May 22nd, 2008 by Donagh
More on the Interpol report on the supposed finding of laptops belonging to bombed FARC rebels. ‘What’s really happening with this dodgy laptop story’, asks Pepe Escobar. Forrest Hylton says its part of the US’s propaganda war against Hugo Chavez.
Lots more detail on the Interpol report here.
May 22nd, 2008 by Donagh
I haven’t had time to complete the music post that I wanted to write this week, so here’s the plan of what I intended it to be about.
Point 1: Mention the cancelling of the Animal Collective gig in the Tripod on Monday night because the band missed the ferry.
Point 2: Moan on about how their last gig was cut short because one of the band had a bad cold.
Point 3: Go on about how this was one of the few gigs you were likely to go to this year and how you don’t check out new music these days in blogs, magazines or whatever, the way you used to. Blag on about how you don’t seem to have time these days, and how you feel there’s something missing.
Point 4: Mention Atlas Sound, and how you’d never heard of them until just before the planned AC show and how this illustrated how ‘out of touch’ you were because the music sounded up your street and a bit like My Bloody Valentine in a way.
Point 5: Describe the news that Animal Collective hastily arranged an alternative gig in Whelan’s on Tueday night, how they got their Irish ‘merch guy’ to sort it out and get their gear to the venue because their van broke down for a third time, how a poster was put up outside Whelan’s and people starting texting each other to say it was on. How they finally got on stage at 12 and played till 2 in the morning and how this spontaneous gig was reportedly ‘awesome’.
Point 6: Admit that you didn’t find out about this until Wednesday because you don’t read music blogs any more (the update was in the State blog) and how this made you feel old and suburban.
Point 7: Discuss your fear of ‘Dad Rock’, and how men of a certain age, an age you’re on the cusp of, tend to get stuck in a nostalgia loop, listening more and more to music that conforms to the type of stuff they used to listen to when they were in their feckless early 20s.
Point 8: Describe how people listen to music in a different way these days, and how with the advent of MP3s and cheaper electronic goods people have on average about 20 GB of music on their laptop or work PC, and more in an external hard drive while also storing a shit load on their iPod or mobile phone. They regularly burn CDs with compilations of the latest ‘sounds’ and swap CDs packed with 700 MG of MP3s with friends making their access to new music incredibly easy.
Point 9: Tentatively make the suggestion that this often means that you are less rather than more likely to seek out something different and imply that there used to be an excitement in searching and discovering new music, following new avenues and coming across stuff by accident that potentially opens your ears to something completely new.
Point 10: Admit that this may also be middle-age bunkum
Point 11: Use the Sean Hughes line: “When you’re young music is the soundtrack of your life, but when you get older it’s the background music that’s playing when you’re doing the washing up.”
Point 12: Retell the story of how you were listening to one of your home made compilation CDs while doing the dishes and ‘Check Out’ from Joy Zipper came on.
Admit how you always liked the sound of Joy Zipper because they have a clear My Bloody Valentine vibe but that the track is at least 8 years old. Point out your stark realization that you were listening to Dad Rock.
Point 13: Inform people that Kevin Shields produced tracks on Joy Zippers follow up album American Whip and that some of the tracks have a sort of soft focus MBV sound.
Point 14: Mention also that many bands, including MBV, who were in vogue in your early 20s are reforming and doing special one off shows at music festivals. Admit how this seems a bit sad and seems to be more of a marketing idea as it appeals to men of a certain age who are stuck in a nostalgia loop, craving after music that was all the rage when they were in their feckless youth.
Point 15: Change tack slightly and pull in the points about how you don’t have time to search out new music now and how you’re feeling culturally bereft because of that. Remind readers also about Mark E. Smith’s point about how all the Fall songs he’s written are largely based on the time he spent his early 20s when he was unemployed, having dropped out of college and had nothing to do. Emphasis that he thought this was time well spent, doing nothing. It allowed him to think for himself and be creative.
Point 16: Suggest that you had a similar period in your early 20s, wasting time, reading books, hanging around and most importantly getting into music.
Point 17: Quote from a great Sean O’Hagan article from last Sunday’s Observer in which he describes the circumstances surrounding the recording of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless album and how the length it took to record it was partly down to Shield’s tendency to loll about doing fuck all for ages. Sleeping during the day and spending whole days and weeks doing nothing. Mention also that much of Bradford James Cox’s solo music comes from the year he spent recovering from chest and back surgery as a teenager.
Point 18: Reuse the quote from Adam Phillips, who Sean O’Hagan interviewed before and which he uses at the end of his article on MBV:
“When I asked Phillips what would be the single thing that might make us more content in our ever-accelerating culture, he took his time before replying. Then, finally, he said: ‘We need to find the time to daydream and be bored, and to see that, too, as a part of our creativity. We need, as it were, to find the time to waste time without worrying about the consequences.’ “
Point 19: Conclude that rather than worrying about whether the music I listen to is ‘Dad Rock’ or not I should admit that what I really miss is not so much all the new music I should be listening to, but rather the time I had when I had little to do.
Emphasis that now that everything is a rush with family responsibilities, work, and other online pursuits, I actually crave the opportunity to be creative and to discover new things, and to suggest that this creativity and discovery is intimately linked to music.
Resolve to definitely get out more.
Joy Zipper Check Out: Play Now | Play in Popup Atlas Sound - Recent Bedroom: Play Now | Play in Popup My Bloody Valentine - Soon: Play Now | Play in Popup Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel : Play Now | Play in PopupMay 21st, 2008 by Sean Baite
Some news just in, this year’s Charles Edward Trevelyan Award for Humanitarian Crisis Management goes to…
.. those lovely chaps from the Myanmar Junta.
A years supply of Cornish Pasties for them and all their families, lucky sods !
Trevelyan photo from Wikipedia
The Juntadales from AP Photo via Daylife
May 20th, 2008 by Donagh
Readers may hate me for putting up the Eamon Dunphy interview with former Government Press Secretary Mandy Johnson, which aired on RTE Radio last Saturday morning, but I only do it as a note for the record. Much of what she has to say is about her career, and her time with Charlie McGreevy, little of which interests me personally. But it’s the bit about her work as Government Press Secretary, especially during the 2007 election that I found most useful as a supplemental to the interview with Dr. Heinz Brandenburg that I published on ILR.
So, let the record show that 25 minutes in, after Dunphy mentions Fianna Fail’s relationship with The Sunday Independent he notes ‘I see a big wide smile on your face’.
Judging by the photo accompanying Miriam Lord’s comments on the program on Saturday she’s not one normally given to producing wide toothy grins, so this must be something she is really pleased about.
Dunphy suggests that Fianna Fail has had a relationship with The Sunday Independent for a number of years. She corrects him on this:
“First of all, there hasn’t been a relationship for a good number of years. Its a new relationship”.
This corresponds to Heinz Brandenburg’s point that Irish newspapers are not (or were not) distinctly partisan. Unlike the Irish Press of old, Irish newspapers didn’t overtly associate themselves with the values and ideals of one political party in the same way that, for example, the Daily Mail or the Sunday Express associates themselves with the values and ideals of the Tories.
We know of less overt connections, but more on that later.
Mandy says that the relationship started just before the last election in 2007 and continued throughout it. This, she suggests, was initiated by the Sunday Independent:
Sunday Independent took the view that what the vast majority of Irish people felt what the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was going through was unfair and they wanted to give him a voice, to give him the chance to get his point of view across
She, to use Dunphy’s footballing phrase was the ‘link person’, the bag carrier between the party and the paper. She doesn’t mention, and nor does Dunphy for that matter, the meeting reported in the Irish Times between Bertie Ahern and Tony O’Reilly, nor the number of other meetings they’ve had down the years*. Independent Newspapers have since denied that this meeting had any bearing on their decision to stop haranguing Fianna Fail, especially over Stamp Duty (which suited their business interests) and to support him instead.
So within an intensive election cycle, the dominant party whose leader was under increasing scrutiny owing to the irregularity of his financial affairs, was able to call upon the support of the biggest selling broadsheet newspaper in the country in order to get this story across.
The admission should be staggering, as it doesn’t try to hide the well known association between Fianna Fail and Independent Newspapers.
But instead its a minor point, expressed with a rather banal voice:
“We needed someone to get our side of the story across, and it worked very well for us and worked very well for them.”
During his recent troubles Bertie Ahern complained of a media witch hunt. But with Independent Newspapers on his side was he saying that all the others were after him? Well, RTE have traditionally gone easy on him. Those short RTE radio interviews are closely managed, and the Dobson interview was the softest of soft interviews. Primetime has not had a face-to-face interview with Bertie for over 10 years. The Examiner, while a national newspaper, do not have the circulation figures to dent Bertie’s well managed image, even if they wanted to.
Other media interests, such as News Talk, are owned by Denis O’Brien and apart from recycling news items about Bertie and the Tribunals there is little indication they were ‘after him’.
No, Bertie is talking about the Irish Times, the newspaper that really pisses Fianna Fail off. The newspaper that, as Martin Mansergh mentioned in the Village recently, considers itself ‘the real establishment’. Prominent Fianna Fail TDs are repeatedly saying that the Irish Times are responsible for forcing the party to push Bertie into retirement (according to the most recent issue of Phoenix magazine, it was the Fianna Fail members of his cabinet who pressured him).
Maybe the Irish Times is responsible, but this opinion suits their prejudices. While it may have appealed to the IT audience to appear to stand up to Bertie they are not overtly interested in who leads the party, or who is in government.
They are only interested in telling stories that sell, increasing their readership while keeping costs down and attracting more advertisers.
There is a lot of stuff said about the media and much of it is couched in high sounding language straight out of a Civics text book. Good media is essential for a healthy democracy, they say, or for a just and more equal society, and even to protect our freedom of expression.
This is nonsense, of course, because at end of the day Irish media organisations have one single objective, and it’s got nothing to do with truth or democracy.
All they want to do is make more money.
*In 2001 Emily O’Reilly wrote an article for The Sunday Business Post, which provides plenty of detail about the Former Government Press Secretary PJ Mara and his close connections with Tony O’Reilly:
“Much of his work is escort duty. Mara has personally escorted Bertie Ahern on a number of occasions to lunch with Tony O’Reilly in O’Reilly’s Fitzwilliam Square townhouse. Members of O’Reilly’s family have also been escorted into the Taoiseach’s office for meetings about undisclosed matters.
The escort duty has helped to cement the relationship between O’Reilly and Fianna Fail that was already well-glued together back in 1997 with the Irish Independent’s infamous “Pay-back Time” front-page editorial on the eve of the general election urging its readers to vote for Fianna Fail and the PDs.”
May 19th, 2008 by Sean Baite
Apologies to regular visitors here but we’ve slowed up considerably on the posts recently. For myself, I seem to have contracted a dose of Joycean Paralysis or Dublin Sleeping Sickness since I got back from a trip there for 10 days in April. I know Conor has a document to submit at the end of May and will probably be off radar until then. Donagh has, apparently been locked away in the cellar of the ILR by Libertarians from another planet, or some such silly accident.
In any case, I thought I’d get going again on the back of someone else’s post. It’s a translation of French music blogger (and radio DJ, I believe), Pol Dodu’s, post on Five Go Down To The Sea’s 1984 Knot A Fish EP from his excellent Blogzonheureux! music blog. I came across Pol’s site as it had one of the few write-ups of any length on FGDTTS that came up through a Google search I did a year or so back. When he’s not referring to Cork’s insanest geniuses, his blog is based on a record by record presentation of his fairly excellent and eclectic record collection. As he seems to have lived in London from the start of the 80s on - there are a lot of examples of the finest Indie output of the time and he has a lot of 1st hand accounts of bands from the Creation / C86 scene * referred to elsewhere on this blog by Conor. Speaking of Conor, I have given my solemn promise to Mr. DODU that I will not reveal his, or his record collection’s whereabouts as Conor might very well organise himself to get invited to a party in the vicinity..
So, for those interested, here’s the translation of Pol Dodu’s post (Pol has very kindly given me permission to use it and would also like any suggestions for the title of the live mini-cassette track posted up below) :
Original post from Pol Dodu’s Blogonzheureux / Original Post in French
EP Review :
FIVE GO DOWN TO THE SEA ? :
Knot a Fish EP
May 14th, 2008 by Donagh
Mark E Smith’s most distinctive texts echo both Lovecraft and Dick’s methodology. According to caricature, The Fall proffer a naturalism whose dreariness is leavened only by its humour. But it was only in their earliest mode that The Fall were comic naturalists, introducing an amphetamine-driven garage punk to the bingo halls, industrial estates and cracker factories of Northern England. By the time of Dragnet, The Fall were seeing the same Northern vistas through the filter of Weird fiction. Manchester tenements were now haunted by Roman spectres. Ghostly figures follow you down the Salford streets. ‘Impression Of J Temperance’ and ‘Jawbone And The Air Rifle’, from Grotesque and Hex Enduction Hour, compress Weird tales into a distorted, Northern rock. By now, Smith has repeated what Lovecraft had achieved – relocating the bizarre and the anomalous in his own neighbourhood. It is precisely the disjunction between the Manchester ‘estates that stick up like stacks’ and the ‘hideous replicas’ and haunted jawbones which generates the effect of Weirdness. Taken as a whole, Grotesque and Hex Enduction Hour are themselves weird objects: unplaceable, intractable, they are confections of things which should not belong together.
K-Punk writing up a storm about The Fall, Mark E. Smith’s new (auto)biography, HP Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, notions of ‘Weirdness’ and The Hammer House of Horror.
It also suggests that Smith has become a “doppelganger” which has all but replaced the Mark E Smith of old. A ‘licensed fool on the BBC, licensed prole (in The Guardian)’.
Fair enough, I guess. As with all K-Punk articles, you should read the whole thing, though.
May 9th, 2008 by Donagh
Will Oldham is playing in Vicar Street on the 15th of June. I’m going because Sean Baith can’t and someone has to shout ‘Sean Nós’ at him.
I’ve put this up before but its worth showing again: the great Jeffrey Lewis singing a song about thinking he’s seen Will Oldham on the L-train in New York.
All artists are pussys/…./but if I’m a pussy that’s okay/because maybe in a few months I’ll put out something good
May 9th, 2008 by Donagh
I’ve recently become a fan of Jerry Haber’s blog Magnes Zionist. Jerry is an academic and Orthodox Jew who works in the US and Israel and takes grave exception to how the Israeli government are treating Palestinians.
The Magnes of the title refers to Judah Magnes, a Reform Rabbi, who originally worked in the US with a number of Jewish organizations, but moved to Palestine in 1922 and founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to his wikipedia entry he believed ‘that the land of Israel should be built in a “decent manner”, or not built at all’ and this seemed to inform his opinion right up to the end of his life, which coincided with the formation of the State of Israel.
In a post written a couple of days ago, Jerry referred to a recent Haaretz article, which discusses Magnes efforts at the end of his life to try to ensure that the new Israeli state wasn’t a Zionist state, but a United States of Israel.
Continue Reading »
May 7th, 2008 by Donagh
On Monday the New York Times reported on protests and violence in Bolivia, following from Sunday’s referendum which would give Santa Cruz greater autonomy and allow it to have control over the natural resources located in the region, which currently accounts for 30% of Bolivia’s GDP.
The move for greater autonomy, however, should be seen in the context of the new draft constitution that would limit large land holdings. The Santa Cruz vote, which was passed by 80% although voter turnout was low, would mean the region might be able to bypass the new constitutional arrangements and control land distribution itself, as well as retain rights to negotiate royalty agreements for oil and gas reserves with energy companies.
As the New York Times reports:
The statute would give Santa Cruz the ability to elect its own legislature, create its own police force and raise new taxes for public works. It is expected to allow the province to negotiate its own royalty agreements with energy companies.
Or from BoRev’s perspective:
If you haven’t been paying attention, the rich white folk in the rich white state of Santa Cruz are holding a referendum on Sunday to declare “autonomy” from the majority redskins. And while the sponsors are a bunch of scary racists, they wrap their arguments up with declarations of economic efficiency and “states rights.” Sound familiar?
Morales is trying to redress the balance a little and use some of the cash from the country’s natural resources to provide better living conditions for the majority who happen to be impoverished Indians and not the elite Santa Cruz minority, who still use impoverished Indians as indentured slaves.
But such moves by a region for greater automomy from central government are often couched in the language of secession; calling for the freedom of a people to control their own destiny etc etc. However, as Nikolas Kozloff points out in a Counter Punch article published yesterday such moves in South America by a region rich in natural resources is often supported by US Oil and Gas interests.
“In an effort to rollback social and political change in Bolivia, the U.S has funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups through USAID and The National Endowment for Democracy. What’s more, USAID explicitly supports demands of the right wing for greater regional autonomy in the east.
It’s not the first time, however, that the U.S. has sought to encourage secessionist sentiment within South American regions possessing rich natural resources.”
Kozloff describes in some detail what happened in Venezuela in the early part of the 20th Century, when the US, who were beginning to aggressively tap all available oil resources, encouraged the State of Zulia to cede from the strong, centralized government controlled by the dictator by Juan Vicente Gómez. The irony of it is that Gómez came to power in 1908 as a result of a successful coup d’etat, which was supported by the US.
It’s a very interesting historical perspective, but the point being that if US oil interests conspired against Gómez, a stolid anti-communist dictator who they helped to bring to power in the first place, what do those interests think of Morales and his efforts to redistribute some of his countries wealth?
Update:
The Real News Network has a good report on this. Pepe Escobar mentions that 85% of the Santa Cruz electorate were in favour but that the turn out was only 45%, which is considerably lower than usual. This suggests that many of those who were against autonomy boycotted the polls.
May 7th, 2008 by Sean Baite
Take a look at the wee family spat over here on the Guardian’s site, classic ‘Little House on the Prairie’ stuff I think you’ll all agree : Houllebecq’s Darlin’ Mother
:->
