The Cedar Lounge Revolution

‘Some war news’ November 30, 2014

Interesting, here’s Archon from the Southern Star of Skibbereen, Co.Cork. who writes under ‘some war news’ about that spat over comments Gerry Adams made about Michael Collins and the treatment of the Independent during the War of Independence.

Interview with Larry Kirwan -Black 47 November 30, 2014

From the Connolly Media Group

Like buses, perhaps you’re waiting for ages… November 29, 2014

… for news about AC/DC and then…

I’d have to have a smidgin of sympathy for the group. Notoriously secretive about their doings this year we’ve had not just one story about the camp – very bad news as regards Malcolm Young who is suffering from dementia (and who a fairly recent edition of Classic Rock had outlined as the main mover in the group up until recently), and then even more recently news as regards an on/off accusation against Phil Rudd.

All that and a new album – Rock or Bust – just released… this review here in the Guardian takes that last with due seriousness.

The critical reappraisal for them is remarkable given that they were absolute mud a decade or two ago (and to some extend justifiably given the long empty years from the early 1980s onwards to – if one is kind, the early 1990s or more realistically, the early 2000s and the release of the actually pretty damn good Stiff Upper Lip from 2000 which was neatly efficient in a way most of its predecessors in the Brian Johnson era had not been.

Little will persuade me that the Bon Scott period was better…

The problem was that unlike that earlier period, with a lead singer who was a sly and knowing and surprisingly thoughtful presence – and where there was a slight crossover with punk, in much the same was as there was with Motorhead, given short and speedy tracks – pretty much all the cliches one wishes to think of in relation to certain aspects of metal were pretty much accurate in relation to the 1980s albums, dire lyrics, ever increasingly slowing and plodding rhythms and worst of all the melodies just dried up. It wasn’t all bad, the first two albums during those years were great in their own way and saw tracks as strong as this.

But after that… well, let us not talk of it again.

That everything has changed and utterly now is almost bizarre, and near inexplicable. Is it simple branding, the power of publicity? Difficult to believe that in a world where there’s so much product that there’s surely easier causes to take on and champion. So perhaps it’s nostalgia, or perhaps it’s just that exponents of the rock riff are, oddly enough, fewer and further between than ever before.

And let’s not ignore the absurdity of all this too – something they were never unaware of either. As Angus Young once said:

I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, In fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

So, if the suspicion is that the new album is going to be not that different from the last which was alright, and further that one could make a fairly decent compilation from both, and that Still Upper Lip still remains the best of their more recent output (and that a good 14 years ago), well, so be it. As the Guardian review asks, the question remains just how many other terms they can find to align with ‘rock’, ‘rock and roll’?

This site hasn’t been averse to them, as seen here and here. So it only remains to leave you with the latest single…

Speaking of the National Museum Collins Barracks… November 29, 2014

…it’s also well worth taking a trip around the “The Irish at War at Home and Abroad from 1550”. which has to do some fancy footwork on engaging with a – shall we say – tangled history. Here’s a review from HI which notes there’s nothing about the North bar, if I recall, a passing mention, what do others think of it?

Just on the artefacts there’s a very broad range, it’s good to see the Are Corps Vampire jet, amongst other exhibits, but I had to smile at the overly delicate sensibilities of some of the staff.

There’s a real ‘don’t touch’ approach which sits oddly with other museums with similar pieces. For example, there is a Defence Forces Panhard M3 armoured car decked out in UN colours which some a small number of early middle aged men from, I’d guess the North, were peering into. One had his hand on the door of the vehicle and was asked, politely it has to be said, not to do so. They complied happily, but as one said to the other when the staff member was walking away ‘surely it’s seen worse than that’.

Žižek and…er… wage transparency… November 28, 2014

Good review of Slavoj Žižek’s latest works in the Guardian recently from Terry Eagleton. I like Žižek if only because his instincts appear spot on, but it’s hard work given the noise to signal ratio. Let’s just say that wading through to find useful messages can be heavy going, and there’s no shortage of unusual messages. But this I think is spot on, not so much the political correctness bit (of which more again) but the last part:

Stentorian, faintly manic and almost impossible to shut up, Žižek is a man who gets out of bed talking about psychoanalysis and steps back into it holding forth on Zionism. As a frenetic intellectual activist, he always seems to be in six places on the planet at once, like Socrates on steroids. His day may begin with a visit to Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and end with writing supportive letters to one of the imprisoned Pussy Riot performers. In between, he passes his time antagonising a sizeable chunk of the world’s population. If he is a scourge of neo-capitalism, he is also a sworn foe of liberal pluralism and political correctness. He tells the story of how at an impeccably enlightened US seminar he attended, the chairperson began by asking each participant to state their name along with their sexual preference. Žižek throttled back the urge to announce that he enjoyed bedding young boys and drinking their blood. He also points out how much less forthcoming the participants would have been if asked to state their salaries.

I’m never that convinced that political correctness is half as problematic as some seem to think. Far too often the complaints seem to amount to ‘I want the ‘right’ to be as obnoxious and discourteous to others as I see fit with no regard to their feelings’. It’s difficult to ascertain the loss to society or human life in general that results from misogynistic, homophobic and/or other comments being considered obnoxious, discourteous and not being appropriate.

That said, the example given seems absurdly self-conscious on the part of those who would who ask questions about participants sexual preferences. None of their business is the response that springs to mind.

But, whatever about ‘political correctness’ more broadly Žižek is onto something in relation to his point about salaries and, presumably, consciously cuts through what is most likely an irrelevance (the sexual preference of participants) to get to the centrality of economic issues in shaping our lives. For discussing wages is, usually, a complete taboo in our societies. In the US discussing ones salary with other workers in a workplace can be a dismissible offence. It’s a means of differentiation within companies and between them.

As it happens in Sweden one can – I think for a small fee – access tax returns of any citizen, though an reason for the request is necessary. And most intriguingly the European Commission earlier this year had a number of recommendations on pay transparency which though not apparently going to quite the same degree strike off in that direction. Polly Toynbee some time ago discussed similar moves in the UK, and here is a US view from the Atlantic from a few years back.