with my sisters in general, and Anissa specifically. Determined NOT TO BE WEAK, I gritted my teeth through the second verse, bracing myself for the bridge.

Now in her childlike eyes
You see the beauty there
You know it was always there
And you need no longer wear a disguise…

And at that last line I lost it. Cin squeezed my hand as I wept, and I let her. More to the point, I realized that if I was going to make anything positive come of Anissa’s death, and of my life, I would have to shed my protective shields and camouflage. Of course, at that time I thought it would be a simple matter of digging up some albums and seeing if there were any Monkees fans still puttering around online in the wake of Davy’s death. Heck, maybe I’d even start a blog or something. Let’s just say I did not yet comprehend just how deep the rabbit hole of radical vulnerability would take me.

Ram’s Head Tavern, January 18, 2016

Ram’s Head in Annapolis is a nifty venue that struck me as a more casual version of a City Winery. There are two main sections, the restaurant and the performance venue, and we took advantage of their dinner+show+validated parking deal. I hadn’t even dared to get my (much less anyone else’s) hopes up, but the fan at the next table during dinner told Melanie, Megan, and me that her husband had confirmed that Micky would be signing autographs after the show. Megan showed off her copy of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, (already signed by Nez, Peter, and all the Jones girls), thrilled that she would have a chance to complete the set. I grabbed my phone to text my friend Zak Mortensen‘s grandma, to find out what (if any) Micky CDs he didn’t already own. There was unsurprisingly no signing after the Nashville Twokees show, so I hadn’t been able to get Micky to sign the sparkly fedora I got for Zak as his 1 year “Heartversary” present. Luckily, I figured this would work as his birthday gift in February (his birthday is two days before mine because of COURSE it is ). After we headed next door from the restaurant to the venue and settled into our seats, I scampered out to the merch stand, conducted a little business, and returned to see Andrew Sandoval (who was sitting at the sound board like 10 feet behind us) running the slide show. As the show ticked closer, Zilch podcast listener Hubert swung by our table to say hello, and we made small talk with a few people nearby.

The Show

I think the easiest way to recap the show is to just go down the set list and share my thoughts. That’s how I’m gonna do it, anyway.

Mary, Mary: I wouldn’t have thought of Mary Mary as an opening song, but it works! Of course it helps that Rich Dart was on fire. His drumming was rock solid from the opening riff of this song, and he stayed nice and deep in the pocket for the last of the night. (Now, he and/or John Billings may have had a little too much caffeine before the show, but we’ll get to that in due course. )

(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone: Well played, well sung, a playlist staple these guys can do in their sleep. The main point of interest was Andrew’s new animation for the video screen, sort of a Mad Men/Mid-century Mod animation of the lyrics that reminded me a lot of the art he sporadically posts on his facebook page (which you should follow if you don’t). It’s hard to describe, but I suspect many of you will get to see it later this year, tour gods willing.

That Was Then, This Is Now: Glad this was still in the set list. That was a pleasant surprise from the July concert, and I hope it sticks around.

She: The Mike Stand Spin lives on!

Words: David Alexander took Peter’s vocal part, and he and Micky traded lines smoothly and confidently throughout. (Somebody’s been working on that one! )

Sometime in the Morning: Whatever was off about this song in Nashville got fixed. THIS is the live performance I’ve wanted (needed?) to hear of this song since 2012. I still need to compare it to my Nashville recording, but I think they made it a little more country, and more reminiscent of the arrangement from Remember. All I know I was transported back to the events of my prologue. I knew instantly what lyric would become the title to this review, and managed to keep my eyes dry as my personal “movie of the Mind” played out during Micky’s performance. Well, OK, I almost did…

D.W. Washburn: Once again Dave took Peter’s opening bit on this song, and though he didn’t quite embody it with as much hammy verve as Peter did, it (and the rest of the song) was still darned good. I’m glad that this song didn’t go anywhere, and I hope it doesn’t for any *ahem* future shows either.

(Yes, I know that at the rate I want to keep these rarer songs in, the 50th anniversary set list will wind up being 4 hours long, especially if Nez chooses to come back and all of his spotlight tunes are back in the mix. They can just add an intermission, or a set of Coco and Circe Link singing, or just run some episodes on the screen. )

Last Train to Clarksville: After responding to the enthusiastic cheers to the question “Got any Monkees Fans here tonight?” with “…Well, we’ll fix that!” Micky did a roll call of all the songwriters featured in his first set, culminating with a few kind words for the ones who started it all, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. He followed that up with their first #1 hit, done in the traditional manner if not in the traditional spot in the set list.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard this done in the middle of a set before, but it worked. Also, after the song Micky shared a story about recording it, which I’d never heard before. Apparently, there were originally lyrics in that fast little “doo-dee-doo-doo, doo-dee-doo-doo, doo-dee-doo-dee-diddle-diddle-dum” section in the bridge. However, Micky apparently came to the studio after 14 hours of shooting, took one look at the sheet music, and essentially went “LOLnope”. It may have been born of exhaustion, but IMHO the song was better for the change.

Johnny B. Goode: Excellent song and they hung together, but it did seem a little, erm, rushed. As in I half-expected them to pull a Marty McFly and jump off the deep end into thrash metal rushed. Alas, the song ended before we could see Wayne Avers go full Eddie Van Halen. Great performance that nearly blasted the roof off (and special credit for Dave Alexander’s excellent keyboard work), but the band earned a mock-stern look from Micky and a threat to remove the Red Bull from their contract rider.

Purple Haze: THIS was a hoot, with Micky reenacting the infamous reaction to Jimi Hendrix as the Monkees’ opening act in 1967, followed by a full rendition of the song, which was capped with his customary “The Colors! The Colors!” flashback. Side note–whatever Micky’s paying Wayne Avers ain’t enough, because he basically stole this number.

Crying in the Rain: After Micky got a bit jumbled due to the alleged “small font” on the set list (and did a remarkable impression of a rewinding video after Wayne pointed out his goof), Micky and Coco did a delightful duet of this Carole King classic. Because I don’t own King for a Day (a situation I intend to rectify), the only time I’d heard Micky do this song was with the amazing Circe Link on a Concert Window show a few months back. It’s a hard pick between the two duets, but I think I have to give the edge to Coco. At the end of the song, Micky handed over the reins to Coco, and introduced her stellar performance of…

Different Drum: Now, don’t get me wrong Nez, it’s not that I knock your delightful Edith Piaf-esque re-arrangement of the song from the Movies of the Mind tours. It’s just that Coco, who stuck to an arrangement nearly identical to Linda Rondstadt’s, hit this tune out of the bloody park. I got audio of the show, but nobody’s posted any video yet. *pout* Here’s a Youtube of Coco from another show a few months ago that will give readers the gist.

The Girl I Knew Somewhere: After Micky took a moment to say hi to his local family members including his daughter Emily (who I had been 95% sure I saw walk past before the show started), this setlist staple came next. Not much to say, besides the fact it was excellent as always. Special kudos to Dave Alexander, who handled Peter’s traditional harpsichord solo delightfully.

Daydream Believer: The Monkees standards continued with The Song That Will Be In Any Monkees/Micky/Peter Show Until The End Of Time. Much like in Nashville, Micky did the bulk of the song on his own, then invited the crowd to join in at the end. Always a high moment of the show, and Melanie, Megan and I belted out the chorus as Rainbow Room Davy danced away from us on the video screen. The band transitioned into another Davy tune handled well by Micky…

A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You: The Monkees mini-set ended on a strong note, with another formerly classic Davy tune handled superbly by Micky.

Sugar, Sugar: I may have quietly squeed when the intro of my favorite song from Remember came up, as Micky sprayed his throat with it-probably-wasn’t-really-vodka (I hope? ) and shared the origin myth of the song. And then Micky made most of the women in the room (and probably a few of the men) melt with his snarky salted-caramel lasciviousness. It’s moments like these that I am glad I found the guts to defend the honor of this tune against the snark of my more-musically-educated co-podcasters way back in the early days of Zilch…

Oh! Darling: I’m used to Micky using the Royal Family/ “I looked like a cross between Ronald MacDonald and Charles Manson” anecdote to intro Randy Scouse Git (and I thought we might even be getting Good Morning Good Morning) , but instead the band kicked into a superb cover version of the Beatles’ Oh! Darling. I’d never heard this band do this one live, and they did it justice, particularly Dave Alexander’s keyboard work and John Billings’ tasty bass line.

Goin’ Down: What can I say about this one? Excellent as always, and Wayne and Dave both got nice solos. Nobody got picked on to sing a verse, though there was no need as half the room was singing along with him anyway.

White Rabbit: I’d seen youtubes of this one, but seeing Coco do it live is an entirely different animal. Utterly amazing performance. I both wonder and don’t wonder why Coco didn’t have a solo career of her own (if that makes sense), but heaven knows she has the pipes for it. Again, I wish I had some video, but I’ll make Ken play an excerpt on Zilch.

Pleasant Valley Sunday: The main set ended with  a customary set ender, Pleasant Valley Sunday. Much like the other Monkees staples, it was played well, by folks who’ve done it so many times it’s practically burned into their nerve endings. After just enough of a break for Micky to grab a drink offstage, he was back up in front of the lively crowd for an encore.

Gimme Some Lovin’: Again, this isn’t video from the show I attended, but it’ll give you an idea. Being a solo Micky virgin, this was another one I’d not heard him do live, but it’s a good cover, with nice work from Dave Aexander and Wayne Avers especially.

I’m a Believer: The song itself, performed capably and enthusiastically like most of the Monkees standards, wasn’t particularly noteworthy. However, I have an anecdote that is. One of the nifty things about the whole “dinner+show+validated parking” deal was that your waiter from dinner follows you next door to the venue, and takes care of any drinks or snacks you order during the show. He came by to bring back my credit card just as Micky was starting the song, and leaned over to ask, “Is that the original guy who sang that song?”

I blinked, and looked at the kid–he had to be over 21 since he was serving alcohol, but he didn’t look like he was much over 21. I did some hasty math in my head and realized that he was probably only 6 or 7 when Shrek came out. Which meant…I was witnessing Micky’s Shrek Schtick play out right in front of me. I grinned, and replied, “Yes! That’s the original guy who did that song!” He said back “That’s like my favorite song! I’m totally recording this!” And with that he scampered off to find a good spot to stand with his phone, and I started wondering if I’d packed my Metamucil. Even us Third Gen folks are getting old…

Overall Impressions: I had thought the Twokees show in Nashville was laid back and mellow, but that was because I had never seen Micky solo. His band (also the core members of the Monkees’ touring band) is a rock-solid machine that has played many of these songs hundreds of times over the past few years, and it shows–in a good way, not a stale way. They either have great chemistry as a group, or can do an excellent impression of it. It was a lot of fun seeing these guys operate as “just” a bar band, without the bells and whistles that come with The Big Show, and it seemed like all concerned were having just as much fun as the very enthusiastic audience.

After the show

Like I said, there was a signing. After the 2014 convention and completing the signatures on my Listen to the Band box, I had decided never to do a meet and greet line again. I’d ticked “Meet all Monkees” off the bucket list and my perfectionism and anxiety just made it too emotionally grueling. Never mind that I can make small talk with professional leaders, present at international conferences, and co-host a podcast without batting an eye, something about meeting a Monkee in the flesh just activates a lot of overlapping anxiety triggers. However, this trip through the line wasn’t for me, I was just running an errand for my friend. And yet, as the line moved closer, I found myself getting nervous in a way I hadn’t been in a line since the conversation reception with Nez. But I took a deep breath. I gathered strength from my nearby friends Megan and Melanie, and my distant friends from all over Zilch Nation and the Monkees community, like Cin and Mich and Ken and Iain and so many more. Beyond that, I thought of my Heart Defect friends like Stuart and Rowan and Jane and Sarah and Iain (not that Iain, a different Iain, though they would probably hit it off) and Eric (who bridges both worlds), friends I would not have found the nerve to make had Anissa’s death not taken me down the road of self discovery that helped me find them. That road, in due course, also led to Zilch, and the bizarre coincidence to top all coincidences that led to me standing in line for a CD for my and Micky’s mutual friend, Zak.

And then I got to the front of the line. I’m going to write Zak with the whole story, since it belongs to him just like the CD does. But suffice it to say that my time with Micky was short, and sweet, and will make our mutual friend Zak very happy. Micky, in the very unlikely chance you’re reading this, now you’ll understand some of the things I lacked both the time and the guts to say in the middle of that that meet and greet line. My thank you at the end of our time together was from me…and Zak…and the confused kid I used to be when I was trying to use the lyrics of Carole King and Boyce and Hart and Nez and even you to make sense of a VERY weird world. Now, I haven’t lost my sense of proportion here. You’re just a celebrity whose work made all of us happy in dark times, and I’m fairly confident you’re at least as screwed up as anyone else in your line of work. But if I’ve learned nothing else in my life, nothing beats the abyss back quite like a great song belted out by a great singer. Thanks for being part of our playlists, and thanks for giving so much back to your fans.

 

 

Two ARCs sit on the bedside table, here in the Magic Bungalow. One waits for a blurb from the BUG, the other for a blurb from me. They represent my most recent interaction with the NY publishing industry. They were both sent by David Hartwell, of Tor.

On my brag shelf is an old copy of Northern Stars: The Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction. I haven’t noticed it for years. The first story in that anthology is “A Niche”: the first story I ever had published, the first to get reprinted. Northern Stars represents my very first interaction with the NY publishing industry.

It was edited by Glenn Grant and David Hartwell.

It would not be much of an overstatement to say that David is largely responsible for my current incarnation as an SF author. It would almost be an understatement to point out that I’m just one of a myriad people who can say this.

It was David who, having read the rough first half of a first draft that would later become Starfish, sent me an email that inspired me to keep writing when I was on the brink of junking this whole fucking pipe dream of authorhood and resigning myself to getting a Real Job. (Don’t try this at home, kids— it was Glenn Grant who took it upon himself to pass my scribblings along, and even then only because David had expressed an interest. Where are you, Glenn? Haven’t seen you for years. I still owe you.) It was David who accepted the completed manuscript back in 1996, after I’d flown across the country to attend my first con (okay, my second, if you insist on counting that Star Trek thing at the Royal York back in 1975). That was even more of a faux pas— you never thrust a manuscript at an editor during a con— but I didn’t know that, and he took it anyway. He then sat on it for eighteen months, waiting for exactly the right moment to phone with an offer: when I was sitting on the toilet with my pants around my ankles, in the worst possible psychological space for aggressive negotiation. To this day I wonder how he knew that.

I was fortunate to come of age (authorwise) during the days of David’s Canadian initiative, back when everyone else in NY regarded Canada as little more than America’s Hat. We northern wannabes were overjoyed at his scouting efforts north of the 49th (and heartbroken when, a few years later, he headed off in the opposite direction on his somewhat-less-applauded Australia Initiative). He launched my career, showcased my stories in a half-dozen best-of collections, edited every one of my novels except for the Crysis tie-in. I wish he’d edited one less title, actually: some will remember that βehemoth was intended as a single book, and try as I might I could not prevail on the man to waive Tor’s tendency to split long novels into separate volumes. He did, however, let me add an Author’s Apology to each volume, warning potential buyers that they were only getting half a story for the price. It was a concession, and it cost, and it was more than most split-volumes got.

That one episode might just epitomize my relationship with David, and/or with Tor (it was always difficult to know where one ended and the other began, whether he was making policy or channeling it). He did not cave, but he could— bend. Enough to make enough of a difference, usually.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a relationship, professional or otherwise, that was so simultaneously rocky and cordial. We would— I guess you’d call it fight, except it wasn’t really. We would argue, passionately— I was usually the more hot-headed, big surprise— but while it was about things that mattered personally, it never seemed to get personal. There was never any question of us hanging out when he was in town— on patios or in hotels, with partners or one-on-one. We didn’t always butt heads; most of the time we just shot the shit, about everything from relationships to jellyfish, from politics to history. The man was a walking encyclopedia, he rubbed shoulder with giants; the man was a giant in his own right. And even at its most infuriating, there was always something— mitigating, I guess you’d say, about the relationship.

I remember buying him drinks not so long ago, on the rooftop patio at Hemingways. “I really like you, man,” I told him. “I respect you. But I don’t know if I can trust you.” He shrugged, and smiled, and we clinked glasses.

This morning I awoke to the news that David Hartwell had suffered a massive brain injury, and that while the heart continued to beat, the man was not expected to survive. As I write these words my facebook feed is alive with the news: with expressions of shock and sadness and regret, with sympathy for Kathryn and their kids. Making Light called it, then walked it back; Locus posted an obit and deleted it. SF is holding its breath, awaiting the inevitable.

He was in his seventies. He was winding down to retirement anyway. Nobody thought he was immortal.

Except we did. I did. It’s the dumbest thing, this obstinate Human refusal to internalize our own mortality. Down in my gut, I guess I just expected the guy to go on forever.

There was still so much to argue about.

Question in email:

A couple months back you posted about the GOP presidential candidates but you haven’t said anything about the Democratic candidates. Any thoughts? 

My thoughts are thus:

I suspect that despite people getting hopped up about Bernie Sanders that the nomination is still going to go to Clinton in the end, and I’m fine with that. But if it goes to Sanders instead, I’m fine with that too. And if both Sanders and Clinton are suddenly trampled to death in a freak spontaneous elk stampede and Martin O’Malley is the only Democratic candidate left standing, I’m fine with that, as well.

I recognize that there are material differences in the personalities and policies of each of the Democratic candidates, and that these differences are not insignificant. But at the end of the day, what matters is that each of them, any of them, is so drastically preferable to any member of the howling sampler box of Dunning-Kruger that is the current GOP field that, to me, and for the purposes of my presidential vote in November, the policy and personality differences between Clinton and Sanders and O’Malley are immaterial. Whoever the Democratic candidate is, they will get my vote.

Note well that this does not mean that in any election year, any Democratic nominee would get my vote; if the Democratic field in another year were as pathetically mashed-potato-brained as the current GOP field, it’s entirely possible I’d kiss off the lot of them, too. As a matter of political honesty I admit it would take more for that to happen, as there are consequences to a GOP president that I wouldn’t like (see: Supreme Court as the obvious example), and that’s not insignificant. But it’s possible. However, this year I judge all three Democratic nominees competent enough that this isn’t a problem.

As I don’t really have a problem with any of the Democratic candidates from a competence perspective, I’ve been largely unengaged regarding the current tsuris brewing between Clinton and Sanders (O’Malley has no chance and is in this for a cabinet position or maybe a Vice President slot). Again, in the end I think Clinton’s going to pull it out and I suspect in the long run that’s better for the Democrats because she and her machine are likely to be better engaged in the downmarket congressional races, but if she doesn’t? Well, fine, Sanders it is, and he’ll have fun with his veto stamp.

I recognize there are a lot of people who feel very passionate about Bernie or Hillary, in what to me feels like a “Kirk or Picard” sort of way. That’s nice for them, but I find the spitty sort of rage they appear to feel about their less-favored Democratic candidate kind of stupid. I do hope people realize that after the primaries are done there is still the general election, and the GOP standard bearer will be delighted if a large portion of the potential Democratic electorate has ragequit in a fit of pique because they didn’t get exactly the presidential candidate they want. This is how you end up with a President Trump, or President Cruz, people. So suck it up, be an adult and vote for either Clinton or Sanders, even if you wanted the other one instead.

(But — third party candidate! Oh, my sweet summer child. You’re adorable. I mean, if you were always going to vote Libertarian or Green or whatever, or were otherwise honestly up in the air, then don’t let me stop you. Groovy by me. But if you were going to vote Democratic but then didn’t get your way in the primaries, so screw it, then yeah. Maybe think beyond your own fit of foot-stomping pique. I suppose this also holds true for you potential GOP voters who might ragequit if Trump/Cruz/whomever doesn’t get the nomination, but my point of view, since that field is filled with people I wouldn’t vote for even if you promised me all the ice cream I ever wanted for the rest of my life, delivered by a unicorn that farts gold coins and diamonds, I’m less concerned if you do it.)

From my own point of view this year I think it’s important to recognize that this GOP field is easily the worst in any election cycle I can remember, and in particular its top candidates — Trump and Cruz — are just appalling. I was not going to vote for McCain or for Romney in the last two elections, but in both cases I could see the valid argument for them (and for keeping them alive so their respective vice-presidential picks never took up residence at the White House). I didn’t think they might actually offer lasting damage to the office. I don’t feel the same way this year. Barring the sudden ascendancy of Kasich, or the now-increasingly-unlikely chance of Rubio finally finding his ass with a flashlight, the GOP standard bearer this year will either be a populist racist or a preening, deservedly-disliked tub of self-regard, neither of whom I want anywhere near the levers of executive power.

Neither Clinton or Sanders is perfect — Clinton in particular comes with a healthy load of baggage — but the qualitative difference between the two of them as presidential candidates, and Trump and Cruz, is the starkest contrast between the two major parties in my political lifetime. This isn’t even a contest. Or shouldn’t be. I’m embarrassed for the country that it actually is.

So, yeah: Democrats, pick Clinton, pick Sanders, hell, pick O’Malley. From my point of view, given the competition, they’re all equally likely to get my presidential vote. I mean, I’d like to have the luxury of actually caring about the policy differences between the Democratic candidates. But this election year, it just doesn’t matter. Democratic positions are generally closer to my own, but this year, I’m mostly voting against the GOP valorizing the horrible people it’s made as its choices for front runners, and, likely, for whichever of those horrible people it will choose as its candidate.

The history of Q-Tips and why you should never use them.

The post Swab Story appeared first on News From ME.

A couple of days ago a patient said he’d become depressed after starting Xolair, a new asthma drug I know nothing about.

On the one hand, lots of things that mess with the immune system can cause depression. On the other, patients are notorious for blaming drugs for any random thing that happens around the same time they started taking them. So I did what any highly-trained competent medical professional would: I typed “does xolair cause depression?” into Google.

The results seemed promising. The first site was called “Can Xolair cause depression?”. The second was “Is depression a side effect of Xolair?”. Also on the front page were “Could Xolair cause major depression?” and “Xolair depression side effects”. Clearly this is a well-researched topic that lots of people cared about, right?

Let’s look closer at one of those sites, EHealthMe.com. It says: “Major depression is found among people who take Xolair, especially for people who are female, 40-49 old, also take medication Singulair, and have Asthma. We study 11,502 people who have side effects while taking Xolair from FDA and social media. Among them, 14 have Major depression. Find out below who they are, when they have Major depression and more.” Then it offers a link: “Join a support group for people who take Xolair and have Major depression”.

First things first: if there were actually 11502 people taking Xolair, and only 14 of them had major depression, that would be a rate of 0.1%, compared to 6.9% in the general population. In other words, Xolair would be the most effective antidepressant on Earth. But of course nobody has ever done an n=11502 study on whether a random asthma medication causes depression, and EHealthMe is just scraping the FDA databases to see how many people reported depression as a side effect to the FDA. But only a tiny percent of people who get depression report it, and depression sometimes strikes at random times whether you’re taking Xolair or not. So this tells us nothing.

And yet a patient who worries that Xolair might be causing their depression will Google “can xolair cause depression?”, and she will end up on this site that says “major depression is found among people who take Xolair”, which is one of the worst examples of weasel words I’ve ever heard. Then she will read that there are entire support groups for depressed Xolair sufferers. She will find all sorts of scary-looking information like that Xolair-related depression has been increasing since 2008. And this is above and beyond just the implications of somebody bothering to write an entire report about the Xolair-depression connection!

In case you haven’t guessed the twist – no one’s ever investigated whether Xolair causes depression. EHealthMe’s business model is to make an automated program that runs through every single drug and every possible side effect, scrapes the FDA database for examples, then autopublishes an ad-filled web page titled “COULD $DRUG CAUSE $SIDE_EFFECT?”. It populates the page by spewing random FDA data all over it, concludes “$SIDE_EFFECT is found among people who take $DRUG”, and offers a link to a support group for $DRUG patients suffering from $SIDE_EFFECT. Needless to say, the support group is an automatically-generated forum with no posts in it.

And it’s not just EHealthMe. This is a whole market, with competitors elbowing their way past one another to the top of the Google search results. Somebody who doubts EHealthMe and seeks an online second opinion will probably just end up at PatientsVille, whose page is called “Xolair Depression Side Effects”, which contains the same FDA data, and which gets the Google description text “This opens a possibility that Xolair could cause Depression”. Or Treato, whose page claims to contain 56 reader comments on Xolair and depression, but which has actually just searched the Web for every single paragraph that contains “Xolair” and “depression” together and then posted garbled excerpts in its comment section. For example, one of their comments – and this is not at all clear from Treato’s garbled excerpt – is from a tennis forum, where a user with the handle Xolair talks about how his tennis serve is getting worse with age; another user replies “Xolair, I read this and get depressed, I just turned 49.” But if you don’t check whether it came from a tennis forum or not, 56 reports of a connection between a drug and a side effect sounds convincing!

This is really scummy. Maybe it’s not the most devious of traps for you or me, but what about for your grandmother? What about for those people who send money to Nigerian princes? The law is usually pretty strict about who can and can’t provide medical information – so much so that it cracks down on 23andMe just for reading off the genome in a way that uneducated people might misinterpret. Yet somehow sites like EHealthMe are allowed to continue, because they just very strongly imply fake medical information instead of saying it outright.

Remember, only about 50% of people who are prescribed medication take it. Sometimes it’s personal choice or simple forgetfulness. But a lot of the time they stop because of side effects. I had a patient a few months ago who was really depressed. I started her on an antidepressant and she got much better. Then she stopped the medication cold turkey and got a lot worse again. I asked her why she’d stopped. She said her shoulder started hurting, she’d Googled whether antidepressants could cause shoulder pain, and read that they could. She couldn’t remember what site she was reading, but I bet it was EHealthMe or Treato or some of the others just like them.

One day, somebody’s going to Google “can penicillin cause cancer?”, read a report with a link to a support group for penicillin-induced-cancer survivors, stop taking antibiotics, and die. And when that happens, I hope it’s in America, so I can be sure their family will sue the company involved for more money than exists in the entire world.

A week on and while the raw pain has eased slightly, the shock and sense of loss remains.

And while I slowly begin to feel better, I realise that I still see traces of him everywhere:

The tributes and concerts and parties and film screenings and club nights continue, although I still don’t feel quite ready to join in.

This letter from a palliative care doctor struck a particular nerve:

Many people I talk to as part of my job think that death predominantly happens in hospitals, in very clinical settings, but I presume you chose home and planned this in some detail. This is one of our aims in palliative care, and your ability to achieve this may mean that others will see it as an option they would like fulfilled. The photos that emerged of you some days after your death, were said to be from the last weeks of your life. I do not know whether this is correct, but I am certain that many of us would like to carry off a sharp suit in the same way that you did in those photos. You looked great, as always, and it seemed in direct defiance of all the scary monsters that the last weeks of life can be associated with.

And again, I think of my dad, and again, I am sad.

There was at least one real moment of joy, however. Imagining Giles Coren’s frustration at having to wait until the Saturday before he was able to publish his piece in the Times, and knowing how heartbroken he must have been when he realised that Camilla Long had not only beaten him to it, but was also invited on to Question Time by the programme’s unimaginative and grubby producers.

There are many problems with Coren’s article, the main one being that it was ever published in the first place. But let’s just take a moment to look at a few of them.

I described the response to Bowie’s death as “hysterical” and it was.

[…]

The hysteria was positively Diana-like (indeed the two had much in common – all skinny and sad, obsessed with hair and clothes, desperately shagging everything that moved) and that is because Bowie (like Diana) appealed to hysterical people. People who make a massive great fuss about the teeniest thing.

The idea that this, bullying, unpleasant, short-tempered man-child who once went into a four-hour meltdown on Twitter because he misread the terms and conditions of a service he signed up to should have the audacity to lecture anyone on how to keep their emotions in check shows such a colossal lack of of self-awareness that you wonder how he is able eat a bowl of soup unassisted, having apparently been born without any proprioceptors.

His is not an anti-Bowie piece, he repeatedly states. He “had six or seven of his records on vinyl as a kid”, He bought Hunky Dory and “the first Ziggy album” when he went over to CDs (although he didn’t bother with the rest of the back catalogue, explaining that “nobody buys Station To Station twice”). He even “downloaded the odd Bowie song” after his collection went digital, although by that time he was 40 years old and “a bit old for pop music.”

So what is his objection to the way that people responded to Bowie’s death? It seems that it all comes down to Coren’s own sense of insecurity, worthlessness and fear. But even then, Giles is unable to articulate this in any way that makes any kind of sense.

“All that guff about how Bowie liberated gay people,” Coren writes. “That’s just tosh.”

“That liberation has been far too gradual, tidal and culturally momentous a thing to lay at the feet of one (as I said, excellent) singer.

There’s a straw man, waiting in the sky.

I’m not sure anyone was really suggesting that one individual was personally responsible for all of the advances in the gay rights movement during the last few decades. I think they were just saying that he was an influential figure in that battle.

Because when I was a teenager I didn’t want to wear androgynous carnival costumes or do coke or paint a zigzag on my face or be a girl or a spaceman or kiss other boys. I didn’t even want to dance (I still don’t, dancing is for idiots). I just wanted to do my homework, play football, eat Chipsticks, watch Swap Shop, maybe go to university, then get a job, get married, and get old.

And for most of history, that would have been okay. But then David Bowie came along and made my tastes and aspirations seem laughable and bourgeois. He made it feel not okay to be hard-working, square and middle class. Personally, I found his stupid clothes, daft little personas and grotesque sexual incontinence completely terrifying, but I wasn’t allowed to say so. So the only place for those feelings to go was into self-hatred and a deep sense of my own social inadequacy.

Oh, Giles, David Bowie isn’t to blame for your feelings of self-hatred and sense of social inadequacy! That’s all your own work. Stop being so modest. Credit where credit’s due.

But there is a slight contradiction here is there not? Bowie could only have possibly have made life more difficult for people who didn’t want to wear androgynous carnival costumes or do coke or paint a zigzag on their face or be a girl or a spaceman or kiss other boys by making it easier for people who did want to wear androgynous carnival costumes or do coke or paint a zigzag on their face or be a girl or a spaceman or kiss other boys.

And the only way that making it easier for people who did want to do those things could in fact make it more difficult for people who didn’t want to is if those people were so self-obsessed and emotionally insecure that they would see someone else’s liberation as a personal attack on their own.

That is why Giles doesn’t like Bowie. Because Giles Coren is a scared man. And like lots of scared men, he is scared because finally all of the certainties that laid the foundations of his worldview are being challenged and he is unsure of his place in life.

And “nobody buys Station To Station twice”? Seriously, what a twat.

But of course, he doesn’t actually believe what he says. He even admits as much himself:

It is rare to see someone admit so openly to their own grasping venality that part of me almost wants to admire him. But then I regain my senses and realise that he’s an absolute bell-end.

Now, let’s all agree to never think about the pointless little typist ever again. He’s invisible and dumb and no-one will recall him.

My Facebook and Twitter timelines are filled with people talking about which of his albums they’ve been playing the most this last week. Listing their favourite albums and songs in order. But I’m not yet able to think like that. I’m only able to listen to Blackstar, over and over again. What am I searching for? Meaning? Answers? No. I don’t think so.

There are, of course, subreddits and Tumblrs and blogs and newspaper articles trying to decode the album. Where is the Villa of Ormen? Does “Blackstar” relate to a form of cancer lesion? An Elvis song? The transistional phase between a star and a singularity? ISIS? Citizen Bowie has turned us into a million Jerry Thompsons.

And this seems to be how things are going more generally anyway. Like everyone else on the internet, I’ve been watching Making A Murderer. Before that, like everyone else, I was listening to Serial. Both shows have inspired wild speculation among their fans, with laptop detectives eager to crack the case.But while Making A Murderer perhaps steered viewers too far in one direction, Serial was a bit more subtle in its approach. It wrong-footed a lot of people because they misunderstood the question the programme was asking. People thought (and in the first few episodes were maybe led to believe) that this was a programme asking “Did he do it or didn’t he?” when actually it was “Would you have found him guilty or not guilty?”

People thought Serial was a puzzle when really it was a mystery. And trying to fit the final piece of a puzzle into the missing hole of a mystery never works. It never quite fits, no matter how close it is, there is always a gap of uncertainty. People watch a film like Mulholland Drive and think it’s a puzzle they can solve. Their solution? “It was all a dream.”No. I’m not having that. Why take a work of such complexity and reduce it down to something so reductive and perfunctory? Why not just accept the mystery? “It was all a dream” is a cop out. It means you’ve run out of ideas and you’ve run out of energy and you’re just looking for a convenient way out of your flimsy attempt to make sense of something you couldn’t possibly begin to understand.

There’s a quite extraordinary interview that David Bowie did with Chris Evans on TFI Friday back in 1999:

I asked (the other) DB about it on Twitter once:

So strange and irrelevant  that you may feel I’ve collapsed. Just let me go.

And then I think of the incredible sassiness (he got game) of that final third section of Blackstar.

I can’t answer why

Just go with me.

As humans, we seek answers. It’s what shields us from our greatest fear. Ambiguity and ambivalence and uncertainty make us feel uncomfortable and itchy. We want to find out the significance of Rosebud, of Blackstar, of the solitary candle. We need to find those answers because the alternative is terrifying. What if it’s all just unknowable? What if there are no answers? What if there isn’t a secret code? Where does that then leave us?

I can’t answer why

But I can show you how

And I think of Tony Visconti during the recording of Blackstar and I think of him asking Bowie if this was a “farewell” album and I think how Bowie just laughed at the question.

Here was a man being asked the most fundamental of questions by one of his most trusted collaborators and friends, and he refuses to give an answer.  And I think that he didn’t give an answer because there isn’t an answer. Because it isn’t a puzzle to solve. And I think that he really meant what he said in that last song.

Seeing more and feeling less

Saying no but meaning yes

This is all I ever meant

That’s the message that I sent

I can’t give everything

I can’t give everything away

I can’t give everything away

And I think it’s OK that we don’t have an answer and it’s better that we don’t have an answer because how could you try to reduce his life and his work into a single thing? An answer? Wouldn’t that just be so disappointing? Because he wasn’t a puzzle. He was a mystery. And he could never give everything away.

But then you think about him again and it all seems so improbable that he ever existed in the first place and only one explanation seems to make sense.

It was all a dream.

Main picture from the “Heroes” album shoot by Masayoshi Sukita.

Yesterday, speaking at a mandatory convocation at Liberty University, Donald Trump once again proved incapable of convincingly posing as an evangelical Christian. His awkward attempts to affirm the signifiers of evangelicalism only served to demonstrate his general lack of familiarity with them.

The example of this that observers had the most fun with was the way he pronounced 2 Corinthians as “Two Corinthians,” rather than the more common “second Corinthians.” Some even suggested this was a game-ending faux pas that would doom Trump’s pursuit of white evangelical votes.

This is a man whose candidacy consists of ethnic slurs, racist slanders, instigating violence against Muslim Americans, a disdain for the Bill of Rights, and contempt for the poor. This is from a philandering casino magnate and slum lord whose public persona is so crude, arrogant and bellicose that he made Spy magazine seem piously moral by comparison. We’re supposed to believe that white evangelical voters happily swallow all of that, but will abruptly abandon the short-fingered vulgarian because he muffed a scripture citation?

Yeah, OK, maybe. That wouldn’t be far out of character for Liberty University-style white evangelicals. And that is pretty clearly what they’ve demonstrated as their priorities: Racism is never a deal-breaker. Misquoting the Bible can be.

Still, though, I think Trump’s awkward, fumbling attempt to quote the Bible was actually a positive for his campaign for this audience. Two reasons:

1. Trump was quoting from 2 Corinthians 3:17, a passage that he quite obviously did not understand or care about other than that it contains the word “liberty.” He was, in other words, prooftexting based on a quick-and-dirty concordance word search. He didn’t care about the context of the surrounding passage, or about the larger theological argument, or about the social, cultural, religious or political context for this verse. He looked up a word, found a verse with that word, and cited that verse as the final word on the subject.

Or, in other words, Trump demonstrated that he perfectly understands the hermeneutic of white evangelicalism. He reads and interprets the Bible exactly the same way they do.

2. Donald Trump was speaking to an audience of mostly white evangelical undergraduates. Less than four years ago, these kids were in white evangelical or fundamentalist church youth groups. So Trump’s cringe-inducing botched attempt to pander to their culture would be, for these kids, comfortably familiar.

Think about it. Trump was up there trying to convince this audience that he was one of them — just like their former youth ministers, and all the many guest speakers at youth group, had done all through high school. And just like those youth ministers, Trump garbled the lingo, embarrassed himself by using insider-slang he only half-understood, and generally came across as someone who desperately wanted to be liked by a roomful of young people he didn’t understand.

For kids who grew up in church youth group, that’s like going home.

Ultimately, though, none of this subcultural subtext matters. Trump’s Bible-polishing was met with a shuffling silence, but he shifted to his standard talking points — military bluster, rights for whites, lower taxes, etc. — and the audience cheered.

Is Donald Trump evangelical enough for white evangelicals? No. But he’s white enough — and for them, that’s what’s most important.

See also Molly Ball on “The Religious Right’s Donald Trump Dilemma“:

Trump’s candidacy will prove clarifying. The Republican Party has relied on “values voters” for decades without, in their view, faithfully representing their interests. As Falwell put it in his introduction of Trump: “For decades, conservatives and evangelicals have chosen the political candidates who have told us what we wanted to hear on social, religious, and political issues, only to be betrayed by these same candidates after they were elected.” In Trump, these voters see someone who shares their true priorities.

David G. Hartwell died today. He was 74.

For those of you who haven't heard of him, two factoids might be of interest. Firstly, he was nominated for a Hugo award on 39 occasions (winning three times). That fact alone probably says more about his standing within the SF field than anything I can add. (Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tor's Editorial Director, describes him as "our field's most consequential editor since John W. Campbell.")

Secondly, he acquired and edited my Merchant Princes for Tor; and acquired and was editing a new trilogy in that setting for publication next year. I've known him for more than 15 years and was looking forward to seeing him again next month—this is a terrible shock.

A giant of the field has departed, and I'm going to miss him as a friend as well as an editor. I offer my deepest sympathy to everyone else who knew him.

Margaret Beckett's report on what she believes to be the reasons for its defeat in last year's general election has been published by the Labour Party. BBC News has a summary.

There is an article about it on Liberal Democrat Voice, which gives in passing a dispiriting glimpse of the tactics we used to hold on to Sheffield Hallam.

It also has a noteworthy comment from Liberator's Mark Smulian:

At least Labour has published its report. I understand the equivalent Lib Dem one was released only to Federal Executive members on paper, which they were obliged to return at the end of their meeting, and has otherwise remained secret.

Let's hope the Lib Dem equivalent of the Beckett Report will be published soon.

Today Stonewall presents its annual list of the UK's top employers for LGBT staff.

The "Workplace Equality Index" is one of the organisations key programmes these days, after 25 years of campaigning for, and sometimes against, legal changes to establish either lesbian and gay or LGBT equality.

Bisexual exclusion in LGB or LGBT spaces is nothing new, though there is an encouraging trend to address it in workplace staff networks. At BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bisexual organisation, we've been working with employers and voluntary organisations on bisexual inclusion since the late 1990s, when the more switched-on groups started to address this.

Research over the past decade on workplace experience for bi people tells us two key things. First, that simply having an LGBT network in place made a big difference to how comfortable gay and lesbian people were about being out at work; but no difference to bisexual staff. Second, that while around 50% of gay staff feel they can safely be out at work, bi women are half as likely to feel they can be out at work as are lesbians or gay men - and bi men only half as likely again. When seven out of eight bisexual men feel they need to mask their sexual orientation to get by at work, we've still got a lot to do.

To me, that reflects the wider 'gay scene' where in the 80s and 90s there was widespread prejudice towards and exclusion of bi people. Back then Unison's lesbian & gay network expelled bi members, the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard would not let bi volunteers work on its phonelines, and bars on Manchester's Canal Street had "no bisexuals" door policies.

There has been a tendency when moving from "LG" to "LGB" or "LGBT" organising to welcome the "gay side" of bisexual people - which of course we don't have, any more than an English person is just a Welsh side and a Scottish side put together. We're entirely bisexual.

But if your LGBT group is having a women's night out and your lesbian colleagues can bring their girlfriends, do you feel you can bring your husband, or do you feel a bit less welcome?

If your posters and policies in the workplace talk about homophobia and transphobia, are you challenging biphobia - including biphobia from gay and lesbian staff?

What can employee networks do?

- Understand that you don't start with a clean slate: for example Unison's LGBT group spent several years getting from the initial change from LG to LGBT to having a thriving bi network, because they had to undo the effects of past bi exclusion.
- Collaborate with local bi organisations around the country like BiPhoria. There's a list of them on the Bi Community News website.
- Put Bi Visibility Day (September 23rd) squarely on your activity plan for the year alongside events like Trans Day Of Remembrance.
- Be conscious about language; it's easy to slip from "LGBT" into "gay", yet it sends a message about which parts of the LGBT communities are welcome and the centre of your attention.
- Assume some of your staff are bisexual. Including some of the people who you've read as being gay or straight.
- Outreach work such as advertising in bi press like Bi Community News, sponsoring or otherwise supporting events like BiCon and BiReCon.

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January 18th, 2016: I spend a lot of time thinking about Batman!! I have this many regrets: NONE. – Ryan

This list, which it took a not inconsiderable amount of effort on my part to find after seeing it go by on my dash the other day¹, is of interest, I think. It represents a trend that I’ve been trying somewhat cack-handedly to put into words for a while now – crudely, the “bundling” of various sorts of media into a certain kind of interest superset. The idea that certain kinds of people like certain sorts of media is nothing new, of course, but this isn’t exactly a grouping according to anything as specific as interest – it depends far more on an ambiguous quality that seems be bestowed by the approval of bearers of a weird seemingly omnidirectional but in fact very narrow and specific enthusiasm.

These people are distinct from fans – fandom culture, while not really my thing, can and often is as ruthlessly critical of the things it loves as anyone who dislikes it (in the words of Steve Burns, “I don’t need to hate Doctor Who, because Doctor Who fans hate it far more than I ever will”). It’s a weird sort of “enthusiast” culture: peculiarly uncritical, fundamentally unreflective. One is a Fan – not of a specific thing – book, film, television series, but of Stuff, of the superset of Things That One Is A Fan Of – things exemplified but by no means entirely enumerated by the list. It’s a litany of adaptations of other properties – comics, videogames, books² or sequels³ to kid’s films/things from the ‘80s, and this forms the core of “awesome” things that people are for some reason meant to care about⁴.

In monoliths I talked about my historic difficulty regarding individual items within e.g. the aegis of Doctor Who as separate works rather than part of a whole. I have come around to thinking that not only is the opposite way of thinking better, it is a necessary corrective to this bundling, and that the monolith effect, stretched, warped beyond collections of stories about the same thing to the scale of aesthetic and genre, is the problem. Some of those things (though very few, admittedly) hold a degree of interest for me, but I can guarantee that in a month someone will ask me if I’ve seen Deadpool yet. No, I’ll respond weakly, it’s not really my thing. But I thought you liked comics? Mmm.

This evening York Mix posted 12 vintage films of the city.

One caught my eye straight away, because it comes from August 1979 and so falls during my time as a student in the city.

Watching it today does confirm one memory of mine - and I don't mean the gruesomely distorted sound, which reminds me of film shows at primary school.
No, that memory is of a time before the Jorvik Centre opened. In my student days there was a large archaeological dig on the site. You can see it on the film from 2:27.

As I recall, there was no charge for going round and you were given a Viking oyster shell when you left.

The latest news from the Jorvik Centre is rather grim. It was badly affected by the recent floods and the government has rejected a plea for extra funds to allow a swift reopening.

A report in the Yorkshire Post quotes the former North Yorkshire councillor and Liberal Democrat peer Angie Harris:

"When I visited the Jorvik Viking Centre in York last week it was a scene of utter devastation. 

"It's a world renowned tourist attraction and educational centre, provided by the excellent York Archaeological Trust, of which I am a member, and which depends largely on its funding from the viking centre. The Trust could be destroyed by this enormous loss of revenue."

I like to keep track of US politics, because it's generally less traumatic to contemplate someone else's smoking wreckage than one's own house when it's on fire.

2016 is a Presidential election year in the United States, and I make no predictions as to the outcome. However, a lot of my friends and acquaintances are looking at the Republican party primary debates in slack-jawed disbelief and coming out with variations on, "OMG, we're doomed! Did he really say that?"

Well yes, in most cases he did. What we're seeing is the climactic efflorescence of tendencies that have been running in American right-wing politics for longer than I've been alive, so none of this is a surprise: but if you find it bizarre or confusing and want to know where it's come from, carry on reading.

In the earlier "Long-range forecast" thread, one of the regular commenters said, my human side wonders if the toxins can be sucked out and hatreds healed and works on that assumption. (Innocence-with-awareness).

I fear that her human side is wrong, at least in the short term, for values of "short" on the approximate order of my lifespan. I have two essays I'd like to cite, both by historian-journalists in search of the heart of [American] darkness.

The first one, by Richard J. Hofstadter, was published a month after I was born, so it's over 51 years old and predates Nixon's Southern Strategy: The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It tells you how deep some of the taproots of crazy go. The essay's a classic. In it, Hofstadter explores (per wiki) "political paranoia against Illuminism (intellectual subversion), freemasonry (corporate subversion), and the Jesuits (religious subversion), then progresses through U.S. politics to its contemporary (1950s-60s) modern incarnations of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society." (Note that the John Birch society was co-founded by Fred C. Koch. His children's political activities today should require no introduction.)

The second one is more recent. It's by Rick Perlstein, published in 2012, and it's all about the motives of the people who irrigate those taproots: The Long Con: mail-order conservativism. The key point is that the conspiracy tendencies Hofstadter pointed to in the 1960s are still around and in use to this day by opportunist hucksters who rely on Republican party mailing lists to milk donations from the gullible and frightened, just as televangelists use variant theology to solicit donations from their own flock of believers.

If you've read and inwardly digested these, and have an understanding of Altemeyer's book on Authoritarian Followers (wikipedia crib notes here), then you're equipped to understand how this deeply toxic meme complex perpetuates itself—or at least how it did so up to roughly 2007.

2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices). Telepathy, unfortunately, turns out to not be all about elevated Apollonian abstract intellectualism: it's an emotion amplifier and taps into the most toxic wellsprings of the subconscious. As implemented, it brings out the worst in us. Twitter and Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers and public execution spectators. It can be used for good, but more often it drags us down into the dim-witted, outraged weltanschauung of the mob.

It turns out that when you take the old paranoid-style driven give-us-all-your-money mailing list scams (and their old-media spin-offs like Fox News and Clear Channel's talk radio shock jocks) and add telepathy, what you get is the whole festering stew of the Neo-reactionary movement, a scream of rage directed against the modern world. (Let's not forget that the ideological roots of the neo-reactionaries, notably Nick Land's writings on accelerationism, emerged during the late 1990s, not at all coincidentally at the same time that internet access among the western bourgeoisie was becoming A Thing.) When you add telepathy to the toxic stew of rejection of the Enlightenment legacy you get an ad-hoc movement of angry ideologues who have jabbed their fungal hyphae into the cerebral cortex of Reddit and n-chan to parasitically control the rageface collective.

Of course higher-order top-down parasites like the NSA, GCHQ, the Five Eyes and the 50-Cent Party have also noticed this fertile disinformation vector and are using it to provide evidence to justify their existing bureaucratic imperatives: and combat newer ad-hoc upstart rivals. Oh, and to drag it all in a circle, if you look at Da'esh and the Neoreactionaries? East is East and West is West and this is your face in a mirror.

But here's the key take-away: 2016 will be the first US Presidential Election where the outcome will be visibly influenced by telepathic broadcasts direct from the political id, with the more plugged-in candidates (cough, Donald Trump) speaking in tweets rather than TV-friendly sound-bites and making their play in real time to their audience reactions, much like the plot of a novel co-written by Neal Stephenson before he got famous. If you've wondered why Trump can say the things he says, it's because his core constituency want him to. If you want to know why Islamic State are so awful, you can find the answer in Hofstadter and Altemeyer's work—just add Islam instead of Capitalism as a guiding ideology. And if you want to know what the worst possible case outcome for the USA looks like (caveat: I think it's highly unlikely it'll go that far), now you've got the tools to figure it out for yourself. It looks kinda like Da'esh's caliphate, only with the NRA instead of religious police, Facebook instead of the Friday sermon after the call to prayer, and a surplus of unhappy zoned-out worker-consumer-units on tranquillizers.

When David Bowie died local newspapers scrambled to find a local angle on the story.

The Leicester Mercury did rather better, reprinting a rather sniffy review from 1973 of a concert he gave at De Montfort Hall:

He's become the figurehead of a new phase of rock sub-culture with its transvestitism and glitter trappings. There are those who have dubbed the Bowie-Roxy-Cooper glam-rock as the decadence preceding the demise of rock. 

But I can't believe that Bowie or his followers really take the Gay Liberation bit seriously. 

Certainly the man himself seemed to have his tongue firmly placed in cheek throughout last night's performance as he pouted and minced his way through all the best numbers from his exceptionally fine last four albums. 

Bowie has brought show-biz back to rock with a vengeance, and judging from last night's hysterical response, the younger fans are only too eager to accept the theatrical trappings that their elder brothers and sisters once rejected. 

But the Larry Grayson aspect is just a pose - albeit a highly successful one. Bowie has become Ziggy Stardust - the focal character of one of his songs. 

'The music' I can hear some of you saying. What about the music? Good point. Well to be frank, there's nothing new about that. It's mostly rough and raucous rock, power-pop as Pete Townsend calls it. The sound is based on Mick Ronson's strident rasping chord work with bass Trev Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey providing perfect support for Bowie's strong Anthony Newleyish vocals. 

Bowie's biggest recent hit for example, "Jean Genie" is a straight rip-off of the Yardbirds' 'I'm a Man', and last night Bowie performed the song with even more of an R and B flavour, swapping harmonica with Ronson's lead work just like Keith Relf and Becky used to do. 

But the music's not important. Presentation is what today's rock is all about, and no-one could complain about that last night.

I'm not sure you would get such an opinionated review in a local paper today, and that is a shame.

There was also a good letter published in the paper yesterday from someone who attended this concert as a 15-year-old:

I am sure if you talk to anyone present on that night they will have the same opinion: it was the gig of a lifetime. Those of us who loved Bowie are gutted at his passing in a way that non-believers can never understand. He, for me, was the man that opened my eyes to all art in a way my teachers never could. 

It is true to say that every book I have chosen to read, every painting admired, every play, show, ballet and gig that I have attended since that June evening in 1973 owe something to it for the beautiful spark it ignited. 

Thank you, David, your show was life-changing and life-enhancing and it took place in the city I love.

Anyway, thanks to that 1973 reviewer, here are The Yardbirds with "I'm a Man".

There is an earlier, live version with Eric Clapton, but I can't find it online, so here is Becky (as I have never heard Jeff Beck called before). The link with "Jean Genie" is obvious.