tinnitus silence

Werner is Cheney

2011-01-22T10:58:00.004Z

So watching The white diamond, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was a bit... off about it till she said to me "don't bogart that joint Mark Anthony". It's true, they were all stoned. Werner allowed an amazing shift in tone from a man crying about how his dirigible killed a film maker to one of the locals (Mark Anthony - the hero of the film in a way) talking about how great his rooster was. Allowing Herzog to laconically voiceover about how he had to meet this wonderful character. So they took the film ("in celluloid we trust") to the chicken. A minor Herzog really. I like the flexibility he exhibits in going where the situation seems to be leading him (as in Finnisterre where he allows the film to be completely taken over by the beauty and power of the burning oil wells), but none of it is very substantial. He didn't make a nature documentary, he didn't make a documentary about flight, or about British Guyana, or about the waterfall...

It does include the classic line, when the scientist was insisting on flying the machine alone for the first flight, "there are different kinds of stupidity, there's dignified stupidity, heroic stupidity... but this is just stupid stupidity". For Herzog of course a dangerous flight is not the stupid part, but doing it without a camera on board - that's just stupid stupidity...

127 Hours

2011-01-13T23:36:00.003Z

Watched this tonight, as I may have mentioned before my active pursuits mostly include nursing my arthritic joints and raising a glass to the heroic doers of this world, and while we enjoyed it we felt something lacking. It fizzed along very well and at 90 minutes it didn't outstay its welcome. Despite its horrifying premise it wasn't chock full of body horror and actually at its worst it resembled Disney Torture Porn: somehow facile, video game, music video, Tarantino, denaturedviolence purely for aesthetics, shits, and giggles... The shocking violence of the film rarely felt as painful as the single golf club to the knee that resonated with waves of pain throughout Funny Games for example. Which is fine really as the story was much, much more upbeat: pretty Hollywood boys and girls leading the active life. Outdoorsmen youknow.

It was fun. In a music video kind of way. Much more "artistic" than the climbing movies I've been watching lately. And much more shallow.

But fun.

Books for 2011

2011-01-13T08:51:00.008Z

So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.

Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.

Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."

Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?

nationalism, rampant crony-capitalism, and liars

2008-10-23T12:36:00.006Z

Patriotism transmutes individual selfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to a nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932

How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class

"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".

And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.

What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.

* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.

She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-24T15:23:00.001Z

A mate asked about him in an email and this is my reply:

I'm still seriously depressed, no disappointed the way that life does disappoint you, about DFW.

Somebody quoted from American Psycho to me recently when I said something about music and I was just thinking "that is the kind of "ironic" hip, self regarding, smug, empty, vapid, self conciously clever, consumer as creator, dead end of literature and culture that David Foster Wallace demonstrated is the nadir of civilisation. A rallying point, a line to make in the sand and anathema to reject. And now he's dead". I read Infinite Jest and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again as well as various journalism. He's infuriating, Razor sharp yet obfusticating, earnest, sincere and elusive. Difficult and brilliant to read. I wanted to edit his books with a hammer.

McSweeney's doesn't do it for me, I feel like I'm not part of the joke, not part of the scene. DFW had a terribly self destructive streak, an inability to not analyse, to enjoy, to deliver straight. It's the thread that joins Harvey Pekar to Curb Your Enthusiasm but allied to a fierce and ferociously learned intellect and a genuine and sincere quest to understand modern society, happiness, sadness, horror, television, literature, advertisement, debasement, entertainment, infantilism, addiction, autoeroticism, intoxication, and again and again, sadness and living.

I can't honestly recommend that you read him however.

Lars and the Real Fantasy

2008-04-11T06:58:00.003Z

So last night's film Lars and the Real Girl - in contrast to last week's properly creepy the Orphanage -was cute, life affirming and touching. Perhaps not a little twee. We went to it as fans of Six Feet Under (one of the many series that makes me say that current US TV is the golden age. The best in the world. Ever.) I'm sure you know the set up, painfully shy (or actually mentally ill and terrified of contact) young man brings home one of those Real Doll sex toys and it gets integrated into the community when everyone plays along with his delusion that she is real (Brazilian half Danish missionary - the Danish is important, this is a Danish community he lives in). The film had to work hard not to creep me out - I'd just come across the book Still Lovers in work the other week. This is a book of men and their real dolls. Even the shots that weren't creepy were creepy. Really creepy. I mean those shots that didn't look like the aftermath of rape looked like creepy mental illness...

The first big thing they did to avoid the ick factor was they made Lars a serious churchgoer and in his fantasy Bianca (the realdoll) was a missionary so she slept in his brothers house. I'm glad to say that his brother didn't appear to take advantage of her. Leave out the psychobabble gloss they put in - that rubbish appears in all american movies and is no more or less serious than the magic that would be used to explain this in a fairy tale - and we have an incongrous, perhaps surreal device or plot element to make us consider the ordinary surroundings as if they were new. And now we see where the real fantasy is: the community he went to, his church, his work, the local GP who is also a psychiatrist and has hours of time a week to spend chatting to him (who's paying?). Hell the Emergency Room springs into action when he says Bianca is ill. Did he bring her to the local Kaiser Permanente ER? Did they perform a wallet autopsy on a sex doll? How did the insurance underwriters classify the treatment? Was it perhaps experimental and will Lars get a Real Bill be doing a long sequel of overtime to pay for it?
The fantasy is not that a man can love a doll, or that his community will accept it. The fantasy is that the community exists in the first place. Sure, you may think that your church is that community, leeching and tithing your money out of you: but try actually bringing in a sex doll to church.

Klaus Nomi is cold

2008-02-26T17:20:00.004Z

I was trying to post this somewhere else, but I couldn't. So I'm putting it here.

I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)

Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.

Previews

2008-02-21T09:11:00.002Z

I really meant to write something serious here yesterday. It was to do with sentencing policy and drugs and stuff. But I didn't. I did write some previews of DVDs that arrived in here yesterday so I'll post them instead.

Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)

Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)

20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)

Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)

South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)

Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)

Sicko (Moore)

Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)

Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)

Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)

Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)

Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)

Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)

Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)

1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)

Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)

Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)

What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)

Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)

Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)

Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)

Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)

Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)

Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)

The wire (don't bother - I have it first)

Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.

St. John's Passion

2008-02-18T16:34:00.005Z

Seeing as how my living circumstances have changed this year I only went to one performance in the Living Music festival. I went to none last year but it was John Adams and after having to sit through the RTE Concert Orchestra while they dragged their lazy arses through a soporific rendition of short ride in a fast machine I didn't feel like putting myself through it. Part should have been different and I would have gone to lot more if Back of Head wasn't in my life. I chose to go to the Passio on Saturday night in Christchurch and brought my mother as a Christmas present. I am vaguely familiar with the piece - I have the Naxos rather than the Hilliard ensemble recording and the presence of the Hilliard Ensemble was part of the reason to choose this rather than one of the other performances.

Hmmm.... they play it considerably slower. Glacially paced. Sure nothing much goes on in the music anyway but the pace, for me, exposed it's thinness. I love devotional music but rarely pay attention to the words. I often find myself walking down the road singing "chant down Babylon" but when I think of Babylon I think of Gilgamesh and rather appreciate its impact on world culture (apart from chunks of the bible being nicked from old Babylonian poetry. That's not so cool.). I digress. I had much time to pay attention to the words of this passion. The text comes from the latin version of St. Paul. It's a rum choice for a passion. The authorial interventions by The Evangelist (in the role of Basil Exposition) are many. And frequently elongated and monotonic. Jesus in this version is not a sympathetic character: he is aloof, a grudging participant in fate. And a smart arse "are you the king of the jews?" asks Pilate, "you say I am" Jesus replies. No Jesus, he didn't, he asked you a question, now tell him the answer and get out of there. The only attractive character, and played by the tenor who gets the liveliest musical line, is Pilate. He doesn't want to kill Jesus. He is forced into doing so by "the jews". This passion is a deeply anti-jewish text written as an apologia for Roman imperialism. Jesus was doing his job, so was Pilate: it was the nasty jews who weren't. It's quite obviously written for a Roman audience.

Most of these flaws are within the text itself. It does not lend itself to a sympathetic narrative of the passion. Its racism is out of tune with the modern world (if it was anti-roman we wouldn't really mind...) Its Jesus is almost old testament in his aloof disregard for creation, with only an almost modern Bart Simpson smartarse personality lending him humanity.
Po faced and solemn rather than moving and contemplative. I shifted on my wooden chair for the duration.

I don't care what Giovanni says - Arvo really does look like a hunched up Salman Rushdie.

I also wasted two hours watching Atonement at the weekend. If it wins an award for best supporting actor or something it should be the house that does it. The house was the best dressed, most interesting character in the film. The film was a strange mix of difficult and facile. The child was a proxy for the author in a crass way - her atonement was anything but. The exposition was sometimes so subtle as to make you feel a scene had been cut. Which it probably had.

Despair, hope, Repuberlick, and the Trap

2008-02-13T11:03:00.006Z

As I have said many times before - it's not the despair. It's the hope that kills you.

Might I be allowed to watch republic playing a match without peeking through my fingers shaking my head groaning numbing myself with drugs and alcohol beseeching the elder ones in syllables beyond language?

I can see it all: I turn up. Spruce. Alert. Hopeful. Watchful.

My spirit gets dashed against a pebbledash wall and rubbed repeatedly while raw down to a stump.

Or:

He doesn't turn up as manager. Even Venerables decides he's too cool for us (and in fairness, too cool for the repuberlick is not too hard: the most high profile toupee wearer in English football is too cool for us) and we get somebody else who once coached Scunthorpe reserves through their bad patch before the current renaissance.

Adam Curtis' the trap pitched a world of theoretical people: hard hearted criminals the lot of them upon which the political / economical elite / establishment based its calculations for control. If only we were those people. The prisoner's dilemma would be simple: always assume the worst about Irish football. Always assume failure. We are trapped not by failure but by hope.

Saw this somewhere..

2007-08-23T11:14:00.000Z

Also this looks really interesting too... Ordered a copy for "work".

Hiatus

2007-05-16T20:21:00.000Z

Forgive the lack of posts. I have a social networking / virtual community of practice project on the go and I will not be writing here until after the middle of June. I'm busy with
http colon backslash backslash crcp dot gcd dot ie

why have I suddenly gone secretive?

Sequel to Pi

2007-05-03T13:30:00.000Z

If you don't know what this number is it's probably less funny.

Busy?

2007-04-16T07:59:00.000Z

It turns into a catalogue - I can't write about it all. Thursday night went to see Kicking a deaad horse in the Peacock with Stephen Rea. I liked the horse. I bought the play to read it afterwards - I kind of missed what he was saying towards the end. I think he was knackered. Whenever I break my rule about seeing plays in the first two weeks I'm disappointed. Most people found his performance compelling but the play shit. In the pub on Saturday they were saying it was written in the 80s and sat in his drawer - he knew it wasn't good. So I didn't pop over to Sam Shepard in the pub and say hi, I mean if I'd loved the thing I would have.
Friday went to see Indigenes at the IFI, about Algerian soldiers fighting for France in WWII. Afterwards had tagines and Alsation riesling in respect (the film ends up in Alsace, they are fighting alone for a French village where the inn is called Sonntag and the snow is coming down). Fine film, very emotional.
Saturday evening went to see Joanna Newsom live in the Olympia and she was absolutely phenomenal, I think it's the first night of her current tour with a small scale band. All of whom were annoyingly young and gifted. Everything she does from playing the harp, to singing in an 'ickle gurl voice (she talks like that too) to using words like 'spelunking', 'dirigibles' and 'ledger' (though in fairness it does rhyme in the song...) should annoy me but I think she's a genius. Actually, I love the word dirigible. It's a privilege to be in the same room as someone when they turn it on like that. A real fucking privilege. She totally blew me away. Did a good long show too. After went to the pub and everyone had seen the play... that's when we saw Sam in the pub by the way.

Sunday went to seen Nanni Moretti's new film The Caiman about which nothing should be said and in the evening on to Sunshine Danny Boyle's pastiche of 2001, Solaris, and Event Horizon. Did I mention Silent Running? That too. I loved it. Particularly the bits where not much happened, but then I think that if Solaris was twice as long, and half as much happened, it would be four times as good. Which is kind of the opposite of most people's opionions. But it was kind of ruined at the end when Sam Neill's character from Event Horizon turns up all burnt skin and the movie briefly follows slasher conventions. I find them tedious in the extreme. There is not a film that I have seen where the baddie defies logic, physics, and good writing to repeatedly return from the dead to terrorise the people in the movie that I haven't despised as I was watching. Think of something like Cape Fear where that gurning oaf masquerading as an actor won't just fuck off and die... Anyway, I liked the film's abstract noise, liminal images, and grand gothic doom laden aura. I found it gripping and frightening. I found the acceptance and even craving for death believable and refreshing for a film such as this. The people I was with were less enthused.
Caught the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition in there sometime too. It was alright.

La Folie

2007-04-04T14:17:00.000Z

Just after buying (on Amazon.fr, thank fuck there isn't an Amazon.ie so we get to buy stuff at the cheap prices in France) an album by Benjamin Biolay and Chiara Mastroianni (no idea if she's related to the famous one) along with the box set of series one of Doctor Who for less in yo-yos than the price in English pounds of the box set from Amazon.co.ck Anyway, why would I buy such fey French acoustic pop? Have I no patriotism and cannot I get my fey whimsy from an Irish source? Well it's like this: on our honeymoon in Mexico we occasionally stayed in actual hotels, you know the things with plumbing in the rooms and TVs and it was rare there or anywhere that the music channels were not playing Shakira. You remember that Shakira video where she is being voyeured by the neighbour and she greases up in engine oil, pulls here trousers down so her hipbones are sticking out, lies down with her shoulders and feet on the ground and hips in the air, jiggling her scrawny butt across the floor humping nothing furiously, looking like she's going through sexual ecstasy and yodelling like a transgender Bulgarian weightlifter auditioning for "the Sound of Music: the muscle mary version"? Well that one pissed me off mightily because, well hearing her "it's a pity my breasts are small so you won't mistake them for a mountain/ it's lucky my ass is big. a like a my mama's" yodelling makes me cringe every time. I mean, if you're going to do porn Shakira just do fucking porn so I won't have to hear and see you when I go for coffee. Anyway, this video was such an antidote to Shiteera.

And if that was far too wimpy for you try this: the resemblance to a Serge duet is uncanny, with subtracted loucheness though. Je suis folle d'elle.

Why am I happy?

2007-03-29T08:05:00.000Z

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

2007-03-26T07:43:00.000Z

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

2007-03-22T08:55:00.000Z

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

2007-03-15T08:47:00.000Z

“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

2007-03-09T09:09:00.000Z

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)

2007-03-07T14:58:00.000Z

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

2007-03-01T08:59:00.000Z

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

Independent Idiotic: not news I suppose

2007-02-21T09:10:00.000Z

Well I got into trouble with one of the kids yesterday for slagging off the Irish Independent. I picked up one from the large piles teetering unread that they give out free and laughed at the strapline 'Ireland's best selling newspaper'. "who'd buy this shit?". The kid replied that a quarter of a million copies were sold everyday. You, I, and the whole world know that newspaper's sales figures are, at best, wishful thinking. So I said, assuming they do, why? You can pick it up for free all over the place. Anyway, the kid said he and all his family bought copies. Don't you love the loyalty? Even if I don't need it I'm going to buy this low grade sheet that publishes dubiously reported propaganda at the whim of its owner. Maybe his da works for it, but he's maybe 19 or something - he should be hating his da if he has any grit in his soul at all.

So today's headline "Death crash bus driver is cleared: verdict puts pressure on Dublin Bus to find cause of accident". And lots of stuff about compensation - this from a paper that regularly accuses this country of being obsessed with compensation. Let's get it straight. The prosecution made a mess of the case and gave the defence incorrect figures to work on. The defence concocted a case based on the tachograph from a South African bus - it was a weak case as it happens but this is irrelevant as it was based on an entirely different bus. During the trial this mistake was discovered - the prosecution had the figures from the correct bus and no 'power surge' was on it. So the Independent - front page 'Power surge key to verdict' is absolutely wrong. The chain of evidence and the presentation of evidence by the prosecution is the key to the verdict. Absolutely no evidence of a power surge was adduced in court. None. That said the defendent had to be found innocent: would you like to be convicted in a case where the prosecution was so sloppy with the evidence? But, crucially there is no need for Dublin Bus to find the cause of the accident. There is no suggestion that there was anything other than driver error.

This is a distasteful comparison but there you go. OJ Simpson had to be found innocent due to the prosecution's actions, the police do not have to go looking for the real killer of his wife. The defendent had to be found innocent, I think, but that does not mean the search for the cause of the accident goes on. The Irish Independent - up to the usual lofty journalistic standards of the Independent group - has covered the story with profound ignorance of the law.

More web 2.0ness

2007-02-20T19:47:00.000Z

I made a post the other day being enthusiastic for some kind of web 2.0 application- to be deluged with the response that it did exist. So now I'm trying to be officially enthusiastic for web 2 so on my sidebar where what should be my blogroll resides you might notice - if you haven't been here in a while - that there is a technorati link and a new social networking aggregation link. This is provided by elgg.

When will they learn?

2007-02-20T08:59:00.000Z

On the way up to work this morning walking through the Tenters and what do you know it but the cherry blossoms are out already. Obviously they come out weeks later on the Northside where I grew up. But I've been walking past these cherry trees for years and while the urge to start singing Sakura rose up in me as strong as it would in any man I had to ask myself: when will these trees ever learn? Yes it's been mild the last few days, Saturday was warm and sunny (yesterday was, well, let's forget yesterday) but winter lasts long these years. Last year it only started in January and while everyone thinks it was a warm summer it was below ten degrees and pelting down in July: May was horribly cold. Winter goes on and on. November and December tend to be pleasant. These trees will never produce cherries while this goes on.
They produce cherries on the Northside you know.
Anyway, I stop to say hello to a cat with some weird facial deformity and the poor thing runs away. This is quite unusual as cats tend to lose their timidity around me. Honestly, since I was a kid. I mean I always thought if I had to choose I was a dog man (though it's a bit like 'are you a breast or a leg or an arse man? Yes! No which? YES, YES, YES!') but cats prefer me. Though I do seem to remember they preferred me when I was hairier - kittens had a thing for big beards and actual cats tried to nest in my big hair. Then I remembered a snippet of a dream I had last night which involved me violently picking up a cat and throwing it away (with extreme prejudice - I think I must have been affected by that US doctrine I read about yesterday, known as the 'Ledeen doctrine' of 'throwing some shitty little country up against the wall once a decade just to show we mean business' HUH! YEAH! I met that guy (who no doubt is even weedier and nerdier than me or I wouldn't dream of threatening. Actually, why deny the internet. He, like most of the hawkish neocons really is even weedier than I) I would throw him repeatedly against the wall. Call it socratic dialogue mofo. No really Messrs Ledeen and Goldberg, I really, really, would throw you repeatedly against a wall if I met you. It's odious. But perhaps you might realise what dreadful little people you were and how you were giving succour to dreadful little people with violent little minds.) which is really unusual. I don't really go for violent dreams. Actually, I don't remember them largely as they are so dull they send me into deep sleep. A friend and I used to, about a dozen years ago, email each other in the morning with our dreams. Pretty soon I had to make them up: my conscious imagination is less hide-bound, conventional and dull (maybe) than my dreams. It's a bit like kids really - they're supposed to be these imaginative 'don't they say the durndest things' kind of people when in fact, in my rather limited experience, they tend to crave repetition and conformity. Once they have a concept they judge everything by it if at all possible.

Infamous - or at least not famous

2007-02-07T14:22:00.000Z

Somebody said, when the subject came up "I don't know why anyone would make a film about Capote when there was one just out". I'm not a producer so I neither can answer, nor am I interested in answering that question. I can however offer a perspective on why you might go and watch it. The main reason is that it is a fine film with a balanced script and a set of excellent performances: Dobby the House Elf utterly outdoes Philip Seymour Hoffman's smug Hollywood turn. Sandra Bullock is an even less likely comfortable shoe wearing Harper Lee than Katherine Keener - looking like she is about to corpse every time Capote opens his mouth down South adds great charm to the movie. James Bond is a rounded, believable, frightening Perry. The whole film has many charms: in this we can see why Capote was popular as well as the fact that artists are monsters cannibalising life. The relationship with Perry is very believable rather than the coy cut to the next morning of the previous film. The supporting cast is huge - Sigourney Weaver as a grande dame best mate, Peter Bogdanovich (I'd prefer he directed instead, we went to see his last film 'the cat's miaow' and it was a perfect ensemble piece), Isabella Rosselini...

All I remember liking about the other Capote film was the film emulsion. Normally most cinematographers seem to go for a chiaroscuro effect: doesn't matter if you're in a hospital ward the shadow side of your face will be pitch black. It's sort of the equivilent of the overenthusiastic foley artist in my book. In this however the print was undersaturated and the emulsion had a greeish hue: it looked like a late 50s early 60s Life magazine spread. The kind of thing where they followed Kennedy's campaign trail. I particularly remember in the jail scenes the dark of Hofmann's face being green.

As an actor pointed out to me: you can't really blame Hofmann for the facile part. All he did was an impersonation. Nothing else to the film really. Which reminded me of the other film I saw that same weekend last year: Walk the line. Again nothing but impersonation. Somebody said to me this week that the music made the film worthwhile. Buy the records. I don't need some actor doing them.

Both those films were deeply philistine: mimesis as the highpoint of art. Infamous, on the other hand was a real film. It added something to the world. Not the greatest film ever. But it was a piece of art.

Starbucks

2007-02-05T09:04:00.000Z

So I got a coffee in Starbucks the other day. Or ThreeBucks as they should call it, well ThreeBucksTwenty is what my coffee cost. Not the same ring to it though I suppose. It's not that I made a huge conscious decision to avoid it before but the thing is I pass it every week. Early in the morning on a Saturday. And I need a coffee but I don't go there as it's ten minutes walk to where I'm going. And I'm usually carrying a computer (why don't laptops weigh as much as lapdogs? In fact spidery little legs for self locomotion and fur would make nice additions to laptop design. They could sort of purr maybe during use. Anyway.) so I don't bother. But, there is no coffee shop between College Green, past the copshop on Pearce Street, down past Westland Row to the far end of Pearce St. Chef shops, kitchen gear, yeast retailers, fundaligionist creeepy fucked up fambly friendly young earth creationist Christian Worship Centres yes. But no coffee shops. I think to myself is this some kind of 21st century version of Joyce's game 'can you get from a to b in Dublin (in his mind, in Zurich or Trieste) without passing a pub (and no doubt a bracing restorative imaginary glass of wine)' except now it's a coffee shop. And you'd be doing it on google earth / maps.

Does absolutely everything have to have a web 2.0 interface now?

Needless to say we had the 'hilarious' I'm too stupid to talk to them thing. 'Large black coffee to take away please'. Fool! 'What kind?', 'oh you know, normal, black, americano, whatever you call it', 'normal or Americano?''Americano''With milk?' 'no black' 'large whateveryadadyadaddaa no room to go'. And there was no room in this giant litre vat they served me. So I spilt a bunch on the way to where I was going, soaking my hand in scalding coffee and soaking the cardboard sleeve that should keep your hand from getting too hot when holding it and the vat, when half full, toppled over and spread an oilslick a metre square on the carpet.
I read about WalMart's gallon jars of pickles (who wans a gallon of pickles?) now I saw it in action.

I'll make my own in future. It's at least as good, costs pence, isn't a two litre tub, and won't go all over the place.

I mean to put these up in a more timely fashion. From Get Your War On

2007-02-01T14:55:00.000Z

Budget

2006-12-06T09:08:00.000Z

Spending too much time this morning thinking about modelling prisoner's dilemma on children's robots to really take the time to write what I had intended to write.

Another budget and another confused set of tools will emerge. Bertie had his supposed 'road to damascus' when he discovered the ordinary people had begun to blame him for the neoliberal ruin that was emerging and the huge disparity in income that is developing and so claimed he was 'the last socialist in Ireland'. This budget will be another set of giveaways; institutional giveaways to the very rich and corporate greed that will see the bifurcation in Irish society entrenched; and handouts to the poor to buy votes - increases in social welfare for groups (like the elderly) that his electoral machine is afraid of losing. The cynicism of this clientelle politics is really sickening. It's also deeply infuriating as their hypocrisy is damaging for the country. In reality the key economic policy of this government is croneyism rather than the neoliberalism of Charlie McCreevy (though of course he was guilty of cronyism as his tax breaks for billionaire horse pimps shows). They rub shoulders and create a corrupt business environment for their billionaires they worship in the Galway Races hospitality tents and up a few shillings (bread and circuses again) for the excluded's dole rather than seeking an economy where the rising tide raises all boats. Many of the boats have holes in them and handing out life jackets isn't the best use of public money.

Not that the best use of public money is something this government has shown the slightest understanding of.

White shirt, red mist

2006-10-11T07:43:00.000Z

Early in Zidane, a 21st century portrait there were two images that spoke volumes about football and Zizou's place in it. The first two names visible after the opening montage, largely abstract of closeups of CRT TV, blurry players in white decomposing into tricolour blobs, were on the back of two Real Madrid players: Zidane and Pavon. This, I think shows the extent to which editing and shot selection are inherently problematic in a film like this (though I think only if you come to it with an assumption that you will see the match "as it really was" rather than just another version). The next was after five minutes sweating already and spitting and hawking out snots as he did the whole way through he is bobbing around, pointing at the ground and shouting for the ball to no avail. Reminds me of childhood.

For me it works best as a semi-abstract film. Rather than an attempt to impose another coherent narrative on the match from the commentators and TV's version (which I would suddenly like to see) we see the match in claustrophobic confusion. Thumps and bumps and runs. I think they were quite lucky that Villareal, judging by the number of dribbles Zidane did and the number midshots in which Zidane was alone, didn't man-mark him at all. Perhaps the twilight of his career was the time to do it and his years of delaying were part of a plan... It was interesting to see how much of his game involves trapping with his chest and stomach and cushioned headers. There were sequences when he didn't touch the ball with his feet. But when he did, ball at feet, turning defenders inside out before lobbing a cross over the keeper into the path of one of his teammates requiring only any kind of touch to be a goal...

He didn't say must. Just loads of 'hey's the odd 'aqui', a subtitle told us that he said to the referee 'you should be ashamed' after a dodgy penalty award. Shortly before the end Roberto Carlos (the player he had most interaction with) said something funny and Zidane laughed and kept the smile on his face a long time, the way you do in a time when you have had no human communication. But did he smile any other time? Was it lost in the edit? This is no dogma style document that promotes its purity. I guess that they did edit the film as near as they could to real time using the synchronised timecode but even at that the choices mean that this one smile could simply be the one they left in. Around about then I noticed the soundtrack began to foreground the thumps of people hitting each other. Zidane had been clattered to the ground early on, earning a Villareal player the first booking. There had been a couple more but in general the physical power of Zidane's game was a constant presence and he muscled his way on to several balls. Forlan got sent off (he also missed a sitter disproving the notion that he bangs them in for fun in Spain) and the camera made a big deal of him pushing Senna. And then (was it Raúl?) was bustled off the ball at the byline and Zidane barged in swung a punch and grabbed some guy. Game over and the film makers must have been glad he got sent off in the final.

Funny thing is, he was only a cameo but, the player showing mastery and artistry and consummate genius in this game was not Zidane: it was Casillas.

This film is not yet rated

2006-10-06T07:46:00.000Z

Hey, it's turning into movie review city. We saw this at the documentary festival on in Dublin last weekend and it was a hoot. The US has a very different system for censorship compared to most of Europe: it's privatised. It's not called censorship, it's called a ratings system to help parents protect their children. We have a more paternalistic state run system. It's called censorship and they simply won't release films with extreme sex or violence except through porn and mail order outlets. If a film gets an NC-17 rating the theatre owners are theoretically free to show the film. They won't however. The US non-censorious "censorship" is remarkably effective at stopping films being seen. I've been thinking a fair bit recently about what is done well in the US privately and bad by the government and what is done badly by Europe privately and well by the government (no one sector fits this exactly but you can say European public health is good, US private education is good...). Funnily enough most US citizens would scream blue murder if their government had half the censorship power that they gladly cede to an unelected cabal at the service of big business. In Europe the opposite is the case. And I do think that in this instance we are right. If the government applies ratings it has to do it in an open, transparent, and legally challengeable way. You have to be able to take them to court. The appeals process in the US system is that you appear before an anonymous board comprised of members of the organisation that convened the first panel and you are not allowed argue any precedent. This is huge. Forget denying constitutional rights. This is bigger: the common law is explicitly denied you. There is no presumption that you should be treated fairly.

Dick exposes the inevitable result of this: homophobia, anti-women, pro-violence films in the theatres. Kevin Smith argues that the censor should come down hard on misogynistic violence: it is disproportionately the lazy plot device of the intellectually neutered hollywood violence movie. Can't argue with him on that one. Do we really need to see women raped or in fear of rape constantly? What's better and less worthy of protecting children from seeing that or normal, bog standard sex between two people? The British censorship board draws a distinction between pornography and cinema with actual sex acts filmed in it. It reminds me of Negativland's distinction in copyright law between theft and artistic appropriation of a sample: they argued that ordinary people could tell the difference. You can. So why not do that, in public, and with right of appeal?

The censorship system in America won't be destroyed by this film: it's an embarrassing anachronism already. This film will only be seen by many people because this is already the case. The question is what will fill the void of its collapse? A free for all of violent women hating pro gun homophobic porn? A snide self serving censorship by new media which will serve to deny access to customers for smaller media organisations but do nothing to stem the tide of misogynistic gung ho violence that pollutes our channels? The US government needs to take control of this issue but is too weak to do so. I figure another century of hypocrisy is on the way.

As a postscript I feel I must link out to the in evitable far right wing blog which describes the film as "shameful". The Kirby Dick film talks about a film which was initially given an NC-17 and later downgraded to 13. This film is Gunner Palace, this fact is discussed in the film. It is entirely in context of the US censorship system that a film full of violence and what is hilariously called "dropping the f-bomb" should be passed rather than a film with normal activity like sex. Most of us don't go invading foreign countries and killing civilians.We do engage in enthusiastic sex.
The "f-bomb", have you ever heard anything so peurile? And their mammies* weren't even with them as far as I can tell.
I'd sooner we dropped the motherfucking f-bomb all over the fucking place than cluster bombs all over Southern Lebanon.

*mommies

Little Miss Sunshine

2006-09-29T07:42:00.000Z

We're making a habit of going to see films on their last day of release. Last week it was Volver, Almadovar's best since 'all about my mother'. Loved it. Last night we went to see Little Miss Sunshine which was mighty fun. I often worry about US "indie" (it's on Fox) films. They often have the same tendency to be Joseph Campbelled and Syd Fielded to death with heroic story arc and all that wank. You start noticing all the plot holes, mcguffins, clumsy expositions, and shitty dialogue. But only if they don't hold your attention. This film built our interest in the characters rather than assumed it and gradually brought us to the point where the entire cinema was hooting with laughter. I think it helped that the small screen in the IFI was jammed with people: the documentary festival was just starting so anyone who walked in off the street ended up in the small screen. I was worried also that the film would feature lots of cute hollywood kids that would make me want to throw up. Fortunately it was about a bunch of freaks. But the kids reminded me of this book . And that made me think that I wanted to make a list of my favourite photography books of the past few years.

This one, Ricas y famosas features the trophy wives of Mexican rich socialites and daytime soap stars and their incredibly tacky, yet incredible houses and outfits. It' s fairly camp to be sure. But stunning darling. The gold! The heels! The makeup! The pools! I think Pierre et Gilles may have had a bad influence on me many years ago.

If that was camp, well, this is simply the gayest book ever to cross my threshold. Wow. Who would have known the Taliban are queer, but they sure are. Here the army of lovers pose for their identity photographs (photography having being banned but security being important a contradiction arose in the state) kohl rimmed eyes stare out from whitened faces with rouged cheeks, touched up pouts and jet black hair. Conspicuous consumption in the form of flaunted watches and mobile phones, guns taped up with bright coloured tapes. Guys mock killing each other in front of Swiss chalet backdrops that look like they long to set up home sweet homestead, put on the blonde pigtail wig 'who shall wear the apron today habibi?'

This book 'Ghetto' (or gee-tow as Timmy Hillnigger would put it) is compiled by the editors of Color magazine. Or ex editors, I think they called it a day to make this book. The cover image is from a portrait project in a Cuban mental hospital and much of the book is even grimmer than that.

Anna Karina

2006-09-28T11:23:00.000Z

And now on to Godard's early 60s muse and her work with Gainsbourg. I'm not sure what I consider to be his best form: the late 50s early 60s jazz chanson. The excursions into soundtrack jazz and latin. The string of hits with Jane Birkin. Or maybe, just maybe, the string of hits with pop moppets like BB, Gall, and Karina, which continued well into the 80s with albums from the likes of Isobel Adjani. Here is some Karina anyway.

Gainsbourg pour vouz

2006-09-28T11:21:00.000Z

Thailand

2006-09-26T07:34:00.000Z

You see, the problem with Thailand isn't their politicians: they're as corrupt as you let them be. Which is quite a lot. Thailand is a seriously corrupt place both internally and internationally. It's the bunch of chancer arrivistes calling themselves the Thai royal family. They deal with every corruption, every manifestation of the sickness in Thai politics and Thai people pretend to themselves that their are hands clean. They are the cancerous heart of Thailand's body politic. While they are 'the voice of the people' like the tzar was father of the peasants democracy can never work in Thailand. Look what happened to Cambodia for a chilling endgame to the relentless politicking of a royal family removed from any consequences.

We were in Thailand nearly three years ago when the government decided to admit there was a war on. It had been waging for years but they'd just sent ten policemen or something to the axis of the unwilling, coerced, or were caught in when they were pretending to be out behind the sofa and couldn't avoid sending in some token unarmed nobodies to Iraq. But anyway, they thought this was an opportunity to pretend that their little problems with predominately muslim ethnic minorities (they don't look like Thai people either: but then Thailand is a mixture of many different looking people) was part of a global war on 'terror' rather than yet another example of Thailand's centrifugal force. I remember being in Pai in Northern Thailand (lovely place up around there) and somebody was talking of going on a trek to see the hill tribes and I said 'why not just go to the shop?' Almost nobody around there is ethnically Thai: but it's better being there than across the border in Burma. I'd love to visit Burma. The people are even nicer than Thais if that's possible and the massages are even better. I digress.

Royal families everywhere are chancers and arrivistes. Two generations out of the saddle living in yurts on yaks yoghurt and the Chinese royal family lived in the forbidden city surrounded by castrated guards and a cult of personality unrivalled by the current US mysticism surrounding the job of president. Our history is as full of the madness and sickness of kowtowing to royalty as it is of deferring to religious fantasy. Ancient Egypt is particularly interesting in the relationship between the two.

Are we inherently infantile? Can we not just take responsibility for ourselves?

Syd Barrett

2006-07-11T16:10:00.000Z

is dead I hear. Nobody is saying how he died, other than having diabetes (the epidemic of the old). I've been watching videos of him taking acid. And a home film slowed down and cut to solo music of his. I'll link to that as his music's gentle melancholy suits my mood better.
you and i, and domino. days go by.

More wrongness

2006-07-04T11:09:00.000Z

The wrongest thing I predicted about this world cup was that France wouldn't get out of their group. When they did I didn't figure them for beating Spain - but I didn't figure Spain for being set up so STOOOPIDly. I had very few doubts about them giving Brazil a proper hiding however: Brazil were badly shown up and France got to play exhibition football. The closest Ronaldo got to a goal was a hilarious swan dive towards the end: way to go Ro! The camera shook as you hit the ground. As it happens I didn't think Spain could have exposed Brazil, and certainly not the way they were set up against France. Porugal have left two of the last three tournaments with fistfights and long bans. Considering their jammy diving, hacking, ill-tempered, dour progress so far and the fact that France is a grudge match after Euro 2000 I expect more of the same here. Really think Scolari is the man to take English football on a level to winning professionalism? Yeah right.

At least I was right about Germany doing well. Once they get out of the group you begin to feel they are very hard to beat (and an easy group didn't hurt), so predicting a penalties win against Argentina isn't too unusual. I suspect most people expect a France Germany final with Germany winning. Maybe I'm wrong (I don't have a vestige of anti-German sentiment in my body) but I think most people won't dislike that as much as they have in the past. The Germans have run a fun tournament with good football and played like ambassadors for the sport. Frings and Ballack have been excellent. Klose has been inspired and looks like he could unlock the toughest of defences. The toughest defences? They're Italy and France right?

Surprised by how wrong you can be...

2006-06-28T08:20:00.000Z

At least I am surprised by how wrong I can be. Never figured France for winning the match last night. In fact if truth be told I never figured France for getting out of the group. I thought the sides that drag you down to their level (the Switzerlands and Koreas and Irelands of this world)would triumph. But instead they played their first good game in fully six years and were good for their victory. I don't think they'll meet two worse full backs in the tournament though. Spain made a mistake. Or several - playing the high offside line with Zidane to supply through balls and Henry to run was stupid. Not playing with wingers was merely ill-advised for two reasons. Firstly if you progress you want to be comfortable with playing a team selection that can beat the selecao, with nothing down either flank you play into Brazil's strength (plus you play the high line like Ghana did and you will get hammered) and secondly their full backs were so weak you needed something to take the French wings minds off attack. They didn't and Sagnol and Ribery took them apart. Sagnol looked like a worthy heir to Lizarazu - which he has never looked before. This was Ribery's only effective match in the tournament and he was marvellous. Hell, even the deeply average Malouda looked good. Too many of the same players turned out for Spain. Xabi, Xabi Alonso, Cesc Fabregas, and on the bench Iniesta and Senna. Okay, there is no team in the world that wouldn't like to have some passing midfielders, but just because you have five of the best doesn't mean you have to play them all: see England and the Lampard/Gerrard axis of feeble. They needed a ballwinner in there and didn't have one. Raul wasn't needed - that is until he was taken off when the new formation would have suited him and you'd have had him there rather than Luis Garcia.

* I meant to say - why didn't they play a decent full back like Asier del Horno? Is it because he is black or something?

What the civil war denied us the joy of...

2006-06-22T08:18:00.000Z

News that the lovely people at the progressive democrats have fallen out with each other (and why wouldn't you? You have a viper in your midst.) has been greeted with glee tempered with dread round our way. Mary Harney has many faults - chief of which is being leader of a party which defends privilage and as morally correct and capital as something, the operation of which is beyond human interference - but I don't think she is a crypto fascist. McDowell is. That's not to say he personally believes in scientifically outmoded racial inferiority doctrines (for those not paying attention for the last fifty years or so the notion of a race among human populatios is derided by geneticists) but racist is as racist does and his constitutional referendum that he slipped by used the race card and people's fear of race. It redefines citizenship in a way which is not appropriate for a republic but one which is for a nation: in this situation McDowell chose not to follow the progressive model of the US but is instead heading the direction of Serbia. This is particularly ironic given the Minister for Justice is a disciple of all things American including their failed criminal justice system and their barbaric, expensive, and useless prisons. It seems to be no coincidence that a media panic about gang wars opens up on his watch. During all this the minister has an ever lengthening Criminal Justice Bill which will solve all problems. He just doesn't have any legislation passed ever. His bloated incompetence is further demonstrated by his aloof sang froid as the courts had no option but to reveal the unconstitutionality of our statutory rape laws. Their illegality is not his fault - it was pointed out to us in college about 18 years ago - but what is his fault is his failure to react when cases were in progress as had never happened before. So, we have a Minister for Justice that single handedly created a racist nation, failed to protect children from child abuse, who by his own admission is minister for justice during soaring gang crime that he believes needs much legislation to crack down on but who has introduced no such legislation (just reamended and deamended drafts) - in other words as abject a failure as a minister as has ever held a post in this country. Why should anyone worry? His stop-start career, built on media whoredom should be over. Unfortunately Harney had the nerve, the balls, the chutzpah, to take the post of Minister for Health - perhaps the most underfunctioning department in the government. She was always going to fail there. Her stock is crashed.

So why the stalled leadership bid? Harney is a link to the old school: to a time before it would have been acceptable for a man with the moral stink of McDowell to run for public office. His kind would be seen as the kind of beast that rose in central and Eastern European countries: no decency about him. The PDs under him could mutate, slightly, from the party of capital and privilage into an actual racist extreme right wing party thus able to, possibly, garner a popular vote (it currently has no sizeable electoral base and weilds power in great disproportion to its support) and move up a gear. What would possibly unite the very rich and the very poor other than having a classic old school extremist right wing party like we never had in Ireland? Naive class self interest is rampant in this country. Comments like "I'm a builder/nurse/pensioner Haughey looked after us", laughably naive (he gave back a bit of what he stole, like a porcine Robin Hood), are common stock. The poor are under the cosh. Their jobs have not got better wages and conditions over the last decade. They see them being taken by better educated immigrants who will move up and move on or just work like, well whatever hard working people work like these days, and take the money and spend it in another country where it's worth something. That is how they could give their allegiance to the party of the divine right of capital which has stolen their futures from them.

It is quite funny that the PDs were founded to break us out of civil war politics and they may just succeed. It's difficult to explain Ireland's political parties to someone from abroad. I usually say that left and right is only one axis. There is also the y axis of socially liberal and conservative. Then there is the z axis of republican versus unionist. The independence/ republican/ nationalist axis was at its most extreme socially liberal and left wing rather than fascist like in the rest of Europe so we never had an all out fascist party due to our civil war politics. McDowell's PDs, if he gets to run them, may change that. Finally a break from civil war politics will allow the creation of a fascist party that so many in this state will benefit from. In the old days he would have needed religious support for this. The beauty of the state we now live in where our rights are defined by our nature as consumers rather than as citizens and our aspirations by consumption rather than production is that this is no longer necessary.

He serviced some state

2006-06-14T08:39:00.000Z

So he's dead then. And why should we speak ill of the dead? Because we can. Because his censorship of dissent by threat and writ is over. His control over a craven media is finished and the backlash is audible today. Because I can honestly think of nothing positive to say of him. I'm a dog in the streets from North Dublin in a town the size of the whole of Longford with a wee country road and no buses. His corruption polluted the whole of the country. I'm not saying the country was great before him, but it was much, much worse with him. There is no legacy. When people try to convince me of his 'presidential' qualities they usually mention the tax exempt status for artists that allows the multimillionaire Bono to lecture at me about helping the poor. It strikes me as symptomatic of his seigneurial contempt for the plain people of Ireland. We should be indebted to the great and the good and be glad to fund their lifestyle.

Panis et Circensis

2006-06-09T08:08:00.000Z

And so the global spectacle begins. The sport beloved of dictators and racists everywhere. Even if Franco didn't actually like the damn thing - into his horses like a proper aristocrat apparently - he like the rest saw the power. Think of the government of colonels in Brazil, the military junta in Argentina, all of the Soviet bloc. Okay so maybe it's not all that global, China isn't there - yet. India isn't there or interested - yet. And the US hasn't dominated it and sold it back to us with added sugar and a drug habit - yet. I see the US winning the world cup before an African nation.

So anyway, I'm down with the circuses big time. And beer is bread right?*

So who to watch? Everyone says it's hard to look past Brazil, so lets do that. Lets face it if Kevin Gallacher of Blackburn Rovers and Scotland could make Roberto Carlos, at his peak, look ordinary what would an international standard winger do to him? Nobody could beat Brazil. Save Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay in about the last year in competitive matches. Argentina giving them a proper stuffing too. Last world cup they were lucky that when using the rather useless Ze Roberto as a full back against Holland he didn't have to face the injured Overmars. Holland would most likely have beaten them. I can't see that this time: though the team may not fight each other it seems to lack geniuses. I groan every time I see Cocu on their team sheet. Tidy. They were always a better team with Seedorf playing. Still has his pace too. Though they do have the mighty, or mightily named and popular with the kids round here for replica shirts van Hennegoor of Hesselink. Or Jan as they call him no doubt.
The Czech republic are rated 2 in some quarters (FIFA rankings are absolute bollocks) but this team is too old this time. Sorry guys, you were robbed by dreadful refereeing in the last two Europeans, but not this one. The Crouch template at the top can't run any more - people forget that they used to say of Koller that he was remarkably mobile for such a big man. Now he's only remarkably mobile for a big man who has been dead two days. Same for France - save the robbed bit: too old, too old, too old. Guy Roux was offered the French job before the last world cup and said he'd only take it if he could take apart the team and start again - a few of those playing for the Ivory Coast this time would have been a good idea - that was six whole years ago for the Zidanes and Thurams.
Talking of robbed the USA were robbed by dreadful refereeing last time round against the eventual finalists Germany. Unusually with the officiation at the last tournament there doesn't seem to me to have been any direct advantage handed to the hosts (oh, by the way that's the answer to Korea and Japan's chances - no corruption, no semi finals. Plus Korea'll be in Switzerland's group and they have a secret lifeforce sucking weapon that removes the zest from any of their opponents. And Japan are fourth best in their group) so maybe the Germans were glad handing... Anyway this time round they'll struggle to escape a rotten group. And fail.

Oh Spain Spain Spain. Why do you do it to me? I always head into the World Cup and look to you. And you always let me down. (ditto Portugal until I copped on one day that any country still banging on about a team that won underage championships 15 years later - even we stopped that and had considerable success with the underage teams, more than Portugal in fact - was a country with a team of losers. Time to go all the old guys. Once that's done a team that might win might be fashioned). What can you say? The young midfield players like Iniesta, Barcelona's best player by some distance in their European cup semi final, not the anonymous Ronaldinho who gave a nowhere pass that Giuly latched on to with sublime pace and anticipation and lashed into the net from a difficult angle first time and did absolutely nothing else in two matches, and Fabregas have beautiful balance unlike two of the greatest midfielders in the world manning the centre of England. They can tackle and track and cover. And boy can they pass. And Iniesta makes great runs. Joaquin was easily the best winger at the last Europeans. Raul is... found out? No pace, no dribbling, no great shot, just the lethal cold bloodedness in front of goal. No nerves at all. I'm not convinced by Torres either. And the defence looks like it has goals in it. So sadly no.
England my England, obsessed with a bone that only English soccer players seem to possess. If Rooney plays and he's as fit as Beckham was for the last European championship they will get nowhere. While it is the squad that wins the world cup (who knows what stand in left back you'll have come the business end of the tournament when, really, anything could happen) it isn't good to be delving into it right from the get go. Not that they had too many attacking options to bring along. Why don't Lampard and Gerrard perform for England like they do for their teams? Makelele, Sissoko, Hamman, that's why. Pure and simple. Neither is remotely a complete midfielder. Neither can tackle (and some of the ones Lampard does you only get away with in the premiership if you are an England international), neither can defend. Gerrard is a headless chicken with no tactical sense without the ball. But with the ball... he strikes it as beautifully as anyone. Better than Lampard. Though the new balls may suit Lampard. Bear with me. Watch a typical Lampard goal from behind the nets. He strikes through the ball harder than anyone else, keeps it down and on target. But that's it. Other than that he has no idea what's going to happen next. Thing is the ball deforms when he hits it and moves eccentrically through the air. Keepers often say it moved at the last minute and with him that is in fact the case. It behaves like the off centre striking point is a strange attractor. Gerrard places the ball with serious velocity. Like quite a few teams England are good enough to win it: I'm not sure they're the team to beat Brazil though - they lack ball carrying wingers to exploit Cafu and Carlos Brazil's greatest weakness

* my beloved used to make real bread from live yeast and in the morning after eating loads of it the smell coming from the toilet bowl was like you'd been out on the almighty batter with the beer the night before. Quite strange.

More Property Porn

2006-05-14T17:27:00.000Z

+

It's official - google trends has us down as a bunch of property obsessed wanker knobheads.

And I'm still the pedant hater that cringes every time I hear the word property used when someone means 'a house' or 'realty'. To be fair though, property is marginally less popular than sex, but only in Dublin and London is it even close. Sickos. Interestingly, free stuff is much more popular than property (way to go India!), but in many places free stuff is much more popular than sex, others it's the other way around. Property is just as popular as mp3s in Milton Keynes.

And if google says it, it must be true. It's uniquely democratic Right?

Prop'tay Porn

2006-04-28T07:52:00.000Z

Indulge me. I've a report running on a database and a few minutes to spend. I'm not picking on the English here, well I am but any brain dead trend in England or the US will be taken up with enthusiasm here. Sadly that can't be said of interesting or exciting new developments. Our TV schedule is dominated, it seems to me, with 'property porn' shows. Some airhead presenter will go abroad with some people with money and ask them to compare "prop'tays". It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and Blue Peter would be on and they'd be talking about their sticky-back-plastic and cutting out "pattons". For the life of me I couldn't figure out what a "patton" was. Was it some kind of template? I didn't realise that English people can't pronounce an r after a schwa sound unless the schwa is at the end of a word and not followed by an r in reality. So 'Africa' is pronounced 'Afriker' and 'water' as 'watah'.

Anyway, the jarring pronunciation just highlights the word which is my problem. They'll be standing there in front of a house and saying things like 'so what do you think of this proptay?'. When did the word house cease to mean a house? At whatever dimwit school they went to were they taught the alphabet with 'p is for proptay' and a picture of a house on the wall? Anglo-American-Irish obsession with the price of residences has made a whole generation of people who cannot distinguish between a pile of bricks and a set of rights that you can enforce against other people. Our greed is sickening. Not only that, but unlike say stocks and shares, we have three societies devoted to nonproductive assets. I should point out that this applies less to the US than England and particularly applies here. We are pouring the wealth of the country into something which will swallow it up and never give it back. We have largely leveraged our capital to disenfranchise anyone under 30 already in this country and we are moving abroad like the rapacious carpetbaggers we are. The massive increase in disposable capital in this country has produced no rise in innovation, no amelioration of poverty that is supposed to be expected when the tide rises, and development that is so skewed to the construction industry and the rising value of a nonproductive commodity that the future seems almost as scary as it did in the 1980s. When we had no money and we were all miserable and we all emigrated. I wonder has the 'leave this country' gene been wiped out by a decade and a half of full employment? Will twenty somethings start thinking to themselves that they have no chance of a decent quality of life, of fair and reliable tenancy (as buying is a mad dream for most of them) in this country and up sticks like we all did?

Or will the 'soft landing' the credit institutions and government are desparately propagandising about turn out to be a rough and catastrophic one? With every extension of leniency on credit the banks, in the interest of quarterly returns and the ultimate morality of shareholder value, risk the whole confidence trick of this economy.

I'm worried. I like it here. I feel too old to move out again. It's home and I want to stay here but if the arse falls out of the economy I migh be forced out. Mind you, if it does those with capital after the deluge will be able to make out like bandits (or those who multiple bought in the 1990s).

Vive la revolution... or at least we'll have a strike

2006-04-07T15:12:00.000Z

Just came back from over a week in France, in Toulouse and Carcassonne. Had a great time, bought a load of records, went to a match with my da for his seventieth birthday and it was great, came home later than expected. I love France, and in general, I love the French people. Though the civil service there seem to get their only thrill in their stunted, joyless, impotent lives by being arseholes. Off work they're probably fine.

I was sitting in Carcassone castle enjoying the sun and reading 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski (extraordinary book - David Foster Wallace's 'infinite jest' is the major reference that comes to mind. But without the smug annoying self satisfied onanistic backslapping on its own cleverness and with terrifying voids of horror and emotional damage)and I met some nice Americans while I was having a glass of wine. They insisted on buying me a glass - no other nationality would have in that circumstance, Americans are actually, genuinely much nicer than Europeans. One thing that struck me as odd was that they were genuinely annoyed by French people going on strike. I was kind of 'why do you care? I mean it doesn't hurt your economy...' Which is kind of my attitude to incomprehensible things that you can't change and don't really effect you. I often find it funny when people in Europe get heated about US domestic issues. It's not like you can vote. Anyway I was saying that they had a revolution so that they could do this and if they were the same as everyone else why would people come to France? We were sitting, as I said, in a beautiful huge castellated medieval city. If it was in Ireland every tourist image of the country would have it. But the more I thought about that issue the more the revolution came into my head. Revolution often fills my head. When I was in school I remember writing a parody of Hopkins called 'that nature is a Hegelian dialectic and of the comfort of the revolution'... Anyway. I think the reporting of the current French strikes and protests against the law to 'liberalise' the youth employment market misses the point. The protestors are the children of petit bourgeois, functionnaires. The French revolution was a petit bourgeois revolution. It was unnecessary in England as merchants ran the country rather than aristocrats. The US revolution, by contrast, was a revolution of aristocrats and oligarchs avoiding paying tax to the English. As a result France is run by and for the petit bourgeois: the US is run by and for the ultra-rich who don't pay tax. Where does that leave us? I've said before that we took the Canadian option when we were run by our local version of the US revolutionaries: rich landgrabbing Anglos that didn't want to pay tax to England. And then we had a revolution. Or did we?

Godzilla

2006-03-09T08:48:00.000Z

Put on the new, restored, clean, old version of Godzilla for a film society last night. I've never seen the version that has normally been shown in English language countries. Apparantly it is bowdlerised with all the references to nuclear weapons taken out and a Basil Exposition style American reporter shoehorned in to make sense of the plot (those ker-azy Japanese!) when its point has been removed. It's an interesting film. Its pace is very different to what you might expect, more measured than a shocker. Right from the titles there was tension with the overture having surprisingly good manipulated concrete monster noises all over it. As the tension was being built up people on trains and on the street alluded to the misery of the Japanese war experience 'I can't be killed by Godzilla, not after my escape in Nagasaki', 'Tokyo will be evacuated' 'not again'. My favourite was the one-eyed mad scientist with an eye patch. When told by a reporter that their man in Switzerland had heard from his friend in Germany that he had a weapon that would kill Godzilla he took a step back, hand clutching something to his breast while his eye darted wildly around the room 'I have no friends in Germany...'

As expected the special effects weren't great. They weren't bad either. The rubber suit was surprisingly good and some of the model making, particularly of large buildings as they came apart, shedding masonry, was extraordinarily good. It's just that the movie became a spectacle movie two thirds of the way through and that is the kind of film that lasts the shortest before it seems dated. I didn't mind it but one of my companions found the devestation scenes boring.

Anyway, Gojira was destroyed by an alternative to a nuclear weapon invented by the mad scientist. So as an anti-war and anti science supporting war film it was a touch flawed. The mad scientist had the sense to self immolate in the act of killing the monster - V for Vendetta style - at the end. Those with the ability to destroy monsters have no place in a monster free society.

What was great about 2005

2005-12-23T10:01:00.000Z

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!

2005-11-23T08:56:00.000Z

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

2005-11-15T08:51:00.000Z

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

2005-10-19T07:52:00.000Z

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?

2005-10-14T07:24:00.000Z

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...

2005-10-10T07:45:00.000Z

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

2005-10-06T08:28:00.000Z

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

2005-09-30T07:43:00.000Z

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

2005-09-27T15:50:00.000Z

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

2005-09-27T07:45:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-26T07:31:00.000Z

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

2005-09-20T08:55:00.000Z

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!

2005-09-19T11:41:00.000Z

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

2005-09-19T07:58:00.000Z

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

2005-08-23T07:54:00.000Z

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

2005-06-25T18:48:00.000Z

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

2005-06-13T21:06:00.001Z

bob
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Have you seen this man...

marcos

2005-06-13T21:06:00.000Z

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

2005-06-02T13:31:00.000Z

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?

2005-06-01T07:54:00.000Z

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...

2005-05-24T08:15:00.000Z

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

2005-05-23T12:45:00.000Z

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Bullsith

2005-05-19T08:08:00.000Z

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

2005-05-17T08:05:00.000Z

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?

2005-05-13T07:41:00.000Z

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

2005-05-09T07:49:00.000Z

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

2005-05-06T08:48:00.000Z

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

2005-05-04T08:17:00.000Z

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

2005-04-27T08:44:00.000Z

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...

2005-04-26T07:50:00.000Z

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

2005-04-25T08:11:00.000Z

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

Lots of free music. Go-go Gojira.

2005-04-21T07:33:00.000Z

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...

2005-04-19T07:26:00.000Z

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?

2005-04-15T07:18:00.000Z

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..

2005-04-14T07:32:00.000Z

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

2005-04-08T07:46:00.000Z

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

2005-04-06T07:50:00.000Z

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

2005-04-04T12:17:00.000Z

DSCN3507
Originally uploaded by Emmaline.

some italics

Master musicians

2005-04-04T08:38:00.000Z

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...

2005-04-04T07:41:00.000Z

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

2005-03-23T08:57:00.000Z

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."

2005-03-16T13:57:00.000Z

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

2005-03-11T09:08:00.000Z

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

2005-03-09T08:40:00.000Z

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...

2005-03-08T09:01:00.000Z

...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...

2005-03-07T08:36:00.000Z

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

2005-03-03T08:43:00.000Z

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

2005-03-02T08:39:00.000Z

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?

2005-02-24T08:41:00.000Z

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...

2005-02-23T08:44:00.000Z

... 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

2005-02-22T08:47:00.000Z

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.

2005-02-18T12:25:00.000Z

The Beloved

Restaurants

2005-02-18T09:09:00.000Z

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

2005-02-17T11:15:00.000Z

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.

noise

2004-09-17T18:02:00.000Z

this is my background noise, no need to share it but it won't hurt anyone. There may be politics, there will be music. I will be involved in meme transmission.

I came here while idling looking for web weirdness to while the time away. Not working late, but having to be in work late.

Had to interrupt there, my girlfriend rang to say we now have curtains. She asked me what was new and I told her I started a blog. She asked why? Who would be interested in my life. Fair point. It's not really about that. It's about unlocking your own voice. Making a space in the day (ideally I want to do it before starting work) in which non-directed communication can be attempted. Sort of like a flaneur. In the 19th Century it was noted that people's lives were regulated by the factory timetable and attempts were made to break the tyrrany of production. Obviously humour was used, walking a tortoise and following its lead through an arcade in Paris. In the impressionist paintings of the time a dandy wanderer was often painted. This idea was taken up by the situationists in the sixties, people whose ideas have influenced me since my teens.