thomascott

The European liberal left's teary-eyed love-in with the Obama administration may need some emotional adjustment.
Sure, after the Bush regime, Obama did seem - and to a point continues to seem - like a breath of fresh air.
The point however is, at this juncture, rhetoric is not equating with policy and with the sound of the dizzy, post-election fanfare fading into the background, there is a sense of business as usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?_r=1&hp

More disturbing however, is Obama's intention to shield CIA operatives who imprisoned supposed terrorists without trial, flouted the Geneva Convention and practised torture on (considering they had not been tried under due legal process) effectively innocent civilians.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/obama-pledges-to-protect-cia-torture-operatives-1670067.html

Hardly the policy of a president seeking to implement real change or address the hideous injustices of his predecessor's tenure, is it?

After starring in 'I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here' and doing the narration for a hilariously bad, Boys-Own -type documentary called 'Bugs' for Murdochvision, John Lydon carries about as much cultural weight as Kerry Katona.
Hard to now imagine he was once a co-conspirator in avant-garde-pop, I know this song is as much a product of Keith Levine's sonic experimentalism and Jah Wobble's musical input but Lydon's stream-of-consciousness vocals are intrinsic to the song's sense of cold, dislocated, almost Beckettian narration.
One of my favourite pop songs from the time and unquestionably my favourite Old Grey Whistle Test performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch

The U.S. self-appointed role as a world policeman was always given a degree of public relations saleability by it's particular condemnation of torture.
If you must wage wars of interventionism, then stating an opposition to torture grants a moral supremacy, a legitimacy of purpose.
Whatever shred of legitimacy, this stated opposition to torture, granted the U.S. in other conflicts - the swift, sanitised Gulf War comes to mind - the decision to permit the use of torture in the War On Terror has caused irrevocable damage to public perception of the U.S. amongst the international community.

For a time the Bush administration seemed almost proud of it's advocacy of torture.

The presentation of the idea, that slow-drowning a human being or keeping them awake for days
is not quite torture is an abomination and an insult to anyone with a scintilla of intelligence.
Deprive someone of sleep and they will confess to anything, you don't need thumb-screws or red-hot pincers to torture someone...
Additionally the obvious inference is that information obtained by these techniques is completely unreliable and any case brought about by these means, including that of Sheikh Muhammed, should be immediately dismissed.

This article -http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18thu1.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
in today's New York Times, does give one the sense that U.S. democracy may at last be beginning to correct itself, to find equilibrium after what has been the most venal presidency within living memory.
I personally think it unlikely that Rumsfield could ever be indicted on any of the inferred charges.
More important is the necessity that Obama should follow those election promises to review the executive orders implemented by President Bush and to immediately re-commit the U.S. fully to the ordinances of the Geneva Convention.

http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/present/index.php
The ongoing fluxus exhibition at the Baltic Gallery in Gateshead sounds intriguing, there is however no chance of me being able to go, so I have been trying to attend in proxy by reading reviews and online articles instead.
Any art movement that proclaims itself anti-art is immediately defining itself as paradoxical and paradox seems to be the pith of what fluxus was about, it succeeded in being at once all-embracing and rigidly exclusivist, libertarian and totalitarian, profound and trite, the province of the visionary and of the charlatan.
I think eventualy fluxus' paradoxical elementalism eventually had it's ultimate confirmation in the fact that it became in essence a self-negating entity, rather than overturning art it overturned itself, almost cancelling it's original energy out, before becoming assimilated - in a purely presentationalist way - into the mainstream.
Adrian Searle in this - http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/dec/10/art - Guardian article writes "Fluxus never went down well with collectors. Never mind that fluxus work rarely cost anything to make, and not much more to buy, and its single laudable aesthetic premise was to avoid wasting resources. The problem for most art collectors was that fluxus was too cheap and too ephemeral".
This element of fluxus certainly has not been absorbed by contemporary mainstream art, the art of Hirst and his contemporaries may wear the vestments of fluxus but the real radicalism of their work is most eloquently expressed in the price tag.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/13/damienhirst.art

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/04/law-genetics
Add into all this the prevalence of closed-circuit TV cameras in the UK.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200610020022

There seems something cliched in making an Orwellian connection between all these modes of 'public-protection'...
I wonder is Gordie suitably dour to cut the mustard at The Ministry Of Truth.

Most contemporary Hollywood films are completely unwatchable; behind some little embellishments and other frou-frou most boil down to being predictable, anti-intellectual, ambiguity-free moral fables of good versus evil - or in other words fairytales.
I'm not sure whether Hollywood conducted some market research back in the seventies that caused them to conclude that the public likes trite nonsense or whether the public voted for this at the box-office - perhaps a little from column A and a little from column B....
In any case I like cinema but I have for the past twenty years found very little to like in the contemporary mainstream and so older Hollywood films, art-house cinema and foreign films tend to be what I watch, I occassionally see the odd contemporary film but generally afterwards I feel like I've been over-dosed with sugar.

During the week I watched Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film 'The Conversation' a film that is by a far measure the best thing he ever made.
I'm curious how Hollywood films often hold up a mirror to their times, The Conversation with it's warning notes on the morality of privacy and the darker potentials of surveillance is very much of it's time.
The post-Watergate U.S. had just witnessed a presidency brought down by wire-tapping and concerns regarding privacy were very much the fear of the moment.
There was a whole Orwellian concern about corporations, the government or the C.I.A. listening in to private conversations and acting on the information gleaned.



It's curious how little we care about privacy now, we have taken our parents' lace-curtains off our windows and off our lives.
Big Brother doesn't have to spy on us because we do the leg-work for him, self-mediating on our blogs, divulging our inclinations and intentions, fears and aspirations, politics and beliefs.
We equip Google with a list of the websites we visit leaving a cyber-record of our interests, our purchasing-inclinations,our political leanings, our hidden vices, our idiosyncracies.
We don't give much thought as to whether this self-divulgence could be utilised against us but of course in very particular circumstance it could; in Bangkok and China peoples blogs have landed them in gaol.
Those 'very particular circumstances' are an important disclaimer however, one of the leitmotifs of this blog has been a rejection of the Culture Of Fear -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_fear
- and a countering belief in human resourcefulness.
Of course this resourcefulness can of itself be useful in subverting the online persona your right-clicking creates.
Like the Soviet spies who created false personae by joining right-wing groups within the U.S. during the Cold War it is equally easy to doctor your profile to appear as 'benign' as possible.
Or if this seems ludicrously self-defeating and you wish to opt out of the Age of Information a few key-strokes can eliminate your blog persona entirely.
Online suicide is genuinely painless.

Last Saturday we went for a drive/hike in the Slieve Bloom mountains about fifteen miles from where I live,
here are some pictures I took:

The delphiniums which I grew from seed in the late Spring of 2007 and managed to bring through the winter have begun to bloom.








These delphiniums are Pacific Giants - the largest species of delphinia - and at present the plants are over four feet high, I will post more pictures when they are all in bloom.
Other plants blooming out at present are these Helianthus -



and these Nasturtiums -

Of course fear has been utilised across the span of recorded history as a means of controlling subject peoples and conquered nations.
The use of public execution and torture was used extensively by ancient civilisations to suggest the fearful consequence of challenging the political status quo.
Across the Middle Ages the church combined these techniques - along with christian eschatology - to consolidate it's wealth and power.
In the modern age these less subtle forms of coercion were - for the most part - effectively outlawed by legislation and reform, their actual effectiveness as a means of control being debatable anyway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish.

The more subtle political tools of media-manipulation and propaganda immediately proved more efficacious in directing the thoughts and actions of people and in the twentieth century television and newsreel supplemented the capacity for mass printing allowing for the swift blanket dissemination of the message -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda.

Perhaps the biggest and most protracted 'public information' campaign ever created was the U.S. government's 'Duck and Cover' programme.
Duck and Cover was advanced as a means of personal protection taught to schoolchildren in the U.S. from the 1940s up until the end of the Cold War in 1989.



This seemingly well-meaning, public-spirited programme was largely a sham, the suggested methods of self-preservation sound a little akin to sticking one's head in the sand when one considers what they were supposed to protect against...


The detonation of this device at Bikini Atoll on March 1st/ 1954 was the largest thermonuclear test the U.S. ever carried out, it produced a 7km wide fireball within one second in which temperatures rose to between 60 and 100 million degrees, the surrounding seas were heated to 55,000 degrees and the blast was equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of over fifteen million tonnes of high explosive.

Some six years later the Soviets tested a colossal 50 megaton device over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, this device was - and still is - the largest explosive device ever detonated.



Despite the obvious evidence that Duck and Cover was rather thin prophylaxis against nuclear attack, it continued to be taught in U.S. schools for the following three decades.
Some may argue that the ultimate purpose of the programme may have been to act as a psychological panacea but I would argue that quite contrarily the purpose in it's superannuated implementation was to instil fear and mistrust, to perpetuate the Red Scare psychology in the mass populace and perhaps most crucially of all to instil this fear at an early and formative age.
If you want to keep your citizens in a state of fear you can't beat getting 'em young.

Finally here is a rather amusing satirical spoof on the original public information film, intriguing how the spoof film displaces the 'old fear' of nuclear holocaust with the 'new fear' of global warming.

Last week I blogged on the subject of fear, specifically fear - experienced spuriously through media - as a phenomenon of entertainment, even enjoyment.
I also commented on the efficacy of cinema as a means of inducing this effect in the watching audience, arguing that films which suggested a parallel 'real' fear in tandem with a supernatural 'unreal' fear are considerably more effective than all the gore, viscera and latex prosthetics that Hollywood has cliched into the 'horror' movie genre.

Fear on another level is of course a very effective means of controlling the citizen, their actions and thoughts.
Mention this and immediately people tend to think of totalitarian systems, citing the obvious examples of Nazism and Stalinist communism.
Democratic systems however, contrary to common perception, also thrive on fear -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_fear -
and this wiki article almost adds up the sum of all our Western fears, oddly eschewing a few biggies along the way, namely our irrational fear of Islam and the fear-storm that the enviro-lobby has whipped up through ridiculous extrapolations regarding global warming.
Surprisingly few people have taken on the culture of fear, Frank Furedi's books -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Culture-Fear-Risk-taking-Expectation-Continuum/dp/0826476163

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Politics-Fear-Beyond-Left-Right/dp/0826492940/ref=pd_sim_b_title_1/026-5180341-8623641

-and Adam Curtis documentaries



-come to mind but these don't really receive as much attention as they should from a media that has come to love the unit-shifting potential of fear and a public that has come to need the addictive hit of the next big scare.
The irony in all this is that the world is probably a safer place now than at almost any point in the twentieth century, in the absence of real fears our politicians in collaboration with our media have created a fantasy world of glittering horrors to chime our midnight hours.

At present I'm intrigued by the subject of fear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear) and of it's immediate cousin anxiety.
Clearly we humans are as drawn to fear as we are repelled by it, this affinity begins with roller-coasters and horror films and extends to the political control of nations of millions through the interpretative manipulation of events or history.
This post concerns the former titular dalliance with fear.

Even the most solidly rationalist of us enjoys a good ghost story or tale of supernatural dread, I think it's arguable that the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an especially fecund period for literature within this tradition and Ireland yielded a particularly rich seam with writers such as Maturin, Le Fanu, Stoker et al.
Internationally this gothic horror genre was propagated by Poe, Shelley, R.L. Stevenson, M.R. James, it's legacy was carried into the twentieth century by Lovecraft and others and even into the modernist era by Robert Bloch and Henry Farrell.
Toe-dippers along the way included Henry James, Conan Doyle Ambrose Bierce et al.

I've never been much taken with films of the horror genre (dopey teens, remote location, unlikely demonic presence, claret everywhere, yawn) and cinema has very, very seldom succeeded in carrying a genuinely chilling ghost story.
Two examples do come to mind and not unsurprisingly both are adaptations of original tales from the gothic horror genre.
The first is Jonathan Miller's adaptation of M.R. James 'Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad', the film was released in 1968 with the abbreviated title 'Whistle and I'll Come To You'.




The second is Jack Clayton's filmic take on Henry James classic story 'The Turn Of The Screw', it features a career performance from the great Deborah Kerr and was released in 1961 under the title 'The Innocents'





Aside from the artistry contained in the original literary source, I think what makes these two films so genuinely terrifying is the fact that in both it is never quite clear whether the protagonists are being haunted by the abominations they perceive to be there or whether they are in fact losing their reason.
In a sense that latter loss of the self is more inimical than all the spectres and shadows.

Suppose I'm picking up a thread from the 'Correct Use Of Self-Loathing' post here with another song that eschews the conventions of type.
Former Go-Between Robert Forster made a rather fine solo debut album called Danger In the Past back in 1990 and the opening track has to be one of the best songs ever about being jilted.
Most 'jilted lover' songs tend toward weepy schmaltz or Wagnerian histrionics and cause me to glaze over by the second sack-clothed chorus.
I love Forster matter-of-fact, conversational rationalisation of the circumstance and that perfect kiss-off line "..every man for the rest of your life will less than me".
Bet you wish you'd thought of a line like that to bid adieu to the dizzy beau who first broke your heart and coincidentally did you the good service of overturning your youthful romantic delusions about love...

Planted back in January, one of the successes of an inclement Spring.
Three weeks ago my garden was set back to December by showers of marble-sized hail but these came through...
I like the parrot varietals, they're considered a little two extravagant by some gardeners but they do it for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazine_(band)


Relative to the artistic merit of the music they produced Magazine must be one of the most undervalued of all the post-punk/new wave bands that emerged in the late seventies.
I could never quite fathom just why exactly they did not received the kudos they deserved, but I surmise that it was because they were just too cerebral, too ober-literate, too avant-garde to dovetail in with much of the numbwitted, rebellion-by-numbers conformity of the mainstream post-punk scene.

Take for example 'A Song From Under The Floorboards', the closer on their 1980 album 'The Correct Use Of Soap'.
I normally hate songs about self-loathing as they usually tend toward a maudlin, humourless, ultra-mundane mewling that is so inherently solipsistic as to be the exactly the same thing as self-vaunting ego-parading.
Devoto's self-loathing is - by counter - laced with barbed humour, with scabrous irony and with a knowing self-parody that make the song actually quite edifying.

I opened an account with Livejournal back at the start of February in order to give myself an online identity for other LJ users whose blogs I enjoy and occasionally post to.
I've always been a little dubious about the value of blogging - I just have better things to be doing with my time - but I have quite come to like the format of LJ and the platform's virtual community, the fact that most LJ users leave their blogs open does make it a community without hedges.
At the suggestion of an old friend I have however decided to also open a Facebook account as the site's popularity has ensured that a number of our mutual acquaintances also use this platform and it provides a useful means of communication.
I have to say I'm hugely unimpressed with the format, design and usability of the Facebook platform, if it's virtuality could be made bricks and mortar then it would be a community of bland little houses with high walls,no conversations between strangers at bus stops and rather trite weather-centric discourse between close neighbours.
Facebook generates insular, cliche-based community whereas LJ at least facilitates a more outward-looking, inter-tribal virtuality.
I'm writing this using Six Apart's cross-platform Facebook application Blog It, it will thus appear both in the grey commuter belt town of Facebook and simultaneously in the slightly pretentious but more cosmopolitan and much more interesting city-village community of Livejournal.

Our sunniest February since records began was a month of mists and mellow frostfulness.
Work has been evenly balanced with free time which is the equilibrium I strive to maintain , the shade and the light defining each other better and all that.
I've had time to play with daughters, take photographs, go walking, cook,  garden, read (Maupassant's Pierre et Jean, Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale/Isabelle), listen to music (Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, Britten's String Quartets) and enjoy this Indian Spring.
One month on and this journal is proving a useful identity marker but a conventional diary suits my peregrinations better than an online version so for now it's fortnightly photo posts and the idle thoughts of an aspiring idle fellow.

















 

Things were grim back in Summer 2002, my partner Ruth and I had left Dublin to escape high rents and burnt-out cars and had moved to the sticks. 
Ruth had given up here Dublin job and was searching for work whilst I - wearied of being skilled but miserably paid - had set up my own business and was trying to make enough to beat the wolves back. 
In July however Ruth got some tax back from her previous employ so she decided to invest it sensibly... by blowing it all on a trip to Paris.
We had no chairs but we had Paris in August.













The above pictures were shot on an old East German Praktica with 50 and 35mm lenses, the roll of XP2 they were taken on got lost after the holiday and only surfaced last week. During the interim it had travelled around 10,000 miles with us and had probably endured temperatures extremes between minus 20 and plus 30 degrees .
A combination of six years inclement storage and some rather mediocre scanning has produced the results shown. 
I rather like the peculiar cut-from-old-newspapers effect;  I have no memory of taking any of the pictures shown and their newsprint appearance suits my association with them and the time between.

Scrapbooking through some old newspapers today I came across two very different reviews of George Steiner's 'My Unwritten Books', one from Blake Morrison in The Guardian and one from Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times.
There is much, very much I like in Steiner's writing and ideas though like many postmodern thinkers he has a fondness for expressing ultra-mundanities in the most treacly shuffle.
A little of this is pardonable - even expected - in a writer of Steiner's standing but then he himself has often taken post-structuralism to task for indulging in exactly such a dialect of wilful obscurity.
The below inclusion taken from Christopher Hart's review should provide some light relief for those who have pulled the hair of their reason in frustrated attempt to understand such language of exclusion. 
 

     Living in Toronto in 2005 I missed the BBC's documentary series 'How Art Made The World'. 
Sky Arts took a break from it's stock schedule of well-thumbed repeats to broadcast the first in this five part series this evening and having read a few reviews of the programme I took the time out to watch it. 
I actually had good expectations of the series and was particularly drawn to the premise of the first episode which sought to explore why particular cultures at particular points in their history chose to depict the human form in a certain way.
Presenter Nigel Spivey, a University of Cambridge lecturer almost instantly hit a bum note by marvelling a little too long at the intriguing similarities in Paleolithic stone carved figurines unearthed in vastly separate locations and was dazzled enough to suggest that these similarities were due to an aesthetic reaction that we as humans have  "hard-wired into our brains".
To substantiate his theory he then produced some herring gulls....an idea which could have stood up to some brief scrutiny  had Nigel not chosen to completely ignore the huge, aching obviousness that environment played in this homomorphy.
      The programme fared much better in it's consideration of the rendering of human form in Ancient Egyptian art, the aesthetic concept of the artistic desire to present all plains of the body simultaneously was fascinating and the fact that this Picasso-reminiscent visual style remained unchanged  for 3000 years was also compelling.
That much said the central premise of the documentary, namely to investigate why does art almost invariably transmogrify anatomical form into the 'un-real'  was never fully addressed. 
Some wonderful hokus-pokus and speculation was offered up, obvious answers were ignored in favour of the fantastic.
The scientific part of me wants to chuck eggs at this production but the part of me that enjoys the consideration of potential new ideas and the odd wee pinch of charlatanry might toon in again.