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.