File under 'stuff'

A few weeks ago, I got involved in a conversation with some friends about what to do with our old vinyl and CD collections, the assumption being that -in the digital age- nobody really wanted to keep hard copies of anything anymore. I begged to differ, because I’m one of those sad folk who does want to keep hard copies. I like having products to hold, look at, read, smell and –most of all- file.  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a sizable music collection will have to devise an efficient filing system. CDs, for instance, should always be displayed in alphabetical order, preferably in the room in which you do your listening. Unfortunately, I don't have that luxury for my own collection, which resides in the living room, wherein other members my family are to be found, usually watching something they call 'the television'. Due to some legal mumbo-jumbo that I don’t understand, I am not allowed into this room without giving written notice, but at least I know that when I fancy listening to an old CD, my meticulously-curated display will allow me to find it within a couple of minutes.

An alphabetical system should be easy for the layperson to understand. Under a properly administered system, The Eisenhowers, for example, would sit comfortably between The Eiderdown Blankets and Ejector Seat Button. It almost goes without saying that, when filing any act beginning with the definite article, the ‘The’ should be ignored, unless the act in question is The The, in which case, you must simply ignore the first ‘The’ in favour of the second, or –if you wish- ignore the second in favour of the first.

But even something this simple can throw up the odd challenge. The demands of maintaining accurate filing will often wake me up in the middle of the night, as I fret over where to place acts like Boards of Canada (under B or C?), Captain Beefheart (C or B?) or Admiral Fallow. Is that bearded bloke who sings for them an actual Admiral whose name happens to be Fallow? If it is, file under F. 

Grappling with the problem of whether I should file 'A band called Quinn' under A or Q is bad enough, but even more problematic is the question of where to place the 2003 album by the splendid hip-hop jazz collective The RH factor. The ‘RH’ in that moniker stands for ‘Roy Hargrove’, so should it be filed under ‘R’ because it’s the first identifier after the redundant definite article, or under ‘H’ for Hargrove?  That coy nomenclature creates a headache for the dedicated filer; if the project had simply been called The Roy Hargrove Factor, I would have avoided a whole lot of sleepless nights and at least one bitter online fall-out and resultant caution from the police.

    

Compilation albums should be filed at the end of your collection, after The Zutons or ZZ Top. ‘Greatest Hits’ albums should be filed with the artists, even if the collection has a name which would –under normal conditions- place it somewhere else in your library. There is, among the CD filing community, a militant faction which believes that all compilation CDs (including, ridiculously, ‘Greatest Hits’ collections) should be filed together, under ‘C’ for compilations. This is nonsense of course, unless you are some kind of anarchist. No serious person would argue that ‘Kate Bush - The Whole Story’ could legitimately be filed under ‘C’, or indeed, ‘W’. 

(As an aside, I also have a section in my CD collection for stuff that I've recently bought, but which hasn't yet been properly filed because I'm still listening to it. Stop sniggering at the back).  

You may scoff, but scientists have proven in various studies that folk who don’t have their music and books in alphabetical order are more likely to become terrorists, drug dealers or used car salesmen. Not having a filing system is bad enough, but Dante’s ninth circle of hell is reserved for folk who take CDs out to play them and then put them back in the wrong case. That sort of thing really is not a million miles removed from how Hitler and the Nazis got started in 1920s Germany.  

And what about vinyl, I hear no-one ask?

My extensive (and impressively tragic) collection now resides at two upstairs locations. Singles are stored in a cupboard in the master bedroom (I don’t think my wife has even noticed this), while albums are kept in what -if about a ton and a half of domestic flotsam and jetsam were removed- I could more or less legitimately describe as my ‘music’ room, which contains -among other things- a USB turntable and a USB tape deck. This reminds me that I have a big box full of tapes that I have yet to convert to MP3. I’m wondering if it is going to be worth the bother. The Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, anyone? Or Babylon Zoo? Or how about two albums from the one artist (Todd Rundgren) on the same tape? Was that a thing back then? Now that I think about it, some of this stuff might actually be worth some money; my guess would be somewhere around 43 Vietnamese Dong.     

If you have ever thought about buying either a USB turntable or a USB tape player to 'convert' your old stuff to MP3, let me tell you what is likely to happen. All of your old vinyl and tapes can essentially be put into two categories:

Category 1: Wow! I'd forgotten how good this was! I think I'll buy it again on CD. 

Category 2: This isn't very good. That's probably why I don't listen to it anymore.

      

All of my CDs have also been ripped to MP3 and stored on an external hard drive. For this, I use a simple system to avoid unnecessary clutter in the folders allocated to each letter of the alphabet. 'Major' artists (four albums or more) get a sub-folder within the alphabetical folder for all of their albums. For example, the 'B' folder will have a 'David Bowie' sub-folder containing all of his work. ‘Minor’ artists (three albums or fewer) just get filed under the appropriate letter. 

Given my meticulously-filed collection of stuff, you may well ask why I have felt the need to back-up my collection to a hard-drive. I have taken this precaution, dear reader, in case there is some kind of apocalypse and I am the only survivor able to provide an extensive selection of middle-aged white guy pop tunes for the survivors. In the event of societal meltdown and an anarchic descent into violent chaos, it will be survival of the fittest and only those of us with truly essential skills will endure. I’m sure you’ll agree that I’ve carved out my own particular niche in the post-apocalyptic landscape.  

I hope this brief guide might prove useful to anyone who is thinking of how best to arrange their collection. I have very particular views on filing, but I appreciate that there are alternative opinions and lifestyles out there. Without wishing to appear judgemental, all I would say is that folk who don’t properly catalogue their stuff are probably the kind of sick weirdos who believe in astrology, feng shui and other new-age mysticism. 

Such folk may, on the surface, appear to be harmless enough, but just don’t expect them to understand that the spirit of rock and roll resides in the ability to administer a system of classification that unambiguously locates a particular artefact in a position relative to other artefacts in a collection on the basis of its subject and /or name.

'Progressive' is the new 'authoritarian'

Watching this election has convinced me of one thing above all else: I need to buy a new dictionary. The one that generally sits next to my computer is The Chambers Dictionary (1994) edition. It has served me well, but I have come to realise that twenty years is a long time in the evolution of words. At some point, I must have missed the memo about the redefinition of quite an important word. That word is ‘progressive’. According to Chambers, in 1994 it meant: ‘moving forward, modern, esp. displaying or applying liberal or enlightened views or practices’.

I’m not exactly sure what the new definition is yet, but the word has certainly been bandied about quite a bit, particularly by three of the parties hoping to form a progressive alliance against ‘austerity’. I don’t know much about Plaid Cymru, although I have noticed that whenever their leader -Leanne Wood- is on TV, she likes to point out, at least once or twice, that she is Welsh and represents the people of Wales. It’s good to know that she’s mindful of the needs of the information-poor.  

I do know a bit about the SNP though, enough to be surprised that their progressive brand of identity politics (ingredients: a sense of grievance, a bit of paranoia, a large dollop of self-righteousness with a wee side-helping of cultist absolutism) appears to be paying off. But even if you put the nationalism to one side, the word ‘progressive’, as defined in that 1994 Chambers Dictionary, doesn’t really fit with their modus operandi. The word I would choose is ‘authoritarian’, defined by Chambers as ‘setting authority above freedom; stressing the importance and power of authority; domineering; disciplinarian.’   

That isn’t an assessment based on tribal prejudice; it is based on paying attention to the things they have said and done while in office.   

Since taking power, the SNP has made it clear through the laws it has introduced that it sees the state as the embodiment of The Nation. Many of their supporters take that idea even further: they see the party as the embodiment of The Nation. If you considered yourself to be liberal (again, Chambers Dictionary 1994: ‘generous; broad-minded; not bound by authority or traditional orthodoxy’) you’d surely be troubled by the way that some nationalists are unable, or unwilling, to differentiate between the interests of their political party and the interests of their country. In everyday discourse, criticism of the SNP (and sometimes even criticism of their leader) is now routinely conflated with criticism of Scotland as a whole.

If you know your history, you’ll appreciate that we’ve already seen several examples of this kind of thing in other countries. When people start using words like ‘quisling’ or ‘traitor’ to describe their fellow citizens, we’re witnessing the ugly phenomenon of ideological certainty unmediated by knowledge, perspective, humility or, indeed, just a little bit of healthy scepticism. And if you don’t know your history, here’s a spoiler alert: this sort of thing usually doesn’t end well.

The SNP’s commitment to progressive politics (new definition) is writ large in the form of two illiberal (old definition) pieces of legislation.
This country already had more than enough laws to deal with anti-social or violent behaviour, but they introduced the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, giving police officers the power to decide the context in which blessing oneself or singing the national anthem might be considered 'offensive'. Even East Germany's Stasi didn't have the nerve to pull an oppressive stunt like that. Some of us, at least, are alarmed that we now live in a country where someone can be arrested for singing the national anthem or for blessing himself.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the ‘named person’ legislation (which requires everyone under 18 in the country to have an individual state guardian) is a pretty clear statement that the SNP view the family unit as undermining the authority of the state. It’s a grotesquely Orwellian piece of legislation, dressed up in the usual verbiage about it all being for the good of vulnerable kids. I’ve no doubt that there are folk in Scotland who believe that, since devolution, the country has adopted some progressive (new definition) legislation, but I can’t think of a single thing that the SNP has done to transfer power from the state to the citizen; it all goes the other way with them. That’s the thing about paternalistic, authoritarian statist parties; at their core, they want everyone to be a ward of the state, which is pretty much the opposite of progressive (old definition).

The other party working to the new definition of progressive is the Greens. I once voted for them because I thought I was making a protest. They wanted to save the planet, reduce pollution, preserve endangered species etc. Who could object to all that? 

But the devil, as ever, is in the detail. 

According to political shorthand, some parties don’t like particular groups of people. UKIP don’t like immigrants; Labour don’t like the rich; the Tories don’t like the poor and the needy; the SNP don’t like the English. But the Greens trump all of that, because they don’t even like human beings. They started life in the 1970s as pressure group with the principle aim of reducing the UK population to 20 million. They’ve got a much better image these days, but they still cling to their miserable neo-Malthusian prejudices.

They would like there to be fewer human beings on the planet, consuming stuff and generally messing the place up. This in spite of the fact that, for the last century, the annual number of deaths due to starvation have been dropping and lifespans in some countries have doubled. And all of this has taken place alongside a huge rise in the global population. The Greens don’t get the fact that the more people there are, the more we rise to the challenge of improving the lot of humankind. As PJ O'Rourke observed, the truth is that those 'progressive' concerns about population control can be distilled down to one grubby little nugget of prejudice: There's just enough of me, but way too much of you.  

They want to end all animal experimentation. This, in effect, means that they believe that a rat or a guinea pig in a laboratory is as important as a child with cystic fibrosis, diabetes or sickle cell anaemia. For that reason alone, they don’t deserve your vote. I’m not even sure that I’d trust anyone with those views to go and collect my laundry.

But if you think that communism was a good idea that only got a bad name because it was ineptly managed by the wrong people, you’ll find plenty to love in the Green manifesto.   

Among other things, they’d like to control and reduce the volume of advertising on TV and in newspapers, because it promotes the “materialist and consumption-driven culture”. They’d like to introduce measures designed to encourage a “transition from diets dominated by meat” to vegetarianism. I’m wondering what that ‘encouragement’ would look like. I’m a non-smoker, but have noted with interest the way that smokers have been encouraged not to smoke in public places and will shortly be encouraged not to smoke in their cars. Maybe 'encourage' is another of those words that was redefined when I wasn’t paying attention. 

One thing you can say in their favour is that they have got lots of ideas; in fact, they’ve got a whole steaming pile of them. Their manifesto is a gift that keeps on giving: They’ll reduce the numbers of people in prison by introducing ‘mediation centres’ where the principles of ‘restorative justice’ will ensure that, if any nasty crime is committed, we’ll all be able to sit down and have a right good chat about it. They have a position on which countries the national football team should be allowed to play against and also a position on the ownership of football clubs. They say that, "where appropriate" they would put members –and not shareholders- in charge. It must really have irked them when Manchester City's owners recently used £200 million of dirty oil money to build a football academy in order to develop young talent.  

The so-called ‘Beyonce tax’ (wherein a penalty on “superstar performances” will be levied in order to support “local cultural enterprises”) is more than just a proposal for a stupendously wrong-headed bit of meddling. The idea of imposing a tax on one art form specifically to support another art form is such a brutally naked example of top-down cultural elitism that it almost takes the breath away.

Think what it would take to do all of these things. Think of the powers that a government would have to have in order to carry out such a programme. No wonder they are also agitating for state funding of political parties.  

Oh, and everyone is going to get free condoms to prevent … can you guess what? Yes, it’s overpopulation. That’s the Greens in a nutshell. They view every new human being as a problem to be dealt with, not as a potentially wonderful person, a wealth creator, a brilliant entertainer or architect or sports person or nurse or brother or daughter or inventor. They talk about helping the poor, but they despise the one thing –economic growth- that actually lifts people out of poverty. They believe that "the pursuit of economic growth… must cease to be an automatic aim of human societies.” Right. Let’s all get back to working the land, making our own candles and shitting in ditches.   

If, however, you like this kind of stuff, I’d recommend that you do some reading on the history of 20^th century politics. You’ll quickly get an idea of how well the imposition of that amount of state control worked out for some of our Eastern European neighbours.

The people who had to live through it didn’t like it very much, but hey, that’s just a detail when you’re on the side of progress (new definition).

The monster is about to tear down Frankenstein Castle

One of the more surreal episodes in Scottish political life occurred seven or eight years ago when Motherwell was nominated for the annual ‘Carbuncle’ prize. The architecture magazine Urban Realm (formerly known as Prospect) gives out this award with a view to encouraging discussion and debate about the quality of development in Scotland's towns and cities. Their editorial line is that "the truly depressing places are the ones which could be great, but are stifled by a lack of imagination, creativity and passion. The towns shortlisted … must have real potential, which local leaders for one reason or another are failing to exploit."

The leader of the Scottish Labour party at the time, Jack McConnell, thought that it was a disgrace that Motherwell town centre had been allowed to get into such a state. He described it as ‘dirty’ and ‘untidy’ and criticised other towns for failing to show enough civic pride. He said that Scotland had a problem with “small provincial towns like Motherwell, Wishaw, Paisley, Alloa, Cumbernauld and Dunfermline” and argued that the neglect of these town centres symbolised “something in the public realm that has a lack of commitment to quality of life.”

It was hard to disagree with such noble sentiments. 

But this was Jack McConnell speaking, the Labour leader and a North Lanarkshire MSP. That's North Lanarkshire, the region that had been run by Labour since dinosaurs roamed the earth, the place where a blow-up doll in a red rosette would command a good majority in any of the constituencies. You couldn’t help but feel that perhaps Jack was suffering from a touch of the old cognitive dissonance. He thought that our town centres (generally run by Labour) were disgraceful, but went on to cite the “Tory economic decline of the 1980s” as a major factor. Of course … it was all Thatcher’s fault.

It was no real surprise that he could so nonchalantly absent his cronies from anything approaching ‘blame’. For more than half a century, the Labour Party in Scotland operated like the Cosa Nostra, but without the glamour, the violence or the intellectual depth. Mired in class-warrior dogma that was at least a generation past its sell-by date, the ‘natural’ party of government in Scotland could coast along in what was, effectively, a one-party state. When bad stuff happened it was never their fault, because those perfidious Tories in Westminster were always to blame and -as long as enough of the electorate fell for that line- everything was more or less peachy for Labour; it could take a pliant electorate for granted, happy to peddle the myth of Scottish exceptionalism. Scots vote Labour, so the argument went, because we have a more developed sense of social responsibility. That may have made some folk feel good about themselves, but it was -and still is- utter tripe.

Voting habits are always influenced by a variety of factors. Under the last Labour administration, there were parts of Scotland where the public sector accounted for more than 70% of all economic activity. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that if a large chunk of the electorate is -either directly or indirectly- on the government payroll, then a greater proportion of that electorate will invariably vote for the party that advocates a bigger government payroll. Nor do you need a degree in economics to understand that the continuation of government largesse, on those non-wealth generating percentages, is not merely unsustainable; somewhere down the track and around the bend, it’s going to be a train wreck for which your kids and grandkids will be picking up the tab. 

To get an understanding of just how successful the long Gramscian march through the Scottish institutions was, all you have to do is watch a TV debate, listen to a radio phone-in or loiter for a while on the social networks. You’ll soon notice that our overwhelming political orthodoxy is both statist and leftist. For a large section of the public, anything that involves spending money on ‘public services’ is unequivocally good, while anything that involves spending rather less of that money is not just bad; it’s disgracefully immoral. 

A couple of years ago, the right to buy council houses, as introduced by the Conservative government in 1979, was described by The Herald columnist Ian Bell as an ‘atrocity’. Some of you may think that ‘atrocity’ is a word you’d use to describe fifty people being blown up in a Baghdad marketplace, or perhaps a group of fanatics indulging in a bit of ethnic cleansing, but no. According to this respected columnist, it was an ‘atrocity’ that working class people had been allowed to buy their own homes. Bell articulated the disdain of the patrician, authoritarian left: How dare these folk get so uppity as to want to buy their own home? Where was their sense of class solidarity?  

That default ‘blame it on Thatcher’ position also accounted for the collapse of the traditional heavy industries. There was little acknowledgement of the economic fact that if you can’t make stuff at a price that people are willing to pay for it, you’ve got problems. And as recently as 2012, I heard a radio interview in which a Labour councillor in Glasgow blamed ‘Thatcherism’ for vandalism and petty crime in his constituency. But Mr. Bell’s ‘atrocity’ remark unwittingly revealed the truth that, for many on the left, the real sin of Mrs Thatcher’s government -the one that will never be forgiven- was to persuade working class people, in big numbers, to vote for her version of popular capitalism. She ‘stole’ some of Labour’s people, voters they had taken for granted. Plus ca change.    
But if you say something often enough, some people will start believing you. In 2015, when someone talks about enterprise, self-reliance or public spending restraint in the land of Adam Smith’s birth, it sounds to great chunks of the electorate like white noise. It’s not that these arguments are being lost; rather, they hardly ever get made, because that language no longer makes sense to people who appear to believe that politicians have the option of ‘abolishing’ austerity, as if there was a secret switch in an oak-panelled room somewhere in Westminster or Holyrood:

Press button 1 to abolish austerity. 
Press button 2 to abolish the deficit. 
Press button 3 to abolish the national debt.    

Maybe there's a button for the weather, too. 

If the opinion polls are correct, Labour will get a thrashing in Scotland at this election. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a party that has been quite so complacent, quite so content to showboat its spurious sense of moral superiority, quite so unwilling to accept the fact that it is economic activity that lifts people out of poverty, not government programmes. Another party may be wearing their clothes now, but that unflagging commitment to the ‘tax and spend’ expansion of the state still makes perfect sense to those who would consider economic literacy to be an over-rated concept. 

Yet even as the SNP pull the collectivist rug from under their feet, those high priests of profligacy, Miliband and Balls, are hamstrung by the knowledge that, to have any hope of winning at Westminster, they must concede that our national debt and deficit have to be addressed at some point. But they are discovering that this won’t wash with an electorate weaned on five decades of an unending statist narrative. The people want an end to austerity, so someone must promise to push that magic button.  

And now the monster that Labour helped create is preparing to tear down a once-impregnable fortress. As they survey the auguries of electoral Armaggedon, I wonder if any of those Labour apparatchiks, purveyors of the old tribalist dogma, might have cause to recall the words of WB Yeats:
  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It's nearly time to choose

Over the next few weeks, in the run-up to the big vote, things are probably going to get quite heated on the various social networks. We are all individuals and we’re all entitled to our points of view, so don’t be surprised to find friends disagreeing with friends, colleagues arguing with colleagues or sisters being vehemently opposed to the views of their brothers. Claim and counter-claim will be made as we argue our respective cases. We’ll all have our favourite candidates, but we should accept that our favourites may well be despised by our friends, colleagues, relatives and acquaintances.

But instead of getting carried away with the passion of it all and allowing ourselves to fall out with each other, we should keep in mind that -whatever the results of the vote- we’ll still be living in the same places on the morning after. We’ll still be sharing the house with loved ones, we’ll still be going to work and we’ll still have those friends, colleagues, relatives and acquaintances. That’s why we shouldn’t allow a few differences of opinion to define us as human beings. 

But the most important thing to remember is this: Whatever the result, whether our favourites win or lose, we’ll get the chance to do it all again next year.               

That, my friends, is the beauty of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Listen to Vicky Leandros

Hence why I literally mean pacifically

A couple of days ago I was going through some emails at work, replying to important stuff and kicking some less important stuff into the long grass. It’s a shared workspace and the computer is used by a number of colleagues. I noticed, after a couple of minutes, that it had been left on an 'auto-correct' setting and was changing some words as I typed. I’m not keen on that sort of thing; I don’t even use predictive text on my phone, because I don’t like the idea of a piece of software interpreting my intentions, guessing what I’m about to do next (I’m not paranoid, but everyone else thinks I am).  

Responding to one particular message, I had to use the phrase his specific requirements. I typed it, added a sentence or two and was just about to hit the ‘send’ button when I froze in horror. There, on the screen, was an electronic grenade with the pin pulled. The software had corrected my intended ‘specific’ to the (in this case) deadly ‘pacific’. I’m guessing that I had somehow missed out the ‘s’ as I hurriedly composed the message. Accordingly, my email now featured the phrase his pacific requirements.

A shiver ran down my spine.  I was but one touch of the keyboard -a mere fraction of a second- away from personal and professional humiliation.

As a bit of a purist (some might say language snob, some might say pedantic tosspot), I could never have recovered from the shame of having put such an email into the public domain. Saying "pacific" when you mean "specific" is one of the unforgivable sins. It’s worse than saying "hence why" in a sentence. It’s worse than saying "I was literally shitting myself watching that scary film" when you weren’t literally shitting yourself watching that scary film. It’s worse than saying "I’m going to give this 110%". It’s probably even worse than saying "totes amazeballs".  

It is hard to imagine a more heinous crime than sending a message featuring the phrase his pacific requirements. Had I hit the 'send' button and released that toxic email into cyberspace I would have had no choice but to commit hara-kiri, such would have been the shame I would have brought upon myself and my family. I could not have endured the ignominy, the sheer loss of face. I could not have walked the streets again, knowing that people would be sniggering at me behind my back, passing comments about ‘the idiot who says pacific when he means specific’. Ritual disembowelment would have been the only honourable way out. 

Hence why, whenever I’m writing emails from now on, I’m literally giving it like 110% concentration, pacifically spelling and grammer-wise.