Seduction by vinyl

Vinyl LPs have always had their champions. Ever since the point in the 80s when CDs became the dominant medium for listening to music, there have been people who swore the swore the sound was always better on a 33 RPM LP, and vinyl albums have often been priced at a premium to those little silver plastic discs.

This seems to have stepped up a gear since digital downloads knocked CDs off their perch, and there have been plenty of magazine articles, radio and TV documentaries exploring the enduring appeal of vinyl. A couple of weeks ago BBC4 gave Danny Baker three hour long shows to talk with various mates about what made the old LPs so great.

So far it’s been a minority interest, but this week I saw a sign that it’s a love affair that has obtained some weight in the mainstream media. On a platform at Baker Street Underground there was a large poster for the online dating service match.com, conveying a sense of expectancy with the words “I listened to her favourite album before the date so I could understand why she loved it so much”.

Alongside the words was an image of a vinyl LP, the stylus on the grooves of the first track. It was a surprising choice, as for the vast majority of people that moment would mean slipping a CD into a slot or pressing a button on an MP3 player, but it was obviously meant to convey that there was something special about the man, the woman and the prospects for their relationship. The message was that it would produce something better than most first dates, or whatever any other dating service could offer, because playing an LP produces something CDs or downloads can’t match.

You could argue over whether it’s a message that stands up to scrutiny, but when the advertising industry stars to use an idea it believes it is sufficiently widespread to seduce a large number of people. It’s betting that there’s a demographic with money to spend and a readiness to accept the association of ideas: in this case that a guy who listens to vinyl is worth a serious relationship.

It might amount to a load of old tosh, but it shows that listening to music on vinyl – or at least the idea of it – has become seductive to more than a few music geeks.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Credibility and kiddie hackers

I can’t be the only person who wasn’t completely surprised by the news that, according to IT security firm AVG, kids as young as 11 are beginning to write malicious hack code to wreak some havoc and steal some data in the cyber world. We’ve heard plenty about hackers in their mid to late teens, but this fits neatly with the image of delinquent behaviour by junior geeks who are happier staring at a screen than going out in the real world, and is something you could believe of those who would like to but don’t have the nerve to spray graffiti or smash up a bus shelter.

But while the story sounds credible, the evidence seems limited. AVG came up with one solid example, and a lot of talk about patterns that suggest there may be a growing number of kids barely of secondary school age who are up to no good in the cyber world. It’s not clear if it’s a genuine trend or speculation based on a handful of cases.

It’s worth remembering that a story like this can do some good for the company that raises the alarm. It says it is paying attention to serious issues and concerned about the wide world in which it works. That’s why they carry out research and publish studies aimed at asserting their credentials as thought leaders; and when it makes the national news it’s a result for the PR team.

But it has to be remembered that this is all part of the marketing effort, and that the overall aim of such efforts is to boost a company’s sales. It would need a lot of time studying the data, and probably a lot of expertise, for anyone to know if the assertions are correct, and I don’t know whether the evidence behind AVG’s warnings is as strong as it claims. But when something like this comes from the private sector you know there’s a commercial element to it.

It might be a real phenomenon, in which case it’s a genuine worry, but it might be just a storm in a cyber tea cup.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

So what’s wrong with eating horsemeat?

OK, so I’m happy to see Tesco seriously embarrassed by the noise over horsemeat in some of its economy burgers. I get fed up with all its self-righteous twaddle about providing value for money when it uses every underhand marketing trick in the book to squeeze as much as possible out of shoppers. But it has made me wonder why people are so enraged at the thought of eating horsemeat.

It’s not just that there are parts of the world where they tuck into equine flesh, or other animals that make us Brits turn up our noses, with gusto. But I would bet that it’s wound up in plenty of things that go through a messy industrial process and wind up in the bargain shelves and cabinets of the supermarkets.

I’ve never knowingly eaten horsemeat, but I’m not disturbed at the thought that I may well have done so unknowingly at some time. The fact is that we tuck into lots of meat products – pies, sausage rolls, processed slices with different names – that have all the odds and ends from dead animals that we would rather not think about. I suspect that the companies who produce this go for the cheapest option on buying their raw material and horse creeps in more often than anyone would admit. You just accept that if you buy cheap meat products you get what you pay for.

I’ve accepted for years that I’m eating things that the manufacturers would want to keep quiet, and as long as it doesn’t poison me I’m not going to make a fuss as long as they  don’t make dishonest claims about it being high quality, unadulterated beef, lamb, pork, chicken or whatever. And if we happily eat cows, pigs and sheep, and do pretty horrible things in raising them as food, why should we get so squeamish over horses?

Probably because we’ve been brought up on movies and TV programmes in which horses had some unspoken empathy with human beings – think Black Beauty or Champion the Wonder Horse – or run around a racecourse to give us a moment of excitement. Who would have wanted to eat Red Rum?

But people in other parts of the world don’t feel like that, and I don’t quite buy into it. And if you want to draw a parallel with domestic animals, I’m in no hurry to eat a cat or dog, but I’d do so if I was facing starvation, and I’ll quite happily tuck into stewed rabbit.

And if I’m ever somewhere that it’s on the menu and I receive a recommendation, I’ll eat a horse.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Tarantino has no right to his tantrum

I’ve felt ambivalent about Quentin Tarantino for a long time. I loved his debut Reservoir Dogs – a great heist movie that was fast, inventive, witty and frightening – but found it hard to feel so enthusiastic about his next film, Pulp Fiction.

I admired the skill with which the story was told, the action set pieces, and dark humour, snappy dialogue, but I had an uneasy feeling that it had crossed a line. In the first film it was always clear that the bad guys were bad guys and deserved a bad end. In the second there were subtle differences that suggested that there was no such thing as a bad guy and the violence was all part of a jolly game laid on for our amusement.

It left me feeling that Tarantino had drifted into morally dubious territory, a feeling that was intensified when I saw From Dusk till Dawn, for which he wrote the screenplay, which asked us to accept as heroes two bank robbers who begin the film by kidnapping then murdering an innocent female bank clerk. It left a nasty taste in the mouth that has put me off seeing any of his movies since.

I have been tempted to break the boycott by the reviews for his new effort, Django Unchained, on the strength from some glowing reviews. The fact that it’s about a slave fighting back in 19^th century America has made me think maybe there are some genuine good and guys in it. But I’m not sure after watching Tarantino’s latest tantrum.

The strop he threw at Krishna Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 for asking about the possibility of a link between enjoying screen violence and inflicting it on others made it clear this is someone who doesn’t want to face an awkward question about what he does. It’s not an easy one to answer, and it’s full of ambiguities. Most of us enjoy screen violence – you can go back to the earliest cowboy or gangster films to see it was a key ingredient of their success – and the moral context or characterisations of those involved affect us all in different ways. But it is a serious that has issue with a lot of implications for a society which has its share of real life random violence.

I don’t expect Tarantino to have easy answers, but he makes a lot of money and has won worldwide fame by depicting violence in a way that suggests it’s there to be enjoyed. It’s the defining element of his career. He has an obligation to at least debate the question, no matter how often he’s asked, and throwing a wobbly at an interviewer isn’t going to win him any friends, and may lose a few who are currently on his side.

And I still haven’t made up my mind about whether to see Django Unchained.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Farewell to Harry Carey Jr

Yesterday I had one of those moments that comes to all of us as we get older, reading an obituary of someone I assumed had died years ago.

It was Harry Carey Jr, a Hollywood actor who, despite not being a big star, is a familiar face to all of us who love old westerns. He was one of the regulars in John Ford movies, which meant that he had significant parts in some John Wayne classics – The Searchers and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon – and a couple of starring roles – The Three Godfathers and Wagon Master. He had his highest profile in the 1950s but used to crop up in movies and on TV until the 1990s, and wrote a book about working on the Ford westerns.

No-one would argue that he was among the Hollywood greats, but he was one of those character actors who always contributed to a good movie and could sometimes provide a redeeming factor for a bad one. And he was one of the faces who would prompt many of us to point at a screen and say “Look who that is!”

I have to mark his passing because I’m a great fan of John Ford movies. I’ve watched some of them several times over – Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Rio Bravo, The Searchers – and always enjoy them even though I know what’s coming. I know there’s something dubious about many of them, feeding a myth about the west that airbrushes the fact that land was stolen and native Americans wiped out in their hundreds of thousands, but they’re great stories with intriguing characters and make magnificent use of the landscape.

Ford was the visionary, and there’s no arguing that the presence of leading actors like John Wayne and Henry Fonda was crucial to their artistic as much as commercial success, but the supporting actors were as much as part of it. They wouldn’t be the same without the likes of Walter Brennan, Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, and Harry Carey Jr.

I believe he’s the last to go, and he deserves a farewell.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

Is it OK to boo in a theatre?

My wife and I had our annual Christmas theatre trip on Friday, going to the Southwark Playhouse to see something called ‘Feathers in the Snow’ by Philip Ridley. The preview blurb made it look interesting, a tale for all the family with a dark edge, but ten minutes into the show we knew had made a bad choice.

It was theatre at its worst; clunky, with a plot that rattled along too quickly and become very repetitive, and hitting the audience over the head with a moralistic message that stated the obvious point that war is bad. I could imagine it being served up in a school hall by a travelling theatre group as part of an educational programme, but even on that basis it worked badly and it was way short of the minimum standard I’d expect from anything that gets into a regular theatre.

But we endured it. It’s partly because we’re both inclined to stick out a performance of any kind to the end; although we were also conscious that the young cast were trying very hard to make the best of a bad job. But we were bored rotten, and by the second half I was wondering if it would be acceptable to start booing.

I’ve always thought there are occasions when it’s OK voice displeasure at a bad performance. If you pay good money to sit and watch something you’re entitled to let those responsible know that you’re disappointed. It happens at football, when the home team plays badly and their supporters give the players some verbal stick. It’s part of the blooding for stand-up comedians to get booed offstage. And a few bands have suffered far worse in being chased off stage by flying bottles at rock festivals.

I wouldn’t boo during a performance; there’s a chance that some other members of the audience are enjoying themselves and it wouldn’t be fair to spoil it for them. But surely it’s OK to abstain from the round of applause at the end of the show and let loose a bellow of disdain? After all, I had just forked out £16 to waste two hours that would have been better spent at home on the sofa.

In the end I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to upset the actors. Maybe I was too polite. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by the idea that booing isn’t something that you do in a theatre, even if you’ve just been subjected to two hours of torture by boredom. But for what it’s worth, I can now offer a one word review: “Boooooooooo!”

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.

In defence of digital

We’ve heard a few more cries about the dominance of digital today, with the transition of The Dandy from a print to an online publication. As always happens at times like this, voices have been raised bemoaning the fact that they will no longer be able to caress a paper copy of the comic and that readers will struggle to cherish the contents of the digital version in the same way.

People have said similar things about other publications, and we often hear it about music. It was just yesterday that I got around to watching the BBC4 documentary, ‘The Joy of the Single’, which included a string of laments for the vinyl 45 and complaints that no-one can feel the same about digital downloads.

There may be an element of truth in this for a lot of readers and music fans, but there’s a good reason that digital has taken over. It’s easier to manage, and when you get into serious listening or reading the accumulation of records, magazines or books places a serious strain on your living space. Big collections of hard copies are wonderful thing in many respects, but they’re also a pain in the arse, and it’s a lot easier to accommodate a pile of digital files.

And it’s important to point out that all that staring at and fondling of books and records is only a secondary pleasure, and should only be worth a fraction of what people get out of reading or listening. Anyone who places more value on the cover art and liner notes of a record, or the feel of a book in their hand, than what the contents do to their hearts and minds has it all wrong. You still get the sounds and words from a digital file.

Be honest, digital is taking over because we’re all acquiring a lot more stuff; and there are certain types of stuff that are a lot easier to keep when you can stick them on a computer. Stop worrying about it and enjoy.

Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also check out www.marksaywriter.com.