when the music's over turn out the light

A couple of musical RIPs to catch up on. Firstly, Richie Havens, who died on April 22nd. I really only encountered Richie Havens and his music twice, firstly when I saw the film of the Woodstock concert - titled, imaginatively, Woodstock - and secondly when I saw him in the acoustic tent at Glastonbury in 2002, the last time I went to the festival. On both occasions the centrepieces of his set were the two heavily-strummed semi-improvised epics Handsome Johnny and Freedom, the latter being a variation of the old blues standard Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child that Havens basically made up off the cuff while he was asked to fill a gap in the Woodstock schedule while various of the higher-profile acts were stuck in traffic.

Two remarkable things about the Woodstock footage: firstly that Havens appears to have the world's biggest thumbs - most people can't use the thumb on their non-strumming hand to fret barre chords, but Havens seems to manage it. The other thing is that having been born in 1941, Havens would have been only 28 years old at the time of Woodstock; I think if you didn't know that you'd have put him at at least 40 from watching the footage. This is mostly because he's missing most of his teeth, something you'll be able to see quite easily from the footage, what with its close-up up-the-nose camera angles.

Secondly, Ray Manzarek, who died yesterday. Manzarek was the keyboard player with The Doors, and as such probably responsible for most of the distinctive aspects of their sound. As I said here, the fact that he was the keyboardist and the bass player (via a Fender Rhodes) and that the bass parts weren't played on a guitar gave them their unique sound. It was only when they employed the services of a proper bass guitarist for their last proper album LA Woman that they were able to produce something as rocky and sinuous as its title track. Which is not to write off their earlier stuff, particularly when it features in one of the greatest film openings in cinema history.

it's not rocket science

I caught the second half of The Challenger on BBC2 last night. Interesting stuff, for all that the source material is pretty familiar to most. The Challenger disaster was one of the seminal events of my early teenage years, one of those Kennedy moments where I can remember, even 27 years later, exactly where I was when I heard about it - I was in a minibus on the way back from competing for my school quiz team in a local schools quiz organized by the RNIB. It was a particularly chastening moment since I also recall being allowed to skip some lessons five years earlier to witness the launch of the first shuttle Columbia, among great awe and optimism, and it was a sobering demonstration that the course of human endeavour is not a steady upward progression, things do go wrong, and actual people do die in what were presumably fairly horrible circumstances when they do.

The drama mainly focused on the involvement of legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the Rogers Commission set up to investigate the disaster, and his famous demonstration of the problems with the rubber O-rings at low temperatures. While the dictates of successful drama ensure that the lone-maverick-against-the-system angle was probably overplayed, there's no doubt that Feynman's independence and flair for clear and critical thinking was a key factor in determining the source of the disaster.

William Hurt did a pretty good impression of Feynman in terms of not looking completely unlike him and carrying off the mad scientist wig reasonably convincingly. He didn't really attempt to reproduce Feynman's chewy New York accent, though, and retained that distinctive slightly vague, slightly bemused air he has in most of his parts. I think the real-life Feynman would have been a slightly sharper and more abrasive customer. It took me a couple of goes to recognise Feynman's third wife Gweneth, but I got it in the end: Joanne Whalley, still very foxy even at 51.

There's plenty more Feynman available on YouTube, most of which is well worth a watch, including this BBC Horizon documentary from 1993.

what if you were unable to wake from that dream

Don't even think about bothering phoning me or ringing the doorbell between 6:20pm and 6:50pm each weekday night, because I will ignore you: In The Night Garden is on. Nia is absolutely riveted by it, as you can see from the picture, and while as an adult the general inanity and repetitiveness can get a bit wearing, it's quite soothing in a slightly surreal sort of way. A few observations though:

• It's the sort of programme you tend to drift into about halfway through, and it isn't until you watch it all the way through that you realise that the main sequence (i.e. the bit that takes place in the garden) is being dreamt by Iggle Piggle, who in turn is being dreamt by a small child. Honestly, it's like freakin' Inception.
• An alternative theory vis-à-vis Iggle Piggle's involvement is that he's moored his little boat up somewhere and just has to set off back to it at the end of every episode. Given the apparent size of the garden, though, this seems a bit unlikely, as it would be a pretty long walk. My money's on the dream thing.
• Another strong argument in favour of it all being Iggle Piggle's dream: Upsy Daisy's general behaviour. A carefree spirit, wandering around singing, all very keen on the kissing and the tactile handy-holdy stuff with Iggle Piggle, with a skirt that lifts up at the pull of a cord, and conveniently followed around by her mobile bed a lot of the time - she's clearly just some kind of sordid fantasy fuck-buddy dreamt up by Iggle Piggle's libido. A libido whose existence is all the more surprising since he appears to have no external genitalia.
• What's going on with the teeny tiny Wottingers? They're rarely featured, unlike their next-door neighbours the teeny tiny Pontipines who are in just about every episode. Moreover, they are the only characters not to get a mention in the "go to sleep" segment at the end, by contrast with great big lumbering inflatable oafs the Hahoos, whose appearances in the main sequence are equally sparse but who do get a "go to sleep" moment at the end. 
• Derek Jacobi is a trouper, isn't he? It's quite a trip from playing the lead role in I, Claudius or any of his other myriad thespian achievements to singing Makka Pakka, Akka Wakka, Mikka Makka moo! Makka Pakka, Appa yakka, Ikka akka, ooo. Hum dum, Akka pang, Ing, ang, ooo, Makka Pakka, Akka wakka, Mikka Makka moo! but he carries it off with some conviction. 

the last book I read

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell.

Meet Inspector Kurt Wallander: a tough, uncompromising Swedish cop. Han spelar inte i boken, men vid Gud att han får resultat.

Actually, Wallander is a bit of a mess. His wife Mona (I bet she was! eh? eh?) has just left him, and his daughter Linda isn't speaking to him. Throwing himself into his work, he's eating badly, drinking too much and generally not looking after himself very well. But, at the same time, dammit, results, etc. So when elderly couple Johannes and Maria Lövgren are found at their farmhouse, Johannes dead and savagely beaten and mutilated, and Maria similarly beaten but just about clinging to life, Wallander is called in to take on the case.

The only clues Wallander has to go on are the oddly-tied noose found around Maria Lövgren's neck and her last word before she croaks it at the hospital: "foreign". Naturally this sets Wallander to thinking about the nearby refugee camp and its inhabitants, and also about the local community's dangerously febrile attitude towards it.

But regardless of who was responsible, questions remain to be answered. What was the motive? The Lövgrens had no known enemies, nor anything that anyone would want to steal. And why did whoever carried out the murders feed the Lövgrens' horse before making good their escape? Well, it turns out that Johannes Lövgren wasn't quite the snowy-white pillar of the community he appeared to be: not only did he apparently keep a mistress on the go, but fathered a child with her back in the 1950s, and also had access to a secret stash of money made in nefarious circumstances during the Second World War.

So, cherchez la femme, and possibly her son, and the case will be solved - simple. Well, things get a bit less simple when word gets out via the press of Maria Lövgren's last words and someone takes it upon themselves to murder a Somalian refugee. Rounding up those responsible distracts Wallander and his colleagues from the original murder investigation for a bit, but when they get back to it they quickly locate Erik Magnusson, Johannes Lövgren's illegitimate son. Simmering resentment of Lövgren's treatment of his mother, concern about not inheriting his rightful share of the money - he'll be our guy, surely? Trouble is, Magnusson has an airtight alibi for the night of the murders, so it can't have been him.

So all looks lost; several months pass and the investigation has no new leads. It's only when Wallander has a moment of inspiration after a trip to the bank that he remembers the bank teller with the near-photographic memory that he questioned back in the early days of the investigation. A quick bit of questioning and a look at some CCTV footage later and Wallander's team have a couple of suspects - two men who followed Johannes Lövgren into the bank when he went to make a clandestine withdrawal of some of his secret stash - and it looks like Maria Lövgren was right after all, as they're foreigners. After a bit of trawling round the refugee camps Wallander has a couple of names, and the scene is set for the climax with the usual chasing around and fighting and tying up of loose ends.

Nordic noir is big business these days, and it's interesting to reflect on why that might be and why we Brits find it so fascinating. I think part of it is that we think that the Scandinavians, with their liberal governments and their relaxed attitudes to communal public nudity, are just generally more hip and groovy than us, and are almost certainly having more fun, particularly of the sexy variety, than we are. There's therefore also probably an element of envious glee at seeing their perfect society crumbling round the edges as they have to address the unpalatable truths of their recent eugenics scandal as well as some simmering racial tensions. Whatever the reasons, Mankell's books, as well as those of the late Stieg Larsson and many others, sell in large numbers, sufficiently so for several Wallander adaptations to have been made for TV, most recently starring our very own Kenneth Branagh, who you'll notice is the cover star of my TV tie-in version of the book.

Other than the Swedish setting, though, the Larsson and Mankell books don't have that much in common. The Larsson books are big, fat, lurid thrillers with lots of frankly unlikely chasing around and plot twists, while Faceless Killers is pretty grimy and low-key; Mankell even denies us the satisfaction of a neat thrilleresque plot resolution by having the Lövgrens just randomly tortured and killed by some random opportunists who happened to see Johannes pick up a load of cash in the bank.

Strip away the cultural unfamiliarity and this is a fairly bog-standard police/crime affair, though. The semi-alcoholic cop whose personal life is a shambles but is still capable of crazed intuitive leaps of crime-solving is a pretty well-worked one, as anyone who's read any of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels can tell you. And the dénouement here where Wallander and his team switch from chasing Erik Magnusson and start going after the right guys seems weirdly compressed, occupying as it does only the last 25 pages or so of the book.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it rocks along very entertainingly, but I'd be reluctant to say it's any better than a whole host of other crime fiction not set in Scandinavia, the Rebus books for example. If you want a genuinely weird Scandinavian crime thriller I would strongly recommend Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow. If you just want crime fiction set in an unfamiliar (or at least non-British) location then I would even more strongly recommend Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.

long overjew

Let's laugh at some Jews. I don't mean in a Holocaust-y kind of way, merely at the ridiculousness of some of their more outlandish religious practices.

You'll recall my unseemly chortling over the kosher telephone, the kosher light switch, the kosher lift and the kosher fridge. Well, here's a rather more public display of hilariously unreflective obedience to authority, however barking that authority's rulings may be: a bloke sealing himself inside a plastic bag on a plane.

An over-cautious approach to on-plane hygiene, you might think, or perhaps it was just that he wanted to ensure not a single morsel of airline food would pass his lips. But no, it's nothing as sensible as that; apparently certain ultra-Orthodox Jews are so pure that they will be irredeemably tainted by proximity to a cemetery. And not just any form of proximity, this is strictly vertical proximity we're talking about here. You can sidle up as close as you like in terms of horizontal separation, right up to the boundary fence, and you'll be fine, but even if you're 35,000 feet above it you'll be tainted. Look, I've drawn you a picture.

So the critical thinkers in the audience will be asking the following sorts of questions:

• What form does this impurifying agent take?
• How might we detect it?
• Why does it only spread vertically and not horizontally?
• Does it go down or only up? What if you were in a Tube train under a cemetery?
• Why does the plastic bag stop the zombie voodoo but six feet of earth, 35,000 feet of air and the aircraft superstructure doesn't?
• How would you tell, after the fact, if you or someone you were with had become impure owing to unwitting exposure to cemetery-based tainting? Is there a test?
• Is there really anything about intra-aircraft impurity security in the ancient scrolls?

What I really love about this is that the answer to the last question is clearly "no", so you (as an orthodox Jew) need to rely on the teaching and interpretation skills of your local rabbi. In this case the rabbi, one Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, came up with the plastic bag solution after some serious thought and just making a whole bunch of stuff up at random, as follows:

Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the leader of the Lithuanian Haredi community in Israel, published a halakhic ruling in the past stipulating that Cohens mustn't fly in this plane because they are prohibited from flying over a cemetery. Later, Rabbi Eliashiv found a solution to this issue, ruling that wrapping oneself in thick plastic bags while the plane crossed over the cemetery is permissible.

So basically in the absence of anything in the Torah that says Thou Shalt Not Fly In A Plane Over A Cemetery he just pulled something out of his arse.

There does seem to be a bit of previous for all this stuff in modern Judaism, though. If you've ever encountered the concept of an eruv then you'll be forced to marvel at the ingenuity of modern Jews in subverting the supposedly unquestionable tenets of their whole religion. It is amusing to the non-believer, though, to see the utterly ridiculous contortions the devout will go to to be able to still live and do stuff that they need to do while obeying some squinty-eyed version of the letter of the law of their own particular brand of idiocy, while ignoring the most obvious solution to the problem, which of course is to abandon the idiocy altogether.

the last book I read

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie.

Virginia "Vinnie" Miner is a fiftysomething American academic on her way over to Britain for a trip conducting research for her area of expertise, children's stories and rhymes. Solitary, something of an Anglophile and well-practised in her travelling routine, she is somewhat vexed to be waylaid by brash Chuck Mumpson, a tourist from Tulsa, who happens to be sitting next to her on the plane over.

Fred Turner is a twentysomething American academic in Britain for a shorter trip conducting research for his area of expertise, the work of John Gay, leaving his wife Ruth ("Roo") back in America and their volatile relationship in an uncertain state.

Don't get the idea that Vinnie and Fred are going to have some sort of tender May to December romance or any of that sort of heartwarming crap, because it's not like that at all. They do know each other, though, and it's through Vinnie that Fred meets - and starts up a relationship with - Rosemary Radley, an actress who may or may not also be a minor aristocrat, but who certainly is archetypally actressy in being what sympathetic people might call "flighty", "free-spirited", "eccentric", etc., but the rest of us would just call "mental".

Meanwhile Vinnie has unexpectedly found herself keeping in touch with Chuck Mumpson, and despite her initial reservations finds herself becoming quite fond of the big lumbering oaf. When Chuck decides to extend his stay (not having much to go back for, his marriage seemingly being in a similar state to Fred's) to do a bit of family tree research in deepest darkest Wiltshire Vinnie even finds herself drawn into having a full-blown affair with him.

But the two academics are on borrowed time in Britain, and will both have to return to America before the start of the autumn term. Rosemary takes the impending separation badly, behaving increasingly eccentrically (and drunkenly) and eventually locking herself in her flat and refusing to see Fred at all. Vinnie's relationship ends in somewhat different circumstances as she learns that Chuck has had a fatal heart attack down in Wiltshire.

And so the two academics arrive at the point of having to return home. Fred returns with a bit of a spring in his step, as he's had word from Roo that she is keen to meet up and hopes for a reconciliation, while Vinnie returns with rather more mixed feelings. Should she be sad at Chuck's death, and maybe feeling some pangs of guilt that their energetic sexing might have played a part in his demise, or happy at having (however briefly) loved and been loved? And after all, she's never been very good at living with people, and she and Chuck were too different for it to have worked out in the long term.

Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1985 - it therefore becomes the third Pulitzer winner on this list after Independence Day and The Road. It seems in a lot of ways a bit light for such a heavyweight award; Lurie cynically suggests in this 2003 Guardian interview that its being the only one of her books in which she killed off a major character probably swung it for her. Of course readability and the appearance of lightness while tackling such heavy subjects as sex and death is a cherishable skill in itself, Anne Tyler being the obvious point of comparison in terms of female American novelists. Another obvious point of comparison would be with David Lodge; the whole thing of academics criss-crossing the Atlantic and their various romantic entanglements while away from home is very familiar from Changing Places and Small World in particular. Of books in this list Weekend turns on a similar plot device as well.

Foreign Affairs was also made into a made-for-TV movie in 1993, starring some quite high-powered names. I think Brian Dennehy is a pretty good fit for Chuck Mumpson, though I must say I'd pictured Vinnie Miner as looking less like Joanne Woodward and more like Edna Mode from The Incredibles. I'd also pictured Fred Turner as being a bit more square-jawed and orthodox-looking than Eric Stoltz. And yes, all right, less, you know, ginger: there, I said it.

I think this is better than the previous Lurie in this list, The Truth About Lorin Jones, as I wasn't so sure about the slightly broad (though probably affectionate) swipes against feminism there, as well as some plot implausibilities. I think it's probably not quite as good as the only other one I've read, 1974's The War Between The Tates. Maybe you should start with that one.

good mourning Britain

Well. What to say about Thatch? Or, at least, what to say that hasn't already been said, and since I haven't read absolutely everything that's been written on the subject, as there's rather a lot of it, the answer to that may well turn out to be: nothing whatsoever. But, just to be clear, it's not going to stop me saying it anyway, as I have a number of crackpot theories on the subject.

• Here's the first one: governments and politicians have rather less ability to influence the mysterious ebb and flow of economics than is popularly believed. And where they do influence it, rather more is down to blind luck than they would like to have you believe. This is a corollary of a wider theory that says: the success or failure of governments and politicians in general, and therefore who gets remembered by history as a success or a failure, is more down to blind luck than you might think. It certainly could be argued that Thatcher was a lucky Prime Minister, for instance, with the huge economic windfall of North Sea oil revenue in the 1980s (in addition to the more calculated cash grab of privatisations and selling off of council houses), and the (in hindsight) opportune timing of the Falklands War enabling her to surf a tide of patriotic fervour to victory in the 1983 general election. She was also fortunate in the self-destruction of the Labour Party in the 1980s which rendered them essentially unelectable until their recovery at the tail-end of the decade under Neil Kinnock.
• I think it's significant that I am of the generation which grew up and became politically aware during the Thatcher years: I was nine when she became Prime Minister, and twenty when she was ousted. So I have to view my overall view of her (not especially favourable in general, in case you hadn't got that already) through the distorting lens of having been a teenager for most of her tenure and therefore inherently likely to view all authority figures as deserving of my visceral hatred. That is soooo unfair; I hate you.
• One of the defining characteristics of the conservative authoritarian mindset, of which Thatcher was a prime example, is a general lack of empathy, i.e. the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and try to see things from their point of view. Almost more important is the lack of any desire to try to do so, and even the viewing of such a desire as some sort of sign of moral weakness. One of the effects of this is to make Conservative governments inherently hostile to the recipients of state benefits, since they cannot help but view the need to receive such things as a sign of laziness and moral degeneracy. I say "governments", plural, because of course the current administration has been peddling the same sort of rhetoric, with all the talk about "workers" and "shirkers" and the shameful attempt by George Osborne to co-opt the Philpott case as some sort of argument against state hand-outs. 
• Crackpot theory number two: I suspect that one of the main reasons that Thatcher was uniquely ill-disposed towards benefit claimants and the underprivileged in general was as a side-effect of her personal circumstances - as a woman in the toxically sexist environments of first science and then subsequently politics (mind you, pretty much everywhere was a toxically sexist environment in the 1950s) it must have taken some pretty remarkable drive and single-mindedness to wade through all the bullshit to get to where she wanted to be. All of which probably meant that she simply couldn't understand people who were unable to get through or over the barriers their life and circumstances had put in front of them. It also made her, despite her iconic status as the first woman Prime Minister of the UK, not much of a friend of feminism. After all, what are all these silly women complaining about? What glass ceiling? I made it, why can't they? Just pull yourself together.
• As Mark Steel in the Independent points out, all the banging on about her being a "conviction politician" is picking a slightly strange thing to celebrate. Having strongly held convictions is only a good thing if they are right, and even if they are a general refusal to consider counter-arguments or other points of view isn't really very healthy. You know who else had strong convictions? That's right, Hitler.
• Crackpot theory number three is a corollary of number two: most self-made types, entrepreneurs and the like, are not only instinctively unpalatable conservative authoritarian types who can't understand why everyone can't just do what they did (and - see theory one - fail to realise how much dumb luck was involved), but more generally just really tedious and awful people outside of a business context. This theory was partly confirmed and partly undermined by listening to Hilary Devey (her off Dragon's Den) on Desert Island Discs a few months back - she came across as a nicer person than her pantomime persona on DD would have had you expect, but she scoffed at any notion of there being any barriers to women succeeding in the business world, and her choice of tunes was heroically dreadful.
• Back to Thatch: the other side of the sexism thing is that I'm quite sure one of the reasons she inspired such visceral dislike during her lifetime and premiership is simply the fact of her being a woman. Clearly the trade union movement would have hated a conservative Prime Minister implacably opposed to their very existence anyway, but the fact that they, almost exclusively men, were being told what to do by A BLOODY WOMAN must have added a bit of extra sting. Some of the post-mortem glee has been a bit too focused on her gender for my taste as well, notably the bid to get Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead to number one. Note, however, that while I think it's a bit of a crass stunt I absolutely oppose the craven antics of the BBC regarding its appearance (or not) on the Radio 1 chart show at the weekend. It's in the charts, it's based on sales, don't editorialise, just play it. Rather magnificently the Daily Mail still managed to spin this spineless cave-in to conservative pressure as a victory for the Trot faction at the BBC; that is some impressive cognitive dissonance right there.
• While a lot of people did take the opportunity to make a point of celebrating the event of her death, there was a sense in which she'd already got away from us, since she'd had dementia for the last decade or so of her life. There's an interesting parallel with her great ideological soul-mate Ronald Reagan, who had a long downward slide into dementia at the end of his life too. So crackpot theory number four is that the long battle between right-wing ideology and reality eventually destroys the brain. 
• The ding-dong over Ding Dong is one aspect of another area of stupidity: the whole ridiculous notion of not speaking ill of the dead. Personally I favour the sort of robust post-mortem assessment provided by the late Christopher Hitchens on the demise of Jerry Falwell: "if you'd given him an enema you could have buried him in a matchbox".