Once I realised I was a ghost, I became much happier.

[alexsarll]

Is there any particular reason I should be in London on Friday, Saturday or Sunday?

With council tax set to rocket, what (aside from the ace libraries) are Islington spending my money on? Well, they're cracking down on the illegal fag sellers on Holloway Road, which seems fair enough - except that from this page, they seem more concerned with ads aimed at the buyers than at taking down the sellers. The sellers are not exactly subtle - surely frequent, massed plainclothes sweeps would do the job? Oh, and there's the Finsbury Park Area Action Plan (not, incidentally, at the url given on the paper copy they sent out, which omitted the final .asp) - which, reading slightly between the lines, is clearly a manifesto for turning Finny P station into a ghastly, unwieldy mini-me of the mall-stations like Hammersmith. Still, if you've been sent a copy, do be sure to return the form with your comments - I have little faith that they'll take any notice of what we actually want, but if we don't participate in this sham we lose the moral right to complain about it later. Speaking of which, all those of you who endorsed the arrival of the serpent buses on safety grounds? A colleague saw someone trapped in the door and dragged along the road yesterday, an utter impossibility on the Routemaster.

Last night, I read The Life Eaters by David Brin and Scott Hampton, an elaborate blasphemy against the Old Gods in comic form. It's not true, but it's still quite a good read.

Does it unnerve anyone else that in all the posters for Sinatra at the London Palladium, there's no mention that the star of the show is slightly...mortally challenged? I mean, yes, you might think it's obvious, and I might think it's obvious, but I remember a Varsity music *editor* who tried to get an interview with Nick Drake...on which note Darker Than The Deepest Sea: The Search For Nick Drake by Trevor Dann

The dreamy, dark and folk-tinged songs of Nick Drake are part of the critical canon nowadays; he's a fashionable name to drop in interviews, or deploy on film soundtracks. But as is so often the case, this fame was strictly posthumous; the life Dann recounts is a depressing slog of repeated commercial failure and ever-deepening personal problems, climaxing in a drug overdose which may have been either a tragic accident or an unsurprising suicide. Dispiriting as it is, Dann's book also feels somehow slight, not so much through any fault of the writer (who, if not a great stylist, is competent and commendably thorough) as through the nature of the 26-year life it recounts. The singer Robyn Hitchcock (like Drake, a key influence on REM) is quoted as saying "Nick Drake's music brushes the ear" - similarly, Nick Drake brushed the lives of those he knew. At best, one interviewee after another repeats variations on a theme of how you never really got to know Nick, and he always seemed detached from life. At worst, he comes across as the Pete Doherty of his day, 'untogether' even by sixties standards, the blame for most of his problems very much on his own slender shoulders.
As the book recounts, Nick Drake is the sort of artist who breeds obsessive fans; his oblique lyrics can support myriad interpretations, and something in his vocal style makes the listener feel he’s singing just to them, that he understands. Most people would be better sticking with the music than reading this book; it’s more likely to detract from appreciation of his work than enhance it. There’s little new here, and less of that significant - except one late, distasteful and rather random suggestion that Drake may have been abused as a child, offered without plausible support.

My favourite new band name: The Strange Death Of Liberal England.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

I think this about Brixton tube, and again - I'm sorry to come over all fascist, but they won't do that, because

Legitimate reason a) They'd rather have the dealers where they can see them.
Rubbish reason b) It would really screw with the racial mix in their stop and search and arrest statistics.
Reason c) that I haven't thought of yet.

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

You might have a point with A) because the dealers are only in Camden cos they got moved on from King's Cross, so arresting some just moves the others on, I suppose.

B) I don't think that the police avoid stopping people because of their race. We've done some work with them at work here.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You don't think they do? The Home Office think they do.

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I can only speak for one area actually, as that's the only area where I've done any work with the police. Is it specific to Lambeth or just in general?

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

It's all about what you think words mean. It's general - from the Home Office website:

Police now make a record of all stops and searches, including the self-defined ethnic identity of the person stopped.

Although stop and search figures are now closely monitored to try to reduce disproportionate stopping and searching of non-whites, the Terrorism Act 2000 has led to a palpable increase in stopping and searching of people of Asian origin in particular.

To address this issue, we established a Stop and Search Action Team in 2004 to look at:

* how officers use the intelligence they receive to decide who to stop and search 
* where stop and search is targeted and whether this is fair 
* how police officers and police authorities can actively involve local communities in reaching an agreement about using stop and search

You might say this means that they were previously stopping and searching people because of their ethnicity, and now they're not doing so, or that the current profile of particular crime and risk means that intelligence-led policing will lead to stop-and-search figures out of line with the population as a whole, and attempting to move to a 'fairer' statistical result in that sense means that you are now declining to stop and search people of a particular ethnicity because you want a certain statistical outcome.

I think both may be the case.

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

Hmm.
I would interpret this as an awareness from the police that Stop and Search doesn't actually work that well, in that any advantage that may come from it eg: you might stop someone while they are off to do / have just done a crime, is outweighed by the disadvantages eg: if you suspect people of a certain race of certain crimes, and you use Stop and Search to crack down on this, you will alienate that community and make them not want to cooperate with you, when really you need that cooperation and intelligence that they can give you much more than any chance evidence you may come across from stopping and searching people, in order to prevent crime.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Sure - there might be good or bad reasons for making a stop and search decision based on ethnicity. I am merely saying that my perception is that the black community in particular - though now more the Asian community following last year's events - feel that stop and search has been unfairly targetted at them, and the modern police policy is to reduce the level of it used on those minorities, with the result that ethnicity is a factor in stop and search decisions.