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Saturday 22 March 2008

Who's afraid of the big bad cyber-wolf?

The Washington Post reported yesterday that China-based hackers may have broken into web accounts belonging to the Save Darfur Coalition. Save Darfur are an American lobby group advocating Western intervention to end the genocide in the Sudan, with members including Amnesty, the American Islamic Congress, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. According to the Post, "The allegation fits a near decade-old pattern of cyber-espionage and cyber-intimidation by the Chinese government against critics of its human rights practices".

The idea that the Chinese government would go so far as to hack into a human rights group's web server suggests a level of conscious evil that is almost ridiculous. It's like something you'd see Kim Jong-il plotting while humming happily to himself in Team America.

The world first became truly aware of the massacres in Darfur in 2004: a full four years ago. It was the same year Britney Spears reached no.1 with Toxic, the third Lord of the Rings film won just about all the Oscars, abuse in Abu Ghraib was exposed and Athens hosted the Olympics. Just think how much has changed since then. Now let's think about what we've managed to achieve in Darfur.

Look back to this 2004 BBC report, which quoted the International Crisis Group: "Urgent international action is required on several fronts if 'Darfur 2004' is not to join 'Rwanda 1994' as shorthand for international shame". In the intervening years, urgent international action has continued to be talked about, but no major power has sent in forces as we did in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. In December last year, the UN finally deployed some troops, but the promised force of 26,000 peacekeepers is yet to arrive; currently there are only 9,000 on the ground.

Our failure to do anything more than witness is not for want of trying. As the picture here testifies - it's Mia Farrow and an 8-year-old Darfurian refugee, walking into a sandstorm near the Sudan-Chad border to mark the start of a Dream for Darfur torch relay - the cause is a big deal, with celebrities, marketing campaigns, numerous charitable trusts, books, films and rallies all attempting to get someone, somewhere to make it stop.

Why to such little avail? Did we learn nothing from Rwanda? In an interview with The Observer late last year, Britain's minister for Africa, Mark Malloch Brown, made a comment that seems to pass the buck rather: "Bush and Blair both had a great deal of personal passion about Darfur. But there's a limit to what leaders can do if there isn't a heavy level of concern from the public".

Really? Isn't it more pertinent to note the regrettable limit that any level of public concern can achieve when political resolve is missing? We only have to consider the failure of the anti-Iraq war demonstrations to know that however many petitions we sign, the workings of international politicians bear precious little comparison to true democratic process.

In 2007, a UN report found that the Sudanese government had "manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur... and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes". But U.S. and UK sanctions of Sudanese products can have little impact while China continues to buy 70% of the country's exports, and supply it with weapons. Nicholas D. Krystof in The New York Times makes a good case for renaming this year's sports celebrations in China "The Genocide Olympics".
Which brings us back to the China-based hackers who've cyber-attacked the Save Darfur Coalition. Such dirty tricks do nothing to help China's laughable attempts at positive PR, and certainly undermine the stated motto of this year's Olympics in Beijing:

"One World, One Dream" is simple in expressions, but profound in meaning. It is of China, and also of the world. It conveys the lofty ideal of the people in Beijing as well as in China to share the global community and civilization and to create a bright future hand in hand with the people from the rest of the world. It expresses the firm belief of a great nation, with a long history of 5,000 years and on its way towards modernization, that is committed to peaceful development, harmonious society and people's happiness. It voices the aspirations of 1.3 billion Chinese people to contribute to the establishment of a peaceful and bright world."

If only this were true. The crackdown on pro-Tibet protestors last week and China's general policy of cyber-bullying seems to point more seriously than ever to a boycott of the Olympics outright.

Sunday 9 March 2008

Laura Marling & friends at the Union Chapel



"There's a point in the gig every night where Laura has to change guitars," says the drummer apologetically, "And I have to talk."

The audience laughs. We don't mind waiting for Laura Marling, the 18-year-old whose voice is jaw-droppingly elastic, like treacle, to change from one acoustic guitar to another. Neither do we mind sharing the good-natured camaraderie that her band Mumford and Sons, gently surround her with, like protective big brothers.



The Union Chapel on Upper Street is full yet quiet on Thursday night; quiet with expectation and appropriately enough, a kind of reverence. Almost everyone is here because they bought Marling's Songbox, with the unusual consequence that almost everyone has come alone. The Songbox was the only way to get a ticket - no sales on the door - and as some fans complained, that meant unless you bought twice, chances were you wouldn't be able to take along your friend/lover/gig-buddy.

But at least the enforced solitary attendance has the effect of making everyone far chattier than they might normally be in a London venue; standing in the queue I discuss Marling's album with no less than four people whom I've never met before; as we file into the Union Chapel's wooden pews, hesitant introductions are made: "Hi, would you mind if I sit here?... Have you come far?... What do you do?" For a moment it feels more like speed-dating than a concert.

The venue itself is warm and welcoming like churches should be, dark except for a couple of panels of coloured spotlights that prettify the stage, and the streetlights outside that illuminate the rose window. At the back of the church they're selling cups of tea for £1 and my new friend Orlando buys a hot chicken pie from the bar between acts.

The cosy feel is nurtured by Marling's support acts, including the charming band that later accompany her, Mumford and Sons, and Vertigo-signed Johnny Flynn (watch the yummy faux-antique video for his single Leftovers). Both acts are what people call 'alt-folk', though how this differs from traditional folk I'm not exactly sure, except that maybe it sounds a bit more cool and it looks a lot younger.

Mumford and Sons, four floppy-haired boys in tweed waistcoats and open-necked white shirts that make them look like minstrels or agricultural-workers, are very talented and ridiculously endearing. At one point their lead singer prefaces a song bashfully (and entirely needlessly): "This is a new song, and it's a bit rough so please bear with us". His singing voice is rasping yet somehow still melodic; the other band-members offer harmony lustily.

Johnny Flynn and The Sussex Wit wear their folk-ancestry more fully, and so they should, with Vaughan Williams noted as one of their influences. Flynn himself, tousle-haired and dressed-down in his signature lumberjack shirt, has an unshowy but compelling stage presence, apparently at least partly thanks to Stanislavski. I can't stop humming his "Brown Trout Blues", which you should be able to listen to here, seeqpod permitting (listen out for a reworking of a classic tammy wynette lyric):





It's rare that the support acts are so good that you almost forget they're meant to be filler before the main event. When Laura comes on in a white shapeless smock, skin so pale it's almost see-through, her head is bowed and her voice is a bit shaky. "It's very nice to see you all here..." she murmurs, visibly nervous, "Thanks very much for buying the songbox."

A few lines into her first verse and she starts to relax, and meanwhile everyone else is almost holding their breath because her voice is so incredibly liquid and artless and both fragile and strong at once. Even Orlando, who said he was disappointed with the album when it first arrived, is won over.

She looks like a pale, cropped-haired elf, or a small child. Yet her lyrics are far from childish. In "My Manic & I" she treats mental illness with a personal insight that belies her youth: "He greets me with kisses when good days deceive him and sometimes with scorn, and sometimes I believe him". She's also got a dark sense of humour: "Cross your fingers, hold your toes, we're all going to die when the building blows," she croons merrily. The melancholic "Night Terrors", sits well in the shadowy church, with Marling using her voice like a finely tuned instrument, varying emphasis and volume seemingly effortlessly to intone subtle shifts of register.

All too soon it is the end. No-one wants her to stop, and there are two encores after extended applause. We step out into the chill March air and I feel buoyed up by the power of live music when it's this good. Folk is back and it's very young. Long live folk.

Thursday 6 March 2008

British TV drama is languishing in mediocrity, dominated by cheaply-shot, cliche-ridden fare that looks, sounds and feels like a barely-elevated soap opera (The Bill, first broadcast in 1984, still shows twice a week and yet seems stuck somewhere in the mid-90s in terms of script and style).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, TV just gets better and better. I'm thinking specifically of Damages, which is surely the darkest, cleverest serial since Twin Peaks interrogated American suburbia in the 90s. My only problem with Damages being shown on UK terrestrial (BBC1 on Monday nights) is that it spoils every other half-baked programme around.

In the States, it's just one of a super-league of serialized dramas, so good they're like 10 hour feature films that have been chopped into chewable, consistently compelling segments. HBO have led the field since they created the gold standard in television drama, The Sopranos in 1999; since then they've continued to trailblaze with Six Feet Under and most recently, The Wire (named best TV show ever by Time, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly etc; so good that Slate magazine are publishing a weekly analysis of the final series).

HBO's success proved audiences would lap up drama that is original and provocative, and forged a path for some serious competition. Damages comes courtesy of FX Networks, a channel owned by News Corp's Fox Entertainment, while TV's newest darling, Mad Men, is the first TV drama produced by cable channel AMC; a good start for them, as it's already won 2 Golden Globes.

Even those American series that fit neatly into genre boxes - hospital-based series like ER, Grey's Anatomy, House; police procedurals like the CSI franchise and Without A Trace; political wranglings in Spin City and The West Wing - are still top quality stuff, with real attention (i.e. money) paid to cinematography, lighting and characterisation, the like of which is all too rare in the UK.

The only thing we can do reliably well is period-drama, as the recent Sense & Sensibility and Cranford testified. But surely there must be some TV-friendly British writers more contemporary than Austen and Gaskell? The best we've had recently is Spooks; Life on Mars was good, but not as good as its hype. I tried watching Holby City the other week until the appalling script (somewhere between a Hallmark card and a first aid manual) forced me to switch in exasperation to the far more entertaining BBC Parliament.

In 1879, Matthew Arnold lamented: "In England, we have no modern drama at all." He was talking about theatre but sadly I'd say the same about our TV programming today. In the 19th century we led the way in serialized drama but then the medium was novelistic: Dickens' Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood were devoured by readers in chapters every month. I'd argue that the best TV dramas coming out of the States right now can be compared to those Victorian novels in terms of inventiveness and sheer emotional power. Writers, to your pens. Programming directors, to your cheque books. We need a serious injection of original, imaginative, risk-taking writing here.

Saturday 1 March 2008

I'm getting very fond of Dalston, despite the unexpected opening of a shop called 'Hot Nuts' just a few moments from our front door (I can't really blame them for calling it that as it sells nothing but hot nuts, but it does sound a bit odd).
The most recent local charm to win my affections is a small underground music venue. Underground as in a cellar, aswell as vaguely hidden. Yes, last week, after reading this Songkick.com blog post, I finally got round to visiting Bardens Boudoir. About time too, as it's only a stone's throw from our flat, nestling between grubby late-night grocery stores and a pub on Stoke Newington Road. When I told my friend Ben where I was going, he raised his eyebrows, and it may be worth noting that if the use of the word boudoir had correlated to any burlesque-style activity - as it sometimes does at the venue - then I would be staying away (I'm with Ariel Levy when it comes to raunch culture).
But on Tuesday we were there to see the gentle folky singer/songwriter Andy Jackson a.k.a House of Brothers and apart from the fact that his songs were "slightly samey" (in the words of M-A) his was an enjoyable performance and all-in-all, one that added to my general feeling of happy-to-be-alive-ness, especially alive in Dalston, and so near such a cosy venue with such inspired decor. Bardens' highlight in my eyes is its little booths, all of which are wallpapered differently. Music Week recently reviewed the place and Time Out say they list it "begrudgingly" since they don't want everyone to know about it. I'm glad we've found it anyway and await future nights (and the happy knowledge that I can walk home easy as pie) with bated breath.