I am the very model of a modern vegetarian

I was watching Reeling in the Years last week, possibly the only justification RTE has for its licence fee, and was somewhat dismayed to see that the year being reflected upon was 2000. For those of you outside of Ireland, the show is a 30 minute retrospective of a single year in Irish history comprised entirely of archival footage, pop music and the occasional narrative subtitle, and that's it. No talking heads or z-list celebrities waxing lyrical about stuff that happened when they were two years old or a parent's friend's cousin's dog once told them about, no sarcastic voice-over and only the tiniest hint of hindsight and/or foreshadowing in the narrative subtitles. Its an amazing program that has an unexpected ability to well me up with teary nostalgia, or at least it did until it hit the year 2000.

You see, the seventies, eighties and nineties are the Past, a different country where everything glows with the rosy-hue of forgetful remembrance. Days were longer, summers were warmer and the music was far, far better. The naughties, on the other hand, were barely yesterday and in fact may still be technically part of today. It is hard to shed a tear for something that feels as mundane as a walk to the shop to get some milk, the naughties are altogether too fresh and not enough distance is between them and us to enable us to no longer feel their impact.

Nostalgia can only arise when the beatings have actually stopped.

Still, seeing the year 2000 flash by in a series of well-timed vignettes reminded me that it has now been over eleven years since I became a vegetarian. The last meat that I ate was a pork and wild boar sausage dish cooked by a good friend, Mr Keith, possibly the single most epicurean individual I know. I had been planning on turning veggie for some time but I held off because I knew Mr Keith was planing a dinner party, and I figured that a) I might as well go out with a bang and b) it would be added incentive to stay on the veggie wagon, saying to myself that I wouldn't eat meat again until I found something as good as this last carnivorous supper.

Becoming vegetarian was easy enough, for many of my friends were also veggie at the time, but in the last eighteen months a surprisingly large number of them have returned to the world of the omnivore, mostly for health reasons, some as part of a fitness regime, others on medical advice - in fact I myself have been advised by two different doctors to include fish and chicken in my diet, even for a few weeks, as part of my weight and muscle-gain program following my recent (and ongoing) illness.

This is not something I am about to do, though I have given it some considerable thought, more so than at any time in the previous eleven years. It just is one compromise too far in a cornucopia of concessions that illness has forced upon me.

Thinking on all this brought me back to Mr Keith, a man who has been known to spit venomous acid at the sight of vegetables and take out restraining orders that bar them from approaching any nearer his cookery than 100 meters. He has an occasional blog on which he posts some of his own recipes and reviews of his dining experiences, and it was here that I was somewhat astonished to find a recent review of, deep breath, a vegetarian cookbook, (dum-dum-duuuuuum) with an accompanying veggie recipe.

The book in question is one that graces my own shelves, Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty. Ottolenghi is a London-based chef and columnist in The Guardian, writing their The New Vegetarian series, and what is so interesting about him is that neither he, nor his restaurants, are vegetarian. While most omnivorous chefs can cook passable veggie dishes, few want to. In most restaurants you may have a token veggie dish beyond a salad, normally a stodgy risotto, tomato-based pasta or a hodgepodge stir-fry of whatever vegetable sides accompany the steak. Ottolenghi's dishes, however, are fantastic and imaginative, breaking out of the 'meatless-version of a meat-dish' mold and being unique creations that stand up on their own merits. He brings the same care, attention and imagination to his veggie dishes that most chefs only bring to their meat dishes.

It was also interesting to read Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame extolling the virtues of a mostly vegetarian diet in Friday's Guardian. He hasn't given up meat and fish entirely, just scaled them back drastically, and he seems to love it. His road-to-Damascus experience appears to be mainly based on concerns over the sustainability of a meat-based diet, the impact on the earth of excessive industrial-scale cattle farming, factory-ships and dwindling sea stocks and the general cruelty inherent in animal rearing and slaughter, and has joined the growing chorus of folks urging others to give up meat for at least one day a week.

The difficulty in convincing people to eat less meat is that a) folks love the taste and texture of meat, something which veggie dishes can't, and shouldn't, compete with and b) making interesting veggie dishes takes a lot more effort than slapping a steak in a pan for a few minutes. Many vegetarians fall at the first hurdle when attempting to woo their carnivorous friends to the Light Side by talking about things like Tofu, Tempeh and Seitan, thinking that what meat lovers want is a meat substitute, when the simple fact is that there is no such thing as a meat substitute; there's meat, and then there is stuff that will never in a million years taste like meat, so stop trying (and I say this as someone who loves a good veggie-burger or soy-rashers)!

What Ottolenghi and Fearnley-Whittingstall (who just happens to have a new veggie cookbook coming out) have done is approach vegetarian dishes like an omnivore, not a vegan, and the lack of accompanying ideological baggage (lets face it, no-one likes tofu except Asians and vegetarians) make their dishes far more imaginative and accessible for the general populace.

My go-to vegetable cookbook is a worn and battered copy of A World of Vegetable Cookery by Alex D. Hawkes, from 1968. I picked this up secondhand in the US and for the last eight or nine years it has been my first stop when encountering a mystery vegetable in the market and wondering what the hell to do with it. Written as an encyclopedia of vegetables in alphabetical order, with line drawings instead of photos, it hails from an age where vegetarian lifestyles were still largely non-existent in the western world, and as such the author is most definitely an omnivore (more than a few times I've been halfway through a recipe when I realise that the next ingredient should be pork). A more recent addition to my shelves has been Maria Elia's The Modern Vegetarian; Elia, from a Greek Cypriot background, trained in El Bulli and Arzak and again is most definitely not a veggie, but some of her recipes (particularly a mushroom, beetroot and lentil parcel) have become my default potluck dishes when I know the audience will be mixed.

Of course my favorite cookbooks still come from a few spectacular veggie restaurants that I have been to, and they serve both as reminders of great meals and aspirational notations that occasionally prod me into trying to cook something more exotic. Dennis Cotter, owner/creator of Cork's Cafe Paradiso, has a good few books out which I find great for making use of seasonal Irish vegetables, the two that we have are The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook and Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me, which is far more than just a cookbook, more a history of his love-affair with cooking. My absolute favorite book is, ironically, the one that I have cooked the least from, and that is Pietro Leemann's Joia, named after his Milanese restaurant that is without doubt the best vegetarian restaurant I have been to in the world. This is food to be eaten, not cooked, as the level of work required often far outstrips anything that you yourself could accomplish, but even if you fail the results are often amazing in their own right. The presence of soy and tempeh in a good few of the recipes won't be to every omnivore's taste, but for vegetarians it is nothing short of heaven. Unfortunately I think you need to actually visit the restaurant to buy the book, but that might not be as ridiculous as it sounds, Joia really is that good.

The point here is that for vegetarians attempting to cure their errant carnivorous chums, a subtle approach should be adopted. Going in all tofu-guns a blazing with a war cry of "Meat is Murder!" will hardly win you any friends and/or influence people, but judicious use of recipes from the likes of Messers Ottolenghi, Fearnley-Whittingstall and their ilk could be just the gateway experience your friends need to start them down the path of eventual tempeh-righteousness, or at the very least make them more comfortable with 'Meat Free Mondays' in the staff canteen.

Links
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi
A World of Vegetable Cookery by Alex D. Hawkes
The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia
The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook and Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me by Dennis Cotter

a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids

'Go here, Mac Roth,' Medb said. 'Ask Dáire to lend me Donn Cuailnge for a year. At the end of the year he can have fifty yearling heifers in payment for the loan, and the Brown Bull of Cualinge back. And you can offer him this too, Mac Roth, if the people of the country think badly of losing their fine jewel, the Donn Cuailnge: if Dáire himself comes with the bull I'll give him a portion of the fine Plain of Ai equal to his own lands, and a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, and my own friendly thighs on top of that.'

- Thomas Kinsella (trans.), The Táin, p55

Sex sells, apparently, even in our own national epic of cattle theft, the 8th century Táin Bó Cúailnge. Queen Medb of Connacht implores Dáire Mac Fichna to lend her his brown bull of Cooley, the finest bull in all the land of Ireland, and offers up not only land and goods, but a night with her good self as well. When the deal collapses she begins her plotting and scheming to secure the bull by violence and theft. At one stage she attempts to seduce Ferdia, foster-brother of Cúchulainn, the warrior charged with protecting the Cooley herds, bringing him to her tent:

'...to give you a chariot worth three times seven bondmaids, with warharness enough for a dozen men, and a portion of the fine Plain of Murtheimne. Also the right to stay forever in Cruachan, with your wine supplied, and your kith and kin free forever from tax and tribute. And this leaf shaped brooch of mine that was made out of ten score punces and ten score half-ounces and ten score cross-measures and ten score quarters of gold. And Finnbair, my daughter and Ailill's, for your wife. And my own friendly thighs on top of that if needs be.'

- Thomas Kinsella (trans.), The Táin, p169

So in 8th Century Ireland we clearly have a strict hierarchy of economic needs, cattle at the top, then land and bling, followed a good bit further down by the prospect of female company, thrown in for good measure like a salesperson giving you a 10% discount for paying in cash. While the modern reader may be shocked by the prospect of Queen Medb desiring the Bull so much that she would offer her own body to anyone willing to get it for her, the truly shocking part of both passages often goes by unnoticed at first reading, the almost offhand reference to the chariot worth "thrice seven bondmaids", a bondmaid being a female slave.

Slavery was widespread and extensive in the Ireland of the first millenium of the common era, and contrary to our modern perception of slavery based upon images of nineteenth century America, the majority of slaves were female. So common were female slaves in early Ireland that, according to Nini Rodgers in Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865 they formed a basic unit of currency:

"In the law tracts (the bulk of which were compiled c. AD 700) they are most frequently listed as units of currency. Cattle were the normal medium of exchange employed in receiving a stipend or rendering tribute, but slaves constituted a higher unit of currency. The value of land was calculated in numbers of slaves - cumal, a single Irish word requiring a double barreled term in its English translation 'female slave'...

...The law tracts show seven cumals as a key unit underpinning the institutions of early Irish society. A small farmer would have land worth seven cumals; a strong farmer fourteen cumals. The basic rate payable to the kin group for the murder of a freeman was seven cumals, though it could go higher...

...The conversion rate of the female slave to milch cows, the commonest unit of exchange, naturally varied over the period of time covered by the law tracts and later commentaries (eight to twelfth centuries) but Crith Gablach, a law tract on status, suggests an eight-century price of three milch cows to a cumal."

- Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865, pp8-9

Cumals, or bondmaids, were most often women stolen or captured during tribal conflicts. They looked after livestock, milked cows and made butter, and were the primary grinders of grain, a very labour intensive and arduous activity. They were also expected to provide sexual services. They were outsiders, alien and Other, their degradation and use as objects justified because they did not come from the same tribal structures as their possessors, and the entire economy of 8th to 12th century Ireland was built upon their trafficking and exploitation.

Over the weekend Ruhama, a Dublin-based NGO that works with female sex workers, issued its annual report. It revealed that up to 1,000 women are involved in sex work throughout the country on any given day, and it worked with just over 20% of those involved over the course of the year, providing substantial support in 140 cases. Of these 140, 80 were classified as trafficked, and half of all the non-trafficked women were originally from outside of Ireland, mainly from Eastern Europe and Africa. Of the 80 who were trafficked an astonishing 49 came from Nigeria. The picture that emerges from their report is of a sex industry in Ireland that is more than 75% populated by foreign women, the majority of whom have been trafficked into Ireland. Ruhama also reported that of the new cases of trafficking that they worked with last year, more than half were trafficked directly into Ireland, and of these over 80% were trafficked to locations outside of Dublin.

Here in Ireland the law still views the selling of sex as a criminal act, but not the purchasing of it.

And for those outside the sex industry the news isn't good either. On Friday the Central Statistics Office reported that the gender pay gap had increased in Ireland by over 2% between 2007 and 2009, the latest year for which data is available. Men now earn on average 12.8% more than women. On Monday it was reported that the government is failing to hit its own miserable target of 40% of state board positions being occupied by women, with less than 34% of current positions being filled by women.

Article 41.2.1° of The Constitution "recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved", and in the home she is to remain, milker of cows, grinder of grain, or to be stolen from abroad to service the sexual needs of the warriors of Ireland.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The cumal system thrives in the ashes of the Celtic Tiger.

Image: Cúchulainn mounting into his chariot by Louis le Brocquy. Part of the amazing series of lithographs he produced for Thomas Kinsella's 1969 translation of The Táin, from his website here.

Links
The Táin, 1969 Thomas Kinsella translation.
The full series of le Brocquy's lithographs for The Táin can also be found on his website here.
Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865, Nini Rodgers' examination of Irish as slaves, slave owners and emancipators.
Ruhama's 2010 annual report (pdf download link).

Finding Dr Livingstone

My body speaks to me, not in words but in sudden limitations.
I am weaker than I feel, tiring easily and long before I think I should.
Every journey must be planned with its return in mind, I cannot travel too far out for fear of being unable to come home.
Even if I make it there, there is no guarantee that I can stay, the joy of arrival soon eclipsed by the urgent necessity of departure.

Small journeys feel like finding Dr Livingstone.
Smithfield Saturday night for a gig; Hawk Cliff on Sunday as friends arc through afternoon glare into green-grey depths; chasing phantom Libyans through the midnight streets of Portobello, always one block behind their jubilant horns.
The triumph of doing cut short each time, the sharp stab of normal service being resumed.

Home again to watch, not to do.

Image: Installation at MIS-SPENT YOUTH exhibition by Solus, August 2011

Half the time they munched the grass

Growing up I have a fond memory of an old poetry book, a book that was old by the time I was given it, that must have belonged to my mother when she herself was younger. Dating from the early 60's the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children was a purple-covered hardback trove of lyrical delights and amazing illustrations. The book held near-religious qualities for me as a child, revered along with blue-covered paperbacks by AA Milne, but although filled with hundreds of poems from Kipling and Carroll, TS Eliot and Edward Lear, there are only a handful of lines that have somehow stuck in my mind to this day.

My childhood copy vanished into the ether long ago, but something called it to mind the other day and thanks to the magic of the internets a worn and much-loved copy arrived in the post a few days ago, musty and well-thumbed, and for your delectation I now happily present the most amazing poem in the world as selected by my five year-old self:

Cows, by James Reeves

Half the time they munched the grass, and all the time they lay
Down in the water-meadows, the lazy month of May,
A-chewing,
A-mooing,
To pass the hours away.

"Nice weather," said the brown cow.
"Ah," said the white.
"Grass is very tasty."
"Grass is all right."

Half the time they munched the grass, and all the time they lay
Down in the water-meadows, the lazy month of May,
A-chewing,
A-mooing,
To pass the hours away.

"Rain coming," said the brown cow.
"Ah," said the white.
"Flies is very tiresome."
"Flies bite."

Half the time they munched the grass, and all the time they lay
Down in the water-meadows, the lazy month of May,
A-chewing,
A-mooing,
To pass the hours away.

"Time to go," said the brown cow.
"Ah,"’ said the white.
"Nice chat," "Very pleasant."
"Night.""Night."

Half the time they munched the grass, and all the time they lay
Down in the water-meadows, the lazy month of May,
A-chewing,
A-mooing,
To pass the hours away.

---------

Seriously, how could you bring yourself to eat any animal that was that well-mannered?

Brightness was drenching through the branches

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Discovery Channel will no doubt be aware of its much publicised "Shark Week", wherein what passes for normal programming (rough and tumble shows about competitive deep sea fishermen, rough and tumble shows about competitive Canadian truck drivers, rough and tumble shows about competitive Austrian-born dictators of Germany, etc) is suspended for an entire week so that the masses can feast their eyes and what's left of their other senses upon a steady stream of rough and tumble shows about competitive fish.

"Live every week like its Shark Week" said the great philosopher Tracy Jordan, and here at Booming Back we would certainly like to embrace that aphorism, but this being Ireland we have nothing so exciting to offer you by way of dangerous and life-threatening fauna, and so must settle instead for cows. Thus welcome to the second of a series of at least two posts in what surely will come to be called, "Cow Week".

Coincidentally enough this morning's stream of synaptic detritus was also triggered by the aforementioned Mr Jordan, whose mention of a Temple Grandin Hugging Machine set off a flurry of Rube Goldberg activities in my brain that culminated in what can only be described as a Eureka-moment, crying out to no-one in particular, "Yes! We are all stuck in a Grandin Chute!".

But who is Temple Grandin, and what is she squeezing in her chute? (If you guessed 'cows', good for you, you've been paying attention)

This too was the first question on my lips, to which the Very Understanding Girlfriend happily supplied the answer and a print article. Dr. Grandin is an American animal scientist at Colorado State University, was the subject of an Emmy-winning HBO movie starring Claire Danes, named one of Time Magazine's most influential people of 2010, and lives with high-functioning autism. All of which somehow managed to pass me by, probably because here in Old Europe nobody watches the Emmys.

While still a teenager Grandin noted that cattle on a relative's farm calmed down when forced to squeeze through a narrow enclosed chute (or Cattle Crush), and thought that if physical pressure was applied to her in a similar way it might also calm her down during her own frequent fits of anxiety. One effect of her autism was that she did not like to be touched by other people, so she constructed a Hug-Machine to apply pressure evenly across both sides of her body, with remarkably calming effects.

She describes herself as literally thinking like an animal, in that she thinks first in pictures and images, and uses words as a second language. This has given her a huge insight into animal psychology, something that has shaped an entire career improving animal conditions in the farming and ranching industries, and she is responsible for the transformation of the physical layout of cattle pens, the holding areas where large numbers of cows are held before being sold or slaughtered.

She noted that cows have a tendency to try and move back to somewhere they have already been and doing so calms them down, a combination of the physical act of moving in a circle and a possible reaction to the thought of returning to somewhere familiar. With this in mind she redesigned cattle pens to include as many curved chutes as possible to take advantage of this natural tendency to walk in circles, and to prevent them from seeing any people or objects moving around at the end of the chute. More than half of US cattle now end up in a Grandin-designed curved chute on their way into the slaughterhouse, and both McDonalds and the US Department of Agriculture have consulted with her extensively.

Disneyland also uses this layout when constructing the queues for its rides, for much of your hour-plus long wait you cannot see the beginning of the line or its end, and at no stage can you actually see the entirety of the queue and how many other people are in line with you. All of this has a calming effect only slightly mitigated by the cloying sound of the saccharine-sweet piped music and the disapproving stares of scores of parents who have just noticed that you are standing in the middle of the line for the Dumbo ride and don't appear to be accompanying a child under the age of five, or of any age for that matter.

Now prepare yourself, because here comes the laboured pseudo-psychology...

It was at this moment that I suddenly realised why there have been no significant protests in the streets of Ireland, no mass strikes, no riots, why we have taken and continue to take all the government imposed austerity measures lying down, much to the scorn of the Greeks, and the Spanish, and the Portuguese, and even the Israelis who managed to get 150,000 people on the streets to complain about the high cost of day-care and rent.

We are all trapped in a Grandin Cattle Chute, obliviously marching towards the slaughterhouse.

Eighteen months ago all the evidence was pointing towards the need for a loan from the IMF, and yet even in the days leading up to November's bailout the politicians were stressing that no such bailout was happening. The line we were all in ended at the abattoir, but the Government kept us all calm by obscuring the exit with half-truths, misdirection and out-right lies. Today all the evidence points towards a default on our loan repayments, and yet this new government follows the same pattern of obfuscation.

But we ourselves don't need the external hand of the cattleman to hide the truth from us, we happily walk round and round in circles of our own creation. The obsession with the Instant at the expense of the long term, where we happily sacrifice mature and considered analysis on the altar of Real-Time, our Twitter-blinkered eyes shielding us from the horror of seeing the cow up ahead of us disappear into the Happy-Meal box, all of this is self-imposed myopia.

And if we do glance around at our chute, all we will see are reflections of the eighties cast back upon the walls, the shoulder pads and back-combed hair, leggings and leopard-print, skinny jeans with faded denim and rolled up trouser legs, Fine Gael and Labour in government here, the Tories in the UK, a washed-out excuse for a summer and Gaybo back on the telly. All we need now is a lick of a Fat Frog. None of it is exactly right, but enough of a shadow to convince us were heading back in the same direction. We've all been here before and we came out of it, what's the point in making a fuss? All very calming, all very soothing. Pay no attention to the machinery sounds up ahead.

And as the October budget starts to approach and we're told that we have no choice but to slash and burn, that our hands are tied by the terms of the IMF bailout, and the cuts and the taxes start to squeeze us tightly on either side we still won't be out on the streets, for by this stage we are so well trained and the gentle squeezing calms our anxiety as the Government whispers softly in our ear, "There, there, you're doing so well. Its all for your own good".

We go round and round, calmer and calmer, right up until the moment we look up and see the man approaching with the bolt gun, single shot to the forehead and its all over in a second. How very humane.

This is Ireland, a nation of cows. Our national epic is the tale of a cattle raid, our fight for Independence and Civil War is eulogised in the body of an errant heifer, a cow was immortalised on our money from the shilling to the 5p, and more than being a part of our national psyche, it is our national psyche. Generation after generation led by the nose to the slaughter house, literally and figuratively.

Every week we live like its Cow Week.

Anyway, to end on a happy note here is an interview with Dr Grandin where she explains autism using Mark Zuckerberg as an example. Which is nice.



Links
Much more information can be found on Dr Grandin's website, from where I've taken these diagrams.
You can also take a look at the HBO movie site for some pretty clips.

Parts in the Post

Intrigued as I was by the concept of an album being released as a T-Shirt and having, as has been proved on far too many occasions to serve as anything other than a cautionary reminder to young children over a summer evening's campfire tale of woe and misfortune, an unfortunately low money-to-sense ratio, and despite actually already possessing the album in question on at least two other formats, Unkie Dave went ahead an ordered the Plaid Rest Proof Clockwork T-Shirt from Bleep last week.

In case you haven't read my previous post (in which case shame on you), original album artist Kid Acne took elements from the album artwork and designed up a new t-shirt. Embedded in the t-shirt collar is a code the can be entered back on Bleep.com to unlock a download of the album in lossless format. Now for some reason I got it in my head that the code was somehow going to be printed on the collar of the shirt, which I thought was a) going to a lot of effort and b) pretty cool because it meant each shirt would be unique. If I had thought about it for longer than 30 seconds (again with the low-money-to-sense thing) I would have realised how unfeasible that would have been, but knowing me I probably would still have ordered the shirt. When it arrived this morning I discovered that the code is simply printed on a tag that is attached to the collar, which isn't as exciting at all, at all.

Still, its a nice shirt and a great album.

Speaking of great Warp albums, apparently Warp had been planning to run a massive sale of their back catalog on Bleep this month, but the riots put that plan literally to the torch. With their entire physical back catalog destroyed save for what remains at Bleep's own warehouse, and in an effort to generate a quick hit of cash to press up new printings of the lost stock (not all of which will be possible as many of the master tapes have gone missing over the last 20 years), Warp have decided to have a huge digital sale on Bleep.

Between now and 30th August Warp's entire back catalog of albums will be on sale in MP3, WAV and FLAC formats on Bleep.com for £4.99/€6.99 each. Double albums are coming in at €9.99 and singles and EPs are also ridiculously low. While I, being the neo-luddite that I am as far as music is concerned, would only buy a digital download if there was no physical alternative available, you may be of a different mind and inclination.

If you are new to the whole Warp thing, might I sugest the following albums (in no particular order) as a great introduction:

Artificial Intelligence - ten track compilation from 1992, the dawn of the classic Warp sound. Autechre, Aphex Twin's first appearance (as The Dice Man), Speedy J, Richie Hawtin (as UP!) and Alex Patterson thrown in for good measure. One of Warp's first full-length releases and the compilation that cemented the label's sound in the minds of the masses. This was intelligent electronic music for listening to, not for dancing.

WAP100 - Twelve track compilation released in 1998 to celebrate Warp's 100th release, great tracks from Squarepusher, AFX, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Autechre, Jimi Tenor, Nightmares on Wax, Broadcast and others - basically a fantastic snapshot of where Warp was at the end of the nineties, for me the classic Warp sound. Also a very reasonable €4.99

Time Tourist - B12's 1996 album. The soundtrack to an imaginary tour of the future (which I suppose was pretty accurate given the fact that fifteen years later I'm still listening to it), or at least an alternative future where Auto-Tune, X-Factor and the Black Eyed Peas never existed. There's more than a passing nod to BBC's Radiophonic Workshop here, and BBC sci-fi shows of the sixties and seventies.

music has the right to children - Boards of Canada's 1998 debut on Warp and a triumph of deeply hypnotic grooves, field recordings and samples, with a rolling, layered construction that would become the trademark BOC sound. Its also worth pointing out that at the moment the CD seems to be only €5.99 on Bleep and the digital-only download is €6.99, and you get a free MP3 of the album instantly when you buy any physical Warp album so, you know, you might as well go old school on this.

Richard D. James Album - Aphex Twin's 1996 album, at the height of his prowess. Glitchy electronica, Cornish acid house, the occasional thumping beats and possibly the most disturbing song ever written about a milkman. Other albums may contain individually more memorable tracks, but as an album few of his releases hold together so well. Again the CD is mysteriously only €5.99.

Incunabula - Autechre's 1993 debut album that literally changed the way I listened to music when I first heard it about five years later. Dark evocative soundscapes, sounds being created in a way that I had never heard before. I actually went out and bought a whole new sound system to listen to this properly (along with Amorphous Androgynous' 1993 debut Tales of Ephidrina). Although later albums progressively veered into music so experimental it was difficult to actually listen to, this was the benchmark by which I judged all further electronica for many a year to come. Amber may be my favourite Autechre album, but if you've never listened to them before you really need to start with Incunabula. Again, for some reason the cd release of this is €5.99, cheaper than the download.

Double Figure - Plaid's 2001 album that remains my favourite. Bouncy, squelchy and, dare I say it, a happy little album with tracks like 'Eyen', 'Squance' and 'Zala' that are impossible not to want to get up and dance to, and feature heavily in any Plaid live set that I've seen. Ironically for such a simple tune I've seen 'Zala' crash two different laptops that the guys have been using at gigs. Plaid are one of my favourite bands, but I think I have been to more disappointing gigs by them than anybody else.

For Beginner Piano - Plone's 1999 debut (and only) album, and possibly the happiest sounding music on this whole list, if not in Warp's entire catalogue. An electronic martini, the sound of a 60's cocktail party at the Mad Hatter's swinging London pad, if you listen very carefully there are even stylophones. Ok, you don't have to listen that carefully, they're all over the place. Just a bouncy happy album, a shame they didn't make any more.

Stay Down - Two Lone Swordsman's 1998 release. Andy Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood put out a string of excellent albums on an annual basis from 1998 to 2001, and as Felix reminded me in a comment on an earlier post Tiny Reminders is a pretty fine album, but for me the stand out Two Lone Swordsman release was Stay Down. If Time Tourist is B12's trip to the future, Stay Down is a voyage to the bottom of the sea. At times dark and claustrophobic, with enough reverb to sound like it was recorded in a tin shack on the bottom of a swimming pool and a squelchy sound that brings to mind the movement of day-glo jellyfish seeking out the exhaust port of a nuclear power plant, this is another classic of late nineties electronica.

Hard Normal Daddy - Squarepusher's second album, released in 1997. Being such a prolific and varied artist, its difficult to pick out a single album as reflective of Tom Jenkinson's overal career, but this is a good place to start. The love of a good bass line permeates all the tracks here, and would later blossom into Jenkinson's solo bass guitar album Solo Electric Bass 1. Simultaneously jazzy and dancey with moments of hectic madness, this is a playful album that doesn't take itself too seriously. As with some of the others on this list, the cd is only €5.99.

So there you have it, ten albums to kick off your journey into classic Warp. I've stayed away from the more recent stuff like Grizzly Bear, Hudson Mowhawk, Bibio, Battles, Africa Hitech and the rest and gone for the classic nineties sound that everything else is built upon, and while I've tried to encourage you all to go down the disposable download route, as luck would have it almost half of the selections are cheaper on CD and come with a free download anyway.

Everything old is new again!

Hurrah!

When the black herds of the rain were grazing

Good news everyone, according to today's Irish Times: "A dramatic rise in the price farmers are receiving for beef cattle has meant prices paid here have exceeded the average European price and are within 2 per cent of UK prices". You know what this means?

All our national problems are solved!

So confident am I that today marks the beginning of the end of our long national economic nightmare that I will now happily predict the events of the next few years with unerring accuracy (with a little help from our post-Keynesian chum Hyman Minsky):

Stage One – Displacement
Beef prices rise slightly due to slightly higher demand as consumers console themselves over the worthlessness of their property by enjoying a nice steak dinner every now and then. They may not be able to ever holiday abroad again but they'll be damned if they go back to eating potatoes and cabbage. Small groups of well-heeled epicures buy shares in individual cows raised to high organic standards and suburban dinner parties are organised to collectively consume the resulting beef.

Stage Two - Boom
The first articles start to appear outside of the farming pages in the newspapers about the rise in beef prices. Irish cattle prices top those in the UK, the government heralds this as a milestone in the development of our nation, the Taoiseach declares that "the drovers have become the graziers", to a bemused country after watching Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia' the night before on the telly. After an evening in with her galpals in Ranelagh, Róisín Ingle writes about the new trend in Ritzy Sixy for organic cattle co-ops and pop-up dining, "Beef is the time, is the place, is the motion," she gushes, "Beef is the way we are feeling".

Cattle prices rise by an astonishing 50% in twelve months. The race to get on the Cattle Ladder is on.

Stage Three – Euphoria
Cattle co-ownership is no longer the exclusive preserve of the chattering classes. Local authorities controversially rezone vast swathes of land as Agricultural, and herds spring up across the country. Desperate to get on the Cattle Ladder and driven on by television shows like "Lactation! Lactation! Lactation!" (which helps young couples find their first dairy herd), people find themselves taking out 100% loans on individual cows in larger herd schemes, buoyed by the certainty that they can resell the cow, or 'Tip' it, for a profit in a matter of months. Cow Tipping becomes the national obsession, the default conversation between two strangers at dinner parties and ladies' luncheons the length and breadth of the country. More seasoned farmers try to warn that Beef Cattle are slaughtered after two years, "A cow can only be tipped so many times", they say. They are ignored.

Farmers can no longer find enough Irish workers willing to put in the long hours and low pay required to tend the herds. Waves of Argentinian cattlemen start to arrive, first a trickle, then a flood, lured by the prospect of a better life. Ryanair announces new routes with four flights a day to La Pampa (though actually arriving in Peru). Supermercados spring up on streets across the country offering a wide range of yerba-mate, dulce de leche and other tasty snacks. No Irishman ever steps foot inside. The Sunday Independent sounds the alarm bell over the rise in Nuevo Irish, Brendan O'Connor speaks from the heart, "Where I come from the word "Gaucho" doesn't mean someone of any specific socio-economic or ethnic background. It means someone who behaves in a way that society abhors." At the same time the Sindo urges people to buy cattle abroad, declaring that India will be the next boom market despite having almost no history of cattle ownership.

David McWilliams releases his book, "The Papal Herd", chronicling the rise of the beeferatti, Ireland's new middle class economic dynamo, "We can be the new Argentina!", he declares in The Sunday Business Post.

Stage Four - Profit Taking
The first cracks start to appear. 70% more beef is produced in a year than can actually be physically eaten by every man, woman and child in the country, if they ate nothing but beef three times a day for the rest of the year. The Minister for Finance reassures the market "what we do know is that the underlying demand for beef remains strong, driven by a relatively young population and continued inward migration." With supply far exceeding demand, farms start to let their workers go, vast numbers of Argentinians return home and the country suddenly realises that they alone accounted for more than 30% of beef sales.

Pre-boom cattle barons quietly start selling off their excess stock to those few citizens still desperate to get on the Cattle Ladder. Cheap credit and a media-generated fear of being left behind fuel one last heifer-buying hurrah, even as foreign commentators warn of an over-heated market and an imminent collapse.

Brendan O'Connor writes in The Sunday Independent, "If I wasn't already massively over-exposed to the dairy market by virtue of owning a reasonable farm, I'd be buying cattle... The really smart and ballsy guys are the guys who are buying herds when no one else is".

Stage Five - Panic
The Taoiseach declares "I think it's important to point out that the underlying fundamentals of the economy remain very strong". Prices plummet, the cattle market enters free flow, the bubble has finally burst.

Cattle owners can no longer afford the upkeep on their livestock, and find that setting them loose to roam the land unattended is cheaper than sending them to the slaughterhouse. Vast ghost herds blight the countryside, a tragic reminder of man's shortsighted greed.

The nation awakens from its bovine bacchanalia to discover that it is destitute, and the only people to make any significant profit from the Friesian frenzy of the previous years were the handful of large farmers who already controlled 70% of the industry prior to the boom, and who have significant financial and social ties to the ruling political party that inflated the bubble with myopic tax policies and light-touch regulations.

CAP in hand we go to Europe begging to be saved.

David McWilliams declares that he was a vegan all along, and asks why no-one listened to him.

Stage One – Displacement
Hey, has anybody noticed how many empty cow sheds there are all around the country now? I bet you could buy them for next to nothing, convert them into apartments, and sell them off quickly at a tidy profit...

*sigh*

On second thought maybe we aren't saved after all.

The lesson to be taken from all this is that any nation that listens to the likes of Brendan O'Connor, David McWilliams or even Róisín-bloody-Ingle on a regular basis deserves everything that they get.

(I feel compelled to mention that Brendan O'Connor is one of the most loathsome creatures the right-wing press have ever spawned in Ireland. The Gaucho quote above is actually something he said about Travellers back in 1997. He has written more than a few times about why it should be okay to use racial slurs, particularly about Travellers and folks of African descent. He really is a nasty piece of work. Just one more reason why I never read the Sunday Independent.)

Happy Dayvan Cowboy Day!

Speaking of Warp, Happy Dayvan Cowboy Day!

On this day back in 1960, US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger stepped out of the gondola of his high altitude balloon at over 31,000 meters (officially he jumped at 102,800 ft) and fell for four and half minutes, hitting a top speed of 714 mph. This remains the highest altitude jump to this day. More details on the jump can be found here and there is a great interview with him on the jump here.

Of course Warp fans will know all this because the footage filmed of the jump was "borrowed" by Melissa Olson for her video for Boards of Canada's 2005 track 'Dayvan Cowboy', from The Campfire Headphase. Before you all ask, no, Capt. Kittinger's jump did not end in some spectacular surfing action, that part of the video is all footage of surfer Laird Hamilton (apparently his real name).

I know I've posted this video before, but a) its possibly my favourite track of all time, b) its very apt given the day that's in it and c) it's my blog, so I'll do what I want here, thank you very much.

Update - it looks like the video doesn't come through on the RSS feed for this post, so feed-readers will just have to click back to the main article on the blog itself.

Down, but not out

Well, it appears that initial fears have been confirmed and almost all of Warp's physical stock has been destroyed during the London riots. They issued a press release on their website yesterday:

"All of Warp's UK warehouse stock appears to have been lost in the fire. The Sony DADC warehouse also acted as our international distribution hub and so this has affected our ability to supply our overseas partners. Bleep's current stash of Warp CD/LP stock remains unaffected of course.

Forthcoming albums - CANT's 'Dreams Come True' (Sep 12th), Plaid's 'Scintilli' (Sept 26th) and Rustie's 'Glass Swords' (Oct 10th) - are currently being manufactured. We know PIAS are working hard to get alternative distribution in place and we are hopeful that the release dates of these albums will not be affected. Most UK copies of Battles' new single 'My Machines' have been destroyed, although the single will still be released digitally on Monday - with some limited 12inch stock available at Bleep

The biggest challenge for us is replacing Warp's extensive back catalogue spanning the last 21 years. We will replace as much of this as we can by creating new stock and replenishing where possible with stock from outside the UK. Unfortunately some releases may never be available physically again.

We will be closely supporting PIAS in their efforts to get the independent music community up and running as quickly as they can."

This is seriously sad news for music fans, though hopefully Warp is a large enough label that it can financially weather this.

Many of the other indie labels affected by the fire will certainly not fare as well.

The best way to help any of these labels to continue to survive is to buy some tunes from them. Most affected labels have some form of digital download offering, so purchasing imaginary music from them will help them build up the cash to reissue some actual really-real-world touchy-feely music, like the cds and vinyl your parents used to listen to.

A good place to start while we're all waiting for Plaid's new album is their new digital-only retrospective, Induction, featuring 11 tracks from albums ranging from Rest Proof Clockwork all the way up to Greedy Baby, as chosen by the lads themselves. Its available now on Bleep for the princely sum of £6.99. They're not necessarily the tracks I would have chosen, but they're a pretty good introduction nonetheless. While I don't hold with digital music as a rule, exceptions can be made in these trying times.

You can preview the compilation below:


Update: Shiny new Warp boy Hudson Mohawk is featured on the cover of Saturday's Guardian Guide, with an interview inside. His new EP Satin Panthers is well worth a listen to. I caught his late afternoon set in Glasto 2010 and despite him being about 12 years old I was mighty impressed.

Dave is right, and I'm as surprised about it as you are.

Well that didn't take long, less than a week after the worst riots in the UK in living memory, Dave Cameron has finally identified the cause. It is not extreme wealth inequality, nor the maltreatment of the marginalized by those in authority, nor even the X-Factor/Football culture where the raw talent of the few is glorified over education, training and self-development by the many; no, my friends, the true villains here, according to Dave, are technology and the Internets, as he outlined yesterday in Parliament:

"Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill," said Cameron.

"And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

"I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers."

In less than a week the Internets have gone from being praised by the UK Government (erroneously) for helping the downtrodden masses of the Middle East rise up against their oppressive masters during the condescendingly named 'Arab Spring', to being a fearful enterprise used by thugs to plot 'violence, disorder and criminality'.

"Pot-ay-toe, pot-ah-toe", I say; it seems that it all depends on who the oppressive master is that is in danger of being overthrown.

But surprisingly Dave is right (and yes, that sounds even more preposterous on the lips than "I agree with Nick"), but for all the wrong reasons. Dave is looking at three or four large multinational corporations who control the majority of communications between UK citizens and bemoaning the fact that he cannot listen in, when he should be alarmed at the fact that three or four large multinational corporations control the majority of communications between UK citizens in the first place, and that they can, and do, listen in.

At the dawn of the millennium came the first growths in the public consciousness of what came to be called ECHELON, the US/UK (with assistance from Canada, Australia and New Zealand) global monitoring system that intercepts and tracks all telephone, fax and internet traffic. Largely believed to consist of a vast array of listening stations that intercept all communications traffic, and software that scans through these intercepts identifying keywords associated with security concerns and then flagging these communications for follow-up by human intelligence workers, ECHELON has been the basis for numerous films, TV plots and other things that go bump in the night. While protests were raised by individuals and groups as large as the EU (though only when it was allegedly used for corporate espionage on behalf of US companies), in the subsequent decade it largely faded into the background of the collective consciousness as something that we all assume the US government to be doing all the time anyway, and we just get on with our lives.

We manage to live with it because, as recent history has shown us, the US government really isn't that good at doing anything with the intelligence they gather, when they even manage to gather it in the first place. America may be watched over by the All-Seeing Eye, but that Eye is incredibly bad at understanding what it sees. But as Dave and his ideological fellow travelers in the US Republican Party are so happy to tell us, all the people who are really good and efficient at what they do are in the private sector, so as long as we don't turn over the control and monitoring of the majority of global communication to private and for-profit corporations without any national or territorial ties, we'll all be ok then.

Oops.

Whether it is Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned email services like Gmail, the Western World has embraced free communication platforms. But of course none of these services are truly free, the majority are advertising-supported, running ads targeted at individual users of the service based on their online activity. Complex programs scan through every single communication sent on these platforms, every update, every status message, every 'Like', and combine this online behaviour pattern with selected keywords contained within the communications to put together a detailed profile of the user and deliver more targeted ads. And unlike the US government these corporations have the resources, with their vast array of global data centres, to be able to process all this information and analyse it without the need for much human oversight.

Not that this stops humans from intercepting these communications (as appears to have been a fairly widespread practice in some online media companies). A government employee normally needs some form of court order before they can read your mail, no such legal restrictions apply to employees of your email service provider. A Royal Mail employee in the UK who opens your letter can go to jail for Treason (it being the Queen's mail after all), a UK Facebook engineer who reads your chatlog is just doing their job. Internal company guidelines are not the same thing as national or international law.

But with the ECHELON 2.0 system that these communication giants effectively run, human interception of individual messages isn't even the main concern, it is their vast aggregating systems and the sheer power of their analytical abilities that should worry us. The same algorithm that Google uses to predict global flu trends based on search traffic for specific flu-related keywords could just as easily predict insurrections or uprisings based on keywords located within Gmail messages, or Google Talk messages, or Google Voice phone calls. The communication giants have at their hands an intelligence service potentially unrivaled by any government - the NSA may track thousands of individuals, but Google and Facebook can track and predict the activities of entire nations, and much more effectively than the governments of those nations can themselves.

And they do this all in real time.

Unlike ECHELON where all this activity was illicit and covert, with ECHELON 2.0 we willingly hand over all this information ourselves and sign away all our rights with every click of a Terms & Conditions pop-up.

And in contrast to any government whose activities, in theory, are motivated by a national self-interest that should benefit the citizenry of that country, corporations are beholden to no-one. The myth of share-holder responsibility is a fig leaf to put a human face on the fact that the only responsibility corporations have is to Capital itself. If you can predict flu outbreaks, what do you do with that information? A human would try and prevent them from happening, Capital will wait for the outbreak and then sell pharmaceuticals.

Dave was right, the free flow of information can be used for good and it can also be used for ill. He was just wrong about who has the power to abuse it.

How's that Big Society working out for you now, Dave?

Less than fifteen months into the new Tory regime in the UK and the country is already experiencing riots at least as bad, if not worse, than were ever seen in Thatcher's days. After three nights of violence and looting every police cell in London is full, extra officers are being drafted in from as far away as Yorkshire and politicians have been calling for a response that ranges from curfews and water cannon to the deployment of combat troops fresh from Afghanistan on to the streets of London. With the Olympics less than a year away the prospect of this all being used to turn the UK into even more of a locked-down police state is frighteningly real.

It may not be organised, it may not be ostensibly political and it certainly cannot be condoned, but there can be no doubt that what we have witnessed is a reaction to the divided society created in the UK, as elsewhere, by extreme wealth inequality, and exacerbated by Tory policy that continues to protect the wealthy elite at the expense of the most vulnerable in society.

These riots aren't rows of purple-clad liberals asking politely for Proportional Representation or trustafarians demanding Bono pay his taxes by waving a few flags at Glastonbury, nor even middle-class students storming Tory-HQ angered that they might have to take part-time jobs to get themselves through university, this is the most marginalised in society, those neglected and stigmatised by successive governments, the media and by their fellow citizens who live in a fugue of ignorance and manufactured fear, these are Les Damnés de la Terre and, as Darcus Howe said today, this is an insurrection.

Now let us not fall completely into classical middle-class liberal guilt here and lipstick-up this media-engorged pig. What has happened on the ground is horrific, especially for those whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed. The mob did not target the richest 1% or the apparatus of the state, they fed upon their neighbours and those equally marginalized by the inequalities of 21st century England. The mobs were not out to make a political statement, to highlight the inhumanity of their plight, or even to cry out against the perceived brutality of the Metropolitan Police, the mobs were out simply to smash and burn and grab a plasma TV or two in the process. But the mob itself was created by the economic realities of the UK, just as much as if it had been an organised act of political resistance.

It is impossible to see the video footage without calling to mind Jack London's description of the 'People of the Abyss' from his 1908 dystopian novel "The Iron Heel":

"The next moment the front of the column went by. It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic - a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood - men, women and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death’s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted and misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition - the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming screeching demoniacal horde.

And why not? The people of the abyss had nothing to lose but the misery and pain of living. And to gain? - nothing, save one final awful glut of vengeance."

- Jack London, 'The Iron Heel', Penguin, pp232-233

I never condone violence in any circumstances, but when the most marginalized in society finally do rise up what other tools do they have? The way to prevent horrific scenes like these are through education and an equal and just society, but somehow I cannot see that route being taken under David Cameron.

I hope our own political masters are watching and taking notes.

Update: Hmmmn, it would appear that those plucky downtrodden youth at the margins of society burned down a Sony distribution centre last night. This distro centre was also used by dozens of independent record labels, many of whom now appear to have lost their entire stock. Amongst the affected labels are Ninja Tune, Kompakt, Soma, Thrill Jockey, Mute and, horror of horrors, WARP.

This better not delay the new Plaid album.

I've changed my mind, hanging's too good for these ruffians, up against the walls with the lot of them. Bring back corporal punishment in schools, and compulsory military service, end welfare now and sell off the NHS. Harumph, harumph, harumph.

35 Summers? Right now I'd settle for just one.

Wahoo! Plaid have announced a release date for their new album, scintilli, available to the masses on September 26th.

In addition to the standard vinyl edition, the initial CD release will include a die-cut puzzle, or ‘Muda na Mono’:

"the name taken from a Japanese phrase meaning ‘pointless object’. It contains two die-cut rings and a CD which can be assembled as per the diagram (below). If correctly aligned, the sphere created allows the track titles to be read. The packaging reflects a desire to give the CD an ornamental function, beyond its one use as a basic storage device for music."

Indeed. If that isn't esoteric enough for you the album is also being released as a t-shirt, with a code for a lossless download embedded in the collar of the shirt.

You can pre-order the ‘Muda na Mono’ cd-pack here, and the t-shirt here. The video above is for '35 Summers', from the new album.

Plaid, octopi, underwater sword fights. September can't come soon enough.

A thundering disgrace

Way back in the midst of time, as more regular readers may remember, the pages of Booming Back were filled to the brim with almost daily musings on, and diatribes against, the shenanigans, tom-foolerery and other nefarious deeds-most-foul of our political lords and masters. No election was too small, no campaign too insignificant to draw down my ill-informed wrath and ire; Lisbon I, local elections, European elections, Lisbon II, national elections, US elections and more were all the grist for my venomous mill.

However all of this came crashing to an unforeseen halt sometime in March as I, somewhat unfortunately, took ill mere days after the general election drew to a close our long national nightmare and ushered in an era of equality, social justice, rainbows and unicorns. The pain of losing my gall-bladder forever was lessened by the knowledge that its bile-production capacities would no longer be needed in this brave new Ireland of ours.

Imagine my shock and disappointment therefore when I emerged '28 Days Later'-like from the isolation of the hospital ward and discovered that not only had all our national troubles failed to be packed up in a succesion of old kit bags, if anything the economic situation had spiraled even further out of control with even less public outrage than before.

"At least", I said to console myself, "we have witnessed the dawn of a new political age, where it is no longer, as they say, 'business as usual'. The people have spoken and those elected to represent them at all levels know that the old feudal games of hereditary and dynastic politics will be tolerated no more. Sure all you have to do is look at the latest opinion polls where it appears that the favoured candidate for President is a highly educated, articulate and openly gay man, with a strong record of human rights campaigning and no ties to any political party or organization."

I found myself thinking that if one sliver of a silver lining could emerge from the miasma of the Celtic Tiger years it would be that we as a nation had finally put our clerical, tribal and conservative past behind us and were ready to stand up proud and bold as a progressive nation of the 21st century, and that the election of David Norris would encompass all this and more.

*sigh*

I am not going to rehash the whys and wherefores of Senator Norris' downfall, the details have been splashed across the internets and beyond in lurid sensationalized colour quite enough already. I do, however, find it worrying in the extreme that the hand of a foreign government is looming large behind the leaking of these final revelations, the same government whose agents so readily carry forged Irish passports as they go about their sordid trade.

Of greater concern to me though are the flaws in the very bedrock of our Presidential system that have been exposed by this sorry morality play. The farcical pantomime of favour-currying and forelock-tugging that an individual must go through with County Councils, or what few members of the Oireachtas remain that are not bound by the Whip system, simply to get their name placed before the citizenry of the country is, to borrow an aptly Presidential phrase, a thundering disgrace.

While at its worst it is nothing more than a hollow ceremonial role parceled out to aged party apparatchiks as a retirement gift, at its best the Presidency can capture the imagination of the entire nation and define the age it spans. Think of Mary Robinson's candle in the window heralding a new decade of optimism or Mary McAleese symbolically bringing to a close centuries of Anglo-Irish tension, both women who despite the backing of major political parties were themselves fairly apolitical in their previous careers.

The simple fact of all this is that the citizenry themselves should have been afforded the opportunity to judge the suitability of Senator Norris, or any other prospective candidate, to hold the highest office in the land. But with the parties closing ranks behind deeply internal candidates and actively sabotaging attempts by independent candidates to simply get on the ballot paper, the citizenry have been sent the clearest signal yet that it is most definitely 'business as usual' in this brave new Ireland of ours.

And we are all the lesser for it.

Danseizure and the Temple of Pancreatic Doom

As we exhaust the annals of medical history in the increasingly vain search for the cause of Unkie Dave's recent misfortunes, we find ourselves seizing upon whatever scraps of circumstantial evidence remain behind on the heavily trafficked crime scene of my life.

On Thursday, 3rd of March of this year we were visited by Danseizure, musician, film-maker/festival organiser and all-round activist-about-town, and a night of sushi and laughs ensued. Four days later my pancreas erupted for the first time.

On Monday 25th July we were once again visited by Danseizure. No sushi was involved and yet the next day I was admitted to hospital with a second bout of pancreatitis.

Coincidence? I think not. Danseizure is the harbinger of pancreatic doom.

I mention this not only to warn anyone that may come into physical contact with him in the near future, but as a way of alerting you all to the fact that his rather excellent third album of electronica and other noises, 'This is Danseizure', has gone all Creative Commons and is available on Bandcamp for the princely sum of free to download. Technically it is available on a pay-what-you-will model, but since we have scientifically (in the 'Glenn Beck with a blackboard' sense of the word) proven that he is the cause of my pancreatitis, I leave it up to you to decide whether this horseman of the abdominal apocalypse is deserving of your gold.

The album was one of my favourites of last year, and you really can't argue with the price. Well done to Mr Seizure (and his label, Invisible Agent) for sharing this with the masses, though he still has a lot more to do to make up for the pancreatitis.

An awful lot more.

Links
This is Danseizure, free download at Bandcamp
Danseizure's website, a mix of music and Middle-Eastern activism
Invisible Agent - the label that made it possible

Long to reign over us

One of the consequences of this most recent of hospital stays was an accompanying loss of weight, about 1.5 kilos (a quarter of a stone in old money), so I'm now back down to roughly 63 kilos (10 stone). The trouble with this is that my old weight-gain program revolved around eating early and eating often, and eating foods that are now, once again, proscribed thanks to the return of my pancreatitis. Gone are the halcyon days of cottage-cheese covered Digestive biscuits, for my body is no longer capable of digesting fat.

This means that for the foreseeable future I may be resigned to the fact that my beanpole-like physique is here to stay, and my ill-fitting trousers are doomed to forever fly at half-mast, somewhere between my knees and what passes for my waist, like a hippity-hopster youth on day release, as I shuffle down the road and try with all my might to preserve what's left of my dignity.

With that in mind, The Very Understanding Girlfriend rather presciently took me down last week mere hours before this latest pancreatic episode to the one place she knew that my hippity-hopster trouser style wouldn't mark me out as a social outcast, the annual Kings of Concrete festival at the Civic Offices in Wood Quay, possibly both the concrete-iest and monarchy-iest part of the city. A celebration of all things both hippity and hopster, the festival encompasses a wide array of x-game like activities to do with bikes, skateboards, roller-blades etc along with other hobbies of the urbanized youth, including parkour, graffiti, beatboxing and other such activities that I am reliably informed by advertisers are "street", which apparently is now an adjective.

It was actually great, the weather was fantastic and the place was packed with kids of all ages (I am positive that some of the skaters on the half-pipe were father and son teams), and the coincidentally timed Zombie-walk earlier that afternoon added to the madness of the crowd with a sizable portion of the audience decked out in their finest Walking Dead couture. It is amazing to see free events like this happen in the city, supported by the City Council and even held outside their offices. Long may it continue.

The Very Understanding Girlfriend took a staggering number of photos over the course of the weekend, alas I took but a few before the waves of pain overcame me and I was forced to retreat first to my bed, and then to the hospital. The thought has occurred to me that as this was the last thing I did before I took ill, all this excitement may in fact have been the trigger for this latest pancreatic episode.

Perhaps my body is also no longer capable of digesting Phat.

Links
Kings of Concrete
The Very Understanding Girlfriend's Flickr set
My own paltry few photos