New resolution

I’m never watching an ‘alternative music show’ again.  They’re all the fucking same: they all have stupid names; they hail pathetic bands as geniuses; and they’re all fronted by two people – one of whom is an ordinary-looking girl, the other a half-man/half-scarf creature that looks like he was blown backwards through a charity shop in the teeth of a hurricane.   The former will either have a ‘unique’ name or an exotic accent, and the latter will speak in a nasally monotone that suggests that all his adrenaline has long since leaked out of his arse.  Extra points for ‘ironic’ t-shirts or musical tastes.

I could put up with all that, if it weren’t for the way in which these shows remind be of being cornered at a house party by a pair of incredibly boring indie dickheads attempting to pass off reviews from Mojo as their own insights, singing the praises of obscure bands they didn’t know about before hearing them on this month’s free Uncut CD.

And what kind of music will you hear on these shows?  Usually, it’s an easily-startled-by-loud-noises gobshite, playing the same three notes over and over again on an acoustic guitar, singing lyrics that would have been laughed off Sesame Street.  Where the fuck are AC/DC when you need ‘em???

Published in:  on November 17, 2009 at 6:30 pm Leave a Comment

Who Needs John Lennon?

Here, I would like to vent my spleen about John Lennon.

Yes.  That John Lennon.  The idealist, the rebel, the genius, the Voice of a Generation ™, the iconoclast, the Messiah, the poet, the artist, the philosopher, the astronaut, the horse-whisperer, the Klingon and whatever else you’re having.  That John Lennon.

The Beatles are a sort of conundrum.  They were a boy band.  Examine any of their song titles or lyrics, and that fact becomes abundantly clear.  Yet the same critics and music obsessives who never miss an opportunity to tear strips off the likes of N*Sync, Boyzone, Take That and all the others will go weak at the knees upon hearing a Beatles tune.  Why?  Well, the main reason seems to be that they were the first to do it, and for that they are afforded a kind of respect.  But at the end of the day, they were still a bloody boy band, despite all their later protests to the contrary.

Ringo Starr is the only Beatle deserving of any kudos in this regard – he knew that the whole enterprise was little more than stupid, fluffy fun for teenagers with a disposable income, and the songs he wrote reflect this understanding.  While Paul McCartney was writing painfully earnest shite such as “Let It Be,” George Harrison was indulging in Indian mysticism and Lennon was enthralling the gullible with his fiery intellect, Ringo Starr was creating innocent, catchy pap such as “Yellow Submarine,” not suffering from any of the delusions his bandmates were labouring under.

The Indian mysticism has often been interpreted as a reaction against Western capitalism, the Beatles enacting their generation’s search for some transcendent truth.  Looked at objectively, however, their spiritual awakening was no more genuine than the celebrity Kabbala craze that took hold a number of years ago, and it was just as insulting.

Following the break-up of the Beatles, Lennon realised that being remembered as a Beatle for all time was pretty fucking embarrassing.  This, combined with his growing anger at the others for not accepting Yoko Ono into their circle, seems to have driven him to construct his solo identity in terms of extreme opposition to all he was before.

Except he didn’t.  Listen to “Imagine,” and you’ll hear the same airy-fairy boy band nonsense dressed up in playschool-level socialist rhetoric.  Lennon was the kind of ‘activist’ for whom it is more important to be seen to be an activist, and to have others believe that you hold radical beliefs, than to actually do anything constructive.  For example, take the “bed-ins,” where John and Yoko stayed in bed for seven days for peace.

If you seriously believe that Lennon and Yoko were intelligent people, then the only way to interpret this 1969 episode is as a bad joke.  Reading interviews with Lennon from the time, however, one is struck by the sincerity of his belief that by staying in bed, they would change the world.

Lennon the Activist had obviously never heard the maxim that ‘pacifism is not the same as doing nothing.’  It takes a sizeable amount of arrogance to not only do nothing, but to parade your inactivity before the world.  Remember, 1969 was the year of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the violence at Altamont, the year that marked the end of the utopian hippy dream with bloodshed and madness.  A more honest response from Lennon and Yoko would have been to hide under that fucking bed, not lie in it.

Then of course, there’s other things about the Great One that are irritating in the extreme.  Take “Come Together,” the tune that Electronic Arts used to advertise the Beatles: Rock Band game.  It was ripped off of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”  And no, it wasn’t an innocent mistake, either.  When confronted on the issue by a music journo, Lennon responded by saying, “We resurrected him!”  The kind of lame excuse you might expect from a child caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar.

It’s obvious, too, what he meant when he sang, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”  It makes a forceful point, except that the dude who wrote and sang it was a white man.  Lennon comes across like the male feminists you overhear in Bohemian cafes, beaming as they tell their understandably nonplussed female comrades, “I believe in total liberation for women!  It’s time that women had an equal share in the world!  Now, what you gals should do is…”  His pseudo-feminism is all the more laughable considering the resurgence of his old boy-band drivel in ditties like “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” and “Jealous Guy” – the anthem of creepy, self-important teenage stalkers everywhere.  His actual opinion of women is on display in “Woman,” where he praises them for their role as long-suffering mothers for ‘the child inside of man.’

This ties into another one of his singles, “Mother.”  The song is transparently about the pain he felt about being ‘abandoned’ by his mother (fact:  she was actually killed by a drunk driver) and his father walking out on the family. The end refrain goes, “Mama don’t go; Daddy come home.”  He recorded this song seven years after the birth of his son Julian, about whom Lennon the man-child once said, “He came out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night.”  At this point, Lennon obviously wasn’t prepared to give up being a child in order to be a father.

I’m going to lay off here.  I would say I could go on forever about this, but I can’t.  The longer I spend talking about this tissue-paper damagogue, the sicker I feel.  Suffice it to say I’m not partial to the man’s music, and I remain unconvinced of his status as a witty, spiritual, “Working Class Hero.”

Published in:  on September 29, 2009 at 1:21 pm Leave a Comment

Zombies

You might’ve heard about the Canadian mathematicians who used a zombie holocaust as a model for the spread of a highly infectious disease (it made the news in August).  You can find the paper here.

They take the ‘traditional’ pop-culture zombie as its template (y’know: slow, eats flesh, not too bright), and propose several models to cover the dead coming back to life, quarantine, etc.  A bit heavy on the mathematics for a layman, but still very interesting.  They say that this model could be applied to studies of party loyalty, among other things, which is pretty cool.

They did make one boo-boo, though.  Though they based a lot of this on the Romero zombie-world, they create a class of ’susceptible’ people to calculate the rate of infection.  In the Romero films, everyone is infected already.  It doesn’t matter if you fall down the stairs, or die of old age: in the Dead series, you will become a zombie when you die, no exceptions (this was implicit in the early films, and it was explicitly stated in Land of the Dead.  The notion first appeared in the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend).  If you get bitten by a zombie, it just makes you ‘turn’ faster.  Plus, they included a formula that allowed for somebody to develop a cure for zombification – which is really, in essence, a cure for death.  Which is handy.

I suppose maybe they wanted to create a model that left a margin for the possible survival of the human species.  Sissies.  Still, I haven’t enjoyed maths this much in quite a while.

Published in:  on September 10, 2009 at 8:20 pm Leave a Comment

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Francisco de Goya

 

In the run-up to the second Lisbon Treaty referendum, this seems kind of appropriate.

I voted against the Lisbon Treaty last time.  I’m gonna vote for it this time around.  What can I say?  I had reservations about it last time, but in the interval, the EU have addressed those reservations to my satisfaction.  As an added bonus, it’ll feel nice to vote against the No campaign, who are really beginning to get on my fucking nerves.

Last time round, the No campaign carried the day through the use of disinformation and conspiracy theories.  According to them, a vote for Lisbon was a vote for: abortion on demand; the formation of a Federal European State (TM); conscription into a Euro super-army; increased power to France; increased power to Germany; the marginalisation of Ireland; AIDS; Space Invaders; Your Mother; weasels; whatever you’re having yourself.

The EU gave us legally-binding assurances on every single issue we brought to them.  Did that do anything to quell the anxieties of the No campaigners?  Of course it didn’t.

(disclaimer: this post isn’t aimed at people in general who want to vote No, but at those currently involved in campaigning for that result)

So, what’s the European Super-State gonna do to us this year, hmm?  Well, it seems that they still want to take away Ireland’s neutrality, the lying bunch of bastards; not only that, but they want to slash the minimum wage to just under €1.50.  Grrr!!!

And it seems that people are starting to believe this bullshit – despite the fact that there is no way in hell that the EU can dictate a minimum wage level to any of its members, and there is no conceivable situation in which the EU would rely on the Irish army to fight its battles.

It was said of the Irish army in the 1960s that it was “A WW2-standard army, with WW1-standard weaponry.”  I can’t remember who said that or where, so sorry about that.  Well, today it’s a Desert Storm-standard army, with WW1 weaponry.  We have no air force, and our coast-guard doesn’t do much apart from picking up the occasional lost delivery of cocaine from the seas around Kerry and West Cork.  The issue of Irish neutrality, while contentious, is laughable in this case.  The Irish army is a puny peacekeeping force, nothing more – the EU hawks would have nothing to gain by eroding our neutrality.

Then there’s the posters that say, “95% of Europeans Would Vote No: Stand Up For Europe!”  Leaving aside the truism that 87.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot, I have to say that if you’re FUCKING STUPID ENOUGH to fall for it, you deserve to have the No campaign treat you like a moron. 

95% of Europeans?  Really?  Who carried out this research?  What was the size of the sample group? Because if you take it upon yourself to speak for the inhabitants of an entire continent, you might want to make it a big sample – in fact, the only sample big enough to give any credibility to this statistic is 500 million.  Yes, if you’re gonna make claims like that about how ‘95% of Europeans’ would vote, I would like to see documentation that proves you personally went and interviewed 500,000,000 people across the European landmass, and that 475,000,000 of them said they would vote against the Lisbon Treaty.  If there was some proof of a process like that, I would accept the figure of the magical 95%.   Otherwise, you’re just making stuff up.

Yeah, the No campaign is lying to you.  Shock horror.  Quelle surprise.

Ahem!  So, yes indeed.  Voting for Lisbon, and against the No campaign, will make me a very happy bunny.

Published in:  on September 9, 2009 at 10:12 am Leave a Comment

Take it from me…

…you only love crazy until crazy loves you.

Published in:  on September 8, 2009 at 11:56 am Leave a Comment

You ever drunk Bailey’s from a shoe?

Howdy.

The story is, I started off with a blog on livejournal.  Two years ago, I stopped posting in it, an earlier this year I deleted it.

Why?  Because I started it when I was 16, and I didn’t want a reminder of how stupid and petulant I was back then to remain floating around in cyberspace for all to see.

Two years ago, I started another blog on blogspot.  A few weeks ago, I deleted that.  Why?  Because I noticed it was starting to fill up with the same kind of shit, even though I had intended it to be a quasi-serious politics/pop culture commentary thing.

Yep, if you’re doing the international sign for ‘wanker’ right now, you’d be spot-on.

I resolved never to blog again, but a few weeks ago my oul’ mucker barryclassic invited me to join that august publication, 3Berkley.  So I figured why not.  Oh yeah, I got a will of iron, so I do.

So, herein will lie the contents of my brain.  ‘cuz posting crap is what blogging is all about.

Published in:  on September 7, 2009 at 8:06 pm Comments (2)