Mick Hartley

To Aid or Not To Aid

The recent election of Lee Myung-bak as president of South Korea has marked an end to the Sunshine Policy of his predecessors, which sought to soften Kim Jong-Il's hardline policies in the North by being nice to him. Well, predictably enough, that didn't work. On the other hand, though it's early days yet, Lee's tougher approach hasn't exactly met with stunning success: the North's response has been to step up the rhetoric, and start building more military installations.

Now there's the prospect of a serious food shortage in North Korea. What's Lee to do? Send food aid in the knowledge that it'll be used as the DPRK authorities want it to be used, and may well never reach the intended targets, or watch his ratings plummet as the South see pictures of their fellow Koreans starving to death?

Here's the Washington Post:

This spring on the Korean Peninsula, human rights are on a collision course with hunger.

South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, is asking tough questions about human rights abuses in North Korea -- questions that were all but ignored by his predecessors Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.

But he is learning that high-minded principles can quickly run amok if your neighbor is an irritable Stalinist state on the brink of a food disaster

Amid worsening shortages that the U.N. World Food Program says may soon become a catastrophe, Lee's government has yet to dispatch large shipments of free food and fertilizer that over the past decade have become an essential crutch for North Korea's crippled economy, helping millions to avoid famine.

"The delay in shipping food and fertilizer could end up hurting the average North Korean," said Kim Am-soo, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-financed think tank in Seoul. "It is a very delicate situation, and tension has increased on both sides of the border." [...]

Lee quickly made it clear that South Korea's annual gifts of food and fertilizer for North Korea would now have strings attached. His government wanted to audit distribution to make sure that aid did not go to the North's military.

Inside North Korea, food runs short every year, even in areas where crops are good. And South Korea's decade-old aid program -- this year, 500,000 tons of various kinds of food and enough fertilizer to grow about 900,000 tons of grain -- has become a building block in hunger prevention, international food experts say.

Lee's insistence on accountability happened to coincide with an especially troubled year for the food supply in the North. The World Food Program says staple food prices there have doubled in the past 12 months, as a result of flood-damaged local harvests, soaring world food prices and an unexpected drop in aid from China.

Here in Seoul, there are critics who say that Lee, by preaching human rights to a heavily armed dictatorship, has overplayed his hand and risks a domestic political backlash.

"Lee was not elected to sort out human rights in North Korea, especially when there is a threat of famine," said Andrei Lankov, a professor who specializes in North Korean studies at Kookmin University in Seoul.

"All South Korean presidents have domestic constraints on how hard they can push the North," Lankov said. "Pictures of skeletal Korean children will cause outrage, and bad relations with the North would also hurt economic growth."

As I wrote earlier, with the way the Olympics have been going so far, it'll probably all come to a head sometime in August.

Theme Time Statistics

As the second series comes to an end (that's 75 shows in all) here's everything you wanted to know about Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Most played artist: George Jones - "Kind of a cross between a modern-day Prometheus and a possum. The closest thing Country music has to a bushidō. The flat-top wonder". Followed by Tom Waits, Dinah Washington, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, Louis Armstrong, Van Morrison, Buddy Johnson, Elvis Costello, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Porter Wagoner, The Rolling Stones, Anita O’Day, Buck Owens, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, The Stanley Brothers....

50% of the songs he's played were recorded before 1960...Only 9% songs were recorded in the 1980s or later.

One of the comments is interesting:

One history lesson from Bob Dylan that people should pick up on is that what he presents as his own words may not actually be original.

Compare these quotes on Hank Williams -

Dylan: "Hank could be headstrong and willful, a backslider and a reprobate, no stranger to bad deeds. However, underneath all of that, he was compassionate and moralistic."

Colin Escott: "If Hank Williams could be headstrong and willful, a backslider and a reprobate, then Luke the Drifter was compassionate and moralistic, capable of dispensing all the sage advice that Hank Williams ignored."

...There are dozens of similar examples throughout Theme Time Radio Hour.

Bob has sticky fingers.

Well, we knew that. As I've argued before, part of the pleasure of Theme Time Radio Hour, and something I think Dylan takes pleasure in, is listening out for where he nicked some of his lines from.

What's that saying? - "hacks borrow, geniuses steal".

The Modern Body

Paintings by Tetsuya Ishida, who died aged 31 in 2005 (via Metafilter).

Not All Spotty Teenage Losers

Have Times readers responded to Giles Coren's nasty little piece on the "spotty teenage losers" serving in MacDonald's?

Oh yes. Here's a letter today:

Later this week my daughter starts her final exams at university and my son graduates from Oxford with a first-class degree. Both have had part-time jobs in the fast-food restaurant at our local service station and both have had to put up with comments from customers who, like Giles Coren, believed them to be “lower down the food chain” (Comment, April 26).

If Mr Coren bothered to converse with some of the youngsters who work at McDonald’s and similar outlets, he would find that many are either undergraduates struggling to eke out their student loan or graduates who, because of the lack of decent jobs promised by the Government in justification of increased tuition fees, are forced into low-paid work.

So you see they aren't all spotty teenage losers: some are decent young people, with Oxford degrees and fathers who write letters to the Times, just disguised as spotty teenage losers.

Glad we sorted that out.

A Music Transformed

The vocals of the great Bluesman Robert Johnson always sounded a bit strangulated. And to play along, you need to put your capo quite a ways up the guitar neck: on the fourth fret, for instance, for Walking Blues. John Gibbens has a theory:

An abiding mystery about Robert Johnson is the rpm conundrum. Is it true, as a Japanese musician told me it is widely held to be in Japan, that Robert Johnson’s records play way too fast? Should he actually sound much more like his great mentor, Son House?

So he slowed the speed down by 20%:

And what comes out of the speakers? A music transformed. The sound of a man, first of all: this dark-toned voice would no longer lend credence to the youth of seventeen or eighteen that Don Law, the only person to record him, thought he might be. Now, especially in the dip of his voice at the end of a line, we can hear the follower of Son House, and the precursor of Muddy Waters. Hear him pronounce his name in ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’ – now he sounds like “Mr Johnson”, a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with the sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him. (The wordless last lines of ‘Love in Vain’, in this slowed form, are the work of one of the most heartbreaking and delicate of blues singers.) This is a Steady Rolling Man, whose tempos and tonalities are much like those of other Delta bluesmen. Full-speed Johnson always struck me as a disembodied sound – befitting his wraith-like persona, the reticent, drifting youth, barely more than a boy, that Don Law spoke of: the Rimbaud of the blues. Johnson slowed down sounds to me like the person in the recently discovered studio portrait: a big-boned man, self-assured and worldly-wise.

You can check out the results in some brief samples that Gibbens provides.

If the theory I’ve advanced is not completely crazy, a possible motive for speeding up Johnson’s records might have been to try to make them more exciting for an age in which the Delta tradition he came out of was already a thing of the past.

Perhaps there are scientific tests that could be applied to the sound that might establish its original frequencies – to the qualities of the voice, for example, like the vibrato, which at full speed sounds to me like an alien nasal flutter but at slower speeds like a proper musical ornament; or perhaps to the decay time of the guitar notes.

Robert Johnson’s records occupy a place of unique esteem in the heritage of 20th-century popular music. In addition to their innate artistic excellence, they exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of the blues, and on the other forms, like rock, that drew on the blues. They are universally acclaimed by critics: Greil Marcus, for example, the dean of rock writers, while he might not be so blunt as to tag the first Robert Johnson LP as The Greatest Album Of All Time, certainly regards it as An Album Than Which None Better Has Been Made. This cultural prestige is reflected in the continuing demand for Johnson’s music: the 1990 CD box-set of The Complete Recordings, with an expected sale of about twenty thousand, sold half a million. If the records are, in fact, distinctly inaccurate, perhaps we should be told.

Neglecting Enforcement and Apprehension

Worth a read: Nick Donovan of the Aegis Trust, on bringing to justice those Sudanese convicted of war crimes.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb for atrocities in Darfur, Sudan. Their names mean little to most of us, while those of Fred West and Harold Shipman have become shorthand for mass murder. Yet the crimes of these serial killers belong to a pre-industrial age. [...]

Small teams of men tracking down and capturing war criminals is largely the stuff of fiction. The real work is done behind the scenes: threatening to withdraw bilateral aid unless suspects are handed over, untangling extradition requests, creating specialist police units and domestic legal reforms to allow extraterritorial jurisdiction over international crimes. Most of all, the problem is not finding suspects but taking the many small steps to create the political will to prosecute them.

The UK has an opportunity to take one of these small steps in June. Like Eichmann, the Sudanese government minister Armad Harun is suspected of being one of the middle managers of mass murder. It took real management skill to cajole disparate militias, and the Sudanese Army and Air Force, to conduct hundreds of separate attacks across an area the size of France. These skills were rewarded with promotion: Harun is now Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, in charge of feeding the victims of his own suspected crimes.

The international community's response to this defiance has been to do nothing. Nor has it acted against Kushayb, the former Janjawid leader.

This June the UK will play a key role on the Security Council, helping to guide its response to the ICC prosecutor's next report on Sudan. Last time, China blocked a presidential statement on the ICC. This time, with China absorbed by the Olympics, the UK should take the lead and introduce a resolution imposing asset freezes on all Sudanese government officials harbouring Harun and Kushayb. Any future discussions of debt relief or bilateral aid for Sudan should also be made conditional on handing over the two men for trial.

The international community has spent a long time on the “architecture” of international justice and has neglected the “plumbing”. We've built an impressive list of treaties and international tribunals and courts, while neglecting enforcement and apprehension.

The Olympic Torch Carries its Message of Peace and Goodwill Across the World

After Japan, Seoul:

Thousands of young Chinese assembled to defend their country’s troubled Olympic torch relay pushed through police lines on Sunday, some of them hurling rocks, bottled water and plastic and steel pipes at protesters demanding better treatment for North Korean refugees in China.

Two North Korean defectors living in South Korea poured paint thinner on themselves and tried to set themselves on fire in an attempt to protest what they condemned as Beijing’s inhumane crackdown of North Korean refugees, but the police stopped them, according to witnesses and the police.

The South Korean police and Chinese students also overpowered at least two other protesters who tried to impede the run along a 15-mile route through Seoul. The route was kept secret until the last minute and guarded by more than 8,300 police officers.

According to the Marmot's Hole, a pro-Tibet protestor was surrounded and beaten up by what they call "New Red Guards" in the lobby of a hotel. In this Youtube video, you can hear the Red Guards chanting “Beat him to death,” and “Long live China”.

In Lhasa, meanwhile, preparations are underway:

China will seal off the Tibetan capital this week before the arrival of the Olympic torch relay, closing the Himalayan city to farmers and insisting that even schoolchildren must carry new passes. Panic buying has gripped the city as hundreds of thousands of people prepare for the tight security restrictions.

Details of the lockdown in Lhasa emerged as official Chinese media reported that a specially adapted Olympic torch had arrived yesterday at the Tibetan base camp of Mount Everest. Organisers hope that an ascent will mark the literal high point of the global torch relay.

Certainly China is taking no chances of disruption to the procession when it wends its way through the capital. Farmers for miles around have been told that they will not be allowed to enter the city to sell their produce from May 1. Every resident of Lhasa must register for a special pass.

Residents said that they could not remember such draconian restrictions on movement since martial law was imposed in the city after several days of deadly riots when rampaging Tibetans opposed to Chinese rule set fire to swaths of the city in March 1989.

At least there'll be no protests today.

North Korea said it was preparing an “amazing” welcome, indicating that the totalitarian regime would mobilize hundreds of thousands of flower-waving people.

Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud Loud Music)

From 1959, back when folks could still hang around in smoke-filled rooms, here's Joe Maphis with trade-mark double-necked guitar, and wife Rose Lee (from Weirdo Video):

[As featured on Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, though the BBC haven't got to his "Smoking" show yet. Should feature in three weeks time. Here's the track listing y'all can look forward to.]

Boats of the Lower Lea

On the River Lea around Bow:

Coming soon - Boats of the Upper Lea. Followed, possibly, by Boats of the Middle Lea.

A Spotty Teenage Loser

Last week Giles Coren was railing against the Full English breakfast - "You never see anyone with a degree eating a fry-up" - and now it's MacDonald's and their uniform change:

We usually go into McDonald's because we feel terrible. Drunk, hungry, hung-over, barely £2 in our pocket, all self-respect out the window, we push past the weeny bike thieves and kitten-stabbers gathered in the doorway. We keep our stomach together despite the slide of our feet on the cow-greased floor (is there ever not a sign up telling you the floor is slippery?) and the smell of a Swaledale field at the height of the cow-burning epidemic.

We catch sight of ourselves in those mirrors, lit by the merciless white neon overheads (I swear, I still have teenage acne in those mirrors), we jostle amid the giant-arsed women and the bag-snatchers who have come in only because KFC is shut and are grumbling about the high cost of the chicken nuggets, and when we finally come to order, we do not want to be made to talk, thank you very much indeed, to Helena bleeding Christiansen.

You know what I mean? We want a spotty teenage loser in a skid-mark-coloured shirt that drains all the colour from his pasty face. We want a woman, squeezing between the chip-fryer and the milkshake machine, in a blouse you could make into outfits for a whole Brownie pack. We want a man whose polyester shirt sparks in the dark and out of which the smell of BO can never quite be washed. We want someone, in short, who is even lower down the food chain than we are. Someone in whose opinion we are not even slightly interested.

Yes I know that buried deep beneath the snobbery there's some kind of attempt at humour. If you read his restaurant review columns, he plays up the upper-class brattishness. It's his trade-mark. Maybe he wants to be A.A. Gill. But this is just horrible. The contempt for the lower orders - the people who can't afford the £80-a-head meals he regularly reviews along with his latest "flopsy" as they head back from their Wodehousian weekend break - is palpable. Makes me want to head straight down to MacDonald's for a Big Mac special, hand over a £20 and say, "That's alright, keep the change."

Best MacDonald's experience? In Paris, where you get a decent cheap quick lunch without being ripped off in some tourist hell-hole having waited an hour to be served. Besides, there's something particularly pleasurable about going to MacDonald's in France.