I was chatting to Paola on Anna’s hen do as we walked along the beach at Lyme Regis. She was telling a really nice story of how various teams at her work had dealt with the news that one person in their team would have to be made redundant. In several teams, everyone in them decided to give up one day a week’s work and pay so that they could keep on the person who was going to be made redundant.
It made me think of the Sustainable Development Commission’s magnum opus, Prosperity Without Growth, one of the most inspiring documents I’ve read in recent months. This report confronts head on in readable and measured prose the fact that our economies are structurally reliant on endless growth for stability, and yet this is a ridiculous notion in an ecologically finite world.
The truth is that there is as yet no credible, socially just, ecologically-sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for a world of nine billion people. In this context, simplistic assumptions that capitalism’s propensity for efficiency will allow us to stabilise the climate or protect against resource scarcity are nothing short of delusional.
One of the most interesting chapters looks at potential outlines of a macroeconomies with no growth. One of the most damaging consequences of reduced growth is normally rising unemployment, which has knock on effects on consumption causing further unemployment. In steady state economy models it seems you can avoid damaging unemployment by increasing public investment and sharing the work out more equally across the workforce, e.g. through shorter working weeks, flexitime or solutions like a basic citizen’s wage.
I was struck that many companies are now shifting to four-day working weeks in response to the recession, spontaneously doing what our government ought to be directing to reduce unemployment. And I was just reading in New Scientist that this has happened before. According to Rex Facer at Brigham Young University in Utah, it was the crash of 1929 that led to the five-day week. “Before that it was common to work six-day weeks with 12 to 14-hour days. When the Great Depression hit, the idea was to share work around to get more people into employment.”
We were in Lyme Regis at the weekend for Anna’s hen party, lots of us all cooking, drinking, going for walks on the beach, doing karaoke and eating cake. It was very good fun.
On Friday night, we played some improv, first a few rounds of the “yes yes yes” game introduced with druidic om, then around 4am we did an excellent animal-sport interview game. So this is where we picked a random animal (frogs), a random sport (tobogganing), we all adopted over the top American accents, then Anna played an interviewer (the Anna Letterman show of course), and three people played an expert on frog tobogganing, each of them answering one word at a time when questioned so they had to create their sentences together.
It went very well and ended with the poor frogs being stretched out on the toboggans because “they love bondage”.
Then just last night, Matt and I were at the Miller of Mansfield near London Bridge for Shotgun Impro. They are a fine troupe and Ros B had joined them for the evening, it’s always hilarious seeing her on stage. The audience has the option to write down sentences for the troupe to work with in the second half of the show, and I wrote down “frog tobogganing”. Fabulously, they read that one out somewhere near the end of the extended scene that made up the second half of their show and the tobogganing frogs lived again, entering a long sequence where they were experimented on in a lab, tobogganed across a road, got hit by a lorry driver, then entered a musical sequence where the lorry driver made love to them to restore them from mutilation.
It was pleasing to see the meme carry across the two improv situations, from Lyme Regis to London. And now it’s immortalised forever (or for a reasonably long time) on my blog.
Went with Matt to see Werner Herzog’s new film at the ICA. It’s been a very cultural weekend, what with a visit to the National Portrait Gallery too, and lots of Noah and the Whale.
In Encounters At The End Of The World, Herzog travels to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, an amazing 1,000-person grimy scientific settlement clinging to the vast expanses of the South Pole, his droll German voice narrating his encounters with this strange place.
He initially hates the mundanity of McMurdo Station, with its cash point, bowling alley and Frosty Boy ice cream machine, and is keen to take us out into the wilderness, giving a sense of the vast scale of Antarctica and the weirdness of the sea world beneath the ice. There are beautiful jellyfish, alien-like long-tentacled seafloor squid-creatures, and in one haunting sequence we listen to the noises that the charming Weddell seals make when they call underwater, an amazing symphony of futuristic Pink Floyd microcomputer beeps, booms and whirls.
Herzog spends lots of time with the people down in McMurdo Station, a real bunch of dreamers and travellers with stories to tell, who’ve all “fallen to the bottom of the world” as the man who tends the plants in the lush spaceship-style hydroponic greenhouse says. There’s the philosopher who drives a forklift truck who believes that humans dreaming in the Antarctic is speeding the awakening of the cosmic mind. There’s the woman who travelled from England to Uganda in a rubbish truck and whose party trick is to have herself zipped up in a holdall bag to the wild applause of her fellow scientists. There’s the diving scientist who is obsessed with the vicious micromarine world of tentacled and mandibled beasts savaging each other and has a bizarre theory that humans evolved out of the sea on to land to escape this watery battleground.
And there are penguins too, running along with their flipper arms outstretched in anthropomorphically comical fashion. At one point Herzog interviews a famously taciturn penguin specialist, struggling to make conversation with him. Herzog is prone to romantic conjectures which just didn’t work for the man’s dry scientific practical mind. At one point, Herzog asks why there are rogue penguins who suddenly head the wrong way, not towards the crowd or to the sea, but out into the icy wilderness where only death can await them.
You feel as if this might be the key to some greater point, some tragic mystery at the heart of the human as well as the penguin condition. But it is hilariously undercut by the innately comic nature of penguins.
He has an amazing shot of this rogue penguin moving away from the camera, all alone, arm flippers outstretched, waddle-running away from the sea, away from his fellow penguins, towards the icy mountains hundreds of miles in the distance. With masterful timing, Herzog’s voiceover demands “why?” as at that moment the penguin pauses, looking sideways in a way that makes us all laugh but also makes us all wonder “what is he thinking?” Then, decided, the penguin turns away from the camera again and goes waddle-running off again towards the mountains and certain death.
Just got back from the second part of our two-day Noah and the Whale excursion. They played a gig at the ICA, which was really lovely. The new songs have been growing on us, they build on the quiet-loud quiet-loud folky dynamic of the first album, with gentle faltering songs that build up to lush, rich and massive crescendos! Sparse but rousing, as I saw one review describe it.
It was quite emotional because Doug Fink, the drummer, is leaving the band to become a doctor and this was his last gig. It made for a moving finish.
Matt and I both fancy Doug. He is very handsome, and also has an amazing manner of drumming, where he opens his mouth emphatically with every drum beat. Check out Doug in action around the 4:05 mark at the end of this video!
We saw the new Noah and the Whale album/film combination, The First Days of Spring, at the ICA last night. According to Charlie Fink, one aim in making an album/film combination was to compel audiences to digest the album as a whole, rather than pick and choose songs in the iPod fashion, a sentiment I’m very favourably disposed towards. It’s definitely a concept album, a melancholy meditation on heartbreak and loss, with musical themes repeatedly taken up throughout it, instrumental bits and one really jaunty cool song calling for “the love of an orchestra” in the middle, also corresponding to a particularly fun surreal moment in the film.
It’s quite different from their first album, and I’m enjoying it a lot.
