More Property Porn

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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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy thanksgiving from the no-control room!

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

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

Good and bad

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

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

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

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



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

Evolutionary Paleobiology and aliens

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

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

Foley artists. How could I forget foley artists?

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

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

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

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

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

The thing about TV...

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

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

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

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

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

Danger Diabolik soundtrack

dangerdiabolik1vu
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

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

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

Physical Theatre

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

Lost - no spoiler

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

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

Thanks IRA, now go away

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

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

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

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

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

Back to slagging Sinn Féin soon.

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

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

St. Etienne - tales from Turnpike House

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

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

Garrhh! That be spelt wrong!

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

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

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

Land ho!

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

Repeat after a month at sea. Smartly does it.

Signed,
Foursaltydogsatsea

Spicy green salsa and the sorrows of empire

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

Okay, couldn't quite resist it.

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

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

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

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

Monarcy in the UK

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

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

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

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

Idyllic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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