Why am I happy?

So why was last night's one-nil victory by the Republic satisfying where other matches haven't been? Because they played a mostly young team with adventure. Because it looked like we now know our best side: Given, Finnan, O'Shea (for want of better full backs), McShane (who was impressive again last night and is already a bedrock of the team), Dunne (who made one mistake as usual but is otherwise unfussy, tough, fast, and his distribution last night was utterly sublime), Carsley/Kilbane, Ireland (when we play with say, Ireland and McGeady there's nobody to win the ball and we get blown over), Hunt (who was dreadful for 3 minutes when he came on, lost the ball, but not his confidence to run at his men and anyway picked himself up and tracked back), Duff (back on form for the first half last night), Doyle (whose header last night for the goal was awesome), and Keane. Though perhaps Duff's performance might have had something to do with Keane's absence.

So there were a bunch of players out playing who were fine passers of the ball, the control, the takes from long passes, were a joy to watch. Most importantly: they played without the crippling fear that has blighted this team. Whether they can take this courage on the road is another question, but beating Slovakia away should not be beyond them. They are technically superior players.

And talking of Keane's absence. He was putting it about that Cork players weren't playing because of a Dublin bias. This was the least Dublin based team I can remember. There are now young players from around the country and not just Cork. Ireland is from Cork, Miller didn't play despite being in form because when he has played (bar against Sweden who didn't show up for the match) he has been useless. He also said that Given had too many caps and shouldn't have played some of the matches he did: he played when he was asked to unlike Keane. The team needs him for solidity whenever any experiment is made. The previous team needed Keane and he wasn't there. I know he's looking for the Ireland job in the future when he slags off GIven but he's simply not in a position to do it.

Keane should have played many more games for Ireland but he let us down instead and assuaged his own ugly, cynical ego.

Walk on by

I had meant to discuss Adam Curtis's fascinating and fun documentary The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom but to be honest I spent most of it counting the music and going "got that". And anyway the most powerful artistic experience that I had this weekend was from a Dionne Warwick record . I just bought some kind of 60s greatest hits (by Dionne Warwicke as the record has it) and the first song is "walk on by". I've never been a fan of the song itself particularly. But oh the production. And her voice wrapped around you, warm and full. Kind of quite the opposite kind of performance to the shrieking divatrons catterwauling through their autotuners. Oh so hysterical with the soul they got baby, sounding like a Japanese robot doing vocal warmups while grudgefucking an overweight golf-playing samariman. And filing its nails. You ain't got soul baby. If you don't know what I mean have a listen to the vocal histrionics in that cover version of "Lady Marmalade" that was used to promote that sparkly turd "Moulin Rouge".
I digress, I digress
I concentrate less, and less
Let us speak no more of such things. But "walk on by" in its original production and arrangement is beautifully sublime. The mix makes no attempt for everything to sound as loud as everything else. This is an edit. There is a really loud guitar chop at the beginning, barely audible acoustic guitars and her voice. The piano kicks in for the chorous and the famous piano figure is played quieter here than in other versions: they were aware it was facile and didn't overplay it. The orchestra swells, swooning backing vocals drift in and out of the mix, suddenly it all drops out and her voice is present in the room, with a more live room reverb than all the other sounds - she is there with you, suddenly intimate and shocking. The whole thing glides on to the end, with the drums really only kicking in during the fade out. This sounds like nothing that could be played live. It is pure electroacoustic music. A product of recording technology being used inventively to create something new rather than echo something else. Mature use of technology. And you need it on record. A mature technology. I don't know what it would sound like on mp3 and don't want to know.

Staircase wit

The cold snap that traditionally accompanies paddy's day has just ended, proof that while god doesn't exist he does hate us so very much, and the spring birds are singing merrily. And is that early chicks I hear in the attic space above me? And we just discovered that the only way Ireland would win a cricket game against a test nation is by foul means. Not necessarily ours - but this is the foulest, most sordid sports story I have ever encountered...

Anyway, watched "the consequences of love" the other night and really enjoyed it. It had a sedate, hypnotic pace and only became less good in the last third when things started happening. The director wasn't so good at that. Then again Tarkovsky was no John Woo and that's no bad thing. Other people have compared it to Sophia Coppolla, and my Beloved and I both thought of lost in translation but it was far less crass than that film. And deliciously morbid too. And a powerful argument for the quotidien blandness of days going by, endlessly, pulling you into the future.
Perhaps we enjoyed it so much partially as it began with pictures of escalators (or more properly moving sidewalks) and blank industrial spaces and bland hotels and we had just been to see Thomas Demand's L'esprit d'escalier exhibition at IMMA. He makes sculptures out of paper, mdf, plastic and photographs these sculptures into luscious huge prints. The subjects are frequently semi-industrial bland areas: a stock office in a warehouse, a stock room for a shop, a lift, an indescribable yellow machine in a factory. At first the pictures look like the real thing and then you notice that the steel stairway spiralling around the machine is painted on; that while the untreated MDF shelves are real the office is in fact largely paint, and the phones sitting on the desk lack buttons and numbers; the balconies coming out of the building are simply corrugated cardboard.

Don't bother with the Alex Katz New York exhibition on at the same venue - NY toffs drawing pictures of each other. They should print them in the New Yorker. Or something. In case you didn't know I despise as contemptible the graphic style of the New Yorker and it old world pretentiousness "from our correspondant in Tallinn". Ick.

Kennedy assassin: the long wait for a culprit ends

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said in a transcript released by the Pentagon. The transcript goes on to detail the many chilling murders he was behind. It seems "It also makes clear that al-Qaida wanted to down a second trans-Atlantic aircraft during would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid’s operation." (MSNBC News)He was behind the first bomb in the World Trade Centre, the attempt to shoot down and El-Al plane ("or other jewish airliner" wow, airplanes can now have a religion. I live in strange times) in Kenya and the Bali nightclub bomb. "Other plots he said he was responsible for included planned attacks against the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Empire State Building and New York Stock Exchange, the Panama Canal and Big Ben and Heathrow Airport in London — none of which happened." (MSNBC news again).

As for the procedure itself, he said he had no objection to the tribunal process, it was in fact "okay by me"he also said that he was responsible for dirty bombs and biological weapons on US soil in a 31 point confession of activities.

It seems likely, if and when the Pentagon releases the redacted portions, that we now know the identity of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Jack the Ripper, and quite possibly the Bogey Man himself.

You really should pop over to the transript itself.

Ministry of Space

While this book may be slight, it's beautiful. And I really can't stress too much just how beautiful the artwork in this book is. I'm sure (and I know it had a slightly troubled history, the last issue was delayed three years) that the artist spent a huge chunk of his life for comparatively little pay doing it. It was worth it though. Though my word for it is suspect as I deeply fetishise retro-futurism. It's like Dan Dare meets modern repro and digital techniques. Each frame is bursting with colour and detail.

As for the story: it's an alternative history of the late twentieth century. British imperialism rules the skies. The satire, while not gentle, is subtle and pervasive. These two reviews are interesting as both the authors
a) don't know what a mcguffin is, and
b) bought the mcguffin with extra chips to go
so maybe the satire is a little less pointed than I had thought. The source of the funding for the Ministry of Space is the mcguffin by the way, not the plot. The real story is something rather different and by choosing Britain as the target of the satire the author makes some positive points about the US while at the same time exposing the imperialist project for what it is.

I thought it was a tiny bit expensive for such a small comic, but it is so beautiful, so extraordinarily beautiful, that I bought it anyway. Then I thought that if I lent it to a friend of mine I wouldn't be able to accept it back as the art is even more up his street so I went and bought another copy for him. You should buy one for your friends too. This little gem is worthy of our support.

Conservapaedia (sic)

I thought you might be interested in a new wiki project to correct the anti-christian and anti-american bias of wikipedia. for example they have a list of biases in Wikipedia. Here's number one

"1 Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception."

How right they are. I don't know if you've read an academic book on ancient history or archeology recently but they do it too! The whole world isn't utterly compliant with fundaligionist christians. This must be fixed immediately and wikipedia is unworkable with.

The anti-american bias of Wikipedia, and the evidence of it, is even more damning, try this -

9 Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation." Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[9] Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family)
and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

We should insist that this be changed immediately, or until it is changed, insist that everyone use the Conservapedia.
Lead Kindly Light!

I should point out that their page on the bias of Wikipedia is a great advertisement for the corrective nature of wikipedia itself - many of the points that seem to exhibit bias have indeed been changed and others effortlessly withstand the conservapedia criticism. For example: the US no longer uses, according to Wikipedia, the term "most favored nation", and has replaced it with, rather sensibly it has to be said, the term "Normal Trade Relations". The GATT treaty itself also spells in in the non-US English way (can't bring myself to say British English).

I'm not particularly a fan of wikipedia by the way - I just lambasted a student for writing an article in a student newspaper lifted from the wiki only yesterday. But the Conservopedia is a particularly funny example of the uneducated but increasingly powerful religious lunatic. The conservapedia page itself, sadly, is a rather fine example of selective use of evidence, circular argument, peurile name-calling, base anti-intellectualism, non-scientific pseudo reasoning, and pure simple utter madness. I might note that they link to the Religious Tolerance website to lend credance to their view that the majority of Americans disagree with evolution. This is not what their page on the subject actually says. It says that 44% of Americans (overall) believe in some form of young earth creationism, that god created man inside the last 10.000 years. 49% believe in either theistic or non-theistic evolution. That would include the two largest Western faiths by the way. Not that wikipedia as an international document should necessarily reflect majority American opinion.

One last point about largely uneducated religious crazies, whether they be christian, muslim, jewish, or buddhist: to suggest that a scientific article, or an encyclopaedia (non-american spelling, so sue me) should include crazy young earth creationism when writing about evolution and suggesting that it is worthless and biased for not doing so, is much like pointing out that the bible, or koran, or whatever is worthless and biased for not writing about scientifically valid evolution.

And we wouldn't have that said would we?

The Polical Compass

This has been the buzz around the office for the last couple of days: we've been having fun with the political compass. We were at a seminar about critical thinking in students and one of the suggestions was a tool to help them perceive the bias they approached a subject with.

Its central premise I take to be self-evident: that the axis of left and right is unsatisfactory for plotting political convictions and that another of authoritarian vs. libertarian is needed. This, obviously, doesn't work for Americans who like to confuse 'liberal' with 'left' when they are not the same thing. This is part of the reason why former lefties (say Wolfowitz et al though for all their trumpeting of SDS leadership I've never seen them mentioned in anything on the SDS) end up with a very right wing government.

I have long argued that Irish political parties are only comprehensible if you have a three dimensioal axis including both these measures and nationalism and unionism. The lack of a major fascist party here is partially attributable to strong nationalism being associated with the left a bit more than the right. DeValera would have been a willing fascist but his fellow travellers would not.

By the way, I score somewhere between Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

From people at work's score I suspect that most people's politics, when not considering which of their limited parties to vote for, are far less authoritarian than the options offered them. And probably quite a bit left too. Howard Zinn noted that about polling the US people rather than the options they are offered