I managed to live over 40 years without ever consciously hearing the word “pianism“.  And perhaps that explains why there is no appropriate Wikipedia entry. Then again, maybe this is a genuine example of social media failure.  How can it be that a word that describes the technique of playing one of the most transformative of musical inventions of all time has not been covered yet by one of us wisdomofcrowdshivemindtypewritermonkeys?

If I follow the logic of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, it is actually my fault there is no entry for pianism; being the first person to have discovered the chasm in the wikicrust, I should have done my social media duty and filled it in with what passes for the aggregate of my knowledge so that others following would not stumble into the same psychotic abyss.  Instead, selfishly, I thought I’d share this glaring absence with you my few friends for a bit of a snigger.  But you are probably not sniggering, except perhaps at my archness, which, after all this time, I’m a little disappointed that you’re not accustomed to yet.

In mitigation, social media delivered me a gem just the other day: one of those recycled gems that litter the digital steppe.  Via some path I can’t now recall, I ended up on Amazon reading a DVD review that immediately and uncharacteristically prompted me, Pavlov-canine-like, to click “Add to Shopping Basket“, surreptitiously bypassing the obligatory cooling off period in “Wish List“:

My title [One of the Most Extraordinary Piano Films Ever Made] applies primarily to the 1965 black and white film of Alexis Weissenberg playing Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka, amazingly creatively filmed in Stockholm by Åke Falck. I remember seeing this film on TV almost forty years ago and the memory of it has stayed with me ever since. I am so pleased finally to have a copy of that marvellous film. Weissenberg was in his early thirties at the time and at the very height of his considerable form. The views provided by Falck are highly unusual but each has a clear intention of adding to our enjoyment of the music by showing us in closeup both the hands of Weissenberg and the movements of the mechanism of the piano; the camera actually almost climbs inside the piano. The whole thing is filmed with high-key contrast. This is one of the great piano films ever made.

Having confessed to an ignorance of pianism, I am not, however, going to reveal here that I had not heard of Alexis Weissenberg either, nor ever knowingly listened to Petrushka (orchestral or piano version). So don’t ask.

About 18 months ago, I did finally come across this word “pianism”, and on Saturday mornings now I sometimes get to observe it (albeit at my own not inconsiderable expense) being painstakingly transferred from one generation to another.  But I would not dare create a wiki based on these fly-on-the-wall insights.

The other day too, I overheard someone say that, in contrast to the guitar, the piano always sounds like the piano.  Reining in my passion for contradiction I said nothing, even though I was sure that couldn’t be right.  Pianism is about making the instrument sound like all sorts of things that it is not.  A little way in to the Petrushka, the piano does stop sounding like a piano (around 1 minute 35 seconds). In the DVD “extras” Weissenberg too makes an argument that the sounds a piano can make defy the physics of hammer hitting strings. (Ironically, you will find out if you buy it that to film the Petrushka they had to use playback and build a piano without strings).

By other miracles, the copyright owners appear to have provided this enticement for your limbic system. Neurologically speaking, and pace Clay Shirky, the definitive book on pianism might be subtitled “How Change Happens When People Spend A lot of Time On Their Own.”

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There seems to be a move to make the Lehman Brothers’ collapse the central turning point in the whole financial and economic crisis.  But this is what Nouriel Roubini thinks:-

Some people suggest that letting Lehman go in this way was a mistake and if we had just bailed out Lehman everything would have been fine. We would have avoided this global meltdown, this global recession. I believe this interpretation of history is totally incorrect, because by the time Lehman had collapsed the housing recession had already started two years ago and was getting worse. So the idea that the crisis started with the collapse of Lehman and if we had only bailed out Lehman everything would have been OK in my view is just total nonsense.  We were already in the middle of a severe economic and financial crisis, and a mortgage problem and a greater credit crunch that had been developing and worsening step by step for almost two years.

Why might it be attractive at this stage in the crisis to draw attention to Lehman as a key turning point? I wonder if such a simplified narrative, and one that hinges on a relatively recent policy error (if that is what Lehman’s collapse was), lets a lot more of us off the hook. If you did not appreciate the enormity of what was happening before Lehman collapsed and weren’t prepared — whether in business, journalism or just in your own household — you can draw a line under your ignorance and apportion blame more specifically. I suspect for journalists, analysts, investors and executives who found themselves adrift as events started turning sour post-February 2007, it allows them to reinvent themselves as more knowledgeable than they in fact were.

It must be some kind of memory bias at work.  But which one to choose?

More from Roubini and the notion that we may still face death by a thousand cuts:-

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On Friday I had a NASA scientist lying around the house, so I encouraged the youngest Chip off the Old Hack to take him into class for a bit of show and tell.  There was a moment of struggle, with some muttering about being an engineer and not a scientist.  But through my finely calibrated manoeuvring of a Ford Galaxy, the Eagle landed at T minus 10 mins, with USB memory stick in pocket, loaded with images for an estimated 15-minute presentation. Eager questioning from 32 curious nine-year-olds turned this into more than an hour.  One small step…

In my capacity as taxi-driver and and provider of rocket fuel, I facilitated a prime-time public service. What goes around doesn’t necessarily come around, however; searching the TV schedules yesterday for child-friendly space programmage led into the void.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter any more.  You should just record stuff.  Later in the evening the documentary/drama Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 came on, but this overlapped later on and after midnight with In The Shadow Of The Moon.  This I managed to record to PC, along with two mistaken hours of “live” Big Brother and a Whoopi Goldberg movie. There goes the hard drive.  But, if it was worth putting a man on the moon, forty years later you might reasonably expect the public service broadcasters to do a better job, particularly to inspire kids on the road to knowledge acquisition.

But don’t despair.  Sometimes that which is lost and broken resurfaces.  The BBC did perform its civic duty on Saturday morning by interviewing film director Theo Kamecke.  He had been invited by NASA to make a so-called time-capsule documentary of the Apollo 11 mission.  Even NASA’s PR seemed to understand that it would get ignored once it appeared, because the public would by then be all mooned out.  And so it was.  Languishing for nearly four decades, Moonwalk One was rediscovered by the makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon. It has been given a digital dusting off and released on a collectable DVD.

CNN provides three minutes with Kamecke here, where he talks about the smell of fear and the contribution of little old ladies to the space race:-

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The idea of the egg and spoon race was, I’m guessing, to teach children balance, poise and concentration versus speed. Handicap all participants with a brittle object so that they develop a skill other than moving fast; break the egg and, as the computer says, Game Over.  Heuristically speaking, slow and steady wins the race.

But various concerns, such as the risk of salmonella, forced the real egg in the egg-and-spoon race to withdraw. Its place was taken by the hard-boiled, ceramic or wooden egg, or even the surrogate potato or stone.  Casting notions of fragility aside, winning now depends on the participant navigating the course fastest with only the closest approximation to following the rules whilst under observation: a very different competition, more akin to modern banking.

Perhaps educationalists should think twice (another heuristic?) before deciding to dilute an educational activity to the point where its original purpose is lost. There may be another post on this subject in which we will investigate together a new sports day phenomenon: the synthetic sack race, where you find that the winner, in a surprise turn of events, is your local supermarket.

Back in the classroom, sheltering from the rain, other rules of thumb are sitting in the corner with the dunce’s hat on.  Michael Quinion, who runs the site and email list World Wide Words and has just published Why is Q Always Followed by U?: Word-Perfect Answers to the Most-Asked Questions About Language, points to a recent document sent to all primary schools in which the government is now recommending that the spelling rule “i before e except after c” no longer be taught because it doesn’t work.  Quinion takes exception for pragmatic reasons, rather than bemoaning a fall in standards as the Opposition has.  He says that, while not universal, it is a small, useful aid on the journey to good spelling.  In fact, he notes from the document itself that there is a refined definition of the rule that delivers even fewer exceptions: “i before e except after c when the sound is ee”.  The point is that the rule is approximate, and there is a subsidiary learning process in absorbing the exceptions to the rule.

I’ll take Quinion’s word for it on its value in spelling: it helped me.  But there may be another reason not to drop so readily a rule of thumb that has proven its worth to so many generations of children, whether you are in the business of advocating spelling reform or not.  The teaching to children of how to apply rules of thumb may itself be a useful pedagogical exercise for our modern times, and perhaps is even a first order imperative; the kids would be better equipped to face a complex future than we turned out to be.  If I have this right, rules of thumb can work very well for those who will never master quantitative methods.  Moreover, rules of thumb can operate as an antidote for those whose mastery of the quantitative, or dependence on the technological, makes them slaves to the same; something liable to get them, and the rest of us, into trouble.

Maybe schools are doing this anyway, and it’s just that I’m not seeing it yet. My gut feeling is that they are not.

Well, even from the giddiest of academic heights there does seem to be a problem according heuristics the respect they deserve.  This is what Dan Goldstein at Decision Science News wrote recently:-

All smart statisticians use rules of thumb. DSN has noticed that as soon as one statistician codifies or pronounces a rule of thumb, smart alecs come along with special cases that violate the rule thereby “proving” the rule and the person who articulated it “wrong”. (Smart alecs love to pretend that those who impart rules of thumb are so dumb as to believe that the rules work in all circumstances).

This leads me, if not you, back to Quinion, and an entry in his earlier book Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths on the subject of the phrase “the exception that proves the rule,” a phrase often uttered by smart alecs in the corollary to Dan’s example i.e. when they themselves might have been otherwise proved wrong.  Quinion shows how this is a corruption of its original meaning, wrapped as it is in heuristic value.  The phrase really comes from a medieval Latin legal principle:-

exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis

Which Quinion translates for me as:-

the exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted

In practice, what this means is that when you see a sign “Parking prohibited on Saturdays” you are seeing an exception to a rule which can be inferred as “parking is allowed at all other times”.

In the meantime, I note that the heuristics literature has always had its skeptics:-

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Since I heard about social proof, and more specifically Joshua Bell’s famous busking experiment, I’ve wondered what in fact determines my own musical taste: how independent is it of others?  Like anyone, I want to think I’m a free spirit.

This may not be helpful, but the only sure example I have where I responded independently to a piece of music was Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.  I really did not like his music in the period up to 1983 for very particular reasons: Off the Wall had been played in our house for several years till it drove me up the wall.

From what may have been the very first UK airplay of Billie Jean, I immediately went out and ordered the 12″ version, making the record an outlier in an LP collection of otherwise orthodox neurotic-boy-outsider (NBO) teenage angst music. That’s if you exclude the bootleg Buddy Guy album that found its way to small-town Lincolnshire by some miracle or another.  Much is made of the revolutionary impact the accompanying video had on the success of Billie Jean, and that may all be true, but I know that did not influence me.

It didn’t stop there.  Soon after, and in a similar fashion, I heard the roughly contemporaneous Walk Right Now, penned and performed by Jackson and brothers.

Walk Right Now certainly does illustrate my early experiences of social proof in action.  I upset and embarrassed a good many of my adolescent chums with this one, particularly one who was a dyed-in-the-wool Joy Division and Morrissey fan. He loathed it, until his big brother (whom he worshipped) returned from Cambridge porting it in his own diminutive singles collection.  Things were crossing over fast in 1983 for those of us with parochial musical tastes and where the only good record shop occupied the tiniest of former corner stores.  Within a few months of Billie Jean’s release, my friend found his erstwhile NBOs, New Order, going all techno-dance on him, creating a yet more legendary 12-inch.

It seems impossible to know the truth about Michael Jackson.  Maybe, with Billie Jean, he flew too close to the sun.  I understand New Order, meanwhile, retired and went yachting.

And here, as promised, we cross over from maudlin to up-tempo.

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It’s perhaps time to end this maudlin phase on the blog, but before we go up-tempo, here’s an excuse to post another picture of ’80s Soviet rock icon Viktor Tsoi.  Nearly forgotten him had you? Newbies can start an excursion here to learn more about my chance encounter with Tsoi nearly a quarter century ago.

I may be wrong but I believe this photo was taken on Kodachrome transparency film.  I know I used a bit of Ektachrome in those days too, but I suspect this was 200 ASA, out of the red packet. Tuesday saw the demise of this much loved film brand.

On a happier note, I was recently reunited with my long lost Nikon FM, with which the above photo was taken.

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There is now a cloud appreciation society.  You may have heard about it on the radio a few weeks ago.  They have named a new cloud — undulus asperatus — from the Latin, which roughly translates as “agitated waves“.  And the roughness is what matters.  They are highly disturbed, heralding a storm, and yet tend to disperse without one.  The pictures above are nothing of the sort: just cumulus or perhaps nearer cumulonimbus.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, and it is true what they say: that some clouds do have a silver lining, though I’m hesitant to agree yet that every one does. More research is needed.

It was sports day when these photos were taken earlier this week, and for the first time in a while it was not rained off, not even just the once.  So these clouds were silver-lined if you were the harassed head teacher.  But the sun did not shine for the Smaller Chip off the Hack, who came away with no honours.  Last year, if memory serves correctly, he won the egg and spoon race.  This year, although the video evidence is incomplete, it does look like he finished the course without dropping the egg once, compared with his fellow competitors who all seemed to have at least one upset.  Had the eggs been real, this would have been a feat in itself, but that day it was not the one being measured. Shall I add that the spoons were not institutional dessert spoons of yore, but wooden spoons with barely any dish?  Ah well.  He is his father’s son.

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One of the most unanswerable questions you’re likely to be asked in a job interview is “Do you think  you’re tough enough to stand up to Piers Morgan?”

Unfortunately, I’ve had that question put to me. Several years ago, by dint of having the two words “managing” and “editor” next to one another on my CV, Trinity Mirror called me in to see them in the possibly mistaken belief that I could help dig them out of a very big hole indeed.  I was pretty sure I could help in some way, but I think we had a different view of what type of hole they were dealing with. Given Piers Morgan’s inexorable rise on two continents as the mean-spirited arbiter of folksy talent, might I humbly propose that this is the mother of all interview posers?  Top it if you can.

To be sure, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as usual. There was a small coda to this interview conversation which involved another legendary Fleet Street figure: an experience that finally persuaded me it was time to steer a reciprocal course to the one Fleet Street was headed down and, boat-hook in hand, retrieve my bedraggled dignity.  As tabloid journalists allegedly say in potentially compromising situations: “I made my excuses and left.”

Rightly or wrongly, and with rare exceptions, my approach to news management had been unusually low-key; a function of personality, combined with the demands of real-time, I think.  I was always more interested in process than result.  That’s what I offered in that interview, and I suspect that it was mistaken for weakness and (worse still) inexperience, whereas for them it should have represented a diverse perspective. My interviewer, I could tell, was not convinced. Mercifully, one of us escaped, and I think it was probably me. Though maybe it was Piers.

So in a sotto voce way, this is the Knackered Hack finally taking a hyper-linked opportunity to stand up to Piers Morgan: something that in real life only a handful of people seem ever to have done, and the Fates denied me the opportunity to chance my arm at.

Morgan was honoured this week with a slot on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs: the longest-running music programme in the history of radio. It is the mama of all mixtapes: you get to choose the records that define your experience and broadcast them to the nation. Although Bob Geldof famously said that it is only a radio show, I reckon an invitation to appear is greeted by most of its guests in the same way as being tapped by Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s birthday honours.

Piers Morgan’s life is a catalogue of rather ghastly errors, none of which seems to have been a setback to his advances to fame and fortune: a modern day Bel Ami, perhaps?  So it seems like a category error for our public service broadcaster to accord him such high-quality attention. But hey, there goes the neighbourhood. For those who want to see if theirs is a match for his musical taste, this link should do it. Me, I’m averting my eyes.

In at least one of those counter-factual universes of infinite mathematical possibility, the Knackered Hack has himself been granted the honour of discussing his own desert island discs before an eager nation.  In this same universe, Piers Morgan blogs and no-one reads.

Here’s a small taste of what my list contains. Until a few weeks ago, Haydn would not have been on my modest mixtape.  For undisclosable reasons, he has now hopped in.  The words, courtesy of the ChoralWiki, are below.  And for those who read me for stuff on decision-making, Haydn seems to have been on to heuristics and biases long before any of us.  You may have to think about this one a little bit.

Insanae et vanae curae invadunt mentes nostras,
saepe furore replent corda, privata spe,
Quid prodest O mortalis conari pro mundanis,
si coelos negligas,
Sunt fausta tibi cuncta, si Deus est pro te.

Vain and raging cares invade our minds,
Madness often fills the heart, robbed of hope,
O mortal man, what does it profit to endeavour at worldly things,
if you should neglect the heavens?
If God is for you, all things are favorable for you.

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Across Fleet Street from the Tipperary and up a narrow alley is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. I’ve been set up in that pub before now too.

I’m old enough to remember it as a somewhat run-down labyrinth haunted by the last remaining hacks, before Fleet St was repopulated by accountants and bankers.  The Cheese was refurbished.  After that it was a principal hang-out for Goldman Sachs, whose European headquarters stands more or less next door.  Don’t get me wrong: I still liked it.

But my fondest memory of the Cheese is the first time I drank a porter beer: Samuel Smiths’ Taddy Porter, if I recall correctly, though it could easily have been their Imperial Stout. Just a half, mind you, with the Knackered Hackette, near the roaring fire in the quiet snug bar on the right, within sight of Dr Johnson’s favoured seat. We were on our way to see Jane Campion’s film The Piano.  It must have been 1993 when I was Knight-Ridder’s much-too-young London bureau chief. It was a dark winter’s evening, and somehow the beer, the pub, the piano, the days of print: everything was a kind of black and white.

Michael Nyman may not please everyone, but I liked the music to that film.  I have been flipping past the CD for the best part of 20 years until 12 months ago, when I started to listen to it again, and with enthusiasm.

Yesterday, courtesy of the independent journalism site Frontline via Twitter, I came across the following short film at the composer’s homepage.  Nyman is offering film-makers free music to accompany their creative efforts as part of a competition being run by Shooting People.  The prize is £750 of video training with Frontline.

The title of the film — We Are What We Lost – struck me hard; how better to define the process of delivery that is grief? When young, if we are lucky, we tend to think we are defined by our accomplishments or their symbols; when older, if we are lucky, we will eventually be disabused of such notions.

It’s an affecting film, so perhaps something really for home viewing, not the office.

The filmmaker, Srdjan Mitrovic, describes it thus:-

This short film is moving reconstruction of a specific personal experience within a given tradition to remind us of the constant interconnection between life, food and death.

Cheese sign photo credit teamaskins

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In the middle of that 2001 Chapter 11 process, I was being primed for information in the Tipperary pub in Fleet Street.  The “Tip” is the oldest Irish pub in England and the first ever to sell Guinness here, or so the free information on the internet tells me today.  I did not know that then.  There was plenty of free information available in 2001 despite a relative shortage of comprehensive pub histories.  All the same,  you still had to pay for the Guinness. And that’s invariably the case today.

I was with a very senior colleague who was plying me with the black stuff; I think he’d been asked to keep an eye on me and my rank-breaking entrepreneurship.  I said to him that I thought part of the problem for even highly specialized subscription content businesses, like the one we were proposing to launch out of the bankruptcy, was that so much generic news was then free on the internet. This factor perhaps had already tipped investor sentiment away from the concept of proprietary news content. I suggested that one of the principal reasons for this may have been the example set by our competitor, the news agency Reuters, in selling its news feed to search engine/portal Yahoo!, without obvious limitations on what could be published.

“Oh, I did that deal!” said the executive.  Imagine the Knackered Hack coughing into his artisan-poured pint, spraying his “mentor” with white foam.  [For sure, that's not what happened exactly, but I'm not a factual journalist any more; I don't carry an NUJ card these days, and even my poetic licence is only provisional.]

Some of us had known for a long while that the value proposition of unbundled real-time news was not what it once was.  It wasn’t a good time to be giving so much of it away. Reuters seem to have wised up a couple of years ago, because they no longer operate that Yahoo! deal.

But I still wonder, in my counter-factual way, if such a vast organization like Reuters had not taken that fork in the road so prominently, would other news media have felt so compelled to provide so much stuff for free?  And thence GoogleNews. Would a viable subscription model not have been built by now to get the more innovative news organizations [oxymoron warning] cleanly out of the ink-on-dead-trees business? Perhaps not. Just askin’.

There may be more lessons from the real-time news industry of the ’80s and ’90s for today’s media to illustrate the tragedy/farce heuristic. Anyone interested in another chapter on that soon?

Photo credit tricky

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