Cinderella Brown?

A photograph of Dave 'Boy' Cameron in celebratory mode on the front page of The Guardian should have pleased Gordon Brown. His Conservative opponent looks very pleased with himself. It's thumbs up chaps, the election's as good as in the bag.

While Party chairman Eric von Pickles will be doing his best to rein in and discipline the natural smugness of he who must be obeyed, grease is very hard to constrict, and these days Dave Boy is looking positively oleaginous: smart, positive and confident. Just like Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 General Election.

Whereas Mr Brown is looking anything like Irn Brew. Instead of coming across as tough as girders, he looks a sad old Bagpuss. Labour voters must earnestly wish that Dave Boy and EP believe that and go on believing that for the next six months.

For Mr Brown's demeanour reminds me of the American heavyweight boxer James J Braddock, as portrayed by Russell Crowe in Ron Howard's uplifting 2005 biopic Cinderella Man.

His career hit the canvas in 1929 when the Great Depression floored the US economy. To support his family, Braddock had to beg for work on the waterfront as a stevedore. They lived hand-to-mouth until 1934 when Braddock's luck changed.

He had a couple of fights and, against expectation, won them. Having beaten the heavyweight contender, he found himself up against dancing Max Baer, the Californian whose killer right fist had led to the deaths of two fighters. Like The Joker in Batman, Baer enjoyed clowning. But coming up against him on June 13, 1935 wasn't a joke.

Like Dave Boy, Max Baer was super confident of destroying Jim Braddock. He lost on points. Nine years after turning pro, James J was the champion of the world, a title he held for two years until Joe Louis got up from the canvas to take it off him in 1937.

Next June marks the 75th anniversary of the Braddock-Baer title fight in New York City. Cinderella Brown might be advised to call his contest with Dave Boy Cameron as near to the 13th as possible. Who knows, the pundits might be confounded. Expectation is a terrible thing, it triggers the Law of Unforeseen Consequences.

A Panto for Wall Street b-b-bankers

The papers are getting worked up over recent rises in the FTSE100, from under 3,500 points in March to 5,300-plus.

Before the global economy went into submarine mode and dived, dived, dived, the Footsie was heading towards 7,000 points. The US Dow Jones was surfing the waves at over 12,000 while Japan's market was above 20,000.

So there's a long way to go before fings are wot they used to be. However, expectation being what it is, some enterprising director might consider putting on seasonal panto for high financiers hoping to make a killing when the value of stocks fluctuates and the crest of the wave falls.

Based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, how about Goldman Sachs and the Three Bear Markets?

Twas on the Good Ship Beagle...

That Charles Darwin caught an ague, or several agues. But I'll come to them in a moment.

The reason why I did not go to see the movie Creation was that the trailer did not impress me; the film came across as yet another costume drama - as opposed to historical drama or a drama of ideas. The trailer of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about Keats and Fanny, left the same impression.

Also I was fed up with the media adulation that Darwin was getting, principally on Channel 4 - Darwin the genius, Darwin the reality changer, Darwin the new god - having just scanned a new book by Leeds University lecturers Mike Dixon and Gregory Radick, called disarmingly, Darwin in Ilkley.

They say that Darwin came to Ilkley on October 4, 1859, for a nine-week stay, during which time his book On the Origin of the Species was published, on November 24 - 150 years ago.

Why did the man of science travel 200 miles from his home in Surrey to engage in what, to many, was a form of quackery? Because he had been ill for more than 22 years, ever since returning to Blighty in 1837 from his voyage on the good ship Beagle.

The poor man suffered from fits of vomiting, abdominal pain, skin rashes, tiredness, headaches and much else. Like many well-heeled Victorians, Darwin's diet had everything to do with his unhealthy inner condition. He was dyspeptic and flatulent.

He came to Ilkley for the water cure. He had heard of the restorative powers of Ilkley Moor's natural springs. A bathhouse was built on the hillside in the 17th century with a 1,500-gallon plunge bath fed by subterranean sources. White Wells is still there.

At other, more genteel spas, the well-to-do 'took the waters', together with soothing baths, wax treatments and other diverse entertainments. Ilkley was different. The 'water cure' would have delighted the sadistic Countess Elisabeth of Transylvannia, whose pleasure it was in winter to entertain guests by having cold water poured over servants to turn them into ice statues.

Darwin was subjected to baths, douches or wrapped in sheets soaked with ice cold water. To flush out the muck from his bunged up digestive system, he was obliged to quaff large quantities of H2O as well. His diet was controlled and he was sent out for bracing walks. In winter Ilkley can be bloody cold, wet and cold, when the wind howls eastwards along the funnel of the Wharfe Valley.

Within a fortnight the naturalist was trilling like a moorland curlew to a friend: "You cannot think how refreshing it is to idle away whole day (sic) & hardly ever think in the least about my confounded Book, which half killed me."

Which brings me to ask whether Darwin's magnum opus was as original as his acolytes want us to believe. It seems to me that Darwin re-assembled the ideas of evolution rather than created them; gave them an evidential basis from his own researches.

But others had been there before him or at the same time. The French scientist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1774-1829) reportedly first proposed the notion of heredity with the phrase "the inheritance of acquired characteristics".

Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Augustinian monk (1822-1884), who seemingly had no problem reconciling God and genetics, patiently identified from 28,000 pea plants seven pairs of seeds that propagated growth. He was 37 when Darwin's book was published. Mendel's own paper, published in 1866, was ignored for 35 years. When it was recognised he was called, appropriately, The Father of Genetics.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) arrived at the idea of evolution through natural selection in 1858, a year before Darwin's book.

Lamarck, Mendel and Wallace are rarely mentioned, as though Darwin thought up evolution all by himself.

Similarly, Francis Crick and the American James Watson get all the credit for coming up with the twisting stairwell of the double helix, the structure of deoxyribosenucleic acid - DNA. They won the 1962 Nobel Prize. The pioneering work of Maurice Watkins in 1953 seems to have been forgotten or ignored.

And but for the work of Linus Pauling, who in 1951 proposed the idea of a treble helix, Watkins, Crick and Watson, between them, might not have brought the structure of DNA to fruition.

Donald Trump, of all people, in his latest book Think Like a Champion, casts doubt on whether individuals create ideas on their own. He says they assemble them. As though by a process of symbiosis across cultures and generations, I suppose he means. He likes to quote Einstein, who said: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

For an illustration of this idea have a look at El Greco's painting The Agony in the Garden (1590-95) and Picasso's work from 1907 through to Guernica. I think the Greek was the originator of Cubism; the Spaniard developed it.

The View From Darwin Gardens

Rain clouds rumber over Hebers Ghyll,
Panorama Rocks and Weary Hill,
pelting fur and feather along Pancake Ridge;
strafing Jags and Mercs on Curly Hill
across the Victorian river bridge.
A fanfare of late summer sunshine
summons spinsters and widows to tiffin
from privately-wooded thoroughfares.
In Betty's they're fortified with Earl Grey,
Darjeeling and upholstered eclairs.
The green detonations of Middleton Wood.
Under those broccoli bunches, flowers
parade in uniform shades of blue.
From khaki to Roman bronze and amber,
the pebble-dashing river changes hue.

Rushmore sculptures shape the air,
as the night trains recruit males
with cocky coxcombs, tattoos
and private hurts to quench.
Tonight they'll snatch relief in booze
and girls. Tomorrow, those old enough to die
for bluebells, Betty's and folk on Curly Hill,
will be cock of the Wharfe no more.
They fly them out on Pegasus,
boys apprenticed to be men of war;
eyes brighter than summer at Robin Hood's Bay.
They will send them back in Union Jack
boxes, to Brize Norton or Lynam;
and at the going down of the sun
we will remember them - but not for long.

For more see Grist, now published. www.hud.ac.uk/grist

Rose Cottage

You will not see ivy clinging to brick walls,
nor the cross-hatching of trellises.
On summer evenings the aroma of honeysuckle
does not feather the abdomen.
Out of blueness that hurts irises and pupils,
helicopters hovering like humming birds and bees,
drop out of the desert,
bringing them back in twos and threes.
They are taken to Rose Cottage,
tagged, bagged, ready for inspection.
While far away in houses with trellises and ivy,
and honeysuckle redolent of memory and heart's ease,
families hedge the roads from dawn,
awaiting the arrival of dead sons.

The Art of Professional Lying

On June 30th this year, Sunday Times freelance journalist Stephen Grey was one of three people who gave verbal evidence to 11 members of the House of Commons Defence Committee, chaired by James Arbuthnot MP. A good deal of what he said, in light of what subsequently happened in Southern Afghanistan, is worthy of the front page of The Sunday Times.

Mr Grey spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His recorded evidence takes up the best part of nearly 16 pages. Leaving aside serious criticisms - lack of continuity between military, civil and political arms; operational decisions based on poor intelligence; short-termism in both staffing and strategy - Mr Grey told the committee:-

...commanders are very regulated in what they can say to the press. I remember in Iraq, when I was there last, which is 2006, I believe, the lines-to-take book had got up to 130 pages. I remember hearing soldiers being briefed for the visit of the Prime Minister, and they were choosing junior officers, certainly young soldiers, who would be in line to talk to the Prime Minister and what they should tell him. The whole thing seemed completely circular - basically politicians going out to be told what they wanted to hear.

Chairman: What you are telling us is that when the prime Minister goes there he gets no ground truth: he gets some pre-organised line-to-take cooked up in advance by the Ministry of Defence?

Mr Grey: That is the objective of certain officials...

Mr Holloway: Do you think generally in both Iraq and Afghanistan that the politicians have been well or ill-served by the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office in terms of what the Chairman refers to as ground truth?

Mr Grey: ...I just know that there is almost a professional optimism that is provided to yourselves which is not borne out by the private opinions of many of the same people that make these public statements.

Chairman:....the Comprehensive Approach is more in words than in reality. Is that right?

Mr Grey: Absolutely, and the impression you get from very senior people within the military is that they are confronted with other departments who have no genuine belief in the value of this conflict; there is a sense in which they are not sure there is a real will to win in other departments. You get a sense in the diplomatic department, for example, that the military have pushed ahead of the political will that exists in this country. So that adds up to a dysfunction between those departments which, despite great efforts by a number of people to pull together, has not been resolved...

...I would say the biggest source of finance for the insurgency is actually NATO and its contacts, not any money coming from Al Qaeda or the Gulf or something like that, because we often deal with people who are corrupt...Basra went wrong because there were not good people there, they were all driven away, and we actually handed power in the Police and the Government to the extreme Islamist militias. That was a deliberate decision made. We thought we were not going to be there long and allowed them to take over the apparatus of state there. That was not because it was inevitable, NOT because there were not good people there: it was because of really bad intelligence and really bad short-term decision-making.

Stephen Grey's recently published book, Operation Snakebite, contains 230 interviews with British and American military and civilian personnel.

In the week following Mr Grey's testimony, five British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, including Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, CO of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards. Of the 174 British deaths out there Richard North, whose book Ministry of Defeat chronicles and analyses military procurement and strategy in Iraq, calculates that at least 49 occurred in vehicles susceptible to both Improvised Explosive Devices and Explosively Formed Projectiles.

When soldiers die unnecessarily, it is usually because there is a grave disparity between what politicians think is happening and what the military know is happening. When the latter don't know why it is happening, the poor sods in the front line are doomed to die or suffer serious injuries.

Johnny Remember Me - Revisited

Gordon Brown is a jammy sod. On the day he finally commits political suicide, urging the credit-crunched West to cough up £60 billion A YEAR to help Third World countries with dubious climate change, news of this foolishness is virtually obliterated from broadcast news by the death of Michael Jackson.

As I write surgeons in Los Angeles are carving up the singer's body and poking about in his innards, looking for clues to explain why his heart arrested. The operation wouldn't look out of place on the video of Thriller.

In the past hour or so I've heard an awful lot of emotional tosh spoken about MJ, principally that he was the first black singer to put black singing/dancing on the world map. Er, anyone ever heard of Sammy Davies Junior? That man was a brilliant singer, dancer, musician, comedian and a reasonable movie actor.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly did more for popular dance back in the 1940s and 1950s; they could sing and act as well. Mr Astaire gave it elegance, Mr Kelly gave it power and energy. They were, respectivly, the John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier of dance.

As for music, I would say that Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry were much more important historically and musically; they didn't just galvanise fellow black musicians, their influence was trans-Atlantic. Without them no Beatles, no Rolling Stones.

And don't forget a certain James Marshall Hendrix, former US paratrooper and the first Ziggy Stardust who played guitar left-hand and was, reportedly, well hung.

From 20 to about 30, Michael Jackson put out great songs and exciting dance videos. He was a thriller on stage and he knew it. Millions of people got a lot of happiness from his creativity. He had a lot of good people to help him to make the impact credited to him on MTV - Quincy Jones, Martin Scorsese. The increased budgets for his videos were commensurate with his rising fame - from $50,000 for the first to $7,000,000 for Scream. That helped too.

He was a considerable artist the best of whose work will live on. Right now, the dollar possibilities of his demise are being calculated. When Elvis Presley keeled over in 1977, he unwittingly resuscitated his career. He went from mortality to myth overnight, with the media cashing in every anniversary. It's an ill wind.

I wouldn't be surprised if negotiations are underway for the movie rights. Michael Jackson's albums will dance up the charts. Millions of greenbacks will change hands. And Elizabeth Taylor will make a public appearance to express her grief.

In death, Michael Jackson is going to be bigger business than ever. That is neither a jealous nor a cynical assessment. It is what happens in a world where celebrity and entertainment matter more to the media than truth and justice. His death is not a greater tragedy than the murder of Veronica Guerin and the killing of Neda Soltan in Iran.

But I do feel saddened. A shooting star has fallen. When people die, unless they were exceptionally wicked, the good they did far outweighs their human frailties. That's how it should be. I never thought Michael Jackson was a child abuser; but I did foresee that the court case brought against him following the television interview with Martin Bashir would bring him endless trouble.

This afternoon I saw Nick Moran's engrossing film Telstar - The Joe Meek Story. I came away with the Sermon on the Mount plagiarisation going through my head, 'Joe Meek will inherit the earth'. That man created two pieces of music that formed part of the soundtrack of my youth: Johnny Remember Me, and Telstar.

Until a few years ago I had no idea who Joe Meek was, let alone that he recorded those evocative, stirring sounds in rooms above a handbag shop on a North London high street. Three weeks after he killed himself in 1967, a French court released his royalties for Telstar. Like Michael Jackson, he died broke, in a certain amount of torment

At such times the best we can do is take Eric Cantona's advice in Ken Loach's fine film Looking For Eric. "Say non! From your balls!". Non to the bullshit, hypocrisy and sentimentality that inevitably follow the death of a star.

And Michael Jackson's legacy? His video Black and White should be played all over Tehran, throughout Iran, by the opposition to President Dinnerjacket and his turbanned jackasses. Now that would be something.

..............................................................

Since posting this blog on Friday evening, I have seen, heard and read quite a lot about MJ, his life and music.

I would only like to add the following. James Brown should have been mentioned as an influence on the young Michael's idea of stage-craft. So should the BeeGees, perhaps. They created the disco dance music craze, with that distinctive style of falsetto singing, in the1970s.

The notion that MJ was a one-hit wonder with Thriller is an opinion, but an ill-judged one. Of all the songs I have heard repeatedly this weekend the ones that stand out for me are:- Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough; Billie Jean; Rock With You; Black and White; that rain song from Invincible; I Want You Back, from his time with the Jacksons; You Are Not Alone. I also like the Earth Song.

You'd have to be brain dead to fail to get a buzz from the opening riff of Black and White. I saw Slash from Guns 'n' Roses play it on stage with MJ. We have lift off.

Childhood is an adult idea. You only have a view of your own in retrospect. Children are too busy in their eternal present. I think MJ was happy enough as a child while he was performing, but if the story is true that his father and brothers ridiculed him about the size of his nose, no wonder he did something about it when he was rich enough to do so.

Children need to be loved, disciplined, encouraged and put right when they go wrong; one thing they don't need is ridicule. The humiliation that attends ridicule is never forgotten; it is felt as a physical hurt.

As for Michael Jackson's eccentricities, he wasn't the first famous public figure to act oddly.

Howard Hughes, multi-talented genius though he was, had a phobia about germs that got worse with age. William Gladstone chopped trees and consorted with prostitutes to offer them moral correction. Yorkshire textile magnate and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt had a partality for crows and liked to grow pineapples in his greenhouses. Michael Jackson had a pet monkey. Lord Byron had a pet bear. Alice Cooper loves playing golf.