Whatever I expected from The Prisoner of Second Avenue, it certainly wasn’t what I got.  This New York comedy seemed a fair candidate for enjoyableness; it certainly has an impeccable pedigree, having been written by Woody Allen’s old mucker, The Odd Couple playwright Neil Simon.  What’s more, in its 1971 Broadway incarnation this play starred Peter Falk (aka Columbo!), and in 1975 it was made into a film featuring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft.  That is possibly a difficult lineage for the Vaudeville Theatre to live up to, even when its audience can safely be assumed to be in the grip of Goldblumschönheitslust. 

Briefly: Mel Edison, played by Goldblum, loses his job as a result of the economic downturn and is stricken by a nervous breakdown which is variously marked by insomnia, a sudden distaste for material possessions, and a murderous vision of burying his upstairs neighbour in a snowdrift (it’s a heatwave summer when the play opens).  Edna Edison, played by Mercedes Ruehl, comforts her husband, goes out to work in his stead, vies with Mel’s four siblings for caretaking duty, briefly succumbs to the strain, and ultimately goes to Mel for succour which he is suddenly, miraculously, able to provide again.

Now, as many critics of this play have observed, Goldblum cannot be faulted as an exponent of physical comedy: he makes perfect use of facial expression, gesture, his own height and leanness, and altogether cuts an extremely sympathetic figure, not to mention quite a dash.  Ruehl on the other hand, who I hear is a wonderful actress, comes over in this play as a bewildering hybrid of haughtiness and housewifery.  It is as if some Frankenstein had cruelly tried to meld the post-Botox Stockard Channing into another Edna, namely Edna Turnblad as played by John Travolta in the recent remake of Hairspray. I was depressed by this play.  Its recessionary topicality, which someone must have thought occasioned the revival, served only to sap the comedy from the funny bits and render the serious bits excruciatingly, because so anomalously, sad.  The between-scene interpolations of “news footage” from early Seventies New York, covering shootings and robberies by the starving unemployed, are neither funny nor clever; and nothing is more tonally inappropriate than the moment where Edna squeezes Mel tight and begs him, ‘Please don’t get sick and die!  I don’t want to stay here without you.’ 

It does not need saying that comedy and tragedy are conceptually close: The Prisoner of Second Avenue could hardly be faulted for being both humorous and sombre.  But what is striking about this play – and it bites harder, perhaps, in straitened times – is that Mel and Edna’s sorrows are not of their making, or even of Neil Simon’s making; that their and their country’s sorrows extend well beyond the limited remit of this or any playwright; that there are serious things going on which only time will mend.  That is an intrinsically tragic thought, no matter how much howling and gesticulating is done to counter it; some upsetting truths are conjured up, but woefully mishandled, by this less-than-comic Prisoner of Second Avenue. 

“The great secret of morals is love,” wrote Percy Shelley, “or a going out of our own nature.”  Effusive and excessive as P.B. could sometimes be, I am firmly in his camp regarding humans’ need to strive against our innate self-containedness; in fact this is a political imperative too. 

Of course, in the loftiest, most existential sense and at the most grindingly practical level, each of us is alone in our head and can never really know what others are thinking.  But surely no-one can entertain this concept for long without entering into a Pirandellian spiral: intellectually intriguing, the thought process is also indulgent, inexpedient, leading to misery and mistrust, and taking us far away from Shelley’s “morals.” 

As Dr Alan Finlayson sagely observed at a recent Compass debate on the future of the Left, interdependence is not only a theory or wise precept (still less a “great secret”): it is just the truth.  At a practical level we are all dependent on each other; not just in a parent-child permutation, but on broader familial, local, communal and international stages. This is true, but it is an easy truth to retreat from, especially if you fear the fallibility of others.  Such a retreat was undoubtedly once part of the Conservative agenda and, the current government’s claim to progressivity notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether that has changed.

Interdependence is why society works, and history has shown that when people distance themselves from the fact of each other’s humanity, bad things happen.  In this light it is not a coincidence that it was precisely during the heyday of literary Modernism, with all its faintly onanistic fretting about the boundaries of the self, that the far right was able to root itself in such hospitable soil. 

Emersonian self-reliance is insecurity cloaked as hardy realism – the homespun adage “If you want a job doing well, do it yourself” is only true if you are lucky enough to be able to do the job in the first place. I say this as a big fan of Pirandello and Emerson both, and no small worrier about the inaccessibility of another person’s consciousness, the impossibility of perfect communication – but I am aware, as I think one has to be, that these thoughts are luxuries. 

So I am concerned by the lack of self-awareness in some of what we have recently heard from Cameron, Osborne et al about the satisfaction of a good day’s work, the thrill of laying something by for the family, the privilege for parents of taking their children’s schooling into their own hands.  This strain of thought is partially true, but it is not very imaginative, and it is neglectful of the substantial swathes of our society which fall outside its purview.

In this way the Con-Dems do not seem to be, in Shelley’s phraseology, “going out of their own nature,” but, at least for now, unironically regressing right back into it. Osborne proudly espouses for an all-new generation his same old “hard-headed recognition that without enterprise… compassion comes with an empty wallet.” With policies that smack of deep, luxurious self-containment, and do not even know it, this coalition’s only innovation has been its fallacious realignment of semantic opposites “conservative” and “liberal.” 

If this is the New Politics, I’m Lord Byron.

Arthur Miller often said that if All My Sons had not been a success he would have given up writing and ‘found some other line of work.’  Theatregoers probably feel that they owe this play a great deal, therefore; and in a way they do.  But modern audiences, whatever their admiration for Miller, are privileged to approach this 1947 work from the vantage of 2010.  They can see what this play’s original audience could not: that All My Sons, so much better than so much else, was by no means the best this playwright could do.  This is something that appears to have been forgotten by even the most muted reviews of the Apollo Theatre’s current production of All My Sons, very nearly all of them five-star.  A typical example calls it ‘a play of extraordinary power and emotional depth,’ an appellation whose accuracy, I would argue, depends on one’s definition of ‘extraordinary.’

Undoubtedly, Howard Davies’s company is composed of serious actors who have taken themselves and their text very seriously.  They have even striven for contemporaneity – witness David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker’s appearance on the Andrew Marr show to talk about this play’s relevance to the present day, or the remarks on a certain BBC blog (though they had me squirming) about ‘Arthur Miller’s Big Society’.  This is a play with the ingredients of brilliance and the cast and crew know it, but – with a few notable exceptions (Stephen Campbell Moore’s naturalistic tour de force of a performance among them) – those participating in this production lack the sense of perspective to make it extraordinary.

All My Sons is set entirely in the backyard of the Keller family, whose ageing patriarch, Joe, prospered by selling equipment to the armed forces during World War II.  Larry, one of Joe and his wife Kate’s two sons, did not make it back from the war, and as the play opens he has been missing in action for three years.  Everyone but Kate, it appears, is certain Larry has died – indeed, his erstwhile fiancée Annie has come to visit in order to marry the other Keller son, Chris – but we slowly learn that all kinds of other family secrets are tied up with the possibility of Larry’s having survived. 

Something important about All My Sons, and Arthur Miller’s plays more broadly, is the application to ‘ordinary’ people and events of the conventions of classical tragedy.  To have its proper effect, as the most successful productions of Miller plays have shown, such formal artificiality has to be offset by authenticity of mood.  The latter is much harder to create, and Davies’s All My Sons does not manage to create it: this failure is partly the fault of the actors – the script’s frequent flashes of wisdom sometimes suffer from the portentousness with which they are uttered, by Suchet and Wanamaker in particular – but a measure of the blame must be laid at Miller’s door; as when, at the end of the play, at least one deus ex machina is felt to fall on us like an enormous clanger.

As a playwright Arthur Miller was prescriptive, a real Barthesian Author-God: his stage directions and instructions are highly detailed, which means that productions of his plays tend not to vary much.  For the most part, this works superlatively well.  But All My Sons was written when Miller was only on the cusp of greatness (or the cusp of the cusp – Death of a Salesman was written directly afterwards) yet here it is treated, erroneously, as if in 1947 the playwright had no heights left to scale. 

As the reason why a twentieth-century literary titan did not give up writing plays, All My Sons is extremely significant; but the current run is weakened by an at once slavish and self-important interpretation.  This is a good play that, as is happily standard in Miller, has a lot to tell, I would even say teach, us – but it does that writer’s astonishing oeuvre a disservice to call this incarnation of All My Sonsextraordinary.

posted by Roberta

Gnome’s own Andrew brought my attention to this fascinating piece reporting on a forthcoming study which suggests that the presence of salads and other healthy options on fast-food menus actually leads customers to make less healthy choices.

The name of the column is ‘Drilling Down’, and I wonder if that might be one piece of irritating management-speak destined to become less voguish in the aftermath of the oil spill.  What is certain is that the spill’s consequences will be profound both environmentally and politically.  President Obama today said that ‘In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,’ which seems an odd way of putting it – but then perhaps he was keen to divert Bush-era-analogies away from Katrina territory.

BP’s flowery logo and its slogan of ‘Beyond Petroleum’ could pretty well be summed up as the oil industry’s equivalent of putting salad on the menu, given that alternative energy accounts for a minute fraction of BP’s $80 billion spend over the last five years.  James Cameron’s Avatar was panned for its pantomime-villain portrayal of the Resources Development Agency and its drilling for ‘unobtainium’ - and with good reason.  The ‘who us?’ hypocrisy of real-life Big Oil is worse for everyone’s health.

- posted by Edward Randell

There’s a new way to show your appreciation of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield: write a “snarky recap” of your favourite book. 

“Look right down any crowded hall

You’ll see there’s a beauty standing - -

Is she really everywhere, or her reflection?

One always goes up to you

The other’s shy and quiet

Could there be two different girls who look the same

At Sweet Valley High…?”

Why yes, there could – not to mention at Sweet Valley Middle School and Sweet Valley University, and in countless spin-off Super Specials – sometimes starring werewolves, always starring the physically identical but personally antithetical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield.

Sweet Valley High is the Young Adult series “created” by Francine Pascal, but ghost-written by several different writers under the name ”Kate William,” who gives way to one “Laurie John” when things get cutty at SVU.  A late-eighties innovation, these books were being written until about 2003, and are still hugely popular.  They are also – and I say this with love – pretty rubbish.

Nowhere but in Sweet Valley are students alternately rich as Croesus or poor as church mice, constantly falling in love or being date-raped (I kid you not), and having parties all, but all, the time.  The books lurch between the prim (any scene featuring Elizabeth) and the frankly eye-popping, as in one memorable scene between Jessica and her Medieval History lecturer/ lover Professor Louis Miles:

“Jessica responded instantly to his touch. She tilted back her head and parted her lips slightly. Then the passionate fire of his kiss came down upon her. ECSTASY. PURE AND TOTAL ECSTASY.”  

Luckily for us, the internet yields a way to spin this garbage into gold: the “snarky recap,” glorious romps through the plot of the best books, found at sites such as thedairiburger.com, named for Sweet Valley’s burger joint, a favoured hangout for drapes and squares alike, or the livejournal community 1bruce1, named for the Porsche numberplate of Sweet Valley’s resident playboy, Bruce Patman.

The dairiburger and 1bruce1 contributors unerringly pick up on all that is most lampoonable/ loveable about the Sweet Valley books: their repetitive, implausible storylines; their clichéd handling of hot teen topics like eating disorders, alcoholism and parental divorce; their moralising about what tends to be tagged in snarky posts as “teh sex” or “teh drugs.”

Best of all I like these bloggers’ well-timed interjections, which puncture the occasional po-facedness of Francine Pascal and her minions. Recapping SVH no. 88, Love Letters For Sale, wherein a girl named Shelley gets upset because her boyfriend Jim is spending too long putting the school yearbook together, thedairiburger says what we’re all thinking: “Save your time, Jim.  This school year lasts fifteen years.”

Posted by Roberta, with many thanks to Anna Steadman for alerting me to thedairiburger in the first place.

Last week’s story about singing lessons for muezzin (here) was more about below-average reproduction of holy word, or call to prayer (and, then, the word), than it was about noise pollution.

I imagined that these lessons would occur in boot camps, muezzin evacuating the sprawling Eurasian city for a week in the countryside (but which side?) leaving… silence.

Or, leaving The Morning Line: 40 speakers and an ‘interactive ambisonic sound system’ developed at York University form a sonic pavilion from now until September 19th.

Of course a de-muezzin of the Turkish capital is not going to happen, but competition with this new, unknown noise will have an equally distorting effect this summer.  

posted by Ossie Froggatt-Smith.

(Photograph from thewire.co.uk)

Good morning. Welcome to the future. Or, welcome to now.

If anything sounds more pompous than ‘welcome to the future’, it is ‘welcome to now’. This is probably one of many reasons why the former is favoured by rhetoricians. Oliver Hyams has explained why the Stern Review causes problems for policy-makers who need to act in all the tenses, in his essay for gnome. Charlie Brooker suggests poisoning the water supply with LSD as a short-term solution.

These problems are not confined to the present day. The early modern past also got into trouble with the future, so much trouble that Lucian Holscher refuses the past even so much as a conception of the future. Holscher’s notion of Zukunfstaat (state calculation of and planning ahead – see the Stern Review) is, he says, an ability of the modern world.

Richard Burke disagrees with this in his foreword to The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (Brady and Butterworth, 2010).

This collection of essays finds the future in everyday wills and the spare-time fiction of canonical giants.

Futures ‘were intended to stimulate critical reflections on the present that would lead to changes’, not dissimilar to the metrics of political philosophers today.

This applied whether these futures were probable and mortal or indulgent and utopian.

‘Utopia was transplanted from a remote place (or ‘nowhere’) to a new age,’ says Bolchum. But Burke’s argument says that these are not different places or spaces in time: the future is something that we can anticipate and change. This idea provides comfort to our ancestors, as well as those of us alive today. Though sometimes it might seem difficult to plot our future, we should be confident that it is on its way.

posted by Ossie Froggatt-Smith 

Could you put a monetary value on your own life?

This question is less about the contents of your bank account or your life insurance policy, and more about how much another might pay to save you from a nasty fate. 

Such a cost is not easy to calculate.  In reality, the value depends on the valuer: a family member will be willing to part with more than someone you have never met.  To approach a more comprehensive answer, abstract theories come in handy.

A more subtle measure of value is “welfare”.  It is a concept that permits comparison between how different people might assess an improvement in an individual’s wellbeing: your mother might value an increase in your welfare more than the man on the street.  It illustrates that valuing the same person from different perspectives is not necessarily a matter of objectivity: it depends on the individual’s relation to the valuer.

How, then, might we value different people when looking from the same perspective? Ought I to place the same value on the welfare of Helmut Kohl and Ashley Cole?

The concept of diminishing marginal utility of income explains how an extra unit of welfare will be worth more to the less wealthy.  Say you, the reader, possess £10, and I, the impoverished writer, possess just £1.  An additional £1 of income will double my assets but increase yours by just 10%.  The corresponding increase in welfare is smaller for the wealthier individual; and therefore, when seeking to maximise welfare, some argue that it is morally necessary to allocate the extra unit of welfare to me.  These important questions of redistribution within generations already register on many people’s political consciousness, but diminishing marginal utility is also relevant to future welfare arguments.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006) asks the really vital question: should we, people living in the present, value welfare the welfare of future generations identically to our own?

If we judge each successive generation’s welfare as subsidiary to our own, after no more than a few centuries, generations will possess no value at all.  This construction has startling implications for policy decisions.  The classic example is drawn from the world of environmental science, where the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be most keenly felt by our descendants.  With valueless future generations, any policies to mitigate climate change become pointless.  We must therefore engage with the questions of justice that are raised in intertemporal policy decisions, and judge how we ought to value future welfare versus our own. 

Policymakers do have a tool for making decisions about valuing the future, even if they don’t tell us about it.  For politicians it is unnecessary to raise an issue that is complex, confusing and bound to be controversial, especially when issues of intergenerational justice rarely make it to the top of the public’s agenda.  We have seen, during the election, a focus on personalities and the diametrical policies of oppositions, rather than how much consideration we should give to future generations. This party politics is your fault. Politicians who appeal to ‘your grandchildren’ are exploiting your self-interested, dynastic instincts.

Anyway, in 1928, a Cambridge economist, aged just 24, created this mechanism for ascribing a value to future welfare.  Moving the above discussion away from ethicists, who had discovered the problem of “intergenerational equity”, and placing it in an economic framework, the model that the young Frank Ramsey produced is genuinely enlightening and exciting.  John Maynard Keynes described Ramsey’s model as having combined scientific and aesthetic qualities that challenged Thomas Carlyle’s notion of the “dismal science” of economics.

Ramsey’s formula calculates a “discount rate”, which tells us how much a benefit enjoyed in the future is worth in the present.  The rate is defined by the two motives we might have for placing less value on welfare enjoyed in the future.  Firstly, economic theory tells us that future incomes will be higher and that, as a result of diminishing marginal utility of income, additional units of income will generate less welfare in the future.  This is a reason to sacrifice future income for current income, and thus future welfare for current welfare.  Motive two is the one we are really concerned with here.  It says that welfare is worth less in the future, simply because it will be enjoyed in the future.  The proper term for this is “pure time preference”.  These two factors combine to give a percentage at which we can legitimately reduce income, and consequently welfare, in future years: the discount rate.

Discount rates are used more extensively than might be expected and are to be found in any area of policy where value must be ascribed to human welfare.  Transport ministries employ discount rates to determine whether a certain safety measure ought to be employed and health departments use them to decide what equipment to invest in.  Each makes a judgment about the value of someone’s welfare – of someone’s life.  In environmental policy, discount rates have a crucial role in deciding the extent to which we want to abate climate change to maximise welfare overall.  Due to the long time horizons involved, the choice of discount rate becomes vital: Neil Wallace, the economist, tells us that even a small change has an enormous impact on where the cut-off line is between someone being morally considerable or not.  If we set too high a discount rate, we remove a whole swathe of future people from having consideration in our policy decisions.

The first explicit discussion of discount rates in a public forum occurs in a 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.  Despite having in many respects similar content, this generated little of the interest that the publication of the Stern Review aroused on its release by the UK Treasury in October 2006.  This report has been the focus of much comment, both positive and negative.  In particular, its economic model has been praised as widely acceptable to governments, and is therefore perceived as appropriate for public policy decisions.  The Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz believes “it provides a comprehensive agenda – one which is economically and politically feasible – behind which the entire world can unite in addressing this most important threat to our future well being.”

This report has facilitated a new discourse that separates the normative and the positive, that is to say, looking at the way people do discount future welfare in their daily decisions as different to how we should discount future welfare.  It has renewed the question of how to value future people.  By setting the rate of pure time preference at zero, Nicholas Stern’s fundamental thesis proposes that we ought to value the welfare of current generations on a par with that of everyone who will ever live.  He tells us that a superior valuation of your granddaughter’s welfare, in comparison to her granddaughter’s, is morally insufficient.  It is a direct contradiction of a widely observed condition that Arthur Pigou famously called a “defective telescopic faculty” whereby people are impatient, selfish and short-sighted. 

Criticism of Stern, which after four years is approaching coherency, is not as compelling as it could be.  It has focused on the idea that the selected discount rate makes a judgment about future people that is inconsistent with real decisions made by individuals.  It has been observed that people actually place relatively high discount rates on the future in their everyday actions.  “Defective telescopic faculty” is related to an important philosophical tradition originating with David Hume, a tradition that considers the welfare of those emotionally closer to us as more valuable.  Being closer emotionally makes a nearer temporal location likely.  So an adaption of Hume’s concept provides justification for treating the welfare of those in closer generations as more valuable. 

This critique of Stern’s model, along with many others, argues that his model places too much weight on the distant future.  But not everyone with a “defective telescopic faculty” is convinced.  Charlie Brooker recently called time “the strangest substance known to man” because we “remain stubbornly wedged into narrow individual pockets of time”.  And he is right.  We are unable to see the world in terms of the future.  And this is the primary distinction to be drawn: between high individual discount rates – those you or I might employ in discounting our future consumption over a period of a few months or years, and social discount rates, where the rights and interests of everyone who will ever live must be taken into account.  Because policymakers must not only take account of present, but also future citizens, high discount rates are reasonable. 

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the most coherent critique of Stern suggests that his model may not protect the interests of future people far enough.  Instead, it contends that we ought to confer rights upon generations who do not yet exist, ensuring that they have a quality of life and available resources commensurable to our own.  Creating such a model might require us to save much more for the future than proposed even in the Stern Review, severely reducing our quality of life to guarantee that future people can have an adequate existence. 

While it is instinctively sensible to reject the notion that people living in Luton have fewer rights or less intrinsic value than people living in Luanda or Los Angeles, does the same instinctive logic apply when comparing your grandchildren with people who do not yet exist, or might never exist? This is a conundrum that they will inherit.

How we value the future has a considerable impact upon the decisions we take today.  It is time that these ideas were pushed further into the public sphere.  Then the voting population might be better equipped to judge policies and account for the value of future people.  

In the UK, the most exaggerated, important and/or interesting (I lump for ‘fun’) general election campaign in recent history, is about to end. 

gnome has been on a short holiday. This has not been due to overexcitement, nor party-political angst. We will be returning with more writers and offline things soon. 

While gnome thaws, we bring to your attention GIF PARTY. Perfect for a post-GE e-card, or whatever.

It is the work of Molly Lambert, managing editor at This Recording.

An immaculate smart-casual read, (with mp3s), This Recording deserves time. 

posted by Ossie Froggatt-Smith.

Have you been feeling that contemporary politicians are a bit soft lately? That they’re all a bit gooey when it comes to the economy? That they really should stop waffling on about the trivialities before the country starts to crumble?

Tenuous food puns aside, the political process has been marred by some rather unsavoury goings-on of late, and the joker in the House of Commons who feebly shouted “a plague on all your houses” is arguably the most representative expression of the disenchantment felt nationwide. What better way to make politics more palatable, then, than a Parliamentary Waffle House?

Bompas and Parr, the cultural gastronomes that describe themselves as “architectural foodsmiths”, have set up a Parliamentary Waffle House near Carnaby Street. Each item on the menu will correspond somehow to one of the three major political parties, and orders will be tracked directly by a live action swingometer that gauges the mood of the country as people vote with their mouths. 

Ignoring the fact that my political tastes and my more basic appetites may not match (though according to cultural theory, and as anyone with a passing familiarity with the Guardian’s food pages knows, they probably do), this project is no mere lighthearted sweetener to the altogether more grueling gruel of stodgy politics. Rather, I see Bompas and Parr’s ingenuity as signaling a new era of political engagement. 

In an age where commodification begets publicity and desirability, the act of boiling down political allegiances to a treat that can be bought and sold makes the whole affair infinitely more desirable. Just as Katharine Hamnett’s 1980s slogan t-shirts commodified social causes from safe sex to saving the environment, we seem to like our politics best when we can make it a part of our personal identity, and can display that choice by wearing it emblazoned across our chest, or popping it into our mouths.
On the other hand, what’s all the more appealing about Bompas and Parr’s digestible politics is that, much like in the confines of the ballot box, your allegiance can be completely secret. You may profess to find Tory initiatives unpalatable, but if you can scoff the waffle down as quickly as possible, your friends need never know. 

by Sarah Sternberg

Tickets for the Waffle House’s Meal Deal can be bought here.