Plastic pop

Humming Gil Scott Heron's "Lady Day and John Coltrane" over the past few days I keep hearing the lyric "Plastic people with plastic minds, on their way to plastic homes." Which reminds me of what a bad rap plastic gets in pop--from Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" to David Bowie's backhanded compliment to his "Young Americans"-era music, which he described as "plastic soul". I think the same veiled insult is there in the name of X Ray Spex's Polly Styrene. The least negative reference I can think of is Scott Walker's "Plastic Palace People", which being Scott Walker is so obscure and impressionistic that I can't tell if he's being positive, or negative, or something beyond either category.

But musicians should love plastic! Their acoustic guitar strings are plastic, their plectrums, and drumskins, and keyboard keys, and amp cases, all plastic. Their music has pretty much only ever been recorded on plastic, and played on plastic devices. Without plastic, there would likely be no recording industry to support musicians bitching about plastic.

You can probably tell it's a bit of a hobby horse of mine that plastic is unfairly maligned. I think it was initially looked down on from the mid-20th century as something for the poor--mass-produced so that those who couldn't afford Doulton china could get a Bakelite knock-off and start acting alarmingly like their social betters.

That horror of mass production has bled into the modern view of plastic as a byword for overconsumption. People see it as emblematic of degradation of the environment to support consumerism, which I think is grossly unfair. After all, plastic is waste material converted into something useful.

The viable alternatives are mostly paper, wood, glass, and aluminium, primary products made by the famously eco-friendly timber, smelting, and glassmaking industries. They're not nearly as versatile and, in the case of wood, they're not really recyclable. Furthermore, they're mostly a lot heavier, which means more energy is needed to move them around. Admittedly, plastic is mostly a byproduct of the dreaded petroleum industry, but there the problem seems to be petroleum, not plastic. Plastic manufacture needs hydrocarbons, not crude oil: if we switched to a non-fossil ethanol economy, we could make the same materials from renewable hydrocarbons too.

So I'm going to raise a semi-crumpled beaker to PVC, PET and all the other plastics in our lives. Long may they bend.

Babystemology

I think we can now conclude, per an earlier post, that Anya was definitely waving: on the flight over she spent ten minutes methodically waving to the sleep-deprived mother of the baby in the next seat to us, and she's been doing it ever since.

"Mama" and "Dada" also seem to have definitely settled on their proper signifieds, and since we've had Robs' dog Bonnie staying we're pretty sure she's added "Dog" to the repertoire.

On that subject, Anya *hearts* dogs. She thinks cats are pretty cool too, but Jasper has given her the cold shoulder for so long that she's transferred her affection to a species more likely to reciprocate it. Dogs, being noisy hyperactive creatures, seem better suited to a nine-month-old who spends most of her life crawling after stuff and squealing with delight.

This whole process, like lots of baby development, still feels as much like epistemology as empiricism. We spend as much time interrogating our interpretations of her behaviour as we spend interpreting her behaviour. But with time it gets easier, and I think we knew she was saying "Dog!" as soon as she said it. Though at the moment she's still a bit rusty on the consonants, and it's just possible that she thinks this 40lb sheepdog is a "Duck".

A whole new turf full of earworms

Everyone gets an earworm once in a while--those catchy but irritating scraps of pop tunes that hang around your head like some disgraceful alcoholic uncle, aggressively challenging you: "If your music taste is so great, why are you always listening to me?"

I never thought I'd say this, but I am now officially nostalgic for the days when my earworms were all written by Vanilla Ice and Haddaway.

You see, last week we visited the local toy library and came back with a one-week lease on a musical walker--basically a push-button panel attached to a baby-sized zimmer frame, which plays an array of tunes, remarks and noises. Anya loves two things above all at present: standing and dancing to music. So this pretty much fulfils all her needs, but the side effect is that Kate and I have its electronic witterings pasted over the insides of our skulls.

Driving back from a friend's house today, we both broke into: "Hello, puppy calling, would you like to play with me? / Let's all sing together as we learn our A.B.C." At random times, the words "Dance to the island beat!" pop into my head, followed by an electronic version of that well-known calypso, "I'm forever blowing bubbles". Or "Rock and roll", followed by a bit of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". Whoever designed this thing had a shaky grasp of musical genre.

Of course Anya loves it so I can't complain. And one day she'll grow out of musical toys and I can go back to having Whigfield and MC Hammer taking up my headspace.

But in the mean time, one thing seems particularly uncanny--in the Freudian sense--about this toy. It's got an English accent, a more youthful version of that slightly posh English accent that you hear on train messages and the speaking clock. This just seems wrong. Since I encountered my first Speak n Spell around 1982, there's one thing I've been quite sure of: all toys speak with an American accent.

Gil Scott Heron is dead

I don't normally feel deeply sad over the deaths of public figures or celebrities - it's not like I knew them or anything, and I don't really buy the argument that something special in the world inheres uniquely in these people and is gone when they die.

But I do feel pretty sad at the news that poet/novelist/soul singer/hip-hop precursor Gil Scott Heron is dead. Mainly because I feel sad about his life, and pretty embarrassed about what future generations will think it says about our society.

Certainly, he brought a lot of his misery on himself. He'd been an addict for decades, to pretty much everything going; this New Yorker profile from last year pretty much captures what a life of using had done to him.

But what makes me angry is that he spent about a third of his last decade of life behind bars on non-violent possession charges. For someone who wrote such lucid music about the racial and economic injustices of American society and the withering effects of drug addiction, it's a horrible bitter irony that he ended up crushed in a system that combines all those things. Gil Scott Heron led anything but a model life, but his incarceration seemed to be much more the product of a sadistic justice system than any attempt to reform his own tragic life. Addicts need rehab and support, not the Hobbesian drugs supermarket of the US prison system.

Obviously, Scott Heron's experience is a long way from being unique. And he didn't deserve special treatment just because of his talent. But I think if we looked back at a Coleridge, or a de Quincey, and saw they had spent great stretches of their life in prison because of their addictions, we would wonder at the barbarity of a society that chose to punish a disease rather than treating it. No one deserved the treatment he received, but in the US, 0.7% of the entire population is behind bars. Half that number are inside for non-violent offences, a fifth of the total for drug offences.

Hopefully his music will outlive this system, at least in its current brutalising form. There's already a growing realisation that America can't really afford the lavish cruelty of its prisons.

Anyway, if you want an introduction to the music, 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' is justly his most famous track, while 'Home is Where the Hatred Is' and 'The Bottle' are his best-known addiction tales.

But I'm sending my link to Lady Day and John Coltrane. For one thing, it's a more upbeat and personal song to celebrate a life with. For another, just as Scott Heron is constantly sampled in hip-hop both for the beat and for the conscious reference to black musical history, there's a sense of that going on here in the name-dropping of jazz greats.

But what I think I like best is his sense of bitter, wry irony: the way that this upbeat tune has a huge groundswell of melancholy underpinning the lyrics, which are all about driving off anomie and unhappiness by listening to what is objectively quite melancholy music. Scott Heron was a huge fan of Langston Hughes and this reminds me of the Hughes quote about blues: "sad funny songs--too sad to be funny and too funny to be sad".

Train in vain

Wow. Well I came back to the UK being deliberately contrarian about public transport, which I do think is very unfairly maligned here. London has one of the world's great public metros: compare it to Sydney, where less than a dozen stations see more than four trains an hour in the evening rush, and you realise how little people have to complain about.

Then I had the nightmare journey to work today. Trains were jammed up at Harrow-on-the-Hill; our semi-fast service became an 'all stations' one to pick up the refugees; we crawled through snarls and red lights to Wembley Park, people sardined along the aisles.

But I'm going to be stubborn and stick to my guns on this. Stuff happens when you're carrying one billion passengers a year, and when it's rush hour problems can escalate fast. The Underground is so vast that something is always going to go wrong: the Central and Northern lines alone carry more people than all of Sydney's regional services north to Newcastle and south to Wollongong.

Most importantly, money is being spent to improve the situation. Admittedly, London might be splashing more cash because it's in a pre-Olympics spending binge, while Sydney has been stuck in a post-Olympics hangover for 11 years. But stuff like Crossrail and Thameslink won't be delivered in time for the games, and most of the Overground is pretty peripheral to it.

Basically, I think the political, media and business elites in the UK have come to their senses over the past decade or so and recognised that improving mass infrastructure is a really good way of improving people's quality of life.

The costs look big on paper, but that's because these are necessarily big projects: I'm sure if you totted up what a country spends on rubbish disposal each year you'd get a big figure too, but no one's suggesting we stop doing it. Decent public transport should be seen in the same way, as more a necessity than a luxury. Sydney is a long way away from waking up to that fact.

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Cot acrobatics

For most of Anya's life, she's slept in some sort of swaddle. These have ranged from the standard away-in-a-manger arrangement when she was a newborn; to an odd straightjacket-like thing that pinned her arms by her sides when she was a month or two old; to a y-shaped zip-up swaddle more recently that tends to keep her arms up each side of her head.

We've been looking forward to her growing out of these for ages and now she is finally sleeping swaddle-free. And I wasn't prepared for how hilarious it would be watching her try out different positions in her cot.

For one thing, her night time tantrums have gained massively in terms of variety and personality. Previously, if she woke up hungry you'd find her lying on her back crying, maybe twisting her back a bit and likely kicking up her legs in frustration. Nowadays, it's always a surprise when we go in to her.

Sometimes she'll be sitting semi-cross-legged on the mattress, waving her arms in the darkness like a demented sadhu. Other times, she lies on her front and pushes herself up with her arms, bawling at her sheet like an imperious dowager wailing over a gutter where she's just lost a string of pearls. Kate has even found her standing at her bars, rattling them like she'd been imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit.

I don't mean this to sound insensitive. Obviously it's horrible to hear your baby cry and we only see this stuff because we're in her room trying to cheer her up.
But I remember thinking the same thing when I first heard her cry after she was born. Though it's bred in the bone that a baby's cry should be heart-rending to a parent, beneath that feeling there was something wonderful and remarkable in it: this was some of the first communication between us. Crying isn't so different to talking, and it's much more emphatic.

So given she's still going to cry for food occasionally at night, I quite like that she's doing it in all these new ways. All these cot positions are so filled with character that I can't separate them from one of the things I'm enjoying watching so much at this age of her life: the gradual unfolding of her personality.

Fight or flight

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="If only it was this easy..."][/caption]

So last week we did something we've been dreading for months: we flew all the way to the UK with Anya in tow.

In my childless, penny-pinching youth I thought air travel with infants was a great wheeze. Children under two travel free, so this was basically airlines giving away wads of cash: concentrate on the wads of cash and not the "children under two travel" bit, and what's not to like?

Now I'm actually travelling with a wriggling, giggling, crawling bundle of nine month old baby the scales have fallen from my eyes: cut-price tickets are probably the only way that airlines can persuade new parents to travel at all, except in cases of the direst necessity. In addition to which, there's now some fiendishly complex sliding scale of costs for infant flying, so that the old free kids' tickets have gone the way of the in-flight martini and flight attendants who look more glamorous than haggard.

All that said, it actually wasn't too bad. It helped that we set our expectations very low: we all managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep at a few points during the flight, which counted as a triumph against the benchmarks we'd set ourselves. And jetlag was also a bit of a non-event: as my dad pointed out, Anya's asleep 70% of the time anyway, so it's probably less of an upheaval to shift some of that around compared to those of us who only sleep about 30% of the day.

We were given advice before we flew to hand out earplugs and chocolate to adjacent passengers as a sort of bribe or downpayment on expected yowling. In practice, we never got around to it, which was probably a good thing: no amount of chocolate or foam could blot out Anya's protests when she's at full throttle.