Hair, music and bad journalism

On the train yesterday I stood in front of a heavyset young man in his twenties who spent the entire 10 minutes between Yutenji and Shibuya gazing at himself in the mirrored screen of his cell phone whilst making minute adjustments to his carefully tousled hair. It obviously took this young man considerable time and effort to achieve  a look that said "just fell out of bed, slipped on a trendy sweatshirt, and ran my fingers through my hair - but I'm not a hobo."

In fact not only Japanese men, but Hong Kongers are inordinately vain about their hair, and prone to extensive sessions of hair-adjustment on public transport, smoothing here, lifting there, so that they look like they have just stepped out of a wind tunnel or the chair of a demented hairdresser. Or maybe just stepped out of their Ferrari. Many seem to be emulating the hair styles of manga characters. A quick search of manga hair online suggested one explanation: manga characters have similar eyes and so hairstyle is a way to differentiate characters. It is one of the pleasures of Tokyo public transport to observe the infinite creativity of male hairdressing at work in Asia.
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Last night I returned  to choir practic eafter a long hiatus, and what a joy it was to sing for two hours! Most members of the British Embassy Choir were present, as far as I could tell - that was very cheering. Our choir director Steven is an exceptional teacher who and explains so clearly why we should interpret the music in a certain way, while sharing his deep musicological knowledge - its like a lecture/practice. We have been working on Bach's Mass in B minor, which I sang last year in Hong Kong and so  I am liberated from the stress of sight-singing (I am atrocious at it) and free to simply appreciate the amazing complexity and beauty of the music. Unfortunately we lost too much time to be able to perform the entire Mass as planned in June, and will therefore present only parts of it along with some short pieces by Haydn, Schutz and a couple more obscure baroque composers. More when we have dates for our charity concert.
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Reading news coverage of Japan over the last few weeks has revealed the truly atrocious  level of much of what passes for journalism. To be fair, journalists are under pressure to submit a lot of copy at short deadlines, so do not always have time for in-depth research. But sometimes they are simply lazy, stupid and attention-grabbing.

I was delighted to find that someone had set up this Journalist Wall of Shame, which lists some of the most egregious violations of the "fair and unbiased" code. These are ranked by severity on a scale from one to ten :

1 - 2: Probably unintentional, and based on bad info that seemed legit
3 - 4: Not malicious, just misunderstanding of the situation
5 - 6: Reporting without checking easily-confirmed facts; lazy as opposed to malicious OR just dumb fluff piece using human tragedy as a background
7 - 8: No fact checking; printing rumours as fact; sensational story more important than actual truth
9 : Fear mongering
10 : Hysterical fear-mongering along with racial/cultural/political bias
11 : Satan

My peeve of the week was an opinion piece on Slate.fr by Jacques Attali, a respected French economist, former head of the EBRD, former "sherpa" to François Mitterand. I was happy to find an forum where I could publicly excoriate him. I ranked it an 8. Obviously, he is more comfortable with numbers above 10⁶ than below 10^-6 . This just goes to show that even intellectuals can be intellectually lazy.

I'll also take advantage of this opportunity to point out that the French government (which Mr Attali served during the 1980s - the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was in 1985) argued that nuclear testing in Polynesia similarly posed no health risk to  populations nearby because the amounts of radioactivity, though "higher than normal", were still well below the levels considered dangerous to human health. This is exactly what the Japanese government and many experts have been saying: dangerous to plant workers, probably a disaster for the immediate area around Fukushima, but not for Tokyo. the Australians and New Zealanders at the time were not persuaded by the French arguments and there was considerable diplomatic tension as a result (I worked at the French embassy in Canberra in 1993 - so I remember...). Similarly, I suppose, many outside Japan believe the information provided by the Japanese government cannot be trusted. But for someone with Attali's resumé to take the high moral ground on this issue is highly disingenuous.

There, I got it off my chest, and need not bring it up again. Pace, French friends, I love you dearly.