Most Sincerely Folks

So I saw this thing on Nialler9 where you have to list your favourite record from every year you’ve been alive, and I thought sure why not.

1976 Stevie Wonder Songs in the Key of Life
1977 The Beach Boys Love You
1978 Elvis Costello This Year’s Model
1979 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Damn the Torpedoes
1980 Stevie Wonder Hotter Than July
1981 Human League Dare
1982 ABC The Lexicon of Love
1983 Michael Jackson Thriller
1984 I don’t have any albums from 1984, save REM’s Reckoning, and I don’t like it
1985 The Replacements Tim
1986 The Pogues Rum Sodomy and the Lash
1987 REM Document
1988 Traveling Wilburys Volume One
1989 De La Soul 3 Feet High and Rising
1990 Sonic Youth Goo
1991 Nirvana Nevermind
1992 Faith No More Angel Dust
1993 Matthew Sweet Altered Beast
1994 Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
1995 Teenage Fanclub Grand Prix
1996 High Llamas Hawaii
1997 Ben Folds Five Whatever and Ever Amen
1998 Air Moon Safari
1999 The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin
2000 OutKast Stankonia
2001 Pernice Brothers The World Won’t End
2002 Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003 OutKast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
2004 Kanye West The College Dropout
2005 The New Pornographers Twin Cinema
2006 Lupe Fiasco Food & Liquor
2007 Lupe Fiasco The Cool

Basically I went through Robert Christgau’s Pazz and Jop pages and picked out whatever I liked best from the list, with the exception of a couple of entries: Matthew Sweet and The High Llamas, which I remembered as being from those years in particular because I played them a lot. I listened to Altered Beast the other day: that is one twisted and bitter piece of work. Sweet’s previous album, Girlfriend was a sort of power-pop flouncing about the bedsit thing, and I never really got into it, but Altered Beast is full of really dark stuff: lovers getting tied up and drugged, people finding out that their former loves are pathetic and disgusting. It really is a masterpiece, of sorts. I surprised myself with how mainstream my choices were, and also with a couple of choices in particular- the Travelling Wilburys at the time didn’t appeal at all, but I quite like the first record now. If pushed to pick an album out of all those above which I could keep if the others were going to be taken away from me, I’d probably go for Tim by the Replacements, strangely. The album has an oblique, jaded feel to it, even when it’s rocking hard, and it sounds better the older I get and the further I drift from the first time I heard it.

Ni hao, haterzz.

There’s an article in El País today from superstar philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, who is writing about the fallout from the Irish referendum and what it means for Europe. It is a translation. I don’t know what language Zizek originally wrote the piece in, and I don’t know from which language it has been translated to render it into Spanish, but I have translated an excerpt into English, in my rather rough and ready style, because I thought it was worth bringing to your attention, what with its exploration of what it means when party politics cannot express the viewpoint of the people.

The Irish No is a repetition of the 2005 French and Dutch No to the European Constitution project. Many interpretations have been offered on the Irish vote, some of these even contradictory: it was an explosion of narrow nationalism and of fear of globalization, incarnated in the United States; The United States is behind the No because it fears the competition of a united Europe and it prefers to deal bilaterally with weak partners…However, these ad hoc interpretations do not take into account something more important: this new rejection means that we are not faced with an accident, a simple slip, but with a dissatisfaction at the back, which has been around for years.

Now, three weeks later, we can see where the real problem is: a lot more worrying than the No itself is the reaction of the European political elite. It has learned nothing from the 2005 No, it has discovered nothing. In a meeting of EU leaders held 19th June in Brussels, after mentioning, to keep up appearances, the obligation to ‘respect’ the decisions of the voters, they quickly proceeded to show their true face and talk of the Irish government as though it were a poor primary school teacher who was unable neither to control nor to educate his backward students. They said they would give it another chance: four more months so that it would correct its error and bring the voters back into line.

The Irish voters had not been presented with a symmetrical choice, because the very terms of the referendum gave preference to a Yes. The authorities proposed to the people an option which, in practice, was nothing of the sort, since it consisted of ratifying the inevitable, which was the result of enlightened experience. The media and the political elite portrayed the referendum as a choice between knowledge and ignorance, between experience and ideology, between post-political administration and old political passions. However, the very fact that there was no alternative and coherent political vision that could serve as a basis for the No vote constitutes the greatest possible damnation for the political and media elite: proof of their inability to express, to translate into a political vision, the yearnings and dissatisfactions of the population.

In other words, this referendum had something rather peculiar: its result was simultaneously the expected one and a surprise, as though one knows what’s going to happen but, somehow, can’t believe that it’s happening. This discrepancy reflects far more dangerous division among the voters: the majority (of the minority who bothered going out to vote) went against the treaty despite the fact that all the parliamentary parties (with the exception of Sinn Fein) were decidedly in favour.

The same is happening in other countries, like in the neighbouring UK, where, just before winning the last election, Tony Blair was chosen by a large majority as the most hated man in the country. This divergence between the explicit political choice that the voter makes and his intimate dissatisfaction ought to sound the alarm bells: it means that party democracy is unable to capture the mood of the people, the fact that a vague resentment is building up which, without due democratic expression, can only flow out in dark “irrational” bursts. When referendums transmit a message that directly contradict the message of the elections, we are dealing with a divided voter, who, for example (thinks that he) knows very well that Tony Blair’s policies are the only reasonable ones but, even so.. (he can’t abide him.

It’ll probably come out in English soon, but allow me the dubious illicit pleasure of feeling like that French kid who translated Harry Potter.

Quentin Fottrell sez:

As a last resort, I recently took refuge at a Socialist Workers talk about how advertisers market happiness. I had heard it all before, but I was prepared to listen until the very end when the mobile phones started ringing and one-by-one they were outed as supporters of capitalist oppressors Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens.

Do advertisers market happiness? I doubt it, for if they did no-one would buy anything. The point of an advertisement is to whet the appetite of the consumer, to make the person feel that they will not be happy until they make their purchase and have the item in their possession. It seems more accurate to say that advertisers market misery.

Never been to an SWP talk myself, but I doubt that they’re so extreme in their opposition to capitalism that they believe one should refrain from making use of any items produced by capitalist firms. How would one keep one’s milk fresh for starters? Is there a socialist Weetabix out there? It would be quite hard to struggle for the emancipation of the working class on an empty stomach. Speaking of which, I have noticed some rather lumpy hard bits in my organic Weetabix of late. This never happened before. Something has clearly changed in the Weetabix production process: it may be that the rise in global wheat prices has had repercussions in other areas of production -cutbacks in quality control, cheaper replacement components, that sort of thing. Whatever the explanation, it is making for many an unpleasant morning. Times are indeed tough in recession-era Ireland.

I survive the gradual, and I now fear inevitable, disintegration of our democracy because great literature and poetry, great philosophy and theology, the great works of history, remind me that there were other ages of collapse and despotism.

Which is all well and good for the likes of you, Chris Hedges, but some of us have crusts to earn and nappies to change. Besides, snuggling up with a well thumbed Thucydides isn’t going to save you from the Mad Max-style marauders who are sweeping the land even as we speak, robbing the last tins of tuna flakes at gunpoint.

Do you know, I haven’t read a novel since before Christmas.

Thought this was an interesting take by Crispin Sartwell on the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ in schools.

I was thinking about the big deal made of immigration as a factor in the No vote in the Irish press over the last few days. See here. Only 1% of No respondents chose ‘to avoid an influx of immigrants’ as a reason from the list of available options in the Eurobarometer survey, but that doesn’t stop people from pointing the finger at immigrants as the root cause of the decisive No vote. OK, so they don’t do it directly. Rather, it’s via a form of ventriloquism: it’s not me who blames the immigrants: it’s the No voters.

Given the institutional pressures to produce a Yes vote, and the consequent pressures to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, it’s hardly surprising to see immigration presented as an easy explanation for the No vote. Since both mainstream media and the government largely serve business interest, what we are seeing is a collective project of getting back to a position of Yes to Europe as soon as possible, and the referendum results and the surrounding data are being interpreted in that light. The government receives criticism for its failure to sell the treaty, but not for the conditions that produced a No vote, and a working class has temporarily swung into the media’s purview, but only as a totem of ignorance, backwardness and xenophobia.

Fine Gael has blamed ‘left wing campaigns’ for ’stirring the immigration pot’.

Fine Gael deputy Lucinda Creighton said she believed the phrase used frequently by Sinn Féin of a ‘race to the bottom’ had become a code for stoking public fears about migrant workers driving down Irish wage rates.

‘‘You had Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin and almost all of the No side talking about this mantra of a ‘race to the bottom’. They dressed it up as concerns that these workers were not being paid the same as Irish workers - but it fed a fear that foreign workers were coming in, taking jobs and working for less,” said Creighton.

The phrase ‘race to the bottom’ has little, if anything to do with ‘foreign workers coming in’. Says here that the term was coined by Louis Brandeis. It has to do with the consequences of deregulation and competition between states for investment capital. In the context of the European Union, a practical example would be where a firm based in one location sets up additional plants with excess capacity in other locations where the wages are lower. The low wage locations, desperate for the investment, will accept whatever conditions are laid down by the firm. Consequently, the workers in the location with better conditions will be forced to accept a deterioration of conditions, and their means of bargaining for better wages will be undermined by the excess capacity in the other location. In short, go on strike if you like: we’ll send production elsewhere and you can go fuck yourselves.

Either what we see from this FG TD is an astounding display of braying ignorance, which would be disgraceful enough, or she does know what the term means but, because she thinks the phenomenon it describes is a good idea, she is quite happy to claim that it means something else, so that -with an eye on the next referendum- she can depict perfectly legitimate reasons for voting No as founded on right-wing xenophobia.

The Sunday Business Post produced a poll which apparently revealed ‘a high percentage of No voters want more stringent limits on the number of foreigners coming into Ireland’:

‘This newspaper’s poll reveals that, of all respondents, 59 per cent believe there should be stricter limits on the number of foreigners coming to Ireland, while 37 per cent disagree. About two thirds of those who voted against the treaty agree with stricter limits.’

So about two thirds of No voters agreed with stricter limits, which means that half of those who voted Yes also agreed with stricter limits. That is also a high percentage of Yes voters.

But is the poll result evidence in itself that immigration was a decisive, or even significant factor in the No vote? To arrive at that conclusion, would one not have to demonstrate that immigration was also a significant factor in the Yes vote?

What this poll does not provide is an indication of the relative importance of immigration to other issues in terms of how voters made their choice. Therefore it says next to nothing about why people voted No. I mean, you could ask voters whether they think paedophiles should be castrated, and it may turn out that a higher percentage of No voters favour castration for paedophiles, but you couldn’t say, based on that, that people voted No to Lisbon because the EU does not castrate paedophiles, or, in the Sunday Business Post’s terms, ‘A fear of paedophiles not getting castrated was an unspoken issue behind the Lisbon No vote’.

It’ll continue like this until people vote Yes, you know. Even if they have to rewrite history so that the No vote caused a recession.

Pretty much anything goes in the name of paella but the favourite combination in my household is spicy chorizo with mildly flavoured, creamy and meaty monkfish or tender (and blessedly inexpensive) squid, with a few prawns to finish.

Sorry, but that’s disgusting. I like chorizo as much as the next punter, and I have conducted a long affair with monkfish ever since I tried it in Jury’s Ballsbridge at the height of the last recession, but putting the two of them together is vile and obscene, since the chorizo destroys the taste of the mildly flavoured monkfish.

I was reading this sentence from Anatole Kaletsky:

But the market is not always right. It is usually right, but sometimes it is spectacularly wrong - as in the recent sub-prime saga. To acknowledge that governments must sometimes correct market failures is not to reject the economic lessons of the 1980s but rather to apply a proper understanding of economics.

Thinking: to be able to talk about ‘a proper understanding of economics’ after saying that ‘the market’ possesses faculties of judgement, you need to abandon generally understood scientific principles as a basis for appealing to the reader, and appeal instead to the reader’s ability to interpret poetry. Kaletsky then goes on to talk about whether one should ‘trust the market’ in the case of oil. This is rather poetic stuff, and it seems to demand a sort of faith you would more expect to encounter expressed in a priest’s homily than in writing on economics.

Not unexpectedly, he then attributes the fact that we are unable to ‘trust the market’ in the case of oil to the apparent fact of ‘market failure’, manifest in the form of monopoly. But is ‘market failure’ here a case of the oil monopoly failing to produce the desirable outcomes, or a wider failure of the market to bring about competition among sellers of oil? To clarify: is it a failure of this market, or the market?

It appears to me that there are different instances of ‘market’. You have the general concept of ‘the market’, and then you have phenomena which you can identify as specific examples of that market. It may well be that the former is produced as a result of by one’s encounters with the latter. And then, once the general concept is constituted, it may also be that the general concept becomes instrumental in the formation of the specific examples. A comparable process would be where man recognises himself as separate from the rest of nature, and in so doing becomes able to identify a creator who is responsible for man’s existence. Then, once the concept of that creator is fleshed out, so to speak, men begin to comport themselves in conscious imitation of that creator. Whether that creator exists as an object in reality scarcely matters: the point is that the creator becomes the condition for man being able to identify himself as such. And as men evolve, so too does the creator.

I realise I am not getting to the point very quickly here. Basically, I think -and this is probably not an original thought, that in the idea of ‘market failure’ as expressed by Kaletsky -and his is a pretty conventional use of the idea- one can identify one figure of ‘The Market’ analogous to God the Father (the general concept of the market), another analogous to The Son (the specific instance), and possibly even a Holy Spirit figure out there (what brings people to enter into exchange agreements in the first place, rather than simply bludgeoning each other to death in an all-out war for resources).

A quick google reveals that there is already ample material written on this topic. Such as this.

Anyway, I think it’d be hilarious if 1500 years in the future -once the world has been destroyed and reconstituted and only fragments of this civilisation remained- you have some sort of myth on the island of Ireland developing according to which St Patrick introduced the ancient Irish to belief in the free market through the use of the shamrock.

I notice RTE has a series called One Thing To Do Before You Die on at the minute. The title is excessively morbid since to the best of my knowledge everyone dies, including those living in Dublins 4 and 6, and most people would agree that it’s not really possible to plan to do things after you die. But since One Thing To Do doesn’t really do it, you need to threaten people with death in order to get them to watch it.

Kathryn Hughes writes in the Telegraph of Georgia O’Keefe:

To an audience just getting to grips with popular Freudianism, her semi-abstract studies of flowers and shells seemed to suggest vaginas, wombs and clitorises. With some determined nudging from Stieglitz, O’Keeffe had become a symbol of female emancipation, representative of the new generation of socially and sexually confident women emerging in the wake of the Great War.

Seemed to suggest? Seemed to?

When I first moved to Dublin I stayed in a flat whose landlord had decorated the place on a shoestring budget, but with some aspiration toward tastefulness, with lime green carpets and terracotta wall paint. If that sounds not very tasteful at all, I can only imagine you never went flat-hunting in Dublin 8 at the turn of the century, where the general rule was the furrier the wallpaper and the thicker the dado rails the better, with bonus points for getting the place to exude a smell of Donegal Catch.

But anyway, the piece de resistance of the exquisitely decorated cardboard hovel I ended up renting was a series of Georgia O’Keefe prints in the kitchen and living room, and let me tell you that after contemplating them every day for years on end, I can confirm that there’s nothing suggestive about them. Unless, perhaps, I’m still just getting to grips with popular Freudianism.

By the way, can paintings have audiences?