Keith Mansfield

I’ve always disliked The West Wing, primarily because it peddles the myth of brave and decent politicians, always doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. In reality I suspect the public prefer not to think about the dirty deals and corrupt and seedy goings on behind closed doors, which makes The Thick of It more my cup of tea – maybe that’s the UK/US divide? Of course I’m not saying most politicians don’t enter the fray with the best of intentions, but they universally seem to disappoint and the longer they hang around, the more they disappoint. Power corrupts. Even the scent of power corrupts.

So full marks to Ides of March for telling the down and dirty, shabby story of how politics always seems to turn out. Last Wednesday I joined George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood on the red carpet for the UK premier. To really appreciate a movie, I try to read as little as I can about it beforehand, so I can watch at face value. Because of that I can admit my ignorance by believing we were likely to have some kind of retelling of the Julius Caesar story (by coincidence the play I studied for my O level Shakespeare), so I entered the Odeon Leicester Square confident of making the necessary connections between the film and the Bard. Not a bit of it.

The bfi (the British Film Institute in official lower-case letters) is a great institution and a former employer of mine, but their organization often leaves a lot to be desired. I ended up being sent to various spots around central London to collect my tickets, meaning I only reached the red carpet about one minute before curtain up. I ran past George Clooney being interviewed without noticing, sat down in my seat and then saw the whole shebang being projected on the cinema screen.

As part of the bfi London Film Festival, my old colleague Sandra Hebron (it’s her last year as Artistic Director of the LFF) called Clooney up on stage where he proceeded to share a few jokes and introduce various cast and crew. Then the curtains parted and we were treated to 101 minutes of an intriguing thriller, even if the expected links to Shakespeare were missing.

This is the fourth film Clooney’s directed. In front of the camera he plays Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and leader in a two-horse race with a Senator from Arkansas. What I loved about the movie was that it’s not The West Wing – it shows just how sordid the realpolitik can be, and all credit to Clooney he’s right at the heart of it. The Ides of March of the title refers to the date of the key Ohio primary, which will fall on 15^th March and help decide the contest.

The US Primary system has always seemed flawed to me because (in my doubtless limited understanding) it seems anyone can get to vote to decide the preferred candidate. All well and good if it’s only people supporting the party concerned, as they have an honest interest, but I’ve always thought the other party (in this case the Republicans) should rally their voters to support the weakest opposing (in this case the Democrat) candidate. That’s what’s happening in Ideas of March, and it’s embraced by Paul Giamatti’s Tom Duffy who’s campaign manager for the underdog from Arkansas because he thinks it could win them the White House.

Morris’s campaign team is led by the always-brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman as Paul Zara, working alongside second-in-command Ryan Gosling’s Stephen Meyers. There’s also intern Evan Rachel Wood as Molly Stearns. Her dad is  leader of the Democrat National Council so she has all the right connections to land a temporary job in the campaign office.

In the main the movie follow Gosling’s Meyers in a magnificent performance. His (and our) knowledge of what’s going on around him is limited and he has to act as he sees best given the circumstances he finds himself in. The best of the screenplay is the flirting between Gosling and Wood, and Clooney’s West Wing-esque campaign interviews and speeches. I bet there are plenty of real-life Democrats wishing they had screenwriter Beau Willimon as a speech writer.

When you’ve grow up with the sickening bullying spin doctoring of real-life Alistair Campbell or his celluloid double Malcolm Tucker, you get the feeling Zara should have been far more on top of things and people than appears to be the case, which is one of the weaknesses of the movie, and much hinges on a meeting between Meyers and Duffy that seemed very innocuous to me. But if you can get over those two creaks in the story the rest of the film unfolds to give a real humdinger of a thriller and one of the must-see movies of the year.

Posted in America, Cinema, Film, Previews
Tags: Alistair Campbell, Beau Willimon, bfi, British Film Institute, Evan Rachel Wood, George Clooney, Julius Caesar, London Film Festival, Malcolm Tucker, Movie Premiers, Odeon Leicester Square, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sandra Hebron, The Thick of It, The West Wing

The science and even the popular press are filled with excitement at the moment after the OPERA experiment at Europe’s giant particle physics laboratory, CERN (to which I applied for a summer job when I was 16, but that’s another story). Apparently, neutrinos sent from CERN and captured at Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory about 730 km away are arriving faster than scientists thought physically possible – faster than the speed of light travelling in a vacuum.

I had to write about this because the news reporting has really annoyed me. Every announcement has said that Einstein might be wrong because he (special relativity) says nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Poppycock! (As I’m being polite.) What the theory says is that nothing that has what scientists call “rest mass” can travel at the speed of light – there isn’t any block on things travelling faster. It’s always slightly surprised me that in a discipline where mathematical physicists are used to things called discontinuous functions, I rarely hear of people willing to accept that something could go from “slower” to “faster” without having to “equal”, but it might be possible.

One argument against travelling faster than light is that, although there are solutions to Einstein’s equations, they contain the square root of minus one which we sometimes call an “imaginary” number (as opposed to other numbers that are called “real”). This is a brilliant example of mathematical spin and how it has actually damaged our understanding of mathematics and the universe. There is nothing less real about these imaginary numbers than what are called the real ones. It’s actually by combining both set that we achieve a far deeper understanding of the mathematical and physical universe. But way back when they were first introduced, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Decartes was very distrustful of them so coined the term imaginary as a pejorative description, hoping it would mean they didn’t catch on. He’s got a lot to answer for.

What is a neutrino? Like the similarly named neutron, a neutrino carries no net electric charge (compared with other familiar subatomic particles such as electrons (-1) or protons (+1). Unlike the neutron, the neutrino has almost (but not quite) no mass. Having no charge and almost no mass makes a neutrino extremely difficult to detect.

Back to relativity! Anything travelling faster than light in relativity yields solutions including the square root of minus one which people have interpreted as meaning travelling backwards in time. That’s the reason for the joke that’s currently doing the rounds on the twittersphere:

Barman: “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t serve neutrinos in here.”

A neutrino walks into a bar.

The idea of time travel in physics isn’t as unusual as nonscientists might think. In fact travelling into the future is completely straightforward and not disputed. Even if the time comes when relativity is superseded by a better theory, it will have to allow for the possibility of time travel into the distant future as we know full well how to do this (you just move very quickly) and have demonstrated it experimentally. However, as I mentioned in a recent article on the Johnny Mackintosh website, we can consider an antimatter particle to be the same as a particle of normal matter but travelling backwards in time – that’s how a notation called Feynman Diagrams actually work.

One of the reasons relativity came about was due to the unexpected results of the Michelson-Morley experiment back in 1887 which showed the speed of light didn’t vary, even if you changed the way you yourself were moving. Could it be that people will look back on these OPERA results in a similar fashion? Although we can’t yet rule it out, I doubt it. Nowadays we realize that there is an amount of uncertainty in every observation and experiment – statisticians possibly occupy the most pivotal role in the interpretation of results. And in an experiment such as this which is so incredibly complex, there are a lot of uncertainties that have to be quantified. It only takes the most fractional error somewhere for these results to be off by enough to bring the results back into line.

For instance, CERN can’t make the neutrinos in short enough bursts that there’s a gap between them leaving Switzerland and arriving in Italy (so they use statistical methods to infer which are which). Then the neutrinos don’t actually travel round the Earth – they go through it – so we can’t directly measure the distance they travel. We use light to measure distances accurately around Earth by bouncing it off satellites, but the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum – it is slowed down in different media and by different phenomena so it becomes hard to measure this distance as precisely as we want. And how can we know exactly how far away the satellite is. In fact I’ve just published a book on a technique called Nonlinear Filtering that tries to answer these sorts of questions and will be a technique the CERN scientists have used. And then, probably far more important, there are delays in electrical circuitry and clock speeds.

But it’s brilliant that CERN has released the conundrum – it shows a problem in action and is especially brave because everyone thinks the results are almost certainly wrong. I applaud them for asking the world to scrutinize this when they couldn’t find the error themselves and, whatever the final outcome, new things will be learnt as a result. And it’s always a great day when theoretical physics makes it into the news bulletins.

Posted in Science
Tags: Albert Einstein, CERN, Descartes, Feynman Diagrams, imaginary numbers, michelson-Morley, nonlinear filtering, Opera, relativity, special relativity, speed of light

Ever wondered how to get ahead in advertising? Upon leaving university I tried and failed, but have always had a love of the ad world. Here’s a piece I wrote for Tracy Ann Baines’ blog, Tall Tales and Short Stories. The blog’s a really impressive piece of work and is now ranked in the UK’s Top 10 Children’s Literature blogs. My little article is about structure, using one of my favourite ever commercials as the example, and is called Storytelling in 60 Seconds.

Posted in Battle for Earth, Publishing Industry, TV
Tags: advertising, book blogs, children's books, Earth stops spinning, Gripping Stuff, Nessun Dorma, Pirelli, Tracy Ann Baines

It’s ultra busy the day before publication of Johnny Mackintosh: Battle for Earth.

On the Quercus Books blog (Quercus is my publisher) you can read my post about Doomed Teddy Bear Love.

On the brilliant Book Zone for Boys website you can read another of my posts, this time on the coolest way (we’ve yet come up with) to land on another planet.

Then, over at www.JohnnyMackintosh.com, there’s a piece on Jo Rowling’s and Harry Potter’s influence on the Johnny Mackintosh books.

What are you doing still here? Go and get reading!

Posted in Battle for Earth, Harry Potter, Johnny Mackintosh, Mars, music, Publishing Industry, space
Tags: Book Zone, Harry Potter, JK Rowling, Jo Row, Quercus, Teddy Bear

With my third novel publishing on 1st September 2011, pop over to the Johnny Mackintosh website for the latest news. I’ll be posting a series of pieces on the influences on Johnny Mackintosh in the run up to publication (and probably just after depending on how quickly I can write them).

Join in the conversation about the new book on Twitter using hashtag #JMB4E.

Posted in Johnny Mackintosh
Tags: authors, children's fiction, New books, publication, science fiction, series novels, YA books

After finally downloading some of my pictures, here’s a belated post about summer fun. If you’ve never been to the Glastonbury Festival you might be labouring under the misapprehension that it’s a music event. In fact, you could have a great time in the fields of Worthy Farm if you don’t do to see a band at all. A city of two hundred thousand people, three miles across, descends on the Somerset countryside and it is a city of wonders. I think the first time I went was 1992. I remember catching sight of the place and thinking I had stumbled upon Tina Turner’s Bartertown, from the Mad Max movies. There was just so much going on and here are a few pictures away from the music side:

Much of this year’s art was on a gigantic scale, set in some sort of post apocalyptic dystopian future. Here in an area of the site known simply as Block9 is “The London Underground”, a 50ft tower block complete with a crashed Tube train near the top.

Opposite “The London Underground” is another extract from an urban cityscape, the magnificent “NYC Downlow”. Dare you cross the road to enter what for the Glastonbury campers might still appear to be luxury accommodation. Yes the bathroom’s exposed to the elements but, hey, at least there’s a bath.

Shangri-La was a nearby area of the site that had “been contaminated”. It was a Blade Runner-style world with a mixture of hope and desperation. You entered underneath a neon banner proclaiming “We are all sky” which is something that’s always had a special resonance for me in my more poetic writing.

There was a rumour (that I started) that Bono’s plane had been shot down on leaving the festival, ending up as another club in one of the outlying fields. Or maybe this is an allusion to Lord of the Flies, that if the mud becomes too deep we’ll all revert to savages. Whichever, I think the styling’s extraordinary.

Here’s your chance to begin again in the off-world colonies. Now we’ve seen the final space shuttle flight it might be the only way to go there.

There are more conventional creations (but none the less disturbing) like this oversize sand baby. Basically everywhere you go that’s away from the very central area you’ll see something.

And, after his performance on the Friday night (I was on the front row, so confess I did see some music) where better to give thanks the Temple of the Blessed Bono?

If you go to the festival in 2013 (next year they’re having a break) then make sure you do more than sit in a field listening to faraway music.

Posted in Architecture, Art, Exhibitions, music
Tags: art installations, Blade Runner, Bono, festivals, Lord of the Flies, music festivals, NYC Downlow, Shangri-La, The London Underground

Have you ever wanted to peek inside Johnny Mackintosh’s spaceship, the Spirit of London? For those out there who don’t know, she sits at 30 St Mary Axe in the City, the capital’s financial district, and also goes under the name the London Gherkin.

Three months after the dreadful events of 22nd February when Christchurch, New Zealand, was struck by an earthquake, the Gherkin is unlocking its revolving doors to make way for the Step up 4 Christchurch Earthquake Appeal. You have the chance to walk or run (there’s even a race) all the way up the 1037 steps to the top or, if that sounds a tad too much effort on a Sunday morning (shame on you), there’s an alternative route to the top via the lifts. Sadly, these will be the conventional type rather than the antigravity ones normally used on the Spirit of London.

The event, taking place on Sunday 22nd May 2011, been organized by the Evans Randall Investment Bank so full marks to them. I was alerted to it by Meg Ellis who’ll be taking part as one of her 100 things for charity. There’s an entrance fee that goes to the earthquake appeal and, if you’re taking part, get yourself some extra sponsorship too.

One last thing, watch out for aliens when inside, including this one in the lobby …

Posted in Aliens, Architecture, Johnny Mackintosh, London
Tags: charity, Christchurch earthquake, Evans Randall, Gherkin, Grosse Geiste, Meg Ellis, New Zealand, Thomas Schutte

Another year, another London Book Fair. You could be forgiven for thinking that very little was different – that everyone’s still talking digital, but no one really knows what the true impact of eBooks will be. Well, that seems to be changing with a vengeance – the news that, in February of this year, eBook revenues overtook trade paperbacks in the US is a tremendous wakeup call for publishers everywhere.

A stripey Cory Doctorow

The Digital Conference, the precursor to the main fair, took place on the Sunday. Although I wasn’t there, much of the Twitter comment suggested that it was the same arguments being rehashed, though Evan Schnittman (ex of Oxford University Press and now at Bloomsbury) created quite a stir by apparently announcing the enhanced eBook is dead. This was just as people were getting their previews of ePub3, next version of the digital format of choice for most eBook retailers apart from Amazon Kindle (which has its own proprietary format).

I arrived at Earl’s Court on the Monday, in plenty of time for “the great debate”, whether publishers themselves will soon be irrelevant. Representing the industry were Andrew Franklin of Profile and Richard Charkin (also ex of OUP and now at Bloomsbury, but with rather more than Evan sandwiched in-between).  The new media specialists on the other side of the camp were Cory Doctorow (founder of Boing Boing) and James Bridle, an editor and technologist.

We all know the industry has to change. Publishing is about connecting the creators of the content to those who need/want to use it – how it’s done can alter, but most of the audience seemed to think there will be a place for it. In my day job I’m a publisher at Oxford University Press, to which Charkin referred a fair bit, stressing the continued need for academic publishing. Franklin was more forthright that publishers are needed more than ever as arbiters of quality. Self-publishing is all very well, he claimed, except that no one would want to actually read the results – we sort the wheat from the chaff. The debate was a little like last year’s Prime Ministerial versions, with everyone queuing up to say “I agree with James” who spoke passionately and sensibly. Charkin did conclude by saying publishers need to bring books out far more quickly, and that they must be marketed continually, not just at the time of launch. Authors everywhere would doubtless cheer those sentiments.

Wayne Davies (left) & Mark Smith (right), co-counders of Quercus

Around the fair, of course I made my way over to Quercus and found its two founders, Mark Smith and Wayne Davies, momentarily free of appointments – it’s always good to chat about Johnny Mackintosh with the bosses. As ever, the stand was buzzing and impressive. I also snapped Australia’s Murdoch Books, who distribute my titles down under.

Last year the Book Fair was a bit of a write-off, disrupted by the ash cloud from Iceland. This year, to all intents and purposes, the British book scene showed itself off as vibrant as ever. An added plus, on the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, was a live linkup between the London Book Fair and the International Space Station. It was great to hear that the astronauts read while up there, and it’s now my mission to get copies of all the Johnny Mackintosh titles into their orbiting library. Though, I can’t help thinking that the ISS is one place where having a few hundred books on your eReader could provide a very considerable advantage over the printed word. Perhaps that’s the best demonstration of the need for eBooks.

Right now, the digital world is still problematic for publishers. Each reader has different requirements so needs different electronic versions (even different ISBNs). There’s also the question of rights – as Doctorow pointed out eloquently in the debate, readers have to be allowed to “own” eBooks rather than simply “rent” them. VAT (that’s sales tax to some of you) is charged at 20% on eBooks but doesn’t apply on print copies, making it hard to meet the market’s expectations. And the spectre of piracy looms large in the background. But unless the industry moves quickly, it’s very clear it will be cut out of the loop and left behind.

Posted in eBooks, Publishing Industry, space
Tags: Andrew Franklin, Bloomsbury, Cory Doctorow, Evan Schnittman, International Space Station, ISS, James Brindle, Mark Smith, Murdoch Books, OUP, Oxford University Press, Profile, Quercus, Richard Charkin, Wayne Davies

I spent Saturday in the company of Duran Duran. Had you told me, back in the 1980s, that I’d do that, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet, in recent years, I’ve had nights out with a fair few of the popstars I grew up listening to or watching on Top of the Pops. There’ve been the likes of Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet, Leee John of Imagination (we danced together to “Just an Illusion” at the rap party of Reborn in the USA) or even the lovely Tereza Bazar from Dollar (who could forget that dress for Hand Held in Black and White?).

Even so, Duran Duran are special and I’ll certainly treasure my crew pass. They were always a cut above the others. While not necessarily regarded as such in their home country, they were the biggest British band in the US since the Beatles. Never overtly cool, they had a superb brand of brilliantly crafted pop that I’ve always loved. In fact, over their thirty year career in music, I’ve enjoyed every Duran single, perhaps with special pleasure reserved for the brilliant “Ordinary World” that led to a revival at a time when it appeared they would fade away, when their music has always deserved to be heard.

It’s thirty years since debut singe “Planet Earth”, a song the band sometimes mix with the underrated “All She Wants Is” in their live shows. There’s an element of sadness that, after all this time, the band are still worth writing about. I once scripted a TV show called Sing it Back with Paul Gambaccini, the walking encyclopedia of music who stated earlier this year that the era of rock ’n roll is over. It seems horribly true. It’s not just that I went to the opera a few weeks ago, and surprised myself by rather enjoying Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. It’s that there’s very little interest or enthusiasm from the young generation in forming bands and actually crafting songs.

On Saturday, Duran played three of their new songs, all of which were impressive, especially “Leave a Light On” which I presume is a single to come soon. The band were recording Duran Duran: One Night Only at ITV’s London Studios, hosted by Christine Bleakley. Very professional, they were working pretty much all afternoon on sound checks and setup, but at times even this band with great stamina (as you’ll know if you’ve seen them live) need a break. At one point I was asked to take to the stage and mime a little bass playing, giving John Taylor a well-deserved rest. I’ve done some strange jobs over the course of my lifetime, but I never expected to become the body double for one of the world’s great heartthrobs.

The Independent on Sunday music journalist Simon Price, perhaps the man with the most distinctive haircut in music since Phil Oakey, also came to the filming. I always see him at gigs and wish now I’d asked him who he feels the next decent band to break might be. There’s lots of hype around Slough’s Brother or Chapel Club from my own East End, but I’m not convinced they have The X-Factor (another ITV show which is, without doubt, brilliant television, but has probably played its part in undermining real music). But this was a night to look back, not forward, and enjoy a great musical legacy, and share a beer in the very crowded green room afterwards – even Frank Lampard popped in after the show to join up with Bleakley.

The show transmits on Sunday 20th March and will be well worth watching for any Duranies still going strong (I’m sure there are lots). Once it’s been seen, I might add a few of my own pictures from the day to spice up this entry, but I’d hate to annoy either the band or the good people of ITV by slipping them out into the ether before the show is aired.

Posted in Gig reviews, music, TV
Tags: Brother, Chapel Club, Christine Bleakley, Die Zauberflöte, Duran Duran, Frank Lampard, Just an Illusion, Leee John, Paul Gambaccini, Reborn in the USA, Simon Price, Sing it Back, Spandau Ballet, Tereza Bazar, Tony Hadley