What was great about 2005

As I was saying to a mate the other day 'I'm an enthusiast, not a critic' so here's things I'm enthusing about this year. Obviously this list is pretty subjective - it was probably a pretty shit year for Freedom, Democracy, Human Life, and all the other things you capitalise when you undermine them.
1 Getting and being married to my beloved. What's better than that?
and in no order:
my drum machine. I bought an electribe drum synthesiser and now sit around twiddling knobs making science fiction noises and tapping along to electro records. Class.
Brian Eno's 1994 diary. Perfect toilet book. I love him for the reason that I love Laurie Anderson (meeting her was a highlight of 2005) and Sophie Calle: he makes you feel capable of creating by being interested in the world and engaging with it simply and continusously. They have an idle thought and follow it through; sometimes what follows is art, sometimes it isn't. That's not the point, keeping alive and interested is the point.
Pere Ubu gig: how can they be so great thirty years after they started up? I didn't see that many gigs this year but this one would stand out in any year.
Singing. I started singing lessons, my teacher moved me up from baritone to tenor which makes it hard work. Everything I did when I was singing was wrong. That and the hard work means improvement is immediately audible. At the end of my first lesson she said that being in a choir would be good for me and the started rehearsing next week and would be singing in the National Concert Hall in a month. So I made my debut in the Concert Hall. How cool is that?
Mexico where we went for our honeymoon. I remember going to a Yucutan restaurant in DF (I had already discovered that Mexican food isn't hot at all - they don't use the right kind of chillis except in the Yucutan where they have habaneros) where I had my first marguerita in Mexico, the waiter warned us off one of the condiments so we piled it on. I had a chilli and marguerita buzz. The band was singing so I asked them for the most romantic song in the world for our honeymoon. They sang Besame Mucho (soprano and two tenors) so I added a very loud baritone to the mix to my beloved's embarrassment. Oaxaca was lovely and we bought a beautiful tryptich of oil paintings. The pacific coast (where they shot y tu mama tambien) was marvelous.
Spain in September. We went to two weddings in Spain a week apart in September. The two couples didn't even know each other: the first time they met was at our wedding. We drove around Andalucia for a week and visited tiny towns and had lovely food and fino, and montilla morile. And carried home loads of olive oil which smells of ripe fruit and the farmyard from Baena.
My sauces: they've really improved. I can finally make a nice beure blanc, my gravy is pretty good, I usually have a nice stock or fumet in the fridge so I have a good basis. I've been saying for years that the problem with being a vegetarian is not 'what do you eat?' it's 'how do you make sauces?' I've been promising myself for a few years now to get that sorted out and I'm finally getting there.
Archeology: I started reading a bit of archeology and found it has profoundly influenced my understanding of the world. Never since I started reading evolutionary biology has a science had such an impact on me.

Things that will be great in 2006
Not being sick in a low grade constant, immune system undermining way. I'm really looking forward to that.
Learning to draw. I think that drawing is a basic skill like being literate, numerate, and the ability to make music. I feel inadequate and intend to fix that. I tried before and found it exhausting, which means it is good.
Learning to read music. Well I've got a head start on that - my sight reading has come on from having to read a score recently.
People in work have just suggested that New Zealanders call the year two thousand and sex. Which is good. Northeners do the same thing too.

Happy thanksgiving from the no-control room!

I meant to write an entry last Friday. Only thing was it was supposed to be about the premiere of Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price that I was hosting last Thursday night. I had planned to have somebody from Impact (the retail workers union) and Tesco (which is the closest to Wal-Mart here) and to be completely ignored by Lidl and Aldi, and maybe somebody from Superquinn to try and have a different tack on supermarkets. I thought it would be a great antidote to that simpleton Eddie _!_ Hobbes and his series of programmes that managed to convince most people here that the problems with prices in Ireland were all to do with tax and that if we all had an Aldi nearby our money problems would be over. Like grocery prices are really the deal rather than non-productive assets (say land for example). Like Irish farmers are actually getting a reasonable price for quality product. Like supermarkets are ever an economically sensible place to buy fresh food, fresh meat, fresh fish, or anything healthy. Seriously, they do all these programmes about the varying cost of items. Hobbes went on about how a LidlAldi in every town would be the saviour of housewives. Did he ever pop into a local greengrocer and have a deco at the prices? And the quality is of course incomparable. Food might actually taste of something if you buy it in the greengrocer, or if you want to pay supermarket prices, in your local organic market. And that's without thinking about food miles and other issues that you may want to consider that go beyond cost and quality. But Eddie _!_ Hobbes successfully campaigned to get the groceries order revoked thus ensuring Tesco's complete domination over this country (and the filling of our roads with monstermotherfuckingtrucks that they can't actually deal with and the levying of huge tolls and another round of taxation to pay for the road upgrades to make Tesco richer). I felt this film would be very relevant in Ireland with the impending IBEC led collapse of social partnership and Irish Ferry's hilariously blatent contempt for its workers, the government, and of course all of us. You're never getting on one of their ferries again, right?

Anyway, I began to get suspicious as the promo materials didn't arrive. Last Thursday dawned, dull and dreary (actually it was bright and sunny at dawn as it has been for the last while till the fogs rolled in) and still no sign of the film. A disasterous day looked like happening. I was thinking of showing Robert Greenwald's previous film 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's was on journalism' but then I remembered that it was only the second best film about a satellite news channel that I and my Beloved saw at the documentary film festival that year. So we showed 'Control room' about Al Jazeera instead. This turned out also to be topical given the current revelations about the US's willingness to bomb their headquarters (they of course bombed their bureaux in Afghanistan - nearly killing the puppet Karzai - and in Baghdad - killing a journalist but ensuring that their all important spin on the invasion of Baghdad was the only one out there). There were all sorts of organisational nightmares but it went well enough, I was just bitterly disappointed that we let people down, including those that came via the film's website to the only showing in Ireland. They've been in touch and when the film actually arrives we'll be able to have a full showing and do lots of publicity. Hope to see you there.

Good and bad

I was really looking forward to reading 'Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything' by Stephen Levitt, and perhaps crucially a sycophantic journalist called Stephen Dubner. And no, I'm not going to put an Amazon link in to the book, if you must buy the overrated tosh don't do it from those gouging scumbags. Unfortunately the book turned out to be largely trite and obvious. My suspiciouns were aroused when they spent considerable time in the introduction explaining why estate agents might not always be looking for the best price for your house if they were selling it and then spending quite a lot more space congratulating themselves on being able to reach such counterintuitive results by parsing the data. If you hadn't copped that estate agents are more concerned with a quick sale than the couple of percent they might make on hanging in there for a couple of weeks and the odd ten thousand you might possibly benefit from this book. Grown adults need not hang around. To be fair the chapter on the effect legalising abortion had on crime in the US (and elsewhere) was interesting.The reason I got the book was the chapter on the economic effect of the name you gave your child. I've long been idly interested in the naming of children, particularly among minority ethnic groups, and particularly with regard to the greater naming diversity and the greater likelihood of an ethnically distinct name being given to girls so it was nice to have someone grep the data on it.

But much of the book was so trite it was beyond belief. Teachers will lie, apparantly, if they are given bonuses if their class perform well in easily fakeable tests. Wow. Drug dealers live with their mas and don't make much money (as a gamble on rising through the ranks and making money that most of them never get to) whoopeedoo Stephen: I've lived in one hood or another all my adult life and that is simply a truism. Levitt may have had access to really good source material (and the story of the sociologist who got it is interesting) but to present this truism as if it were a radical rethink is so disingenuous as to really stick in my craw. We have access to academic journals Stephens: we can tell when you're telling porky pies. Sumo wrestlers, he believes he has proven, cheat as a matter of norm. Hmmm. It's actually a lot more complicated than that in high level sports. I remember in the last European championship when Denmark and Sweden needed a hugely unlikely three all draw or something for both to go through. As Liam Brady said, the bookies are making it odds on: it will happen. He was asked would they be cheating and he said. I don't need to think about that, the result will happen if the bookies say it will. I watched the match and it was a genuinely full blooded, hard fought, desparate clearances, unexpected forward play thriller. Three all of course. I swear they weren't cheating. It's a lot more subtle than that.

Anyway, this wouldn't annoy me except that a substantial part of the book is devoted to pages, usually quoted from elsewhere, about what a wonderful maverick genius Stephen Levitt is. 'Levitt fits in everywhere and nowhere. 'He is a noetic* butterfly that no one has pinned down... but who is claimed by all. He has come to be acknowledged as the master of the simple , clever solution. He is the guy who, in the slapstick scenario, sees all the engineers futzing with a broken machine - and then realises no one has thought to plug it in'. Let's get this straight: rogue from what? He's a bog standard social scientist. And a chronic and disgusting self congratulator. I'll blame the journalist maybe, and then the editor for allowing this cack out. But the bottom line is you have to take the blame for your own disgusting and unjustified hubris Levitt.

Learn some humility and ditch the coauthor. You should be ashamed of yourself.



* Of, relating to, originating in, or apprehended by the intellect. [Greek notikos, from nosis, understanding. See noesis.] I had to look it up. Intellectual would suffice just as well but it would make the author of that piece not appear smarter than you or I. This is what I call the Tom Wolfe approach to vocabulary: the only thing I'm communicating with it is how smart I am. And Tom, hilariously, sometimes makes mistakes, because he genuinely does swallow a dictionary (or more accurately an architectural/archeological survey glossary) and regurtitate it without knowing what he is saying in from Bauhaus to our house.

Evolutionary Paleobiology and aliens

Was at a fascinating lecture by Prof. Simon Conway Morris last night, based on his book 'Life's solution: inevitable humans in a lonely universe' in which he tried to convince us that there was nothing freakishly unlikely about human evolution - that the example of convergent evolution throughout made us, or something like us, very likely. This of course flies in the face of the most popular evolutionary biologist ever - Stephen Jay Gould -he believed that at every point, if you 'ran the tape' of time again random mutation and the wondrous variousness of life would assert itself and nothing would be the same. Morris, based on others research, demonstrated that the effects of chance and history statistically diminished as time ran but that of adaption became more pronounced. He then showed lots of lovely and interesting examples of convergency to suggest that something like us was inevitable, in the environment of the earth. He then considered possible planets and the idea of aliens and suggested that intelligence was extremely likely if life emerged in other planets. Then, suddenly, at the end of the lecture he said that there weren't enough planets and we were on our own. Bang!

The reason I mention it here is that my communications class in the Design Faculty are going to be asked to start blogs as a reflective diary and he had some intriguing examples relating to vision. He was showing how the camera eye that we have evolved in several different species completely independently (the most important things are transparent cells and the ability to change light to electricity - these have evolved long before eyes) and that he felt it was the most likely solution for an intelligent being (we would need eyes of between 1 and 10 metre diameter to see as we do if we used compound 'fly eyes'). The reason the lovely little critter at the top is here is that the star nosed mole, a native of the US, has a nose with sensitive tentacles which it feels its way around with. The strange thing is that they are wired into what would be the visual part of the brain in a human. They 'see' with their 'hands'. He claimed there was an analogue of colour for them too. He also gave the example of dolphins. They have camera eyes as we do but also echo location. Their echo location connects to their visual sense. They both see and hear visually.
I kind of see sound. Not colour, just shapes.
A.R. Luria's classic 'the mind of a mnemonist' about an auto remembering person focused on how we remember best by mixing our senses: his mnemonist was seriously synaesthesic. He had to sit in a dark room to avoid the pain of more sensory input that bled into all his other senses which he would then be forced to remember forever. He was obviously an extreme case (hence the neuropsychological casebook), but is it difficult to believe that in all of us our senses are not entirely separate? That we can talk about rhythm of colour and colour of sound would seem to suggest so. When I was younger and people were trying to disparage criticism, critical thinking, and critical writing they would say 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture'. I always thought to myself 'what a great subject for dance'.

Foley artists. How could I forget foley artists?

and their need for everyone to be walking in clogs on parquet, or cobbles. In an echoing street in mittel europe. Some ridiculous examples

1 Elephant
Alan Clarke's BBC film made in 1989 about the troubles in NI. The title refers to the idea that executions and mutilations were going on while people were having their tea with the vicar in the living room. 'More tea vicar?' and nobody mentioning the large elephant in front of them. The film largely consists of people grimly walking in the 1970s looking streets, pulling out guns and killing people; sometimes in front of their family; sometimes as they are closing up shop; sometimes as they are walking home; sometimes they bring the victim into a car park and he submits meekly to his punishment. Mostly they don't talk. But oh, do they walk, down dark and glistening streets their blocks of wood for feet ring out. An otherwise silent soundtrack (bar the guns and one scene of playing football in the muddy grey fields) gives the foley artist the creative space to really go to town and create a concrete symphony of clattering on the cobbles.

2 The boxer
Jim Sheridan's jailbird come back to do good film was despised by republicans at the time. It was also despised by any lover of good sound design. Going jogging across the cobblestones the foley artist just can't resist turning his trainers into clogs: imagine Rocky sounding like a delivery in a lumber yard by a tip truck. On the other hand it is about the only thing that isn't forgettable about the film

3 Blow-up
Antonioni's classic study of just how much noise a man can make with chelsea boots and parquet floors: lots. And lots. All through the bloody movie. Mind you David Hemmings was wearing chelsea boots and walking on parquet floors throughout, but that was a mistake they made, not something to be celebrated by getting a few blocks of wood together in an echo chamber and hammering the bollix off them.

I'm mean and spiteful to everyone called Foley. Always have been. They've been mean to me.

The thing about TV...

I was talking to a documentary maker at work the other day and we were discussing various documentaries. I was complaining about one I saw at a festival last year. They had used libary cues for the music but hadn't matched them for length. That's not cheap: it's lazy. They also had an academic talking head who was discussing something and its source and then said maybe it was from another book. Stop the camera. Go look. It's not live. So we were laughing about shoddiness and she was saying to me that if we watched TV together we would get properly annoyed.

So here are some of the things that annoy me about TV and film. If they don't already I hope they will from now on.

1 Eating
I was watching 'the hunt for red october' last night - unchallenging light entertainment - and Seán Connery was eating while others were talking around him. Perhaps it was to express that through his big beard, perhaps it's because he's a rotten actor, but he did that eating thing people do on TV: jaws working furiously and violently. It doesn't look like eating. A bit like when they sign in a film they
SHOUT! HANDS SMASHED INTO EACH OTHER.
Maybe they should go visit some deaf people or something. I once shared a flat with a stage actor. He was doing a play with PanPan theatre company. Something barking about Strindberg's diaries. He signed all day every day and at night he read Strindberg and books about seeing sound and being deaf. He was mad by the end of it. When I went to the play with a deaf guy he couldn't believe he wasn't a native signer. For all their talk I don't see that in big budget movies. I see people doing trashy, showy, yet lazy performances. Oscars night they love that shit.

2 Rain
It never rains, but it pours. Seriously, what is it with rain in the movies? The bigger the budget the more ludicrous the rain is. Big sheets of rain, each 'drop' the size of a biro. I've seen lower budget films and the rain making machines in operation (I used to live overlooking this laneway that got used for making films about every month - directors have the most irritating, arrogant, smug, loud voices at six on a Sunday morning 'camera, speed, action, extras ....') and it doesn't end up looking quite as silly as big budget films where they have banks of the yokes and enough water to keep a small town going.

3 Fake introductions
I don't know why on TV programmes they persist in having the presenters call on the people they are visiting and greeting as if it's the first time they met. With the cameras inside and everything. Why this pointless little lie? It's unconvincing and serves no purpose. It undermines the audiences faith in the rest of the show, as to how staged it is (very, it's on TV obviously). This is mearely a minor manifestation of the collossal scam that is 'reality TV'. Anyway, I watch this stuff to get away from reality.

Danger Diabolik soundtrack

dangerdiabolik1vu
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Somebody posted the legendary Morricone soundtrack for Danger Diabolik on Rapidshare. I haven't heard it yet. Don't expect great quality - the masters were burnt long ago and any transfer is a dub from an old film - but I do expect classic groovy soundtrack action.

Excuse lack of posting here - Blogger ate some long, complicated (for me) posts about the supposed primacy of visual culture. It was too much hassle to recreate them. I normally just fire off posts when I'm early for work, this time I spent some effort getting it right. And then Blogger eats them...

Physical Theatre

I couldn't count the amount of times I've heard people say that theatre in Dublin is bad as there's no physical theatre. And let's not talk about the odd time I read the papers (refusing to get the Irish Times means that at least I'm spared the mantra from them). I have a problem with this. I don't have a problem with 'physical', or dance theatre, or theatre of movement yada yada yada, I have a problem with the assumed primacy of it. Just as I have a problem with 'pure' cinema. Hitchcock may be pure cinema, as Truffaut said the second last of the masters, only Welles arriving in the era of sound when text took over and people lost their visual purity, but just watch him in a real theatre with real normal people rather than a film studies class and see the difference. I can appreciate Hitchcock when I read about him or watch how he puts a scene together, but when you are in a crowd his films are frankly embarrassing. His misogyny is crass beyond belief and, on the two occasions I have gone to see rep presentations, both in crowded cinemas, the audience giggled and finally laughed out loud at the picture. Another example, from a lesser director, I watched a TV version of Dr. Zhivago a couple of years ago, and I thought of the different choices made in presentation from David Lean's. David Lean's version had a scene where Lara was in a horse drawn carriage with the older man, he tried to kiss her, cut to the Hussars drawing swords, the carriage starts bouncing, the hussars charge the protest march, carriage bouncing, hussars crack heads, blood stains the snow. Okay, so I know she was raped and was a virgin, in the TV version it was made explicit that this was the case - rather than some kind of visual allusion which merely trivialises.

Lost - no spoiler

Watched the end of Lost last night. I know it finished ages ago in the US but it just finished in Ireland last night. If you are considering following it to the bitter end in Britain my advice would be don't. I couldn't even offer a spoiler for the end: nothing happened. Dud. Duff. Dull thud. It crashed into the shark. Sharkmeat everywhere.

There was some quite spectacularly bad CGI on display which was about the only charm in the last few episodes. Apparently Jack and Kate have a contracted amount of screentime together per episode (bit wasted as she wouldn't go for a milquetoast like him and she's utterly unconvincing as a felon/killer/bitch from hell - or indeed as a source of male interest), I think that Sawyer has a contracted amount of shirt-off screen time added in as the show went on. They obviously audience tested that one first however given my sister in law's uncharacteristic outburst about how much she'd like to ride him. Lots apparently.

Thanks IRA, now go away

Well I was going to use this spot to slag Sinn Féin, because, well, because it's fun and because they're a bit more thin skinned than other parties and you feel that somewhere out there, someone will notice. Whereas Fí­anna Fáil delight in the deserved contempt poured upon them by pretty much anyone engaged in any critical thinking as it demonstrates to their satisfaction that they have us all by the balls.

But that would be churlish on a day when we should be thanking Sinn Féin for being the first party to the Irish conflict to demilitarise. Don't get me wrong, the British army have partially demilitarised the situation and the RUC has been disbanded (or renamed...). Sinn Féin / the IRA have not policed the community for the last while and when the loyalist community attacked, urged on by the DUP and the Orange Order, the PSNI did what the RUC would not and took the hits: the blast bombs, the petrol bombs, the gunfire, the bricks. And nobody was burnt out of their houses. This is 40 years of progress from times when the 'police' in NI would stand idly by while an anti-catholic pogrom was going on.

I noticed the resurgence of an issue that died out several years ago: how do we know if this is all the IRA's cache of arms? Let me remind anyone who has forgotten how that question was answered before: as part of the Lockerbie deal the Libyan government gave the inventory of arms sent over to the British government (they were always disappointed by the use it was put to - they gave enough for a war, not harassmentment). That, added to US intelligence, meshed with UK, Irish and, significantly if we take the decommisioning bodies word, the IRA's own quartermaster's report, to such an extent that it is a dead issue. It was dead five years ago and the DUP's attempts to reanimate the corpse are comical. Pick your favourite zombie flick here.

Let me say that if and when the loyalist terrorists want to destroy their weapons it won't be a major issue either - as long as British Army intelligence hand over the details of just what they got them.

Now what are the DUP going to do? Paisley declared deChastelain's mission a 'complete failure'. Let's face it, Paisley's policies have been a complete failure. His supporters take to the streets claiming they are disenfranchised. Well disenfranchised has a meaning: you have no vote. They can vote for Westminster (obviously going to be unsatisfactory - too few of them to really influence the state) and for the NI Assembley. They chose to scupper the assembly and use their influence to deny the people of Northern Ireland a democratic voice. Well done Ian. As a vox pop in Ballymenagh, a town untouched by Ireland's recent economic prosperity, in the grip of gangsters and loyalist terrorists, a heroin hellhole, put it 'he's not seen us far wrong'. How wrong could you be missus? How wrong?

Back to slagging Sinn Féin soon.

It takes two teams to make a great match and we had one yesterday. I was an honourary Tyrone man for the day, what with the house overrun with Tyrone women to watch the all Ireland final, and it was a classic. Kerry started off firing all over the pitch and Tyrone looked outclassed in the first fifteen minutes. They matched Kerry for scores though and never let them pull away or who knows what might have happened? I was a bit worried that war might break out after somebody appeared to have tried to gouge the Gooch's eye out and as play wasn't stopped a forearm smash took down Brian Dooher - it was the first of three he took during the match. All eyes were on Ryan McMenamin, he has form, but it appears to have been a clash with the keeper and the ref took no action. In general the match wasn't dirty with Kerry leading the fouling until the last few minutes when Tyrone were desperately holding their lead. Initially it looked like Tyrone's weakness in fielding would play into Kerry's hands but as the match wore on Tyrone took more and more of the possession turning over the ball and not letting Kerry pass. Undoubtedly the press will say Dara Ó Sé had a great game, they always do, in truth he gave the ball away and ran round like a headless chicken for much of the game. No doubt the same commentators will talk about the genius of the Gooch, and he is one of the most outstanding forward of our time, but no point he took was better that Peter the Great's from almost the touchline on the left at a crucial stage of the game or another on the right that Stephen O'Neill squeezed in. It's hard to say what lost it for Kerry, tactics, work, and quality were part of it. Theoretically Tyrone should have weakened: their high energy pressing game should have worn them down and Kerry's vaunted long range passing and vision should have opened space. Kerry failed to do that and it way they that weakened as the game went on. Tyrone's epic journey to the final had them game hardened like no other team has ever been. The championship was refreshing this year what with the standard of soccer in Europe declining so precipitously and Irish international matches (make that European internationals) being snoozetastic.

Maybe the Dubs will come through next year....

St. Etienne - tales from Turnpike House

I've been listening to this since Friday. Walking to work on a clear, chill September morning, before the daily walks are both done in darkness and the sadness of winter is upon you, I heard 'sun in my morning' for the first time. I knew the album was going to make me happy. It sets up a groove on triangle with acoustic guitar, organ, and brushed hats joining in. A little gem, as Bobby Robson said of Paul Gascoigne. Without the fat and blubbery tears though keeping all the sentimentality. The next track, the longer more ambitious 'milk bottle symphony' starts telling the lives of the residents of the block of flats, the characters we'll continue to meet over the course of the album. It begins with gentle synth pulses and drum machine - while still managing to feel like a slice of classic sixties pop unsullied by the euphoric plagiarism of the British Invasion - but morphing over its four gorgeous minutes to take in a tubular bell and cello break. I'll be putting this on a CD for my neice as the last character is a girl going to school and she has her name. The next track 'lightning strikes twice' I mention not for its own qualities but to ask the question 'what separates St. Etienne from chart pop?' It's not the instrumentation or even the lead vocals. Chart pop can handle the breathy female lead of St. even if it would tend to go for the obvious high note which they don't. This song has, like many on the album, a bedrock of vocal harmonies that could serve as all the harmonic backdrop the song needs. I imagine that there were instruments on the last song 'goodnight' at one stage and they were removed to leave the big acapella backing that remains. I think what separates their sound is differentiation. From Phil Spector's wall of sound, through ABBA's doubling (and quadrupling) all instruments and vocals to fatten the sound and remove all elements of individual performance, to the contemporary 'hot mix' used for radio play which compresses all the timbres and removes the dynamic elements of a song into a warm comforting soup, there is a tendency in chart pop to not allow elements of a song to stand out. The backing vocals on this album sound like a group of people. They don't sound like the Sugababes - all of whom have the same syrupy soul voice (don't get me wrong, I have a soft spot for the Sugababes) and when harmonies like theirs are swamped in reverb its very difficult to imagine that at some point a human chest pushed out air damp with waste water from the body to make the sound. St. Etienne leave music sounding of itself quite often. The beautiful 'side streets' is a reclaim the streets for the stormtroopers of gentrification. 'Last order for Gary Stead' a glitter band stomper with Petula Clark or Karen Carpenter effortlessly melancholic on top. 'Relocate' sounds like a duet between Anthony Newley and a property greed programme TV presenter in a sixties kitchen sink drama musical. 'Teenage Winter' reminds me of a song on a Siesta compilation I have that was made to celebrate the tastes of a soft pop enthusiast who sadly died a few years ago called 'Emma Peel crossword Puzzle' which was the titles of Avengers episodes read out to music except it also has a chorus.

Now I have to listen to all their records over the last ten years that I missed out on.

Garrhh! That be spelt wrong!

Avast! I'll whip me with the cat'o'nine tails for a scurvy dog. It's International Talk Pirate Day and I wrote like a landlubber. The recipe is -

1 Cup o' weavils
2 squeezes of tar from a wet ponytail
1 pound of sawdust
The whole grog ration for the next month

Mix the first three together with some stale water. Boil up on the deck. Eat. Vomit. Mutiny. Steal the whole of the grog ration. Drink.

Land ho!

Whore for a month solid 'till the press gang, curse 'em, take you from your buxom molly.

Repeat after a month at sea. Smartly does it.

Signed,
Foursaltydogsatsea

Spicy green salsa and the sorrows of empire

Well, I haven't been writing here due to my pledge to myself about not writing successive negative entries. It was just so hard what with every time I thought of writing here thinking about one of two things - the fallacy of 'small government' and the moral bankruptcy it implies and the headless chicken the state will become. If you think the only thing a government - which will be huge - has a right to spend money on is killing people, we have nothing to talk about. That and something to do with a sweet lie about a revolution that never happened that has festered in the heart of America. Which heart of corruption is the seed and soul of empire.

Okay, couldn't quite resist it.

Had a lovely weekend making food for people. On Friday and Saturday the starters were cheeses and smoked salmon on McCambridge's brown bread with butter and capers served with manzanilla. Friday's main course was baked aubergines (with a tomato and trompette du mort sauce, cooked for hours) served with warm bread and olive oil from Baena (it smells of rich fruit with just a whiff of farm - well worth the hefting five litres of the stuff) and for dessert we had, on both days, tiramisu. Saturday's main course was seared tuna served with a spicy green salsa and rosemary roast potatoes with asparagus (tossed in a pan with a knob of melting butter just after being refreshed and before serving). Nothing at all complicated, but there's nothing better than lots of really good ingredients. I thought I'd give the recipes for the salsa and tiramisu.

Spicy green salsa (stolen from Avoca café, but it was a long time ago)

5 plum tomatoes
1 large spoon of capers (to taste)
1 nt too ripe avacado
1 lemon
1 large green onion (obviously scallions are nice too)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon onion seeds (we used one of brown mustard too)
1 glug of vinegar (we used sherry vinegar)
4 jalapeno chillies

Soak the seeds in juice of half a lemon before you start anything else. They will soften in the acid, as will everything else so this is best done a couple of hours before the guests arrive, depending on the avacado. I add the sherry vinegar about then. Cut an x on the skins of the tomatoes at the end opposite from the stalk and put them into boiling water for a few minutes untill the skin starts peeling off. I get worried and don't leave them in long enough sometimes. Peel them, remove the seeds and chop roughly. It is absolutely essential to do this. Seeds are bitter and acidic, when they are liquidised in a sauce you can heat the mixture at 80 degrees and let the acid bubble away for hours, in a salsa it's raw. And the skin is minging anyway (remember that Spanish fake olive oil scandal and people getting crippled and dieing in the 80s? Well it wasn't olive oil - it was fertiliser residue on salads. Lose the skin) and it is easy to take off. Dice the avacado, the less ripe it is the smaller the dice, and put it into the mixture. The avacado will soften in the acid so don't get one suitable for guacamole or the whole thing will be mush. Dice the red onion finely, the jalapeno peppers to your preferred size and add with the capers. Season to taste. Nice and tart on seared tuna.

Monarcy in the UK

So racist rants by muslim clerics demand a suspension of the normal rules of democracy? Why not pass a law banning incitement to racial hatred like most of the civilised world? Because much of the tory party, BNP, and allied loyalist parties speaches would be similarly viewed by an impartial court perhaps?

It's good to see that at last democracy is reasserting itself in Britain. No Tony, everything has not changed. You are not your master. You cannot make a clean break with human rights. Your hold on your party and the media is too fragile to allow you down the road to totalitarianism. I hope. Shoot to kill policies were unthinkingly approved by the media - or at least they were so frightened by the fruits of dissent in the US after terrorist attacks that they were cowed into silence - but at last after weeks of police lies, disinformation, leaks, and dirty tricks the press is beginning to reassert the normal rights of democracy.

Here's a thought: people in the UK can never have a proper foundation to a democratic state, a proper sense of citizenship, a proper foundation to the defence of human rights, a sensible balancing of the rights and needs of its citizens until they are citizens rather than subjects. Abolish the monarchy in the UK. Get a constitution which legislation will have to be tested against. I know the judges have tended to do this against the unwritten constitution for the last 15 years but this labour government is doing its best to assert the primacy of the executive branch of government at the expence of the other two. Take the conduct of government out of the shadows and let people know what is going on. How else do you expect people to vote and take part?

Later, how exactly the opposite process is taking place in Ireland and the US. We are becoming subjects to our executive branch of government. I went to a football match a while ago and had the indignity of having to listen to the 'Taoiseach's march'. What? When did he become a ceremonial figurehead? And of course in the US they have 'in god we trust' written everywhere, and flags, and pictures of their beloved leader. Quite like a third world dictatorship really. Funny how the most republican of parties in the most republican of countries is forgetting what a republic is and how it differs from an oligarchy. You don't inherit the leadership in a republic. We owe the leader no more respect or reverence than any other public servant dependent on our pleasure. You cannot commit a sacriligious or blasphemous offence in a republic - whether that be to the flag, the institutions or offices of the state, or to some established religion. Republics are the result of the intelligent design of the people: all other foundations for the state are the result of exploitation.

Idyllic

Yesterday
´this is pretty idyllic, we´re sitting on our balcony in a simple hotel outside the village. It´s actually Playa San Augustinillo, we meant to go to Mazunte 1km further on but decided to stop the taxi. We´re the only people in this big hotel, and the previous guests were a week ago. There is a constant stream of butterflies past us, yellowish white with a canary yellow to green one always visible somewhere and the odd orangey red one once in a while. I don´t know how many are visible at one time. 100? How do you count? If you look left and see 30 and in front 30 and to your right 50 but they´re the same ones travelling across in some kind of migration moving from somewhere upwind in an constant flow.

Just left the sea which is unlike any I have ever been in, Brónagh grazed her leg pinfully, dripping blood from being upended on a wave that I was happily bobbing on 10M out. 70M from where we are now sitting in the hotel they look terrifying - big walls of water curving over and crashing - the foam blowing off in doily sheets and a second ghost wave of a diaphanous sheet drifting down after the mighty crash. They look like they would pulverise a person trapped in the tube as it imploded, and in truth even when the subwave crashes closer to shore it can give you a fair battering. Even the waves 20-30M out, 2M higher than the swell they come from are brown from being loaded with exfoliant sand. If you could only tie things down here you could save a lot of hard work with sandpaper.

Coming here was a good idea, I think, there may even be a little nightlife - I saw a sign in Pochutle for a salsa bar with belly dancing. I might have a shower soon, it´s very humid here and I´ve been sweating all day long - in the plastic seat of the taxi, carrying my maleta? in the shade. The room is cool as there is a breeze flowing through it.

There seem to be many more butterflies than there were - if 100 were before me at all times before it must be 200 now. But the tumult of the waves is ceaseless and changeless except for when I try to photograph or video it when it goes tame for a few moments.´

Later we went to eat - fish in a spicy sauce and rice - while the waves crashed in Mazuntle in front of us. A serious and not very sane surfer, and I´ve seen manysurfers on the waves and their bored girlfriends on the shore basting and browning, like a collection of tennis player´s wives and surfers are not normally worth watching - but this guy was awesome, like the films, on a tiny board surfing into the pipes, and when he did fall off it was not because he couldn´t stay on (when he wanted to finish he rode a wave smoothly all the way to the beach) but that he wanted to try the impossible. He glided off the sea past us and I lifted my imaginary hat off for him.

The lightning started way out at sea and it was some time before you could tell the difference between the roar of the waves and that of the thunder, as the thunder drew in and in gaps between the waves their sound became more shrill in comparison. We walked out on the dark road, exotic birds, crickets, and frogs for noise - crabs scuttling away from us - illuminated like very lights with the lightning in the distance and the deep artillary report of the thunder shaking the sky to find some music but ended up escaping the torrential downpour (and I do mean that - nothing in halves here) and sat in a bar with the owner and chatted. He recommended hiking up the hills to see the flowers covered in hummingbirds and butterflies. Apparantly they were brown last week, they´re lush green now. The rains were a month late and they say they´ve had a month of them in the last week.

Today we slept in of course. And when we woke up we couldn´t believe that something unusual wasn´t happening - that tumult couldn´t be constant. But it is. Took a long breakfast and we are just off to see the turtle santuary now. It´s a bit grey (but not that it wasn´t lovely to lark about in the water this morning) so we will leave the hills for another day. And I really wouldn´t mind a bit of dancing later on. We´ll see - the crowd is younger than Puerto Angel but they all seem much as lazy as we are.

bob

bob
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Have you seen this man...

marcos

marcos
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

... and this man in the same room together? I thought not. Bob was supposed to live in Equador I thought. Must have moved to the Chiapas. The thought popped into my head last night as we were toasting the revolution in a little cafe in Oaxaca. I know, I will burn in hell.

Or wherever it is that naughty subgeniuses go.

Leave of absence

I might not be writing too frequently in the next month as I am marrying my beloved tomorrow morning and then we are going to Mexico. Can't wait to do both. I'm a very lucky man.

Somebody put a comment on an earlier post and suggested I put some pictures into the next"A Day in the Life Of" on flickr. So I intend to do that and to put some pictures of Mexico up here on the blog.

Better not get to soppy here.

Bookburning: a competitive sport for the noughties?

Maybe we can stop thinking too while we're at it? While some of this list are probably to be expected, like the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf I wonder how much relationship they had to do with the crimes they are being blamed for? Surely the urge to ban books has a strong relationship with the evil ideology of Mein Kampf and I imagine the mass media which didn't speak out against the bookburning has more to do with its rise than those that read the book. I think the far right's distrust of books has more to do with their totalitarian similarity to the Khmer Rouge's rejection of 'intellectuals' than it does to history.

Their approach to historicism can be gleaned from a quote on Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money "FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt." The blind ideology of the far right always makes me laugh. A Keynesian government (to some extend) left power with balanced books - a non-keynesian government took power and spends to death. The difference is that their spending is assumed to be sustainable as it seeks to acquire foreign wealth for America. No source other than imperial pillage will make the federal budget of the US sustainable. Never had that much time for Lenin, but he sure got that one right. Imperialism bolsters unsustainable capitalism. The anti-FDR attacks from the extreme right wing in America (that is, BTW the centre of the Republican party) are also beautifully ahistoric. FDR was a traitor to the world for signing the Yalta agreement? Well sure Yalta kind of sucked for Eastern Europe and we're all sorry about that. But what should he have done? Taken on the Red Army? That fantasy depends on non-examination of the second world war. The Western front was irrelevant, all the people that died there did not bring down the Nazi government. The Soviet Union did it. The sacrifices and battles on the Western front saved some of Europe, no more. If the allies had decided to take on the Red Army it would have rolled on to Calais and taken the whole of Europe with very little resistance. I suspect Stalin regretted not doing it while he had the chance. They had all the oil. They had the troops, airforce, and a frightening battery of artillery. They had many more tanks. Their tanks weren't rubbish (they did receive tanks as aid from the US but used to shoot themselves rather than drive them - the Soviets used rather risky tactics which was fine if you were driving one of their steel mostrosities, but not in one of the US suicide machines - I must do a footnote on US tanks in the second world war, the cynicism of their manufacturers [putting the magazine in the turret to ensure instant death if you got hit] and failure to rectify the design faults on the basis that they could produce more for cheaper without changing the factories, and they could, is markedly similar to car manufacturers. The failure of this economics is that it in cars it doesn't account for those maimed and requiring permanent care or support, in tanks it would have been demonstrated in fighting an economic base you should defeat which would roll over you by having built proper tanks). Western Europe has a lot to thank FDR's US for - they didn't save us from the Nazis; they saved us from the Soviets. And they saved as much of Europe as could have been expected: more than they could militarily have claimed.

Well the Eurovision is more democratic than the European Union...

Euro
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

So I was watching the Eurovision voting on Saturday before going out to meet DarkTeen in a small local pub where people SMOKE CIGARETTES! Not loads of them, the place isn't thick with smoke or anything, and not until after closing time, but they do smoke. And I was hugely enjoying it, things like the sustained bout of booing, it felt like a full minute, when Belarus gave full marks to Russia. It makes you reflect on how Ireland kept winning Eurovisions in the past - bland inoffensiveness - we didn't invade anyone so could not expect to be blackballed by counties with a grudge. I was thinking about Rem Koolhaas's Content, which is well worth the 10 yoyos of your money, it's half way between a magazine and a book. He has these maps of Europe with the EU, Council of Europe, EFTA, Eurovision, and EUEFA marked on it. Which I find funny - the idea of Europe is quite funny; it used to be Christendom, quite recently it was Western bourgeois Europe, and now? Well Rem suggested a new logo for the Euro. This is where I went looking for it on the web and left the post. So, excuse the delay, and well done to... whoever it was that won the Yoyovision.

Reminds me of going to a gay club the night the Israeli transexual won the Eurovision. It was like the gay nation had won the world cup. I was hoping Israel would win on Saturday - it would piss off so many people. So many of the right people. Telling them we love them when they're busy using US money to blow up everything European taxpayers built over there to try and bring a small bit of peace. Beautiful. Well actually it's all blown up already. Utterly destroyed. Such marvellous contempt!

Multimedia message

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Bullsith

Bullsith
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Or ROTS as it is called on the bulletin boards. Several people have mentioned what a twat Lucas was to have an anagram of Shit in his new film's title. That counts as a movement to me so I've been Osubstituting the word Sith for all sorts of excrement the last few days. When I get it imprinted on people I'm going to start saying Sithe. Sithe and onions. The lot of it.

Download live sets

And why not? There's a list on Bootleg Browser and while it is heavily skewed to things I have no interest in, it is long enough that you should find something you like. I'm downloading Calexico as we speak - looking at the setlist I don't think I know most of it.

Oh, most of these aren't bootlegs BTW, they're promo often from people's own websites. Just if you feel you might not be rendering unto Caeser. What old record label used to have a cassette tape skull and crossbones with the legend "home taping is killing music: keep up the good work"?

iRob is committed to play nothing but Spanish language classes on the way to work for the next couple of weeks, so I won't get the pleasure from this.

Route Irish - does it go all the way to fascism?

I had some blog time yesterday but I spent it following up a story. Somebody told me that the main route to the airport from Baghdad is called 'route Irish' by the US military and that, while the term was commonly used by the US media it was being avoided by the Irish. This would be in keeping with the Irish media's craven response to the war. The main, so called 'liberal' media outlets, are in fact dominated by the PDs, who are an extremist right wing party which has added an explicit racist agenda to its previous take on laissez faire, 19th century right wing liberalism. The largest newspaper The Independent, and many others, are owned by a baron somewhat like Murdoch but much less pleasant and interesting. And then there are the English papers transplanted here which are, as in England, racist.

Anyway, I went to check the story out, and there isn't the empirical evidence to back it up. True, the Irish media have avoided any mention, but with the relative numbers of articles there would be no expectation that it would crop up in the Irish media. Really it barely features in the US media too and their focus is much sharper on Iraq. Or at least they write about it a lot more even if their gaze is rather choosy. We also might expect the term more readily there as they fetishise the US military with their 'thunder runs' and coopting of military propaganda terms in an unblinking fashion - a process that really saw the light of day when the US media invented an organisation called the viet cong, which is quite hilarious but another story entirely (see the introduction to Philip Jones Griffiths Vietnam Inc. where he gives the US military propaganda name that they insisted be used by accredited journalists with the alternative name, you can really see how they created a fantasy world where they were loved by the locals, a cosy fantasy that obviously convinced many, long after they were tipping the hueys into the sea and promising to pay a few paltry billions in reparations for the millions of civilians they murdered. Billions they forgot to pay.)

I mention all this as I am avoiding doing a project on blogs in Ireland. There is a cosy consensus in Ireland of quite extreme right wing opinion. This is continually reinforced by the media. A (pro-war) american friend of mine who is leaving here as soon as he can told me shortly after he arrived here that he found it really funny that Irish media sources continually got away with saying that this country was 'anti-business'. He claims you wouldn't get away with that in the US. This country is 'the most globalised in the world', is rapidly heading from a country of have nots and hereditary wealth (those that invaded and those that collaborated) to a country of have-nots and robber barons. Our media is turning the other way. At the same time a movement appears, to me, to be gathering at the fringe of the media. This movement is of independent but mutually supportive groups, lobbying and colinising cyberspace with hate and contempt filled rants. These people bolster each other, and talk of ranters like Kevin Myers as an intellectual and free thinker, rather than an intellectual minnow and bigot. There are people there like the freedom institute and the open republic that need to be monitored. They are pushing a cosy consensus further and further to the right, further towards extremism, racism, and ulitmately facism if they are not checked. I think of leaving here too. Let it fester in its hate filled, racist, kill the poor, culturally backward, weeping wound of a public discourse. Though for evil to prosper... Well, I'm not a good man anyway, but it's time I did something. And as I pointed out at the beginning of this piece, counting and logging what they are saying to check what is really going on is a start, although I really don't look forward to immersing myself in that filth.

Acceptable racism

So anyway, I can't have the Sunday Times in the house. It's full of references to French people as 'frogs'. Which apart from being racist is unbelievably crass, peurile, and dimwitted little Englander, . So, while the English papers that have fostered anti-immigrant sentiments in Ireland (does anyone remember 'Rapist refugee rampage' from The Star?) congratulate themselves on the lack of racism in English football compared to the continent (true, monkey chants aren't common any more in Britain - though it isn't that long ago it was, and I wouldn't have spoken in an Irish accent, or seen a black person, on the terraces in 1990) they are rotten to the core with disgusting triumphalist anglo racism.

So, I got a taxi on Saturday night and I was saying to the taxi driver that I was sorry Southampton got a very late equaliser with Palace as I like Iain Dowie, their manager, as he really was a rocket scientist as well as captain of Northern Ireland and the taxi driver goes 'yeah, but he's a total hun you know'. And I was thinking to myself 'I live in a country where racist terms can be used in public' it's just different racisms in different countries.

Vannier

vannier
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Idly checking ebay for records by Jean Claude Vannier, the producer behind Melody Nelson by Gainsbourg, I saw, among the 50 quid for dodgy one off singles (JohnnyHalliday? Not something you'd take a risk on) I noticed that there were new CDs. Now where there are new CDs like as not there are new records. Sure enough Finders Keepers records launched a couple of months ago with the release of L'enfant assassin des mouches on CD and me pleasing vinyl. The legendary 'follow up' record to Melody Nelson. I've just ordered it (happy birthday me!). Hurry up post. You should go too. Are you any less deserving than me?

Saul Bass

golden
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Funny, I never really considered what Saul Bass was up to after the early '60s. He did those great title sequences and posters for things like Vertigo and Man with the golden arm. It never really occurred to me that he was doing the titles for Scorcese movies like Cape Fear, Goodfellas, and Casino. Must check them out. Sad to see his filmography shrink through the 70s and 80s, where he introduced such greats as Big and That's entertainment part II.

I suppose this links quite strongly to the Barry Adamson post before. He did a cover version of the Man with the golden arm theme, and his album art is influenced by Bass's work.

The Saul Bass web site has flash animations and QuickTIme movies of the title sequences. Well worth going to.

psycho

psycho
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

I just got lost on the web, was going to just post a quick link to the great edit of both versions of Psycho played together. I've never heard of Frank Hudec before, but I like this, the Usual Suspects edit on the same page doesn't come close to it. It seems like Gus van Sant's is a mirror image of the original - probably made it handier for copying on set. As an aside, I could never understand the adulation van Sant got - didn't like any of his movies that I saw (I even sat through an early one with William Burroughs in it at the Pompidou centre), but I loved Elephant. I got the link from Bitter Cinema, and followed a link there about the legendary Skidoo. I first came across this picture in the biography of the Marx brothers Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo, and have wanted to watch it, intermittently, since. Of course it has never been released on VHS or DVD, of course it is available at this marvellous site with all sorts of non-released and incredibly strange films. I got that link at a fine film site. But of course it's available cheaper on ebay. Plus, you can watch clips from it. Got to get the credit card out.

But you can find the links here...

Mocha Beans
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

At Marco's Weirdomusic site. I don't know about you but I'm looking forward to Mocha Beans' in the moog. In truth it's easy to be let down by moog albums (hey, it's by no means my favourite synthesizer - in fact it's not in the top twenty I think) but you keep hoping. And anyway, lots of them use tape manipulation and all sorts of synths.

Gojira's links are offline

I'll get on to him today to see if he is putting that page back up.

Lots of free music. Go-go Gojira.

Joe Burns over at Gojira 69 has handily collected a bunch of the exotic sharity free downloads available in the extended virtual community. Watch those lovely page transformations and his nice scratchy old film backgrounds. Most of these are up for a week or so only and then changed, from legends of sharing strange and unusual music like weirdomusic, basic hip, Vegas Vic, and Hepcat Willy, . There are also some newcomers, like the soon to be legendary Sabadaba. Sem Sinatra, and Kristof Space Debris.

No need to hurry, as it's been up for years, but you really need to check Mohommed Al-Bakkar for some classy middle eastern music.

It's all about the name for me...

Now you can do both!! At the same time! And not feel dirty! It's here yagoohoo!gle. I suppose it's interesting to compare the two (Google has loads of ads) but since their corporate divorce (Google provided the search results for Yahoo until early last year) Google has been working even harder than usual on homogenising their results manually to ensure important searches don't throw up curveballs.

Where's the memes?

Good point. I haven't engaged in any meme transmission. So here's some I got last week and have received again since (which qualifies them as far as I'm concerned).
Dennis Madalone, ex Star Trek stunt coordinator (apparantly) now has joined the fireman loving, soft rock for jesus school of hilarious patriotism. He's not afraid to stand in the sea. I love the green Ceylon eye thing he has going on his wraparound shades in the splash page. I wonder were his web designers undermining him? I'll leave the last words to his own website "Dennis' song wishes to fill your heart and soul full of pride, hope and love for our nation and most importantly each other. He is truly an artist of power, passion and originality".
No I can't let them be the last words. His song is out there wishing things off its own bat. I'm scared. He's got nearly 76K visitors to his site - go on, you know you want to.

At least you can deface the site.

Possibly the least accurately named song ever..

would be one note samba by Jobim. I tried to learn it the other night. One note? By the time it's finished telling you it's only got one note it's gone through 10 chords, only two of them not weird. Tonight I start again.

Cars

After years of holding out we are finally buying a car. Or trying to anyway. Everybody who owns a car seems to live in Saggart or Clonsilla or some other place you can only get to by car.

Not knowing anything about cars doesn't help much either.

Barry Adamson on repeat

You know those times when you just have to put Barry Adamson on repeat? I must load some more on to iRob. You get asked, often enough that you'd comment on it, why isn't Barry Adamson huge? Why aren't they queuing up to have him write their soundtracks? Barry Adamson is an ex member of magazine (funky basslines, Sly and the Family Stone covers) and the Bad Seeds (they did dark) who went on to do solo electronic crime jazz. These were soundtracks to imaginary noir films. Just like everybody else from Portishead on you might think, but this was 1988. And Barry Adamson put out Moss Side Story. I first got some of his stuff with The negro inside me in about '94 or so - more for its cool cover version of Serge's je t'aime than anything else. I'd recommend Oedipus Schmoedipus and As above so below which should be easy to get.

That's it. I was too full of words yesterday after a long absence due to idiocy, insomnia, lethargy, deafness, and a strong urge not to ridicule incessantly.

test

DSCN3507
Originally uploaded by Emmaline.

some italics

Master musicians

I finally got my hands on 'Brian Jones presents the pipes of pan at Jajouka' by the Master Musicians of Jajouka. I've been hearing about this album for maybe 20 years. Isn't the net wonderful? All those things I spent my youth hearing about are now available. I can get my hands on old Kosmicherock like Can, Neu!, Faust, Popul Vuh, (I will be reading lots about Popul Vuh soon - apparantly it is the creation myth of the Mayan people and I'm going to Mexico in June) and so on. This album is a legendary psychedelic masterpiece. I came across it again recently in the Wire's list of 100 albums that changed the world if anyone had been listening. There is a fair amount of intervention in the recording - phased rhythm tracs, deep reverb in spots, and some obvious editing. The album takes a lot of stick from purists because of this - but then, it was people like Robert Palmer that did the criticising. I love it. Anyway, I don't like anything pure. I like keeping it unreal as Mr. Scruff puts it. I've been involved in a mailing list called exotica for about 10 years. Exotica is, to take a narrow definition fake jazz with fake polynesian influences. So no, this record is not a literal recording of a seven hour ceremony. But it is a wonderful presentation of psychedelic ritual, and more exciting than the average gnawa album. I can hear its influence in Badawi and in Frederic Galliano. Not in the music so much as the integration of found sound, music, and technology.

Less of a media John...

I've always been suspicious of the process of daily news and avoided consuming it. News doesn't happen on a daily basis, or on the schedule of 7,8,1 and 6 o'clock news programmes. Morning and evening papers are there to sell different things aren't they? Daily or continual news reporting is so wonderfully easy to twist and fool. There was a great part in the documentary The control room where they speculated about why the US might have murdered the Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad. The US media attache Josh Rushing (one of the most sympathetic people in the film) pointed out that if they wanted to stop broadcast they could simply jam the signal. No fuss about it. The Samir Khader of Al Jazeera pointed out that the two other arab media sources broadcasting to the general world in Baghdad were also attacked (with casualties) - the fact that al arabiya was attacked wasn't even mentioned in Ireland at the time - the US murder of a Palestinian journalist did get mentioned. He then replayed the arrival of US tanks in the centre of the city. There was supposedly a joyous crowd there. When you look at it again there is a suspiciously homogenous crowd of boys and young men that arrive with the tanks. Nobody joins them. He then pointed out that the young men did not speak like Iraqis, were foreign. And nobody broadcasting in town on that day could tell that. By shutting down the arab media, even for a single day, the army's orchestrated media propaganda did its magic. For all we know everybody in all the buildings around may have wanted to join the 'celebrations' at the statue of Saddam but a rational fear of tanks and soldiers kept them away. But I do believe we were successfully lied to. The fact that anyone knows that now is irrelevant - the result has already happened. Another side of this is that I never really believe the baby killing stories that almost inevitably arise from a war - whether this be Cromwell in Ireland, the Boers, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They take days to disseminate and years to be disproved. Not that it matters the feelings they create never go away. I still felt sick when I arrived in London and saw Oliver Cromwell's statute outside the houses of parliament. Mind you he's not that great a role model for republicans - he never could get himself elected no matter how often he purged parliament and the voting register.

Continuous news, rolling news sources like Sky News just love a big juicy pageant like the pope's death. I mean, don't get me wrong, he was interesting and did wonderful things for the end of the repressive system in Eastern Europe and soviet Asia (unlike the US Republican party which did nothing for those people but likes to, as Doonesbury said at the time, 'claim it' as their victory), relations with islam and the arab world, and went some way to making amends for the appalling treatment of jews by catholics. Not that that helped relations with extremist zionism of course as on the ground in Israel/Palestine the catholic church refused to be part of the programme of taking land from arabs, even when it was offered for christian churches. Anyway, they're still broadcasting it, and he's still dead. That's it. No news yet - just continuous news.

And the reason I'm less of a John is that I managed to not buy, and not miss, Sunday newspapers this week. I tend to buy The Sunday Times as it has Irish news in it but isn't as vacuous as most Irish newspapers (the Business Post being the honourable exception - the Sunday Independent being the hilarious nadir of pretend serious journalism). Last week I finally got sick of how much of it, that I read at least, was written by A.A. Gill, that guy Clarkson (he's supposed to only write about cars isn't he?), and Brian Appleyard. All people who have gone down the Julie Burchill route - write, but never read. So, out it goes from my weekly spending and nothing will replace it.

It's summer

It's been a whole week since I posted; as I said - what was to say? I have this seriously nasty cold? Until this morning I have been dizzy and deaf from the ear infection part of it. Right now I don't feel absolutely shit for the first time in a week and a half. And it's sunny and warm and walking to work was a pleasure and I could listen to headphones and chose Johnny Cash (American IV) knowing I have part III on my computer waiting to be put onto iRob whenever my ears are up to music again.

Went out to dinner in my favourite restaurant (mentioned below) last night. And guess what? The prices are up and the quality is down. The paneer came in what seemed to be the juice of a can of alphabet spaghetti without the slug like pasta. Do cooks think we won't notice that they have resorted to pouring sugar into the food? Listen, the thing with tomato sauces is you got to cook them. Takes time. No substitute for it. For some reason indian food cannot accept passata or other prepared tomatoes in it either. You have to cook from scratch. If you've not done the experiments save your time: I have.

Oh well, it was still good and not expensive. And they have more chillies in their food now.

I normally call in on DarkTeen on a Tuesday to watch Star Trek (one of countless bad habits) but I felt another night doing nothing would kill my cold, and anyway we've bittorrented half the series (if you want spoilers...). Then my beloved rang to say she'd booked our holiday in Mexico in June (and she'd got a decent price, she's much better at this stuff than me) so we had to go out to celebrate.

"Can I groove a jump off your bake."

What? It's a phrase from a tobacco company's glossary accompanying a policy document on marketing to generation x (this was '94). That and another wonderful brainstorming session on selling candied tobacco to the kids are at www.fairenough.com. As they say themselves "it might be funnier if it wasn't true".

Excuse the delay in writing - I had a nasty head cold and I was thinking at home that I should get a phone (and therefore the net) - but then I realised what would I talk about, the incredibly detailed hallucinations I was having? Or how my lips cracked open from dehydration because I couldn't breathe properly? Whoops, I already have.

Apparantly it's #29

I popped over to the Dewaele brothers website and found out the radio soulwax sessions are up to 29. That's this month's download, I was listening to it on the way to work this morning, but I didn't hear much.

Get this mix by JD Twitch

I went over to the site of those people that did the Kill the DJ mix CD (Optimo/Twitch and Wilkes) and they have a free mix available, starts off dancehall d'n'b and goes into A forest by the Cure and Radio by Joy Division. Loses a bit of impetus towards the end but it's still fantastic and free.

Apparantly there are 1o more about in the filesharing world for those that participate in that.

I still want to talk about Daft Punk...

...but I ended up listening to Annie's debut album Anniemal instead of taking notes (it's all about the detail with Daft Punk) and loving her fizzy pop. It seems to have been released last year but I only saw 12"s in the shops in the last couple of weeks. That's what happens when they release stuff on CD only; I don't even find out about it. We've loved her stuff (what little there was) since The greatest hit which, according to all the web bios was released in 1999. Maybe, but you try buying it outside Norway before Summer 2000 when I did. Unfortunately her producer/partner Erot died and nothing else was released apart from I will go on which I got on a 2002 release on Loaded.

I always had a thing for breathy girly pop like St. Etienne or Dubstar, and the most played songs on my iPod are cheesy pop (including a couple of Richard X things and he produced the first single from Anniemal), but I can understand that others find it cloying. Nothing on this album has, for me, the sonic impact of greatest hit with it's solid house beat allied to silly disco toms and serious sonic manipulation undermining the pop melody. If you listen close you can hear lots of sounds that appear to have been recorded inside the mouth or very, very close amped up, looped, and multiechoed. The track has a sonic richness allied to glossy melodic pop that you rarely find.

That, and I listened to some of the How to kill the DJ part two, so no in depth examination of Daft Punk's attempt to bring a live rock dynamic to their programmed dance, how they dirtied their beats, and yet, how they haven't stretched beyond one of the many microgenres Arling and Cameron invented for themselves to very little success. It's hard not to feel a little jealous of Optimo, like they're stealing your thing by putting out these releases full of records that you know and love, and that a certain community know and love. But hey, they do it, and they do it better than I could!

A mixed bag of scores...

Went record shopping with a mate this Saturday. Picked up some old Yello secondhand in Abbey Disks - there's a bunch of old stuff there if you're interested- but nothing new there grabbed our attention (apart from an I monster 7"). Moved on to Carbon in Temple Bar where the range of new stuff is always going to be cool, but pricy. Bought a couple of the five or six GAMM 12"s they had there. GAMM are a bootleg label so if you like something you buy it there and then. One was old breaks, something like Tim Love Lee's 12" mix of 'Again son..', you could put it on, pop out for a whiz and still sound like you had mad skills on the breaks. Another was the SWAT cop show funk with a full on samba/batucada beat track. What's not to like? I also bought the Kill the DJ compilation, which I haven't listened to all of but it's fairly safe to say if you liked 2 many DJs (which one? I had about six at one point and I know they did several sets after that, I don't know where they are now and...) you should give this a blast. The set list is a bit more now (Gang of Four) but also more daring (they mix into the Langley School Project doing Good Vibrations into that) but the game has been raised. We then popped into CIty Discs and browsed mainly the second hand vinyl and CDs. What a great shop, best prices in Dublin for new records, great selection of new electronic vinyl, and a huge range of second hand CDs. My mate bought an old Afghan Whigs 12", a Black Strobe 12" and something else, all winners he says. We both bought the LCD Soundsystem's new single for 2.99, just as we were moaning about the price of the album on vinyl which doesn't even come with the singles which were vinyl only in the first place, yes we have them but we wanted to keep on being treated specially. I suppose going on to a big record label means you can't indulge in that kind of behaviour. And I bought a Boyd Rice/NON compilation of ambient work from '75 to 2004 for a fiver. Not bad going.

I've been hearing about Boyd Rice for so many years it's amazing I haven't heard his stuff before. I suppose I listen to very little power electronics or industrial or whatever. This one passes the girlfriend test, some of them must you know, we listened to most of it last night whithout her going 'what is this shite?' I like the way that he takes the John Cage attitude to his noise art - he gets around people saying 'that's not music' by saying that it isn't. Cage said 'don't call it music if the term offends you'. You might have noticed a Cage connection in my name and the blog name BTW. So why would you listen to this if previously you listened to music? We were round visiting some friends with a nine-month old child. She had all these annoying toys that produced facile melodies (including one that kept on going do-re-mi to fa-do-re!) and my mate was saying it drove you mad and they got into your head. I was saying that there was nothing better for earworms like that than music that cannot be parsed by rhythm, melody, or harmony but simply by timbre and structure alone. I said I'd burn him a nice drone CD I have, but this Boyd Rice one will do too.

But it was getting late and we had Bad Santa to watch. I'm sure I'll mention that here again.

And I meant to write a review of Daft Punk's Human After All. I've had it for some time and not listened much to it. Next time.

Media Whoredom

I became a media whore yesterday evening. Somebody in work mentioned me to the researcher on a radio show that he was on as someone who might talk about blogs if I was rung. So they did and I talked on 2FM (a national radio station) with Dave Fanning and Karlin Lillington, a journalist and blogger who knows far more about blogs than I do, for a few minutes and felt like a phony. That said, I do stand by everything I said but I don't think a life as a rent-a-quote is for me.

On the way in this morning I listened to a compilation CD somebody made for me called 'The creative genius of William Shatner' and it ruled. This is stuff from The Transformed Man, his legendary performance of Rocket Man at the Science Fiction Awards in 1978, his priceline ads, and some stuff I'd never heard before, including collaborations with Ben Folds from a few years ago. They worked together again on his recent album Has Been. If you get a chance have a listen: there are moments of genius on it.

Goggling at Google

So what spurred my rant on the French revolution? Lara Marlowe wrote a piece in the Irish Times about a French project to digitise old newspapers in which she quoted the director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de Franc, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, suggesting that Europe do something about the hegemony of American information sources on the internet. I have for some time been worried about the near monopoly google has on student's research. Even when far more appropriate tools are available to strong students the pull of just typing in a question to google is irresistable. The example cited by M.Jeanneney was the prevailing attitudes to the French revolution in the Anglo-saxon world - that now includes us by the way - which would be quite shocking and extreme to most French people. The funny thing is that a search for 'french revolution' on google brings you to George Mason University's excellent site.

Are the French being paranoid? I don't think so. It would be them that points it out of course, but in the face of a sustained barrage of public and official racism that is truly shocking and awesome (shock and awe together are a euphemism for terror) I think they probably have more cause to worry than most not in actual imminent danger of having a president googling for a target which he will then order bombed back to the stone age. If he choses a target that isn't already living in the stone age of course.

Google has reached a monopoly just as it has become less reliable. Networks of links, farmed and managed by commercial organisations, are undermining the relevancy and purity of its beautiful ranking system. No doubt they are programming day and night to fix it. No doubt also that once you start hacking and kludging your very paradigm has been undermined. In reality of course their system was compromised from the beginning by non-automated systems ranking the importance of linking sites (you don't really think they weighted every site on the internet do you?) but we ignored that as it solved the problem of reams of useless sites making their way through the older stochastic relevence ranking systems. Those systems were undermined immediately by web programmers spamming their sites up the robots ranking. A war of attrition began with the search engines which the 'bot programmers, playing catch up with the field, was destined to lose. What google did to get around this was rank sites by how many sites linked to them and weight these sites by how many linked to them. In practise, in the early days, this meant being on the top of Yahoo! I know this from looking after a website that was on the top of google's ranking for years despite having much larger competitors that had many more sites linking to them.

You all remember, I'm sure, that typing in 'French military victories' into google and hitting 'I feel lucky' leads you to a page asking do you mean 'French military defeats' and such racist nonsense as -
'World War I
Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.'
To set the record straight, just as Germany was defeated in WWII by the Soviet Union, the Western front was an irrelvance, Germany was defeated as an attacking force in WWI by France and the appalling losses it was willing to take to defend itself from invasion. Those losses effectively finished it as a warring nation for the foreseeable future. Given its history of invading most of Europe for the previous centuries this was probably not a bad thing.
So yes, the French are right to be worried by an unreliable racist monopoly on information.

What has the French Revolution ever done for us?

I have been interested at the propaganda victory and ideological debate surrounding the French Revolution ever since I was in school. We had to study William Burke's 'reflections on the revolution in France'. William burke was an Irish conservative and British MP. He was a Tom in other words. His essay began, roughly from memory, 'when I first beheld the queen of France, then the dauphiness, alighting from her carriage her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground...' and lots of flowery prose defending the beauty of a corrupt and murderous monarchy. I was livid at being forced to read this gilded nonesense and being told, no argument, that it was great prose. I discovered William Blake's 'let the brothels of Paris be opened'

The Queen of France just touched this globe,
And the pestilence darted from her robe;
But our good queen quite grows to the ground,
And a great many suckers grow all around.

I can remember the joy I felt reading through my Da's old book of Blake, most of it incomprehensible to me, and discovering this; someone else we were told was 'good' lacerated Burke's idiotic pretensions. It felt good, centuries later, to have my point of view expressed on this issue by a great writer. Imagine how much better it would have felt at the time? "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" as Wordsworth put it.

Over the years I started noticing things about the French revolution. It never got mentioned without the accompanying phrase 'not since the worst excesses...' The French revolution has become a byword for tyranny in the English speaking word. The most famous actor in it is not Robbespierre or Marat but the Scarlet Pimpernel. A fictional character from 1905. More than a century out of whack. I had read discipline and punish by Foucault and knew that the rate of execution during the 'Reign of Terror' and the French Revolution was slightly lower than that during the last days of the ancien regime. I knew that the people they killed were dedicated to overthrowing the state, and sought allies abroad to bring this about. I knew that the number killed in the 'Reign of Terror' was, from other reading, about a third of the number massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune. But they weren't toffs. The guillotine was regularly held up as an example of the inhumanity of the revolutionaries. Yet, I also knew that the guillotine was a device scientifically designed to minimise suffering and get the ugly business over quickly. As distinct from the ancien regime's pageantry of torture, degredation, humiliation, and day-long executions. This is the pageantry of a regime that has lost control. An interesting side note on the cruelty of the guillotine is that I have read several times that the disembodied head remained conscious for some time (why only with the guillotine? Why not with hacking a head off with an axe, or pulling it off with a rope?), and that this was an unconscionable cruelty. I happened to be reading some scientific and medical history some years back and came across Roselyne Rey's History of pain which refers to the late eighteent to early nineteenth century controversy over where pain came from, the nerve endings or the brain itself. In it there is reference to correspondance between a rural French doctor and a rather more important one in Britain. In the letter he makes reference to having heard an account of the execution of a Duchess(?) and that after her head came off it was picked up and slapped. His sources said she blushed. The eminent doctor in a reading to the Royal Society cited this as evidence that pain came from the brain (for if sensibility - but only the rarified sensibility of a Duchess mind - remained after the body was severed from the brain, so did pain). Obviously hearesay is hardly a source of scientific opinion: it is however a source of public opinion. And it is one that has stayed with us in the English speaking world.

Vive la revolution!

Pigeons eating vomit...

... slowly freezing on the pavement. As Martin Amis said of pigeons, what is it that even they consider worth excreting? Another nasty thought is that most of what you excrete (anally) used to be part of yourself. I think we have a comforting fiction that it is undigested food or something. When it's undigested food you can see that it is (think sweetcorn) most of it is recycled cells and bacteria. If we produce a half litre of blood a week it has to go somewhere or we'd explode. Oh, and lots of bacteria too. Take some antibiotics and notice the effect. Mind you they do mess up your digestion anyway.