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.

Misogynistic one-trick ponies and the right to have silence

I went to make tea for my Beloved this morning before I left for work and John Waters came on the radio to discuss the morning's papers. I had just read an article comparing this radio station's morning coverage of the papers with others. They talked of the gravitas of Newstalk's survey of how the papers were covering stories. I thought to myself 'is that fecker ever off the TV/radio? And he only ever has one thing to bang on about. Fathers and child custody. You'd think he didn't have custody of his own child. You'd think that his persistent pursuit of victimhood was backed up by something other than being a rich columnist (think Julie Burchill) with reactionary views (sexist in his case, racist in hers) whose voice was never off the media.' I came back with the tea and sure enough his review of the papers was about child custody. Now I normally leave work just when the paper review comes on (I live near work but I start early), but he appears to be there about a third of the time. Is taking his views seriously really to be considered as gravitas? He is a lonely buffoon.

Please make him and his atavistic colleagues seeking victim status (you know the ones, those that hide their misogyny under a cloak of 'saying what others dare not') shut up and allow us silence from their tedious, bland, formulaic, reactionary drivel.

The Beloved 

Restaurants

I don't know. It's funny. Myself and my Beloved went to a restaurant on Sunday (I was visiting a sick friend and was starving so I didn't want to cook) and it cost 45 yoyos for two take-out style Thai curries and a bottle of indifferent wine. No surprise there really. Went to an excellent restaurant last night and had four different dishes (dhal, paneer, chestnuts and green beans, spicy potatoes) and rice and a nice bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc (Nautilus - they've gone screw cap which is fine with a young (2004) wine like that, they didn't have the gruner veltliner left, which is a pity as it goes really well with curry) and it came to 48 yoyos. This place isn't your normal curry house; it really is distinguishable from the ultra fatty muck that you normally get and that caters for people that have already had a skinful by the time they get in the door (ever leave an indian take-out in the fridge overnight and see what happens to it? I promise that if you do you will have to be drunk to order there again). I suppose in the other place we had the joy of scarlet shiny polyester tablecloths and all the Chinese staff pretending to be Thai. And what a joy that was.

We don't eat meat. I think that should make eating out very cheap, but then I think meat should be very expensive. Most restaurants think nothing, however, of serving up some pasta mess that really should cost a fiver (and does in Italy) and charging 14 for it. Jaipur gets the pricing right. We started eating fish a couple of years ago. I think it was partially because we were sick of getting ripped off in restaurants. If I'm going to pay I'd like to do it for something that cost money not some "goat's cheese tartlet" that has been in your cold room for a month and comes out dry (the filling) and soggy (the pastry) at the same time from your microwave. Does anyone like goat's cheese tartlet? We were discussing clueless restaurant reviewers on the way home, my Beloved thought that being a socialite and posh doesn't necessarily mean you know anything about food. She also was saying that she hoped Jaipur didn't cop on to what good value they are. This really is food that you could easily be charged twice the price for somewhere else. I'm going back. Soon.

Laurie Anderson

I met Laurie Anderson last night. I felt like such a fanboy nerd stalker walking up to her and put on a posh voice as she made me nervous. To put it in perspective I was sorry I didn't have my camera with me as I wanted to see what she had called the settings programmed into her effects unit. However she was so pleasant and animated that I was put at my ease. You know the way she talks on the records? Well she really does simply talk like that. The caesurae, the odd accents placed on words, the measured pace. But with permanently arched brows and an infectious smile. She was performing at the opening of her show in IMMA in Kilmainham. I didn't go to the show after as the place was crowded and I live accross the road so I can go and experience it at my leisure. It's a funny thing, Michael Durand - a photographer friend - mentioned that she was playing in the gallery and I assumed that I wouldn't be able to get in without tickets, that I'd be spotted as an interloper, rather than given not bad wine, a free performance, and a chance to talk to someone whose work I have loved for years. I get that feeling about art galleries and film festivals, they accidentally exclude people; I always thought it was strange that the theatre festival got people going to the theatre even if they didn't normally do it while the film festivals always seem to make a demotic activity elitist.

So what did we talk about? Unfortunately I didn't add to her store of happiness. I was wondering had she tried to do anything about the obnoxious Ford Ka ad that soundalikes the title track from her Bright Red album. This song has background sythesiser washes and male and female voices, disturbingly uninflected and changing mid sentence without warning or break in the rhythm, saying 'get into the car little girl: it's a brand new cadillac'. The Ford ad has similar synth sounds and a similarly disembodied voice going 'get into the Ka'. There's no way that an ad agency can really think a song about a paedophile child abductor is really a good idea for an ad for a family car? A small and young family car at that. Her attitude was that it happens all the time and if you spent your time following up on all of them you'd never get anything else done.

Great to meet her.