.
Seamus Milne is in optimistic mode in today’s Guardian, and ends his column with a bold statement:
“The government has started a journey from which there is no way back.”
I hope he’s right. Logically he ought to be. Truth and Justice both demand that we all learn the lessons of the past 30 years and recognise that unregulated ‘market’ economies DO NOT promote social justice, or the eradication of poverty, or even the wellbeing of capitalism itself.
Strangely enough, some of us still care about social justice and poverty, and we’d quite like to see the worlds of commerce and business working for the benefit of the working classes, instead of being preyed upon by the fat cats and asset-strippers who see a factory as something to be bought up, knocked down and sold off to property developers for instant fat profits.
Only a government OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people cares to run the economy so as to ensure that the economy works for the benefit of everybody and not just a few. New Labour has seen the failure of trickle-down theory, deregulation and laissez-faireism, and must now do things differently.
We can see the fruits of deregulation and laissez-faireism in the devastation all around us, which would be truly hellish were it not for the intervention of governments, on behalf of all of us, using OUR money.
Therefore this New Way ought to ensure that the worlds of finance and business work on OUR behalf and for everyone's benefit since it's OUR money that has rescued the planet from the devastation that would otherwise have ensued, thanks to the unbelievable greed and stupidity of the bankers and financiers.
Logically those people should now be made to earn their crust by being put on OUR payroll after the majority of the banking sector is taken into public ownership and refashioned to become institutions that earn money for US, and in time ensure that the investment WE have ploughed into them is generating substantial incomes for US, not private shareholders - the people who are already incredibly rich, and didn’t have the wit to ensure the banking sector behaved responsibly, let alone in the interests of the nation as a whole.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/04/economic-crisis-labour-ministers-comment
------------------------------------
Having started down this optimistic road, let’s continue with a mention of what’s being proposed for Iraq. Last Thursday’s Guardian published a very uplifting article by the highly respected Jonathan Steele, who has written with great distinction about the Middle East for very many years.
“Two victories in a single month. Amid the encircling economic gloom, it's hard to believe we deserve such good news. First, of course, Barack Obama's election win. And now Iraq's unexpected deal with the American government for the occupation to end at last.
Debated by the Iraqi parliament today, the agreement has been virtually ignored in many left-liberal circles as well as by most of the mainstream American media. We are so inured to thinking that the US will always get its way in Iraq, thanks to its enormous investment of troops and treasure, that any potentially contrary development is dismissed. The US has agreed to leave Iraq. "You must be joking," comes the response. "Why would they build 14 mega-bases if they didn't intend to stay for decades?" The US is allowing Iraqi courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by American troops. "Give me a break. You can't believe that," I hear the sneer.
Well, look at the agreement's text. It is remarkable for the number and scope of the concessions that the Iraqi government has managed to get from the Bush administration. They amount to a series of U-turns that spell the complete defeat of the neoconservative plan to turn Iraq into a pro-western ally and a platform from which to project US power across the Middle East.
The agreement stipulates that "all US forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31 2011". More remarkably, all combat troops will leave Iraqi towns and villages and go back to base by the end of June next year. Pause for a moment and take that in. Six years and three months after the invasion, Iraqi streets will be a US-free zone again.
Iraq will have a veto over all US military operations. A clause added at the last minute after pressure from Iran says that Iraqi land, sea and air may not be used as a launch pad or transit point for attacks on other countries.
Under the withdrawal agreement, no Iraqi can be arrested by US forces except with permission from Iraqi authorities, and every Iraqi who is arrested in these circumstances must be handed to Iraqi forces within 24 hours. The tens of thousands of detainees in US custody must either be released or turned over to the Iraqis immediately. US troops may not enter or search any Iraqi house without an Iraqi judge's warrant, except if they are conducting a joint combat operation with the Iraqi military.
The deal gives Iraq's national resistance almost everything it fought for.
From the American point of view, the main thing the pact does is to allow the US to withdraw with dignity. No hasty Vietnam-style humiliation, but an orderly retreat from an adventure which was illegal, unnecessary, and a disaster from the moment of conception. Like most Iraqis, I am content with that.
American neoconservatives will declare victory, as Frederick Kagan, one of the architects of the "surge", did this week. But the fact is that Bush and his ideologues wanted to make Iraq a protectorate and stay indefinitely so as to intimidate Iran and Syria. Now they have been forced to give up, and a newly confident Tehran has been helping its neighbouring Shia-led government in Baghdad to show them the door.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/27/iraq-us-foreign-policy
It’s interesting to consider the role of the rich Right in the USA in all of this - in that their stupidity and greed has caused the financial melt-down, and as a result of that the USA can no longer AFFORD to wage a war and continue with an occupation that’s been wasting trillions of dollars.
--------------------------------------------------------------
It’s quite hard to get your head around what seems to be happening in a world we’ve become accustomed to thinking about in a wholly negative way. Can these things be real? Unrestrained capitalism being replaced with intelligent Keynesianism? The USA effectively nationalizing its banks, insurance industry and motor industry? The USA agreeing to withdraw completely from Iraq? The USA kicking out the disgraced Bush and electing Obama!!! The death of neo-conservatism? The death of New Labour? The elimination of tax havens?
Ẁake me up somebody!
Ken Livingstone also wrote an excellent piece in the Guardian last week - Death of the Old Dogmas.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/27/new-labour-ken-livingstone
Back in October Ken also wrote this piece on the need to nationalise the banks,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/11/marketturmoil-banking
-----------------------------------
Tax Havens
I never thought I’d live to see the day that anyone started to talk seriously about nationalising banks, and neither did I think I would ever be around to read that political leaders in the USA (including Obama) and Britain have started to talk about getting rid of tax havens, including Britain’s own disgraceful tax regime. But this seems to be what’s happening. See last Saturday’s Guardian editorial:
"Havens are the 70 or so territories that serve as the boltholes of tax avoiders, who enjoy low tax rates and no questions asked. Companies who set up shop (or shopfront, since hardly any real business is done) in these places duck their financial obligations to their host societies. Tax havens thus rob poor countries of vital income. They also nurture the shadow banking system, that web of shoddy deals and bad faith which grew so quickly during this decade's boom in obscure financial instruments. If good business practice is defined by openness, accountability and social responsibility, tax havens are in the opposite corner. Barack Obama certainly thinks so. The French and Germans agree, while Alistair Darling is looking into the issue."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/29/leaders-and-reply-tax-havens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-39
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/3235555/Britain-backs-European-crackdown-on-tax-havens.html
http://www.accountancyage.com/accountancyage/analysis/2229369/overview-war-tax-havens
--------------------------------------
White Cat Bulletin
One-eared Cancer Cat has moved on again, and has finally gone into sheltered accommodation. Daughter couldn’t really cope with her special needs, so she’s back in my conservatory, living in a cosy box, venturing out of it just to eat, drink and use the litter tray. Her whole world consists of an area about 4 square metres in size (given that she stays at the bottom end of the conservatory), and she’s clearly quite content with her situation, her minimalist existence. Life goes on.
.
Showing posts with label Barak Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barak Obama. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Layer 89 “Excellence is a useful reference point.”
.
Watching Obama’s first press conference since the election, live on CNN yesterday, was an experience. Instead of just walking on like the big cheese and standing alone at the lectern, he first of all sent out his new team, who arranged themselves across the back of the stage like some dark-suited choir. How clever is that? Firstly - here’s the whole group of people who are going to be running this country quite soon, and secondly, here am I, their spokesperson and leader, certainly, but also a team player.
He invited questions from the gathering by calling out the names of the journalists, first names only. (I KNOW who these people are. I’m on first-name terms with them.)
He was low key, serious, kept to the point, didn’t over-elaborate, didn’t waffle, didn’t sloganise or patronise. He kept it short, and he left swiftly and without ceremony, pausing only to say, “Bonjour” to a French journo who threw a parting question at him. Or was that a French/Canadian pranker?
Was he looking tired, finally, or was he feeling unwell? Both, maybe.
There’s some excellent writing in the Guardian today:
By Marina Hyde (A bad week for the cause of banality and witless snidery -
Obama's extraordinary oratory made us feel less jaded, and less willing to humour those who made us jaded in the first place
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/barack-obama-usa)
By Jonathan Raban ( 'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-race-democrats-us-elections?commentpage=2)
And by Polly Toynbee ( ‘Barack could teach Brown to say boo to the goose -
Obama has broken the spell that says centre-left parties threatening to tax the rich are inevitably dead in the water http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-brown-glenrothes-labour )
Each of these articles also generated a huge amount of responses in Comment Is Free, which are worth taking the time to read, even when they’re written by saddos, cynics and frustrated rightists. What it is to have this huge, virtual meeting going on with the possibility of re-reading what each individual is trying to get across.
Marina Hyde said,
As they watched Barack Obama's inspiring acceptance speech this week, one wonders how many politicians, and even ex-politicians, experienced a . . . sobering, gut-sinking sense if not of their own inadequacy in the face of the gold standard, then at least of the manner in which the public discourse has been allowed to bump along at the level of the banal and unedifying for what suddenly seems so long.
Obama's extraordinary oratory this week made people feel less jaded, but simultaneously less willing to humour those who had made them feel so jaded in the first place. Many will have smarted anew at the terrible squandering of New Labour's mandate in 1997, sensing that the president-elect realises there are rather more pressing things to do than organise cocktail parties for pop stars; or, to use a more up to date example, that there are nobler ways to spend one's time than messing about on oligarchs' boats.
This week people were reminded of what an inspiring politician sounds like, and how he carries himself. Excellence is a useful reference point. While that memory remains fresh in the public mind, people will be measuring their own leaders against it - the very leaders now seeking to be Obama's best friend.
Jonathan Raban said,
Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.
Much of the nightmare of the last eight years has arisen from the fact that one of the least intellectually curious or gifted presidents in history was in thrall to a group of passionate, but second-rate, neoconservative intellectuals, all associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose imperial agenda for the US was lost on the man they guided and advised.
The 43rd president . . . prided himself in reading no newspapers and being in bed by nine. While Bush was bicycling and cutting brush at his Crawford ranch in Texas, the intellectuals in his administration were staying up late in DC, busy about the task of reshaping the United States into the Roman Empire of the 21st century.
Heaven knows, (Obama) will need all the intelligence and range of viewpoints he can muster to cope with the toxic legacy he inherits from the 43rd president: the mounting turmoil in Afghanistan, the dangerous, simmering cauldron in Iraq; an America cordially loathed by at least half the world; an impending global economic catastrophe, triggered by the lunatic improvidence of deregulated Wall Street. Not since Lincoln and Roosevelt has an incoming president been landed with an America in such desperate need of rehabilitation and repair, and it was no surprise that, in his Chicago victory speech on Tuesday, Obama conjured the ghosts of those two presidents.
On Tuesday, there was a strong echo of Roosevelt's first inaugural speech when Obama said, "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."
After eight years of an administration whose hallmarks have been secrecy, dishonesty, and a refusal to listen to any voice outside its own inner circle, this promise of candour and conversation was probably the most important policy statement that he could make as president-elect.
The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded.
Polly Toynbee said,
To the centre-left Obama sets a remarkable challenge, especially to the Labour government. He has changed everything: triangulation is dead; saying what you mean and meaning what you say has won the day for progressive values, with no feinting to the right. Can Gordon Brown grasp how many of the old rules Obama has broken?
Here is an American president - repeat, an American president - elected on a platform well to the left of Labour's. Obama is pledged to take 10 million of the lowest paid out of taxation, paid for by higher taxes on earners of above $250,000. Brown has never permitted even the whisper of a suggestion of taxing the rich more fairly. He never castigated the greedy in the years of plenty when they needed to hear it
Obama won the day when he said: "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." However often John McCain and Sarah Palin replayed the phrase, calling it socialism, the spirit of fairness resonated with voters.
Obama talked openly about obscene pay at the top: "You can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street." He said: "The last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else." Can you imagine Brown ever saying this? "Our free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it." Obama promises a windfall on energy companies too.
Beyond that, he lays into tax avoiders. "There's a building in the Cayman Islands that houses supposedly 12,000 US-based corporations. That's either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world." He promises to close the loopholes and "restore fairness to our tax code". So who rules the Caymans? We do. Who controls more tax havens than any other nation in the world? We do. Let's hope Obama now forces us to shut them all down. Much of the £28bn missing in uncollected UK taxes leaks out here - and 11 years into a Labour government, our tax havens remain untouched.
So will Gordon Brown get the deep message of the Obama win? Stop being afraid of your own shadow. Say what you think. On gross greed and excess, the people are far ahead of the politicians, as they are on the behaviour of banks. Yesterday, prodded by the public outrage (or maybe by the Mail's "Shame of the banks" front page), Alistair Darling summoned the bankers in and made each of them round the table say, one by one, what they would do to cut their lending rates - and they did. Labour is learning to say boo to the goose.
Now it's time to abolish bonuses, ending the phoney "performance related" culture that brought the world economy to its knees. There is no research evidence for its effectiveness: it simply inflates excess. Clean up corporate culture; stop fleecing shareholders with outrageous pay and executive expense account extravagance with money stolen from our pension funds. A time of austerity, where millions suffer greatly and permanently in lost jobs, homes and businesses, demands political leadership that echoes the indignation on the streets. Obama did just that.
America always amazes, and we usually follow on - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Blair made the terrible mistake of following the lead of the very worst of all US presidents. The question now is whether Brown can breathe in the message from one who may prove to be among the very best.
.
Watching Obama’s first press conference since the election, live on CNN yesterday, was an experience. Instead of just walking on like the big cheese and standing alone at the lectern, he first of all sent out his new team, who arranged themselves across the back of the stage like some dark-suited choir. How clever is that? Firstly - here’s the whole group of people who are going to be running this country quite soon, and secondly, here am I, their spokesperson and leader, certainly, but also a team player.
He invited questions from the gathering by calling out the names of the journalists, first names only. (I KNOW who these people are. I’m on first-name terms with them.)
He was low key, serious, kept to the point, didn’t over-elaborate, didn’t waffle, didn’t sloganise or patronise. He kept it short, and he left swiftly and without ceremony, pausing only to say, “Bonjour” to a French journo who threw a parting question at him. Or was that a French/Canadian pranker?
Was he looking tired, finally, or was he feeling unwell? Both, maybe.
There’s some excellent writing in the Guardian today:
By Marina Hyde (A bad week for the cause of banality and witless snidery -
Obama's extraordinary oratory made us feel less jaded, and less willing to humour those who made us jaded in the first place
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/barack-obama-usa)
By Jonathan Raban ( 'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-race-democrats-us-elections?commentpage=2)
And by Polly Toynbee ( ‘Barack could teach Brown to say boo to the goose -
Obama has broken the spell that says centre-left parties threatening to tax the rich are inevitably dead in the water http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-brown-glenrothes-labour )
Each of these articles also generated a huge amount of responses in Comment Is Free, which are worth taking the time to read, even when they’re written by saddos, cynics and frustrated rightists. What it is to have this huge, virtual meeting going on with the possibility of re-reading what each individual is trying to get across.
Marina Hyde said,
As they watched Barack Obama's inspiring acceptance speech this week, one wonders how many politicians, and even ex-politicians, experienced a . . . sobering, gut-sinking sense if not of their own inadequacy in the face of the gold standard, then at least of the manner in which the public discourse has been allowed to bump along at the level of the banal and unedifying for what suddenly seems so long.
Obama's extraordinary oratory this week made people feel less jaded, but simultaneously less willing to humour those who had made them feel so jaded in the first place. Many will have smarted anew at the terrible squandering of New Labour's mandate in 1997, sensing that the president-elect realises there are rather more pressing things to do than organise cocktail parties for pop stars; or, to use a more up to date example, that there are nobler ways to spend one's time than messing about on oligarchs' boats.
This week people were reminded of what an inspiring politician sounds like, and how he carries himself. Excellence is a useful reference point. While that memory remains fresh in the public mind, people will be measuring their own leaders against it - the very leaders now seeking to be Obama's best friend.
Jonathan Raban said,
Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.
Much of the nightmare of the last eight years has arisen from the fact that one of the least intellectually curious or gifted presidents in history was in thrall to a group of passionate, but second-rate, neoconservative intellectuals, all associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose imperial agenda for the US was lost on the man they guided and advised.
The 43rd president . . . prided himself in reading no newspapers and being in bed by nine. While Bush was bicycling and cutting brush at his Crawford ranch in Texas, the intellectuals in his administration were staying up late in DC, busy about the task of reshaping the United States into the Roman Empire of the 21st century.
Heaven knows, (Obama) will need all the intelligence and range of viewpoints he can muster to cope with the toxic legacy he inherits from the 43rd president: the mounting turmoil in Afghanistan, the dangerous, simmering cauldron in Iraq; an America cordially loathed by at least half the world; an impending global economic catastrophe, triggered by the lunatic improvidence of deregulated Wall Street. Not since Lincoln and Roosevelt has an incoming president been landed with an America in such desperate need of rehabilitation and repair, and it was no surprise that, in his Chicago victory speech on Tuesday, Obama conjured the ghosts of those two presidents.
On Tuesday, there was a strong echo of Roosevelt's first inaugural speech when Obama said, "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."
After eight years of an administration whose hallmarks have been secrecy, dishonesty, and a refusal to listen to any voice outside its own inner circle, this promise of candour and conversation was probably the most important policy statement that he could make as president-elect.
The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded.
Polly Toynbee said,
To the centre-left Obama sets a remarkable challenge, especially to the Labour government. He has changed everything: triangulation is dead; saying what you mean and meaning what you say has won the day for progressive values, with no feinting to the right. Can Gordon Brown grasp how many of the old rules Obama has broken?
Here is an American president - repeat, an American president - elected on a platform well to the left of Labour's. Obama is pledged to take 10 million of the lowest paid out of taxation, paid for by higher taxes on earners of above $250,000. Brown has never permitted even the whisper of a suggestion of taxing the rich more fairly. He never castigated the greedy in the years of plenty when they needed to hear it
Obama won the day when he said: "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." However often John McCain and Sarah Palin replayed the phrase, calling it socialism, the spirit of fairness resonated with voters.
Obama talked openly about obscene pay at the top: "You can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street." He said: "The last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else." Can you imagine Brown ever saying this? "Our free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it." Obama promises a windfall on energy companies too.
Beyond that, he lays into tax avoiders. "There's a building in the Cayman Islands that houses supposedly 12,000 US-based corporations. That's either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world." He promises to close the loopholes and "restore fairness to our tax code". So who rules the Caymans? We do. Who controls more tax havens than any other nation in the world? We do. Let's hope Obama now forces us to shut them all down. Much of the £28bn missing in uncollected UK taxes leaks out here - and 11 years into a Labour government, our tax havens remain untouched.
So will Gordon Brown get the deep message of the Obama win? Stop being afraid of your own shadow. Say what you think. On gross greed and excess, the people are far ahead of the politicians, as they are on the behaviour of banks. Yesterday, prodded by the public outrage (or maybe by the Mail's "Shame of the banks" front page), Alistair Darling summoned the bankers in and made each of them round the table say, one by one, what they would do to cut their lending rates - and they did. Labour is learning to say boo to the goose.
Now it's time to abolish bonuses, ending the phoney "performance related" culture that brought the world economy to its knees. There is no research evidence for its effectiveness: it simply inflates excess. Clean up corporate culture; stop fleecing shareholders with outrageous pay and executive expense account extravagance with money stolen from our pension funds. A time of austerity, where millions suffer greatly and permanently in lost jobs, homes and businesses, demands political leadership that echoes the indignation on the streets. Obama did just that.
America always amazes, and we usually follow on - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Blair made the terrible mistake of following the lead of the very worst of all US presidents. The question now is whether Brown can breathe in the message from one who may prove to be among the very best.
.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Layer 88 Obama, Change, and Going Forward
.
It’s been an exciting week, and it’s been good to have the time to watch BBC 24 and CNN non-stop, both during and after the election. Momentous times.
The Guardian yesterday not only had a special Obama supplement but also filled most of the first half of the paper with Obama news and celebrations. There were also several pages of it in G2.
Obama speaks of change, and various commentators have been giving their views on the sorts of change that's needed. I’m interested in the very few that talk about changes to people’s emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and how they might be achieved.
Rebecca Walker in her column raises the issue of tackling what I guess Oliver James would call Affluenza:
"I predict we will instruct our children to strive for mental and spiritual health, in addition to physical health. We will expect them to do more with less, and to understand the finite nature of the world's resources."
It’s interesting that she sees the new Obama period as one for ushering in changes that are beyond the material, the economic, the legal, the political and the social. Mental and spiritual health issues ought to be high on everyone’s agenda, but rarely come into the news pages, as such.
She also makes a good point about Obama being a writer:
"America is at the end of one story, and the beginning of another. We are fortunate Obama is a writer. We need his heart and his pen and his intuitive understanding of narrative to bring us to the other side of the current crisis, having learned to turn tragedy - of which we are sure to see more - into insight, and the decline of a superpower into an educational epic of redemption".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/barack-obama-president-election
Meanwhile, in the special Obama supplement, another Walker, Alice, Rebecca’s mum, writes,
"I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters.
A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker
The Guardian seems to have reprinted this from TheRoot.com, where it was published on November 5th as an open letter to Obama, but curiously the Guardian has changed the opening, Dear Brother Obama, to Dear Barack Obama, and has also omitted the final sentence, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Perhaps the sub-editor didn’t understand it.
http://www.theroot.com/id/48726
There’s another of Alice Walker’s recent articles that’s well worth reading at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.barackobama
Check out some of the pig ignorant comments that follow it, too.
-------------------------------------------------------
The key thing about Obama does seem to be that, unlike all his middle and upper class predecessors, he understands the lives, the aspirations and the needs of the vast majority of so-called ordinary people, and he seems determined to run the country for the benefit of ‘ordinary’ people, and not for the better-off, or for the sake of making the USA ever-more powerful and dominant. He sees clearly the correlation between squandering vast amounts of money on global domination and keeping the majority of the population in relative poverty with no access to proper health services and no decent schools for most kids.
----------------------------------------------------------
Have just caught up with the Rachel From North London blog, which had an excellent piece on Obama on Monday, 3rd November: “More than a righteous wind”
http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/
----------------------------------------------------------
Going Forward
Damian Grammaticus (crazy name, crazy guy) reporting for the BBC from Beijing said something about what relations between America and China will be like, going forward.
I love this phrase. It instantly marks out its user as a prat. Going forward? How can relations go forward? When was it that people started talking about going forward when they mean in the future?
It’s one thing for dickheads and the general public to use whatever stupid so-called hip expressions they like, but how can professional journalists get away with using dumb expressions like going forward?
“He needs to prove he means what he says, going forward.” So says Emily Prat, reporting from the US. Not going backward, then? Or going sideways? AAAGGGHHH!
.
It’s been an exciting week, and it’s been good to have the time to watch BBC 24 and CNN non-stop, both during and after the election. Momentous times.
The Guardian yesterday not only had a special Obama supplement but also filled most of the first half of the paper with Obama news and celebrations. There were also several pages of it in G2.
Obama speaks of change, and various commentators have been giving their views on the sorts of change that's needed. I’m interested in the very few that talk about changes to people’s emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and how they might be achieved.
Rebecca Walker in her column raises the issue of tackling what I guess Oliver James would call Affluenza:
"I predict we will instruct our children to strive for mental and spiritual health, in addition to physical health. We will expect them to do more with less, and to understand the finite nature of the world's resources."
It’s interesting that she sees the new Obama period as one for ushering in changes that are beyond the material, the economic, the legal, the political and the social. Mental and spiritual health issues ought to be high on everyone’s agenda, but rarely come into the news pages, as such.
She also makes a good point about Obama being a writer:
"America is at the end of one story, and the beginning of another. We are fortunate Obama is a writer. We need his heart and his pen and his intuitive understanding of narrative to bring us to the other side of the current crisis, having learned to turn tragedy - of which we are sure to see more - into insight, and the decline of a superpower into an educational epic of redemption".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/barack-obama-president-election
Meanwhile, in the special Obama supplement, another Walker, Alice, Rebecca’s mum, writes,
"I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters.
A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker
The Guardian seems to have reprinted this from TheRoot.com, where it was published on November 5th as an open letter to Obama, but curiously the Guardian has changed the opening, Dear Brother Obama, to Dear Barack Obama, and has also omitted the final sentence, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Perhaps the sub-editor didn’t understand it.
http://www.theroot.com/id/48726
There’s another of Alice Walker’s recent articles that’s well worth reading at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.barackobama
Check out some of the pig ignorant comments that follow it, too.
-------------------------------------------------------
The key thing about Obama does seem to be that, unlike all his middle and upper class predecessors, he understands the lives, the aspirations and the needs of the vast majority of so-called ordinary people, and he seems determined to run the country for the benefit of ‘ordinary’ people, and not for the better-off, or for the sake of making the USA ever-more powerful and dominant. He sees clearly the correlation between squandering vast amounts of money on global domination and keeping the majority of the population in relative poverty with no access to proper health services and no decent schools for most kids.
----------------------------------------------------------
Have just caught up with the Rachel From North London blog, which had an excellent piece on Obama on Monday, 3rd November: “More than a righteous wind”
http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/
----------------------------------------------------------
Going Forward
Damian Grammaticus (crazy name, crazy guy) reporting for the BBC from Beijing said something about what relations between America and China will be like, going forward.
I love this phrase. It instantly marks out its user as a prat. Going forward? How can relations go forward? When was it that people started talking about going forward when they mean in the future?
It’s one thing for dickheads and the general public to use whatever stupid so-called hip expressions they like, but how can professional journalists get away with using dumb expressions like going forward?
“He needs to prove he means what he says, going forward.” So says Emily Prat, reporting from the US. Not going backward, then? Or going sideways? AAAGGGHHH!
.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Layer 87 Obama is President. Rejoice!
.
As one very tired commentator nearly said on TV this morning, “The new president will have the backing of the House of Resentatives”.
I’d like to be a member of a House of Resentatives, full of grumpy old men and women. I think I’d be good at it.
“No way! I’m not voting for that! You never voted for the things I wanted. You’ve never cared about my feelings. You’re just self, self, self. Why do we always have to do things your way? Oh, oh - you’re the president are you? I’m not bothered. I didn’t vote for you. Sod off!”
Every country should have a House of Resentatives.
----------------------------------------------
Meanwhile we’ve been treated to more of our own Prime Minister’s magnificent rhetoric:
“This is a moment that will live in history as long as history books are written.”
He’s going to look back and feel proud of those inspirational words of wisdom. How wonderfully apposite and memorable they are. How fortunate we are to have him as our P.M.
-------------------------------------------------
Another fabulously talented Brit, Georgina Baillie, is in the news today and has called for Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to be reinstated. According to Yahoo,
“The 23-year-old said that Radio 2 DJ Brand's resignation and Ross's three month suspension without pay was "out of proportion".
Baillie, who performs with her dance troupe the Satanic Sluts, has also told how she wants to pursue a career as an actress and model.
She told broadcaster Five in her first TV interview: "I was really angry when I said I wanted them both to be fired, but I think the suspension was good enough. So I'm feeling a bit gutted really about the whole thing.
"I think it's way out of proportion what's happened, and I don't hate either of them, I don't at all. I think they're really talented comedians and I think a world without Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand would be a very sad, dull place.”
“She added: "I want to keep performing with my dance troupe. And all these modelling offers have come through which is quite interesting. I thought about doing modelling a few years ago but was told I was a bit too chunky for that, but now all of a sudden I'm not, so that's great.”
Well, that’s really, really great. I always thought something good would come from this recent sad episode in our nation’s history, one that the Prime Minister himself needed to attend to, let us not forget.
How very wonderful that she’s not too chunky after all, and we’re all going to see a lot more of her, and no doubt more of the Satanic Sluts too, assuming we can obtain copies of Filthy Chunky Whores magazine and its sister publications, and also have a local stockist of the Chunky Slags Who Fuck series of DVDs.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081105/tuk-georgina-wants-ross-brand-back-45dbed5.html
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Sachs-Granddaughter-Wants-Ross-And-Brand-Reinstated/Article/200811115142444?lpos=UK_News_Second_Home_Page_Article_Teaser_Region_3&lid=ARTICLE_15142444_Sachs_Granddaughter_Wants_Ross_And_Brand_Reinstated_
Curiously the reinstated Sky page seems to have deleted most of the stuff about gorgeous Georgina’s chunkiness and modeling ambitions.
---------------------------------------------------------
Now, what else has been happening in the world? Oh yes, the election. I went to sleep around 2.00am, with no results yet in from the swing states, and so no certainty of an Obama victory. Somehow I managed to wake up at 5.00, just as he was starting his victory speech, which was fantastic, brilliant. So glad I watched it at the moment it was happening.
Political commentator Bob Schrum said on the radio this morning that Obama has a steadiness of purpose and a huge depth of knowledge. And this is the really exciting thing - that he’s highly intelligent and he does have a real purpose that goes way beyond wanting to be president. He has a very clear vision of what needs to be done in a country that has totally lost its bearings, thanks to eight years of Bush and the neo-cons.
Obama recognises that the country is in deep shit, and the people who are suffering the most, and will suffer even more, are the poorest. He seems to see that he’s become president-elect not on account of him being Mr Wonderful but on account of the promises he’s made to do the right things to sort out the mess the country is in, both at home and abroad. He’s there to carry out the wishes of the masses, and to do the right thing. He’s promised to redistribute wealth, and he’s bound to do that.
Whereas Clinton seemed to believe that it was ‘job done’ to get himself elected, Obama sees that the job won’t be done unless and until he can correct the things that are wrong and do the things that need doing.
It’s true that by running a highly effective campaign he’s already achieved something momentous and historic, but these have been means to an end, and the end is still way over the horizon.
Meanwhile, the whole world, with the exception of McCain supporters, rejoices.
The BBC website has a page of good stuff, including Obama’s acceptance speech, all 17 minutes of it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/americas/2008/vote_usa_2008/default.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7710079.stm
---------------------------------------------------------------
Banks and Banking.
I meant to post this yesterday, but here it is anyway, since the whole issue of the ‘bank bail-out’ is so important. From yesterday’s Guardian editorial:
Wriggling out of the deal.
What was the point of Gordon Brown's bank bail-out plan? Not to rescue bankers, nor simply to prop up ailing banks: fecklessness and failure are not usually rewarded with state handouts
This was no giveaway, Alistair Darling stressed; banks would have to comply with strict curbs on their behaviour.
Almost from the moment that agreement was struck, financiers have tried to wriggle out of it. They were at it again yesterday, as the boss of Lloyds TSB laid out plans to pay dividends to shareholders from next year - something that had been on the chancellor's list of no-nos - while a senior executive at HSBC snubbed calls to revive lending by suggesting that the bank would not pass on cuts in interest rates to customers.
Without taxpayer support, many British banks (not just those taking government funds) would struggle to do business in these traumatised markets. Either financiers should comply with taxpayer interests or the government must force them to do so.
Just what the public expected from the banks in return for all those hundreds of billions was spelled out on October 13 by Mr Darling, the day he unveiled his bail-out plan.
There would be "guarantees" on lending to businesses and to would-be homebuyers, which was the point of supporting the banks in the first place. Because taxpayers' cash could not be wasted, there had to be "restrictions" on boardroom pay. The same went for dividends. The chancellor was not about to "put billions into banks only to see it disappear out of the door [to shareholders] again". This was a tough deal, but Mr Darling noted: "They [banks] knew the terms and conditions and they signed up to them."
Yet ministers' pleas to bank bosses at least to go easy on small businesses have yielded not one concrete pledge from the industry. What about bankers' bonuses? Both Lloyds and RBS have assured staff that they will keep paying out, even if it means using (government-supported) shares. And when it comes to paying dividends, Lloyds' Eric Daniels was adamant yesterday that by next year it would be business as usual.
This is a gross display of collective arrogance. The banking industry has just been through a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, and the bosses who helped to bring it about show no contrition or wish to reform - just a desire to get back into the fray.
Taxpayers, who will have to pay for this rescue (probably in higher taxes), are entitled to ask what exactly they are getting in return. And the government must strive to make sure the bankers stick to their end of the bargain. Arms-length management is not good enough; Mr Darling has to be hands-on. On behalf of the public, the chancellor has taken a big stake in the banks; now he has to show voters the reason why.
There are some interesting readers’ comments on the Guardian’s site:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/banks-regulators
.
As one very tired commentator nearly said on TV this morning, “The new president will have the backing of the House of Resentatives”.
I’d like to be a member of a House of Resentatives, full of grumpy old men and women. I think I’d be good at it.
“No way! I’m not voting for that! You never voted for the things I wanted. You’ve never cared about my feelings. You’re just self, self, self. Why do we always have to do things your way? Oh, oh - you’re the president are you? I’m not bothered. I didn’t vote for you. Sod off!”
Every country should have a House of Resentatives.
----------------------------------------------
Meanwhile we’ve been treated to more of our own Prime Minister’s magnificent rhetoric:
“This is a moment that will live in history as long as history books are written.”
He’s going to look back and feel proud of those inspirational words of wisdom. How wonderfully apposite and memorable they are. How fortunate we are to have him as our P.M.
-------------------------------------------------
Another fabulously talented Brit, Georgina Baillie, is in the news today and has called for Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to be reinstated. According to Yahoo,
“The 23-year-old said that Radio 2 DJ Brand's resignation and Ross's three month suspension without pay was "out of proportion".
Baillie, who performs with her dance troupe the Satanic Sluts, has also told how she wants to pursue a career as an actress and model.
She told broadcaster Five in her first TV interview: "I was really angry when I said I wanted them both to be fired, but I think the suspension was good enough. So I'm feeling a bit gutted really about the whole thing.
"I think it's way out of proportion what's happened, and I don't hate either of them, I don't at all. I think they're really talented comedians and I think a world without Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand would be a very sad, dull place.”
“She added: "I want to keep performing with my dance troupe. And all these modelling offers have come through which is quite interesting. I thought about doing modelling a few years ago but was told I was a bit too chunky for that, but now all of a sudden I'm not, so that's great.”
Well, that’s really, really great. I always thought something good would come from this recent sad episode in our nation’s history, one that the Prime Minister himself needed to attend to, let us not forget.
How very wonderful that she’s not too chunky after all, and we’re all going to see a lot more of her, and no doubt more of the Satanic Sluts too, assuming we can obtain copies of Filthy Chunky Whores magazine and its sister publications, and also have a local stockist of the Chunky Slags Who Fuck series of DVDs.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081105/tuk-georgina-wants-ross-brand-back-45dbed5.html
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Sachs-Granddaughter-Wants-Ross-And-Brand-Reinstated/Article/200811115142444?lpos=UK_News_Second_Home_Page_Article_Teaser_Region_3&lid=ARTICLE_15142444_Sachs_Granddaughter_Wants_Ross_And_Brand_Reinstated_
Curiously the reinstated Sky page seems to have deleted most of the stuff about gorgeous Georgina’s chunkiness and modeling ambitions.
---------------------------------------------------------
Now, what else has been happening in the world? Oh yes, the election. I went to sleep around 2.00am, with no results yet in from the swing states, and so no certainty of an Obama victory. Somehow I managed to wake up at 5.00, just as he was starting his victory speech, which was fantastic, brilliant. So glad I watched it at the moment it was happening.
Political commentator Bob Schrum said on the radio this morning that Obama has a steadiness of purpose and a huge depth of knowledge. And this is the really exciting thing - that he’s highly intelligent and he does have a real purpose that goes way beyond wanting to be president. He has a very clear vision of what needs to be done in a country that has totally lost its bearings, thanks to eight years of Bush and the neo-cons.
Obama recognises that the country is in deep shit, and the people who are suffering the most, and will suffer even more, are the poorest. He seems to see that he’s become president-elect not on account of him being Mr Wonderful but on account of the promises he’s made to do the right things to sort out the mess the country is in, both at home and abroad. He’s there to carry out the wishes of the masses, and to do the right thing. He’s promised to redistribute wealth, and he’s bound to do that.
Whereas Clinton seemed to believe that it was ‘job done’ to get himself elected, Obama sees that the job won’t be done unless and until he can correct the things that are wrong and do the things that need doing.
It’s true that by running a highly effective campaign he’s already achieved something momentous and historic, but these have been means to an end, and the end is still way over the horizon.
Meanwhile, the whole world, with the exception of McCain supporters, rejoices.
The BBC website has a page of good stuff, including Obama’s acceptance speech, all 17 minutes of it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/americas/2008/vote_usa_2008/default.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7710079.stm
---------------------------------------------------------------
Banks and Banking.
I meant to post this yesterday, but here it is anyway, since the whole issue of the ‘bank bail-out’ is so important. From yesterday’s Guardian editorial:
Wriggling out of the deal.
What was the point of Gordon Brown's bank bail-out plan? Not to rescue bankers, nor simply to prop up ailing banks: fecklessness and failure are not usually rewarded with state handouts
This was no giveaway, Alistair Darling stressed; banks would have to comply with strict curbs on their behaviour.
Almost from the moment that agreement was struck, financiers have tried to wriggle out of it. They were at it again yesterday, as the boss of Lloyds TSB laid out plans to pay dividends to shareholders from next year - something that had been on the chancellor's list of no-nos - while a senior executive at HSBC snubbed calls to revive lending by suggesting that the bank would not pass on cuts in interest rates to customers.
Without taxpayer support, many British banks (not just those taking government funds) would struggle to do business in these traumatised markets. Either financiers should comply with taxpayer interests or the government must force them to do so.
Just what the public expected from the banks in return for all those hundreds of billions was spelled out on October 13 by Mr Darling, the day he unveiled his bail-out plan.
There would be "guarantees" on lending to businesses and to would-be homebuyers, which was the point of supporting the banks in the first place. Because taxpayers' cash could not be wasted, there had to be "restrictions" on boardroom pay. The same went for dividends. The chancellor was not about to "put billions into banks only to see it disappear out of the door [to shareholders] again". This was a tough deal, but Mr Darling noted: "They [banks] knew the terms and conditions and they signed up to them."
Yet ministers' pleas to bank bosses at least to go easy on small businesses have yielded not one concrete pledge from the industry. What about bankers' bonuses? Both Lloyds and RBS have assured staff that they will keep paying out, even if it means using (government-supported) shares. And when it comes to paying dividends, Lloyds' Eric Daniels was adamant yesterday that by next year it would be business as usual.
This is a gross display of collective arrogance. The banking industry has just been through a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, and the bosses who helped to bring it about show no contrition or wish to reform - just a desire to get back into the fray.
Taxpayers, who will have to pay for this rescue (probably in higher taxes), are entitled to ask what exactly they are getting in return. And the government must strive to make sure the bankers stick to their end of the bargain. Arms-length management is not good enough; Mr Darling has to be hands-on. On behalf of the public, the chancellor has taken a big stake in the banks; now he has to show voters the reason why.
There are some interesting readers’ comments on the Guardian’s site:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/banks-regulators
.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Layer 86 Decision Day, More Neil Young, and Opening Minds.
.
So the day has finally arrived. It’s either hello to a new liberal America, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, since the Democrat president will be backed by a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House, in an America where the ideology of conservatism has now been fully tested to destruction and is totally discredited. Or we’ll have the appalling prospect of a McCain/Palin leadership for the next four years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about.
I’ve been catching up with last Friday’s Guardian G2, whose cover article was, ‘What’s Bush done for our cultural life?’ ‘Twelve prominent Americans’ were asked to give their verdict.
Naomi Wolf wrote,
“It's not just that [Bush] didn't fund the arts or invite artists to the White House; it's not just that he doesn't read poetry, doesn't read books: there's something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.
I've done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art.
[Why are people so reluctant to call the USA of the past (x) years a neo-fascist regime?]
I think artists in America are scared. Respected journalists are being arrested. Film documenting the Republican national congress has been destroyed. And artists are next on the list after journalists. So if, God forbid, there's a McCain/Palin presidency we'll see a crackdown of the police state, there's no doubt.
I'm really quite ashamed of the American people - and of course I include myself in this. We have seen what was happening, and we kept right on internet shopping. All these writers and artists, good people, have just looked around and quietly aligned themselves.
Novelists have been really silent. Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way ... Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?”
-------------------------------------------------------
Well, Neil Young and his mates, for a start. The Dixie Chicks? Also Naomi Klein. And Gore Vidal. It’s an interesting challenge for us Brits - to think of any prominent Americans who have put themselves out front, protesting and denouncing in a place that’s very scary, given the appalling ignorance and potential savagery of the American Right.
I had an interesting conversation with a close friend yesterday, a long-time Neil Young fan, about Neil Young getting the band back on the road to protest about what was happening in the country, to protest against the Iraq war. Having seen the first part of Friday evening’s BBC4 documentary of the 2006 'Freedom of Speech' tour, my friend was of the opinion that it was rather sad and embarrassing to see those old geezers still trying to crank out rock music, ‘protest’ music if you will, in large stadiums.
I had to disagree. On the grounds that in the first place the music and the performance were OK, but also because it’s entirely admirable for any musician or artist to speak out visibly and publicly against the Bush regime, or indeed any injustice. To hell with what they look like. At least my friend admits he’s an ageist and a sizeist.
You still have a few days to see all 60 minutes of the documentary about Neil, 'Don’t Be Denied', (or download it) at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f815m
Or you might need to go first to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/neilyoung/
where you can also see some clips featuring Steve Stills, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, etc, talking about Neil and his music. Stills says some interesting things about how scarily polemical, provocative and combative Neil is. Emmylou talks about him putting something back into the world, and being a good father.
-----------------------------------------------------
Other contributors to the Guardian feature on the 'Bush legacy' said,
Daniel Libeskind
How can you even begin to speak of a cultural legacy? It's been wholly negative. Culture's a dirty word to these people, like "liberal" or "literate". We've experienced a complete bankruptcy of the culture of ideas over the past eight years. The intellect has been denigrated. Deep cuts have been made in education and in investment in cultural institutions.
It's hard to believe Bush, a man who's proud not to read books and who makes fun of words longer than one syllable, has been the inheritor of the mantle of the Founding Fathers, or of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or even Bill Clinton. These people believed in the value of American culture being seen as an inspiring and civilising force around the world. Jefferson was a fine architect. All Bush has offered the world is military force. This is still a great country, but Bush and Cheney have ensured that only the negative side of US culture has spread around the world.
David Simon
Enron, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Wall Street. An untenable drug war. A non-existent energy policy. An obliviousness to climate change. An unwillingness to recognise our problems, much less begin the hard work of solving them. Incompetence - rank incompetence - has become the American standard. We are no longer a competent, responsible nation-state. America. The can't-do superpower. Quite a legacy. Mr Bush is a remarkable man.
Alex Gibney
I think the Bush administration did its best to create a vast wasteland. At the same time, because of the perfidy and corruption and utter lawlessness it created a very interesting backlash of politically oriented materials that were inspiring. Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.
Edward Albee
What cultural legacy? There is no cultural legacy. We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn't seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.
I'm something of an optimist. I hope that we're capable of getting back on the right track and continuing our peaceful social revolution.
Elizabeth LeCompte
He has fostered the rise of political satire as an art form again. It hasn't been very strong for the last 30 years or so and I think television programmes such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don't think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.
With satire there's an incredibly powerful challenging of the powers that are, which I think is very healthy. There's also a trivialising effect at the same time. But it is a change, because young people are going to be involved in politics in a way that they haven't been before.
When Obama had trouble, before he beat Hillary, they began to make fun of him as a pompous teacher, so let's see. I think it'll be interesting. I just know that for me, under the Bush administration, things like The Daily Show and South Park will be remembered as real satire, not just parody and caricature."
This is an interesting point - the difference between satire, parody and caricature. The Daily Show has produced some brilliant satire, absolutely slaughtering McCain and Palin. Jon Stewart in particular is a genius.
Wouldn’t it be good if the general populace could read all the above comments before they go out to vote today. McCain says, “I’m not George Bush!” - but how different is his mindset and his ideology in reality? Palin, in many ways, is even worse than Bush.
Read the transcript of her being pranked by a Sarkozy impersonator:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/04/sarahpalin-usa
--------------------------------------------------------
Education News
The RSA Academy, Tipton, was featured on BBC TV news today. It’s an interesting place.
“Radical, controversial - should this school become a blueprint for others?”
“We actually want students to be motivated in their learning. Traditional homework has been scrapped,” says the headteacher, Michael Gernan.
The changes are fundamental. The focus is now on life skills or competences, managing information and relating to people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7707662.stm
The RSA’s “Opening Minds Framework” is excellent:
“The Opening Minds curriculum features five categories of competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information. Focusing on competences means that Opening Minds teaching is emphasising the ability to understand and to do, rather than just the transmission of knowledge.”
Read the rest of it here:
http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/opening-minds/opening-minds-framework
It is radical, and it should be a blueprint for other schools.
.
So the day has finally arrived. It’s either hello to a new liberal America, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, since the Democrat president will be backed by a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House, in an America where the ideology of conservatism has now been fully tested to destruction and is totally discredited. Or we’ll have the appalling prospect of a McCain/Palin leadership for the next four years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about.
I’ve been catching up with last Friday’s Guardian G2, whose cover article was, ‘What’s Bush done for our cultural life?’ ‘Twelve prominent Americans’ were asked to give their verdict.
Naomi Wolf wrote,
“It's not just that [Bush] didn't fund the arts or invite artists to the White House; it's not just that he doesn't read poetry, doesn't read books: there's something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.
I've done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art.
[Why are people so reluctant to call the USA of the past (x) years a neo-fascist regime?]
I think artists in America are scared. Respected journalists are being arrested. Film documenting the Republican national congress has been destroyed. And artists are next on the list after journalists. So if, God forbid, there's a McCain/Palin presidency we'll see a crackdown of the police state, there's no doubt.
I'm really quite ashamed of the American people - and of course I include myself in this. We have seen what was happening, and we kept right on internet shopping. All these writers and artists, good people, have just looked around and quietly aligned themselves.
Novelists have been really silent. Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way ... Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?”
-------------------------------------------------------
Well, Neil Young and his mates, for a start. The Dixie Chicks? Also Naomi Klein. And Gore Vidal. It’s an interesting challenge for us Brits - to think of any prominent Americans who have put themselves out front, protesting and denouncing in a place that’s very scary, given the appalling ignorance and potential savagery of the American Right.
I had an interesting conversation with a close friend yesterday, a long-time Neil Young fan, about Neil Young getting the band back on the road to protest about what was happening in the country, to protest against the Iraq war. Having seen the first part of Friday evening’s BBC4 documentary of the 2006 'Freedom of Speech' tour, my friend was of the opinion that it was rather sad and embarrassing to see those old geezers still trying to crank out rock music, ‘protest’ music if you will, in large stadiums.
I had to disagree. On the grounds that in the first place the music and the performance were OK, but also because it’s entirely admirable for any musician or artist to speak out visibly and publicly against the Bush regime, or indeed any injustice. To hell with what they look like. At least my friend admits he’s an ageist and a sizeist.
You still have a few days to see all 60 minutes of the documentary about Neil, 'Don’t Be Denied', (or download it) at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f815m
Or you might need to go first to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/neilyoung/
where you can also see some clips featuring Steve Stills, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, etc, talking about Neil and his music. Stills says some interesting things about how scarily polemical, provocative and combative Neil is. Emmylou talks about him putting something back into the world, and being a good father.
-----------------------------------------------------
Other contributors to the Guardian feature on the 'Bush legacy' said,
Daniel Libeskind
How can you even begin to speak of a cultural legacy? It's been wholly negative. Culture's a dirty word to these people, like "liberal" or "literate". We've experienced a complete bankruptcy of the culture of ideas over the past eight years. The intellect has been denigrated. Deep cuts have been made in education and in investment in cultural institutions.
It's hard to believe Bush, a man who's proud not to read books and who makes fun of words longer than one syllable, has been the inheritor of the mantle of the Founding Fathers, or of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or even Bill Clinton. These people believed in the value of American culture being seen as an inspiring and civilising force around the world. Jefferson was a fine architect. All Bush has offered the world is military force. This is still a great country, but Bush and Cheney have ensured that only the negative side of US culture has spread around the world.
David Simon
Enron, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Wall Street. An untenable drug war. A non-existent energy policy. An obliviousness to climate change. An unwillingness to recognise our problems, much less begin the hard work of solving them. Incompetence - rank incompetence - has become the American standard. We are no longer a competent, responsible nation-state. America. The can't-do superpower. Quite a legacy. Mr Bush is a remarkable man.
Alex Gibney
I think the Bush administration did its best to create a vast wasteland. At the same time, because of the perfidy and corruption and utter lawlessness it created a very interesting backlash of politically oriented materials that were inspiring. Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.
Edward Albee
What cultural legacy? There is no cultural legacy. We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn't seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.
I'm something of an optimist. I hope that we're capable of getting back on the right track and continuing our peaceful social revolution.
Elizabeth LeCompte
He has fostered the rise of political satire as an art form again. It hasn't been very strong for the last 30 years or so and I think television programmes such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don't think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.
With satire there's an incredibly powerful challenging of the powers that are, which I think is very healthy. There's also a trivialising effect at the same time. But it is a change, because young people are going to be involved in politics in a way that they haven't been before.
When Obama had trouble, before he beat Hillary, they began to make fun of him as a pompous teacher, so let's see. I think it'll be interesting. I just know that for me, under the Bush administration, things like The Daily Show and South Park will be remembered as real satire, not just parody and caricature."
This is an interesting point - the difference between satire, parody and caricature. The Daily Show has produced some brilliant satire, absolutely slaughtering McCain and Palin. Jon Stewart in particular is a genius.
Wouldn’t it be good if the general populace could read all the above comments before they go out to vote today. McCain says, “I’m not George Bush!” - but how different is his mindset and his ideology in reality? Palin, in many ways, is even worse than Bush.
Read the transcript of her being pranked by a Sarkozy impersonator:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/04/sarahpalin-usa
--------------------------------------------------------
Education News
The RSA Academy, Tipton, was featured on BBC TV news today. It’s an interesting place.
“Radical, controversial - should this school become a blueprint for others?”
“We actually want students to be motivated in their learning. Traditional homework has been scrapped,” says the headteacher, Michael Gernan.
The changes are fundamental. The focus is now on life skills or competences, managing information and relating to people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7707662.stm
The RSA’s “Opening Minds Framework” is excellent:
“The Opening Minds curriculum features five categories of competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information. Focusing on competences means that Opening Minds teaching is emphasising the ability to understand and to do, rather than just the transmission of knowledge.”
Read the rest of it here:
http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/opening-minds/opening-minds-framework
It is radical, and it should be a blueprint for other schools.
.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Layer 84 Music, Politics, Neil Young and Laughter.
.
In the mornin' when you rise . . .
Are you thinkin' of telephones, and managers,
And where you got to be at noon?
You are living a reality I left years ago
It quite nearly killed me.
In the long run it will make you cry.
Make you crazy and old before your time.
So said Stephen Stills in ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’, in 1970, giving an impression of someone who’s well sorted, tuned in, turned on, dropped out and living a different reality. No more Affluenza for Mr Laid Back L.A. - Christ, he even had time to cry:
And the difference between me and you
I won't argue right or wrong,
But I have time to cry, my baby
You don't have to cry,
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
In reality this new wave of migrant songsters and sophisticates who moved into L.A., mostly in and around Laurel Canyon, were as obsessed with fame, recognition, happiness, ego gratification, status, money, power and acclaim as anyone else - which isn’t to say that CSNY and the other bands and singer/songwriters didn’t turn out some excellent music from time to time, because they certainly did.
They just weren’t as good as they thought they were, in most cases, and many of them certainly lost their muse, their focus and their inspiration (the counterculture!) in a haze of excess, idleness, hedonism, angst, petty squabbling, and, of course, the heavy use of narcotics, especially coke.
The collective values of the Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock generation had initially generated a sense of unbridled optimism, but the shooting of students at Ohio State and the murder that took place at the Stones’ Altamont concert created a sense of deep foreboding. Concerts were supposed to be fun. College campuses were supposed to be places of peace, love and protest.
The Manson murders in L.A. pretty much shook the rock fraternity to its core, and if such horrors were what drugs and madness could do to people who considered themselves part of an enlightened movement to change the world for the better, what hope was there after all?
Besides which, the brilliant Joni Mitchell was writing songs for her wonderful Blue album that spoke of her own jealousy and greed - so if even the gifted and somewhat saintly Joni could acknowledge these destructive emotions, then where did that leave the rest of them?
Pretty much with the Eagles, ‘country rock’, cowboy fantasies and songs of escapism that demonstrated a complete disengagement from politics. At that point The Eagles were the ultimate corporate rock band, and the L.A. scene had gone from hippie utopianism to the corporatisation of rock in the name of massive profits for all concerned, including legions of smart managers and lawyers.
The increasing use of heroin and speed, as well as shitloads of coke, coincided with increases in greed, anger and cynicism - a far cry from the days of Californian love and peace in low-rent communes. Increasingly there were security guards amongst the hangers-on, and even the clubs where the bands hung out became exclusive to the celebrities and high rollers.
Those who were there at the time recall the rise in self-centred craziness, and the darkness of mounting despair and alienation. The ‘emotional landscape’ had turned very bleak indeed.
Friday night’s repeated BBC4 documentary, HOTEL CALIFORNIA: LA FROM THE BYRDS TO THE EAGLES (Chris Wilson, 2007) offered a decent enough run through the history of the music business in LA, but made some strange omissions in its erratic little journey, such as no mention of The Doors or Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, who were LA-based megastars and surely impossible to ignore. Maybe Mr Wilson couldn’t get hold of any decent archive film of them.
BBC4’s mammoth evening of music on Friday was pretty engrossing, and a pure joy for not having your head invaded by a single bloody irritating advertisement. BBC4 itself is a pretty interesting phenomenon.
"There are lots of different ways of being intelligent or serious. There are things that are easily recognisable as television with a serious purpose, such as The Proms or world cinema. But other things are just as valuable. Last week we ran a fantastic programme called Hotel California which featured music from The Byrds to The Eagles. It was about music but it was also about culture, social history, politics, the feeling of the time. Our audience adored that."
So said the channel’s controller, Janice Hadlow, in an interview in the Indy last year: Welcome To The Sanctuary.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bbc4--welcome-to-the-sanctuary-433125.html
---------------------------------------------------
“There’s a big difference between knowing what’s going on and physically doing something to change it.” - Graham Nash
The main focus of Friday evening on BBC4 was, of course, Neil Young, and what emerged from the hour-long documentary, ‘Don’t Be Denied’, was that NY was always a serious and committed musician, who didn’t give a shit about his image, or cashing in on fame by relentlessly recycling his back catalogue. He was even prepared to alienate audiences by following his muse and performing the music that was currently filling him with passion, even if they were turned off by it and clamored for the ‘hits’. He insisted on speaking of meaningful things. In order to sing something he always needed to feel it. He didn’t give a damn whether his records were commercial or not.
It was Neil Young, of course, who wrote ‘Ohio’ for CSNY in response to the National Guard killing the students - magnificently accusatory and polemical, and how many other artists can claim they made any kind of effort to “speak out against the madness”?
His sense of engagement (and enragement) with what’s happening in the real world burns as brightly today as it did back in the days of the Vietnam protests, as has resulted in him setting up a website, a sort of anti-CNN, anti-Fox news/magazine site, called Living With War Today - LWW.
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html
On the site read the following article and prepare to be scared, very scared:
MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
As you read it Mr Young will serenade you with ‘Let’s Impeach The President’.
Alternatively you can enjoy the video version:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/letsimpeach_wm.html
The Restless Consumer has been around for some time and is a fantastic song, and is set to a brilliant video at:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/therestlessconsumer_wm.html
where you can also download it for free.
You can also catch it on U-Tube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IEA7wcxjJvw
Includes great images of a silent, smiling Dick Cheney. Pure evil.
Sample lyric:
Don't need no ad machine
Telling me what I need
Don't need no Madison Avenue War
Don't need no more boxes I can see
Covered in flags but I can't see them on TV
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
The restless consumer flies
Around the world each day
With such an appetite for taste and grace
People from around the world
Need someone to listen
We're starving and dying from our disease
We need your medicine
How do you pay for war
And leave us dyin' ?
When you could do so much more
You're not even tryin'.
Read the rest here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/neilyoung/therestlessconsumer.html
It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling more passionate or trying to do more than NY has been doing to combat what the White House has been up to these many years.
Here’s a short video of Neil and the band laying down the track in the studio:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LWI1Wzu-7NE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To try to raise some anti-war feeling in the USA in 2006 Neil decided to reform CSNY and take the band out on the road, literally in buses, to perform across the nation. The documentary of the tour, CSNY Déjà Vu, was also screened on Friday, and was pretty arresting stuff.
Was is naivety on the part of the band or was it deliberately provocative to sell tickets to their concerts without advertising the fact that the evening would effectively be an anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Republican rally? Maybe the Republican-voting punters were just too stupid to realise that the whole point of the tour was to rally people against the ‘war on terror’.
There were some stunning shots of Bushites going into a state of total melt-down when the band launched into songs like Let’s Impeach The President. Those good old boys, and their good ladies, wanted to inflict some terrible violence on the band members, but were mostly reduced to yelling, raising the finger, and walking out, ranting and raving. Said one young woman to the camera, following a volley of expletives from her partner, “It was a little political”. Y’all.
But as someone else wrote in a review, “What a rarity - a concert that sent you home thinking, feeling and rocking.”
Here’s the trailer:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GBxrCY980f4&NR=1
http://www.csny-dejavu.com/
--------------------------------------------------
There’s one of the best-ever covers on Private Eye this week - a real classic:
CORFU! WHAT A STINKER!
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers.php?showme=1222&
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joy and laughter seem to me to be the vital ingredients for a life well lived, and of spiritual intelligence, and though they’re not always on tap, they ought to be accessible at frequent intervals. The question is, what gives joy, what raises our spirits, what produces laughter?
This has been quite a week for Russell Brand, and true to form his column in the sport section of The Guardian yesterday was brilliant. On the surface, not a word about what’s been happening to him personally, even though he begins with this paragraph,
“What a palaver! In a season that I'd already judged to be utterly barmy we have seen another week so hysterical and incomprehensible that I'm beginning to wonder if our country is in the grips of a cosmic fever.”
He then writes about crazy things happening in the world of football, and he concludes,
“In these rare displays, these athletic requiems, the player and the game issue an elation that I've struggled to find in a cathedral or a Caravaggio, so we endure the drab, rain-spattered Sundays, the financial indiscretions, the scandals and the heartbreak because instinctively we know that within this sport there is the potential for grace and redemption and incredible beauty. No matter how insane things become or how far from the truth we are led by histrionics and lies, the truly, objectively beautiful remains untainted.”
By some wonderful coincidence the second series of “Russell Brand’s Ponderland” began on Channel 4 last Thursday, and predictably there were critics who sneered at it and pronounced it unfunny. Like the Guardian’s, for example,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/oct/31/russell-brand-channel4
(check out the variety of readers’ comments at the end of the article, including a pathetic response to these responses by the author of the piece.)
This first episode had him pondering the subject of pets, and he showed a series of clips of total nutters who did things like keep a lion in a garage, dye doves in primary colours, put up with regular assaults from their ‘pet’ dogs and ponies, and at the other extreme have sex with their pets.
This kind of thing is priceless, and had me in tears of laughter. Try to catch it on the C4 website.
Other subjects coming up in series 2 are families, education and class.
If you could do with a quick chuckle or two then try these clips from series 1:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
And on Google Video, the whole of the programme on science:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/01/russell-brand This week’s column.
.
In the mornin' when you rise . . .
Are you thinkin' of telephones, and managers,
And where you got to be at noon?
You are living a reality I left years ago
It quite nearly killed me.
In the long run it will make you cry.
Make you crazy and old before your time.
So said Stephen Stills in ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’, in 1970, giving an impression of someone who’s well sorted, tuned in, turned on, dropped out and living a different reality. No more Affluenza for Mr Laid Back L.A. - Christ, he even had time to cry:
And the difference between me and you
I won't argue right or wrong,
But I have time to cry, my baby
You don't have to cry,
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
In reality this new wave of migrant songsters and sophisticates who moved into L.A., mostly in and around Laurel Canyon, were as obsessed with fame, recognition, happiness, ego gratification, status, money, power and acclaim as anyone else - which isn’t to say that CSNY and the other bands and singer/songwriters didn’t turn out some excellent music from time to time, because they certainly did.
They just weren’t as good as they thought they were, in most cases, and many of them certainly lost their muse, their focus and their inspiration (the counterculture!) in a haze of excess, idleness, hedonism, angst, petty squabbling, and, of course, the heavy use of narcotics, especially coke.
The collective values of the Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock generation had initially generated a sense of unbridled optimism, but the shooting of students at Ohio State and the murder that took place at the Stones’ Altamont concert created a sense of deep foreboding. Concerts were supposed to be fun. College campuses were supposed to be places of peace, love and protest.
The Manson murders in L.A. pretty much shook the rock fraternity to its core, and if such horrors were what drugs and madness could do to people who considered themselves part of an enlightened movement to change the world for the better, what hope was there after all?
Besides which, the brilliant Joni Mitchell was writing songs for her wonderful Blue album that spoke of her own jealousy and greed - so if even the gifted and somewhat saintly Joni could acknowledge these destructive emotions, then where did that leave the rest of them?
Pretty much with the Eagles, ‘country rock’, cowboy fantasies and songs of escapism that demonstrated a complete disengagement from politics. At that point The Eagles were the ultimate corporate rock band, and the L.A. scene had gone from hippie utopianism to the corporatisation of rock in the name of massive profits for all concerned, including legions of smart managers and lawyers.
The increasing use of heroin and speed, as well as shitloads of coke, coincided with increases in greed, anger and cynicism - a far cry from the days of Californian love and peace in low-rent communes. Increasingly there were security guards amongst the hangers-on, and even the clubs where the bands hung out became exclusive to the celebrities and high rollers.
Those who were there at the time recall the rise in self-centred craziness, and the darkness of mounting despair and alienation. The ‘emotional landscape’ had turned very bleak indeed.
Friday night’s repeated BBC4 documentary, HOTEL CALIFORNIA: LA FROM THE BYRDS TO THE EAGLES (Chris Wilson, 2007) offered a decent enough run through the history of the music business in LA, but made some strange omissions in its erratic little journey, such as no mention of The Doors or Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, who were LA-based megastars and surely impossible to ignore. Maybe Mr Wilson couldn’t get hold of any decent archive film of them.
BBC4’s mammoth evening of music on Friday was pretty engrossing, and a pure joy for not having your head invaded by a single bloody irritating advertisement. BBC4 itself is a pretty interesting phenomenon.
"There are lots of different ways of being intelligent or serious. There are things that are easily recognisable as television with a serious purpose, such as The Proms or world cinema. But other things are just as valuable. Last week we ran a fantastic programme called Hotel California which featured music from The Byrds to The Eagles. It was about music but it was also about culture, social history, politics, the feeling of the time. Our audience adored that."
So said the channel’s controller, Janice Hadlow, in an interview in the Indy last year: Welcome To The Sanctuary.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bbc4--welcome-to-the-sanctuary-433125.html
---------------------------------------------------
“There’s a big difference between knowing what’s going on and physically doing something to change it.” - Graham Nash
The main focus of Friday evening on BBC4 was, of course, Neil Young, and what emerged from the hour-long documentary, ‘Don’t Be Denied’, was that NY was always a serious and committed musician, who didn’t give a shit about his image, or cashing in on fame by relentlessly recycling his back catalogue. He was even prepared to alienate audiences by following his muse and performing the music that was currently filling him with passion, even if they were turned off by it and clamored for the ‘hits’. He insisted on speaking of meaningful things. In order to sing something he always needed to feel it. He didn’t give a damn whether his records were commercial or not.
It was Neil Young, of course, who wrote ‘Ohio’ for CSNY in response to the National Guard killing the students - magnificently accusatory and polemical, and how many other artists can claim they made any kind of effort to “speak out against the madness”?
His sense of engagement (and enragement) with what’s happening in the real world burns as brightly today as it did back in the days of the Vietnam protests, as has resulted in him setting up a website, a sort of anti-CNN, anti-Fox news/magazine site, called Living With War Today - LWW.
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html
On the site read the following article and prepare to be scared, very scared:
MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
As you read it Mr Young will serenade you with ‘Let’s Impeach The President’.
Alternatively you can enjoy the video version:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/letsimpeach_wm.html
The Restless Consumer has been around for some time and is a fantastic song, and is set to a brilliant video at:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/therestlessconsumer_wm.html
where you can also download it for free.
You can also catch it on U-Tube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IEA7wcxjJvw
Includes great images of a silent, smiling Dick Cheney. Pure evil.
Sample lyric:
Don't need no ad machine
Telling me what I need
Don't need no Madison Avenue War
Don't need no more boxes I can see
Covered in flags but I can't see them on TV
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
The restless consumer flies
Around the world each day
With such an appetite for taste and grace
People from around the world
Need someone to listen
We're starving and dying from our disease
We need your medicine
How do you pay for war
And leave us dyin' ?
When you could do so much more
You're not even tryin'.
Read the rest here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/neilyoung/therestlessconsumer.html
It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling more passionate or trying to do more than NY has been doing to combat what the White House has been up to these many years.
Here’s a short video of Neil and the band laying down the track in the studio:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LWI1Wzu-7NE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To try to raise some anti-war feeling in the USA in 2006 Neil decided to reform CSNY and take the band out on the road, literally in buses, to perform across the nation. The documentary of the tour, CSNY Déjà Vu, was also screened on Friday, and was pretty arresting stuff.
Was is naivety on the part of the band or was it deliberately provocative to sell tickets to their concerts without advertising the fact that the evening would effectively be an anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Republican rally? Maybe the Republican-voting punters were just too stupid to realise that the whole point of the tour was to rally people against the ‘war on terror’.
There were some stunning shots of Bushites going into a state of total melt-down when the band launched into songs like Let’s Impeach The President. Those good old boys, and their good ladies, wanted to inflict some terrible violence on the band members, but were mostly reduced to yelling, raising the finger, and walking out, ranting and raving. Said one young woman to the camera, following a volley of expletives from her partner, “It was a little political”. Y’all.
But as someone else wrote in a review, “What a rarity - a concert that sent you home thinking, feeling and rocking.”
Here’s the trailer:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GBxrCY980f4&NR=1
http://www.csny-dejavu.com/
--------------------------------------------------
There’s one of the best-ever covers on Private Eye this week - a real classic:
CORFU! WHAT A STINKER!
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers.php?showme=1222&
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joy and laughter seem to me to be the vital ingredients for a life well lived, and of spiritual intelligence, and though they’re not always on tap, they ought to be accessible at frequent intervals. The question is, what gives joy, what raises our spirits, what produces laughter?
This has been quite a week for Russell Brand, and true to form his column in the sport section of The Guardian yesterday was brilliant. On the surface, not a word about what’s been happening to him personally, even though he begins with this paragraph,
“What a palaver! In a season that I'd already judged to be utterly barmy we have seen another week so hysterical and incomprehensible that I'm beginning to wonder if our country is in the grips of a cosmic fever.”
He then writes about crazy things happening in the world of football, and he concludes,
“In these rare displays, these athletic requiems, the player and the game issue an elation that I've struggled to find in a cathedral or a Caravaggio, so we endure the drab, rain-spattered Sundays, the financial indiscretions, the scandals and the heartbreak because instinctively we know that within this sport there is the potential for grace and redemption and incredible beauty. No matter how insane things become or how far from the truth we are led by histrionics and lies, the truly, objectively beautiful remains untainted.”
By some wonderful coincidence the second series of “Russell Brand’s Ponderland” began on Channel 4 last Thursday, and predictably there were critics who sneered at it and pronounced it unfunny. Like the Guardian’s, for example,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/oct/31/russell-brand-channel4
(check out the variety of readers’ comments at the end of the article, including a pathetic response to these responses by the author of the piece.)
This first episode had him pondering the subject of pets, and he showed a series of clips of total nutters who did things like keep a lion in a garage, dye doves in primary colours, put up with regular assaults from their ‘pet’ dogs and ponies, and at the other extreme have sex with their pets.
This kind of thing is priceless, and had me in tears of laughter. Try to catch it on the C4 website.
Other subjects coming up in series 2 are families, education and class.
If you could do with a quick chuckle or two then try these clips from series 1:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
And on Google Video, the whole of the programme on science:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/01/russell-brand This week’s column.
.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Layer 83 Looting The Public Wealth.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Layer 82 Different Realities.
.
Listened to a guy doing Desert Island Discs today - Ian Bostridge - who sounded like a grown up version of the clever little choirboy he used to be. He’s now an opera and classical singer. And a CBE.
The usual background - posh schools and uni - Dulwich College, Westminster School and Oxbridge. He now lives on Planet High Culture, and lives in the different reality where posh boys who’ve had posh educations go to live.
He tells stories of how he and his schoolboy chums used to spend their time debating whether Wagner was any good. As do we all. Though he quite liked Punk’s ‘vigour and energy’.
He played a Dylan track and said some bullshit about Bob being ‘the inheritor of the Schubert tradition’. Oh yeah. Nothing at all to do with the Blues tradition, the folk tradition, African traditions, etc.
“Bob Dylan’s got a dreadful voice, but it expresses emotion.” So that’s OK.
He’s such a fucking cultural absolutist and snob he could never understand that Dylan actually has a great voice, which is HIS voice, and which strikes deep emotional and spiritual chords with millions of people in ways that his own fucking ‘tenor’ warblings never could. He really could never see that people like me are entitled to feel absolute revulsion for the sentimental, supercilious, melodramatic elitist bollocks that constitutes ‘classical’ singing.
I had to laugh out loud when he went on about falling in love in his schooldays with some German guy’s voice even though he couldn’t understand a word of what he was singing. This story was supposed to make him sound ‘deep’ and ‘sensitive’ and ‘serious’, but actually makes him sound like a pretentious twat.
--------------------------------------------------
On the Today programme today there was an item on tonight being ‘Neil Young night’ on BBC4. I wonder what Ian Bostridge and his pals might make of it. “Oh yah - lots of vigour and energy.”
“The whole evening of programmes about the singer is centred round a documentary about his life called Don't Be Denied.”
Director of the documentary Ben Whalley and author Barney Hoskyns today discussed the rare interviews and film not previously broadcast. Both big NY fans, obviously.
They seemed to agree that Young’s up there with Dylan as a songwriter, singer, musician and performer. They said he’s ‘less cerebral, more instinctual’ than Bob. Interesting that - opposite ends of the ‘IQ’ spectrum of intelligence.
They spoke about Neil matching the intensity and danger of the Rolling Stones with the lyricism of Dylan. He’s able to do ‘loud and intense’ and also ‘soft, quiet and tender’ - absolutely brilliantly.
He does what he pleases and doesn’t follow trends and fashions. He’s grounded in reality. He’s got unswerving honesty. And as he himself says, he ‘didn’t get dragged down by success’.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7701000/7701334.stm
-------------------------------------------------------
Here’s the web address of the Today programme interview with the teenage gang boys that was broadcast yesterday.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7697000/7697198.stm
-------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, last night on This Week, cuddly posh girl Diane Julie Abbott MP (Harrow County Grammar and Cambridge) was banging on about Russell Brand, calling him stupid and disgusting, and saying he has no talent. Which just shows how ignorant, uninformed and dull she is. Fair enough to say that things he said in his infamous broadcast were stupid and disgusting, but Brand is the very opposite of stupid, having a brain and a wit that’s as sharp as a razor.
As for no talent, he’s unbelievably bursting with talent, not least for making people laugh and making them think. He’s probably the most cerebral comedian and commentator at work today, truly a man in the mould of the great Bill Hicks.
-------------------------------------------------
Lord knows we need sharp and ascerbic commentators in these dark times, preferably ones that make us laugh. There’s such a mountain of nonsense and bullshit out there, and it gets bigger every day.
Yesterday I was in a shopping mall and noticed a booth which I first took to be an ordinary passport photo booth. On closer inspection it turned out to be a device called ‘Dance Heads Recording’, inviting people to ‘Be A Star’ - ‘No Talent Required’. Quite so.
This thing appeals to talentless wannabees who are gagging to be on TV and DVD, ‘performing’ in some way - singing and dancing. The machine takes your photo/video and then superimposes your singing head on a stupid gyrating cartoon figure as you sing along to your chosen song. I imagine the ‘I Will Survive’ option is very popular.
You end up with a DVD to take away and impress your family and friends. Harmless fun? Maybe - if it satisfies someone’s longing to see their silly face singing (miming) on a TV screen. Or maybe it also records their actual voice, singing in the booth? That might be funny.
Meanwhile ‘Mr China’ was displaying in his shop window a sign offering a free 5 minute massage, which had been altered from its original wording of a free 5 minute message. Now that I could have gone for - what kind of mystical oriental message might that have been? Something like an oral fortune cookie, at much greater length.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Last night’s Daily Show featured an interview with Obama himself, and very impressive he was too. Jon Stewart teased him about ‘The Bradley Effect’ - whether his mother’s white genes would allow him to actually vote for himself. He dealt with it very well.
He also handled the charge of being a socialist very well, saying that his willingness to share his toys when he was in his Nursery class (‘subversive activity’) clearly marked him out.
Here’s some of the interview, including bits that More Four missed out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/21/barack-obama-on-the-daily_n_97889.html
Here’s a brilliant must-watch spoof video the Daily Show made of Barak’s ‘informercial’:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/29/the-daily-shows-obama-bio_n_122350.html
Catch up with the Daily Show at Comedy Central, including another version of the Obama interview:
http://www.comedycentral.com/
Check out the “Barack's Millions” video. The Muppet Show bit is brilliant.
Also have a look at this bit about Sarah Palin ‘Going Rogue’:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=189759&title=goin-rogue
It includes a wonderful Bob The Builder interview.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G2 had an interesting feature yesterday on The West Wing predicting this year’s presidential contest:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/westwing-television-usa-elections-obama
There’s an hilarious photo in the Guardian of George Osborne and friends gathered for the Bullingdon Club shooting match, with a very funny article giving a run-down on who’s who and who’s wearing what:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/30/fashion-bullingdon-george-osborne-oxford
Check out this article on whether Russell Brand has turned to Hare Krishna:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/russell-brand-celebrity
.
Listened to a guy doing Desert Island Discs today - Ian Bostridge - who sounded like a grown up version of the clever little choirboy he used to be. He’s now an opera and classical singer. And a CBE.
The usual background - posh schools and uni - Dulwich College, Westminster School and Oxbridge. He now lives on Planet High Culture, and lives in the different reality where posh boys who’ve had posh educations go to live.
He tells stories of how he and his schoolboy chums used to spend their time debating whether Wagner was any good. As do we all. Though he quite liked Punk’s ‘vigour and energy’.
He played a Dylan track and said some bullshit about Bob being ‘the inheritor of the Schubert tradition’. Oh yeah. Nothing at all to do with the Blues tradition, the folk tradition, African traditions, etc.
“Bob Dylan’s got a dreadful voice, but it expresses emotion.” So that’s OK.
He’s such a fucking cultural absolutist and snob he could never understand that Dylan actually has a great voice, which is HIS voice, and which strikes deep emotional and spiritual chords with millions of people in ways that his own fucking ‘tenor’ warblings never could. He really could never see that people like me are entitled to feel absolute revulsion for the sentimental, supercilious, melodramatic elitist bollocks that constitutes ‘classical’ singing.
I had to laugh out loud when he went on about falling in love in his schooldays with some German guy’s voice even though he couldn’t understand a word of what he was singing. This story was supposed to make him sound ‘deep’ and ‘sensitive’ and ‘serious’, but actually makes him sound like a pretentious twat.
--------------------------------------------------
On the Today programme today there was an item on tonight being ‘Neil Young night’ on BBC4. I wonder what Ian Bostridge and his pals might make of it. “Oh yah - lots of vigour and energy.”
“The whole evening of programmes about the singer is centred round a documentary about his life called Don't Be Denied.”
Director of the documentary Ben Whalley and author Barney Hoskyns today discussed the rare interviews and film not previously broadcast. Both big NY fans, obviously.
They seemed to agree that Young’s up there with Dylan as a songwriter, singer, musician and performer. They said he’s ‘less cerebral, more instinctual’ than Bob. Interesting that - opposite ends of the ‘IQ’ spectrum of intelligence.
They spoke about Neil matching the intensity and danger of the Rolling Stones with the lyricism of Dylan. He’s able to do ‘loud and intense’ and also ‘soft, quiet and tender’ - absolutely brilliantly.
He does what he pleases and doesn’t follow trends and fashions. He’s grounded in reality. He’s got unswerving honesty. And as he himself says, he ‘didn’t get dragged down by success’.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7701000/7701334.stm
-------------------------------------------------------
Here’s the web address of the Today programme interview with the teenage gang boys that was broadcast yesterday.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7697000/7697198.stm
-------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, last night on This Week, cuddly posh girl Diane Julie Abbott MP (Harrow County Grammar and Cambridge) was banging on about Russell Brand, calling him stupid and disgusting, and saying he has no talent. Which just shows how ignorant, uninformed and dull she is. Fair enough to say that things he said in his infamous broadcast were stupid and disgusting, but Brand is the very opposite of stupid, having a brain and a wit that’s as sharp as a razor.
As for no talent, he’s unbelievably bursting with talent, not least for making people laugh and making them think. He’s probably the most cerebral comedian and commentator at work today, truly a man in the mould of the great Bill Hicks.
-------------------------------------------------
Lord knows we need sharp and ascerbic commentators in these dark times, preferably ones that make us laugh. There’s such a mountain of nonsense and bullshit out there, and it gets bigger every day.
Yesterday I was in a shopping mall and noticed a booth which I first took to be an ordinary passport photo booth. On closer inspection it turned out to be a device called ‘Dance Heads Recording’, inviting people to ‘Be A Star’ - ‘No Talent Required’. Quite so.
This thing appeals to talentless wannabees who are gagging to be on TV and DVD, ‘performing’ in some way - singing and dancing. The machine takes your photo/video and then superimposes your singing head on a stupid gyrating cartoon figure as you sing along to your chosen song. I imagine the ‘I Will Survive’ option is very popular.
You end up with a DVD to take away and impress your family and friends. Harmless fun? Maybe - if it satisfies someone’s longing to see their silly face singing (miming) on a TV screen. Or maybe it also records their actual voice, singing in the booth? That might be funny.
Meanwhile ‘Mr China’ was displaying in his shop window a sign offering a free 5 minute massage, which had been altered from its original wording of a free 5 minute message. Now that I could have gone for - what kind of mystical oriental message might that have been? Something like an oral fortune cookie, at much greater length.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Last night’s Daily Show featured an interview with Obama himself, and very impressive he was too. Jon Stewart teased him about ‘The Bradley Effect’ - whether his mother’s white genes would allow him to actually vote for himself. He dealt with it very well.
He also handled the charge of being a socialist very well, saying that his willingness to share his toys when he was in his Nursery class (‘subversive activity’) clearly marked him out.
Here’s some of the interview, including bits that More Four missed out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/21/barack-obama-on-the-daily_n_97889.html
Here’s a brilliant must-watch spoof video the Daily Show made of Barak’s ‘informercial’:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/29/the-daily-shows-obama-bio_n_122350.html
Catch up with the Daily Show at Comedy Central, including another version of the Obama interview:
http://www.comedycentral.com/
Check out the “Barack's Millions” video. The Muppet Show bit is brilliant.
Also have a look at this bit about Sarah Palin ‘Going Rogue’:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=189759&title=goin-rogue
It includes a wonderful Bob The Builder interview.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G2 had an interesting feature yesterday on The West Wing predicting this year’s presidential contest:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/westwing-television-usa-elections-obama
There’s an hilarious photo in the Guardian of George Osborne and friends gathered for the Bullingdon Club shooting match, with a very funny article giving a run-down on who’s who and who’s wearing what:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/30/fashion-bullingdon-george-osborne-oxford
Check out this article on whether Russell Brand has turned to Hare Krishna:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/russell-brand-celebrity
.
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