The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Survivors… July 1, 2017

Had a bad flu earlier in the year, and hey whatchaknow, during it watched the first episode of this on Youtube for the first time in years, Terry Nation’s Survivors. All the way from 1975 depicting a mutated virus that wipes out most of the world’s population. Can’t say it was a cheering experience.

I only have random memories of it from the first time around. I remember the title sequence vividly – Soviet scientist in a lab drops a beaker and then… well. Then.

Terry Nation was the person behind it and he had already quite a track record of productions.

It’s well done for the time – though one can hardly imagine in a world of social media and the internet people being quite so isolated and ignorant of what is going on if it were to happen today. It’s got that very special 1970s sort of bleakness – not a lot of sentimentality. And some neat, if again bleak, twists. The problem with a lot of this sort of fiction is that the events of such an outbreak are in a way what is of most interest – a society sliding from normality to abnormality, whereas what comes a while after can seem oddly banal. I seem to recall getting less and less intrigued by it as it went on for season after season (three in all) – though I may be confusing it with Day of the Triffids in that regard.

Good to see female leads. That would put some shows today to shame. Not so great to see the class aspects of it and just how middle class many of the survivors appear to be. Man are they middle class. And this did not go uncommented on at the time too.

Rock bottom… July 1, 2017

A scathing review in the IT recently by Liam Cagney of David Hepworth’s book ‘Uncommon People: the Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars’. Have to say, and in fairness I have not read the book, it doesn’t sound too hot.

It’s a narrative that assumes rock to be, like cave painting, a thing of the past. Hepworth is a music journalist and editor who founded or edited a string of notable publications such as Mojo, Q, and Smash Hits and whose last book was the faintly dull 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year.

And:

Although Uncommon People has a promising premise – to orient rock’s history around the centrality therein of freaks – his narrative quickly settles into the usual stale postures and platitudes. Much the same arc, not coincidentally, as we find in the careers of those stodgy male rockers to whom he’s beholden.

It takes a year at a go – as with other recent books – and

examines a specific artist to represent that year. Which leads to some curious choices…

Once we’re out of the 1960s, though, rather than keeping his focus on new blood, Hepworth tends to stick with mainstream 1960s artists as they grow complacent, conceited and musty. This suits his narrative of nostalgia and decline and ignores the more vital rock musicians of recent decades.

And:

His 1986 shuns The Smiths for the frog-throated Dylan. His 1989 is summed up not by The Pixies, nor Sonic Youth, but Bonnie Raitt (!) No room at Hepworth’s cocktail party for tatty types like Beefheart or Big Star, or for abrasive women like Nina Hagen or PJ Harvey. No punk (Ramones, Sex Pistols, Slits), and nothing that’s not Anglophone (Serge Gainsbourg, Can).

And what about dance and electronica which were the coming thing in the late 1980s and even if not exactly ‘rock’ certainly were a phenomenon which in some ways replaced it or appropriated aspects of it and then ran in tandem with it. There’s another point along with the gendered aspects of focusing on a ‘rock’ canon – that of race.

And beyond those important caveats…

Hepworth has two theses. The first is that rock apotheosises societal freaks. Rock stars are those who “had no reason to expect that they would ever be special” yet who also ‘”refused to accept that they would ever be anything but exceptional”. These are people who ascended society’s ladder usually without having typical advantages such as an expensive education or social connections. Hepworth’s second thesis is that the rock star as an animal is now dead, made extinct by the changing digital environment much like the polar bear will be made extinct by climate change. “The true rock stars rose and fell with the fortunes of the post-war record industry. They came along in the mid-fifties and passed away in the last decade of the century just gone.”

Possibly so. Possibly so. In relation to both counts. Though listening to a lot of soft rock recently – it seems to me the freakish aspects of rock is overdone and that they are a taste, a flavour, rather than the whole dish. And in relation to rock being extinct…

As someone interested amongst many other genres in hard/heavy/rock etc I’m struck by how much of a live phenomenon it is – how many of those groups from the 70s onwards are still gigging and how popular they are. This doesn’t – of course – invalidate Hepworth’s thesis. Something has changed – as we have often discussed here. What that is is perhaps a little more difficult to determine. Perhaps it is that many things have changed – social media, the collapse of certain formats, the rise of others, streaming and so forth. The fact that groups now tour to make money is in itself a significant shift. And so on.

And yet – and yet – there I was at the beginning of the year at a Sabbath gig which was pretty packed. There’s an appetite there for some sort of spectacle. Whether those that come after and those that come after those that come after can provide the same spectacle is a different question.

Perhaps – as always – this is about another example of the fracturing of what once had a cultural status that was much higher, or at least more prominent. It is, of course, difficult to envisage any musical movement having the same media (as distinct from actual impact) as punk. Or even dance in the early 1990s (remember the legislative efforts to deal with that in the UK?). There’s too many alternatives – sport is in a way more prominent, more pervasive (coverage of it anyhow), computer games and other pastimes likewise, television itself is something there seems to be a greater focus on, not least because there’s so much of it. And so on. How could ‘rock’ compete? How could music?

And yet it prevails. Indeed this I think is spot on.

Rock is a paradigmatic art of the mass-media age and, contra Hepworth, that age is still very much with us, even if the media and instruments continue to evolve. “On the air you could be anyone you wanted,” Hepworth says of how radio and TV enabled early rock. So long as young people still have the imagination and drive, our mass media age will continue to engender such mythic monsters and superfreaks.

In a way the curiosity is that it has staggered on as long as it has – and I’d cast the net wide in respect of the definition of ‘rock’, which is after all a whole different discussion. After all the trick – and it is to some extent the same trick – that interface between youth, enthusiasm, the excessive or the exaggerated, has been played quite a few times. Watch the Beatles and then punk and ignoring the cosmetic changes the enthusiasm and unchained energy are not dissimilar (albeit the numbers of those in relation to the Beatles was vastly greater than the latter). Whole genres have risen and fallen attempting to recapture that to varying effort. The thing is that that enthusiasm, so often a function of age, by dint of its very nature keeps recurring. And the wheel keeps being reinvented (sometimes in hugely entertaining ways – I’m not much of a goth despite loving lots of goth (and post-punk that shaded into goth) but looking at the faint xerox of goth that was emo I suspect I was closer in attitude to my parents incomprehension – or disdain – of my musical taste than at any time previously – although that’s not entirely correct because part of my problem was how retrograde emo was when compared with places actual goth had gone, futurepop/EBM, crossovers into trance and metal and so on with fantastic experimentation. Emo seemed so… tame… by comparison. Such a retreat, sort of the equivalent of the experimentation of the 1980s, good and bad, settling for Britpop in the 1990s).

And there are the micro-scenes, and small scenes. Talking to someone a bit older than me recently who had recently released an album on their own of 1980s style synth pop I discovered that there’s a whole synth pop scene in Dublin that worships at the altar of all things Erasure and OMD and so on.

In some ways the emphasis on the ‘super freaks’ is to get the dynamic wrong. They’re a product of, not the initiator of, rock.

Stephen Furst July 1, 2017

I was sorry to hear about the death of Stephen Furst last month. An actor, who many of us will know best from Babylon 5, with a great range. Did anyone see him other roles?

Left resources and links – June 2017 June 30, 2017

We’re looking for links/resources useful to the Left at Starkadders suggestion. This can be archives, support groups, study groups, whatever people think can assist in building up a stack of easily accessible tools necessary to the tasks ahead. Perhaps keep articles – unless they’re longform, to the What You Want to Say thread.

Brexit Culture News! June 30, 2017

Some may have missed a useful piece in the SBP, written by Colette Sexton, from a couple of weeks back which looked at the Irish film and television industry (that is the film industry on this island, north and south) and how that would be impacted by Brexit.

There’s so many issues – television crews covering sport who criss-cross the island on a weekly and daily basis.

A hard border would have a massive impact on companies, crossing the border with an outside broadcast unit, or a satellite van or even carrying a camera kit.

And a comparison was made with the EU and the processes of inventories and so on that have to be outlined before getting a sniff at entering that state.

This would be totally impractical in NI.

And a very very valid point is made that I haven’t heard articulated before…

Even if we are going to Donegal we pass through the North, going in one end and out the other. It would just be impossible and unworkable to try to do that on a weekly basis.

And here’s another point which I haven’t heard articulated either…

If the border is sealed it will lead to production companies and broadcasters like RTÉ, TG4, TV3 and Eirsport having to negate access to continue the sports coverage they do north of the border. That coverage is crucial, because the GAA and rugby are 32 county organisations and the coverage does not take any cognisance of the border.

All this points to how to all intents and purposes this is a borderless island and has been since 1998. And now the potential for that to change and change utterly wreaks havoc with workers and jobs.

There are some business opportunities – they’re outlined in the piece – though many of them will see jobs lost in the North as the RoI becomes ‘a gateway to Europe for Hollywood and vice versa’ as one interviewee puts it – particularly since this state ‘will be an attractive location for multinational co-productions looking for a home in Europe for financial reasons, an English-speaking crew and cast and to qualify as European content’ , but really they don’t outweigh the massive logistical inconveniences and worse that seem likely to be imposed.

Joyless June 30, 2017

Interesting point in the IT last week about the British General Election campaign and the tone of same. 

Mrs May’s joyless election campaign was rooted in hostility to Europe.

I’m not particularly exercised by the second point, but the first I think is worth exploring. Certainly she tried to convey seriousness and strength. But somehow it didn’t add up. And joyless is a perfect description for what she offered.

All those pat phrases – strong and stable, Brexit is Brexit, and  so on (amazingly effective in terms of being memorable, appallingly useless in terms of being applicable to anything material). And just on the phrases, she was at it again on Friday in relation to EU citizens rights – a ‘fair and serious’ offer…

There was no vision at the election, or before it, no sense of tomorrow being better than today. And in a way that followed on seven years of Tory political part-dominance (again the fact that the Tories only managed a majority for hardly two years is fascinating). A period of outright austerity – an austerity that the Tories revelled in as they used it to slash at the state again and again – and in ways that even Thatcher eschewed.

I genuinely find it incredible to read reports from the UK of the gaps and deficits in state provision – libraries, health care, education, welfare and so on. The network of supports and resources that I remember from living there in the 1990s seems to have been deliberately picked at. The simple fact of the growth of food banks an absolute affront to the concept of a civilised society. That this should happen in Britain is just unbelievable.

And yet, this was presided over, and not merely tolerated but encouraged by Cameron and May. In that respect their reworking of the post-Thatcher dispensation represents a radical hardening and deepening of it albeit clothed in more ameliorative language.

That this was also tolerated by the British electorate has been startling too. Albeit we saw a retrenchment and push back this year at the GE (and enormous credit to Corbyn et al for being part of that push back) and again granted Tory rule since 2010 was weaker than it seemed.

But I do worry that so much damage has been done that it will take a very long time merely to return us to the status quo ante, let alone anything better.

Legal matters… June 30, 2017

I’m at a loss reading Stephen Collins in relation to the judicial appointments process. He is hugely antagonistic to the judicial appointments process going through the Dáil at the moment. And he writes in very stark terms about it. 

Fine Gael has stumbled into a dangerous confrontation with the judiciary that threatens to do serious damage to the image of a party that has always prided itself on standing by the institutions of the State.

Many Fine Gael backbenchers and Senators were horrified to discover in recent days that they are at loggerheads with the country’s senior judges at the behest of Shane Ross. To make matters worse, Sinn Féin and the hard left are backing this assault on one of the pillars of Irish democracy.

He brings in another figure to underline this…

Labour leader Brendan Howlin struck a chord with many in Fine Gael when he observed in the Dáil on Tuesday night that “the party of Collins and Cosgrave is being assisted in this endeavour by another party for which – if I put it at its kindest – the concept of the courts would not always have passed constitutional muster in the past”.

Fine Gael backbenchers did not begin to appreciate the implications of the so-called reform of the judicial appointments system until Chief Justice Susan Denham made her concerns known on Monday following the trenchant comments of High Court president Peter Kelly.

What horror is this new appointments process going to involve? What anti-democratic aspects can we expect?

Collins writes:

To be fair to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, this mess is not of his making. He inherited a programme for government that contained a specific commitment to follow the Ross agenda on judicial appointments. It was the price of Fine Gael being able to put a government together but pressing ahead now in the face of public opposition from the judiciary is another matter.

But what is the problem?

Most members of the public are probably not too concerned about the proposed change in the judicial appointments system, which provides for an advisory appointments committee with a non-legal majority and a non-legal chair.

Yes yes, it’s above the citizenry… bless them… but wait, a non-legal chair? That’s the problem?

The bottom line, though, as articulated by former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness, is that the removal of the Chief Justice from the chair of the committee represents “a deliberate kick in the teeth” not only to the incumbent Susan Denham but to the judiciary as a body.

For Ross and Sinn Féin the whole point of the Bill is to give the Chief Justice and her colleagues that deliberate kick in the teeth. While the system of appointing judges could certainly do with some improvement, the deliberate humiliation of a judiciary, which has broadly served the country well, is a dangerous path to go down.

If all this seems almost risible, well, then perhaps you and I share similar feelings about this. Is this approach unknown elsewhere? I look at the UK judicial appointments body and see that they manage with a ‘lay’ chair. Now I’m the last to say we have to follow the UK in all matters…

But other than the utterly emotive ‘deliberate kick in the teeth’ line what precisely is the problem? Surely the status of a judiciary rests upon its own actions and pronouncements in the course of its work? And if the perception of ‘humiliation’ is the worst that Collins can eventually find (despite accepting the process need improvement) then he’s not best positioned given his own constant rhetoric about the  need in Irish politics for governments to take ‘hard’ and ‘painful’ decisions. Nor is it as if the proposed appointments process is that robust, the body will still only make recommendations…

Or is there more to this representation in the appointments process? Surely not.

The stuff about Fine Gael and the judiciary, though, is so revealing. Isn’t it?

For a more measured view what of this from a barrister, political scientist and former FG legal advisor (who clearly doesn’t share Collins superheated view of these matters), Dr. Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, who has written a work entitled The Politics of Judicial Selection in Ireland, though entertaining to see Pat Leahy  rather misrepresent her position – as enunciated in an article she had published the previous day. MacNeill’s view is that the judiciary has lobbied the government and that:

The particular problem is this. What is the broader impact of the judiciary successfully lobbying to change the contents of the proposed Bill? Whether or not that was the cause of the Government changing the proposed legislation, the volume of lobbying and the strength of feeling expressed both privately, and now publicly, has left the judiciary in an impossible situation.

If the Government pays no further regard to the policy preference expressed by the judiciary, then the judiciary will have been on the wrong side of this now rather public constitutional squabble. If the Government capitulates to judicial pressure, then there will have been real damage done the to doctrine of separation of powers – making it more difficult for future legal advisors to political parties to dissuade politicians from making statements about judicial processes.

One has wonder at the pushback in the IT against this too. The general consensus is that the appointments process while sub-optimal isn’t an issue. Well, maybe not, but.. given someone has made it an issue why this opposition?

Finally we are served this fantastic, and I mean that in a literal sense, analysis from Collins…

Ross in his long career as a journalist and politician has engaged in one populist campaign after another. He is the nearest thing we have to an Irish Donald Trump and Fine Gael needs to think very carefully before betraying one of its core values to appease his grudge against the judiciary.

Ross is Trump-like? Core valuesof Fine Gael – what is Collins talking about? What exactly is going on here?

Jobstown Verdict June 29, 2017

Having followed the Trial on Social Media it’s hard to see how the jury could have reached any other verdict than Not Guilty.
There will no doubt be plenty more written here about it but a number of things that struck me about the whole thing.
-Hard not to think it was a Political Trial, were it a farmers protest about suckler payments, rather than a Water Charges/Austerity protest featuring Paul Murphy you’d imagine there wouldn’t have been any investigation or Trial.
-The initial Main Stream Media reports were somewhat exaggerated (If I recall there was even photoshopped brick throwing in some news outlets). It was those reports that framed the initial narrative about the protest.
-Clearly the difference between Gardai Statements and The Video evidence leaves some questions about the Gardai. (as indeed does the circumstances of the initial arrests of the defendants , especially compared to some of our banking friends)
-The Legal team for the Defence did an excellent job.
-False Imprisonment was a ridiculous charge to be bringing in this case.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series June 29, 2017

Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:

I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.

Any contributions this week?