Caveat Lector

I’ve managed to get through a fair bit of reading of late, probably because there’s a bit of a stretch in the evenings.

Into The Dark: 30 Years in the RUC, Johnston Brown

Chronicles Volume One, Bob Dylan

Collected Poems, C.P. Cavafy

Poems from the North of Ireland, Edited by Framk Ormsby

Out of Place, Edward Said

Elephant, Raymond Carver

Notas de prensa – Obras periodisticas 5 1961-1984, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(This one was given to me by a woman in Cuba who had lived for a while with her son in Ireland and thought it was an awful place altogether. She was living out in Lucan, I think. She said to me that she preferred Cuba, even if people there had escasez (scarcity), because it was warm, and people had a great sense of solidarity and community.

He has a couple of funny anecdotes in it about Cuba, particularly assassination attempts against Castro. It seems there was one guy in the canteen at the Habana Libre hotel, where Fidel used to go to have his fruit juice any time he was around. The CIA had given him some odourless capsules, colourless and tasteless, but with a delayed effect so that the assassin could escape. He was supposed to drop the capsules into Fidel’s juice, but by the time Castro turned up, six months had passed and they were out of date. So the CIA gave him other ones that didn’t go out of date if you froze them. He put them in the freezer, but the next time Castro returned, four months later, he made him the same fruit juice as ever, but in the end he couldn’t break the ice that had covered the capsules.)

Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein

I Married a Communist, Philip Roth

El Camino Cubano

I see Wulfbeorn has a post about Sinn Fein saying they could learn from the Cuban experience, apparently in relation to healthcare. I reckon they should go one further and learn from the Cuban experience in relation to roads. The roads up my neck of the woods are worse than the ones in Cuba. Seriously and no exaggeration, as the man says.

Quite Right, Reg Dwight.

So. Elton John. My first memories of him were when he was chairman of Watford. For most of the nineties every time I heard the name Elton John that bit in that George Michael/Elton live duet jumped into my head, you know, the bit where George has started murdering ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ and then he goes ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Mr Elton John!!’. Well that for some reason rang in my ears Pavlovianly every time I heard a song by him, or saw him on TV. When Diana was assassinated and they were all at her funeral I thought George was going to get up and bark ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Mr Elton John!!’

Anyway, the point is that I’ve been listening very intently over the last few days to his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road double album and have come to the conclusion that the guy is a pop genius. Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding has to be one of the best opening tracks to an album ever. The title track is also a cracker, and the concluding song, Harmony, which I’d never heard before, is probably his best song. And some of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics aren’t too bad either. I bought Goodbye Yellow Brick Road instead of Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy mainly because if I worked in a record shop I’d be trying to figure out what people are like according to the albums they buy. So if someone bought, I don’t know, James Blunt, I’d assume they also watched Property Ladder. Walking up and paying for an album titled Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy is just a step too far for now.

Bad Rockin’ Tonight

I saw that the winner of Best Rock Band at the Brit Awards, as voted for Kerrang! TV viewers was.. actually I forget, but it was someone like Kaiser Chiefs. Yeah, Kaiser Chiefs I think. Anyway, I couldn’t give a toss about Kaiser Chiefs. The point is that Kerrang! TV viewers voted for it! Jesus I don’t have my finger on the pulse at all. The last time I read Kerrang it had Skid Row on the front cover! I never read Kerrang really though. That was read by the metallers in school.

There was a song years ago by Kingmaker called ‘Armchair Anarchist’ that went

In fact, just the other morning
I was planning a bombing
Firstly, the House Of Lords
then on to the Brit Awards

Singing
“Bomb the idiots”
“Bomb all the idiots now”
“Bomb the idiots”
“Bomb all the idiots now”

Not likely to get released these days. Incidentally, I thought Kingmaker were shit, but the fact that I remembered the song as I was watching it counts for something.

Gratuitous Remark

The whole ‘free speech’ blogophenomenon left me cold. There seemed to be a distinct lack of ‘free thought’ about it.