Dadblog

Here’s a sad, amazing thing: Doris and Geoffrey Thompson, the mother and son team who largely ran Blackpool Pleasure Beach have died within a fortnight of each other. I used to go there several times a year when visiting my grandparents in Cleveleys, and it remains one of my brightest childhood memories; so much that it dominated every visit “up North”, with hourly requests to my dad to take us down to the Pleasure Beach, requests that were only granted on the penultimate day of the trip. My first rollercoaster ever was the Grand National, and it scared me to the core.

So it was lovely to see these obituaries, but sad to think these two people died, the son first, the mother second. Was she pining?

It was Geoffrey, as managing director from 1976, who promoted Blackpool as a resort for Arabs “suffering from their oppressively hot summer climate”, a spin on the resort’s bracing northern temperatures delivered with a wink. He repeatedly showed great savvy in teaming up with commercial sponsors, balancing a Pepsi-branded rollercoaster with one named after the curious Scottish tipple Irn-Bru.

Zeldman lets off some steam on the subject of drop-down menus:

As a designer, wherever possible, I avoid drop-down menus. For they almost always create an inferior user experience versus drilling down through clearly labeled, intelligently organized categories.

Smart clients understand that it’s their job (or yours) to understand why people visit their site, and to arrange the material along paths driven by their visitors’ needs. But even very smart clients sometimes lose the battle to a higher-up who knows and cares nothing about user experience.

I hear you, brother. I hear you.

David Aaronovitch’s column today, on Glastonbury, is great:

In one way this kinder, gentler festival can be read as yet another colonisation of working-class pleasures. As with football (the argument might go), high ticket prices, better conditions and more policing lead to the “gentrification” of cultural or sporting events. What is spontaneous, dangerous, cheap and subversive is gradually chased away, leaving a sexed-down, safer, vanilla version of the original. There may be fewer hooligans, but we also have fewer workers.

Yet in class terms this doesn’t really make sense: £115 for several days of top music acts is not really that much money, when an Indian meal for two and a couple of pints can set you back 50 quid. And Glastonbury wouldn’t be more proletarian if the organisers took the decision actively to encourage drug dealers and criminals on to the site. It would just be emptier.

The other part of the argument - that events like Glastonbury have become somehow disauthenticated - is, essentially, generational. What it says is that there are too many old fellows with paunches and ponytails for this to be a genuinely rock’n'roll occasion, like what it once was. Indeed, the editorial (presumably written by one of our younger, hipper leader writers) ends by hoping that the next musical revolution is being fomented right now in a “teenager’s bedroom”.

Well, hold on a second. First, the old folks at Glastonbury now have a tendency to be the same people who were there 20 years ago, except they are 20 years older. They go because they still like the music and because they are not yet senile. What would we prefer them to do? Die?

And here is the strange thing. They take their kids. I was completely knocked out by the sight, in yesterday’s G2 Glastonbury special, of a father and his two 20-odd sons - all three bare-chested - camping together. The idea, the thought, the concept of my father standing next to me shaking his locks, circa 1969, while the Edgar Broughton Band savages the night air with Out Demons Out, fills me with retrospective visceral horror. Only incest could be worse.

Of course, I have to say this stuff is great, or otherwise contemplate my imminent cultural annihilation due to age….

OK, a quick reminder to myself of all the stuff I was doing at Glasto this year.

This was my first time (how’s that for a late starter), and the mud was a nasty revelation, and I rediscovered how much I hate camping. But apart from that it was quite brilliant.

Musically, I saw the following:

PJ Harvey: my first Glasto music, and she was marvellous. She wore a dress fashioned out of two Spice Girls t-shirts, and super-high dayglo pink heels. She was sparky, punky and elaborately schizophrenic: angular aggression during the songs, and half-embarrassed sweet girlishness in between. Obviously a wonderful person, and obviously a wonderful rock star.

Goldfrapp: came on stage to the strains of the theme from Black Beauty, and Alison wore black high-heels and a black one piece body with a horse’s tail sticking out of it. Very naughty, very poised, very brilliant - one of the highlights of the festival, according to everyone who was there. I left a bit early to catch…

Kings of Leon: pretty much everyone hated their set. Not me. I thought it was great. But they have about as much onstage charisma as a strawberry jelly, which is odd when you consider the mythology that was built up around them around the time the album came out.

Oasis: what can I say? They got slagged off by pretty much everyone there, but I enjoyed the pub singalong tremendously, and two recent songs, Little by Little and Stop Crying Your Heart Out, stood up brilliantly. But the new songs they showcased sounded awful, and they did seem pretty annoyed by everything around them. I watched them on TV when I got back, and they seemed really flat and boring.

Scissor Sisters: didn’t care much for them before Glasto, but they were really fabulous onstage, genuine superstars. Will now buy the album. And sad to say a straight guy is never going to look as great as Jake Spears did.

Joss Stone: she played twice, but I saw the smaller session, on the JazzWorld stage. She was brilliant, her voice genuinely is amazing (they seemed to have sanded it down a bit for the album), the only disconcerting thing is how genuinely young she is. Some idiot in the audience was shouting out lecherous remarks to her, and I felt like slapping him and saying “she’s only a baby.” This odd behaviour could be dad-related, of course….

Paul McCartney: for me, the highlight of the festival. Yes, he was a bit annoying between songs, yes, he was mawkish about Lennon and rather dismissive of George and Ringo and yes, he is a bit like your embarrassing uncle. But none of that matters besides the fact that he played Penny Lane. Got To Get You Into My Life. Maybe I’m Amazed. Band on the Run. I’ll Follow The Sun. I Saw Her Standing There. And there were fireworks and flames for Live and Let Die. I nearly cried.

English National Opera: everyone loved this. I thought it was a bit blah, and left early. I mean, Wagner’s bloody awful, isn’t it?

The Divine Comedy: fantastic. He was witty, debonair and musically first-rate. And played a cover of No-one Knows by Queens of the Stone Age. We stood next to Phill Jupitus, who was having a great time.

James Brown: the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness is looking a little wheezy these days, but he put on a hell of a show, with great backing singers, a band tighter than a local bank manager, and go-go dancers in hot pants with “J” and “B” written on each buttock. What more could you ask for?

Morrissey: what a miserable tosspot. What a poseur. What a pillocky waster of people’s affection. And, for the second half at least, what a great rock star. The First of the Gang to Die and Irish Blood, English Heart, which I thought were silly on the stereo, were gigantic on stage.

Muse: wow. My ear cavities were blistered. This was like watching Genesis doing a Black Sabbath tribute. The musicianship was mindblowing, the guitar solos eviscerating, the energy infectious. Oasis should be ashamed. And apparently the drummer’s dad died, on-site, an hour after the performance. No wonder their lyrics are so dark…

Oh, and what I did in between watching bands is written up on Guardian Unlimited: all about Lost Vagueness, Glastonury as a city, the Glastonbury beer perimeter and all about the Kidz Fields.

Back from Glastonbury at 5 this morning, so currently feeling like a train wreck. Will post more when recovery kicks in….

I’m off to Glastonbury in a few hours, so will probably be in a traffic jam in the driving rain when the match begins, but please, please, please let me, let me, get what I want….

So, I was looking in the activity log for Dadblog, and saw in there a search query for “coutu” and “interactive investor.” Now, I had a boss at Interactive Investor called Sherry Coutu. So, is she looking to see if I’ve dissed her on the blog? Or is someone else who worked there looking for much the same thing?

Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?

Christopher Hitchens, eviscerating in Slate:

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Ouch.

I watched a bit of David Dimbleby’s interview with Bill Clinton last night (I was I could argue that I was committed enough to have watched the whole thing, but….sorry). After nearly four years of Bush, I’d forgotten how sharp Clinton is, how energised he is by the cut and thrust of verbal debate, how his mouth seems to have a direct connection to a very, very sharp brain. Of course, this can descend into legal sophistry, but some of the stuff he implied about the legal process of the Lewinsky trial was fascinating.

I haven’t read the book yet, and probably won’t, but Delong has some good, interesting stuff about why men like Clinton and John Kerry - clever, sophisticated men with a clever, sophisticated view of the world - will just never get the coverage they deserve, even from the supposedly clever, sophisticated press. Talking about how one reviewer criticised Clinton for watching TV coverage of a presidential inauguration in Nigeria, Delong says:

Plague, coups, famine, revolution, and–we hope–steps toward development and democracy. For Nigerians, the stuff of life and death. For President Clinton, the potentially most important country in Africa that he needs to know about as he tries to use his policy levers to make a better world. For an elite journalist like Michiko Kakutani, it’s boring–and it is a gross violation of etiquette for Clinton to use two paragraphs in his book to try to teach Americans a little about Nigeria and give them a President’s eye view of this piece of Africa.

Once again, self-parody–once again, not intentional.

I have not yet figured out why so much of our elite press is so… what should I call it? Feckless. Corrupt (in the sense of well-rotted). Decadent. Why does William Saletan find it funny that Kerry tries hard to give nuanced, reasonably-complete answers to questions about issues with nuances? Why do Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff cover the government–rather than, say, cover something like advances in bartending–if they find debates over policy the equivalent of crossing the Gedrosian Desert? Why does Michiko Kakutani think it pointless and boring to wake up early to watch the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president in sixteen years in a country of 130 million people?

Exactly. And the press should be worried that a philanderer with a somewhat loose definition of truth should have so much more moral authority than any newspaper.

Mike Masnick takes a cheap shot on TheFeature this morning, in a useful contribution to the issue of why newspapers just aren’t getting their stuff onto mobile:

The biggest issue, though, is that these newspapers aren’t really looking to take advantage of the medium. They’re simply repurposing the same content with a different user interface. Most of the news isn’t customized or specialized and much of it can wait until the reader gets home and can watch the evening news or visit news on the web. The value of news being mobile is that it can find you anywhere. That means it’s useful for location specific information (e.g., “don’t get on that highway, it’s backed up for miles due to an accident”) or timely alerts (e.g., the company whose stock makes up a good percentage of your portfolio just admitted to cooking the books). It can also be used to change the journalism equation, by making consumers of news creators as well. There are plenty of stories about camera phone wielding citizens helping to create the news, but imagine if mobile phones could be used to coordinate those “citizen journalists?” There are certainly services that look to fill those needs with their own solutions, but it should be the newspapers who are at the forefront of this space if they hope to make themselves relevant in the mobile age. Instead, they remain stuck to their plan of slowly repurposing content in a way that attracts very few readers, pushing subscribers to go elsewhere.

Why is it that commentators assume that newspapers have some magic “content” button somewhere in the building which they can press and out comes all this great new stuff? The reason we haven’t done it yet, Mike, is that it’s very expensive to create new content, and until someone demonstrates a business model we aren’t going to do it. We’re not going to invest in the same way we invested in the Web. That was fun, it’s been a rollercoaster, some of us are doing well out of it - but we’re knackered, mate. Completely knackered. And that’s without even mentioning Wap….