Intermission

I'm going to be taking a short break from blogging for a while, I have come to the conclusion that I have too much else on at the moment and need to focus on that for a few days. Booming Back will return on February 15th for its 4th birthday.

Huzzah!

Here come the knives

Waterford ensemble Fighting Spiders have emerged from the studio with an album of rather tasty tracks. While 'Tarantism' should be released later this year, the first single 'here come the knives' has already been used by the RTE Storyland horror series 'Maraia' as its theme music.

I've seen 'Fighting Spiders' a few times live now, and their energy on stage never fails to impress. I also got a sneak preview of the album late last year and they certainly have a wealth of stand out tracks to choose from come singles time; 'here come the knives' is an excellent debut choice and a great introduction to their sound.

Its available for download from the 29th January for the princely sum of 99 cents at downloadmusic.ie.

The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles

I am now about 20 hours into a 48 hour visit to my family home, which will possibly be the longest continuous period spent in my house since I was twenty. So far I have not killed anyone, which is a good thing. Still, 28 hours to go and the night, as they say, is still young.

Normally when I am here it is because I am looking after one or other of my grandparents in shifts with other family members; I will do the day shift and someone else does the night shift, and thus I get to return home to the warmth and comfort of my own bed each night. Now however it is just me for the weekend and the creepy factor of being in your childhood home that has had no trace of your own presence for eighteen years since your sister decided she wanted your room after you moved out, threw out everything in it and repainted its amazing burgundy walls because they scared her, is really starting to kick in.

But I'm not bitter.

The other weirdness involves watching television with my grandparents. As I have mentioned before my Grandfather has a predilection for watching programs that will annoy him, just to raise his blood pressure and give the rest of us a wee shock. Thus when he announced his intention to spend the evening watching "that hateful, spiteful appalling little man" I braced myself for a night of either Ryan Tubridy or Glenn Beck. Unfortunately for me he was referring to both.

The Late Late Show (the Irish one, not to be confused with any American equivalent that actually has a host with some semblance of charisma, guests that have evolved beyond the intellectual level of bread mold, and an audience whose recent ancestors did not include farm animals*) is an institution that, like anarcho-capitalism, Hanna Montana or Kazakhstan, I am aware of in that I know it exists, but could not actually identify it in a police line-up. It is an experience like tripe, tongue or kidneys that others seem very partial to but when I encounter it sitting on my plate I can't help but retch. I am thankful, rather surprisingly, for last night's experience, for I did not think it possible that any RTE presenter could annoy me more than Pat Kenny, in fact, I did not think it possible that there was anyone more smug, condescending and annoying than Pat Kenny, but I was wrong. Ryan Tubridy is the Black Swan of RTE's 'I can't believe that he has no personality' personalities, and he has changed my understanding of just how awful a presenter can be, forever.

But he is still light years away in awfulness from the other "hateful, spiteful appalling little man", as my Grandfather so eloquently labels him. In the five minutes of watching Glenn Beck during the ad breaks of "The Late Late Show" I learned the following things:

a) Hitler and Stalin were best buds
b) Hitler was actually a far-left liberal, which is why Stalin loved him so much
c) George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw (said in a pirate accent) was English
d) George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw won a Nobel Prize because, like all Nobel Prize winners, he was evil
e) Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from George Bernaaaaaarhd Shaw
f) Obama will create death camps and kill millions of Americans because he is a Nazi and a Socialist and a Nobel Prize winner.

While there was no word on whether any of Obama's works will inspire a Broadway musical and movie starring Rex Harrison, I can certainly see Julie Andrews rocking out "Yes We Can" in a Cockney accent.

Sometimes I think that I live in a parallel universe to the rest of the folks around me, and after a night watching spiteful hateful little men I'm glad that I do. My world might not be as day-glow or hexaped-filled as that of the Na'vi, but its still a pretty nice place to live, with nice friendly people (you know, real Pandorans) and in my world right is right and left is left and we've absolutely, positively, really and truly always been at war with Eastasia.

Always.

* In the interest of full disclosure it must be pointed out that once upon a time I too was a member of The Late Late Show audience. The year was 1994 and a group of us in college went in an ironic way. And by ironic I mean there was drink and/or the prospect of drink involved. Gay Byrne was still host and the guests included The Kelly Family. More than once during the three hour long ordeal I too wished I was an angel.

The Value of Nothing

I'm currently reading "The Value of Nothing" by Raj Patel, and although I'm only half way through I thought I would give it and its writer a little plug this morning.

2007's "Stuffed and Starved" was one of my top reads of the year, and a perfect compliment to Michael Pollan's "Omnivores Dilemma", in that while Pollan concentrated on an Amero-centric examination of the origins of the food he himself ate, Patel's work delved into the multinational food industry and global food trade and the consequences of cheap western food for marginalized food producers in the majority world. It was a very well researched alter-globalisation take on the real cost of food, and I loved it.

"Value of Nothing" goes beyond the food industry and places consumer culture and capitalism itself under the microscope, and rather than just energetic polemic he attempts to provide workable, albeit radical, alternatives.

Beyond these books Patel has embraced digital culture, originally shortly after college through joint editorship of the online journal 'Voice of the Turtle', then through Stuffedandstarved.org, launched to promote his book, and now more recently at rajpatel.org, where he casts a much wider net and is a feed definitely worth subscribing to.

Although Oxford and LSE educated he clearly feels as comfortable marching shoulder to shoulder with his Compañeros in the Global South as he does delivering key note lectures at academic conferences, and his extensive experience in post-Apartheid South Africa and Zimbabwe has given him a unique world-view and a writing voice that I find compelling.

While "The Value of Nothing" is definitely aimed at a mass-market audience rather than an academic one and is a lighter read than his earlier work, it is engaging and ire-provoking enough that it gets a solid two-thumbs up from Unkie Dave.

On Hope and Change

Three years ago this week on the occasion of my 34th birthday I made my first ever political donation to the exploratory committee of a young Senator from Illinois. Though the country of my blood is not always the country of my heart, the man I watched stood as the antithesis of everything that had occurred over the last six years, and I was moved to action. I dared to think that the world might actually change.

Two years ago today I sat and watched the son of a Kenyan immigrant in the church of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. declare that if the people stood together the walls of oppression would be shaken down to the ground. I could feel that the world was about to change.

One year ago today I stood on the frozen grass of the National Mall with a million other people and watched the world change.

Only it didn't.

It didn't.

Nothing more really needs to be said than that.

Again? Seriously? Didn't we do this last year?

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I bought all the childish things I could not afford as a child." - 1 Corinthians 13:11(a)

hmmmmnnnnn.

Thirty-seven.

Not really sure about this whole "late thirties" thing.

Mathematically speaking I am now in my prime, something I haven't been for six years, but given my inability to effectively use the word "sick" in a non-ironic way in a sentence, the derision with which I greet the sight of young male haircuts and the increasing frequency with which I draw pop-culture references from continental philosophers rather than the D-list talking heads on "The Top 100 'Top 100 Shows' of All Time" shows, I must now accept the undeniable fact that I am getting old.

While American television and film is populated almost exclusively by 30-somethings playing the talented denizens of assorted High Schools and Colleges, only on a very, very good day could I hope to pass for an 18-year old. With progeria. In bad lighting. As viewed by a blind person. Who is also deaf. And has never actually encountered a real 18-year old.

Which is just as well, as 18-year olds are quite possibly the most useless thing on earth, good only for serving as cannon fodder in the overseas conflicts of fading empires. Unless they are a whiskey.

But no bitterness there, honestly.

Happy Birthday me.

Yay!

en fraternité

"When, echoing the French Revolution, the black slaves in Haiti revolted in the name of the same principles of freedom, equality and fraternity, this was "the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it"... In Haiti, the unthinkable (for the European Enlightenment) took place: the Haitian Revolution "entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened". The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom - but only for rational "mature" subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality...). This led to sublime "communist" moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion that occurred and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side."
- Slavoj Žižek, "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce", pp111-112

You can donate here to Oxfam Ireland who have a presence on the ground in Haiti , as do Concern who also have an emergency appeal, or to the agency of your choice in your home country.

Nous sommes tous les enfants de Toussaint l'Ouverture.