Peter Reavy’s blog

Suspicious figure, originally uploaded by Peter Reavy.

Testing to see how easy it is to make a blog post from Flickr.

I don’t like the way Amazon reviews become the property of Amazon. I would prefer if people visiting Amazon could see reviews on private blogs in some way. However, this is not going to happen soon.

Occasionally I would like to comment on a book publicly in a way that might help others to decide whether to buy the book. I’ve belatedly realised that I have no choice but to add my thoughts to Amazon’s site. So I’ve added a link to my Amazon reviews over at the right hand side.

On Friday evening, I was sad to hear of the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I was led to Stockhausen’s music by following back through the influence of bands I was listening to at the time. The Fall led me back to Can, a couple of members of which had studied with the great man.

Stockhausen not only fundamentally challenged my idea of music, but in seeking to understand him I was led back in turn to Webern, Schoenberg and their classical predecessors.

I consider myself very fortunate to have attended a weekend of concerts in Belfast, back in April 2004. Stockhausen visited the city to oversee and introduce these. (He was also honoured by Queen’s University.)

I was able to sit quite near the mixing desk where Stockhausen operated the controls each evening. I don’t expect ever to be in such close proximity to a major composer again.

I acknowledge that there was something of the showman about Stockhausen and that he was eccentric to say the least. But for me his work Kontakte has a quality of total reinvention which music hasn’t had since JS Bach.

Ivan Hewett catches this in his obituary when he writes:

What he has in abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen’s music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Take for example the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalyptic brass chords are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener’s head; or the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses.

Stockhausen explained such effects. He said he had discovered that according to the laws of physics, pitch and rhythm were not separate aspects of music as we had once thought, but part of the same phenomenon. Slow a pitch down and it becomes a rhythm. Grappling with the laws of sound in such a fundamental way to create a new form of beauty: this can only remind us of Bach’s mastery of equal temperament.

I would like to repost links to notes on these concerts I attended in 2004, which I made on a blog I had at the time:

• introduction
• Friday
• Saturday
• Sunday

Brian Micklethwait and Guido Fawkes discuss the rise of the Big Media blogs. Blogs at online versions of old media institutions like TV stations, magazines and newspapers. In particular, they speculate that such blogs will not prove economically viable.

I wasn’t aware that bloggers on the Spectator or the BBC or Sky were specifically paid for their blogs, over and above the other journalism or broadcasting they do.

Anyway, I can’t accept Brian’s idea that the penny will eventually drop with newspaper and magazine proprietors and the plug will be pulled on their paid bloggers.

Papers have always lost money and as for TV, the BBC and Sky are hell-bent on interactivity and their blogs must be a relatively cheap way to provide this.

Guido must be rather worried at big media moving on to his turf and he’s right to be.

Speaking personally, I’ve been surprised in 2007 at how my blog-reading has shifted away from the amateurs with an agenda I was reading before, and shifted towards the more objective and fact-checked blogs written by old-school journalists.

Alongside this there has been a growth in free newspaper content this year. More free stuff, and more hard facts to be had for nothing. It tends to push opinion-making further into the background.

The notion of the blogger as “citizen journalist” which circulated a few years back has never developed into anything concrete.

Blogging hasn’t developed the way most of us expected.

Very few important stories have been broken by blogs; they have caught the old media out on very few important issues; they haven’t had as much political impact as we might have thought.

There certainly is a sense of debate opening up due to the internet, but a lot of it is happening in the comments sections of sites run by old-fashioned media. Until a new way of compiling individual opinions arises, then unfortunately the BBC’s Have Your Say and the old media blogs’ comments boxes will rule the roost.

I feel less interested in the blogs I once read. At the end of 2007, it is Samizdata and Guido whose fixed agendas look out of touch rather than the Economist or Nick Robinson who they constantly swing at.

The old media was slow to adapt to the new world, but has now done so more successfully than anyone expected.

Tyler Cowan posted a link to these photos of libraries. It seems to be down at the time of posting. I can’t remember where I found this link to photos of people’s books. I like nearly any photos of the inside of other people’s houses.

You can keep a list of your books at Google Book Search now. I look forward to seeing how they can hook that up to other content. I would like to see online communities for books growing up around something like this. The conversation around each one would come from personal blogs.

I’ve never felt comfortable just starting a blog post on whatever book I happen to be reading. It seems too much like talking into the void. I would like to be able to attach my thoughts to something so that other people with an interest in that book could easily find it.

I don’t like adding reviews to Amazon because I want to have ownership of what I’ve written. I like Amazon a lot; I just don’t feel that I owe them free content.

Possibly I could just write a blog post and put the ISBN and ASIN at the end? Then in the future, an all-powerful book review search engine would collect up all the blogged thoughts on all books.

I more or less enjoyed the DVD of The Short Films of David Lynch. The films on it are:

• Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times)
  • This is very short. A sort of painting animated on loop. It reminded me of Duchamp’s Large Glass. You can see that something is happening according to a set of rules, but you don’t know what the rules are. So, although it’s crude, it certainly has something of latter-day Lynch.
• The Alphabet
  • Quite imaginative combinations of live action and animation. Unsettling, but slightly pointless.
• The Grandmother
  • Clearly he’s headed for Eraserhead at this point with the creepy, organic model of the embryonic grandmother looking very like the Baby.
• The Amputee
  • Notable for mainly for Lynch’s taste in dialogue, as very little happens on screen. But there wasn’t much talking at all in his films until this point, and the dialogue here could just as easily have cropped on in Inland Empire.
• The Cowboy and the Frenchman
  • At this point, we leave the early work behind, for this half-hearted effort from 1988.
• Premonitions Following an Evil Deed
  • Lynch’s 1 minute contribution to Lumière et compagnie is imaginative within a very narrow brief. It repays multiple viewings.

The films are greatly enriched by watching Lynch’s introductions to each one. Since I am interested in his thoughts and creative process, I enjoyed the DVD, but it would not make a great introduction to David Lynch. Next on my list is likely to be Eraserhead, which I have not seen for many years.

In Lynch’s more recent work, he has become superb at creating a certain uncanny atmosphere. This is one of his great strengths but doesn’t seem to be present at all here. I wonder where the earliest example of it occurs.

(ASIN: B000CQM2WQ)

Above, a photo I took of a chip shop in South Belfast. Below, just by coincidence, a photo of the same place. I came across it on the Guardian’s site. It was taken by Rob Garbett.

His is better. He closed in on the best bit. I thought I was already doing that, but clearly I’m not.

Yesterday Bergman, today Antonioni.

I watched The Passenger for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The FT obit seems not to rate it, but I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Great Nicholson performance. No sequence in it is quite as mind-blowing as the end of The Eclipse but it is easy to watch, due to a good plot.

Tyler Cowan wonders whether blog comments will survive. Will another form of conversation replace them? He thinks not, but some time ago Technorati’s Dave Sifry predicted

conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines

Contrary to what Tyler implies, this model should allow for the same reading experience, with comments listed below the original post, even if the commentary comes from posts on other blogs.

Tagging is not necessary, as I understand it. Trackbacks (aka pingbacks or linkbacks) make it work.

Unfortunately, trackbacks don’t seem to have taken off, whether due to the technical problems of handling them or due to spamming.

I was going to add this as a comment on Tyler’s site, but will post it here instead as an experiment.

If anyone reading Tyler’s site ever reaches this post, I would appreciate a one-word comment, to prove that trackbacks, linkbacks or similar mechanisms work.

Newsnight’s deputy editor has been defending a package on Gordon Brown made by Jamie Campbell, which showed a pair of events out of chronological order.

Having watched the film, it seems to me that the meaning is at least somewhat affected by the order.

More to the point, Jamie Campbell’s packages to date have not been a great fit for Newsnight. They feel like a different sort of documentary-making. They are akin to the work of Louis Theroux or, before that, Nick Broomfield. In this type of film, the film-maker is part of the story. The interviewer becomes a character. We begin to doubt the interviewer’s own motives and sincerity.

I can see the editorial need for a roving reporter taking the maverick approach that Michael Crick once did. Crick has had to tone his approach down now that he is the programme’s political editor.

However unless Jamie Campbell can work in a different style, his approach feels wrong for Newsnight.