Surprised by how wrong you can be...

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...

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

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

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

+

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.