Seen and heard: May 2014

The Grand Budapest Hotel - lovely and crafty Wes Anderson film, its surreal visual inventiveness reminding me of the films of former animators such as Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Beautiful emotionally-grounding performances too from Ralph Fiennes and the unknown Tony Revolori, as the concierge and his young protege.

Voice - an episode from Series 5 of The Digital Human audio series from the BBC, presented by Alex Krotoski. The other episodes I've found only moderately interesting, but this one was founded on the obvious-only-when-you're-told-it insight that while social media are dominated by text, pictures and video, the exchange of audio (with the important exception of music) is far less significant. Why is speaking less important as a means of self-expression in the digital world? Discuss.

Talk the Talk trailer - promotional video for a FutureLearn MOOC about giving presentations, whose production I've been overseeing. Interestingly in the light of the above entry (Voice), the team have focussed on the speaking aspect of presentation, so that the course doesn't become just a primer in designing PowerPoint presentations. Great trailer, and it looks like being a great course; well done Mirjam, Helene, Marshall, Bill, Lee - and especially Liz, who's been holding it all together.

Cognition, Episode 2 The Wise Monkey - it's been a year since I played Episode 1, but I dropped back in to the "later the same night" continuation as though I'd never been away. Once again, great voice acting and very good gameplay, with clever use of Erica's psychic powers, as you take her on the trail of another serial killer. I was going to take Episodes 3 and 4 on holiday, but annoyingly they're not available on the iPad; I'll just have to play them on PC.

Stephen Cleobury training day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing - great value, with the bonus of singing afterwards in King's College Chapel, as he encouraged us to higher standards of precision in tone production, vowel sounds, and continuity of melodic line (we were doing Renaissance polyphony). His advice included: if your part has got something interesting, let people know about it; if your part has got something ordinary, find a way to make it interesting. Good advice too for writers of teaching materials; it never occurred to me before how much the two activities have in common.

BBC Young Musician of the Year - the instrumental finals and overall final on TV. We had trouble understanding some of the judges' choices of winners, but there was no disputing the merits of the pianist (Martin James Bartlett) who won, and the percussionist (Elliott Gaston-Ross) who was our second choice. Astonishing to see such evident musicianship in performers so young (ages 17 and 15 respectively). There was also welcome encouragement and reward for approaching music-making in a collaborative spirit; perhaps the days of the egocentric soloist are coming to an end.

The Story of Women and Art - BBC TV series, presented by Amanda Vickery. There's a feminist political message, of course, but fundamentally this is about some great pieces of art which truly opened up new or different ways of seeing and representing the world - making their obscurity and occlusion all the more tragic. (There were several pieces which she had to call up from storage to make the programmes, because the galleries didn't think them worth having on display.) I found the final programme, on six influential women artists and designers from the 19th and 20th centuries, the most inspirational and the most moving.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers - interesting new novel, right of the moment. The Circle is a globally hegemonic digital company, like a combination of Google, Facebook and Twitter, seen through the eyes of a young woman who joins it full of excitement, initially at least completely buying into its vision of total data integration and universal connectivity. The arguments for its utopian programme are persuasively put forward by the company's leaders: total transparency of data, they claim, will end crime, oppression and political corruption. But right from the beginning there are hints that things are not going to be so unremittingly positive, outside the cult-like atmosphere of The Circle and its Circlers. (As well as the Moonies, The Circle reminds me very much of the glass city of continuous mutual surveillance in Vevgeny Zamyatin's We, the original dystopian novel; even its slogans - "Secrets are lies", "Sharing is caring" and "Privacy is theft" - sound Orwellian.)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Northern Ballet Theatre at Milton Keynes Theatre. Northern Ballet always deliver value for money (as I console myself, when hesitating over the price of tickets), but this was especially wonderful, with the Dream set into the story of a ballet company, riven with conflicts and tensions, whose collective dreaming on an overnight sleeper train brings them resolution and healing. The Ballet Master, who becomes Puck in the Dream, was a truly magical character, appropriately lithe and spirit-like in his movements, in both roles bringing about change and transformation with his staff, like Hermes.

Botanicula - wordless graphic adventure game from the Samorost team, who also produced Machinarium; in this, a team of little tree-dwelling creatures try to save their environment from destruction by a venomous predator. Endlessly inventive, with great visual and aural jokes and gags. It works beautifully on the iPad too.

9 Elefants - puzzle game, set in Paris. I suppose it's good to keep the brain active, and the hot jazz soundtrack keeps things buzzing along, but I'm not enjoying it so much now that I'm half way through and the puzzles are starting to get more difficult.

Music in the Mountains festival - based in the Alpujarra region of Spain, where it has run for some years thanks to the energetic organisation of musician and Alexander teacher Cat Jury. Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, gave three concerts under the Festival's auspices: in Granada Cathedral, the Cuevas de Nerja, and the church of Mecina. An admirable feature of the festival is that Cat makes sure the visiting musicians bring trade to local businesses; so as well as the Hotel de Mecina Fondales, we ate at the three local bars (the bar Aljibe, the Cuevas de la Mora Luna, and El Baranquillo) - as well as the beautifully located Chiringuito (Casa Emilio) on the seafront at Salobreña after our Nerja concert. The Archbishop of Granada publicly invited us to return to his Cathedral for another concert, and we'll be happy to do so.

Alhambra palace - the must-see site, which we duly visited on the afternoon of our Granada concert. Having seen it so much in pictures and on television, it was hardly a surprise (though the walking distances required to get through the gardens were daunting), but still very beautiful and impressive in its scale.

Bernard Rudofsky exhibition, at a gallery in Granada, just by the cathedral - filling in a spare half hour between the Alhambra and our rehearsal. His classic work, it seems, was called Architecture without Architects, and he sought to bring the humane qualities of folk design and construction back into the professional world. Interesting chance discovery.

Cuttings: May 2014

Net Neutrality in pictures - referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. 'Valiant attempt to explain something that most politicians don’t appear to get.'

Thomas Piketty's Capital: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller - Paul Mason article in The Guardian 29 April 2014  ‘That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US.... Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank / ministry / TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally. If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.’

The Big Beasts who Shaped the BBC, Charlotte Higgins article in The Guardian, 15 May 2014,  ‘It was Reith's great achievement to shape the pragmatic decisions that went into the creation of the BBC into an ideology, which he outlined in 1924 in his book Broadcast Over Britain. The BBC's powers as an educative tool were sketched out ("to have exploited so great a scientific invention for the purpose and pursuit of 'entertainment' alone would have been a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people"). It was activated as an equalising, democratic force: "It carries direct information on a hundred subjects to innumerable men and women who will after a short time be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment." (Reith importantly invoked women, newly enfranchised.) "The whole service … may be taken as the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man," he wrote, a wonderfully hopeful thing to say. Its purpose was, he declared, to carry "the best of everything into the greatest number of homes". This ringing statement has been refined and rethought over the years – as in Huw Wheldon's famous chiasmus about making the good popular and the popular good. As a founding idea, it lies deep in the BBC's psyche. Hall himself referred to it in his first speech as DG in October 2013. "At the core of the BBC's role is something very simple, very democratic and very important – to bring the best to everyone," he said.’

The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades - article by Christopher Fox in The Guardian, 17 May 2014.  '[Today] listening [to music] at home is ... trouble-free, a laptop and headphones doing away with the need for all those records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, amplifiers, wires and speakers. So much time filled, so much space saved; never before has music been so available and yet so immaterial. Perhaps it's this immateriality that has provoked a revival of interest in older audio technologies, in ways of recording and listening that involve something more tangible than a stream of digital code. Tellingly, this is a revival led by people too young to have used these technologies when they were state of the art.... It's this generation that is buying vinyl, and it's musicians of the same generation who are making the records, experimenting with tape recorders and enthusing about analogue sound.'

How people spend their time online, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. Chart, based on 2013 data from 5000 Americans, age 18-64. 'Some interesting aspects: note how important email still is, despite all the talk about social networking. Note that online newspapers and magazines together only add up to the same time consumption as blogs or internet radio.'

Diary: first person account of psychosis - referenced in MindHacks blog. 'I met a woman called Margaret in Fairmile hospital. I assumed she was my link to the politician with the same first name. She explained periods to me. I wondered if the PM was angry with me for writing a story saying she deserved to hang for sinking the Belgrano. I tried to manoeuvre Margaret around to the front of the hospital so that a Rolls could pull in off the main road and take me to Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t seem very willing to comply. The shrink had been watching me and asked why I looked up at the sky when helicopters flew over. They were sent by Francis Pym to rescue me. Despite the massive grounds around the Victorian building the choppers never seemed to land. I soon realised I would do six months unless I staged a recovery. I stopped looking at helicopters and after only three months I was free.'

Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain) - article in The Atlantic, referenced in MindHacks blog.  'Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There's something a little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. Ah! That's not a vine, that's a snake! That's an LG logo. NO—it's Pac-Man! But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. What's going on here?'

Still running Windows XP? That's the way Bill Gates planned it - Observer article by John Naughton, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. 'On 8 April this year Microsoft released its final free security patch for XP. From now on, anyone wishing to obtain security upgrades for the system will have to enter into an expensive ($200 a desktop) deal with Microsoft.... In this country, the government has hundreds of thousands of PCs running XP. And of the 800,000 PCs in the NHS about three-quarters are running it. In those circumstances, the news that Her Majesty's government has forked out £5.5m for one year's cover looks like a rare example of government doing the prudent thing. But in reality it has just bought time: the awful moment when the public sector has to upgrade its computers is approaching inexorably. Think of it as technology's equivalent to the Scottish referendum.'

Politics or technhology – which will save the world? - article by David Runciman in The Guardian 23 May 2014, being extracts from his book Politics, from a series Ideas in Profile. 'The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world's poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange…. But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won't rescue anyone from civil war. …. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.' 'In the developed world, impatience with politics takes another form. We don't look to technology to rescue us from failed states. We look to it to rescue us from overbearing ones. Politics in the west can appear bloated and stale. By contrast, the tech world looks dynamic, flexible and exciting. It invents stuff all the time.... These failures [of government IT projects] help breed contempt for politicians not only among citizens but from the tech industry, which often assumes that government is simply an obstacle to be overcome, an analogue annoyance in a digital world. But there are some things the tech industry doesn't understand very well. Its blind spots include the story of its own origins. There would be no tech industry on the scale we know it today without government. This is not simply because every industry needs stable and reliable political institutions to uphold the property rights on which its dynamism depends…. It is because government investment is what made the information technology revolution possible in the first place.'

Twelve ways to fix British politics – column by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, 28 May 2014. '3. The so-called "professionalising" of politics is widely despised. No one should become an MP without having done other jobs. The media doesn't count as a job!... 4. No one should stand for a seat in a place to which they have no connection. Why on earth should ambitious Londoners be helicoptered into safe seats? I have heard talk that the standard of MPs would drop if it were left to local talent alone. Yes, really. 5. Language: the terrible fear of actually saying something results in verbless slogans and expensive logos. Hardworking Britain Better Off, for instance, appears as if it were the result of a brainstorming session that had to be abandoned halfway through as a fire alarm went off. The making up of new phrases should always ring alarm bells. If you can't tell voters who you are and what you want to do with the pre-existing vocabulary and vernacular of the entire English language, surely that's not good.'