Happy Christmas

Happy AleXmas

In memory of the late, great Alex Chilton.

Reading Writing

I'm not in the mood, really, but thought I'd post some quick thoughts on my recent reading. It's always useful to look back on this blog as a sort on repository of memories - it is mostly talking to myself after all. The following are reviews from my Shelfari page and are more aides de memoire than anything else.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" - John Lydon, 1978

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder

A brief, beautifully written masterpiece which strikes me as a forefather of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mary Lavin. Full of quotable sentences and a testament to the love that gives meaning to life.

Wrestling

My first trip to an Arthouse screening was to see Rumblefish in the then Curzon cinema on Abbey Street. The cinema was later to be my workplace, both as The Curzon and in it's later incarnation as the Lighthouse but at the time I wasn't thinking about that (it hadn't happened) I was thinking that Mickey Rourke was surely the coolest man on the planet, at least in his incarnation as The Motorcycle Kid.

For years I wore grey v-necked jumpers, second hand jackets and only saw the world in black and white. He was the older brother I wished I had (or was?).

Cosmic Captain

When I had just turned eighteen I went to London for the summer. It was and I guess remains a crucial time in my life story with good and bad things happening and my horizons broadening at a terrifying yet exhilarating speed.

One of the most exciting things that I picked up that summer was an L.P. (sure beats STD's) from a library in Morden which (shame on me!) remains in my possession. It was Safe as Milk, the first Captain Beefheart album and it remains just as exciting today.

The sound (that Ry Cooder slide) the lyrics, the VOICE, the seriously playful wordplay and intonation.

This was Gram Parson's cosmic american music and now the Captain has set sail for the outer limits of that cosmos.

Well I was born in the desert came on up from New Orleans
Came up on a tornado sunlight in the sky
I went around all day with the moon sticking in my eye

New National Anthem

As another chapter is written into the Book of Invasions as the IMF and the EU become the latest wave of invaders to storm the shores I would like to respectfully suggest a new National Anthem.

"Lay down your silver and your gold.
I'm a man who can't be sold.
And, even when my heart grows cold,
I'll curse your evil stranglehold."

The National Death

I keep thinking of Saul Bellow's great Herzog when I sit down to write a blog. The titular character is constantly drafting letters on all sorts of subjects but never finishing or posting them. Is this irritability with the world a function of male middle age. For some I fear it is.

I am one of them and my advice is to read no further. This is the verbal equivalent of bursting a boil. It should have ended up in the wastepaper basket. And many many people are saying these things.


Irritability with the world has a very clear target in Ireland at the moment. Vast sums of money in excess of what the government earns or can draw on have been guaranteed to the very financial system which caused the recent shock to the world economy. These people have now refused to lend to Ireland at rates which could possibly be afforded and driven us into the warm embrace of the IMF and the EU.

til the money runs out

You just can't seem to get away from the rumblings of national bankruptcy these days and some songs suggest themselves as a soundtrack.

Ain't That Good News

I have just finished reading John Pilger's collection of some of the best in investigative journalism since the Second World War. Ezra Pound famously said that literature is news that stays news. By that criteria there is a lot of literature here.

There are many crimes outlined here, and in a way that pushes you to face the truth that is often obvious but usually ignored.

Dachau, Hiroshima, McCarthyism, Cambodia, Mai Lai, Beiruit, Rwanda, Checnya, Iraq, how our food is produced, american funerals, how drug companies and governments try to hide their actions behind a wall of disinformation and secrecy etc etc.

The way in which words can be used to hide the truth is examined relentlessly perhaps nowhere better than in an extract from Robert Fisks magesterial Pity the Nation where he stumbles onto the scene of a massacre in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beiruit and meets some eternal companions of death.

"If we did not move quickly enough, they bit us. Mostly they stayed around our heads in a grey cloud, waiting for us to assume the generous stillness of the dead. They were obliging, these flies, forming our only physical link with the victims who lay around us, reminding us that there is life in death. Someone benefits. The flies were impartial. It mattered not the slightest that the bodies here had been victims of mass murder. The flies would have performed  in just this way for the unburied dead of any community. Doubtless it was like this on hot afternoons during the Great Plague."

Addictive Tunes

Listening to the great Buzzcocks album Another Music from a Different Kitchen I was particularly struck by I Need and it's great dissectation of all forms of consumption :

"The things I used to want - I need"

It inspired a quick (and short) playlist on addiction that I place here for your delectation. Addiction and withdrawal.

Peeling in the Years

Today has been designated keepingitpeel day and the idea is that people blog about music from a Peel session or share links to Peel Sessions etc.

It's hard to think of what music to blog about as Peel was so central to my introduction to music. I started listening about 1979/80 when I was 11/12 years of age and still hear things that bring me back to lying in bed with the radio on low listening to Peel introducing yet another of the bands that would form part of my musical constellation over the rest of my life.

Subway Sect, Wire, Magazine, PIL, Dexys, Specials, Madness, Desperate Bicycles, The Slits, The Skids, Augustus Pablo... the list is long. Many times in later years I would listen to something and it would be familiar from  Peel and some of the many cassettes I would make on my cheap tape recorder and a sixties radio something like the ones above. If my music taste is eclectic this was the source.

Look, Know

The past week has seen the birth of my third child, a beautiful baby girl. It is such a miraculous event it is impossible to explain. You are so privileged as a parent.

But then the responsibility hits. This child needs a name. And many people will want to have an input.

Family, celebrity, historical hero.....where will inspiration lie?

Initial suggestions include some of the earlier mythical women, versions of Eve and my daughter suggests Pandora.

And now for the
                                          TANGENT

Incense and Mirrors

The whole issue of religion has been taking up a bit more space in my head these last few days than in quite a while. I have been reading Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' and hearing all about the visit of Josef Ratzinger to the UK.

It also reflects on my last blog and religion is, I think a central part of belonging. The central part of belonging is a shared body of assumptions, often without basis in reality. Other religions can seem bizarre even to those who are religious but it is often difficult to see this about the religion that you are brought up in. Dawkin’s puts forward a few possible evolutionary reasons why religion prospers including the need to believe and act on your parent’s instructions unquestioningly (in early human society).

Personally I feel that one of our great evolutionary strengths is our need for an answer and perhaps our weakness is reliance on ‘faith’ where there is no obvious answer. However this weakness doesn’t necessarily have any negative affect. It didn’t affect pastoral communities to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe or that it was flat.

Shot By Both Sides

Abstinence makes the heart grow weaker. A Speculation.

It has got quite a lot of good press for the drinks industry, the study that shows that heavy drinkers live longer than non-drinkers. The number of factors that could be influencing this are myriad, including probable funding bias. The most likely reason is, however the relationship between the size of peoples network of friends and their health. We need to have positive interaction with others to help keep our brains in healthy working order, apparently. We need to feel a sense of belonging. Try feeling that when you’re out with a group of drinkers in a pub on a Friday and you’re the only one not drinking.

Call me Myself - Claire Keegan, Pat McCabe and some rambling shite

Original Post - Thursday, August 26, 2010

I recently read Clare Keegan’s collection of short stories Walk the Blue Fields and was impressed by the clarity and stylistic mastery displayed within. It is a mastery within the tradition of the short story writers and I had thought McGahern a number of times before arriving at Surrender (after McGahern) based upon his memoirs.

The books cover is replete with the acclaim of critics and her peers. “Already touched by greatness” “exceptional” “genius” Raymond Carver”  etc. It started me thinking about the things that make a writer “great”. One thing felt wrong for me – I wasn’t sure that the writer was really consumed by the voices within the stories (and I wasn’t wholly consumed myself). They felt self-consciously like ‘great short stories’.

MicroMansions on Arbour Hill - Cathal Coughlan

Monday, August 16, 2010

It was my great good fortune to get an invitation to go along to see a low key solo performance from one of the heroes of Irish rock yesterday afternoon. At the very civilized hour of five pm Cathal Couglan performed a set in an artists studio in Stoneybatter to a small audience. This was in part to warm up for a series of forthcoming gigs that are lined up.

The performance was coruscating, like the darkest  of Weimar Cabaret on steroids. Old and new songs sat together with The Loyaliser from Fatima Mansions days and Rat Poison Rendevous from the far more recent Flannery’s Mounted Head show being particular standouts. (I almost wrote Slattery's Mounted Foot (Val Doonican standard))

Of Time and the City

Original Post - Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Of Time and the City - Terence Davies

I have just finished watching Terence Davies inspiring Of Time and the City, a poetic montage of archival footage of the Liverpool of his memory. Davies was born a working class catholic into poverty in Liverpool in 1945 and left in 1973. The film charts in a very subjective way the ‘history’ of Liverpool in that era.

As well as archive there is a voiceover which also uses quotes and poetry, both Davies own, Shelley and an excerpt from Eliot’s Four Quartets amoung others. There is an almost ecstatic surrender to memory and the emotional impact of human endurance in the face of hardship.

Sweet Smell of Evil & Touch of Success

Original Post - Monday, August 09, 2010

The Sweet Smell of Evil

 Just watched The Sweet Smell of Success again on television last night. So good I didn’t even doze off despite it ending well after midnight when dozing is an almost unavoidable hazard.

It’s years since I saw it and I had forgotten just how good it is, particularly the translucent cinematography of James Wong Howe. The look, I have since read, was achieved in part by putting oil on the walls of the studio.

That Finnish Beat

Original Post - Monday, July 26, 2010

I’m currently reading Kerouac’s On The Road which has long been a glaring omission from the books I’ve read. I have long felt that I had missed the boat not reading it as a teenager as it has a place as a teenage rite of passage. However it’s rapturous embrace of ‘the American night’ brings back memories of  my own youth and although Dublin to Galway and back doesn’t quite match the continental scale of Kerouac’s peregrinations you make do with what you got.

I may return to On The Road in a later ramble but it was reading it that led me to see Taisto, the hero of Kaurismaki’s Ariel as archetypically beat, as I understand Kerouac to use the word. The world pisses on him but he can’t be bothered to put up an umbrella.

He loses his job when the mine he works in is closed. He then goes for a drink with his father who gives him the keys to his Cadillac convertible, tells him to leave and heads into the pub toilet and shoots himself. Like the Rain Dogs in the song by late era Beat Poet Tom Waits, he's out on the street and the rain has washed away the scent of home.

The Inspirations of George Lucas

Original Post - Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Short film George Lucas in Love creates a myth of creation for Star Wars and is very funny. It's well worth watching if you haven't seen it and have ten minutes to spare.

The reason I was reminded of this film is that I have just been reading The Witches of Karres which seems to be the likely source for a number of the elements that make up the aforesaid blockbuster.