His first novel, serialised in 1912, was set on Mars. For his second, he chose another “alien” territory: the African jungle. Burroughs, who lived in Chicago, had never been to Africa. Nonetheless, one of the most enduring fictional icons of the 20th century was born.

Tarzan was a sensation, swinging effortlessly from novel to comic book to cinema screen. Since 1912, Tarzan and the Apes has been translated into 56 languages, while the character has spawned almost 15,000 comic books and 42 feature films.

A new exhibition at Paris’s Musée du quai Branly tracks Tarzan’s impact on popular culture. Curator-anthropologist Roger Boulay spent 18 months amassing hundreds of items, ranging from first editions of the novels, which he acquired on ebay, to a stuffed crocodile and a tunic made of panther fur from Mali. He is most interested in the power of association: how cultural iconography is played out in different eras and media.

One of the first objects in the display is an arrangement of glossy miniature toys: a plastic Batman, a Catwoman and a Tarzan glued together like an ultra-contemporary triptych. Boulay made this himself, and has placed it close to a painting of Hercules by Toussaint Dubreuil, dating from 1618, and some suspended Disney figurines.

Clearly, they are related, these strapping, sinewy superheroes. The overlapping genres – painting, sculpture, promotional toy – testify to the easy translation of myths across time, the appeal of an archetypal figure, in this case the superhuman navigating a hostile natural world.

The highlight of the exhibition is a treasure-trove of original comic storyboards, including those by the master illustrators Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, alongside a room devoted to the Tarzan films. The hand of the censor is evident in both media, as the eroticism inherent in the myth became too outrageous for regulators. There is a beautiful scene censored from the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which Jane swims naked underwater, while a 1947 comic storyboard showing a topless Jane appears with the revised version, in which she is more modestly attired in a leopard-skin bikini.

Elsewhere, a huge figure of King Kong, borrowed from the promotional department of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film, signals not only our post-Darwin obsession with primates, but also the repetition of a familiar scenario played out in Tarzan and the Kong narrative: the vulnerable white woman snatched by a primitive beast. A more explicitly transgressive version is also on show, a first edition of the 1925 erotic novel Ouha King of the Monkeys, in which a millionaire’s daughter falls in love with an orangutan.

Disappointingly, Boulay does not interrogate the disturbing context of these images. As Alex Vernon points out in his book On Tarzan, they reflect a deep-seated anxiety over interracial relationships, extending from colonial times into the mid-20th century. Burroughs (pictured right) neutralised the issue by making his ape-man the descendant of British nobility, allowing Jane a relationship with a primitive “other” while protecting her from its real implications.

Raymond Corbey, an anthropologist and specialist in the ape-man phenomenon, says that if the exhibition does not unveil the “true” Tarzan, it is not necessarily Boulay’s fault. “These images of Africa as the ‘other’ are deeply ingrained in European cultural identity,” he argues. “It’s very hard for a curator to overcome that. The rhetorical force of the images is so strong it can overpower any attempt at deconstruction.”

The exhibition is in many ways fun; visually exhilarating and light-hearted. But in celebrating a western pulp version of Africa, Tarzan! seems at odds with the ethos of the Musée du quai Branly, which opened just three years ago with the express purpose of displaying non-western art. Boulay insists this is the point: his focus is the myth of Africa as perpetuated by the Tarzan stories, not the reality.

But the museum has surely missed an opportunity in bypassing Tarzan’s more troublesome elements. The ape-man character and his continued popularity is ripe for deconstruction; in 1999, Disney created a Tarzan who exists in an Africa without Africans. Black characters were entirely removed from the narrative. The studio seemingly didn’t know what to do with the deeply racist presentation of Africans in Burroughs’ novels. In itself, this cultural evasive action is fascinating, and could have been usefully explored. Instead, the exhibition ultimately schools us in nothing but the power of myth itself.

This was first published in the FT arts section.

“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”

So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.

The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006.  Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?

Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:

“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”

Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam.  The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher.“

Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed, and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.

Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.

I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. He told me he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:

I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…

This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.

If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say, tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.

“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.

Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we’re forced to make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:

* why would this person or organisation lie to me? One of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.

* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.

* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.

Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the coming century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists have begun to predict. Which would be great. Bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face global catastrophe. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ‘sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, could yet retain the upper hand.

When was the last time you noticed colour in a film?

Perhaps it’s been a while, because rather like perfect dialogue or sound design, the best use of colour is often characterized by it’s very unobtrusiveness.

In such cases, the cinematographer wants to nurture the illusion that you’re watching reality in all its winter grays and mud browns, not some gaudy approximation of real life. Even when colour is being used to parallel the emotional tone of a story, it will usually do so subtly, moving in undercurrents your brain hardly has time to register. We’ve come a long way from the hyper-real technicolor of The Wizard of Oz.

But rules allow their exceptions to work even more powerfully. The red coat of a little girl in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List plays a different role to the red coat of the girl in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now; the subdued grays of the Belgian steel town in L’Enfant make its heartbreaking plot all the more plausible. Steven Soderbergh, in his best film, Traffic, employs colour like an expressionist, shading his locations with starkly contrasting palettes – whether a Mexican border town, a middle-class Ohio suburb or a sordid drug den.

Certainly the award for most stunning use of colour in recent years should go to Waltz with Bashir, a documentary animation that was trailer of the week back in September. Having seen it last week I briefly felt tempted to ask the government to get a copy for every school and force children to watch it, like David Miliband did with An Inconvenient Truth. Though the truths told in Ari Folman’s film are not so much inconvenient as simply horrifying.

The opening sequence, in which a pack of snarling, slathering dogs chases through a city, is dominated by a burnt ochre yellow, a colour that sears itself into the film’s complexion and returns to haunt the film and its hero throughout. The same colour is later resurrected in the form of a set of flares erupting in the sky above Beirut. That sequence, in which the protagonist and his comrades rise slowly from an unnaturally placid sea and walk towards a burning city, is, like the opening, a nightmare; an example of the post-traumatic stress that provides the catalyst for the film itself. The extreme colour in some way signals to the audience that we are in a dream state, an effect heightened by the leaden, sluggish movements of the men, as if they are walking in treacle.

The filmmaker’s quest in Waltz with Bashir is to retrieve the memories of his time as an Israeli soldier during the Lebanon war of 1982. His journey proves utterly compelling, not only because it provides its own narrative momentum, as Folman pieces together facts and memories from comrades and eyewitnesses, but also because this quest is really a pretext for a far more universal urge: to understand man’s inhumanity to man, to unearth the place where darkness hides in the human heart.

While the quest itself is satisfying, its conclusion is perhaps inevitably less so. Much tragic art functions cathartically, leaving its audience feeling ultimately cleansed, allowing us to re-enact personal and collective trauma in a safe and controlled way. Folman’s canvas resembles the safe space of the psychoanalyst’s room, an environment in which he can explore and enact the original trauma in order to exorcise its power over his unconscious. Indeed at one point he actually interviews a psychiatrist, an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder.

But for the audience, Waltz With Bashir does not seem to offer such balm; perhaps it cannot. For although it wears the garb of a choreographed work of art, it is most importantly a documentary,  and thus relies on real life, that most chaotic and unyielding of narratives.

The audience must live with an absence of closure because the lessons of the film – that violence is repeated; that massacres beget more massacres; that we cannot erase history – point so evidently to the horrors going unchecked in the world today – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; in Darfur.

Aristotle said that tragedy was a process of imitating an action which “is complete”. He added, “A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles”. Essentially, the tragedy explored in Waltz with Bashir can never be complete while genocide occurs anywhere in the world. The fact that the trauma is therefore ongoing will always prevent catharsis.

But despite this, the film is a triumph. It is right that we should leave the cinema shaken and dumbfounded. It is the least we can do to acknowledge the suffering of the refugee victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the terrible cyclical nature of violence which has rendered the phrase “never again” so futile.

It sends a shiver of excitement down the spine.

Obama promised that if he won the Presidency, he would act on climate change immediately – in his own words, “from the moment I take office”. He added: “The question is not if a renewable energy economy will thrive in the future, it’s where.” He challenged the sceptics who doubt we can halt our carbon-heavy lifestyles in the short term:

When the scientists and engineers told John F. Kennedy that they had no idea how to put a man on the moon, he told them they would find a way. And we found one. I believe we will again.”

In his Op-Ed for the New York Times this week, Al Gore borrows the same image, to powerful effect:

President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface.

The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.”

One day left, and we’re on the cusp of great change. Fingers crossed. A while back I read ‘Dreams from My Father‘, the memoir published 13 years ago, when Barack Obama was just 33; post his social justice work, post-Harvard; the book he wrote while working as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.

As such, it’s an incredible historical document. What’s really fascinating is the window it gives into Obama’s motivations, offering anyone who can afford the price of a paperback the chance to see beyond the weighty rhetoric of his speeches; to get into his head.

Of course if we’re talking about historical documents, this one is hardly an objective source, and the cynics would say, why trust it? Couldn’t he just be telling us what we want to hear? Isn’t an autobiographical memoir the perfect way to reconstruct oneself and manipulate your readers’ reactions?

Language is surely powerful. But the cliche is correct: actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s actions are on his side. Indeed, one of the strongest endorsements of Obama’s integrity has to be the actual timeline of his life thus far. Not to mention that the man would have had to be ridiculously machiavellian to have thought of writing a manipulative memoir over a decade before he even ran for Senate.

Dreams from my Father, above all else, witnesses to something truly inspiring in a politician: someone who isn’t interested in power for its own sake. Near the end of the book, having worked in the deprived Chicago housing projects of Roseland and Altgeld, Obama describes his decision to study at Harvard:

I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change… I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.”

Leave aside the lyricism of these sentences, their measured cadences; it is the actions that follow that best bespeak his integrity. Returning to Chicago, Obama worked as a lawyer and civil activist for a further three years before deciding to run for Senate. He revered the law but also recognized it’s limitations.

How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me – for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.”

I love the barefaced idealism of these words. When Obama’s half-sister Auma visits him for the first time in Chicago, she asks him why he’s chosen a low-paid, undervalued job as an “organizer” (an American word for community advocate – a bit like a youth worker, except that it’s for all ages).

Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?”

I shrugged. “For them. For me.”

That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

That Obama includes this line in the book tells us something: he’s faced cynicism and doubt for a long time, even in the people closest to him. He understands why good people hardly ever bother to go into politics anymore, which makes his own career choice all the more admirable.

On top of all this, the writing is crafted, elegant and often witty. A great writer has to have imagination; the compassionate vision to relate to anyone and everyone, to “climb into [their] skin and walk around in it“. It’s a quality that we should desire in our politicians, and yet it’s all too rare. In the course of telling his story, Obama demonstrates it constantly. Like when he describes trying to reason with four teenage boys who’ve pulled up in a car outside his flat:

One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps…

The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath…

That knotted, howling assertion of self… while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this:

The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth.”

Can you imagine a man with this level of compassion and intelligence, such understanding of human weakness and woe, in the White House? And did you get that bit, where he describes being “drunk or high” in class? The book isn’t a carefully censored, clean and tidy version of a life. It’s honest to the point where you know the writer didn’t intend to run for president when he wrote it – he just wanted to tell a truth.

Obama also talks about race with astonishing candour. It’s all very well to admire his Perfect Union speech (see below), but it’s almost more illuminating to read about the first time he visited Kenya:

“You could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.”

I’m still not certain what the title “Dreams from my Father” means, even after having read the book. It’s not ‘Dreams of my Father’ though it easily could have been, since the narrative is haunted by the absence of Obama’s dad, who left his wife and two-year-old son and returned only once.

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned… The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image”

So is it that Obama’s dreams were inherited from his father? Or are they the dreams his father would have wanted him to have? At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter: what counts is the nature of the dream. Here’s an excerpt from his speech, A More Perfect Union:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

Of course we can’t predict how well Obama will actually perform in office, if he does win tomorrow. In today’s Financial Times, Clive Crook argues: “The plain fact is, Mr Obama cannot deliver what he has promised. The problems he will confront are too difficult.” He’s right, in that to idolize anyone, to put unconditional faith in any human being given power, would be absurd. But I would argue that if Obama brings to office even just a little of what this book promises, we have good reason to be hopeful.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A few other key excerpts from A More Perfect Union:

23.23: “…to wish away the resentments of white americans, to label them as misguided… this too, widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”

26.11: “The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

“But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

Sellotape criss-crossed the binding, which had come unstuck through long use, and there was a small rip at the bottom of one page.

Most astonishing, there was a picture. In between the lines, in a sudden block of white space, was a boat with a chimney that puffed smoke into the hymn title above it. It could have started out as a house, or perhaps it was always meant to be Noah’s Ark.

My grandpa died when I was still a teenager. He was much loved and respected, remembered for his careful compassion as a doctor, his love of jazz and his idiosyncratic sense of humour. He wore a bow tie nearly every day. My memories of him are drawn mainly from disjointed episodes – car journeys when he’d tap the steering wheel in time to Benny Goodman on the tape player, hand out chunks of dairy milk before pretending we were hopelessly lost; times he’d pick up his trumpet and play along to a record or pluck at the double bass while I struggled to find chords on the piano.

There are also the more abstract sensory memories – the smell of his cigar smoke, the scratch of his shaven chin as I kissed him hello; the pretend fierceness in his voice when he barked “Quiet!” at his rabble of beloved grandchildren. I often wondered what it would have been like to know him as an adult, rather than in my childish, half-grown form. I wished I could have played the piano better, for music was one of his greatest pleasures, and in particular I wished I had the aptitude to improvise the jazz he loved so well, but it always sounded false when I tried.

It was strange and wonderful to come across this trace of him, in the back of his old hymn book. It made me wonder what traces we all leave behind, intentionally or otherwise.

When had he drawn it? While bored one day in the cold, echoey church that nestles in the hills above the village? Did he imagine that one day someone else would find it and smile? Was that why the giraffe’s neck was so long as it peered out of the window?

photo by Bruno D Rodrigues, courtesy Creative Commons

Wow. So last week the committee responsible for advising Parliament on climate change told the government in no uncertain terms that Britain needed to slash its carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. In 2000, policymakers came up with a target of 60 per cent, and have resisted calls to increase it for some time.

In their letter to the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband (which is, incidentally, charmingly friendly – “Dear Ed… Yours ever“) – the committee explain it pretty clearly.

Reductions of this scale are required to limit the expected global temperature increases to around 2 degrees centigrade… and to reduce the chances of exceeding 4 degrees centigrade… Temperature rises above 2 degrees are likely to have a major and increasing impact on human welfare and the natural environment. Temperature rises above 4 degrees centigrade could be catastrophic.”

So what would an 80 per cent reduction mean?

At most, we could only expel 118 million tones of CO2 each year.

That might sound like a lot, especially as it’s got the word million in it, but last year British CO2 emissions totalled 544 million tonnes. And by 2050 there’ll be a lot more people around.

An 80 per cent target will put the UK at the vanguard of climate change mitigation. It will also have immediate implications for existing energy policy, as Greenpeace’s exec director John Sauven explains:

The new target should sound the death knell for new coal-fired power stations and Heathrow’s proposed third runway.

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a new fleet of coal plants would hole the new target below the water line, while Labour’s current ambitions for aviation expansion would finish it off.”

In fact, aviation would account for Britain’s entire carbon budget in 2050 unless the industry shrinks dramatically.

Of course with the financial meltdown currently dripping its doom all over the globe, lots of people think we can’t afford to worry about other worrying meltdowns, say, in the Arctic. Thank goodness Ed Miliband disagrees. Yesterday he told the Guardian: “I don’t think there is an option not to act.”

Then today, he passed that message on to Parliament, telling MPs he accepted all the recommendations from last week’s report, and committing Britain to the 80 per cent target.

Good work indeed, dear Ed.

Posted in Thinking ]]> http://filtnib.com/2008/10/16/eighty-per-cent/feed/ 1 estherbintliff Coal Power Plant in black and white http://filtnib.com/2008/09/30/when-i-grow-up-i-wanna-be/ http://filtnib.com/2008/09/30/when-i-grow-up-i-wanna-be/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:07:40 +0000 estherbintliff http://filtnib.wordpress.com/?p=920 ]]> It recently came to my attention that the Pussycat Dolls have a new song out.

Ok I might as well say it. I watched T4. Confession over.

Now, interested as I am in the issues behind gender inequality and female empowerment in the workplace, I was pretty intrigued by the lyrics of the ridiculously catchy When I Grow Up.

In contrast with their charming debut single, Don’cha, (“Don’cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me”), the Dolls’ new record is altogether more introspective.

Boys call you sexy (What’s up, sexy)
And you don’t care what they say
See, every time you turn around
They screamin’ your name
When I grow up
Fresh and clean
Number one chick when I step out on the scene

[Verse 1]
Now I’ve got a confession
When I was young I wanted attention
And I promised myself that I’d do anything
Anything at all for the boys to notice me

[Bridge]
But I ain’t complaining
We all wanna be famous
So go ahead and say what you wanna say
You know what it’s like to be nameless
Want them to know what your name is
‘Cause see when I was younger I would say

[Chorus]
When I grow up
I wanna be famous
I wanna be a star
I wanna be in movies
When I grow up
I wanna see the world
Drive nice cars
I wanna have Groupies*

When I grow up
Be on TV
People know me
Be on magazines
When I grow up
Fresh and clean
Number one chick when I step out on the scene

[Hook x2]
But be careful what you wish for
‘Cause you just might get it
But you just might get it
But You just might get it

[Verse 2]
They used to tell me I was silly
Until I popped up on the TV
I always wanted to be a superstar
And knew that singing songs would get me this far

[Bridge]
[Chorus]
[Verse]
I see them staring at me
Oh I’m a trendsetter
Yes this is true ’cause what I do, no one can do it better
You can talk about me
‘Cause I’m a hot topic
I see you watching me, watching me, and I know you want it
[Chorus]

* Groupies is pronounced ‘Boobies’

Aside from the ‘fresh and clean’ bit, which I suppose is quite good for promoting personal hygiene, I’ve got to say the overall message here is kind of depressing. The whole whether-it’s-meant-to-sound-like-boobies-when-they-sing-groupies is a separate debate that I’m not getting into – besides, lead boobie-pronouncer Nicole surely cleared it all up when she told Ellen DeGeneres “it’s open to interpretation and some of us want boobies”.

What bothers me more about the song is that it’s such a proud example of the pervasive raunch culture that encourages girls to disempower themselves, bump by sordid grind. Even Steve Jones was shocked at the girls’ risque moves on the T4 soundstage. “It’s amazing we’re allowed to show that at this time of the morning,” he laughed. The revelation for me (which I’m sure most of you already know) was that the Pussycat Dolls are not just any other super-branded girl band with a tidal wave of adolescent girls aping their every wriggle, but in fact a real x-rated burlesque troupe.

If the girls performed this song every night on a Sunset Strip stage, where they were originally resident in 1995, I couldn’t care less.The problem is, the PCD’s management want the Doll Domination to be total. And that means tapping one of the most lucrative market groups around: kids and teenagers. In fact in 2006, the toymaker Hasbro created a set of plastic dolls based on the band, to be marketed at 6 to 9 year old girls. Luckily the wave of protest that erupted persuaded Hasbro to cancel the Pussycat line before it reached stores.

That didn’t stop the PCD from expanding their merchandise. On stardoll.com, (a “virtual paperdoll community” with 21,200,240 members, most of whom are aged 7 – 17) you can dress up Melody, Nicole and co. in knee high leather boots, hot pants and a bra, though actually the PCD are the least fun paperdolls on the site since their wardrobes are limited by the fact that they’re the real thing – branded clothing – rather than fun fantasy outfits.

(NB. The admittedly very entertaining stardoll site does make a gesture at some kind of female empowerment, in the form of a page entitled ‘Role Models‘. Apparently, girls, our leading role models are Coco Chanel, Rosa Parks, Beatrix Potter, Forest Fairy (??), and Venus. That would be Venus, as in the mythical goddess of beauty. Great.)

It’s not that I think the Pussycats intend any harm with their fixed-smile fetishization of fame and mindless attention-seeking. Like Nicole says: “The Pussycat Dolls have no boundaries. We continue to stretch and find ourselves in every performance. We do what is truthful for each of us.” Bless. I’d be suprised if the Dolls even had the brains to think past their own shiny latex wardrobe. They’re dolls, right?  Here the group claims the ‘When I Grow Up’ song is meant to be a warning, though of what exactly?

I think people see us and think: ‘Wow, I want to do that. I want to be famous, I want to see the world, I want nice cars, I want groupies.’ But it’s not going to be an easy road getting there and it’s not as glamorous as it always seems.”

OK. So the warning is not that maybe there’s more to life than fame, but that getting there might be tricky?

The fact is that girls could really do with better role models than a group of strippers who glorify the single-minded pursuit of fame and boobies (or groupies, for that matter). 

One recent study found that 63 per cent of teenage girls aspired to be topless models rather than doctors or teachers, while 25 per cent considered lap dancing a “good career choice”. Unfortunately, as this former dancer testifies, it’s not. The Pussycat Dolls insist we’re all pussycat dolls-in-waiting, that – like they said in their TV show, The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll – “inside every woman is a pussycat doll”. Presumably with limitless potential to strip and grind and be watched, and thus have value, if only we believe in ourselves enough, right?

The weird thing is that if Pink were to sing ‘When I Grow Up’ it would be hilarious; a piercing satire of the objectification of women. As it is, it’s just really very sad.

He actually spoke a lot of sense, and happened to echo the opinion of numerous economists, that Britain is facing very tough times ahead. That’s hardly news; Mervyn King said back in May, and again last month, that Britain was heading for recession. But that didn’t stop the frantic baying journalists desperate for a story in these late summer days from touting it from the rooftops, until finally, the Chancellor was forced into a pooled television interview to defend himself.

I am no closet fan of Mr. Darling, and indeed until this weekend cared very little for his public profile. But if you bother to read the original interview, everything he says makes sense. Even Decca admits it:

He is exactly what the public always says it wants: decent, straightforward, unostentatious. The ideological intensity of Brown unnerves voters, and they didn’t trust Blair’s showmanship – but if Darling has vanity it seems invested entirely in doing the job well.”

But that doesn’t really make a great headline now, does it. Aitkenhead’s only real criticism of Darling is that “he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare”. You can imagine the hacks rubbing their hands in glee. Right, he’s straightforward and not great at warfare – GET HIM!

Accordingly the Guardian chose some ‘straightforward’ comments about the state of New Labour and our floundering economy – which, at their worst, simply over-egg what others have already told us – and dressed them up as Caesar-stabbing betrayal, cabinet weakness and personal incompetence. e.g.

His blunt remarks lay bare the unease in the highest ranks of the cabinet that the downturn is making it all but impossible for Gordon Brown to recover momentum after a series of setbacks… The chancellor’s remarks about the economy… highlight the nerves at the top of the government…”

Nicholas Watt, the Guardian’s chief political correspondent, even mocks the Chancellor’s motive behind the interview, painting the whole piece as a choreographed ploy to manipulate the public into feeling more sympathetic towards Mr. Darling:

Today’s interview was designed to show the chancellor in a more personal light.”

Well, duh, OF COURSE that was the point of the interview. Why would it be any different? Why do we read interviews with politicians? Not to get the details of their policy, or we’d be reading the latest Budget. How could the Guardian Weekend have otherwise persuaded Darling to give up two days of his holiday for a big interview piece, when, “For most of my political life,” Darling admits, “I’ve kept out of doing this kind of interview. You have to be quite careful – unless you’re one of those people who’s happy to give everything of themselves. And I, for one, am not“.

Faced with such life-long cautiousness, there’s no doubt the Guardian, in its original pitch to the Chancellor, must have promised him their exclusive interview would do his image good; they probably even used the phrase, “a more personal light”. Today no doubt the paper’s staff will be thrilled the interview has gained the momentum of a major celebrity scoop – being quoted directly in the Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune and Forbes.com.

Darling has now been forced to backtrack on the interview’s bleak appraisal of the difficult times ahead – although, as Philip Stephens notes in the FT, the Chancellor did not say Britain was facing the worst recession in 60 years, but the worst “economic times”, which means something quite different. Certainly Darling may have been too severe in his outlook, but on the other hand he might have hoped that by laying it on thick, businesses would be better prepared for the coming slowdown. Or he might have been trying to answer the criticisms that came in August, from Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond: ‘Instead of hiding in his bunker, it’s time Gordon Brown was straight with people about the problems we are facing”.

By now the wires are hectic with news that the pound has fallen to its lowest level against the euro ever; most commentators, following David Cameron’s gleeful lead, attribute this directly to Darling’s comments. Actually, the drop is more likely due to a phalanx of new data coincidentally released today: a Hometrack Ltd. survey revealing that house prices fell 5.3 percent in August, a Bank of England report that mortgage approvals are at their lowest level since records began 15 years ago, figures from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply showing manufacturing shrank for the fourth consecutive month in August. All of which happened before Mr Darling’s interview was published.

As it is, a lower pound could actually help rebalance the economy. Certainly the self-perpetuating media maelstrom around Darling’s ill-fated interview will do nothing to help rebalance our political sphere. No wonder politicians learn to be dishonest, evasive and misleading. If the Chancellor had been any one of those, he might have been spared this week’s inevitable thrashing.

“going to this? we have plastic blow up canoes”,

the email read.

With great sadness and not a little shame, I must confess I’m not there, as I’m out of the country at present. Otherwise I’d be hopping on a train from London to Strood (following the instructions here).

George Monbiot’s already there. He says he’s gone, “not because of polar bears… not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for – food, clean water, shelter, security – is jeopardised by climate change.”

So why exactly are all the cool kids flocking to Kingsnorth? And what’s with the blow-up canoes?

At the moment the government is sticking by a lunatic plan to build a new COAL-fired power station there. Britain’s first in 20 years.

Coal is only the most polluting way we know of producing electricity.

The new power station, if it goes ahead, will produce more CO₂ each year than the whole of Ghana.

How does the government try to justify it?

…the rather boring fact is that the world is going to be burning lots of coal”

sneers energy minister Malcolm Wicks.

An argument that basically boils down to: “everyone else is doing it so why shouldn’t we?”

Well Malcolm, how can we even ask China and India to cut their carbon emissions (at the cost of significant development) if we’re not willing to cut our own? And should we assume you were just greenwashing last year, when you told the Fabian Society:

I have long been convinced of the intellectual case for early action on climate change…

The effects of global warming become extremely severe with a temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius, and as you see much of the world faces a rise of over 4 degrees if we fail to take decisive action.”

And your decisive action will be… supporting a brand-new emissions factory.

Counter-intuitive, you’ve got to admit. It goes against everything we know about the planet’s current, pressing problems.

NASA’s leading climate expert, Professor James Hansen says:

Kingsnorth is a terrible idea. One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions“

Hansen’s even written to Gordon Brown directly, asking him to ban new coal. So, who will our PM listen to: a NASA scientist… or, the lobbyists from E-ON, the world’s largest investor-owned power and gas company?

Currently the decision lies in the hands of John Hutton. You can write to him here, asking him to freeze the plans and conduct a full review of UK coal policy in light of the latest science on climate change. You won’t be alone. A parliamentary committee has already told the government that the plans are “failing to take adequate account of the environmental impact of coal”, and that “replacing old coal-fired power stations with new ones, rather than using alternative energy sources, locks Britain into a high level of emissions for many years to come”.

Like they say over at the climate camp,

coal might have made sense at the beginning of the industrial revolution but then so did child labour, slavery and woollen swimming trunks. Now we know burning coal is wrecking the climate.”

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. The blow-up canoes. So this Saturday, thousands will gather at Kingsnorth to shut down the power station. Amongst other tactics, a ‘Great Rebel Raft Regatta’ will launch an armada of rafts on the river towards Kingsnorth. God speed those ships.