what makes us better than a neanderthal?

This story was published on CNN’s science blog, Light Years, on April 6, 2012.

How did modern humans conquer the planet? It’s one of the most intriguing questions in the whole of science.

Right now, sitting pretty at the top of the food chain, it’s tempting to see our 200,000-year rise to power since the emergence of the first homo sapiens as a fait accompli: The evolutionary endpoint of a story that got started on the African savannah via the two key innovations of bigger brains and the shift to walking upright.

Yet for our ancestors things were not so clear cut. For a start they were not (as we now find ourselves) the only game in town. When Cro-Magnon (ancestors of modern humans) migrated north from Africa’s Rift Valley to settle Europe around 40,000 years ago, the continent was already populated by another breed of hominid, the Neanderthals. Within a few thousands years the Neanderthals were wiped out and the Cro-Magnon had taken over.

Why was this? What special attributes did our ancestors possess that the Neanderthals did not?

As Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History points out, the fossil record often throws up more questions than answers. Neanderthal skeletons, for example, show that they had stronger builds and the same-sized brains as Cro-Magnon. They were sophisticated tool-makers and animal remains found at Neanderthal sites reveal they were skilled hunters, expert in bringing down large prey such as woolly mammoths. Based on this evidence there is no obvious reason why we made it and they did not.

But Tattersall thinks we need to look beyond the fossil record to find the secret to our success. One place to start looking, he says, is in the Lascaux caves in southern France. Discovered accidentally in 1940 by four children, the Lascaux cave complex contains hundreds of paintings of animal figures in caverns larger than football fields.

Talking at the museum this week to promote his new book, “Masters of the Planet: The Search for Human Origins”, Tattersall describes a visit to the caves as “one of the most profound experiences of my life.” It’s more than just the beauty of the paleolithic art that moved him, however. The cave paintings, he says, prove early man’s ability to think symbolically. Horses drawn on to the cave walls are symbolic representations of real life horses.

No other species of early human left artwork behind and this, he says, is the crucial difference.

The capacity for abstract thinking is the key to our success. All our creativity stems from it. But abstract thinking is not only useful for making art. Early hunters, for example, reporting back on the movement of reindeer herds would be disadvantaged if those hearing the report could not make the mental leap of faith needed to understand that these herds existed even though they had not seen them.

“It is this capacity for ‘what if’ thinking that sets humans apart from all other creatures,” says Tattersall. He says it’s no coincidence that this advance in human cognition came along at the same time as language. “Symbolic thinking is impossible to imagine without language,” he says.

There is no evidence either way to tell us whether Cro-Magnon spoke language with each other, though Tattersall is certain they did. It’s also impossible to say if linguist ability was something early humans acquired or it was innate. Noted linguist Noam Chomsky has argued the later. He believes humans are born with an ability to learn oral language. Hence a toddlers amazing talent for stringing words together in the proper order even though they may never have heard the sentences before.

According to Tattersall, humans may have possessed the ability for language for millions of years before some, as yet unknown, cultural stimulus set it in motion. This is a common trend of evolution, says Tattersall, who has been researching our history through the fossil record since the 1960s and has written several books on the subject. “Birds had feathers for millions of years before they learned to fly. You acquire a feature and, much later on, you find a use for it.”

Of course, the capacity for symbolic thought is just one theory of how humans got to the top of the food chain, and there are many others.

It may have been, as some anthropologists have argued, that in a prehistoric age where nature was red in tooth and claw and fearsome predators such as saber-toothed tigers roamed the landscape, our ancestors were simply the most efficient at killing off the competition. Disease or drought may have played a part; so too may climate change.

That human’s unique way of seeing the world helped them on their rise to becoming the masters of the planet seems indisputable, however. Whether it was the one, big thing that made all the difference; that we may never know.

the tree of the one big fantastic idea

This is an extract from a novel I am writing about a young girl and a street urchin who tells stories that all begin on the same location – the Y-intersection of a crowded city street. This is the first story he tells.

Many years ago when the musicians who got this city jumping were not allowed to buy a coffee in the bars where they played, there was a tree grew on this spot. It was a silver birch and under its shade, on summer days, buskers came to play. One such busker was Marshall J. Marshall. He was a second rate musician but a first class snoozer.

One summer afternoon he lay asleep here and when he awoke he was struck by a revelation. He realized that he would never make it as a musician; that he just didn’t have what it took. This revelation pained him greatly because he loved music above all else in his life. He went about for days in a terrible depression. At the end of a long day wandering the city streets he came back to the square and tipping his hat over his eyes, as was his habit, he nodded off again under the silver birch. A short time later he awoke with a start. He had undergone another revelation only this one didn’t make him depressed. In his sleep he had realized a fantastic new direction for his life.

Since he would not make it as a great musician, he thought, he would do the next best thing. He would listen to music and he would write about what he heard. In this way Marshall J. Marshall became the first great reviewer of music in the city and his stories appeared in all the big papers of the day, making him rich and famous.

One day near the end of his life a reporter asked Marshall how he had come to be a reviewer and he told the man the story of the tree. “I am sure,” he said. “That there is something special about that silver birch. Twice I slept below its branches and twice it showed me how to get on life.”

Sitting at home one day in his luxurious townhouse J. Booker Jarvis read this story. He was the offspring of a wealthy family and lived in a large house in an exclusive neighbourhood of the city. Jarvis lived with his long-suffering wife Mildred. They had no children. Mildred wanted them but Jarvis insisted there was simply no time for such trivialities. You see all Jarvis’s energies were devoted to the important task of inventing. This was his passion above all others. He had spent years on his inventions and taken out innumerable patents. Until now all his attempts at reinventing the wheel had ended in failure. But when he read Marshall’s words Jarvis was struck with an interesting possibility. If he could just get that tree out of the square he could perhaps benefit from its mystical properties. But Jarvis was a shut-in and he had a mortal fear of the city streets, which he regarded as volatile and dangerous. He realised he could not manage such a thing alone and so he asked the son of his neighbor, a precocious teen with quick eyes.

The neighbor’s boy was called Arty.

One night Arty and Jarvis took a cab to the square and to this same Y-intersection where the silver birch grew. With shovels and pitchforks they dug up the tree and wrapping it in a shawl they carried it back home. Jarvis planted it in his back yard and the very next night he slept under it. He slept under it every night for the next month and nothing happened. He began to despair.

Then, one afternoon in late summer he was gardening in his back yard when he found himself getting sleepy. He lay down under the tree and dozed off. When he awoke an incredible idea had occurred to him. He had long lived in fear of impostors breaking into his home in the dead of night and he knew that burglary was a terrible blight on the city. It was an invention for a new type of lock. Jarvis was filled with excitement as he wrote down the calculations.

In a flurry of hand-waving and garbled words he told his wife, who said it sounded like a great plan and smiled with half her mouth. But when Jarvis read the calculations again and he was suddenly filled with doubt. Hadn’t he come up with a hundred ideas that had come to nothing? Why should this one be any different? And hadn’t his wife told him it sounded like a great plan every time he came up with a new idea?

He hesitated over the idea for weeks, mulling it over in his head, wondering if it was indeed the one big fantastic idea or just another dud. This poor nervous wreck of a man thought and thought and thought until his brain ached and he could think of nothing more. Around a month after his first revelation he slept again under the tree and when he awoke he found that once more he had dreamed about the new miracle lock. This time he wasted no time. He went down to the patent office to register his idea.

Imagine his horror when the clerk told him that the design for the lock had already been patented. Jarvis demanded to know how this could be. He had poured through the patent records in the days after his great idea and found no such lock in existence. The clerk said the patent had been filed only two weeks before. Jarvis was dumbstruck. He looked at the signature of the person who had registered the patent and saw in black and white the name of his betrayer. It was Arty, his young neighbour.

Back home he slammed hard with his fist on his neighbor’s door. When the boy’s father opened the door he looked nervously at Jarvis. In a fit of rage Jarvis said the man’s son was a thief and a fraud and he demanded to see him. The old man, who was inclined to see no wrong in his offspring, took great offence at this outburst and shut the door on him, refusing to have anything more to do with his volatile neighbour. For the next few days Jarvis waited by his window for the boy to leave but his wait was in vain. Arty had returned to boarding school in another state and was not due back for some months.

With his terrible fear of the streets, Jarvis would not be able to go find the boy. Instead he decided to wait it out for his return. In the meantime he sat at his back window gazing out on the tree, wondering how the boy could have stolen his idea. The more he contemplated the great deception that had been played on him the angrier he grew, and the more he thought about it the more this anger was directed towards the silver birch. That lone tree came to represent for him all the failures of his life and eventually, unable to contain his disgust any longer, he took an axe and chopped it down. When this was done he returned to his back window but looking out he was still bothered. The stump of the tree remained. Deciding to remove all trace of it from his life he hired a gang of workmen and had them yank the tree up, roots and all.

That night it rained heavily and Jarvis slept fitfully. In the morning his wife awoke and went out to do some shopping. When she returned she found a pile of rubble where her house had once stood.

The firemen dug all afternoons through the remains until eventually they found her husband, in his usual spot by the back window. In his hand he still clutched his morning coffee. At the inquest they discovered that the roots of the silver birch were the devil in the piece. They had reached under the house and when they were pulled up the heavy rain had poured into the holes left behind and weakened the foundations of the building. After the funeral, Mildred moved away to live with her sister in another state in a house by the ocean where she spent her days making socks for children in need.

Gazing out on the sea one day she remembered two things about her married life that had not seemed significant before. The first was that her husband was frequently in the habit of talking in his sleep and the second, in case you haven’t guessed, was that the quick-eyed Arty had a bedroom window that faced onto the yard. Mildred smiled with half her face and turning her head from the window she went back to her knitting.

halloween in auschwitz

A version of this story was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on October 22, 2011.

I was in Krakow as the city was celebrating its independence. It was a fresh winter morning and its sumptuous main square was bathed in sunlight. An ageing soldier with a walrus moustache and a great coat decorated in brass marched at the head of a brigade of veterans. Crossing a small portion of the vast Rynek Glowny (it is the largest medieval square in Europe), the veterans narrowly avoided a florid sick stain on the flagstones that threatened to put an end to the dignity of the moment.

When the Poles kicked out their communist overlords, it was never going to be long before the rest of the world beat a path to Krakow. With its medieval ramparts that date back 700 years, it’s a fairytale city of grandiose castles, baroque churches and moderately-priced beer.

This last factor is less of a draw than in Prague, in the next-door Czech Republic. Nonetheless, a fair volume of Western men tip out of the budget airlines each weekend to drink themselves hoarse. Krakow’s status as a party city owes as much to its student population as anything else, though. Its historic Jagiellonian University is the most prestigious in Poland counting among its alumni the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the late pope John Paul II.

In the evening its present intake mill about in the streets that feed off Rynek Glowny and down vodka shots in the proliferation of bars there or in the cafes off Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter.

I suppose if you were being precious you might consider it a slur on the impeccable beauty of the place, all this hedonism. But that would be to forget the world the decadence replaced.

When Krakow emerged from the tatters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918 (the event I saw memorialized in the town square) it became part of an independent Poland for the first time in over a century. This independence lasted just two decades until the Nazis arrived. After a reign of terror that included the wholesale murder of the city’s Jews, they gave way to the Russians, whose rule was just as unyielding though markedly less deranged. These days a degree of nostalgia for the more kitsch elements of the communist-era is reflected in hostel names like “Goodbye Lenin” and tours of the suburbs and old steel works in a restored Trabant.

No such playfulness can be brought to bear on the German occupation, however. An hour’s drive west of Krakow is the town of Oswiecim. Better known by the Germanic version of its name, it was scene of the biggest act of mass murder ever known. Walking around the death camp of Auschwitz, the most striking thing is the ordinariness of the place. The redbrick prison blocks look like warehouses, the chimneystack above the gas chamber is neat and unassuming.

A second, much larger camp was built a few miles away. Known as Auschwitz-Birkenau it accommodated 200,000 inmates in wooden blocks that resembled stables.

More than a million Jews, Gypsies and Poles were tortured and killed at Birkenau. New arrivals were herded from the wagons and made to form a queue before an SS doctor who looked them over before ushering them to the left or straight on. Left took them into the camp but majority – around three quarters, our guide said – were directed ahead to the four purpose-built gas chambers.

Standing by these same rail lines facing the ruins of the gas chambers I asked our guide Beata if she found it hard to retrace such disturbing material each day.

“Most of the people who work here have some connection with the place,” she said. The first director of the museum was an inmate. So was Beata’s uncle, who was imprisoned here after he was caught by Gestapo officers on the streets of Krakow beyond a 10pm curfew.

A meek-voiced woman with dark patches below her eyes, Beata pointed out the block where he slept on straw mattresses two to a bed, and where he contracted Typhoid and nearly died. “Afterwards, he was one of those who preferred not to talk about his experience,” she said.

At the outbreak of war there were 65,000 Jews in Krakow. Today there are less than 200. This horrendous statistic is tempered a little by the stories of those who tried to help. A third of those recognised as “the Righteous Among Nations” by the Jewish faith were Poles. They include Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who ran a pharmacy in the Krakow ghetto from where he doled out medicine (often for free) to the severely malnourished residents.

Pankiewicz, who published a harrowing memoir of his experiences, is an easier character to admire than Oskar Schindler, whose status as a saviour is complicated by his collaboration with the Third Reich. A war profiteer who came to Poland to spy for the Nazis, Schindler took over an enamelware factory on the edge of the ghetto in the working class neighbourhood of Podgorze where he employed Jews because it was free labour. His workers lived in a camp connected to the factory in conditions of squalor, but it was paradise relative to what was going on outside.

The site of the factory has been turned into a museum that opened in June 2010. It tells the broader story of Krakow during the Nazi occupation as well as the history of Schindler’s Jews.

I went there a Friday afternoon. When I came out it was dark and I walked through Kazimierz, passing a smattering of Jewish restaurants playing klezmer. Outside of bars rosy-cheeked Polish girls handed out vouchers for cheap vodka.

At a restaurant back in the old town I ate a goulash that sat within a bowl of bread. I chugged back a few vodkas and moved on to a bar where the house band was stomping on some American rock standards. On the dance floor vampish blonds vogued beside bleary-eyed men wobbling unsteadily like bowling skittles.

I joined in for a few tracks but I couldn’t get into it. Back on the streets the ghosts of the past crowded in on me. The past intrudes on you here in that way that it must in places where true horror has existed. As I walked along I thought about Beata’s uncle, back in Krakow after the war. How often had he repassed the spot where they arrested him in the years that followed? Crossing the square under the town hall tower I passed the site of the morning parade. A drunk young Brit, his hair jelled flat like a set of railings, approached me. “Mate. You know any strip clubs?”

There was a restaurant called “Roasters”, I said, where they showed boxing on plasma TVs and the girls wore hot pants. This information didn’t seem to satisfy him and he squinted at me suspiciously. “Nice place Krakow ain’t it?” He said eventually.

“Lovely,” I said.

“Been to Auschwitz?”

“Yes.”

He squinted some more and shaking his head he said angrily: “Nazi bastards!” And the young man staggered off up the square, narrowly missing the atomic stain that still decorated the otherwise pristine flagstones.

on the trail of native america

A version of this story was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Sept 10, 2011.

On a groggy late summer’s day on Manhatten island I’m taking refuge in the marble-domed George Gustav Heye Center, near the start of Broadway, admiring two pieces of flint. Not just any pieces of flint. Dating from between 11,000 and 13,500 BC, these are among the earliest evidence of Paleoindian culture in any museum collection in the world. Each has been carved in fluted points a few centimetres long.

To archaeologists, they are Clovis points. To the rest of us, they are easily recognisable as the lethal tips fashioned by early hunters before being fastened to wooden shafts to make spears. Aside from their antiquity, the really interesting thing about the spearheads is where they were found: just 320 kms north of here in Washington County, New York State.

So when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that later bore his name to claim New York on behalf of the Dutch East India Company in 1609, the natives who greeted him were part of a continuous occupation that had gone on for millennia.

Yet in less than 400 years they have almost completely disappeared.

Back in Hudson’s day, there were no such countries as Canada or the United States of America. Now I’m in north America’s largest city on my way to a native American festival across the border to learn more about the sad decline of such a proud culture.

I begin at the George Gustav Heye Center, opened in 1994 in the historic Alexander Hamilton US Custom House as the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. The spearheads, like most of the collection, were gathered by George Gustav Heye himself, a New Yorker who quit Wall Street in the late 19th Century to indulge his passion for Indian artefacts.

Heye was one of the few men of his era interested in preserving the continent’s pre-Colombian past, amassing 800,000 pieces in his lifetime. He opened his first museum in 1922 in order, as he put it, to “unveil the mystery of the origin of the red man”. Yet despite his best efforts little material evidence of Manhattan’s native history has survived.
There is the name of course. Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata written in the logbook of one of Henry Hudson’s officers and meaning “island of many hills” in the language of the Lenape Indians who lived there. There is also the route of Broadway, which follows an old Indian trail.

Ironically, the most striking example of Native American craftsmanship in the city in existence today are the skyscrapers. In the Twenties and Thirties Mohawk Indians were employed in the construction of some of New York’s most iconic landmarks, including the Empire State – sadly, because they worked for such low wages and reputedly had such good heads for heights. Like the Lenape, the Mohawks were native to New York State and a large proportion of them were driven inland or had their population decimated by disease in the wake of European colonisation.

Famously, the Lenape lost Manhattan in a treaty with the Dutch in 1626 in exchange for $26. What’s less well know is that the reason they gave away their homeland so cheaply was due mainly to their having no concept of land ownership. To the Lenape, you could no more own the land than you could the sky. And anyway, they believed the Europeans merely wished to share the island with them.

The Lenape were exiled to Oklahoma. But the majority of remaining Mohawks now live north of the border on reservations in Quebec where I am now heading to visit a Native American festival being held in Kahnawake Mohawk territory on the south shore of Canada’s mightiest river. One of the festival organisers tells me that Kahnawake means “place of the rapids” in the Mohawk’s native Iroquoian language.

We drive there on a grey afternoon, crossing over the pregnant waters of the St Lawrence and into the reservation. Battered clapboard houses, gas stations selling cliché Indian souvenirs and scores of smoke shacks line the roadside (tobacco is sold tax-free on the reserve).

The streets are deserted, the houses shut up and the only sign of life is a few scattered children playing on porches. My host Jean takes me to a café where an old photo of the town’s lacrosse team hangs on the wall. Lacrosse, like the smoking of tobacco, is one Native American tradition that caught on with the colonisers. We sit outside watching vast cargo ships slip by on the St Lawrence Seaway, the canal linking the Atlantic to the Great Lakes that runs through the reserve.
“The locals are wary of outsiders,” says Jean in hushed tones. “They prefer to be left to themselves.”

The Mohawks came here from the 16th century onwards. Since then they’ve been involved in a long resistance struggle that continues today. In 1990 the nearby Mohawk community of Kanesatake was involved in a land dispute with a local mayor that ended in a violent standoff and the death of one police officer.

A twenty-minute drive from the Mohawk communities, Montreal feels like another world. Established by French fur traders around the same time the Mohawks came to the region it has developed into Canada’s second city and the country’s cultural capital, with over 100 festivals taking place throughout the year. With a largely bilingual population speaking French and English, it is a friendly, cosmopolitan town that offers a nice melange of Gallic charm and North American practicality.

The city’s annual Just for Laughs comedy festival is finishing and a fashion festival is about to get under way, but I am here for the First Peoples Festival, a 10-day celebration that brings together indigenous artists, musicians and filmmakers from around the globe. Held in the city every year for the past two decades, the festival’s focal point is in the Place des Festivals where traditional teepees are assembled in front of the stage and where a ceremonial flame is lit the first night.

For the opening night the headline act on the main stage is Samian, a rapper from the Abitibiwinni First Nation in western Quebec. A star among the province’s indigenous community, his arrival on stage is greeted by screams from adoring fans and the words from the announcer: “A voice for aboriginal culture.”
He raps in French and in his native tongue, Algonquin, which he learned from his grandmother. “My language is dying out and it’s important I do what I can to save it,” he explains.
Elsewhere there are films, poetry readings and displays of traditional song and dancing.  “This is obviously not Just for Laughs,” says Andre Dudemaine, the chief organiser of the First Peoples event. “We have an agenda to create space for aboriginal artists. There are severe problems burdening our native communities. Unemployment and drugs are the two that come to mind. But there are reasons to be optimistic too, one of which is the festival. Ten years ago a platform like this could not have been imagined.”
We speak amid the gentle bustle of the Quartiers Des Spectacles, where most of the 100-plus festivals locate themselves. I wonder how he hoped to stand out in such a crowded marketplace.
“If you really want to know about the authentic culture of this land then this is the only event that offers that opportunity,” he says. “It is a chance to participate in a living history.”

standing up to bad behaviour

This story was first published on CNN.com on August 13, 2011

As a Brit living in America I have watched the footage of riots and looting going on in my homeland with a mix of sadness and shame. But shocking as the events of the last week have been, they don’t surprise me.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that anyone who has spent time riding public transport in the cities where this civil unrest occurred might echo my lack of surprise.

When I lived in London I took the bus to work every day. Aside from rush hour gridlock, the thing I dreaded most on those journeys was a certain type of adolescent getting onboard.

You could spot them immediately. There was a good chance they’d be clad in hooded sweaters, baseball caps and outlandish sports shoes. Peppering the air with expletives they would strut down the centre aisle and drop heavily into seats, yelling across to one another as if the man in the suit alongside them was no more than a phantom. And woe betide you if you made the mistake of actually engaging them: I have seen teenage girls heap mouthfuls of abuse on a passenger for no other reason than they didn’t like the way he looked at them.

If you don’t live in Britain it’s hard to appreciate just how pervasive this kind of behavior has become. It was part of what the British Prime Minister David Cameron was referring to four years ago when he stated that Britain was suffering from a “broken society.”

This week’s appalling scenes of looting are the worst manifestation to date of Cameron’s stark diagnosis.

The causes are manifold. Even so, when the debate on the riots began in earnest this week the two sides of the political divide reverted to type. The rightwing media were quick to blame neglectful parents, a breakdown of moral values and an indolent underclass with no stake in society after decades of pampering on welfare. The left pointed to the lack of jobs and opportunities in the communities many of the looters came from; they  criticized recent government cuts to facilities aimed at keeping inner-city youths occupied.

But by concentrating all their attention on the criminals, both parties have forgotten to consider the role of the other key player in this story: the British public or, to put it another way, everyone else on the bus.

Let me give you another example from my life. A few years ago I did something very out of character. At the time I was living in Leeds, one of the riot-hit cities. I was riding on the top deck of a bus home from work when a group of teenage boys began flinging coins down the aisle. Beside me sat a young woman with a baby. I shouted at the teenagers to stop, but a few minutes later they hurled a coin in my direction, which, thankfully, hit neither myself nor the mother.

I was shaken up by the experience and when I told friends about it the answer I got was universal: if it happens again, don’t get involved. I understood their concern but the defeatism of the answer was depressing.

Since moving to New York two years ago I have the impression that Americans are better at dealing with this kind of thing. I was in a pharmacy the other day when a young woman pushed past an elderly lady with a walking frame who was trying to get out the door. A customer confronted the girl who noisily protested her innocence. The good Samaritan stuck to her guns and the young woman left looking embarrassed though not quite contrite. In Britain it is rare to see that kind of intervention simply because we are by instinct much less inclined to speak to our minds.

We Brits have ceded our public space to antisocial teenagers. There has been a collective loss of nerve. Most people on the bus prefer to avert their eyes and hope trouble goes away.

This is unsurprising. Nobody wants to be pelted with coins and the consequences of intervening can be much worse. The news in Britain often carries horrendous stories about concerned citizens killed in the streets trying to break up fights or for confronting a gang of young people over some act of vandalism.

But the consequences of doing nothing are evident in all our major cities. With the police apparently incapable of tackling the problem, the hoodlums are given a free rein. Often the product of broken homes or of abusive parents, many of these young people grow up placing no value on themselves or the world around them.

In public this problem is compounded when no one censures them for their behavior. They become emboldened, regarding certain areas of towns and cities (and their public transport systems) as their own personal fiefdom where they can do or say whatever they like.

For some, this destructive path only ends with the intervention of the courts and, eventually, prison, by which point it is usually too late. There is no clear solution. The chronic social deprivation that produces this antisocial behavior is entrenched and will take decades to overcome.

It is also hard to see how ordinary Brits can take back their streets without putting themselves at risk or without descending into vigilantism. Neighborhood Watch programs serve an important role but they are hamstrung by the often chronically slow response time of the police.

Yet until Britons find a way to reclaim their streets, the anarchy we saw explode this week will never be far from the surface.  And, I’m afraid, the passengers on the bus will be in for a bumpy ride.

amy winehouse and the british media

The discovery of Amy Winehouse’s body at her London home gave Rupert Murdoch and his clan a brief respite from an avalanche of bad press, supplanting the  news of the phone-hacking scandal that had remained the lead story for weeks in British newspapers and TV shows.

It is ironic that Winehouse’s death inadvertently took some of the heat off News International, the British arm of the mogul’s media business: The troubled star was frequently a target of the tabloid culture that Murdoch helped to foster. Her battle with her private demons was very public, detailed in a nearly constant stream of lurid tales in the tabloids. The Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper, for example, published images in 2008 of Winehouse smoking from a glass pipe alongside the headline “Amy Winehouse on crack,” with a story claiming the singer had ingested a cocktail of drugs that included crack cocaine during a house party.

But the British tabloids’ casual intrusiveness into the personal lives of the famous must be re-evaluated after the firestorm of revelations about  News International’s news-gathering methods. The scandal began with the egregious story that a private investigator in the pay of the company had hacked the cell phone of a murdered schoolgirl. Up to this point, tabloids seemed to have regarded this predatory intrusiveness as a moral right.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a judge-led and wide-ranging inquiry into the phone hacking that could well result in recommendations for a change in the law. At the very least, the inquiry is likely to come up with proposals on press regulations — and it’s a fair guess that those proposals will deal in one way or another with what constitutes “in the public interest,” the argument defending choices of topics of news stories in Britain.

British newspapers have had an easy ride publishing details of celebrities’ private lives, with the defense that a subject’s high profile makes whatever he or she does in the public interest. The glitch, however, is that the decision about what constitutes the public interest is adjudicated by a watchdog group dominated by newspaper editors and journalists, who have their own reasons for keeping the definition of that term as broad as possible. Critics of the regulatory system insist that this cozy relationship is one of the reasons the tabloid press in Britain has been allowed to get so out of hand.

Another factor behind the tabloids’ often outrageous behavior is the nearly insatiable appetite in Britain for celebrity scandal. It is not a new thing. As far back as the mid-19th century, rumor and gossip circulating about the aristocrat and Romantic poet Lord Byron prompted the politician Thomas Macaulay to note in exasperation that “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

The best-known recent example was the tabloid obsession with Princess Diana. By the time of her death in 1997, the late Princess of Wales was in the U.K. papers nearly everyday; the minutiae of her life, loves and footwear choices scrutinized ad nauseam. Her death was met with public outrage at the paparazzi, blamed by many for the car crash that killed her, and contempt for the tabloids. After briefly toning it down in the aftermath, the tabloids went back to their aggressive coverage of public figures.

Winehouse is the latest victim of this pernicious culture of sensationalism. A worldwide star whose biggest hit was a song about not wanting to go into rehab, her musical ability was matched only by her talent for self-destruction. All this made her perfect fodder for the tabloids. It was a point she appeared to acknowledge in a lyric in her 2007 Grammy-award winning album “Back to Black,” where she sang: “I told you I was trouble/You know that I’m no good.”

Many of the tracks on that album were written about her relationship with her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a man who seemed tailor-made for the role of stock villain in the cartoonish version of reality that dominates the tabloid press.

It is important not to overstate the role of the media in the tragedy of Amy Winehouse’s death — the singer’s troubles ran far deeper than some hostile column inches. Even so, the papers’ bad-taste documenting of her downward spiral bordered on cruelty. Tabloids trumpeted disturbing photographs of Winehouse stumbling barefoot through the London streets, bloodied and disoriented, dressed in tatters. Columnists wrung their hands in false concern at the plight of “poor Amy,” even as their editors turned the star’s descent into a gruesome public spectacle.

It may even turn out that the tabloids were not just prurient observers and chroniclers — a  British journalist reports, citing anonymous sources, that Winehouse, her family and close associates also might have had their phones hacked.

It is too early to know how much of an effect the phone hacking scandal will have upon the tabloid culture; the decline in the sales of newspapers may, in the end, make it a moot point. Yet the very real shock felt in Britain over these two major stories may convince enough people that gawping at the sad lives of troubled people, by any means possible, does no one much good in the long run.

This story was first published on CNN’s website on 26 July, 2011

the other dam

“It’s called ‘Manhattan on the Maas’,” a local said to me my first day in Rotterdam, pointing to the smattering of high-rises that jab the skyline on the banks of the river that snakes in from the North Sea. Then, as if she’d said something grossly presumptuous, she gave an embarrassed laugh: “Well, that’s what some people call it,” she added.

Rotterdammers are absurdly self-effacing when it comes to the charms of their hometown. Almost the first question you hear when you meet someone here is, “So, when do you plan to visit Amsterdam. This inferiority complex is unsurprising in many ways. Amsterdam, after all, is achingly pretty. Its network of canals fringed by centuries-old gable houses provide most visitors with the picture postcard version of Holland they were anticipating. Holland’s second city, by contrast, is less easy to love. Its center was laid to waste by the Germans at the start of the war and though it has recovered remarkably to become Europe’s busiest seaport, it is like the ugly sister who knuckled down to work while her more beautiful counterpart was lavished all the attention.

In Rotterdam, so the saying goes, shirts are sold with their sleeves already rolled up.

In the center this resourcefulness is evident all around you. In the years since the war the flattened landscape has transformed into a wonderland of modern architecture with world-renowned architects like Norman Foster adding their imprint to the city in a series of ambitious building projects.

The best way to navigate the city is by bike. As with Amsterdam there is an excellent network of bike paths and the center is compact enough that all the major landmarks are a short ride apart.

The first stop for anyone interested in the post-war rehabilitation of Rotterdam is the Laurenskerk. The city’s only surviving medieval structure, the church is a powerful symbol of renewal. The Laurenskerk’s imposing tower was the only part that survived the Nazis aerial bombardment in 1940 and in photos taken in the aftermath, the tower is seen alone in a sea of rubble. Walking through its austere and beautiful interior it is hard to believe that most of what you are looking at dates from the fifties. The elegant stone arches that line its nave and transept have been painstakingly reassembled while towering over the vestibule the largest church organ in Europe suggests the ambition that has allowed this city to recover so well.

In front of the church in the large square known as the Grotekerkplein a produce market was underway. Vendors selling traditional local delicacies such as stroopwaffel (treacle-filled biscuits) and kibbeling (deep-friend fish nuggets) were set up alongside Vietnamese and North African food stalls.

At the cheese stand I was offered some samples of Holland’s most famous foodstuff. The British humorist Alan Coren identified two types of Dutchmen – “the small, corpulent, red-faced Edams and the thinner, paler, larger Goudas.” The man doling out the tasters definitely fell into the later. Even so, Coren might have to revise his classifications these days, especially in Rotterdam, which is Holland’s most culturally diverse urban center.

Nearly half the population are from migrant families, with the biggest minority Muslims from North Africa and Turkey. This large scale immigration has caused frictions, the most glaring example of which can be found outside the Schielandshuis Historical Museum, a short walk south of the market. Here a statue was erected to the local politician Pim Fortuyn, an outré character who won widespread support for his harsh views on Muslims (he once told an interviewer he favored “a cold war with Islam”).

His murder by a left-wing extremist in 2002 drew international attention to the country’s racial tensions and challenged the common perception of the Dutch as open and tolerant. Nearly a decade on Rotterdam has a Muslim mayor but the tensions that Fortuyn saught to exploit have not gone away – Holland’s third largest political party is headed by Geert Wilders, whose rhetoric about the tides of Muslims sweeping into Europe is strikingly similar to the murdered Rotterdammer.

Inside the historical museum it was tides of a more literal variety they were concerned about. The area in and around Rotterdam is the lowest in Holland, reaching over six meters below sea level in parts. An interactive map of the changing city down the centuries showed the system of dikes that protect this lowland from the North Sea and the polders, the large swathes of land reclaimed from the sea on which much of present-day Rotterdam is built.

Like the rest of the Netherlands, Rotterdam’s history is inextricably linked to water. Away from the center you can find some of the earliest evidence of this relationship. In the outlying suburb of Delft, a few miles northwest of the city, narrow boats hug the banks of tree-lined canals and the sails of ancient windmills, known as grondzeiler in Dutch, stand dormant in the sun-filled afternoon.

Crossing to the southside of the Maas, the river that splits the city in two, this relationship with water is brought more up-to-date. Riding over the sleek lines of the landmark Erasmus Bridge, designed by Ben van Berkel and named after the town’s most famous resident, the skeletal silhouettes of the cranes that mark the vast container port are visible on the horizon.

Nicknamed De Zwaan (the Swan) for the quirky bend two-thirds up its central pylon, the bridge is located alongside the offices of the Dutch telecommunications firm, KPN Telecom. Another idiosyncratic structure on the city skyline, one side of the telecom tower is tilted and covered in green lights that function as a giant billboard.

A hundred yards upriver from the bridge is the Hotel New York. Dwarfed by the modern edifices nearby, the hotel is one of the few buildings left in the city that attests to its maritime history. The former headquarters of the Holland-America Line, it was a silent witness to the mass migrations of Europeans to the New World. In the last quarter of the 19^th century 130,000 passengers, a large proportion of them Jews from Eastern Europe, were processed through this building. It must have been a profitable venture since the interiors are luxuriously decorated in the Art Nouveau style. The highlights are the beautiful wrought-iron staircase and balustrades that spiral up from the reception area.

In the café-restaurant on the ground floor you can look out on the river. On the day we were there the sky was clear and in the late afternoon sunlight flickered on the waters of the Maas and off the face of skyscrapers on the north shore. Sipping a coffee I watched rush hour traffic cross the Erasmus Bridge, commuters returning home after a day of work in this industrious city, which is much prettier than it would have you believe.

A version of this story appeared in the Toronto Star on 1 July, 2011

of jazz, rock, rap and new york

It was a cold night in Harlem. The speakeasy was down some steps in the basement of a brownstone on West 133^rd Street. We rang the bell and a small, neatly dressed black man with a gold pendant round his neck opened the door a fraction. “Is that you Gordon?”

Our guide stepped out from the shadows and into the thin line of light escaping from the doorway. “I got some guys here itching for good jazz. Think you can help out?”

In the back the band had set up on a small stage: A dusty upright against the wall, the sleek contours of the sax reflected in a solitary spotlight.

“Billie Holiday played here when she was a teenager hustling for gigs,” Gordon said, as the heavyset Venezuelan on piano struck the chords of the first number. “She treaded these same floors.”

From the speakeasies of Harlem to the nightclubs of the Lower East Side and the street corners of the Bronx, New York is a city that lives and breathes music. Almost every genre of popular music has found a home here down the years and many of the greatest musicians of all time have, like Holiday, called the city home at one time or another: Bob Dylan started out in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village; Madonna began her ascent to pop heaven in a crummy apartment in the downtown, juggling playing in local bands with shifts at a donut store.

The city has also witnessed many seminal moments in pop history – the birth of hip hop in the Bronx; The Beatles’ first appearance on American television recorded at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway; the arrest of Sid Vicious for the murder of his girlfriend at the Chelsea Hotel.

Tapping this rich vein of history takes a few days and is best accomplished in the company of one of the handful of tours focused on the musical heritage. The tours are subdivided by genre and usually presided over by amiable obsessives who can give you chapter and verse on the relative merits of bebop or the significance of Joey Ramone’s favorite brand of soft drink (it was Yoo-Hoo in case you were wondering).

Gordon Polatnik runs tours in Harlem. A softly spoken 50-year-old, his mild manner masks a lifelong passion for the neighborhood’s jazz history. He ran a café here for five years mainly, he admits, “so that I could have live jazz on the menu every day.”

His tours reflect this concern with the contemporary scene and feature at least two live performances. In between he led us through Harlem, along streets filled with distinguished brick rowhouses that date back over a century and which first welcomed African Americans driven out of midtown Manhattan in the years before World War I. This migration brought with it dance halls and gambling dens that jumped to the erratic new sounds of jazz and ragtime.

In the roaring twenties prohibition drove the liquor underground into the speakeasies on 133^rd Street, known then as Swing Street. The new law did not dent the party, however, and society figures and celebrities such as Mae West clamoured to the area and to renowned venues like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington’s orchestra were the house band.

These days the music venues are a little thinner on the ground although the Apollo Theater on 125^th Street has been running a talent night every Wednesday for so long that it can boast that Billie Holiday got her big break there.

“The city is a proving ground,” said Gordon as we climbed back up to the street into the crisp air of the Harlem night. “Anyone can come here and get a gig. That’s the genius of New York.”

——–

Standing in front of the downtown tenement Bobby Pinn held up a vinyl copy of Led Zepellin’s Physical Graffiti. Overhead the sky was clear blue and though the sun cast a shadow on the artwork it was still possible to see that the building on the album cover and the one across the street on St Mark’s Place were one and the same.

“Now,” said Bobby, a fast-talking New Yorker with bleached blond spikes and an inexhaustible supply of rock and roll anecdotes. “Which of you is gonna tell me what’s missing on the Zep album?”

Our small band of rock geeks scratched heads in shamed silence as yellow cabs clattered by and skinny young things in black jeans weaved past on the sidewalk.

The tenement on the album has a level missing, Bobby said. Apparently this cosmetic change was ordered by the band after it was discovered that one of the group’s drug dealers lived in the building. “Taking away the dealer’s floor somehow made sense. There’s heroin logic for you!”

Bobby began his rock tour in the heart of the East Village, formerly the Lower East Side. A hundred years back large swathes of European migrants made the streets around here the most densely populated on the planet. In the post-war years this beat-up slum was a perfect haven for penniless artists. Bobby showed us the St Mark’s Hotel, a flop house frequented by Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, who nicknamed the eaterie on the ground floor “the respectable bums cafeteria.”

A hundred yards or so down Second Avenue he pointed out the site of the Fillmore East, a concert venue where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin vied for top billing alongside acts like The Who, who premiered their rock opera Tommy there. On the sidewalk a mosaic plastered onto the base of the traffic lights commemorates the venue, now a savings bank. The mosaic contains the names of bands that played the Fillmore as well as a shard of the guitar Pete Townsend smashed on stage during the Tommy show.

Today the Lower East Side is a sanitised version of its former self, replete with boutiques selling retro clothes and yoga centers (“What we’re rebelling about now is the influx of yoghurt,” said Bobby). But in the late seventies this area was awash with drugs and crime. Nor were these problems confined to the downtown. The city was bankrupt and a blackout in the summer of 1977 led to widespread looting.

Out of this chaos came creativity. The emerging music scenes of punk and new wave were at the vanguard of this creative surge. Homegrown bands like The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie cut their teeth in venues like the legendary CBGB on The Bowery. The Ramones played their first gig there “in front of seven people and the bar dog.”

At the same time disaffected teenagers uptown seized on the chaos to forge a new musical form. JDL is part of the Coldcrush Brothers, a rap act from the Bronx formed in 1979. “Back then the city was in disarray,” JDL said. “Slum landlords were burning down apartment blocks to get the insurance money. These places had no amenities and were deserted. As kids we held parties in them that turned into jams, never guessing this thing we did for fun would turn into a multi-billion dollar industry.”

The former DJ now leads tourists around his old neighbourhood showing them significant markers in the story of hip hop, including the location of the first documented hip hop party on Sedgwick Avenue.

“The reason New York is such a force in music is the diversity,” JDL said. “The drive to make it here is phenomenal. So many people come here to see it, to live it. It’s what makes this the greatest city in the world.”

A version of this story was published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on May 21, 2011

new york street arab

Being some reflections of a man selling art on the streets *

No. 7 – For world peace, sit on my face

A couple of posts ago I complained about being generalized against as an Englishman in America. Now I’m going to entirely undermine myself by conforming to the stereotype by quoting Shakespeare. But not to worry, Old Bill’s a hero of mine and his being dead has the added advantage that, unlike the Royals, I don’t have to read about it in the newspapers every time he gets married or goes to a party in a stupid costume or farts in a restaurant etc.

“All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare. “And all the men and women merely players.”

Today in Union Square the human theater was out in full force. Shakespeare would have loved this place. I think he could have found enough material to get him going on a new comedy, at least a few tragedies. Two tragedies were playing out today on the steps by the southeast corner, just a few yards from where you may recall the sewer monster was beached last time round.

These two bums slept the whole day. They missed the World Falundafa Day celebrations going in the square just a short distance from where they were snoozing. Falundafa (or Falun Gong) is a spiritual practice started 20 years ago and which now claims to have millions of adherents around the world, 70 million of them in China.

The main principal of this “spiritual practice” (“It’s not a religion,” a young man who claimed to have had his life turned around by it told me), the main thing seems to be you have to sing really crappy songs off-key. As a result, watching the celebrations roll out was like witnessing an episode of American Idol filmed live from a mental asylum. I can only imagine what the bum’s dreams were like. Hideous nightmares no doubt soundtracked by screaming sirens and the hounds of hell howling at the moon.

The afternoon’s performances included Mr Wang Chin, who apparently won an MTV vocal competition, singing the catchily-titled “We are aware.” Actually Mr Chin had a decent tenor but “We are aware” sounded like it had been written by a sixth grade music teacher suffering a mental breakdown. According to their promotional literature, the Falundafas are persecuted for their beliefs in China. It is a terrible thing that someone should be persecuted for their belief. For their singing, well that’s another matter entirely…

One man who managed to stay awake through World Falundafa Day was Derek. I call him Derek to protect his identity and because, to be frank, I don’t know his name. I’ve seen Derek in the square quite often and he’s intrigued me. You’ll soon understand why. Today I got some of his story. I was set up next to Elinor, who sells elegantly stylish sketches and prints on wood blocks and cloth. We started chatting with Derek when he wandered by holding up the same sign he does every week.

The sign reads: “Peace through sitting on my face.”

In his other hand Derek holds printouts of photos showing various members of the public (all women as far as I could see) squatting over him as he lays prostrate on the sidewalk. The photos look less erotic than painful and it’s a wonder he hasn’t dislocated his jaw by now.

There are lots of questions spring to mind at this point I’m sure but rather than attempt any amateur psychology on Derek and his strange pastime I’ll just try to repeat as faithfully as possible the conversation we had with him.

“Why do you this?” We asked.

“I like the scent of a woman when she sits on my face. And I think it promotes world peace.”

“Right. And how’s that?”

“Well, I think if more men were able to connect with their masochistic sides then there would be less frustration and less violence in the world.”

“Have you been arrested?”

“I sometimes get hassled. I went to the site of the World Trade Center when Obama was there a few weeks ago and the cops were coming up to me. But when I showed them the photos they thought it was great. A lot of men in uniform are into that masochistic stuff you see.”

“Is it easy to get volunteers?”

“It depends. I think it has a lot to do with my mood. This week I already had four women do it so the hunger is not there as much. When I really want it I try harder to get it.”

“Does it pay well?”

“I don’t get paid to do this. I’m 29 and I live at home with my parents in Brooklyn.”

“How do you get by?”

“Well I get my meals cooked for me and I ride for free.”

“How come you ride for free?”

“Listen. If I can get people to sit on my face then I can sure convince them to swipe me onto the subway.”

All the world’s a stage! Happy World Falundafa Day!

* The title of these blog posts was taken from an essay about New York’s population of homeless children written in 1890. In no way, shape or form is it meant as a reflection on people of Arab descent. I just like the words.

new york street arab

Being some reflections of a man selling art on the streets *

No. 6 – Beached bum: A sketch

“Ha!” Said the fat black girl, a mean look in her eyes. “Now there’s some real New York art.”

The man was laid on the steps that sweep the south side of Union Square, a great corpulent mess of flesh and rags. He faced the sky, an arm hung out to one side. His hair was matted and curled and he had a sinewy beard. The fat girl waited to see if anyone would add to her commentary and then walked off, not quite sure if she had said the wrong thing.

At first I wondered, Is he dead? Then the bloated pile of rags twitched and a face that shone red-brown, the color of mahogany, turned over on its side and snorted bull-like, his eyes still closed. After this I wondered, Is he dreaming?

The man had on a pair of soiled jogging pants that were split at the seam and his shoes were without laces and wedged over his huge clubs of feet. Between his jogging pants and grimy hoodie his gargantuan stomach showed through. It was spotted with moles and the dirt of the street and the great crease that followed the line of his hip bone was deep and long and dark like the sewers that ran beneath us and which may have been from where he had emerged.

Most of the passers-by ignored the sewer monster but every so often one would stop and stare in disbelief, the look in their eyes a mixture of revulsion and pity. Some people began taking photos (this is a photo of sorts). The man was there when I arrived at 8.30 until the police showed up at 11 and woke him.

An hour later he rolled by, rasping and snorting, filling the corridor between the art vendors with his vastness. As I watched him into the distance I noticed the top of his rump was exposed. That was the last I saw of him: thundering down Broadway, pedestrians dodging aside in fright, the massive crack of his arse offering a final, indignant farewell.

* The title of these blog posts was taken from an essay about New York’s population of homeless children written in 1890. In no way, shape or form is it meant as a reflection on people of Arab descent. I just like the words.