Robert Sharp

Writing in the Times, Amir Taheri warns of rising Islamism in North Africa, especially Morocco:

Women in jeans or mini-skirts have all but disappeared from public, along with all females who favoured the colourful dress of the Berber. One sees countless women draped in black that remind one of Hitchcock’s The Birds. … Fewer and fewer places serve alcohol, and parts of the main cities are becoming no-go areas for foreign tourists.

I was in Morocco less that two weeks ago on holiday, and this doesn’t sound like the place I visited. It was difficult, though not impossible, to get alcohol in the old Medinas, but outside the city walls it was not a problem. And I remember being surprised at seeing young, local girls in Western clothing - not hot-pants, admittedly, but certainly figure-hugging outfits, strappy tops, make-up and jeans. Likewise with the Berber outfits, of which we saw plenty. Indeed, it was the black-clad munaqqaba who stood out, because they were an unusual sight. Its true that hijabs reign, but that’s not in itself a sign of Islamic extremism.

Nor did there appear to be any no-go areas for tourists. Indeed, our favourite afternoon was in Meknes, where we cautiously wandered into the back alleys of the Medina, to escape the pungent smell of the souqs. Far from feeling threatened or harassed, we were greeted with smiles and ‘hellos’ around every corner.

Here’s one of the many photos of alleyways I have been taking in the extraordinary Medieval Labyrinth City of Fes, Morocco.  To the left is an apothecary’s shop, full of spice jars and animal pelts.

Incredibly, these lanes receive excellent mobile phone reception.  What did the ancients know that we have forgotten?

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!” wrote Noel Coward. I think he missed a trick: there was no corollary ditty, about mad Scotsmen going out in the rain.

Many of my recollections of peace and contentment take place in the rain. Playing cards under a canvas canopy of an eight-man Stormhaven tent on a scout-camp; Sitting at an old desk and writing a diary during the afternoon storms in Zimbabwe; Leaning against the door-frame of a rural Brazilian villa, watching clouds sweep through the valley. Sure, rain prevents you from stepping out into the street, but it also protects you. It creates a barrier you can hide behind. It isolates you like an incoming tide. It enforces privacy. Sometimes there’s nothing better to be stranded indoors by the rain. Open the window and listen to it fall.

Although, if you’re caught out in the rain, you might as well pull a Gene Kelly, and stay out. There’s a serenity to that too. A favourite quote:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

A great deal of this stoicism was displayed at the weekend, at the Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo event at the Royal Botantic Gardens Edinburgh. The sky was not kind, and we were rained upon from start to finish. However, I had the sense that sheer bloody-mindedness would prevail amongst both performers and performance-goers, and that nothing would be postponed because of the weather.

And so we persisted, but some things are obviously odd when performed in the rain. No sane person would wander out and do Tai Chi in a cold, damp park, and I felt sorry for those giving a demonstration of the art, who did their best to ignore the rain. It must be extra difficult when people with brollys are stomping past. I think this point is true of the dance pieces too - the audience were probably not as relaxed as they could have been. And if you are distracted during a performance, it precludes the possibility of giving yourself over to the dance, incapable of submitting to the pure movement.

However, I think the traditional Chinese music gained something through being played in the storm. The hum of the rain was like a backing track, which bedded very well underneath the stringed notes.

Susie Brown’s installation Natural Progression, persists until 29th June. It consists of a set of painted bamboo sticks set into the ground, forming a fence-like barrier which slithers accross the lawn. Like an organic Fred Sandback installation, it delineates the open space and makes you think twice about crossing the imaginary boundaries it seems to define. It therefore takes a little courage to engage with the piece, which you can do by blowing across the tops of the bamboo to ‘play’ their notes.

Back in the RBGE glasshouse life was much drier, although the towering, anorexic palm trees occasionally drip onto you. FOUND and the Shanghai Jazz Project teamed up to give a performance. The glasshouse, with its collision of nature and human technology, is precisely the sort of odd venue I expect from FOUND. I’ve seen them in Warehouses and Chinese Kitchens, and they’ve played in portacabins before too.

FOUND are known throughout Scotland for their love of sampling stuff, mixing and remixing what they collect into their music. For this performance, we heard them sample an old 1930s Jazz recording, supplied by the Shanghai Jazz Project. We heard the familiar hiss and crackle of the old recording, and I remember thinking that this was not unlike the patter of the rain ouside.

Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo was the brainchild of Kimho Ip. Over at the project’s website, there’s an interesting podcast discussion with Stephen Blackmore, Regius Keeper, about the twin pleasures of nature and music, and their importance in the increasingly frenetic modern world.

Yesterday at the Blog Nation Event, Dan Hardie gave an account of his experiences running his Iraqi Interpreters campaign. He mentioned my post on Open Source Campaigning, but said he thought that ‘open source’ wasn’t an appropriate label, because you need a heirarchy and a leader to run an effective campaign.

To clarify, I’m not sure that the ideas of ‘leadership’ and ‘open source’ are mutually exclusive. Open Source coding projects tend to have a core team of dedicated developers, but individual tasks to code are farmed out to volunteers. Likewise with Jay Rosen’s ‘open source journalism’ - an editor or lead journalist still writes up the piece, but dozens or hundreds of other journalists are able to perform the many discrete pieces of research required.

So it is with Open Source Campaigning. You still need someone like Dan to lead the campaign and make strategic decisions, but the leg-work can be decimated if the lobbying or writing to individual MPs is shared throughout the network.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy website.

Further to the previous chat about Obama’s use of the web, let’s hope it can also be used to more effectively hold him to account if/when he gains power?

If (as many cynics expect, and many supporters suspect) he begins to tweak and backtrack on election pledges, the very same network upon which his campaign is based, could coalesce quite effectively, to force him in to keeping his promises.

The danger of course, for democracy and this new feeling of empowerment that many Americans feel, is when the will of the “base” and what is prudent Presidential policy collide. Let us hope Obama can summon the right rhetoric in those circumstances too.

I’ve said before how much I like the aesthetic of the BarackObama.com site. It seems the Senator from Illinois has returned the compliment. His new site, Fight the Smears, carries a torn-paper aesthetic which both regular readers of this blog will remember from the pre-spam-hack days.

Earlier, I mentioned an analysis of Obama’s fundraising machine, the new bottom-up model beating Hillary’s practiced top-down methods. The piece also says:

The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

As I said earlier in the year, the web will continue to gain influence and in the 2012 US Presidential Election, a robust web strategy will become the crux of all the campaigns. However, part of Obama’s success resulted from mining entirely new set of donors, in an entirely new way. His model and his demographic are now common knowledge, and I wonder whether future candidates will reap quite such a harvest from future fundraising drives.

I remember watching a version of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now on TV a few years ago. Melmotte (played by David Suchet) declares that his grand plans for a trans-continental railway in the USA were a business opportunity that could only be exploited “once per continent”. I’m afraid I can’t find the appropriate reference in the book text.

Could it be that Obama’s fundraising exploits represent a one-off? A ‘once-per-continent’ - or perhaps, in this case, ‘once-per-medium’ - moment. He is often referred to as the Google of the Presidential race, and one thing that characterizes successful dot.com “killer-apps” is that they tend to pull up the ladder behind them. The innovations, once invented and exploited by the vanguard, have a very obvious key to success, which is easy to reverse-engineer and copy. However, none of the copies really achieve the stratospheric success of the trail-blazer.

I think Obama’s next challenge, aside from winning the Presidency and then saving the world, is to expand his fundraising network in such a way that it benefits more people. Perhaps an online project which could be an equivalent of Emily’s List for young, grassroots activists from areas that do not normally produce political candidates? This would certainly be a logical and interesting next step for a movement that, while supposedly about many-to-many networks and bottom-up organising, nevertheless has a single, strong personality at its centre.

Brown’s Woes

Note the recent collapse of the Labour vote, the hemorrhaging of councillors and the plummeting ratings in the opinion polls. Ministers and Labour supporters lament the withering of grassroots support. Remember Gordon Brown’s coronation as party leader. One wonders that, if he (or a challenger) had been forced into a grinding leadership campaign, he might have built up more of a base of support within the party.

The activists and donors to Obama’s campaign became effective advocates for the candidate, inoculating him from the full force of smears, and putting out a positive message after gaffes. Who’s doing that for Gordon? Let us never have a coronation again.

There’s a glut of post-primary analysis in all the papers, on both sides of the Atlantic, but I somehow feel as if I’ve read it already. This is the blogger’s curse. By the time Gerard Baker in the Times, say, or Rupert Cornwell in the Independent opine on the challenges Obama now faces, I’m already twelve hours ahead.

I’ll readily admit that another kind of Atlantic, the magazine, is increasingly becoming my one-stop-shop for American news. British ex-pat Andrew Sullivan is a prolific and influential hub, and I’ve heard more than one person declare that his prescient December essay on Obama’s candidacy is what persuaded them in favour of the jug-eared Senator from Illinois.

Granted, that piece of writing was not a blog, but it came from a blogger, and regular readers of Sullivan’s blog will recognise nuggets of information and thoughts that were posted weeks or months earlier on Sullivan’s Daily Dish. The feeling of having read it before is nowhere stronger than in his Sunday Times column, which often summarizes the ongoing conversation he has led on his blog over the past seven days.

At other times, the feeling of having read something before is because I literally have. Halfway through a piece on Obama’s Web 2.0 fundraisers in the Independent, a noteworthy phrase jumped out at me:

“What’s Amazing” says Peter Leyden, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essntially a a totally different model of the new politics”.

Only then did I notice that the piece was reprinted from an earlier issue of The Atlantic Monthly, snippets of which I had already seen online. Another thing that blogging reveals is how much journalism is reprinted and recycled from elsewhere. And I include Baker and Cornwell’s most recent offerings in that statement, too.

The danger of all this is of course that the new media becomes much like the old media. The top sites still take the lion’s share of the traffic, aided and abetted by amateurs like me who link to them (people like Clay Shirky have been worrying about this for years). Sullivan already employs an assistant and interns to wade through other blogs and show him interesting stories, so the Daily Dish is already mediated by gatekeepers who decide what is interesting. However, the difference is first one of speed and scale - blogging allows more responses and fact-checking to appear, and quicker too. The second difference is that although sites like the Dish, or in the UK places like Iain Dale’s Diary or (we hope) Liberal Conspiracy are the hub, the content and arguments I am actually reading come from smaller sites, and you do get wider, more diverse range of voices.

Photo from the Sokwanele Flickr Photostream

In an entirely predictable move, Mugabe arrests Tsvangirai ahead of the presidential run-off vote in Zimbabwe (via F/P).

This is what happens when the state has too much power. The reason why we have a much healthier democracy than Zimbabwe is precisely because we go all “awkward squad” the moment any politician moves anywhere near this kind of power. For all the convenience that 42 days detention might bring, it is unquestionably a transfer of power from citizen to state. And, reading about the fate of Morgan Tsvangirai, you will forgive me if the prospect of such a transfer makes me squeamish. Now is not the time for 42 days.

Sifting through my late Grandmother’s scrap-books, I found this set of Pharmaceutical envelopes from the Victorian/Edwardian era. They were collected by her uncle (so that’s my Great-great Uncle) Thomas Lewis, who was a Chemist in Pembrokeshire, Edinburgh, and London.

The two things I enjoy about these designs are the innocent and polite text, and the use of typography. One would think that employing several different typefaces would look odd and discordant, but the combination of stencil, gothic, serif and sans-serif faces somehow seems to work. I’m reminded of the illustrator Kevin Cornell’s work, which is unsurprising really - He has an obvious affinity with this era.
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