Are the kids ok?

Why do I ask? Well, for one thing, "During a recent trip to the US, I had lunch with a young man from New York, who told me glumly that many of his peers had spent the summer swanning around Europe while he stayed put in America. ...  I peered at his phone and saw images of the girls draped over each other in terrace restaurants, on  the prows of boats, laid along tree branches in thong bikinis, glowing with the gold-dust of fine living. ... the reason they, rather than the young man, were able to go yachting off Sardinia while sipping Dom Pérignon was because rich older men ­had hired them to come on a luxury holiday with them. The job — look hot, be nice, and be ready to accommodate more without crying assault — is called sugaring. It is — though sugar daddies or babies might not admit it — sex work. My friend betrayed no sense of surprise at the arrangement; such things had, he explained, become totally normal in his age group." More here.

And then there's this: "Just two weeks after meeting on Tinder, an Atlanta college student drew up a 17-page 'relationship contract' with her boyfriend in which she outlined expectations for their coupling — including a 'romantic gesture' every two weeks. ...'We treat our relationship almost like a business interaction. We deal with conflict like partners in business would. We sit down and treat it more like we're partners in life and love is an added bonus,' she explained."

And then I read that Amia Srinivasan's "female students regularly report that they regard their erotic lives as “at once inevitable and insufficient"". 

Given how difficult and/or unpleasant it is to have a relationship with a man, I suppose I should not be surprised that, "According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent." 30%, eh? 

It's not just in America. Here's what they are finding in the UK:

Perhaps they agree with Srinivasan's view that "who we have sex with, and how, is a political question".

Srinivasan and the limits of philosophy

Amia Srinivasan has recently given two very interesting interviews, one to Tyler Cowen (an interview which was the subject of so many comments that Cowen followed up with some post-interview remarks), and one to the Paris Review. I recommend both interviews and also Cowen's follow-up remarks.

Srinivasan is a utopian feminist who believes a lot of things with which I disagree. But this is not about my disagreements with her. Instead, I want to develop a couple of thoughts, prompted by these interviews, about the borders between philosophy and two of its adjacent disciplines, namely economics and psychology. The common theme of my thoughts is that we cannot use these disciplines as short-cuts to avoid properly engaging in the arguments that the philosopher makes. Unfortunately.

Some notes on US and UK comedy

Tyler Cowen has hosted some discussion of the differences between US and UK comedy on his blog recently: the first post was here and the second here. 

It seems to me that the discussion has gone a little off-piste. So here I am to set everyone straight with the correct views.

The discussion started with the question "Why are American talk shows so much worse than British ones?" but then compared British panel shows with US late-night talk shows. So already we have conceptual confusion: we're not comparing like with like. British chat shows (Wogan, Parkinson, Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton) are the equivalent of the US talk shows. They're both fine if you like that kind of thing (delivering prepared anecdotes to an indulgent studio audience). Indeed, I suspect the US has the edge in this area (leaving aside Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge). But they are not panel shows.

The original post tells us that there don't appear to be many panel shows in the US. I'll come back to why that might be. But it seems to me that the lack of direct comparisons is a more interesting observation than saying that UK panel shows are funnier than US talk shows. 

Let's start with some like-for-like comparisons: sitcoms and sketch shows.

The discussion on Cowen's blog has got into British sitcoms and come up with the idea that they are about betterment and self-improvement. I'm afraid that's not right. As ane fule kno, British sitcom comedy is about laughing at and with failures - and "at" and "with" at the same time. 

Basil Fawlty, Reggie Perrin, Blackadder, Mr Bean, Dad's Army, Only Fools & Horses, Hyacinth Bucket ... Or we can take more modern examples: Spaced, Green Wing, The Office, Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show, Black Books, The IT Crowd, Fleabag, Mum. Sometimes we have social strivers, or people keen to get ahead in some other sense, but that is far from being universal: neither Fleabag nor anyone in Gavin & Stacey, to take rather different rungs on the social ladder, aspires to climb any higher in life. But all of these shows are full of people who can't quite cope with what life has to throw at them. Some of them rage (Basil Fawlty, Victor Meldrew), some go off the rails (Reggie Perrin, any character played by Mark Heap) and some just suck it up (Tim, Martin Freeman's character in the Office); some have insight and some don't; some are redeemed and some are not; but what they have in common, at the heart of the comedy that is their situation, is the fact that they are all, in some way, failures. 

It's not that the comedy is always cruel. Dad's Army, for example, is warm and loves its characters. But what is the most famous line in Dad's Army? It's "Don't tell him your name, Pike!", which is the perfect combination of well-meaning intention combined with utter incompetence in execution. Capt Mainwaring is a failure; a pompous, well-meaning, lovable failure.

We laugh at these people when their plans go wrong, or because their self-image does not match up to reality, but at the same time we see ourselves in them - in Captain Mainwaring, David Brent or Alan Partridge - and we squirm.

One commentator on Cowen's blog said "An example of the difference between British and American comedy which I found quite a good summary (I can’t remember who said it), imagines a comedy sketch where a musician is playing a guitar badly and a man comes up and smashes it over the musician’s head. The contention is that an American comic would want to be the one smashing the guitar whereas a British comic would want to be the one getting hit with the guitar." That observation is correct (and also gives the lie to the betterment idea: what is bettering about being hit by a guitar after playing it badly?). But it is correct because the central truth is that failure is at the centre of British sitcom comedy. The "situation" in "situation comedy" is a bleak view of the human condition itself. 

US sitcoms are different, but they are also very good. Frasier, for example, is a bit of an outlier in that it is quite British in format (social climber not quite living up to his acquired social status; humour from awkwardness; combination of both broad physical comedy and verbal wit - in fact, it's a bit like The Young Ones when you put it that way). But it's far from being the only good one. There's been strength in depth for US sitcoms for many years: see Police Squad, Cheers or The Cosby Show, for very different older examples, as well as famous and high-quality recent exports such as Friends, Seinfeld, Scrubs, Modern Family and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. 

US sitcoms also display a consistency which British ones can often lack. Compare, for example, the multiple high-quality series of Frasier with Roger & Val Have Just Got In, which started out being one of the best things on television and ended poorly, or Friday Night Dinner, which suffered a similar falling-off. 

If UK sitcoms are about failure, what are US sitcoms about? Not success, exactly, but success is a part of it. The police in Brooklyn Nine Nine tend to catch the criminals; the doctors in Scrubs treat patients; the friends in Friends really are "there for" each other. There is a centre of warmth that the British sitcom lacks. The typical weakness of US sitcoms is sentimentality, while the typical weakness of Brit sitcoms (apart from inconsistency) is the opposite: having too many horrible people.

One other point worth noticing about UK sitcoms compared with their transatlantic cousins is the much stronger influence of sketch comedy in the UK. Compare Scrubs and Green Wing, contemporaneous sitcoms set in hospitals. Scrubs was, according to Wikipedia, "noted for its ... surreal vignettes". Noted, I would say, only by those who had never seen Green Wing. The plot of Scrubs included romantic entanglements and a difficult janitor; Green Wing, by contrast, included the bit when "Alan becomes unusually happy after winning an internet caption competition, Joanna plans to take him down a peg. Using her dwarf cousin (Big Mick), dressed up in green body paint, she plans to scare him. The plan backfires when Alan is so scared, he beats Joanna's cousin to death with a stuffed heron. Alan and Joanna throw the body into the incinerator, but become paranoid that they will be discovered. Alan, however, learns from Boyce that the death is being viewed as a suicide, so Alan and Joanna go on a rampage, thinking themselves above the law." Wikipedia is pretty accurate here.

So that's sitcoms: both countries have their strengths. Now to sketch comedy. 

Whenever a well-loved American comedian dies there is a spate of 'watch this immortal sketch!' pieces written by the bereft audience. I normally hunt out the sketches in question and they're normally quite good (e.g. the dentist sketch from the Carol Burnett show). I also think Key & Peele sketches are quite good. Portlandia had one joke, but told it well.

But let's be frank: these are the peak of the US sketch show experience. Fry & Laurie were turning out stuff at that level week after week. It's not terribly impressive for a nation of hundreds of millions, particularly as they have the Canadians to help them out. (I won't be the first to notice that so many of the funniest Americans are Canadians. But here's a question: who is the funniest white gentile American who is not Canadian? Steve Martin?)

British sketch shows simply have more variety. Probably more complete duds, but also more things that tickle some people while leaving others cold. Smack the Pony, Armando Ianucci, the best bits of Goodness Gracious Me; the Fast Show; Enfield & Whitehouse - that's a lot of different things going on. US sketch comedy seems to be all 'here's a normal situation made funny' or 'here's a parody of something on TV'; there is rarely something entirely fresh or surreal, nothing (I think) of the kind of Hale & Pace's "Poppadom Pom Pom", or Armando Ianucci's Hugh explaining that cheeseburgers were a penny then, or Ralph saying "Tomato - Ted - aubergine - your - potato - wife's - turnip - dead."

So, by contrast with sitcoms, British sketch shows are clearly better. If we want an explanation, I would point to Monty Python, which seems to have given British sketch comedy a high tolerance for experimentation while at the same time somehow telling the Americans that "zaniness" of that kind is only for the Brits: the higher variance that that experiment produced has led to better experience at the top end. 

British panel shows are different again. They are funny because they are quick and merciless, and feature performers on the top of their game. Semi-spontaneous, someone said, and I think that's right, but the delivery of the scripted lines, and the reactions to them, are top-notch. While the best joke-writers in America go into sitcoms, the best ones in the UK go into panel shows.

So why doesn't America have equivalent programmes? You will recall that this whole saga started when someone said that they don't and they just have late-night shows. I have two suggestions.

(1) First, a cultural explanation. Panel shows are potentially nasty: being on the receiving end of, say, Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr at their best is surely not comfortable. Ask anyone about the tub of lard on Have I Got News for You, or consider the kudos Boris Johnson got from laughing off outright abuse. It all has an uncomfortable edge, familiar to British sitcoms, that I think rubs Americans up the wrong way. They don't want so much grit in their humour-oyster. That's why they prefer the cosy comforts of the talk show.

(2) There's a structural explanation too. The UK has long tradition of radio panel shows (I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Just a Minute, The News Quiz) that have trained the writers, the performers and the audience. Again, this may be different from the US.

But I don't want to leave this on a jingoistic note. The final like for like comparison is the comedy film and here there can be no doubt: it has been many years since the Brits served up (not just starred in) a top-tier really funny and good film. America might not have 8 out of 10 Cats, but it does have Hollywood.

Confucius and the perennial philosophy

I cannot now recall how I came across it, but I recommend this, a rather interesting introduction to the thought of the thinker commonly known in the West as Confucius. 

I also want to draw your attention to the Afterword. This is a response to comments on the original presentation of the paper. Van Norden tells us that one commentator "presented one version of what is sometimes called 'the perennial philosophy’. Those who believe in a ’perennial philosophy’ hold that, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, ’There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it’. In other words, underlying every great philosophical and religious tradition is the same worldview .... If this interpretation is correct, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Nagarjuna, and many others are all saying essentially the same thing (with some differences in vocabulary or emphasis that tend to obscure the underlying identity of views)." 

Van Norden rejects this supposed "perennial philosophy" with what strikes me as some interesting but not quite knock-down arguments. I began to construct some kernel of the perennial philosophy, something more than merely ET's "be good", something to with the Golden Rule perhaps, but then I came across this:

(The link is here.) And that reminded me again of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and quite how odd the thought of the ancient Greeks was. Recall, for example, how the prompt for the discussion of love in the Phaedrus is an older man's pursuit of a boy. 

So I have no interest in arguing against Van Norden on his Afterword. In any case, if Confucius was just saying all the same things as everyone else then there would be nothing to learn from him.

A short essay about video essays and the End of History

I do enjoy a good video essay. Indeed, if I knew how to do it, this blog post would be a video essay. (You'll see what I mean.)

By "video essay", I mean an opinionated piece of criticism or commentary, in the manner of a written essay, but presented by means of video. I don't mean a videoed lecture or a TED talk, fun as those might be [CUT TO extracts from TED talk parodies], but rather an essay in which video - the moving picture itself - is an intrinsic element of the presentation of the argument.

The genre is not new. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation might be regarded as an extended video essay, and television has hosted many other personal documentaries or documentaries that try to pursue a line of argument. Perhaps I can't define the video essay, but I know it when I see it. [CUT TO Clark's "I recognise civilisation when I see it".]

However, the genre has undoubtedly been turbocharged and democratised by YouTube. The barriers to entry are now much lower and they have proliferated. Many are no good, of course, but the best are very good. [CUT TO - but you've got the picture. This would have been better with some video along the way.]

That proliferation is a good thing. However, since YouTube is not as legible to the likes of me as the old TV listings used to be, I have had to spend a bit of time looking for recommendations. I found that fun video about unicorns that I linked to in my piece about fantasy literature recently, but, overall, the effort has been a little disappointing. The unicorn video was a one-off and it turns out that the two best sources of video essay are ones with which I was already familiar, namely Every Frame a Painting (try "Vancouver Never Plays Itself", "In Praise of Chairs" or the one on Edgar Wright, which changed my mind) and Nerdwriter (try "Parasite's Perfect Montage" or "Passengers, Rearranged", if you know these films, or "The Death of Socrates" if you don't), and of these only the Nerdwriter is still producing videos, and there are not many from him recently. 

The video essay is not necessarily about films. I think it works well for the visual arts, with the camera zooming in to focus on a detail that the author is commenting on, or zooming out to show elements of composition or colours, or cutting to a contrasting artwork. Similarly, music is a good subject: we can hear the music while seeing the score, perhaps, or cut between different performances of the same song or piece. But films are well suited to the video essay format: writing about music might be like dancing about architecture, but it's hard to argue with filming about film.

That means that a lot of the not-bad-but-not-quite-first-rank video essayists are film critics. One video essayist film critic who gets quite a few recommendations is Now You See It. Have a look - you might like it. 

An essay from Now You See It that made me think was this piece about the films of 1999. The way I would summarise the thesis is that 1999 was the year between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 in which things were going well (in the US, in the West) but that in iself tended to make people a little dissatisfied. Think of The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, Galaxy Quest: the world itself, our current, everyday reality, seems really nice and lovely but .... something. But maybe it isn't really nice, not under the surface? Or maybe it is nice, but it's just boring and needs to be spiced up? Or maybe it's "nice" and therefore utterly absurd or futile?

This point seems obvious now that it has been pointed out. And I find it striking that it is also one of the central theses of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History: where people don't have conflict they will nonetheless try to seek it out.

The End of History came out in 1992 and indeed it seems to me that the point is not limited to the films of 1999. Other very good films from the End of History 1990s - films as different as Groundhog Day and Jurassic Park - take it for granted that life is generally good and that drama can only come from making some frankly implausible changes to the structure of society or even reality, such as the wholly unexplained repetition of one day, or dinosaurs. Toy Story, Speed, Mrs Doubtfire, the Home Alone series - I could go on - they all take the implicit premise that society and the world in general, at least in the US, are basically fine - everything works! life is good! - and a pretty big twist is required to achieve drama.

Why does this matter? Well, 1999 is generally thought to have been a very good year for films. Ideally I would show you a montage of books and articles here but instead I'll give you some Google results:

This is interesting. I think there is a theory that the societal upheavals of the 1970s (in the US) led to better, richer, conflicted films, while the sunny complacency of the 1980s produced rom-com, space opera or action adventure pap. We might think of this as the Third Man theory of art: see Orson Welles and the cuckoo clock. But perhaps the 1990s give the lie to this theory. 1999 was a pretty decent year for life in the West, and it also produced some pretty decent films.

Another theory is that art requires constraints. Censorship, the Hays Code, the Lord Chamberlain's office - think of the high quality art produced while these restrictions were in place, and compare that with the rubbish produced in the modern, anything goes, era. But again, what about 1999? Anything went in the 1990s: 9 Songs is 2004, but that's near enough, and American Pie and Eyes Wide Shut, both of which would have fallen foul of some kinds of censorship, are both 1999 films. 1999 was a pretty relaxed year for artistic constraints, and yet it produced some pretty decent films.

So, 9/11 happened, the 2008 crash happened and all the rest of it, from terrorism to Trump and from wars in the Middle East to wokeness at home. The End of History ended, and that's a shame, not only for the people of the West, but also for their most popular artform.

On the other hand, we now have the video essay.

[CUE lively music and CUT TO me in my bedroom speaking very quickly to recommend that you buy something from the kind sponsor of this essay.]

[FADE TO BLACK]

The Menuhin family

So here's a thing, or rather a number of things.

Yehudi Menuhin (you know the guy - good at the fiddle, played for survivors of Belsen, first Jewish person to play under Wilhelm Furtwängler after the War as an act of reconciliation) was married twice. 

His first wife was Nola Nicholas, who was the sister of Hephzibah Menuhin (Yehudi's sister)'s husband Lindsay Nicholas. So far so neat: family parties were presumably easy to arrange and everyone knew where they were going for Christmas.

Unfortunately, neither of the Menuhin-Nicholas marriages lasted. Yehudi married again, this time to Diana Gould. (The Yehudi Menuhins then lived at the house in Highgate later owned by Sting. Insert your own joke here.) Here's the first thing: the two sons of the Menuhin-Gould marriage were called Gerard and Jeremy. That's a bold naming strategy. Presumably neither of them was allowed be called "Gerry" or "Jerry".

(Yehudi's children of his first marriage were called Krov and Zamira. I wonder whether he deferred to his wives in the naming decisions, or at least to Diana.)

Gerard was showered with all the advantages that life can afford: he attended Eton and ... Stanford. Again, that seems like an odd combination: googling the phrase "Eton and Stanford" seems to bring up more results in which the "eton" comes from a line break in "Princeton" than from the English school. 

Anyway, the upshot of all of that family background and first-class education was that Gerard became a noted Holocaust denier. Yes, that's what I said. 

Being a noted Holocaust denier led to him having to leave the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation (YMF). "Apart from a few curious comments about America, we weren’t really aware of his politics", Winfried Kneip, YMF's chief executive, apparently said. America?

And Gerard, in another bold naming decision, called his son Maxwell Menuhin. 

I know that all of this sounds only borderline credible. My only source for any of it is Wikipedia (see here and follow the links), but truth is stranger than fiction and all the rest of it. 

Interesting links

1. Tarzan and the collapse of Communism in the USSR. One story here is that engineers build, while sociologists and lawyers merely manage decline and decay. Another story is that we can look forward to the late 2030s for improved Sino-US relations. (On a related note, I have it on good authority that the USSR permitted the Fry & Laurie version of Jeeves & Wooster to be broadcast, in the vain hope that it would show the ridiculous nature of the British class system to the masses. It seems instead to have encouraged rich Russians to want to live in English country houses. A PhD thesis for someone.)

2. (History repeats itself) Third Time as Larp. Review of Bruno Maçães' book, History Has Begun.

3. Following on from Maçães's observations, at some point, of course, reality is not optional. But we're not there yet! Medicine can be taught without reference to biological sex.

4. Still on men and women: rather catty from Mary Harrington here? Purportedly an esoteric reading of Srinivasan's The Right to Sex.

5. So maybe Fidel Castro is not Justin Trudeau's father? I just teach the controversy on this one.

6. Do you want to see a class on conceptual art given by a British woman to Afghans? Of course you do! Here it is, just 40-odd seconds of R Mutt and the urinal. Your tax dollars at work, as they say in America. (From here, which has more to say in a similar vein.)

7. China’s Hottest New Rental Service: Men Who Actually Listen. Women can pay to hang out with men who are nice to them. An import from Japan.

8. Talking of men, have a look at this, about Nike, men, adverts and all sorts of things. And do look at the videos - the one directed by Ritchie is really quite good.

9. An interview with ADS. I found this quite fun. This, for example: "a globalized world benefits from variance. So as an individual person, if you go and experiment with some new thing, maybe you create a new style of music, or a new culinary dish, that innovation can be spread really really widely, the potential benefits are huge. Whereas the cost, if it doesn't work, is mostly limited to your own personal downside. // In that view, a willingness to be weird, or experimental or whatever, is really a tremendous social good." Quite right: weird is good. The right note on which to end.

10. Interesting claims about obesity.